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So we have then this history. These so-called Plumbers were a group of burglars, wire tappers,
and various criminals on this side of the law, who under a former CIA agent and a former FBI agent, all
working for the White House, had burglarized the office of my former psychoanalyst in Los Angeles.
What they were looking for was information with which they could blackmail me into silence because
they feared that I had information about what Nixon had yet to do and had already threatened to do. I had
the information orally, but not in documents. They feared I had documents. People had left the
administration over the invasion of Cambodia. They had left the NSC and could have given me
documents on these threats—they should have, but didn’t. Nixon’s fear that they had done so was not
paranoid at all.
One of them, Roger Morris, an aide at that time to Kissinger, said later, “We should have thrown
open the safes and screamed bloody murder—because that’s exactly what it was.” And he said his failure
to do that was the greatest regret and shame of his life. But to keep me from putting out that material
which they feared I had, Nixon and Kissinger wanted information that would keep me silent. So they
broke into my psychoanalyst’s office to see if there were any notes or anything embarrassing in that
sense, and they didn’t find it. Later they committed a series of crimes in order to shut me up, including
bringing people to “incapacitate Daniel Ellsberg totally” on the steps of the Capitol on May 3, 1972, just
before the mining of Haiphong Harbor, which I was predicting at that point. That was another major
factor in the impeachment proceedings, along with the illegal wiretaps, the use of the CIA against me, and
other things. All of these were illegal at the time.
I used to say a couple of years ago that all of these acts against me had now been made legal
except for the incapacitation attempt, but that last is not an exception anymore. The president and his
people have both leaked or said publicly that they maintain kill lists that include American citizens which
can be executed anywhere in worldwide battlefield in the global war on terror—and that includes the
United States of America. Now, that doesn’t sound constitutional in terms of due process or the Fifth
Amendment, and it isn’t. People have questioned the propriety of Obama presiding over these kill lists
and actually naming people to be killed. One of them was Anwar al-Awlaki—a deliberate assassination of
an American citizen. His sixteen-year-old son was also killed a little bit later by a drone strike; it’s not
clear to this day who they were aiming at—whether it was him or not. So incapacitation is no longer out
of bounds either.
Of course, no higher-ups have been prosecuted for torture. Nothing positive can be said for
torture in terms of having made Americans safer or finding out information that would prevent terrorist
strikes. One thing is very clear: there’s nothing more illegal than torture. Domestically, several laws make
it criminal to torture; under international law, it is prohibited by agreements which the United States has
ratified. Internationally and domestically, nothing is more illegal than torture. Murder is probably harder
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