2010-11-29 Democracy Now!: Daniel Ellsberg, Greg Mitchell, Carne Ross, As’ad AbuKhalil on WikiLeaks and Cablegate

Democracy Now! hosted a roundtable discussion earlier today on the Cablegate revelations, with Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Greg Mitchell of The Nation, Carne Ross, a British diplomat who resigned before the Iraq war, and As’ad AbuKhalil, a professor of political science at California State University. The discussion was hosted by Democracy Now!'s Amy Goodman.

Daniel Ellsberg responded to Adm Mike Mullen's reiteration of the "WikiLeaks has blood on its hands" line: "First of all, we have Admiral Mullen there who is the interesting position of sending American troops- men and women- into harm’s way. So when it comes to blood on hands, he’s really has got a lot to answer for. From another point of view, he’s quite an expert on that.[...] You can believe that if their plumber’s operation- to the tune of more than 100 men working on this- had been able to find one mutilated body, that one would be on the cover of Newsweek by now. So we’ve had a pretty good test of how well the process of sanitizing these documents by the newspapers- and by WikiLeaks- has operated and the answer is, the proof is in the pudding: No harm has been done; Admiral Mullen’s fears are groundless."

Daniel Ellsberg: "For what it’s worth, we are finding that the big problem with our awful, miserable, incompetent foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan is not the fault of foolish, stupid or lying mid-level staffers down below. They are speaking fairly honestly, not with a lot of local knowledge often, but fairly shrewdly in many cases, doing their best job to their superiors. The lying- as in Vietnam- is being enforced by the upper levels. What we need to see, really, is someone following Bradley Manning, or whoever the source is, following his example. He gave what he could- at his twenty-two year old level, corporal’s level, or whatever was available to him- to inform the public. We need somebody with higher access, the kind that I had at that time, and unfortunately didn’t use then, I’m sorry to say, I apologize. But somebody should put out the higher level papers that reveal the high level dealing and stupid formulations, theories, 'mad man' theories and others that are informing our policy so that the American people can begin to get some grip on our incoherent policy and enforce a more humane and productive thrust to it."

Greg Mitchell on the US administration's threats to WikiLeaks: "Joe Lieberman just is the most recent one, quite a detailed call saying this is a national security threat. Peter King said it was the same thing as a military attack, liking it to an attack on the U.S. But so far that hasn’t gotten anywhere and there hasn’t been a serious move to prevent the further dissemination or to stop, as we saw with the Pentagon papers, the actual newspapers printing documents. So we haven’t seen that yet, but we have seen some elegant defenses of publishing the documents, particularly in The Guardian – Simon Jenkins there and in the New York Times note on why the published the documents and they emphasize that it is not the press’ role to keep the government from suffering embarrassment and they also, as he mentioned earlier, the importance of using the example of the false information that was spread about Iraqi WMD’s, that if material like this had come out at that time it would have had a tremendous impact on perhaps halting what became the invasion of Iraq."

The full video is available on the Democracy Now! website.