STORMING OF THE CAPITOL WAS OPENLY PLANNED BUT IGNORED BY LAW ENFORCEMENT

Despite billions spent on intelligence and surveillance, U.S. law enforcement permitted an armed Trumpist mob to sack the Capitol.

Ryan Devereaux

January 7 2021, 7:45 p.m.

JUST HOURS AFTER being the site of a historic siege, the scene outside of the U.S. Capitol was eerie but quiet. The crowds were gone, and the tear gas had lifted. The only sound on the streets was the occasional siren in the distance. From police cruisers to blacked-out SUVs, nearly every vehicle on the road belonged to one law enforcement agency or another. A few dozen TV anchors filed reports from the Capitol’s southwest side. Over their shoulders, camouflaged government employees of unclear affiliation ambled about, relocating their shields and other tactical gear. Closer to the building, a column of black-clad riot cops shuffled through shadows, visible only by the glint of their helmets.

The law enforcement presence Wednesday night, like the one used on protesters at Donald Trump’s inauguration in 2017 and Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, was a reminder that the capital of the world’s most powerful country does not lack for security forces. As a collective body, the agencies are abundant and well-armed, and they are tapped into a billion-dollar intelligence-sharing apparatus. Not that Wednesday’s rally was some secret, nor was its conclusion unforeseeable. 

The rally that preceded the storming of the Capitol had been hyped for weeks, including by the president himself, who for the past four years has had a direct relationship to many acts of staggering right-wing violence.

“It definitely shows the ineffectiveness of the intelligence network that we’ve built since 9/11 — that the Capitol Police would not have been prepared for an assault on the Capitol that was planned in public,” Mike German, a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice and former FBI agent specializing in counterterrorism, told The Intercept. “It wasn’t as if this was a spontaneous gathering. This was an event that had been planned for weeks, and it was very clear in the social media activity and public statements of these militants what they intended to do.”

The onslaught came as Congress met to certify Electoral College votes for President-elect Joe Biden. In response, the president’s supporters organized a “Stop the Steal” rally that drew thousands of demonstrators into the heart of Washington, D.C. It was just before 1 p.m. when the crowd, with the president’s encouragement, began toppling barricades and pushing their way past Capitol Police. Rep. Chris Pappas, a New Hampshire Democrat, who was among the lawmakers rushed from the building, described the speed with which the crowd overwhelmed the Capitol Police as “breathtaking.”

In a statement released Thursday, Capitol Police Chief Steven A. Sund, said his officers “responded valiantly when faced with thousands of individuals involved in violent riotous actions,” and noted that nearly 20 state, local, and federal agencies, including the National Guard, responded to the day’s events. More than 50 officers were injured, he said, adding, “The violent attack on the U.S. Capitol was unlike any I have experienced in my 30 years in law enforcement here in Washington D.C.” According to reports Thursday, the Metropolitan Police Department had “no intelligence” suggesting “there would be a breach of the US Capitol.”

German, the former FBI agent, said, “There needs to be a serious inquiry into the intelligence breakdowns and the tactical breakdowns that allowed the capital itself to be breached, particularly by people with weapons.” 

Adam Isacson, the D.C.-based director of the defense oversight program at the Washington Office on Latin America, linked the events to a broader politicization of law enforcement under Trump, reminiscent of the anti-democratic movements the U.S. has historically sponsored in countries around the world. “You don’t get to ransack the Capitol for hours, then calmly walk away, unless law enforcement and its command share your views,” he wrote. “What we saw yesterday was tacit approval of the rioters. Full stop.”

For those who have followed far-right violence during the Trump presidency, the most shocking thing about the events of January 6, 2021, may be just how predictable it all was. In an address before the violence began, the president, who had long made clear that he had no interest in conceding the election, reminded his supporters that they had been wronged by evil actors and that it was up to them to fight back for the fate of the country. He anointed them the stars of their own action movie, with the final climactic scene now at hand. “If you don’t fight like hell,” Trump warned, “you’re not going to have a country anymore.” He told his followers that together they would march on the Capitol and make their voices heard. Of course, he personally did not do this — Trump climbed into an armored vehicle and left the scene — but his supporters did precisely what they were told to do.

The insurrectionary mob was met with some resistance as they descended on the Capitol — some, but not much. Police did use chemical agents against the crowd, but by and large the response bore little resemblance to the iron-fisted crackdown on racial justice protesters witnessed in Washington, D.C., and cities across the country just months before. The rampagers shouted at the police, calling them traitors, and threw punches at officers without consequence. Trump’s red-capped supporters then crashed through windows and doors of the Capitol. Some waved the flag of the Confederacy; many more carried banners bearing the president’s name. While some Capitol Police officers swung their clubs at the advancing insurgents, at least one indulged them with a selfie.

