host: we have been talking about daniel ellsberg.a recent conversation in chicago will be airing tonight on c-span2 at 11:00 eastern. you can also catch that on c-span.org. during the pentagon papers case, the government argued the publication of that information would cost american troops their lives. what did you think about that claim? guest: that was a very serious claim. if the government had been able to refer the court to pages in the pentagon pages that would support the claim, i think the government would have won. the problem is they were not able to do that. the government made all kinds of significant claims. they could not provide chapter and verse citations to support their claims. that is why the government lost. host: similar claims about american security have been made about the government efforts on fisa warrants. the government surveillance program, to keep that up and running, the same arguments have been made. do you see parallels between the n.s.a. surveillance program and what happened with the publication of

host: we have been talking about daniel ellsberg.a recent conversation in chicago will be airing tonight on c-span2 at 11:00 eastern. you can also catch that on c-span.org. during the pentagon papers case, the government argued the publication of that information would cost american troops their lives. what did you think about that claim? guest: that was a very serious claim. if the government had been able to refer the court to pages in the pentagon pages that would support the claim, i think the government would have won. the problem is they were not able to do that. the government made all kinds of significant claims. they could not provide chapter and verse citations to support their claims. that is why the government lost. host: similar claims about american security have been made about the government efforts on fisa warrants. the government surveillance program, to keep that up and running, the same arguments have been made. do you see parallels between the n.s.a. surveillance program and what happened with the publication of

he dismissed all the charges against danielle ellsberg and anthony russell.o make a fire trial impossible. >> a presidential prosecution that started, we now know, in order to help reelect a president and attending now, i think, to avoid impeaching that said president. but they won't stop the process because thanks in part to this trial are out on the table, they are out of the safes just as the pents oregon papers are out of the safe and the same kind of facts. and they can't be put back in the safe. >>> because of what dan did and the overreaction of an imperial president, if you will, to what had happened, it changed history. >> it was the cover-up of the ellsberg break-in that concerned the white house. and the seeds of all of watergate occur in the pentagon papers. >> the greatest result of what he did was to get president nixon out of office. that wasn't, i'm sure, any part of his expectation or his intention. >>> what has remained significant about the release of the pentagon papers is the decision by a public official to give priority to conscience as

daniel ellsberg. [applause] >> tonight he is in conversation with rick perlstein, journalist and author who politico called the chronicler of the american conservative movement because of his books, before the storm, nixon land, and under the bridge. please welcome tonight daniel ellsberg and rick perlstein. thank you all. [applause] >> thank you, carey. it's truly an honor to be at this glorious new ornament, chicago's literary culture. and america's literary culture. of course it's an honor to be here with one of my heroes, daniel ellsberg. it's an honor to have him here because win the events that he writes about in this book began, when he basically squirreled away thousands and thousands of pages of documents about america's nuclear command and control system in tandem with releasing thousands of pages of documents about the lies that america told in order to create and sustain the vietnam war, he expected to spend the rest of his life in jail. he knew this and he proceeded, nonetheless, in our i

senate reportedly turned down daniel ellsberg when he came to them with this idea 37. but mike gravel was this young guy, 41 years old freshman senator, personally was turning very hard against the war. he tried to stop the draft by filibustering the draft to death. and he was the one guy who took ellsberg up on his offer. they came up with this plan. gravel figured out what he was going to do. he was going to get the pentagon papers into the congressional record so they confidential be censored so they could all be released to the public. and he had this plan. his plan was to read the pentagon papers on the floor of the senate. terrible plan, as it turns out. because mike gravel did not plan it right in terms of the procedural stuff and when he got up there on the floor of the senate june 29th, 1971 he took to the floor and he was going to read the pentagon papers but he immediately got shut down because of the absence of a quorum in the senate chamber. he hadn't figured on that. but mike gravel had a plan b. after it wasn't going to work on the floor of the senate, h

