Ellsberg and the Espionage Act

In 1971 Daniel Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 with leaking the Pentagon Papers.  The case was dismissed on grounds of government misconduct.  Now 41 years later Ellsberg is speaking out with regard to the same charge filed against Bradley Manning, the alleged leaker of WikiLeaks.  One difference between the two cases is that Ellsberg was accused of leaking top secret documents, whereas Manning is accused of leaking secret documents.  I've written about the effect that Obama's pushing of the act will have on the people's right to know what its government is doing.  But you really should hear from Ellsberg:

• “Unauthorized disclosures are the lifeblood of the republic,” Ellsberg said. “You cannot have a meaningful democracy where the public only has authorized disclosures from the government. If they [officials] get control, if they can prosecute anybody who violates that, you are kidding yourself if you think you have any kind of democratic control over foreign policy, national security and homeland security. We don’t have a democracy now in foreign affairs and national security. We have a monarchy tempered by leaks. Cut off the leaks and we don’t even have that.”
• “Had I or one of the scores of other officials who had the same high-level information acted then on our oath of office—which was not an oath to obey the president, nor to keep the secret that he was violating his own sworn obligations, but solely an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States—that terrible war [the Vietnam War] might well have been averted altogether,” Ellsberg said. “But to hope to have that effect, we would have needed to disclose the documents when they were current, before the escalation—not five or seven, or even two years after the fateful commitments had been made.
• “Don’t do what I did,” he cautioned. “Don’t wait until a new war has started in Iran, until more bombs have fallen in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, Libya, Iraq or Yemen. Don’t wait until thousands more have died before you go to the press and to Congress to tell the truth with documents that reveal lies or crimes or internal projections of costs and dangers. Don’t wait 40 years for it to be declassified, or seven years as I did for you or someone else to leak it.”