Daniel Ellsberg
Arrested December 10, 2002: Jail Interview
Weblog Entry
December 12, 2002
On December 10, Daniel Ellsberg was arrested, alongside his son
Michael, and over 100 religious leaders of numerous denominations and
faiths,
protesting the impending war with Iraq in front of the U.S. Mission to
the UN (For a write-up of the arrests, click here:
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/12/10/sproject.irq.protest.)
Some of the arrestees managed to sneak cell phones in past the guards.
From one of these phones, Ellsberg gave an interview, live from the
NYC 17th Precinct Police Station's holding cell, to the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation. The following is an edited, partial
transcript. (To hear the full audio clip of the interview, see the
Streaming Audio and Video page:
http://ellsberg.net/audiovideo.htm)
CBC: Mr. Ellsberg, it's Mary Lou from As It Happens. How are you?
ELLSBERG: I'm fine, I'm great. In fact, I'm in extremely good company,
so we're having essentially a good time, in what is a very dark time
for our country.
CBC: You're in jail right at the moment?
ELLSBERG: We're in jail—and that seems the right place to be—for
sitting in front of the U.S. Mission to the UN, saying as strongly as
we can, non-violently and truthfully, "What is being done in our name is
not with our consent. Approaching war with Iraq has to be done over our
bodies. They can do it, but they have to arrest us, and they did arrest
us, and we're all in this jail together.
CBC: Why did they arrest you?
ELLSBERG: They arrested us being in front of the U.S. Mission. I would
have said that we were assembling quite peacefully, by our First
Amendment rights, but apparently, it was violating some regulation or
other, which we were prepared to do in order to petition the government
to redress our grievances: that we're about to set out on what amounts
to an aggressive war.
The fact remains that a preventive war, which is what this is, is
criminal, a crime against the peace. Along with that, we are about to
invade a country that has, according to our President, weapons of mass
destruction—namely nerve gas—that may well be used on our troops. We
should not be sending our men and women to die under those
circumstances.
CBC: You've heard talk of the debate among leftists and liberals about
whether the analogy is to Vietnam or to the Second World War, about
whether you are there to liberate a whole people from a brutal
dictator,
or whether, obviously you see echoes of Vietnam instead.
ELLSBERG: Well, Vietnam was not nearly as obviously an aggressive war.
You really had to know the history of our support and encouragement of
the French colonial reconquest of Vietnam to know that it was
aggressive
or criminal, and I didn't know that when I was in Vietnam, or even when
I first came back. This case is pretty blatant.
Of course Saddam is a dictator, and may well have some weapons of mass
destruction, as did Stalin, as did Mao Tse-tung, as does Kim today in
North Korea. I've never favored preventive war against any of them. It
would have been, in retrospect, a horribly dangerous and bad idea, and
it's horribly dangerous and bad right now.
CBC: You don't believe then what some Iraqis in exile are telling us,
which is that their country is looking for intervention from the U.S.?
ELLSBERG: I don't know what in the world they base that on—certainly
not on polls, one way or the other, or on free speech, because Saddam
doesn't allow either of those. How many of them want us to go in there
and bomb and kill for their freedom? There's no way the people of Iraq,
even speaking as one, could authorize us, or anyone else, to bomb some
number of them in order to liberate them. That's not what international
order is based on.
http://ellsberg.net/weblog/12_12_02.htm
http://www.Ellsberg.net