but in june of 1971, daniel ellsberg who took these documents from the pentagon was trying everything he could think of to get the documents into the public eye so the american people could read them for themselves what the government really knew about the vietnam war. and part of his strategy was to get these pentagon documents to newspaper newspapers who were publishing it piece by piece and fighting it out with new each bit of publication in terms of injections and threats from administration but newspapers aren't the only avenue for releasing these documents. under the idea to get the pentagon pipes into the public record by getting them into the congressional record where constitutionally they wouldn't be censored and the american people could therefore read them. lots of higher profile members turned down daniel ellsberg when he came to them with this idea but mike gravel was this young guy, 41 years old freshman senator and tried to stop the draft by filibustering the draft to death and the one guy that took ellsberg up on the offer. they came up with this plan. gravel figured

amy: that is the details about the smog of antiwar activists to help daniel ellsberg have been hidden for decades, and the identities of his colleagues are still a mystery. and those are some of the headlines. this is democracy now!, democracynow.org, the war and peace report. i'm amy goodman. juan: and i'm juan gonzalez. welcome to all of our listeners and viewers from around the country and around the world. we begin today with some rare good news for immigrant rights advocates. [cheers] >> ravi! juan: those are members of the new sanctuary coalition of new york city, cheering an order to release their executive director ravi ragbir from detention. last month, ragbir was one of several nationally recognized activists to be taken into custody by immigration and customs enforcement. he was handcuffed and arrested during his routine check-in on january 11, prompting a mass protest that ended with 18 people arrested, including two members of the new york city council. ravi was then quickly flown by ice, in shackles, to the krome detention center in florida. as he faced imminent deportat

daniel ellsberg, who leaked the pentagon papers that in 1971, said in an article, he talked a little bit about north korea because he was a senior nuclear planner. he writes in the "financial times" that he believes trump has largely created the crisis by saying north korea will not become a nuclear weapon state on his watch. trump said i will not let it , but according to ellsberg, it already happened before you take office. he said this is the first time since the cuban missile crisis we are threatening to attack a country equipped with nuclear weapons. are openly talking about assassination teams, as all full-scale invasion exercises, about the decapitation of north korea's leadership. ." what issanity pur your reaction to that ? guest: if you think about the it, more at the end of broadly, i disagree with the point that this is a crisis of president trump's creation. north korea has been pursuing nuclear weapons and ballistic , andles for decades president trump has the unfortunate timing of being in power when these capabilities are coming into fruition. so this is a crisis many

and we wrap up at 11 with daniel ellsberg talking about his experiences as a nuclear war planner in the early 1960s. that all happens tonight on c-span2's booktv. 72 hours of nonfiction authors and books this weekend. television for serious readers. first up, robert merry on president mckinley. ♪ ♪

the first time the key role he and a handful of other activists played in helping whistleblower daniel ellsberg leak the pentagon papers to journalists. this is alperovitz, speaking in a video produced by "the new yorker." >> i helped arrange fothe distribution of thpapers. they had to be delivered to reports s who d cocomeo bostst and d mbridge. the questionasas, how to do that knowing that the govnmnment s trng to o nd the pers anan trying to findan ellsberg. one of the graduate stents who was lpining us would te a bundleff papers and one of the reporters said, go to this hot room and wai waitoror a cl. so a call was made. i basically said to him, ope youroor. the box was there that ha b been left a few minutes earlier the strategy was to f from pupubl telepepne to public telephone annever use the same one, moving inhe boston area, the mbmbridg area, many lilele tieses, you w wld not be traced. iteemed work. y:hat is thdetails abt e smog oantiwarctivistso helpanielllsberg ha been hien for deces, and e idtities ohis coeagues are stila mystery. and the are me of the headlis. th is demoacy now!

those who had broken into watergate had earlier while working at the white house broken into daniel ellsberg's psychiatrist's office under the pretext of national security to try to see what ellsberg's medical records had to try to discredit him. it was, as john mitchell, the head of the re-election committee and former attorney general, thought that crime was worse than the bungled burglary that he approved at the watergate. >> there was a whole series of criminal abuse of power, including misuse of the irs, unprecedented crimes by a president of the united states seeking to undermine the rule of law. going back to his first days in office. not simply about intelligence gathering and his vast campaign of political espionage and sabotage. >> we've got to take a quick break. i want to keep the panel because i want to get everybody's take on something else that happened today. carl researched christopher steele, the author of the trump dossier, could face a criminal investigation if two republican senators get their requests approved by the department of justice. what all of that is about when w

