Dan Ellsberg: "They Are Totally Complicit" (Insightful-Interview By Glenn Greenwald)

Dan Ellsberg on Past, Present, Future

By Glenn Greenwald, Salon Radio
August 1, 2008

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“Don’t wait until the new war has started in Iran, or Iraq in the past. Don’t wait till the bombs are falling and more thousands of people have died, before you do what I wish I had done in 1964 or 1965, years before I did do it: go to Congress, go to the press—both, by the way, not just Congress or they won’t act, as I found—go with documents and tell the truth.

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SNIPPETS

Ellsberg: Well, I couldn’t help noticing as far back as 2001, when the so-called PATRIOT Act was passed, that acts that had been taken against me which were crimes had suddenly been legalized.

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So acts that confronted Nixon with impeachment and were clearly repudiated when they were discovered back in the 1970s and led to the ending of my trial but more importantly later consequences for the President, those acts in the wake of 9/11 have been legalized.

There’s a contrast here. If the President had done these various things for a day or a week or a month in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, I think very few people would have bothered or felt like criticizing that in an emergency, of necessity, when they didn’t know what was happening. But to keep these things going secretly for six or seven years is a different matter.

And worst of all, as you point out, Congress when actually called on moved to legalize these things now. I’m not a lawyer -- I’m a defendant -- but it’s a question in my mind whether you can simply amend the Constitution by majority votes like this, whether they can really make these things legal against the Fourth Amendment and other amendments of the Constitution.
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So they are totally complicit. So at least the Judiciary Committee – which I understand was not brought in on the negotiations about this FISA deal though it clearly had been in their purview – they should be brought in across committee lines.

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We can’t count on Obama – not because he’s complicit himself, he wasn’t, and like you he’s a constitutional lawyer – but what President has ever eschewed and cut back powers that were bequeathed to him?

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We haven’t talked about how to fix it, that’s important. But just to define the situation we’re in, I’d like to sum up what I’ve been saying, by saying, unhappily, that when I pledge allegiance as of now, after that recent (FISA Amendments) vote, I will be pledging it “to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stood.”

And that’s a situation I want to change.


more at:
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/073108c.html

Sorry, I didn't see this post and put it up later.

It's like business and the military are shutting down labor rights and free speech media to firmly establish an empire, precluding any further heroes such as Ellsberg from speaking out in defense of the US constitution.