Examining the WikiLeaks Story

RUSH: Ladies and gentlemen, WikiLeaks did not ‘leak’ anything. I don’t know who leaked it, but since there’s no mention of Obama and his administration, the regime, in any of these tens of thousands of documents, I’d have to say somebody in the regime leaked ’em. But WikiLeaks did not leak ’em. They just published ’em. WikiLeaks is just a sponge, a useful idiot sitting there over in the UK and some disgruntled military guy in Afghanistan somehow has access to all of this and hands it over. In the meantime, is Scooter Libby involved in this? Remember the Valerie Plame leak? You remember how exorcised the entire media structure was. We had to go get Valerie Plame; we had to get Scooter Libby; we had to get Karl Rove; we had to frog March them out of the White House; we had to put them in jail. And now? Eh, no big deal, because this fits the template: US bad; US commits war crimes. So the media loves this. In fact, we’re going to go back in time, we’re going to show you, Obama back in ’93, whenever it was, Obama was big on bringing Daniel Ellsberg into Illinois. The bottom line is a lot of respect for Daniel Ellsberg, who did what? The Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War.

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RUSH: ‘The release of some 91,000 secret US military documents on the Afghanistan war is just the beginning, according to the WikiLeaks founder.’ Have you seen this guy? Have you seen this guy on TV? Ho! (interruption) Well, a ten-mile-per-hour breeze would knock the guy over.

‘The documents cover some known in the troubled nine-year conflict. US Special Operations Forces have targeted militants without trial.’ (Gasp!) They’ve killed the enemy without giving them a trial. (Gasp!) Outrageous! That’s what’s lurking in the next release of secret documents. American military have killed the enemy without giving them a trial. What…have we come to? ‘The documents cover some known aspects of the troubled nine-year conflict. US Special Operations Forces have targeted militants without trial.’ Afghans have been killed by accident. Why, that is unheard of. That is unheard of, in any war, anywhere in the history of the world, that civilians have been killed by accident?

That’s unheard of! Do you realize what this says about us? How guilty, how rotten-to-the-core can this country be? Innocent Afghan citizens killed by accident! In the old days it used to bon purpose (i.e., Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden). In the old days the definition of winning a war was killing people and breaking things. In the old days, there was no such thing a ‘surgical strike.’ In the old days, you purposely killed innocent civilians. That’s what war was all about. That’s how you won it! But now all of a sudden these big WikiLeaks documents say that Afghans have been killed by accident. Whoa, the incompetence of the US military! It’s actually non-news. Still, they ‘also included unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings in covert operations dependence Taliban figures.’

Really? You mean to tell me that in a war, the US military is engaging in covert operations against the enemy? We are doing secret operations against the enemy? The enemy should never not know what we have planned for them! Is that what we’re supposed to believe now? This is a crime, committing covert operations against Taliban figures? The Taliban’s the enemy. What, is it not fair to do secret stuff against them? We have to telegraph what we’re going to do in advance so they know what’s coming? This line is merely a regurgitation of the two earlier points above. This is how thin the gruel is on all this. ‘US officials have been infuriated by alleged Pakistani intelligence cooperation with the very insurgent groups bent on killing Americans.’

Well, of course anybody would be infuriated if it’s happening! What’s news about this? ‘Still, they also included unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings and covert operations…’ That’s the second time they mention this. ‘White House National Security Advisor Jim Jones said that the release of the documents put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk. In a statement he took pains to point out that the documents describe a period from January 2004 to December 2009, mostly during the administration of the Bush people.’ Well, these aren’t just crimes; these are war crimes. We are so rotten! Do you realize what a rotten, scum of a country we’ve become, all because of George W. Bush?

Isn’t it amazing that 91,000 secret documents have been published and not one of them mentions the Obama regime? Not one! There are 91,000 pages and not one of them even mentions Bush’s tax cuts. Not one of them mentions Obama at all or anybody in his regime. ‘Jones noted the time period was before Obama announced a new strategy.’ Oh-ho-ho! (laughing) ‘Just in case there’s any doubt that General Jones is working for the [regime], it’s an obvious requirement that any and all Obama officials must blame Mr. Bush,’ and Jones is right in line here. So now we have a strategy that will please the America-hating radicals at WikiLeaks, the America-hating radicals in this country, the America-hating radicals all over. We are doing ‘secret operation’ against the enemy. We are accidentally killing civilians (breathing heavily), and all of it happened before Obama was immaculated!