Left/Top: Protesters breach a door of the U.S. Capitol during a joint session of Congress to count the electoral votes of the 2020 presidential election. Right/Bottom: Demonstrators clash with police inside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 6, 2021.Photo: Erin Scott/Bloomberg/Getty Images; Chris Kleponis/Sipa USA/AP

Tear gas was deployed inside the building. Lawmakers pulled gas masks over their heads and took shelter under benches and desks before being evacuated to secure locations. “When the people fear the government, there is tyranny… When the government fears the people… There is liberty,” Enrique Tarrio, leader of the Proud Boys, a right-wing paramilitary group loyal to the president, posted on right-wing social media network Parler, attaching a photo of people in hiding in the House Chamber. Tarrio, who was arrested this week on weapons charges, told the Wall Street Journal that he expects the insurrection to continue in the days to come.

At least one woman was shot and killed by police during Wednesday’s assault. Three more died from medical emergencies, the Associated Press reported. When they were through, Trump’s irregular forces walked out of the building triumphant and unmasked, smiling as a law enforcement officer held the door for them. “We love you. You’re very special,” the president said to his supporters in a video message, telling them they could now go home. Police reported recovering pipe bombs outside both the Democratic and Republican National Committees, as well as a long gun and Molotov cocktails.

As an FBI agent in the 1990s, German went undercover inside far-right groups during a period of intense bloodshed and violence, including the Oklahoma City bombing. In the two decades since the September 11 attacks, the threat of white supremacist and far-right militant violence has been steadily deprioritized, German explained, even as the election of the first Black president led to an explosion of activity in that community. From the outset of Trump’s presidency and the infamous white power riot in Charlottesville, Virginia, the deadly consequences of law enforcement’s disinterest in confronting the far right has been plain to see, replayed again and again in cities across the country, including the capital.

“Failure to react to the threat in Charlottesville is exactly the same as what happened today.”

“Failure to react to the threat in Charlottesville is exactly the same as what happened today,” German said. “Violence that was planned and organized in plain sight was ignored by the intelligence network, and that network includes the Joint Terrorism Task Forces in the state and local fusion centers.”

When protests over the killing of George Floyd erupted over the summer, the nation’s post-9/11 system for distributing threat information lit up with intelligence reports. As The Intercept reported in July, internal law enforcement documents showed detailed reporting on emerging threats from the far right, which were born out in the apparent targeted assassination of a federal court security officer and a sheriff’s deputy in California by a military-trained right-wing extremist, as well an alleged bomb plot targeting a Black Lives Matter protest. 

Though evidence of such threats was shared with the White House and the nation’s top federal law enforcement agencies, it was competing against a much larger stream of information circulated through the nation’s notoriously unreliable and often politicized network of homeland security fusion centers.

As a result, German said, police agencies across the country ended up “far more focused on the fever dreams of the far-right media echo chamber, looking at piles of bricks at construction sites and imagining that they were staging areas for antifa super-soldiers who were funded with bitcoin,” than they were on a movement with a long and bloody history of terrorist violence in the United States. Then-Attorney General William Barr, the nation’s top law enforcement official, backed the president’s line of an existential threat from the left, calling on the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces to hunt down “agitators” in an aggressive prosecutorial campaign that swept up police brutality protesters across the country.

As of Thursday morning, law enforcement in Washington, D.C., had arrested 68 people and counting for offenses related to the attack on the Capitol. The FBI was seeking public assistance in identifying others. “A big part of problem, and what has encouraged the most violent elements within these movements, is that they had top cover,” German said. “The president of the United States was encouraging them to act, and when state and local law enforcement and federal law enforcement didn’t respond to their public acts of violence, that conditioned them to believe that that was not only authorized, but desired by the authorities — that this was state-sanctioned violence that they were committing.”

That kind of conditioning doesn’t disappear overnight, German said, even with a change in the White House. “This isn’t over,” he said. “This isn’t a one-day thing for people who are convinced that President Trump won the election and is illegitimately being denied office. Now that their feigned affection for law enforcement is shown to have been a ruse, I think it’s going to be very dangerous for law enforcement and obviously for the public in general and other elected officials.”

https://theintercept.com/2021/01/07/capitol-trump-violence-law-enforcement/?fbclid=IwAR2aFmOxtRHYuwz2z6cBF4WRowSJWm5u8PrVIgViKjkOkGOdayetYOpJRis

Lock Him Up

What Donald Trump did on January 6th was sedition — and he must be prosecuted for it

By 

SEAN WILENTZ 

JANUARY 7, 2021 5:32PM ET

US President Donald Trump arrives to speak to supporters from The Ellipse near the White House on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC.  Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

January 6th, 2021, marked the saddest day in the history of American democracy since April 12th, 1861, the day South Carolina secessionists fired on Fort Sumter and commenced the Civil War. Assassinations, military atrocities, enacting horrific laws, all are shameful and wrenching, and forever stain the nation’s history. But deliberate and violent attacks on the nation’s essential institutions of government, incited by elected leaders, are rarer, and they cut to the heart of our democracy as those other shocks do not. Looking back, only the attack on Sumter surpasses in severity the Trumpist sacking of the Capitol as a direct, calculated, and unashamed repudiation of the nation’s constitutional order.

