Lied To Death: 

Conversations With Daniel Ellsberg On Why We Go To War

By Arn Menconi, May 2015


Chapter 12

Transcript of excerpts

(see also summary)


About Whistleblowing and the Milgram Experiment


time: 0:00

I do believe that you could increase the number of whistleblowers significally, and that could be very useful. It's possible to get the audience, to get a program instituted. 


.... It's happening now, like transgender people, they are coming out of the closet. Whistleblowers are coming outof the closet. .I think that's useful. But I don't expect it to go very far. Far enough to be helpful. It'll be a good thing. That;s what I do. Why am I going on this trip to Europe? I think it's possible to encourage people to be more whistleblowers than we've had. The more the better, but enough to make a big difference? I don't know at all. More than we've had. As many as we need? No, I don't know. 


... What he [Snowden] thinks is a solution, may be he's right. Whether it's a useful solution. I'm dubious, I'm not totally dubious. He is a software person, he's a programmer. He wants to invent software, a program, so that you can have a thumbdrive or something that you just plug in to your computer that will very easily provide very good encryption that NSA can't easily deal with. I can't judge the feasibility of this, but I trust him. If he thinks it's feasible I would bet he's right that you can encrypt a lot more and that you can get a lot more privacy if you want for whistleblowers, for investigative journalists, for people who want privacy, whatever. That you can really afford (?) NSA quite a bit, if you have this little thumbdrive, that piece of hardware that you can insert and do it. In fact, there will be less transparency of private people to the NSA than there is. 


I'm dubious that this will be a very useful change for the world very much, that enough people will use it, and they won't ve able to deal with it. Enough people will want to take the risk of telling truths that NSA doesn't want told, and so forth. Psychologically and socially I doubt that it will go very far, but I don't have any better answer. 


time: 3:55

It's not next to impossible [to blow the whistle]. Without getting caught is the trick. ... Now you can copy stuff and put it on a thumbdrive or DVD or something, the way Chelsea did, much easier and put it on the net, if you want. The trick is whether you can do that without getting caught.Their ability to catch you is ... they are working on this all the time, it's getting better all the time. But it's not impossible. ....


time: 5:05

The question is whether people are willing to steal information, if you like, pass, share information, that doesn't benefit themselves like a thief, information that they are not going to sell to the Russians or the Chinese, that is just for the benefit of other people outside your team. People interested in doing that -it turns out to be- is a small number. 


time: 6:10

How many people could have done it as well as Snowden. ... In fact I asked him. He said about a thousand could have done what he did.


time: 6:21

The Milgram Experiment

Milgram himself is a behaviorist, and he didn't put much stress on interrogating and interviewing people as to why they did what they did. They just recorded what they did, including their complaints, and the number of complaints, how far they went. He did some interviews, but not a whole lot as I would say he should have done. "Why are you doing this? Why did you go on? You complained, said it wasn't good, yet you went on. Why?" Well, as i say, behavior psychologists tend not to put much weight on what people say. They just look at what they do. "We don't care what people say", as if they were rats. 


But other people have asked during the experiment, and what they get a whole lot is "I promised to authority. It's a contract. I promised to do this, and I didn't want to break my promise" and so forth. Even though when you promised to do you hadn't forseen ... Oh, by the way: Essentially no one who doesn't know the experiment, the results, no matter how expert they are, has ever forseen ...  This is a very surprising result. Nobody forsees how people will behave in this situation. As I say, when they first hear it, they can't believe it. They say "Well, there is something funny about this. But then, if they try to reproduce it, they find "My god, it's robust!", and they change the conditions in various ways, the amount of payment, all sorts of things, the gender. For instance, they thought gender would make a difference. They tried the experiment with women, where a fluffy white kitten is the subject, is the learner. It's supposed to push open a particular door. Some kind of learning experiment for a kitten. When the kitten makes a mistake -it's on an electric grid- and the kitten is very obviously actually hurting. Can you get a woman to give the shocks to a kitten that's obviously being hurt by this? ... The answer is, the women are very troubled by it and they're showing stress, biting their nails,  saying "No, I can't do this, no, no!" "You must, the experiment requires you do this!" So they do it. It's an astounding result.


It is as though they are hypnotized. People say "Ok, it's a promise, I made a promise, I can't break the promise.". 


time: 9:2

I make two points.

  1. There is a lot different ways you can get this result. And remember, what they are doing is torture. They are inflicting pain on an innocent subject that is someone who is not worthy of punishment, doesn't have to be deterred, is not provoking you, they haven't done anything to merit this except to make a mistake. And they're getting harmed. Yes, it is in a context of an ideology: science! You are improving science by this. It's surprising that this ideology is that strong. Moreover, they can really reduce the scientific level of this by having other subjects suggest what to do, and people will follow it. So, the first point is: It's not just obedience. 
  2. I drew from all this, which I think no one else has actually articulated, may be I'm wrong. I drew "contract", "I promised to do it." "conformity", "obedience", and there is a couple of other ways exploited. 


