Is it shocking that Barack Obama approved a “kill list”?2
What sort of list do the millions of people who have been killed in all the US wars belong on, if not a “kill list”?
In all of this, Snowden, in exile, has to remain strategic and tactical. He’s in the impossible position of having to negotiate the terms of his amnesty/trial with the very institutions in the United States that feel betrayed by him, and the terms of his domicile in Russia with that Great Humanitarian, Vladimir Putin. So the superpowers have the Truth-teller in a position where he now has to be extremely careful about how he uses the spotlight he has earned and what he says publicly.
Even still, leaving aside what cannot be said, the conversation around whistleblowing is a thrilling one—it’s realpolitik—busy, important, and full of legalese. It has spies and spy-hunters, escapades, secrets, and secret-leakers. It’s a very adult and absorbing universe of its own. However, if it becomes, as it sometimes threatens to, a substitute for broader, more radical political thinking, then the conversation that Daniel Berrigan, Jesuit priest, poet, and war resister (contemporary of Daniel Ellsberg), wanted to have when he said, “Every nation-state tends towards the imperial—that is the point,” becomes a little inconvenient.
I was glad to see that when Snowden made his debut on Twitter (and chalked up half a million followers in half a second) he said, “I used to work for the government. Now I work for the public.”3 Implicit in that sentence is the belief that the government does not work for the public. That’s the beginning of a subversive and inconvenient conversation. By “the government,” of course, he means the US government, his former employer. But who does he mean by “the public”? The US public? Which part of the US public? He’ll have to decide as he goes along. In democracies, the line between an elected government and “the public” is never all that clear. The elite is usually fused with the government pretty seamlessly. Viewed from an international perspective, if there really is such a thing as “the US public,” it’s a very privileged public indeed. The only “public” I know is a maddeningly tricky labyrinth.
Oddly, when I think back on the meeting in the Moscow Ritz, the memory that flashes up first in my mind is an image of Daniel Ellsberg. Dan, after all those hours of talking, lying back on John’s bed, Christ-like, with his arms flung open, weeping for what the United States has turned into—a country whose “best people” must either go to prison or into exile. I was moved by his tears but troubled, too—because they were the tears of a man who has seen the machine up close. A man who was once on a first-name basis with the people who controlled it and who coldly contemplated the idea of annihilating life on earth. A man who risked everything to blow the whistle on them. Dan knows all the arguments, for as well as against. He often uses the word imperialism to describe US history and foreign policy. He knows now, forty years after he made the Pentagon Papers public, that even though particular individuals have gone, the machine keeps on turning.
Daniel Ellsberg’s tears made me think about love, about loss, about dreams—and, most of all, about failure.
What sort of love is this love that we have for countries? What sort of country is it that will ever live up to our dreams? What sort of dreams were these that have been broken? Isn’t the greatness of great nations directly proportionate to their ability to be ruthless, genocidal? Doesn’t the height of a country’s “success” usually also mark the depths of its moral failure?
And what about our failure? Writers, artists, radicals, anti-nationals, mavericks, malcontents—what of the failure of our imaginations? What of our failure to replace the idea of flags and countries with a less lethal Object of Love? Human beings seem unable to live without war, but they are also unable to live without love. So the question is, what shall we love?
Writing this at a time when refugees are flooding into Europe—the result of decades of US and European foreign policy in the “Middle East”—makes me wonder: Who is a refugee? Is Edward Snowden a refugee? Surely, he is. Because of what he did, he cannot return to the place he thinks of as his country (although he can continue to live where he is most comfortable—inside the Internet). The refugees fleeing from wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria to Europe are refugees of the Lifestyle Wars. But the thousands of people in countries like India who are being jailed and killed by those same Lifestyle Wars, the millions who are being driven off their lands and farms, exiled from everything they have ever known—their language, their history, the landscape that formed them—are not. As long as their misery is contained within the arbitrarily drawn borders of their “own” country, they are not considered refugees. But they are refugees. And certainly, in terms of numbers, such people are the great majority in the world today. Unfortunately in imaginations that are locked down into a grid of countries and borders, in minds that are shrink-wrapped in flags, they don’t make the cut.
Perhaps the best-known refugee of the Lifestyle Wars is Julian Assange, the founder and editor of WikiLeaks, who is currently serving his fourth year as a fugitive-guest in a room in the Ecuadorian embassy in London. The British police are stationed in a small lobby just outside the front door. There are snipers on the roof who have orders to arrest him, shoot him, drag him out if he so much as puts a toe out of the door, which for all legal purposes is an international border. The Ecuadorian embassy is located across the street from Harrods, the world’s most famous department store. The day Dan, John, and I met Julian, Harrods was sucking in and spewing out frenzied Christmas shoppers in their hundreds, or perhaps even thousands. In the middle of that tony London high street, the smell of opulence and excess met the smell of incarceration and the Free World’s fear of free speech. (They shook hands and agreed never to be friends.)