Indeed, while hardly identical, 1861 and 2021 bear some unmistakable similarities. Both breaches resulted from the refusal of millions of Americans to accept the election of a new president: Abraham Lincoln then, Joe Biden now. In both instances, reactionary forces, charging the federal government with tyranny and claiming the mantle of the American Revolution, attacked that government with insurrectionary force. While it of course does not rank anywhere near declaring the Union dissolved, the Trumpists’ successful disruption of a solemn ritual of elective democracy displayed a fervid and portentous contempt for the democratic procedures and the rule of law — appallingly instigated, in this case, by a sitting president of the United States. The presence of Confederate flags inside the Trump mob at the Capitol alongside the faux-patriotic “Don’t Tread on Me” regalia signaled a more exact connection across the decades, from defending slavery to upholding Jim Crow and the Lost Cause, to Trump’s embrace of — and MAGA’s friendliness toward — today’s neo-Confederates. One of the leading extremist organizers of the demonstration that led to the assault was a Facebook page called Red-State Secession.

Some questions in the immediate aftermath intrude on calculating the event’s long-term political significance. Plainly, a massive security failure allowed the mob to pounce and surge for as long as it did, a failure made truly grievous by how much authorities knew in advance of what the Trump mob descending on Washington had in mind. The causes of those failures, especially in light of the massive law-enforcement presence during the anti-racism protests in D.C. last spring and summer, need investigation, and those responsible — including any officials in the administration who wanted to aid and abet the rioters — need to be held to account.

Likewise, there ought to be official inquiries over how the day’s mayhem was put together. Although it was obvious that self-starting right-wing social media agitators had played a huge role, it remains open to question how self-starting some of those agitators actually were and are. Somebody arranged and paid for staging the media spectacle at the Washington Monument where the event got started, a view of the White House in the backdrop. That similar outbursts occurred in Utah and Georgia suggests at least the possibility of more coordinated planning and support. If any persons in the Oval Office beside the president, or otherwise close to Trump and his family, were involved in any way, they need to be exposed and punished.

But so, too, there needs to be a larger historical and political reckoning. The attack on Fort Sumter is supposed to have started when a veteran pro-slavery Fire-Eater, Edmund Ruffin, pulled the lanyard on the cannon that fired the first shot — but Ruffin and the other armed traitors amassed in Charleston harbor were hardly the most culpable figures, let alone the only ones. A long history lay behind the outrage of 1861, generated by disloyal pro-slavery pronouncements dating back decades, above all in the speeches and writings of John C. Calhoun. There is, to a historian, deep irony to some of the photographs taken during the Trumpist assault, especially one of a member of the mob brandishing a Confederate battle flag beneath a forbidding portrait of Calhoun in the entrance area of the Senate. Look closely enough and you can imagine the portrait, in its grim-faced way, smiling at the proceedings.

Clearly, as many commentators observed the morning after, the attack on the Capitol was the culmination of Trump’s four years of misrule. But Trump on his own had always been just a deranged, manipulative mogul and reality-TV fraud. The celebrity-smitten news media that abetted his perverse, shock-jock mystique — from big-city tabloids to the supposedly liberal-minded cable networks that aired his every rally, every antic — bear some responsibility. So does the current generation of cynical hard-right political stars who thought they could batten on to Trump’s mythic populist base, Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley above all — their mouths dripping with sedition dressed up in fake history just as surely as the rioters they now ritualistically condemn.

But the attack on our democracy that culminated in the attack on the Capitol actually began many decades ago, at least as early as the mid-1960s, when so-called movement conservatives rallied first by William F. Buckley Jr., and then by a host of fake policy institutes and right-wing publicity organs, modernized the sputtering plutocratic reaction to the New Deal, merged it with the unvanquished white segregationist South, and, eventually, aggrieved right-wing evangelicals, forging what became known as the Ronald Reagan coalition. With the formerly ascendant Eastern moderate wing of the Republican Party either marginalized or forced to submit, the stage was set for the long-term radicalization of the GOP, hastened when Pat Buchanan attempted — and Newt Gingrich — succeeded in filling the vacuum on the right after Reagan left office.

Thence began a process of radicalization on the right which saw, at the fringes, a proliferation of right-wing militia groups and would-be instigators of race war that included Timothy McVeigh and his terrorist accomplices who blew up the Alfred Murrah Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168, including 19 children. Undeterred by the mayhem and death, successive cohorts of cynical Republican leaders thought that they could stoke what had begun as the Reagan base with ever-more radical culture-war rhetoric. By the time Barack Obama was president, what had long since ceased to be the Party of Lincoln had morphed into what the centrist political scientists Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, amid the Tea Party insurgency, called an “insurgent outlier” in our politics.