People are not as inhibited inflicting pain as we like to think, we humans are. Humans are not as concerned about inflicting harm and pain, as concerned -I'm not saying they are totally unconcerned- they don't care. It's not as hard for people to hurt other people as you would think. And what you mean by thinking is: one likes to think, there has to be a very stron reason to do that. You have to be confronted in a military, you'll be imprisoned or killed even, if you don't follow orders, to get them to do it.   ... They have to have a reason, but the reason doesn't have to amount to very much. Almost any reason will do it. It doesn't have to be authority, it can be other reasons. ... Is it that hard to break promises? People do break promises. When it's only a question of hurting other people, not yourself, you can actually keep going on that promise pretty casually. It doesn't take a lot. Keep doing it, you don't care that much.


time: 13:03

I come back to my example: People didn't think it was a good idea to be bombing and it was necessary. And they knew it was killing people. But taht didn't matter that much. "If you want me to do, alright, I'll do it." Are they carreer military? No, they didn't have to be carreer military. When you get out, you stop doing it. Could you get out, if you are a contract person? Yes, but you keep doing it. ...


time: 13:33

The puzzling aspect is how can humans be brought to do this. It's inhuman. But actually it is human, humans don't mind doing this very much. They mind a little, prefer not to do it, do something else, may be. They are not choosing to do it. They are bothered by it, but not enough to stop, to resist it. The instinct to obey is stronger than we realize. It's very hard to get them to disobey, and causing pain is not enough to do it if they promised to obey.


Independent from the Milgram experiment - but my experience: people will do almost anything to stay in a group they want to stay in. Group-think is a slightly different matter. But in terms of complying and going along with what a group is doing no matter how criminal, disastrous, reckless, foolish, deceptive ... 


That was the My Lai massacre. Were the soldiers aberrant, extraordinarily sadistic psychopaths? Answer: No. They were ordinary soldiers given an order. How many soldiers were there: less than a hundred (Thompson in his interview with Tim Sebastian on HardTalk, 2004 says: 170). How many people died: almost five hundred, South Vietnamese children, babies,, women, elderly ... They would not have done it without an order, I would have said from my infantry experience, and this turns out to be true. They don't do this (...?) without an order. But an order from Calley, an obvious Nothing, Nebbish, shouldn't have been in the army at all. Everybody recognizes this guy is a fool. But he got the order from his captain, who was not a fool, Captain Medina. Captain Medina got his orders from Colonel Henderson, Hendersen from the division, it went all the way up "Destroy that village!" [They did it] to increase the body count. ... It didn't get reported. 


time: 18:01

A warrant officer,  Hugh Thompson from his helicopter sees people being killed. He was on observation, recon or something, he's right above that, sees the women and children getting shot right and left, down below him, as did everybody at every level. They are helicopters at different levels, and they can all see very well what's happening down there. So, he sees it, he sees a bunch of women and children in a ditch, and Americans are advancing on them. He sees that other Americans have been killing everywhere he looks, killing women and children, that's all there is, some old men, there's no military age boys or men in sight. They are all elesewhere. So he orders the helicopter to land, he goes out to rescue a couple of girls right in this ditch. Americans are coming and he says to his machine gunner in the helicopter "Put your guns on them". He says "If they interfere with what I'm doing, shoot them", Americans. He goes over, he rescues a couple of girls, babies or something like that, puts them in the helicopter and takes them off. And I think he comes back a couple of times and gets people. When he reports what he's done, they tell him to shut up, don't say anything above, higher than them, and he's then sent out to what amounts to suicide missions for quite a while, later. 20 years later -or 40 years maybe- they gave him an award, finally. But he was convinced that their intent was to get him killed after that. But that was one guy.


... Ron Ridenhour was from that company, but had been on another long-range patrol - he wasn't at My Lai. He comes back and rejoins the company later and he hears talk about what they've just don in Pinkville, killed so many civilians. 


By the way: They did not just shoot under order, Calley was telling them to shoot. Some people said "No", so he said "OK,  I'll do it", and he shot, so he was convicted of shooting some twenty of them himself, or something ...


Ridenhour learns about it. He starts asking more about it, wanting more information, because he's so appalled at what he's heard. So one night he's lying on the ground next to the guy he most admired ... Ridenhour always looked up to him very much. The way he described it they shot these people, and then they got tired. So, they sat down and started eating their C-rations. But there were some babies still yelling in the ditch. So they left their C-rations, picked up their M-16s and shot the babies. So Ridenhour says "Jesus, didn't know that was wrong!", and as soon as he said it, Ridenhour said, he realized that he has said the wrong thing, gone too far. And so the other guy said "Oh, that's just one of them things.", and turned over and went to sleep under his poncho.


