MR. KOJO NNAMDIForty years ago today, the New York Times rocked the nation with its publication of excerpts from a top secret Defense Department study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In the media frenzy that followed, the document became known as the Pentagon Papers. At noon today, the entire 7,000 pages of the Pentagon Papers became available online for the first time, finally declassified in their entirety by the federal government. Over the last four decades, multiple versions have been released but this is the first complete version to be publicly disclosed with nothing redacted.

MR. KOJO NNAMDIWhile scholars who study the Vietnam era are eager to finally see what's in the redacted sections, the public at large may not learn much of great consequence from the version released today. But the fact that the declassification took 40 years raises new questions about government secrecy as the country fights two wars, battles WikiLeaks and tries to silence whistleblowers at the National Security Agency. Joining us in studio is Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Tom, good to see you again.

MR. THOMAS BLANTONPleasure to be here, Kojo.

NNAMDIWhat's the significance of today's release of the Pentagon Papers? Is there anything in them we still don't know?

BLANTONYes and no, which is the big picture we've known for a long time. The government lied and escalated the Vietnam War and millions of people died. And the government lied to us about it. So that's a story we've known at least since 1971 when it was on the front page. What we didn't know, and there's about a third of the total body, the 7,000 pages you mentioned, that had never come out in any of the multiple versions. And partly that's not because they were censored before, it's because Dan Ellsberg has a set of them. And those were the days before scanners and thumb drives.

BLANTONYou couldn't download, like, Bradley Manning did for WikiLeaks. He had to go to the photocopy shop with his buddies and his sweetheart and stacks of paper and you feed them in one at a time. And it was hard to make a complete set of these things. And so, versions came out through the New York Times. A version came to a senator named Mike Gravel from Alaska who had a post office subcommittee and set most of the night in the basement where he went to Capitol reading the stuff into the Public Record to try to get it out.

BLANTONAnd Dan Ellsberg was just trying to get anybody to pay attention. So, scholars have kind of put together these various versions, photocopies and Gravel edition and New York Times version, all that into packages to try to see what's there. And what's been missing mainly has been this chunk of the documents at the end, not the analysis that this Vietnam study group did of the war and the lies and the difference between government rhetoric and what was really happening. But a bunch of the backup stuff. The stuff that the documents fetishists like me are going to love.

NNAMDINo wonder you're happy about this. Why did it take 40 years to declassify the Pentagon Papers and what does that mean for the government's hold on documents relating to more recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan?

BLANTONIt's an embarrassment. And that's why these documents came out today. The government finally got embarrassed enough that a document that was largely public for 40 years was still secret. And there you have the essential, you know, contradiction within the U.S. secrecy system. It was public, oh, but it's secret.

BLANTONIt's kind of like WikiLeaks. They're telling people it's the government. You can't go on the Web, on the New York Times website and read these leaked cables. My gosh, if you're not reading those cables and your job is to know what the government's doing in the world, you're not doing your job, right? So it's an absurdity and I think it's a testament to a couple of things. One is a lot of people in the outside kept asking about what was still missing.

BLANTONAnd some decent people on the inside and there are a bunch of them, serious public servants, like the new archivist of the United States, David Ferriero just basically said, okay, look, what are the post child -- what are the -- what's the poster child of stupid secrets, right?

BLANTONWhat's still sitting in the vault that shouldn't be? What are we paying money to protect with all our security controls and guards and everything that should be out there. And he said, oh, well, Pentagon papers, 40th anniversary is coming up. Let's -- let's put that out. And some good people on the inside said let's put it out. The funniest thing, you'll love this. This is just the absurdity of the whole thing. Come down to the final -- there are just weeks to go before today, the government still wanted to censor 11 words.

BLANTONThey said this in a public hearing, what, three, four weeks ago, and the archivist started joking about it to his credit. He said, we're gonna to have a Mad Libs contest to fill in the 11 words, and -- and it's sort of like, and we -- critics on the outside, we all said, what, are you kidding? If the government blacks out those words, it's like putting a red flag on the spot.

NNAMDIThank you.

BLANTONWe and everybody else is gonna go in and we're gonna figure out what's those -- what are -- what's in there. So if you want to hide them, release them.

NNAMDIDo you know finally now that everything has -- nothing has been redacted, what those 11 words were?

BLANTONWe don't, because they're helpfully not flagging them. But as of four weeks ago, somebody in the U.S. government, inside some intelligence agency, or somewhere else said, no, there are still 11 words that ought to be secret, until wiser heads said no, don't go there.

NNAMDII was just wondering if those of us in broadcasting would have to now add four words to the seven we are not supposed to be able to say on the air at all.

BLANTONReal secrets, Kojo.

NNAMDIIn 2009, President Obama established the National Declassification Center to help speed up the release of secret documents. Has it made this declassification process any quicker?