In the wake of Obama’s re-election in 2012, Republican leaders began reassessing their situation and proposed a redirection, in which they would mute the hard-right posturing — but what had become the core of the Republican electorate, frustrated by decades of empty promises about uprooting godless liberalism, was in no mood for the new-found responsibility of politicians they came to regard as Republican in Name Only (RINO). Enter Trump, who not only commandeered the inflamed base but enlarged it to include men and women unreachable by pollsters, angry minds who had given up on politics completely. With the connivance of supplicating Republicans caught off-guard by his ascendancy, pre-eminently Cruz and Lindsey Graham, Trump then molded a truly dangerous force, one that beheld Trump not simply as their president but as their George Washington (or maybe their Jefferson Davis), the father of their country. Unable to bully his way out of his defeat in November, a desperate Trump had nothing left to do but to unleash that force on the Capitol.

As discouraging, even horrifying, as this culmination has been, there are strong reasons to regard all that has happened since November 3rd not as the shaming of American democracy, but as its triumph and vindication. Election Day did bring an extraordinary display of democratic power, the largest numerical turnout in our history, despite a devastating pandemic, conducted responsibly and virtually without incident. Those who, in the wake of the assault on the Capitol, have described our country as a banana republic need to remind themselves of that display — a display so powerful that it caused Trump, his backup coup plans failing, to describe the election as a rigged disgrace, his ultimate act of psychological and political projection.

The vindication continued in the courts, which many leftists and liberals — myself included, I must confess — were convinced would collaborate in Trump stealing the election, shades of Bush v. Gore in 2000. In every instance, state and federal, in front of conservative as well as liberal judges, Trump attorneys’ cockamamie complaints met not simply with dismissal but with uncommon judicial derision. When the Supreme Court, complete with the three Trump justices Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, closed the door on a last-minute bid to overturn the election, followed three days later by the Electoral College fulfilling its duty, the vindication was near complete; with the admirable resistance by Georgia Republican election officials in the waning days of the process, it ended.

Rather than a defeat of democracy, the shameful, seditious, failed insurrection at the Capitol marked a desperate and doomed effort to break a system that held. Still, all of that said, we need also to remember how near a miss it was. More important, we need to remember that the system did not hold on its own or because of some providential dispensation but because uncounted numbers of Americans, from a few well-known jurists to masses of anonymous election workers, on all sides of the political spectrum, upheld the rule of democratic law. And as we look beyond these events to what comes next, it is essential to recognize that the threat, though scotched, has not been killed, and that nothing is accomplished without vigilant accountability.

Even before the mob descended, Washington was gripped by debates on how the new administration ought to handle the numerous glaring and grievous crimes of the outgoing one. There has been a good deal of talk about healing the soul of the nation, about reaching across the lines of division to combat the vicious polarization of the Trump years by promoting reconciliation. Rather than further provoke discord and disorder, better simply to let Trump fade away in ignominy while appealing to the better angels of our nature, including the better angels of the many millions of MAGA supporters.

The impulse is understandable but the danger is incalculable, as the attack on the Capitol made crystal clear. For one thing, Trump, even in his derangement, has shown he has no intention of fading away, and it would be unwise to bet that he won’t find some means to sustain himself as a kind of president-in-exile. Far more important, though, is the matter of accountability, the sanctity of the Constitution, and the nature of the enemy within that we saw scaling the walls and invading the halls of the House and Senate.

Beginning with the outrageous multiple obstructions of justice outlined in the Mueller Report, Trump as president engaged in crimes against the nation, overt and covert, beyond anything dared by any previous president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon included. His directing of the mob to march on the Capitol to help disrupt the final certification of his defeat was the clearest conceivable attack on the Constitution that any elected official could undertake. Those crimes would only be compounded if, as has been widely rumored, the president attempts to engineer a plainly unconstitutional self-pardon for all of his offenses.

To permit these crimes and others to go unprosecuted would amount to a kind of complicity in them. There can be no healing of the nation’s soul if the Constitution is left mocked and damaged, for in the final analysis, the Constitution is the nation. There comes a time when generosity and appeals to reconciliation turn into the kind of appeasement that invites further aggression. The attack on the Capitol, whipped up and then celebrated by the president, has dramatized as powerfully as is imaginable that the time for appeasement is over.

Among the many stories that got buried amid the mayhem was President-elect Biden’s announcement that he plans to appoint Judge Merrick Garland as his Attorney General. That appointment is a signal of where the incoming president stands regarding the prosecution of Trump and his accomplices. Garland is, of course, remembered as the person Obama named to the Supreme Court only to be throttled by the supremely cynical then-Majority Leader of the Senate Mitch McConnell. He is also regarded as a judicial centrist, which may suggest that he would be less than zealous in pursuit of ex-President Trump, lest doing so would further inflame our politics. Less well-remembered is that Judge Garland, then a top official at the Justice Department, oversaw the successful prosecution of Timothy McVeigh in 1996 and 1997.