So Ridenhour then writes letters about that, giving all the details tp half the Senate, actually, to about fifty senators. ... That starts an investigation. Meanwhile, because a couple of other people had complained, there had been an investigation which was assigned to Powell, later the leader of the Joint Chiefs, Colin Powell. Powell looks into it, asks people about it and writes a report, saying "No problem, no civilians were killed", or something, but he didn't know, he just asked a few people, accepted what they told him. By the way, they had reported so many Vietcong killed, They even got a commendation in the reports that ... "This unit killed the most number of Vietcong". That's all there was, there was no further investigation. Anyway, it's a long story. 


Eventually Sey Hersh learns about it, causing interviews of a number of people involved, writes stories, can't get them published, and finally a later friend of mine, David Oaks from Dispatch News Service they take a list sort of all the papers in the country and start going down the list, asking. They finally get somebody who takes the story, and then eventually it blows up into a big story. ... (time: 24:28)


time: 25:00

What does it take for people to torture? The Milgram experiment explains something very quickly. At Abu Ghraib but all these other places as well, what Linndie England, that famous girl with the dog leash, you know, sums up and so forth in the photographs that were put out, or Janis Karpinski (?) who was ordering her to do it, they were ... the only ones, only a handful actually went to prison as a result. So the question is: Were the people involved in this, and there were really a lot altogether, were they aberrant entirely, were they nuts, psychopathic sadists? No. They were just in a situation and they were encouraged to do this. So they did it, and when they did it, people said "Ah, you're doing a good job, keep doing it." So they did it.


As I say, there is two sides to this:.


You really have got to face the fact that humans are very concerned about harm to themselves, their family, their team, their "we group", whatever it is, their "in-group" that they are in. And they are less concerned about larger groups that they are part of, somewhat less concerned. For most people of the world I would say, they are not concerned at all in any sense  - they are not prepared to pay any cost, any effort to do anything to avoid that harm. They don't care as much as we would like to think, good decent humans do, ordinary, decent, reasonable, good, average people. They'll collaborate with this. It doesn't have to be -and this is what Milgram found- it's not just Germans. That's what he really set up to show. He did show, it's not just Germans who act this way. Actually, Germans don't act this way any more in these experiments than people in other countries. The Germans were ordered to do it and they did it.


time: 27:31

What is being a good person? Keeping your promises? Being faithful and reliable? Doing what your other teammates do? Not being a snitch, not making them look bad or embarrassing your friends? These are very, very high values, higher in many cases than refusing to inflict harm on people who have not harmed anybody else, or are not threatening harm. In a way this is not in the Milgram experiment because they are not really part of a group except for the experimenter, the relationship between the experimenter and the teacher. They are in a room together. More and more I see it as a group phenomenon, personally, that people will do almost anything or risk almost anything in the way of inflicting harm to stay in a group that they respect and want to be respected by, to keep membership. That the threat of ostracism or losing status within the group is enough to get them to take terrible risks of the wellfare of other people, others. They are not necessarily enemies in the sense that  ... especially when they are enemies that you want to harm. But even if you don't actually want to harm them and don't take pleasure in it, their willingness to risk harm to them or to inflict harm on them in order to keep in good standing in a group, keep your status as a level leader or actual leader, or just to be a member of the group, you'll go along. Not going along and being expelled from a group that you value and respect is -this is my proposition- is almost unattainable, it's not an alternative for people. It's almost as if they are unable to do it. They can't do it, they won't do it, do something that will get them expelled. They won't do it. And they don't seem able to do it.


We have this phenomenon, you see. I'll make it personal. How is it that of these thousand people, probably far more than that, at NSA, who believed that the mass warrrantless surveillance they were doing was illegal and wrong. There were probably well over a thousand people who believed that. Why only one, Edward Snowden, why only one eventually who takes the effort to expose that to the larger world? Why only one Chelsea Manning who sees these people being gunned down and knows that it's an everyday experience. Of all the people looking at it, they all said "Gee, that shouldn't happen. That's a bad thing, that's murder, and it's happening all the time. Bad!" One person - well he goes to prison, that's a good reason, right? But shouldn't there be more than one who's ready to go to prison? Well, it turns out there isn't.


