AMY GOODMAN: Joan Baez, singing one of her early songs from David’s Album, dedicated to her then-husband David Harris, sentenced to three years in jail for refusing to fight in Vietnam. Harris spoke recently at a forum at The New School for Social Research with Daniel Ellsberg. They were talking about the Pentagon Papers. Today is the 25th anniversary of their release.

Commissioned by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and classified as “top secret–sensitive,” the 7,000-page, Pentagon Papers traced the U.S. involvement in Vietnam from the 1940s through the late 1960s. In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg made the study available to The New York Times, which spent three months deciding whether and how to publish the report. On June 13th, 1971, the Times finally went to press with the government’s secret history of its land war in Southeast Asia. Publication of the Pentagon reports led the Nixon administration to sue the Times for a prior restraint, unleashing a firestorm of publicity and legal wrangling. Two weeks later, the Supreme Court freed the Times and The Washington Post, which had also secured a copy of the documents, to confine publishing their Pentagon Papers series.

We’ll speak with Daniel Ellsberg in our second segment, but first to antiwar activist David Harris. He’s author of Last Stand about the timber wars in Northern California. His forthcoming book is called Our War: An Internal Moral Reflection. David Harris.

DAVID HARRIS: Tonight, I’d like to talk some about the Pentagon Papers and what they meant in the context of that 10 years’ worth of war. But I think more I would like to talk about the process of remembering and why that process is so essential, and so essential now. This is, indeed, America’s longest war that we’re talking about. And I think there’s a real case to be made that it’s a war that has not ended. It’s America’s longest-running war, not simply its longest, because 10 years does not begin to capture what has gone on. And I don’t think a war is over until it has been digested by the people who made it. And those people are us, and we have not done so.

It was 20 years ago that the last American caught the last chopper out of Saigon. And in those 20 years, a time in which those of us who participated in trying to stop the war expected that the nation would at least reflect, would at least look over its shoulder back into the tall grass from which it had just emerged, were sorely disappointed. You would think that on that day, the door slammed shut, and it was “Olly olly oxen free,” and that a process that had killed 3 million people, for no good reason, somehow had come to an end without anybody facing up to the fact that we had killed those 3 million people for no good reason.

And today, in remembering the Pentagon Papers, I think it’s terribly important that we remember them in that context. We are not here talking simply about an isolated historical event. Nor are we simply talking about a process of secrecy inside of our own government. We are really searching for one fragment of a much larger picture to help us explain how we, the American people, the people with all those glorious words and paper about what kind of state we’re supposed to occupy, ended up being the destroyers of Southeast Asia. It was not a simple or a easy transformation. And it is not a transformation that has been completed yet. And I think all of us in this room have to come to terms with this not simply as a piece of history, because it is not just a piece of history we’re talking about. We are talking here about an ongoing national shame. We are talking about the deepest violation of the principles upon which this country was supposed to stand, that has occurred, certainly, in my lifetime, I suspect in the lifetime of our country perhaps. And it’s left to those of us who survived to come to terms with that, to engage in a kind of moral reckoning that can allow us to finally digest the history that still sits back there like a lump against our hearts.

When the Pentagon Papers came out, I was fresh out of spending 20 months in federal prison, under the authority of the U.S. Board of Parole. I had started out certainly not someone headed for prison. I was the Fresno High School boy of the year in 1963. I was an honors student and student body president at Stanford University. Like all young men my age, I had registered for military conscription when I turned 18. Unlike all of them, I eventually refused to carry a draft card anymore. I refused to accept a student deferment. I did not think Americans were supposed to fight wars that way. And when my orders came to report and go serve in the war myself, I refused. I urged everyone to do likewise. And I continued to do so, until peace agreements were signed.

What I saw when the Pentagon Papers came out was a final public confirmation of what those of us who had been against the war knew for a long time, that this war was a lie, that it had been waged with the government’s capacity to lie to the rest of us, that had they not had that capacity, there would have been no war. We were always told, for the years leading up to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, was that the rest of us might not understand, but those people in power had special knowledge about what was going on in Southeast Asia, which made it mandatory that we send our armies there to stand up for all the good things Americans were supposed to stand up for. It wasn’t until Dan Ellsberg released these documents for the rest of us to read that we understood that there was no special knowledge. And if there was special knowledge, the special knowledge was an absolute contradiction of the policy that the government had engaged and made. And without that kind of prevarication, there would have been no such policy, [inaudible] if you will, all be it unwillingly, by the government, that in order to wage that policy, they had to be able to tell us something besides the truth, because if they told us the truth, we would understand that it was a place we had no business engaged in activities which we had no business being engaged in.