More than virtually any other high official in public service, Attorney General-designate Garland is closely acquainted with the poison that has built up in our body politic over the past 50 years, the poison that made Trump’s presidency possible and which Trump has come to command — the poison that was on display when the Capitol temporarily fell prey to the mob. If Trump is left unprosecuted, let alone unpunished, for his crimes — not for his bad behavior or his boorishness or even his demagoguery, but for his multiple violations of federal law — that poison, too, will remain unchecked, ripe for exploitation by future would-be Trumps. The failure after the Civil War to hold the secessionists fully accountable for their treason helped pave the way for the overthrow of Reconstruction and the installation of Jim Crow. Just as the harrowing scenes at the Capitol are a distant historical reminder of Fort Sumter, so they affirm the extent of the damage Trump and his confederates have done to our country. That damage demands their prosecution.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-sedition-treason-arrest-prosecution-lock-him-up-1111338/

 

Now It Can Be Told: How Neil Sheehan Got the Pentagon Papers

It was a story he had chosen not to tell — until 2015, when he sat for a four-hour interview, promised that this account would not be published while he was alive.

Neil Sheehan in 1972 on the day The New York Times won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its coverage of the Pentagon Papers. Mr. Sheehan was at the center of the episode.Credit...Barton Silverman/The New York Times

By Janny Scott

• Published Jan. 7, 2021
  

There was one story Neil Sheehan chose not to tell. It was the story of how he had obtained the Pentagon Papers, the blockbuster scoop that led to a 1971 showdown between the Nixon administration and the press, and to a Supreme Court ruling that is still seen as a milepost in government-press relations.

From the moment he secured the 7,000 pages of classified government documents on the Vietnam War for The New York Times, until his death on Thursday, Mr. Sheehan, a former Vietnam War correspondent and Pulitzer Prize-winning author, declined nearly every invitation to explain precisely how he had pulled it off.

In 2015, however, at a reporter’s request, he agreed to tell his story on the condition that it not be published while he was alive. Beset by scoliosis and Parkinson’s disease, he recounted, in a four-hour interview at his home in Washington, a tale as suspenseful and cinematic as anyone in Hollywood might concoct.

The Pentagon Papers, arguably the greatest journalistic catch of a generation, were a secret history of United States decision-making on Vietnam, commissioned in 1967 by the secretary of defense. Their release revealed for the first time the extent to which successive White House administrations had intensified American involvement in the war while hiding their own doubts about the chances of success.

Recounting the steps that led to his breaking the story, Mr. Sheehan told of aliases scribbled into the guest registers of Massachusetts motels; copy-shop machines crashing under the burden of an all-night, purloined-document load; photocopied pages stashed in a bus-station locker; bundles belted into a seat on a flight from Boston; and telltale initials incinerated in a diplomat’s barbecue set.

He also revealed that he had defied the explicit instructions of his confidential source, whom others later identified as Daniel Ellsberg, a former Defense Department analyst who had been a contributor to the secret history while working for the Rand Corporation. In 1969, Mr. Ellsberg had illicitly copied the entire report, hoping that making it public would hasten an end to a war he had come passionately to oppose.

Contrary to what is generally believed, Mr. Ellsberg never “gave” the papers to The Times, Mr. Sheehan emphatically said. Mr. Ellsberg told Mr. Sheehan that he could read them but not make copies. So Mr. Sheehan smuggled the papers out of the apartment in Cambridge, Mass., where Mr. Ellsberg had stashed them; then he copied them illicitly, just as Mr. Ellsberg had done, and took them to The Times.

Over the next two months, he strung Mr. Ellsberg along. He told him that his editors were deliberating about how best to present the material, and he professed to have been sidetracked by other assignments. In fact, he was holed up in a hotel room in midtown Manhattan with the documents and a rapidly expanding team of Times editors and reporters working feverishly toward publication.

Reading the first copies of the first installment of the Pentagon Papers in the Times: from left, A.M. Rosenthal, the managing editor; James Greenfield, the project’s editor; Hedrick Smith, a reporter who worked on the project; and Gerald Gold, another key editor involved in it.Credit...Renato Perez/The New York Times

The publication of the first installment of the Pentagon papers on June 13, 1971, blindsided Mr. Ellsberg. He learned it was imminent from another Times staff member, Anthony Austin, with whom he had secretly shared an excerpt months before. Mr. Austin had chosen not to mention the bombshell to anyone at the newspaper, preferring to keep it for a book he was writing about the war.

When Mr. Austin discovered that his own newspaper was about to scoop his scoop, he called Mr. Ellsberg in a panic. Mr. Ellsberg tried to reach Mr. Sheehan, who was on deadline writing a subsequent installment. Mr. Sheehan ignored Mr. Ellsberg’s messages until he knew it would be too late in the press run to intervene. He asked an editor to let him know when 10,000 copies had been printed.

“You had to do what I did,” Mr. Sheehan said in the 2015 interview, justifying his deception of Mr. Ellsberg, whom he described as torn between his desire to make the papers public and his fear of being sent to prison. In his efforts to protect himself, Mr. Sheehan said, Mr. Ellsberg was behaving recklessly. Mr. Sheehan feared that Mr. Ellsberg would inadvertently tip someone off. “It was just luck that he didn’t get the whistle blown on the whole damn thing,” he said.