time 31:02

And I put out -you know- I put out the Pentagon Papers, I'm willing to go to prison for life. Well, it turns out, ok, you can understand why not a whole lot of people are willing to do that. And I had a particular experience, you know, that drew me to that. But I wasn't unique - I was sort of unique in the combination of experiences I had. I'd worked in side at a high level of the Pentagon, I was actually in Vietnam, in combat, getting fired at. Very unusual combination, and I had read the Pentagon Papers. So that combination was close to unique - I was the only person to combine it all of ... so you see why I did it. But does it really take all that, actually? Do you have to have all that? What part is it? Why am I the only one, the only insider in Vietnam who joined the active movement against the war, which of course the insiders tend to despise, you know. These ragged people, young, counter culture, dope smoking etc. They didn't expect getting arrested for live. But still, they were the movement against the war. How come, nobody else joined that movement, I'm the only one? Well, because I'm so amazing?!


time: 32:35

The people who do this don't regard themselves as amazing, unique. The more you know them, the more average they seem from all other respects, except what they did. And I don't think of myself as that unusual - I had an unusual combination of characteristics, but any one of them is very common. It's a question, why don't other people? Because it does mean being expelled, exiled form their group that respects them, and people just won't do that. Even though they know that their side is inflicting massacres and disasters!


time: 33:50

This is exactly what Manning and Snowden, both said: namely 

  1. somebody ought to do this, somebody ought to reveal this, somebody ought to blow the whistle, somebody ought to tell about this. I hope somebody will do it. 
  2. Second point: Apparently nobody is willing to do that, nobody else is doing it, it's nobody who's going to be doing it, Im the one who has access to it. I could do it, others could do it, too, but they are not doing it. 
  3. Third: So, I guess it's up to me - I'll do it.


Now, an awful lot of people would reach that first point - somebody should tell about this, it's bad, it shouldn't happen. And they must notice: It's not happening, nobody is telling. People don't seem to reach that third point. But to the person involved, the whistleblower, it just seem very natural. Well, nobody else will do it, I guess I have to do it. That's the way I think about it. Except what it seems to be very extraordinary. I don't know why. it seems very obvious to me: Nobody else is doing it, I'd better do it.


What leads the person I can't say. It feels obvious to me


time: 35:15

I was a link, I'd say. I was one link in a chain of events and actions, a number of which were utterly ordinary actions by a number of people that made it possible for the war to be ending. I didn't do it by myself.


time: 35:28

Arn Menconi: I want to acknowledge your honor and your bravery, for what you did, and the fact that we've had the ability to look back in time from forty, to sixty to seventy years and see this  arc of injustice, deceipt and lies, and how one individual made such a profound difference.


Daniel Ellsberg: Thank you. But I do (?) - and not just to be modest, it's an important point - no one person can effect events like this, even if they are president or secretary general. It always depends on a lot of other people, for good or bad. No person can construct anormous evil by himself, like Hitler. It takes a lot of cooperation. The whole point of civil disobedience, civil nonviolent resistance, it that dictators depend on a lot of cooperation. It is possible at risk to withdraw that cooperation and remove them their power and change events. Now, on the other side of things, I don't know of any example where the act of one person alone can be said to have had big effect on events, quite apart from the actions of anybody else.


And this is a good example of that, because I think it is the fact that if I'd only copied the Pentagon Papers, it would have had essentially no effect, I'm sorry to say. It would have affected people's understanding of the war, but that didn't affect the war. Nixon didn't care about what people thought about the war. He was pursuing his own policy. Almost by chance -it so happens- I did copy other things as well, and I was prepared to take additional risks for those, putting those out. Because those dealt with the current, incumbent president, they concerned him very much more than this history that I put out. So, that led him to take actions that made himself vulnerable, but not very vulnerable. It was unlikely that he would ever suffer consequences of that. A lot of people -and I mention Butterfield, Cox, Richardson, Dean. A lot of people had to take risky actions, risk their carreers in many cases. Butterfield, Richardson, Cox, for example, and there were others. They each had to take actions that risked their carreers, each of which was very unusual and unpredictable. And without all of those nothing would have happened in terms of the war. 


So, on the one hand there is a number of people who did show ... take initiative in the right way and had effect. But it's also important to see that none of them were abe to do it by himself., not me or anybody else. And there wss no guarantee in any case that it would have a big effect. In fact, it was unlikely, but it was possible. People did In a number of cases the right thing because there was a possibility that it would make a difference. 


That's the example I want people to understand. That's the reality. You never have a guarantee that something you're doing will make a difference, but it's also wrong to conclude that there is no chance, as people do often tell themselves to excuse inaction. They say "Well, there's no chance. It's impossible that I could have any effect.". If it's a question of telling the truth or taking an action in resistance of wrongdoing of some kind, this history shows that, unpredictably, there is a chance that a single person can have an essential effect, essential, and can be part of bringing about a good change and of saving a lot of lives. 



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