My Take | Whistle-blower who won pyrrhic victory over US security state
- Rarely used after the collapse of the case against the late Daniel Ellsberg, the Espionage Act is now employed against those who expose crimes
Daniel Ellsberg, the economist and Rand Corporation analyst who died last week aged 92, did much to further government transparency and public access to information in the United States. But the lifework of this political activist – whose most famous act, or infamous if you are on the right, was to leak the so-called Pentagon Papers to the press – now lies in tatters.
Those rights he championed have been reversed, or worse, subverted in the past two decades. The national security state that has been erected in the US has made prosecution or persecution of whistle-blowers much easier, if not mandatory by law. Today, someone like Ellesberg would not have died in his bed, but more likely in prison, locked up in solitary confinement.
I remember reading in college dozens of pages from a randomly picked volume of the massive Pentagon Papers, which covered US involvement in Vietnam up to the late 1960s. It was analytical and free of government jargons – written, that is, with the clear intention, as they say, to instruct and enlighten policymakers.
Later, I read about another multi-volume official history, this one commissioned by the British Foreign Office for the delegates at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I. It had the same intention as the Pentagon Papers – to help British officials at Versailles learn from the past, that is, from the Congress of Vienna (after the fall of Napoleon) and do better this time.
Well, we all know how they turned out in Vietnam and after Paris.