Fearing Prison

Mr. Ellsberg had been a source for Mr. Sheehan before. So on a visit to Washington in March 1971, Mr. Ellsberg called him and asked to spend the night at his house. During a long night of talking, the two men made a deal. As Mr. Sheehan told it, Mr. Ellsberg would give him the papers; and, if The Times agreed to publish them, the newspaper would do its best to protect the identity of its source.

But when Mr. Sheehan arrived in Cambridge intending to collect the documents, he recalled, Mr. Ellsberg had changed his mind. He told Mr. Sheehan he could read them but make no copies — because, as Mr. Sheehan described it, “once he turned loose of it, The Times would assume ownership of it, and they’d do what they wanted with it.”

“He’d lose control.”

In his 2002 memoir, “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers,” Mr. Ellsberg wrote that he was skeptical that The Times would publish the documents in full, as he had wanted. He feared, too, he added, that if he handed over the papers before The Times had committed to publishing, someone there would inform the Federal Bureau of Investigation, “or the bureau would somehow get wind of it and come after my other copies.”

To Mr. Sheehan, however, it seemed that Mr. Ellsberg’s reservations were “about going to jail.”

“Because when The Times got it,” he said, “The Times would go ahead with it. And when it came out, he might get caught. And he didn’t have a politician yet to protect him.”

He was, Mr. Sheehan said, “totally conflicted.”

Mr. Ellsberg was also taking serious risks, Mr. Sheehan said. He had made multiple copies and had paid carelessly with personal checks. He had approached members of Congress about holding hearings. “There’s no way The Times can protect this guy,” Mr. Sheehan remembered thinking. His ostensibly secret source had “left tracks on the ceiling, on the walls, everywhere,” he said.

“Sooner or later, I was afraid he was going to run into a politician who’d go right to the Justice Department,” Mr. Sheehan said. That person would get on the phone to the attorney general “and say, ‘Hey, The New York Times has got some kind of big secret study, they got it from Dan Ellsberg.’ ”

Mr. Sheehan realized, he said, that he had to move fast. Once word leaked out, the government would go to court to block publication. Lawyers for The Times would end up arguing with the Justice Department over classified material, the importance of which neither the judge nor the public would be in a position to understand.

“Oh, I felt really quite angry,” Mr. Sheehan recalled. Like Mr. Ellsberg, he had turned against the war and intended to do what he could to stop it. “So I was quite upset when Ellsberg said, ‘You can read, take notes, but no copies,’ ” he remembered. “And over the fact that he was out of control.”

He made up his mind, he said, “that this material is never again going in a government safe.”

Back in Washington, he confided in his wife, Susan Sheehan, a writer for The New Yorker. He recalled her saying, “If I were you, I’d get control of that situation.” Play along with Mr. Ellsberg, do your best to protect him, but get the material to The Times.

“Xerox it,” he remembered Ms. Sheehan saying.

He returned to Cambridge to continue reading and taking notes. When Mr. Ellsberg let it be known that he was leaving on a brief vacation, Mr. Sheehan asked to continue working in the apartment where the documents were kept. Mr. Ellsberg agreed and gave him a key. He reminded Mr. Sheehan: No copies.

Mr. Sheehan said nothing.

“I’d known Ellsberg for a long time, and he thought I was operating under the same rules that one normally used: Source controls the material,” Mr. Sheehan said. “He didn’t realize that I had decided: ‘This guy is just impossible. You can’t leave it in his hands. It’s too important and it’s too dangerous.’ ”

Long Night in a Copy Shop

When it was clear that Mr. Ellsberg was leaving, Mr. Sheehan called home. “Come up,” he told his wife. “I need your help.” He told her to bring suitcases, large envelopes and all the cash in the house. She flew to Boston and checked into a hotel under a false name. Mr. Sheehan was in a motor inn, under yet another name.

From the Times bureau chief in Boston, he got the name of a copy shop that could handle thousands of pages. He asked the bureau chief to get him several hundred dollars in expense money for a secret project he declined to explain. When the bureau chief called the Times newsroom and reached the editors on duty that night, they declined the request. So he called the national editor at home.

“Give it to him,” the editor said, according to Mr. Sheehan. No questions asked.

Mr. Sheehan duplicated the apartment key in case he lost the original. Then he began copying the seven thousand pages — first in a real estate office where an acquaintance worked, then, with Ms. Sheehan’s help, in the suburban copy shop. He was ferrying piles of pages by taxi between the apartment and the copy shop, then to a locker in the Boston bus terminal and later to a locker at Logan airport.

When the machines in the copy shop crashed under the strain, the Sheehans relocated to a copy shop in Boston run by a Navy veteran. When the man noticed that the documents were classified, and became nervous, Ms. Sheehan, at the shop, called her husband at the apartment.

“Get down here,” he remembered her saying.

He rushed back and told the manager that he had borrowed the material from some Harvard professors. They were using them for a study, he said, and had put a time limit on the loan. The documents, he assured the manager, had been declassified in bulk. The manager, being ex-Navy, seemed to understand.

