63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to Read
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63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want You to Read
Jesse Ventura
Dick Russell
Copyright © 2011 by Jesse Ventura with Dick Russell
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ventura, Jesse.
63 documents the government doesn’t want you to read / Jesse Ventura, with Dick Russell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
9781616082260
1. Official secrets--United States. 2. Government information--United States. 3. Government information--Access control--United States. 4. Conspiracies--United States. I. Russell, Dick. II. Title. III. Title: Sixty three documents the government doesn’t want you to read.
JK468.S4V46 2011
320.973--dc22
2011006218
Printed in the United States of America
To Congressman Ron Paul, the only federal elected official
who will stand up for America on the congressional floor.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
INTRODUCTION - WHY YOU NEED TO READ THIS BOOK
PART ONE - OUR SCANDALOUS POSTWAR HISTORY
1 - ASSASSINATIONS
2 - EXECUTIVE ACTION
3 - SECRET EXPERIMENTS
4 & 5 & 6 - MIND CONTROL
7 - A FAKE TERRORIST ATTACK
8 & 9 - THE VIETNAM SHAM
10 - FLAWED INTELLIGENCE
11 - AGENT ORANGE?
PART TWO - GOVERNMENT, MILITARY, AND CORPORATE SECRETS
12 - NAZIS IN THE U.S.
13 & 14 & 15 - NAZI WAR CRIMES
16 - WARREN COMMISSION
17 - NORIEGA AND THE U.S.
18 & 19 - RWANDA ATROCITIES
20 - SOLDIERS AS GUINEA PIGS
21 & 22. - WAR’S REAL COST
23 - MILITARY TAKEOVER
24 & 25 - FREEDOMS FOR SAFETY?
26 - CONTINGENCY PLANNING
27 - EMBASSY CABLES
28 - THE FDA’S BLIND SIDLE
29 - THE EPA’S BLIND SIDE
30 - EMBASSY CABLES
31 - MILITARY STUDIES CLIMATE
32 - CORPORATE INFLUENCE
PART THREE - SHADY WHITE HOUSES
33 - NUKE THE RUSSIANS?
34 - THE CIA VS THE PRESIDENT
35 - RESTLESS YOUTH
36 & 37 - STOLEN 2000 ELECTION
38 & 39 - STOLEN 2004 ELECTION
40 - EMBASSY CABLES
41 - PROTECTING CYBERSPACE
42 - MORE CYBERSECURITY
PART FOUR - 9/11
43 - A NEW PEARL HARBOUR
44 - 9/11 WARNING I,
45 - 9/11 WARNING II
46 - A CHANGE OF POLICY
47 - CONTROLLED DEMOLITION
48 - FOLLOW THE MONEY
49 - TURNING A BLIND EYE
PART FIVE - THE “WAR ON TERROR”
50 - SUBVERTING THE CONSTITUTION
51 - NO MORE RULE OF LAW
52 - NO FREEDOM OF THE PRESS
53 & 54 - TORTURE TECHNIQUES
55 & 56 - DRUG ABUSE
57 & 58 & 59 - ENHANCED INTERROGATION
60 - AN ORDERED BEHEADING
61 - EMBASSY CABLES
62 - “AFGHANISTAN’S OPIUM ECONOMY”
63 - RETHINKING THE “WAR ON TERROR”
EPILOGUE - RESOURCES FOR CURIOUS READERS
INTRODUCTION
WHY YOU NEED TO READ THIS BOOK
“There is little value in insuring the survival
of our nation if our traditions do not survive
with it. And there is very grave danger that an
announced need for increased security
will be seized upon by those anxious to expand
its meaning to the very limits of official
censorship and concealment.”
—JOHN F. KENNEDY
This book is titled 63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want You to Read, lest we forget that 1963 was the year that claimed the life of our 35th president. The conspiracy that killed JFK, and the cover-up that followed, is the forerunner for a lot of what you’re going to read about in these pages. In fact, the idea behind this book came out of writing my last one, American Conspiracies. There I presented a close look at whether or not our historical record reflects what really went on, based on facts that most of the media have chosen to ignore—from the Kennedy assassination through the tragedy of September 11th and the debacle on Wall Street. In poring through numerous documents, many of them available through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), I came to realize the importance of the public’s right to know. And I decided to see what new picture might be revealed if you laid out certain documents that the powers that be would just as soon stay buried.
Everything in this book is in the public domain and, for the most part, downloadable from the Internet. I’m not breaking any laws by putting these documents in book form, although some of them were classified “secret” until WikiLeaks published them. I’ll get to my view on WikiLeaks in a moment, but let me begin by saying how concerned I am that we’re moving rapidly in the direction President Kennedy tried to warn us about.
