A Lesson On Leaking From Daniel Ellsberg
By CBSNews.com's Jennifer Hoar.
Remember the Pentagon Papers, the famous 7,000-page top-secret Defense Department document about the Vietnam War?
A Pentagon analyst named Daniel Ellsberg leaked them to the New York Times in 1971 and was put on trial for doing so in 1973. Although the charges were later dismissed because of government misconduct, he was the first whistleblower to face a judge.
Ellsberg still has a few thoughts on the now ubiquitous topic of leak investigations, and he took the opportunity to share some of them Thursday at the American Association of Law Schools conference.
Though he quietly attended a panel discussion called "Prosecuting Leakers and Leakees: The End of National Security Muckraking?," Ellsberg eventually made himself known to the audience only after the Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the Justice Department, Kenneth Wainstein, said something with which he took issue.
"Wainstein had made a comment that not putting out secrets was a matter of integrity," Ellsberg said afterward. "He made the point that there were secrets that the government needed to keep."
But when the secrets involve illegal programs, as Ellsberg says is the case with wiretapping by the National Security Agency for instance, protecting them is a violation of an oath of office.
"Taking an oath as a public servant does not mean keeping secrets or obeying the president, it's respecting the Constitution," Ellsberg said. "All of the lawyers at the NSA who kept the secret [of the wiretapping program] were violating the oath of office."
Ellsberg is also concerned about the prevailing mentality among government workers that their loyalty is to the president, not to the Constitution.
"Most government employees define keeping honor as obeying the president's wishes. That's not the right attitude," Ellsberg said.
"The oath is not the Fuhrer principle," he added, referencing the notion espoused by President Nixon that the "law is what the president says it is."
Ellsberg said that he elaborated on this topic so much during the panel's Q&A period that the moderator had to give him the proverbial hook. It turns out, though, that the moderator who told him to either "ask a question" or "sit down," was a law professor who later "apologized" and admitted fascination with his story.
Plus, Wainstein – the man whose remarks incited Ellsberg's response – is the son of a former colleague of Ellsberg's at the Pentagon.
Jennifer Hoar