Jesse Ventura has exposed the conspiracy involving the Obama administration and Julian Assange from WikiLeaks.
The author, former MN governor, wrestler and host of “Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura” TV show excerpted his research from his book 63 Documents The Government Doesn’t Want You To Read for the TruTV.com website.
The following text is excerpt from the introduction to 63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want You to Read by Jesse Ventura with Dick Russell:
In November 2010, President Barack Obama issued an Executive Order establishing a program to manage unclassified information. This rescinded a Bush-era order designed to keep still more documents away from public scrutiny by putting new labels on them (“For Official Use Only” and “Sensitive But Unclassified.”)
But soon thereafter came WikiLeaks’ first releases of a claimed trove of 251,287 secret State Department cables. This followed the group’s disclosures earlier last year of 390,136 classified documents about the Iraq War and 76,607 documents about Afghanistan.
As everybody knows, the politicians and the media commentators went ballistic over the cables being in the public domain – even though the New York Times, among others, was running front-page stories every day about their contents.
Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, was for a moment our biggest bogeyman since Osama. Sarah Palin says he’s “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands” who should be pursued “with the same urgency we pursue al Qaeda and Taliban leaders.” She stopped short of saying he should be hunted down like the caribou she shoots in Alaska. Hillary Clinton calls what he’s done “an attack on the international community.” (I’ve never known Palin and Clinton to be this cozy in the same bed, so to speak.) Mike Huckabee called for the execution of whoever leaked the cables to WikiLeaks. Newt Gingrich referred to Assange as an “enemy combatant.” Joe Biden described him as “closer to being a hi-tech terrorist” than a whistleblower, and some liberal democrats would like to see Assange sent to prison for life. He’s also been labeled an old-fashioned anarchist, mastermind of a criminal enterprise and, at best, a control freak and a megalomaniac.
This smacks of worse than McCarthyism – we’re in a lynch-mob moment, folks. Didn’t Thomas Jefferson say that “information is the currency of democracy” and that, if he had to choose between government and a free press, he’d take the latter? Ron Paul is one of the only folks to have spoken up on Assange’s behalf. Paul made quite a statement on the floor of the House, when he asked his colleagues what had caused more deaths – “lying us into war or the release of the WikiLeaks papers?” He added, “What we need is more WikiLeaks. In a free society, we’re supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, then we’re in big trouble. And now, people who are revealing the truth are getting into trouble for it.”
Paul’s point is important. Nobody has died as a result of WikiLeaks’ disclosures, but maybe we’ve forgotten that the whole Iraq War was based on fake evidence manufactured by the Bush-Cheney White House and the Brits, resulting in 4,430 American troops dead and about 32,000 wounded as of early December 2010. In Afghanistan, the toll is climbing fast: close to 1,500 Americans dead and almost 10,000 wounded. This doesn’t take into account, of course, the hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties. Do you think it’s possible, as one Internet columnist has written, that Julian Assange is the scapegoat for arrogant American officials who’d rather point the finger at someone else than admit the blood on their own hands?
Assange: Hero or Heinous?
Personally, I think Julian Assange is a hero. It’s a classic case of going after the messenger. Our diplomats get caught writing derogatory remarks and descriptions of foreign leaders, then turn around and accuse WikiLeaks of putting our country in danger. WikiLeaks is exposing our government officials for the frauds that they are. They also show us how governments work together to lie to their citizens when they are waging war.Here are a few things we’ve learned from WikiLeaks’ document releases that we didn’t know before: The CIA has a secret army of 3,000 in Afghanistan, where the U.S. Ambassador in Kabul says there’s no way to fix corruption because our ally is the one that’s corrupt (one Afghan minister was caught carrying $52 million out of the country). In Iraq, there are another 15,000 civilian casualties that haven’t been brought into the light, and our troops were instructed not to look into torture tactics that our Iraqi allies were using. U.S. Special Operations forces are in Pakistan without any public knowledge, and our Pakistani “allies” are the main protectors of the Taliban in Afghanistan!
I mean, let’s face it: WikiLeaks exists because the mainstream media haven’t done their job. Instead of holding government accountable as the “fourth branch” the founders intended, I guess the corporate media’s role today is to protect the government from embarrassment. Assange has pioneered “scientific journalism” (his term)—a news story is accompanied by the document it’s based upon and the reader can make up his own mind. WikiLeaks’ small team of reporters has unveiled more suppressed information than the rest of the world press combined!
Assange is the publisher, not the one who revealed the “classified information.” That’s apparently Private Bradley Manning, who somehow found a security loophole and now is being held in solitary confinement at our Quantico, Virginia base facing up to fifty-two years in prison. Are we surprised that the United Nations’ special investigator on torture is looking into whether Manning has been mistreated in custody? As for Assange, how our government wants to try him under the Espionage Act of 1917 is beyond me. Come on, he’s an Australian citizen and his Internet domain is in Switzerland. (By the way, he also received the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in 2010, and the Amnesty International Media Award in 2009.)
And what about these cyberspace sabotage attacks against WikiLeaks that are being carried out across national borders by our government? As far as I can determine, these are illegal under both U.S. law and international treaties. Meantime, it blows my mind that students at Columbia and Boston University and probably other institutions of “higher learning” are being warned not to read any of these documents if they want to get a government job in the future.
The Internet War Against WikiLeaks
The Office of Management and Budget sent out a memo that forbids unauthorized federal employees and contractors from accessing WikiLeaks. The Library of Congress has blocked visitors to its computer system from doing the same. The Air Force started blocking its personnel from using work computers to look at the websites of the New York Times and other publications that had posted the cables. Instead, a page came up that said: “ACCESS DENIED. Internet Usage is Logged & Monitored.” Over in Iraq, our troops who’d like to even read articles about all this get a redirect notice on their government network telling them they’re on the verge of breaking the law. And a lot of these same soldiers have security clearances that would have allowed them to see the cables before they were leaked.
Given the close ties between the government and large corporations, I can’t say I’m surprised that Amazon, PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, and Bank of America took action to make sure that WikiLeaks could no longer receive any money through their channels. And I can’t say I’m upset that a group of young “hactivists” calling themselves Anonymous have taken retaliatory action against some of those same companies. They call it Operation Payback. “Websites that are bowing down to government pressure have become targets,” a fellow named Coldblood posted. “As an organization we have always taken a strong stance on censorship and freedom of expression on the internet and come out against those who seek to destroy it by any means. We feel that WikiLeaks has become more than just about leaking of documents, it has become a war ground, the people vs. the government.”
More than 500 “mirror sites” now possess all the cables, and Assange has said we ain’t seen nothin’ yet if he meets an untimely demise. I say let the chips fall where they may as WikiLeaks puts the truth out there. If our State Department is asking diplomats to steal personal information from UN officials and human rights groups, in violation of international laws, then shouldn’t the world know about it and demand corrective action? Maybe if they know they’re potentially going to be exposed, the powers that hide behind a cloak of secrecy will think twice before they plot the next Big Lie.
I agree with Daniel Ellsberg, the former military analyst who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War. He faced charges, too, back in 1971, but they were thrown out by a judge. He’s called Private Manning a “brother” who committed “a very admirable act” if he’s the one who provided the documents to WikiLeaks. “To call them terrorists is not only mistaken, it’s absurd,” Ellsberg said.