EARLIER in the week we interviewed Julian Assange about the recent leak of secret documents relating to the war in Afghanistan. To gain more perspective on the matter, I also talked to Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who released the Pentagon Papers, a classified history of America's involvement in Vietnam, to the New York Times in 1971. I asked him about the nature of leaking, how the two leaks compare, and about the government's handling of leakers. We talked over the phone and email. This transcript is edited for length and clarity

DiA: Does Wikileaks's recent release of 90,000 documents relating to the Afghan War warrant comparison to the Pentagon Papers?

Mr Ellsberg: The comparison is inevitable in one major respect: in terms of volume, there's been nothing like it since the Pentagon Papers. In other words, it's the first really big unauthorised disclosure in the last 39 years. And it has the advantage of being more current. The most recent of the Pentagon Papers were dated three years before their release. In this case it's six months earlier.

There are differences, though. The Pentagon Papers were high-level, top-secret documents on internal estimates, alternatives being debated, presidential directives, and so forth. The Afghanistan documents are lower-level field reports, of the kind that I was reading and writing when I was a foreign-service officer in Vietnam. In fact, I could've written a number of them—they were very like the ones I wrote, with the place names changed. Which confirms what I've been saying for some years: that I see this war as Vietnamistan. It's really in many respects a replay of the stalemate we were in 40 years ago.

DiA: The Pentagon Papers showed we were being misled in Vietnam, but we knew the situation in Afghanistan was as grim as what these new documents suggest. So do you think they will have as big an impact?

Mr Ellsberg: I think the drama of the volume has gotten them the kind of attention that Richard Nixon gave to the Pentagon Papers by enjoining them. In this case, perhaps, the administration is being smarter in downplaying the significance of the documents, rather than enjoining them. But it just can't be ignored because of the very volume that's involved here, and the fact that it covers a six-year period of the war. So it has gotten as much media attention as I think could be hoped for. In this case, it wasn't so much a matter of showing deception on the part of the administration as much as bringing the war into the awareness of the American people. It has hardly been a matter of concern to the public, and I think this could capture their attention.

DiA: In a more general sense, what do you think of Wikileaks?

Mr Ellsberg: I'm very impressed by them. They caught my attention with the video of the Apache helicopter assault in Iraq. (Apparently there's another video to come, of a much larger massacre.) I would've thought that the National Security Agency could penetrate them and keep them from giving anonymity to leakers. We pay an awful lot to the NSA to spy on us—since 9/11—and on other people, and I supposed they were up to the task of denying secure communications to Wikileaks. But the administration's surprise at these revelations indicates that Julian Assange is delivering to sources what he said he could—anonymity. And the reason that one person has been brought up on charges, Bradley Manning, is not due to any fault in the Wikileaks technology, but to Bradley Manning's own choice to reveal himself to someone who in turn informed on him. So I hope that his being under charges won't discourage other people from using the Wikileaks technology. I understand that Assange has offered, or plans to offer, this same technology or software to newspapers so that they can do Wikileaks's job on a larger scale. And I hope they take advantage of that.

DiA: Do you think the government is actively working against Wikileaks?

Mr Ellsberg: I'm sure they are, in the sense of trying to discover the sources of truth-telling from within. This administration has shown more eagerness to prosecute leaks than any other administration in our history. As a matter of fact, Barack Obama has now, with the prosecution of Bradley Manning, indicted as many people for whistleblowing or leaks as all previous presidents put together. Did you realise that?

DiA: I did not.