At the airport, the Sheehans bought an extra seat on their flight home and piled their suitcases onto it, buckling them in rather than letting them out of their sight.

Back in Washington, Mr. Sheehan’s editor, with sample documents and a memo from Mr. Sheehan, set off for New York to get approval for Mr. Sheehan to proceed.

Mr. Sheehan and an editor planted themselves in a room at the Jefferson Hotel in Washington. They spent several weeks there reading the documents and summarizing what they had. Then they were summoned to New York to brief the newspaper’s top editors. Meeting at The Times’s headquarters on West 43rd Street, Mr. Sheehan found the company’s lawyer appearing shaken.

“It was like somebody had thrown a bucket of ice water over the man,” Mr. Sheehan remembered. “He was just terrified of what the hell I was saying. He kept saying: ‘Don’t tell them this. They won’t be able to keep the secret. Somebody will talk about it. We may have committed a felony.’ ”

He and the editor were assigned a room at the Hilton hotel in midtown Manhattan to continue working. Soon there was another editor, three more writers, security guards and file cabinets with combination locks. Eventually there were dozens of people working round the clock in three adjoining rooms. “We mapped the whole thing out,” Mr. Sheehan remembered. “And we started cranking away.”

He made a practice of calling Mr. Ellsberg every few days — “to try to keep him on the ranch,” as he put it in 2015. Mr. Sheehan was not worried about another newspaper breaking the story, he said; he was worried that someone whom Mr. Ellsberg had spoken to would blow the whistle before The Times could publish.

So he made excuses to Mr. Ellsberg for his seeming lack of progress. He said the top editors were still discussing how best to proceed. He even went up to Cambridge, he remembered, as though to take more notes. Mr. Ellsberg railed at him there, Mr. Sheehan said. “I’m taking all the risks,” he remembered Mr. Ellsberg saying. “You people aren’t taking any risk.”

A Signal, and Then a Go

A few weeks before publication, Mr. Sheehan decided to send Mr. Ellsberg a signal. He was not willing to tell him directly that The Times was going ahead because he feared that Mr. Ellsberg’s reaction might inadvertently tip the government off. But he wanted some kind of “tacit consent” from Mr. Ellsberg, he remembered.

“It was a matter of conscience,” he said.

So he told Mr. Ellsberg that he now needed the documents, not just his notes. Mr. Ellsberg had said that he would hand them over only when he was ready, knowing that The Times would then do as it pleased. This time, when Mr. Sheehan asked, Mr. Ellsberg consented.

Mr. Rosenthal congratulating reporters after publication of the Pentagon Papers in June 1971. Mr. Sheehan was second from right.Credit...Renato Perez/The New York Times

Mr. Sheehan chose to believe that the consent meant that Mr. Ellsberg understood that The Times could now publish any day.

“This was an exercise in giving Ellsberg some warning — if he remembered what he’d told me — and a bit of conscience-salving on my part,” Mr. Sheehan recalled. “Maybe it’s hypocritical, but we were going to go to press, and I wanted to try to give him some kind of warning.”

Mr. Ellsberg, it would turn out, had missed the signal.

Meanwhile, he arranged for Mr. Sheehan to pick up a complete copy of the historical study stowed in an Ellsberg family apartment in Manhattan. Mr. Sheehan remembered paying the doorman “the kind of generous tip that leads people to say, ‘I don’t know nuthin’.’ Because I knew sooner or later the F.B.I. would be trying to piece all of this together.”

He took other steps at the last minute to cover his tracks. A copy stored at the Sheehans’ house went into a colleague’s freezer. Pages of other copies bearing Mr. Ellsberg’s initials were pulped in New Jersey or burned in the barbecue set of a diplomat from Brazil, a friend of Mr. Sheehan’s father-in-law.

In the end, the timing of the publication of the Pentagon Papers took Mr. Ellsberg by surprise. When Mr. Sheehan finally returned Mr. Ellsberg’s calls, he reached only Mr. Ellsberg’s wife, who, he said, told him that Mr. Ellsberg was happy with the presentation of the material but, as Mr. Sheehan put it, “unhappy over the monumental duplicity.”

In the interview in 2015, Mr. Sheehan said he had never revealed Mr. Ellsberg’s identity while the project was underway. To his editors he always spoke only of “the sources.” It was another journalist, outside the paper, who blew Mr. Ellsberg’s cover not long after the Pentagon Papers story broke.

Nor did Mr. Sheehan ever speak about how he had obtained the papers. In 2015, he said he had never wanted to contradict Mr. Ellsberg’s account or embarrass him by describing Mr. Ellsberg’s behavior and state of mind at the time.

There was no contact between the two men for six months. Shortly before Christmas 1971, Mr. Sheehan said, they ran into each other in Manhattan. In a brief conversation, he said, he told Mr. Ellsberg what he had done.

“So you stole it, like I did,” he recalled Mr. Ellsberg saying.