On the day (actually the night) we met Julian, we were not allowed by security to take phones, cameras, or any recording devices into the room. So that conversation also remains off the record.
Despite the odds stacked against its founder-editor, WikiLeaks continues its work, as cool and insouciant as ever. Most recently it has offered $100,000 to anybody who can provide “smoking gun” documents about the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), a free trade agreement between Europe and the United States that aims to give multinational corporations the power to sue sovereign governments that do things that adversely impact corporate profits.4 Criminal acts could include governments increasing workers’ minimum wages, not seen to be cracking down on “terrorist” villagers who impede the work of mining companies, or, say, having the temerity to turn down Monsanto’s offer of genetically modified corporate-patented seeds. TTIP is just another weapon like intrusive surveillance or depleted uranium, to be used in the Lifestyle Wars.
Looking at Julian Assange sitting across the table from me, pale and worn, without having had five minutes of sunshine on his skin for nine hundred days, but still refusing to disappear or capitulate the way his enemies would like him to, I smiled at the idea that nobody thinks of him as an Australian hero or an Australian traitor. To his enemies, Assange has betrayed much more than a country. He has betrayed the ideology of the ruling powers. For this, they hate him even more than they hate Edward Snowden. And that’s saying a lot.
We’re told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of the abyss. It’s possible that our puffed-up, prideful intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to safety has already been washed away. In which case there’s nothing much to be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution. Encrypting our e-mails will help, but not very much. Recalibrating our understanding of what love means, what happiness means—and, yes, what countries mean—might. Recalibrating our priorities might. An old-growth forest, a mountain range, or a river valley is more important and certainly more lovable than any country will ever be. I could weep for a river valley, and I have. But for a country? Oh man, I don
’t know . . .
John Cusack,
Daniel Ellsberg,
Arundhati Roy,
and Edward Snowden,
in Conversation
“Yes, Virginia,
There Is a
a Missile Gap”
DE: I want to tell you something that I think is relevant to what we’re talking about . . . there was one big issue, a super-issue. It’s a long story, but I’ll just say, we had Joe Loftus and Andy Marshall, at RAND, who were well known. Loftus had been an Air Force intelligence officer for a long time; he worked with the CIA. Andy Marshall, by the way, is still consulting at the Pentagon. He’s in his nineties. I’m talking now about ’58, that’s almost sixty years ago, you see? And he was Rumsfeld’s closest advisor. He was a very mysterious figure, and a very close friend of mine at the time. Back then he was at RAND, we knew he had an intelligence clearance, whatever that meant. Actually we knew that he dealt with the CIA. We didn’t know that meant anything. Now, in particular, it meant he had a K clearance, a KEYHOLE.
Now, the point about the T[ALENT] and K[EYHOLE] being separated was that nobody knows about the plane. It’s only when Khrushchev shoots down a U-2 that people learn about the U-2 program. Before that, before ’60, only a handful of people, including some reconnaissance experts in RAND who worked with the U-2, knew there was a U-2. So, the rest of the people at RAND, like, you don’t know the names probably, like Albert Wohlstetter, but you may have heard of Herman Kahn.
JC: Yup.
DE: You’ve seen Dr. Strangelove?
ES: No.
JC: Oh my God!
ES: Before my time, man.
DE: Okay, so the words of Dr. Strangelove are largely verbatim quotes from Herman Kahn. He had a Q clearance, so he didn’t know. He was in the physics division—for the design of nuclear weapons—a separate clearance. Herman Kahn was famous on thermonuclear war. He was a major model for Dr. Strangelove. Curtis LeMay was General “Buck” Turgidson. Dr. Strangelove from the Bland Corporation is an amalgam of Herman Kahn, particularly the words, and Henry Kissinger . . . And Wernher von Braun, the Nazi, gives the Nazis . . . Mein Fuhrer! (all laughing) His arm goes crazy.
JC: I always thought there was a little Edward Teller in there, too.
DE: And Teller is in there, yes, also. So, there are the four guys. Kahn is known to the public as the thermonuclear war man in terms of strategy and supporting, see? He did not have these other clearances. And we were his buddies. He did not know they existed, and neither did Albert Wohlstetter. RAND was, at that point, obsessed, night and day, with the idea that there were more missiles than the CIA was admitting—Soviet missiles—and that there was a missile gap.