According to a recent article in the Washington Post, there are now 854,000 American citizens with top secret clearances. The number of new secrets rose 75 percent between 1996 and 2009, and the number of documents using those secrets went from 5.6 million in 1996 to 54.6 million last year. There are an astounding 16 million documents being classified top secret by our government every year! Today, pretty much everything the government does is presumed secret. Isn’t it time we asked ourselves whether this is really necessary for the conduct of foreign affairs or the internal operation of governments? Doesn’t secrecy actually protect the favored classes and allow them to continue to help themselves at the expense of the rest of us? Isn’t this a cancer growing on democracy?
After Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential election, I was heartened to see him issue an Open Government Initiative on his first full day in office. “I firmly believe what Justice Louis Brandeis once said, that sunlight is the best disinfectant,” Obama said, “and I know that restoring transparency is not only the surest way to achieve results, but also to earn back the trust in government without which we cannot deliver changes the American people sent us here to make.” After eight years of Bush and Cheney’s secretive and deceitful ways, that sounded like a welcome relief. Obama ordered all federal agencies to “adopt a presumption in favor” of FOIA requests and so laid the groundwork to eventually release reams of previously withheld government information on the Internet.
Well, so far it hasn�
��t turned out the way Obama set forth. An audit released in March 2010 by the nonprofit National Security Archive found that less than one-third of ninety federal agencies that process FOIA requests had changed their practices in any significant way. A few departments—Agriculture, Justice, Office of Management and Budget, and the Small Business Administration—got high marks for progress. But the State Department, Treasury, Transportation, and NASA had fulfilled fewer requests and denied more in the same time period. “Most agencies had yet to walk the walk,” said the Archive’s director Tom Blanton.
Things went downhill from there. In June 2010, the New York Times carried a page-one story detailing how Obama’s administration was even more aggressive than Bush’s in looking to punish people who leaked information to the media. In the course of his first seventeen months as president, Obama had already surpassed every previous president in going after prosecutions of leakers. Thomas A. Drake, a National Security Agency employee who’d gone to the Baltimore Sun as a last resort because he knew that government eavesdroppers were squandering hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on failed programs, is today facing years in prison on ten felony charges including mishandling of classified information. An FBI translator received a twenty-month sentence for turning over some classified documents to a blogger. A former CIA officer, Jeffrey Sterling, has been indicted for unauthorized disclosure of national defense information. And the Pentagon arrested Bradley Manning, the twenty-two-year-old Army intelligence analyst, who for openers had passed along to WikiLeaks the shocking video footage of a U.S. military chopper gunning down Baghdad civilians.
In September 2010, the Obama Justice Department cited the so-called “state secrets doctrine” in successfully getting a federal judge to throw out a lawsuit on “extraordinary rendition” (a phrase that really means we send suspected terrorists to other countries to get held and tortured). In fact, Attorney General Eric Holder was hell-bent on upholding the Bush administration’s claims in two major cases involving illegal detention and torture.
Also in September, the Pentagon spent $47,300 of taxpayer dollars to buy up and destroy all 10,000 copies of the first printing of Operation Dark Heart, a memoir about Afghanistan by ex-Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) officer Anthony A. Shaffer. We first interviewed Lt. Colonel Shaffer for American Conspiracies because his outfit (Able Danger) had identified Mohammed Atta as a terrorist threat long before he became the supposed lead hijacker on 9/11.
With Operation Dark Heart, publishing executives and intelligence outfits couldn’t remember another instance where a government agency set out to get rid of a book that was already printed. Some months earlier, the Army reviewers who’d asked for and received some changes and redactions said they had “no objection on legal or operational security grounds” to the final version. But when the DIA saw the manuscript and showed it around to some other spy operations, they came up with 200-plus passages that might cause “serious damage to national security.” By that time, several dozen copies of the book had already gone out to reviewers and online booksellers. (Those went on sale on eBay for between $1,995 and $4,995.)
So Operation Dark Heart was hastily reprinted with a number of paragraphs blanked out and, guess what, it became a best seller. Here are a few of the things that got canned, which the New York Times first pointed out. Everybody’s known for years that the nickname for the NSA headquarters at Fort Meade is “the Fort.” Censor that one! Another big secret—the CIA training facility is located at Camp Peary, Virginia. You can find that on Wikipedia but not anymore in this book! And did you know that SIGINT stands for “Signals Intelligence?” You don’t see that anymore in Operation Dark Heart. (I can’t wait for the censors to pull my book from the shelves for revealing all this.) Oh, and they removed a blurb from a former DIA director who called Shaffer’s “one terrific book.” Shaffer has now gone to court looking to have the book’s complete text restored when the paperback comes out.
To Obama’s credit, early in November 2010 he issued an Executive Order establishing a program to manage unclassified information that 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?
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 embassassment. 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 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.