brown: the pentagon papers were originally leaked to "new york times" reporter neil sheehan by daniel ellsbergformer defense department analyst who came to believe the government was lying about the progress of the war. ellsberg spoke in a 2010 documentary on the pbs program "p.o.v." >> i've often said that i feel very regretful that i had not put out those documents when i could have in 1964, 65, i think, that a war really might have been avoided. >> brown: "times" reporters spent three months studying the papers. james goodale, then-lead counsel for the "times," told me the high stakes were understood. >> the news people were very concerned that they had fake documents, they didn't know who ellsberg was. and they didn't care who he was, because they wanted to make their own determination whether the documents they had were authentic. if they were not authentic, it would be very hard for the "new york times" to recover from that blow. >> brown: on june 13, 1971, the "times" began publishing stories, until the nixon administration, claiming a violation of the espionage act, secured a court inj

and we need to pay attention -- on north korea, i just have a wonderful lunch with daniel ellsberg, this weekly interview, and he's got this book coming out titled "the doomsday machine" and he's alone has a certain perspective. but we were discussing the accelerated nature of kim jong-un's tyndale and harry keeps eating our expectations -- timetable and heavy keeps beating our expectations. clearly, what lindsey graham has said about south koreans that mattering, what trump has indicated about japanese and south koreans not mattering is removed a deterrence that kim jong-un might have thought a red line that america used to have doesn't happen anymore. so he's accelerating to develop the one threat that apparently, the only threat that america really cares about, the ability to strike the mainland. because the japanese don't matter. it's perfectly rational for him to accelerate his program. source code to test a hydrogen bomb in at some point. he has to to make the icbm range credible. he needs to marry with -- is to demonstrate that. when that will happen, could be next week, , it coul

and we wrap up at 11 with daniel ellsberg talking about his experiences as a nuclear war planner in the early 1960s. that all happens tonight on c-span2's booktv. 72 hours of nonfiction authors and books this weekend. television for serious readers. first up, robert merry on president mckinley. ♪ ♪ [applause] >> so good evening, ladies and gentlemen. welcome to the kansas city public library. robert merry is -- this is his second presentation in the somewhat hallowed halls of the kansas city public library, five-star library this week from library journal. thank you. [applause] he's a graduate of the university of washington. he has a master's degree from columbia university school of journalism. he's been a reporter for the observer, "the wall street journal," managing editor, executive editor and editor-in-chief of congressional quarterly, and more recently the editor of the national interest and the american conservative. the american conservative has, he says it's collaborative, but it sounds a lot like robert merry. this is a description of their philosophy. we believe in constitut

on north korea i just had this wonderful thing, a lunch with the ft with daniel ellsberg. lunch at the ft, as you might know, is this weekly interview. and he's got this book coming out, titled the doomsday machine, and he's alarmed and has a certain perspective. we were discussing the accelerated nature of kim jong un's timetable and how he keeps beating our expectations both in terms of the nuclear yields and the missile range. and clearly what lindsey graham has said about south koreans not mattering, what trump has indicated about japanese and south koreans not mattering removes a deterrent that kim jong un might have thought a red line with america used to have but doesn't have anymore. and so he's accelerating to develop the one threat that apparently, the only threat that america really cares about, the ability to strike the mainland. because the japanese don't matter, the south, it's perfectly rational for him to accelerate his program. so he's going to test a hydrogen bomb in the atmosphere at some point. he has to to make the icbm range credible. he needs to marr

. >> and then you meet the real daniel ellsberg who's 80-something?thing. >> what struck you most? what did you want to say to him? >> certainly how his campaigning is tireless. he still is as ardent a servant as he was then about this sort of -- you know, the wrongdoings in this world. i was -- the more i lived, the more i was staggered by his bravery, really, that he knew the consequences and this is a man who was a former marine working with the government. you know, he was a true patriot but just saw the wrongdoing and said i can't do he was working for the rand corporation and here he saw a study that had undergone four different presidents and the decision-making, warts and all. it was buried and he took them out serendipitously and started photocopying. in the movies he had people photocopying. but in real life who was photocopying? >> he took his children. >> how old with they? >> 11 and 8. they were top secret. they were helping him. it's what got the fbi ultimately onto him. he was divorced at the time and the children went back and told the