And we were working, literally, seventy hours a week, I was there on Sundays, Saturdays, day and night at RAND on the basis that there was a missile gap, and the whole building is working on it. (Pause) Marshall says, There is no missile gap. And he couldn’t tell us why, see? We respected Marshall enormously . . . that’s why he was there for about fifty years. Very brilliant, he’s also quite right wing. And he had another characteristic that I recognized; he was amazingly close mouthed. Not everybody is. One thing is getting the clearance in the first place, but keeping the clearance is another matter, and getting higher clearance is another. And the way you get the higher clearances is when the people who can watch you know, for instance, that you’re sitting with your best friend who’s saying something wrong, and you could easily correct him—and you don’t.
JC: Dan, you said that Marshall said, “There was no missile gap.” The ramifications of this statement are hard to imagine.
DE: Marshall is a sphinxlike character. His nickname throughout the bureaucracy in the Pentagon was—who’s the guy in Star Wars? The gnome . . .
JC: Oh, Yoda. (Laughter)
DE: Yoda. His nickname was Yoda. He looked like Yoda, he had kind of a frog face, but he was willing to sit in any meeting or anything, without an expression on his face, and not say anything. He was simply a sphinxlike person, and you don’t have to be like that to be in this field, but he was, and that’s what made it so all the more significant. I spent all this time leading up to the following simple statement, which is: we still didn’t know there was a reconnaissance satellite program, the KEYHOLE program. It remained secret for . . . easily a decade, possibly two decades. Taking pictures from one hundred thousand feet is very impressive, but taken from one hundred miles—which is what they’re doing—is very complicated. So that remained a secret for a long time. And if you had named any person I’ve ever known, the person least likely to break that silence was Andy Marshall. Remember, it was my field, generally, of how to keep command of the nuclear forces intact under a nuclear attack.
They called it then “devolution of authority”—that was the wording—who is going to actually be running things if the president’s been killed under a nuclear attack? Well, command is one thing—but who’s actually going to push the button? Now that’s the point I want to come to. Let me try to do it and not go on forever here the way I do. . . . The bottom line is that Andy Marshall . . . this is a very key moment in history—secret history, not public history. Very few people understand it. I’m at SAC headquarters, Strategic Air Command headquarters, in August of ’61 to see what the reaction is to the draft war plan that has just come to them from McNamara. And the question about the missile gap is changing their war plans enormously, radically. The chief of war plans deputy says, “The question is how many missiles do the Soviets have?” And he says, “You know what the Old Man thinks?” The “Old Man” was Thomas Power, who led the raid on Japan, the one that killed eighty thousand people in one night.
AR: In Tokyo.
DE: Yes, under LeMay. LeMay wasn’t allowed to go.
AR: And McNamara was involved, too?
DE: McNamara had recommended this raid.
AR: Hmm.
DE: He says, the Old Man says the Soviets have a thousand missiles. Now the CIA estimate at that time was, if I remember, one hundred and twenty, and State’s was higher than CIA’s, I think one hundred and sixty, and the air force was saying hundreds. That was in August. In September, they completed the satellite coverage.
JC: So, what was the number? What was the real number?
DE: Four.
JC: So, the real number was four?
(Dan holds up four fingers)
DE: Four.
OU: In ’61.
DE: In ’61. Four intercontinental missiles.
(Silence)
DE: And it was a bad missile, very inaccurate, and very, very vulnerable. If you got over there fast, you could blow this thing over. They had these four missiles, liquid-fueled, thin-skinned missiles sitting on one side in Plesetsk. We had forty Atlases and Titans. They had four.
JC: Jesus Christ. So, the entire Armageddon of the planet was predicated on no one exposing the lie that there were only four goddamn missiles.
DE: Yeah . . . but here’s a little technical point that I wanted to make. There is a big difference between our assessments of the Soviets having either one thousand missiles, or one hundred and twenty missiles—the one thousand is two hundred and fifty times what they actually had. One hundred and twenty is thirty times the number they actually had. So that’s very, very significant. I went back and I told this to RAND at a top-secret briefing. Everybody had to be signed in, all the department heads were there. Herman Kahn used to say, “You must always have a chart in a briefing.” I never used charts. Everybody knows that I don’t use charts. This time I decided to make some charts. So, here are my charts. There were guards at the door, which you didn’t do in the Pentagon. My first chart—John, what was the name of the child in the Santa Claus letter?
JC: Virginia. “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus . . .”
(Pause)
DE: So my first chart said—Yes, Virginia, there is a missile gap.
(Laughter)
DE: The second one said—It is currently running ten t
o one. No reaction. The third said: In our favor. As I said we had forty Atlases and Titans, four Soviet ICBMs [intercontinental ballistic missile], and then I went through the rest of them. We had Polaris submarines, we had IRBMs [intermediate-range ballistic missile], we had something like two thousand bombers, strategic bombers, and one thousand tactical bombers in range of the Soviet Union, the Russians had one hundred and ninety-two.
ES: People forget how massive the American industrial advantage was after World War II.
Things That Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations Page 5