Now, those activities are summed up today as secrets, and that what Dan did was break out of the pattern of secrets and reveal some of these secrets to the rest of us. But I must say secret doesn’t really capture what was going on. I mean, secret is a very anonymous kind of word that is almost sterile. I mean, secret is something that’s locked up in a safe. You know, secret is something that is hidden inside an envelope. The secrets we’re talking about were not hidden, except from us. Anyone who was on the Southeast Asian subcontinent during that period of time got to witness their piece as the history and those secrets.

I’ll give you an example of what one of those secrets was. One of those secrets was a place called the Plain of Jars. It was not a place Americans knew anything about. It was not a place that was in the American newspapers. It was not a place that the president got on television to speak about. But for five straight years, contrary to its own public declarations, and contrary to what its policy was supposed to be, the Americans bombed the Plain of Jars in Laos. They bombed it because it was supposedly a key location for the war in Laos that we were not going to commit troops to, that we could only commit our airplanes to. So, every day, starting early in the morning was spotter planes, who would come over and look for human activity on the Plain of Jars and identify targets, followed by dive bombers who would follow those spotter planes to the targets and lay down their ordnance. We dropped every piece of ordnance in the American arsenal, short of atomic weapons, on the Plain ofo Jars. There had been some 70,000 people who lived on the Plain of Jars that had been living there for centuries. When we were done, after five years, there was no one left alive on the Plain of Jars. Where civilization had existed for millennia, we extinguished in five years. We did that without one public word to the people who paid for it. We did that without one public word to the people who elected the government who waged that policy, because it was a secret.

Secrets kill real people. Perhaps they always have, but they certainly did in this war. And when we try to understand what the implications of revealing secrets are, let us not do that in some abstraction of political science, because it is not a political science abstraction we are talking about. We are talking about people living and people dying. We are talking about children and women and old men trying to live in huts on a place that none of us had ever heard of, and being impossible to do so. These are what secrets do. And as we talk to ourselves about what remains undone from the Pentagon Papers and what remains undone from the revelations that Dan Ellsberg began, we should start at that point. We should not start with this as a piece of abstraction. We should not start with this as a piece of political analysis. We should start with this as something about people’s lives.

And it has become fashionable in this country, since the war ended, to address it as a mistake. I mean, mistake was a great invention for the war, because it suddenly allowed it to be talked about in mixed company. Everybody could agree the war was a mistake. Some people thought it was a mistake because we did not completely level Hanoi. Some people thought it was a mistake because it was a crime punishable under the Nuremberg precedents. But we could all agree it was a mistake. And in mistake, we were freed of much of the sense of responsibility that we might have brought to the subject. You know, mistakes happen. They happen to everybody. You know, you get up in the morning, you forget to take the papers out of your pockets before you put your pants into the washing machine. That’s a mistake. You know, you forget to turn the stove off when you leave home. That’s a mistake. Mistakes are all over us. They abound. And it’s easy for us to look back at Vietnam and say, “This was a mistake.”

But let us understand what this mistake really was. This mistake was 3 million people who would be alive today, but who are not. And they did not die pleasantly. They died burned alive by jellied gasoline. They died stabbed to death with bayonets. They died blown up by landmines. They died impaled on bamboo stakes. They died tortured to death. They died strung out on the barbed wire crying for their mothers. This was not a movie. This was people’s lives. And “mistake” does not cut it. You cannot take what kills 3 million people, for no good reason, and explain it with something for which the generic response is “Excuse me.” “Excuse me” is not enough.

What is left to the American people on occasions like this one, and hopefully any number of occasions, is to step beyond that to something considerably more profound. This was indeed our war. And any real history of it has to include a reckoning that starts with accepting that ownership and the responsibility that comes with it, and treasuring those moments in our own history when we stepped outside and accepted that while it was going on. That was certainly what Dan Ellsberg did for all of us when he released those papers. And hopefully, it’s something that all of us will soon do for ourselves, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: David Harris, speaking at a New School event, remembering the release of the Pentagon Papers, released 25 years ago today. Harris served three years in jail for refusing to fight in Vietnam. His book, Our War: An Internal Moral Reflection, is coming out soon. Coming up, a conversation with Daniel Ellsberg. You’re listening to Democracy Now!