BLANTONIt should, but it hasn't yet. And that's because they came into being with an enormous backlog, about 400 million pages that President Clinton had order declassified in the '90s. But for a variety of reasons, multiple agencies saying, wait a second, State Department can't release that information because it actually came out of one of my cables from the Defense Intelligence Agency, and they can't fool with my stuff. The turf battles, the sense of oh, no, we gotta put it through the ringer, a daisy chain of referrals.

BLANTONThe idea that of that center was to put it all in one place, have some people who take responsibility, waive a wand and get this historical stuff out the doors. We ought not to be paying as taxpayers to keep it secret anymore. But in their first year, the National D-Class Center only got through about 12 million pages out of that huge backlog, but I'm hopeful.

NNAMDIWhat sorts of things are most readily declassified?

BLANTONThe most readily declassified would be the quick situation reports that after a year or two that are just not, uh, it's like a lot of those Wikileaks cables had dates on them that said declassify this in five years, because it's just a report of a given meeting, not too sensitive, nobody's gonna get killed if their identity comes out. It's a description of a situation on the ground. That kind of thing. Or even an intelligence report describing a foreign military, or if you got a negotiating position going into a negotiation, negotiation gets done, treaty's done, at the end, that can come out.

BLANTONLook, four years after the invasion of Iraq, we got the Iraq invasion war plan declassified, because it just wasn't sensitive anymore. No Saddam Hussein, no Republican Guard, no country. So they could release it. So that's the -- that would be more typical.

NNAMDITom Blanton is director of National Security Archive at George Washington University. He joins us in studio to discuss the release of the pentagon papers today, 40 years after excerpts were published in the New York Times. If you have questions or comments for Tom Blanton, or an opinion about this, you can call us at 800-433-8850. I suppose the modern day equivalent of Daniel Ellsberg, you've mentioned it several time, is Wikileaks.

NNAMDIHow has it it's mass release of secret documents using the Internet changed the nature of government secrecy?

BLANTONThat's a good question, but I think the analogy is wrong, which is, the analogy to Dan Ellsberg is not Wikileaks, it's Bradley Manning.

NNAMDICorrect.

BLANTONIt's a private in the Army who for a variety of motivations thought this stuff was shocking, and embarrassing to the U.S. Government, and it ought to get released. And so he pushed it out the door. And you can see some of it. The helicopter video that got released where those Reuter's camera people got killed...

NNAMDIYeah.

BLANTON...that you could argue was the public interest leak, like a good leak.

NNAMDIYeah.

BLANTONBecause you have the government lying, the government stiffing Reuter's on a freedom information case, the government sort of protecting its own rear. That kind of deserves to get out there in the public domain. On the other hand, you got these conversations with these Afghan elders on the ground in these villages talking to our patrols. That stuff gets published, their names get out there, some people could track them down and kill them.

BLANTONThose are real secrets. And the problem I think, Dan Ellsberg, and this is the famous un -- maybe not so well-known story in the Pentagon papers, he had the whole set. He did not leak the four volumes that were about the secret negotiations to end the war, and the variety of channels. He held them back.

NNAMDIWell, Wikileaks would say the same thing. We held some stuff back too.

BLANTONNow they did. Because New York Times and Guardian and others said, look, you can get some Afghans killed here. And so they're still sitting on about 15,000 of those war logs, and I give them credit for that. I think it shows there are real secrets, and then there's some public -- there's some real public interest leaks, and our system needs them both given the overwhelming reflexive secrecy that we have.

NNAMDIThe U.S. government recently accepted a plea bargain in the case against Thomas Drake of the National Security Agency. What was the initial charge against him, and what does the outcome mean for the government's ability to stem leaks today?

BLANTONHuge overreaching by the government. The original charges were felony counts under the Espionage Act, which was a World War I statute, really idiotic overreaching. And the caution there I think is this case actually began years ago. It's not just an Obama administration case. You got a little bit of the inertia of the career prosecutors going after these folks, and there's a Wikileaks backlash where the government's really gonna try to make example of leakers.

BLANTONThe government's whole case fell apart on Friday, and it's a good thing, because it was a huge overreach.

NNAMDIRunning out of time real fast. I heard a reporter or somebody arguing last week that the Obama administration is coming down harder on whistleblowers than the Bush administration that preceded it, true or false?

BLANTONFalse, but partially true, which is to say the White House has not been able to bring the career and the bureaucracy and the (sounds like) secure-ocrats under control. It's like they didn't get the message the president laid out on day one about openness. When I had a face-to-face encounter with President Obama in the oval office a month or two ago, we raised this issue directly. We said, you're great on whistleblower protection, you're great on open government, but you got your Justice Department prosecuting people for blowing the whistle on corruption and bad contracts like Thomas Drake.

BLANTONDon't do that. That's a disjuncture. He nodded, he get it. He's got some work to do to bring his government to be...

NNAMDITom Blanton gets it. He's director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University. Thank you so much for joining us.

BLANTONReal pleasure to be here, Kojo.

NNAMDIGonna take a short break. When we come back we'll revisit a conversation with legendary Broadway producer, Philip Rose. I'm Kojo Nnamdi.