La guerre de Daniel Ellsberg pour l’“incivisme patriotique”

Daniel Ellsberg est célèbre depuis la publication (en 1971) par le New York Times des “Pentagon Papers”. Il avait donné au quotidien new-yorkais une masse de documents du Pentagone sur l’engagement au Viet-nâm. (Venu de la Rand Corporation, Ellsberg avait travaillé près de dix ans comme analyste au Pentagone.)

Aujourd’hui, Ellsberg estime que le moyen le plus efficace de lutter contre l’administration GW Bush est de renouveler cette sorte d’intervention, de manière massive, voire préventive. Il lance aux fonctionnaires de la sécurité nationale à Washington un appel constant à l’incivisme — dans ce cas, ce qui devrait être désigné comme un “incivisme patriotique”.

Dans un article qu’il publie sur le site Harpers.org de Harpers Magazine, le 20 octobre, Ellsberg explique comment il aurait pu entraver, voire stopper l’engagement au Viet-nâm s’il avait communiqué à temps (en 1964, au sénateur anti-guerre Wayne Morse) certains documents déjà en sa possession. Il s’appuie sur cette hypothèse pour recommander fortement aux fonctionnaires impliqués de rendre publics des documents officiels sur les intentions du gouvernement et la planification d’une éventuelle attaque contre l’Iran.

«Even more ominously, Philip Giraldi, a former CIA official, reported in The American Conservative a year ago that Vice President Cheney’s office had directed contingency planning for “a large-scale air assault on Iran employing both conventional and tactical nuclear weapons” and that “several senior Air Force officers” involved in the planning were “appalled at the implications of what they are doing—that Iran is being set up for an unprovoked nuclear attack—but no one is prepared to damage his career by posing any objection.”

»Several of Hersh’s sources have confirmed both the detailed operational planning for use of nuclear weapons against deep underground Iranian installations and military resistance to this prospect, which led several senior officials to consider resigning. Hersh notes that opposition by the Joint Chiefs in April led to White House withdrawal of the “nuclear option” — for now, I would say. The operational plans remain in existence, to be drawn upon for a “decisive” blow if the president deems it necessary.

»Many of these sources regard the planned massive air attack — with or without nuclear weapons — as almost sure to be catastrophic for the Middle East, the position of the United States in the world, our troops in Iraq, the world economy, and U.S. domestic security. Thus they are as deeply concerned about these prospects as many other insiders were in the year before the Iraq invasion. That is why, unlike in the lead-up to Vietnam or Iraq, some insiders are leaking to reporters. But since these disclosures — so far without documents and without attribution — have not evidently had enough credibility to raise public alarm, the question is whether such officials have yet reached the limit of their responsibilities to our country.

»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.»

Mis en ligne le 21 octobre 2006 à 10H25