Une “taupe“ anti-guerre dans l’administration BHO?

Une “taupe“ anti-guerre dans l’administration BHO?

Daniel Ellsberg est un homme fameux, depuis la publication des Pentagon Papers, en 1971, dans le New York Times. Ces documents du Pentagone qu’il avait transmis au quotidien constituent la “fuite” la plus fameuse de l’histoire de la sécurité nationale aux USA. Ellsberg, d’abord analyste à la RAND puis fonctionnaire du Pentagone avant la “fuite”, est devenu depuis un “dissident” fameux. A partir de la guerre en Irak, il n’a cessé d’inciter les fonctionnaires US à pratiquer des “fuites” comme il avait fait lui-même, pour tenter de stopper la politique belliciste du système.

Dans une interview à Democracy Now !, le 30 mars 2010, Ellsberg fait l’hypothèse qu’une telle “fuite” a eu lieu à propos de divers télégrammes secrets de l’ambassadeur US à Kaboul, le général Eikenberry, en novembre 2009 et, semble-t-il, selon Ellsberg, également en janvier. Ellsberg estime qu’il y a une “taupe” dans l’administration Obama, qui divulgue des documents importants sur la guerre en Afghanistan, et que cette administration est engagée dans une recherche furieuse pour tenter de découvrir cette “taupe”.

Ellsberg est interrogé par Amy Goodman, de Democracy Now !

Amy Goodman: «I saw you speak, Dan Ellsberg, here in New York after a production of Top Secret, a very interesting play about not the New York Times and the Pentagon Papers—they were the first to begin to print them but were then enjoined by the Nixon government, and then the Washington Post started to print the Pentagon Papers, and that’s what this was about. But afterwards, you talked about the US ambassador to Afghanistan and how important what Ambassador Eikenberry had to say in these memos and cables that were made public. Can you talk about those?»

Daniel Ellsberg: «Yeah. Well, for years now, really since we set out to go into Iraq on much the same kinds of lies in 2002 that sent us into Vietnam when I was in the Pentagon, since then, I’ve been saying to officials in the government, “Don’t do what I did. Do what I wish I had done in ’63 or ’64, before we had entered the war, before the bombs had fallen. Don’t wait, as I did, ’til we were in the war and the war was essentially unstoppable, before telling the truth about the hopelessness, understood within the government, and the impossibility—the unlikelihood of any kind of victory there. But do it now.”

»Actually, almost as I—in recent times, that call has been answered. I don’t know whether it was direct or not, but some government official who is now the most dangerous man in America in the eyes of President Obama, I’m sure—I’m sure there’s a Plumbers operation going on right now to find out who leaked the cables, the secret cables, of our ambassador in Kabul, Lieutenant General, retired, Karl Eikenberry, who had been in charge in Afghanistan, and first in charge of training Afghan troops and then in charge of all of our operations in Afghanistan, before McChrystal, and is now our accredited ambassador to Karzai, the head of the so-called government that we’re supporting there now.

»And in those cables, secret cables, which someone leaked in January, after the President had announced his decision, I’m sorry to say—I wish he had done what I most called for, and that is, send the cables, the truth that he was telling, in before that decision had been announced. Still, the decision hasn’t been fully implemented, especially by Congress, in terms of appropriation. And they would do well to read what it is they’re appropriating money for.

»Eikenberry’s cables now, at this stage, read like a summary of the Pentagon Papers of Afghanistan. And that’s the first installment of papers that we need right now. Just change the place names from “Saigon” to “Kabul” and the Afghan national forces serving as the surrogate of our mercenary ARVN of Vietnam, and they read almost exactly the same. He’s describing the President, Karzai, to whom he’s accredited and who he just visited with President Obama. And Karzai has presumably read Eikenberry’s assessment of him as—that he is not an adequate strategic partner for the United States, and for reasons of corruption and inefficiency.

»Allegedly, we hear that Obama’s reason for going seventeen hours over to Afghanistan was to convey in person our desire that he clean up his government. I’m really reminded of when Kennedy and Johnson decided to enlist our Mafia in an effort to get Castro. I don’t think they spent time telling the Mafia, “By the way, it’ll be helpful to us, if you’re going to be our partner, to clean up your act, get out of the drug business.” In Karzai’s government, as in the Mafia, corruption are us, drugs are us. Corruption is his government. That’s his constituency, his source of income. There is no chance whatever that he’ll, for instance, root out his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, from Kandahar, which is our next base of operations, despite the fact that our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says no success is possible in Kandahar while corruption is still the heart of that, while drug dealing is the heart of that, so long as Wali, the President’s, Karzai’s brother, is in charge there.

»It’s obviously—it’s not just a symbolism. It’s the fact that we have a government there that has no prospect of achieving legitimacy in the eyes of the people we’re supposedly appealing to in Afghanistan. And that’s symbolic of the whole effort. There is no prospect of any kind of success in Afghanistan, any more than the Soviets achieved in their ten years there, just as in Vietnam we really had no realistic prospect of more success than the French. But countries find it very hard to learn from the failures of other countries.»

Dans le reste de l’interview, à lire sans attendre, des jugements de Ellsberg sur la tactique de McChrystal, l’avenir de la guerre en Afghanistan, etc.

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