Nuclear attack planned? Urgently needed: a whistleblower.

Daniel Ellsberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower in the early '70's, admits in the latest  (October) Harper's that he's had second thoughts about what he did.  He asks what might have happened if he'd told what he knew when he first knew it instead of 7 years later?  How many lives would have been saved?

Had I done so [he writes], the public and Congress would have learned that Johnson's campaign theme, "we seek no wider war," was a hoax. They would have learned, in fact, that the Johnson Administration had been heading in secret toward essentially the same policy of expanded war that his presidential rival, Senator Barry Goldwater, openly advocated -- a policy that the voters overwhelmingly repudiated at the polls.

Articles by Seymour Hersh and others indicate that we're on the verge of an attack -- with nuclear weapons -- on Iran.  Ellsberg pleads with government officials who gave information to Hersh to do what he didn't do:  blow the whistle.  In time.  He has no illusions about what their fate might be.

Assuming Hersh's so-far anonymous sources mean what they say – that this is, as one puts it, "a juggernaut that has to be stopped" – I believe it is time for one or more of them to go beyond fragmentary leaks unaccompanied by documents. That means doing what no other active official or consultant has ever done in a timely way: what neither Richard Clarke nor I nor anyone else thought of doing until we were no longer officials, no longer had access to current documents, after bombs had fallen and thousands had died, years into a war. It means going outside executive channels, as officials with contemporary access, to expose the president's lies and oppose his war policy publicly before the war, with unequivocal evidence from inside.

Simply resigning in silence does not meet moral or political responsibilities of officials rightly "appalled" by the thrust of secret policy. I hope that one or more such persons will make the sober decision – accepting sacrifice of clearance and career, and risk of prison – to disclose comprehensive files that convey, irrefutably, official, secret estimates of costs and prospects and dangers of the military plans being considered. What needs disclosure is the full internal controversy, the secret critiques as well as the arguments and claims of advocates of war and nuclear "options" – the Pentagon Papers of the Middle East. But unlike in 1971, the ongoing secret debate should be made available before our war in the region expands to include Iran, before the sixty-one-year moratorium on nuclear war is ended violently, to give our democracy a chance to foreclose either of those catastrophes.

The personal risks of doing this are very great. Yet they are not as great as the risks of bodies and lives we are asking daily of over 130,000 young Americans – with many yet to join them -- in an unjust war. Our country has urgent need for comparable courage, moral and civil courage, from its public servants. They owe us the truth before the next war begins.