by Lou Caverly
Winding the spool of history forward once again from the “found terrors” of 1945, this writer must reiterate one question: “Is history about to repeat itself?” Former Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura’s new book, 63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want you to Read, is a real beacon of warning – everything used in the book is in the public domain. Here are some incredibly vital excerpts:
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!
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 intel 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 objections 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 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’ve divided the book into five parts, starting out first to show links between deeds our government perpetrated in the past and what’s going on today… You’ll come across documents on some pretty scandalous behavior, including:
- The CIA’s secret assassination manual and experiments to control human behavior with hypnosis, drugs, and other methods.
- The military’s Operation Northwoods, a chilling attempt by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to stage a terror attack on our own citizens and make it look like Cuba was behind it – using a hijacked airliner, no less.
- After President Kennedy was trying to get our troops out of Vietnam, the military faked the Gulf of Tonkin attacks in order to expand the war.
- Our chemical and biological warfare capability back in 1969, leading you to wonder about the real origin of things like AIDS and lyme disease.
- The CIA’s “Propaganda Notes” designed to shore up the Warren Commission’s lone-gunman conclusion.
- How Oliver North collaborated with Panama drug-running dictator Manuel Noriega.
- What America knew, and ignored, about the genocide happening in Rwanda in the mid-1990s.
- How we still turn a blind eye to Gulf War Illness and our veterans.
- The frightening background for our military to intervene in domestic affairs, set up “emergency relocation facilities” for our citizens, and establish a Civilian Inmate Labor Program.
- How failed inspections and ignored science are impacting our food supply and our bees, while we push to promote Monsanto’s biotech agenda.
- What our military really knows about the dangers of climate change.
- How companies like CitiGroup and Koch Industries promote their “plutocracies” at the expense of the rest of us.
- A think tank called the Project for a New American Century anticipating “a new Pearl Harbor” to promote the agenda for “Rebuilding America’s Defenses.”
- Clear warnings the Bush Administration ignored that something was coming.
- The “Stand Down” order that kept our military form responding on 9/11.
- Evidence that Building 7 was taken down by a controlled demolition.
- The role of insider stock trading in advance of 9/11.
- And finally, part five examines the so-called “war on terror” and the terrible price we’re paying in terms of our liberties and the lives being lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. You’ll first read excerpts from a long memo by Bush’s Justice Department that subverts the Constitution by shredding a number of civil rights, followed by Bush’s justification of America’s torture of “unlawful combatants.”
- The “Media Ground Rules” that keep the truth hidden at Guantanamo.
- The torture techniques, and some medical experiments being conducted there and the paper trail on the CIA’s destruction of 92 torture videos.
- Decapitation of a detainee in Iraq, by our own troops!
- How the CIA “spins” the war in Afghanistan, and the fact that drugs are fueling that country’s economy.
- The State Department’s revelation that Saudi Arabia is actually “a critical source of terrorist funding.”