“No, Dan, I didn’t steal it,” Mr. Sheehan said he had answered. “And neither did you. Those papers are the property of the people of the United States. They paid for them with their national treasure and the blood of their sons, and they have a right to it.’”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/us/pentagon-papers-neil-sheehan.html?smid=tw-share

Donald Trump's parting gift to the world? Signs suggest it may be war with Iran

 Donald Trump's parting gift to the world? Signs suggest it may be war with Iran

Daniel Ellsberg

I will always regret that I did not do more to stop war with Vietnam. Now, I am calling on whistleblowers to step up and expose Trump’s plans

Fri 8 Jan 2021 11.16 GMT

‘I am urging courageous whistleblowing today, this week, not months or years from now, after bombs have begun falling. It could be the most patriotic act of a lifetime.’ Photograph: Charles Dharapak/AP

P

resident Trump’s incitement of criminal mob violence and occupation of the Capitol makes clear there is no limitation whatever on the abuse of power he may commit in the next two weeks he remains in office. Outrageous as his incendiary performance was on Wednesday, I fear he may incite something far more dangerous in the next few days: his long-desired war with Iran.

Could he possibly be so delusional as to imagine that such a war would be in the interests of the nation or region or even his own short-term interests? His behavior and evident state of mind this week and over the last two months answers that question.

The dispatch this week of B-52’s nonstop round-trip from North Dakota to the Iranian coast – the fourth such flight in seven weeks, one at year’s end – along with his build-up of US forces in the area, is a warning not only to Iran but to us.

In mid-November, as these flights began, the president had to be dissuaded at the highest levels from directing an unprovoked attack on Iran nuclear facilities. But an attack “provoked” by Iran (or by militias in Iraq aligned with Iran) was not ruled out.

US military and intelligence agencies have frequently, as in Vietnam and Iraq, provided presidents with false information that offered pretexts to attack our perceived adversaries. Or they’ve suggested covert actions that could provoke the adversaries to some response that justifies a US “retaliation”.

The assassination of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, Iran’s top nuclear scientist, in November was probably intended to be such a provocation. If so, it has failed so far, as did the assassination exactly a year ago of General Suleimani.

But time is now short to generate an exchange of violent actions and reactions that will serve to block resumption of the Iran nuclear deal by the incoming Biden administration: a pre-eminent goal not only of Donald Trump but of the allies he has helped bring together in recent months, Israel, Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Evidently it would take more than individual murders to induce Iran to risk responses justifying a large-scale air attack before Trump leaves office. But US military and covert planning staffs are up to the task of attempting to meet that challenge, on schedule.

I was a participant-observer of such planning myself, with respect to Vietnam half a century ago. On 3 September 1964 – just a month after I had become special assistant to the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, John T McNaughton – a memo came across my desk in the Pentagon written by my boss. He was recommending actions “likely at some point to provoke a military DRV [North Vietnam] response … likely to provide good grounds for us to escalate if we wished”.

Such actions “that would tend deliberately to provoke a DRV reaction” (sic), as spelled out five days later by McNaughton’s counterpart at the state department, the assistant secretary of state William Bundy, might include “running US naval patrols increasingly close to the North Vietnamese coast” – ie running them within the 12-mile coastal waters the North Vietnamese claimed: as close to the beach as necessary, to get a response that might justify what McNaughton called “a full-fledged squeeze on North Vietnam [a progressively all-out bombing campaign]”, which would follow “especially if a US ship were sunk”.

I have little doubt that such contingency planning, directed by the Oval Office, for provoking, if necessary, an excuse for attacking Iran while this administration is still in office exists right now, in safes and computers in the Pentagon, CIA and the White House. That means there are officials in those agencies – perhaps one sitting at my old desk in the Pentagon – who have seen on their secure computer screens highly classified recommendations exactly like the McNaughton and Bundy memos that came across my desk in September 1964.

I regret I did not copy and convey those memos to the foreign relations committee in 1964, rather than five years later

I will always regret that I did not copy and convey those memos – along with many other files in the top-secret safe in my office at that time, all giving the lie to the president’s false campaign promises that same fall that “we seek no wider war” – to Senator Fulbright’s foreign relations committee in September 1964 rather than five years later in 1969, or to the press in 1971. A war’s worth of lives might have been saved.

Current documents or digital files that contemplate provoking or “retaliating to” Iranian actions covertly provoked by us should not remain secret another moment from the US Congress and the American public, lest we be presented with a disastrous fait accompli before January 20, instigating a war potentially worse than Vietnam plus all the wars of the Middle East combined. It is neither too late for such plans to be carried out by this deranged president nor for an informed public and Congress to block him from doing so.

I am urging courageous whistleblowing today, this week, not months or years from now, after bombs have begun falling. It could be the most patriotic act of a lifetime.

• Daniel Ellsberg was the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers, which revealed the US government had lied to the American public about the Vietnam war

• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/08/donald-trump-war-iran-tehran-daniel-ellsberg