by ASHLEY FANTZ
It’s supposed to be sunny on Saturday in Washington, which is good news for Daniel Ellsberg. The most famous whistle-blower in American history is hoping to get arrested in the name of Bradley Manning.
“Oh, it’s easy. I’ve done it before,” he explains. “You don’t have to do much to get arrested at the White House.”
A spry 79-year-old with neat, silver hair, Ellsberg doesn’t look threatening. But he’s pretty mad. Disgusted is the word he uses to describe how he feels that Manning, a 23-year-old Army private, has been locked up for nearly eight months at Quantico military prison.
Charged with 34 counts, including “aiding the enemy,” Manning faces life in prison and maybe execution. He is accused of illegally downloading hundreds of thousands of secret military and State Department documents and giving it to WikiLeaks.
To many Americans, Manning is a traitor. To many Americans, Manning is a hero.
To Ellsberg, Manning is something else.
“I was that young man; I was Bradley Manning,” he says.
In the 1960s, Ellsberg was a high-level Pentagon official. He was a former Marine commander who believed the American government was the good guy. But while working for the administration of Lyndon Johnson, Ellsberg got access to a top-secret document that revealed senior American leaders, including several presidents, knew that the Vietnam War was an unwinnable, tragic quagmire.
The Pentagon Papers, as they became known, also showed that the government had lied to Congress and the public about the progress of the war. Ellsberg leaked all 7,000 pages to The New York Times, which published them in 1971.
Not long after, he surrendered to authorities and confessed to being the leaker. Ellsberg was charged as a spy, and he went to trial facing 115 years.
“I was willing to go to prison,” Ellsberg says. “I never thought, for the rest of my life, I would ever hear anyone willing to do that, to risk their life, so that horrible, awful secrets could be known. Then I read those logs and learned Bradley was willing to go to prison. I can’t tell you how much that affected me.”
Ellsberg has been trying to see Manning but has had no luck getting on his visitors list. Ellsberg says he’ll only pull Saturday’s stunt if he can get out of jail in time to make it to Quantico on Sunday. A rally is being planned outside the prison, and Ellsberg is scheduled to address the demonstrators.
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