The Salon Interview: Daniel Ellsberg

In times of war, Americans tend to give the president the benefit of the doubt. They assume he's acting rationally, on the basis of access to classified information they can't know about. But in his new book "Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers," former Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg demonstrates that such

So far we've talked about the war mainly as irrational. But you have famously described the war not as a mistake but a crime. You base this charge on the evidence in the Pentagon Papers that U.S. leaders from 1954 to 1968 knew they were opposing self-determination in South Vietnam, and were waging an aggressive war against a people who did not threaten us. What impact did your conclusion that the U.S. was morally wrong in Vietnam have on your actions?

The evidence made clear that our war was a crime against the peace. And for me to see that impelled me to take nonviolent actions I was not led to do when I considered it simply a mistake. When I saw the war as unjustified homicide, it seemed to me that it should stop not just gracefully or whenever possible, but that it should stop as soon as possible.

Do you also believe any war against Iraq would also be criminal?

Even if there was a threat, it is not a threat that would justify the extreme dangers of committing mass murder against civilians that is likely to occur, and even the murders I think of Iraqi soldiers. Unjustified aggressive killing of Iraqi soldiers is also murder. Iraqi soldiers have not done anything in the past five years or so, certainly not in the past year, that sentences them to death by our president or by our Congress or by the U.N.

I think right now if people came to perceive what we were doing as totally illegal and unjustified, they might do more to oppose it than they would otherwise. I don't have a lot of faith that that will come about. The media will simply not allow that perception on the whole to emerge.