Mr Ellsberg: Well it's a small number. It's three. It's that small because we don't have an official secrets act the way that the British and most countries do. And therefore we've only had three such prosecutions in the past. I was the first, with Tony Russo, under Richard Nixon. And two other presidents each brought one case. Obama has now prosecuted three people. Two of whom are being prosecuted for acts carried out under George Bush and for which Bush chose not to prosecute—Thomas Drake, who is under indictment, and Shamai Leibowitz, who pleaded guilty (a mistake in my mind). So Obama's famous position of not looking backward seems to apply only to crimes like torture or illegal warrantless surveillance. He's given absolute amnesty to the officials of the Bush administration. But in the case of Thomas Drake, who told a reporter about a billion-and-half-dollar waste at the NSA, and in the case of Shamai Leibowitz, who says he exposed acts to a blogger that he regarded as illegal, Obama was willing to look backward and prosecute. With Manning he has shown more eagerness to do that. I think we can assume that those who don't use Wikileaks's technology to get the information out can be assured of prosecution. I have to assume that if I had now put out the Pentagon Papers as I did, using that now outmoded technology of Xerox, Obama would prosecute me to the full extent of the law.

DiA: Who should be entrusted to decide if a leak is warranted?

Mr Ellsberg: From what we've seen so far, Assange has shown much better judgment with respect to what he has revealed than the people who kept those items secret inside the government. The Apache video was wrongly withheld from Reuters, which tried for two years to get it in order to shed light on why their two employees, unarmed journalists, were shot in Iraq. They tried to get the video under the Freedom of Information Act and it was refused. I haven't seen any investigation of who it was that refused the request, or what their supposed basis was for doing so. Bradley Manning has taken credit for that video, according to the source that informed on him, and he showed better judgment there than the person who refused the request. Likewise Assange. So far I give both Assange's sources and himself more benefit of the doubt on this judgment than the people who are keeping the secrets.

As I've been saying elsewhere, I don't advise people to put out classified material they haven't read and formed a definite judgment of the need for disclosure on. In fact, I would advise them not to do that. How much the case of the Afghanistan documents involves doing that, and whether the risks outweigh the benefits, has yet to be seen. (On that count, I certainly don't give the judgment, or declarations, of Gates or Mullen or, for that matter, Obama much weight, despite, or really because of, their roles. Their commitment to secrecy and manipulation—along with their reckless and irresponsible policymaking—has already cost untold lives in the Middle East, and is continuing to do so.)

DiA: What role do you think the media plays in the leak process? I've heard you say that if you were leaking the Pentagon Papers today, you wouldn't give them to the press, you'd simply put them up on the internet.

Mr Ellsberg: I think I was misunderstood on that quote. What I did say was that my first choice still would be the press. In fact, it would be the press rather than Congress—I think I wasted a year and half trying to get hearings in Congress without the pressure of the press. Of course, I was unsuccessful there—they just held on to the papers. So I would first go to the press for a number of reasons. But if the press delayed or refused then I would certainly get it to Wikileaks or just put it directly on the net. But that wouldn't be my first choice, even now.

Here's an example. The New York Times had the story on the NSA warrantless wiretaps before the election in 2004. They held onto it, I would say very wrongly, for a year. I think the sources of that information were derelict, given the importance of the matter, in not using the new technology and getting that out themselves. If I'd been in that position, I would've bought a scanner and gotten it out on the internet. And I was in that position to some extent with the Pentagon Papers, but I didn't have the internet. The Times was working very hard to get this material out for a matter of months after I gave it to them and before it appeared. But they didn't tell me that. For reasons that have never been clear to me, the reporter said they weren't working on doing it. And that led me to take further risks, giving the papers to Pete McCloskey in the House and talking to Senator Mathias and looking for other venues to get them out. The way it worked out in the end was fine, but certainly if the same thing happened now—if the Times was telling me that they weren't using the papers—I would look for other approaches, and now I certainly would just put them out on the internet.

DiA: I have a quote here from you: "Presidents rarely say the whole truth"...

Mr Ellsberg: Never. "Rarely" is a euphemism there. The politician has a lot of audiences and a lot of interests, his own to start with (re-election). And a politician, essentially, never tells you the whole relevant truth—truth that would be relevant to his audience, in terms of what he's expecting to do, what he's trying to do, what his motivations are, and so forth. You can just assume you're never getting the whole picture.

