By Daniel Ellsberg 
Nearly 40 years ago I leaked the Pentagon Papers – a top secret 7,000-page study of US decision-making during the Vietnam war which revealed repeated lies and cover-ups by the administration. The Iraq war logs, published this weekend by Wikileaks, could be even more significant.
As with Vietnam, we have again seen evidence of a massive cover-up over a number of years by the American authorities. The logs reveal the human consequences of the continuing Iraq war, which have been concealed from the western public for too long: the countless instances of torture; the killing of hundreds of civilians at roadside checkpoints.
Now we know that the Pentagon, which claimed in the early years of the Iraq invasion either that it didn’t count casualties or that it had no evidence of them, was indeed keeping meticulous records all along. It has reports of 66,000 civilian casualties – 15,000 of which were completely unknown to Iraq Body Count, the only public attempt to log the war’s victims. That means 15,000 deaths that never made any news report – five times the number murdered on 9/11. It certainly would be news if they were American or British deaths. That’s 15,000 families who’ve suffered huge anguish and who may potentially have been motivated to seek revenge against American or allied troops. For the Pentagon to lie or try to hide this kind of carnage can only be self-defeating.
Perhaps that the victims are "only" Iraqis shows the kind of mindset among the occupying commanders that kept this bloody war going for so long. Perhaps they failed to realize that the coalition’s deadly activities have been such a powerful recruitment weapon for the resistance, both in Iraq and Afghanistan.
When I released the Pentagon papers in 1971, the administration responded by trying to suppress publication. It took out an injunction against myself and the New York Times in order to stop publication – a clear violation of the US constitution’s first amendment – claiming that every page and every day’s revelations were gravely damaging national security. We were eventually vindicated by the fact that no such damage was shown to have taken place.
Indeed, what gained such great media attention then was not so much the substance of our revelations but the unprecedented efforts by the administration to suppress them. Other newspapers followed suit – in total 19 defied the department of justice. And this duel sparked a wave of civil disobedience that had never been seen before. After a two-week legal battle the supreme court eventually ruled in our favor.
The US administration has learned from that episode. It has repeated the line – as it did with the leaked as it did with the leaked Afghan war papers in July, that the leaks are a danger to national security and put US troops’ lives at risk. (Though the Pentagon has now had to acknowledge that it doesn’t have any evidence of a single life being harmed in Afghanistan since July, despite the fact they’ve been searching desperately for it.)
At the same time, however, the Pentagon has been trying to downplay the revelations in order to lessen the public reaction. It says these reports are nothing new, and that they’ve already been the subject of public discussion. Well, maybe they’re nothing new to Iraqis, who have lived with the consequences of torture and checkpoint killings for seven years. And of course they’re nothing new to the Pentagon – it has been reporting these cases internally for years. But over that period, each time the American media has reported claims of indiscriminate killings, it has always reported either that the US military deny the allegations or that they are "investigating". As former As former British ambassador Craig Murray once said, these revelations don’t risk the lives of our soldiers, but risk merely the reputations of the politicians and bureaucrats who send them to their deaths.
The US is in the midst of a frenzied a frenzied congressional election campaign, and because Republicans and Democrats are both incriminated in Iraq and Afghanistan, the wars have scarcely been mentioned. But now that we have strong evidence of a huge cover-up over a number of years – in the largest unauthorized disclosure in history – the mainstream media cannot ignore it. And I feel confident that meaningful action will result. Forty years ago, to make my revelations, I utilized the then leading technology, Xerox, to photocopy 7,000 pages of evidence. I can only envy the ability of a 21st century whistleblower to impart a vastly greater trove of material using digital technology. And now the information is on the web, millions have the ability to look into it further in the coming days. It will play out very differently.
In addition, I’ve been impressed by Britain’s deputy prime minister Nick Clegg –who, rather than complaining about national secrets being compromised, has said the Iraq data need to be investigated. Any inquiry, even if only in the UK, will keep the issue high on the global agenda.
Any inquiry, even if only in the UK, will keep the issue high on the global agenda.
In the coming months I hope the courage and patriotism shown by the sources of these records – who risk long prison sentences – will be emulated by those with access to higher level documents. We need to see White House, Pentagon and CIA papers that reveal evidence of war crimes by top-level policy-makers – to bring the criminal activity that’s happening right now into the conscience of the American people.
The possibility of uncovering this is worth the great personal risk by whoever the sources may be – just as I never doubted that it was worth risking my own freedom to reveal the Pentagon Papers four decades ago.