DiA: On Afghanistan, is this administration telling the truth? They've been pretty up front about the cost of the war, in terms of lives and dollars.

Mr Ellsberg: I would say in a very crucial way they are deceiving us. President Obama in his state-of-the-union speech said that he would begin withdrawing troops in July 2011. Although other officials, like Robert Gates, almost immediately backed away from that, they all collaborated in implying, with Obama, that July 2011 would represent the high point of our troop presence there. I feel quite confident that unless the public and Congress demand that that timetable is adhered to, there will be more troops in 2012 than there are in 2011, and more troops in 2013 than there are in 2012. In other words, I believe we are currently in the process of an open-ended increase, which is limited by the fact that we don't have a draft. But I do think if and when a sizeable number of troops are withdrawn from Iraq, they'll end up in Afghanistan and the net number will increase. Now, is that a lie or a naive false statement? I do believe it is false when Obama gives us that assurance. Does he know that? Does he think he's in more control than I think he is? That's hard to say from outside. But I think he's on the same course that Lyndon Johnson was on in 1965. He wasn't able to say no to his generals, like Johnson, at the start of this process, and I don't believe he will be any more able to say no to their requests a year from now. And I strongly expect that General Petraeus, like General McChrystal, will be asking for more than the 30,000 troops that the president has already authorised.

Also, when Obama said all US troops would be out of Iraq by the end of 2011—I think that was a conscious lie. He's going to keep troops there. We're going to have bases there. A lot of the troops will be replaced by mercenaries, but our bases will not be manned entirely by contractors. We will have thousands, probably tens of thousands of troops there as long as Obama is in office, and his successor is in office, unless there's a major change in policy. And they will be fighting and killing and dying. So I think that's as blatant a lie as we ever heard from Lyndon Johnson.

DiA: You were the victim of dirty tricks carried out by the Nixon administration. Do you think that type of activity still goes on today?

Mr Ellsberg: Certainly. First of all, I was subject to warrantless wire-tapping surveillance. (Actually, most of that was not directly on me, but on members of the national-security council that I was in touch with. I was overheard on those taps. And that fact was denied by the FBI at my trial for over a year.) That has not only been going on illegally since 2001, but it was finally legalised by Congress, with the help of Obama in the end. A number of the acts undertaken against me, which were illegal at the time, forcing Nixon to obstruct justice by concealing them, have been made part of our explicit policy. Not just the warrantless wire-tapping, but the raid of my psychoanalyst's office is now regarded as legal under the Patriot Act as a sneak-and-peek operation.

Another thing that was then illegal: Nixon brought a dozen CIA assets, under the direction of Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, up from Miami on May 3rd 1972, with orders to incapacitate me totally. That was done covertly and was one of the factors that led to Nixon's resignation. Obama has now announced, through his then-head of intelligence, Dennis Blair, that we have a list of those who can be assassinated by special-forces operators. And this president has even approved names of American citizens on that list. Now that's an astonishing change, not in our covert policy—presidents have been involved in covert assassination plots repeatedly—but to announce that publicly as a supposedly legitimate policy. That negates the Magna Carta. It's a kind of power that no king of England has asserted since John I.

Obama hasn't yet asserted that these special forces can do the same thing to US citizens in this country—that would still have to be covert if it happened. But when I said that Julian Assange is in some danger, others said that's ridiculous, he's too prominent, no president would do such a thing. Well, I'm not saying that it's very likely, but I am saying that the chance of Julian Assange coming to harm from the US president should be zero, and it isn't. To say that it's ridiculous is simply unfounded. My own experience proves that. Because after all, I was as well-known at the time, when that assault was made, as Julian Assange is today.

What did protect me was fear on the part of the CIA assets that they were being set up. So they backed away and instead reconnoitered their next mission, which was the Watergate burglaries.

(Photo credit: AFP)