(Gasp!) And the Pakistanis are working with our enemies. Why, who would believe that one group of Muslims would work with another? Against us! Who would ever think that? No wonder people are ticked off at this. This story goes on: ‘Pakistan’s powerful spy agency Inter-Services Intelligence said today the accusations that had close connections to Taliban militants were malicious and unsubstantiated.’ The New York Times says, ‘The raw intelligence assessments by lower-level military officers suggest that Pakistan allows representatives of its spy service to meet directly with the Taliban in secret strategy sessions to organize networks of militant groups that fight against American soldiers in Afghanistan.’ This is news? This is something worth being leaked? You had no idea how rotten your country was, did you? But now you do.
The New York Times is happy point it all out. I wonder if this means Obama will be giving back his Nobel Peace Prize. ‘WikiLeaks Says Evidence of War Crimes in Documents.’ WikiLeaks doesn’t ‘say’ anything. WikiLeaks is the vessel. ‘WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange says there appears to be evidence of war crimes in the thousands of pages of leaked U.S. military documents on the war in Afghanistan.’ By the way, I think I’ve got a new name for the media: ‘Partisan political operatives.’ That is much more descriptive of who they are and what they do than to just call them ‘media.’ Now, remember, Obama had a historic speech when he was a state senator and courageously announced his opposition to the Iraq war, talked about how he wasn’t against all wars. He was for the war in Afghanistan.

He said the war in Iraq was a distraction created by Karl Rove to distract from a terrible economy of 4% unemployment and 4% GDP. That’s what Obama said. The Iraq war was a distraction created by Rove to distract from the terrible economy of 4% unemployment, 4% GDP. You know, the White House — Jim Jones, everybody — are saying that they are outraged, outraged at the release of classified documents, secret documents. Well, does Obama really object to the publishing of classified documents? When Obama was a student at Columbia, he thought Daniel Ellsberg was a hero. Does Obama really object to something that undermines the war effort in Afghanistan, a war he would love to get out of today? We have the statement by Jim Jones: ‘The US strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information,’ blah, blah, blah, blah.

But let’s now jump forward to the Politico: ‘While a senior at Columbia University, Barack Obama,’ this is 1983, ‘wrote an article angling for a nuclear-free world,’ and here’s the excerpt where he expresses his assignment about bringing Daniel Ellsberg to campus to get students’ minds right. Here’s what he wrote: ‘It seems that students are fairly aware of the nuclear problem and it makes for an underlying frustration. We try to talk to that frustration. Consequently, the thrust of ARA is towards generating dialogue which will give people a rational handle on this subject. This includes bringing in speakers like Daniel Ellsberg to campus, publishing fact sheets compiled by interested faculty.’ So here’s Obama, who couldn’t wait to bring Ellsberg to the Columbia campus in ’83, Ellsberg who had leaked the Pentagon Papers about the Vietnam War. He’s all for leaking documents back then to undermine the US military. Now all of a sudden he’s opposed to these things that show up at WikiLeaks? Which, again, very suspiciously contain not one mention of anything in Afghanistan since Obama was inaugurated. Not one.

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RUSH: Daniel Ellsberg very proud of the guy that runs WikiLeaks. Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon Papers whistleblower stated in an interview that the WikiLeaks founder is, quote, ‘serving our American democracy –‘ and he’s not an American, by the way. ‘– and serving our rule of law precisely by challenging the secrecy regulations which are not laws in most cases in this country.’ So Ellsberg of whom Obama was a huge fan now turns out to be a fan of the WikiLeaks founder. Now the name WikiLeaks might ring a bell. Let’s speak of some context here. You notice how very few, if any, of the partisan political operatives the Democrat Party have mentioned the last time we heard from WikiLeaks. That was when they released a video clip of the 2007 Baghdad air strike which they purposefully edited and misrepresented to make it look like the attack had intentionally attacked two Reuters reporters, when it had not. This is the WikiLeaks that we’re talking about.

They had edited videotape. They tried to make people believe that the US military had purposely attacked two partisan political operatives from Reuters when that is not at all what happened. WikiLeaks call it collateral murder. But it turned out that the Reuters political operatives were with a bunch of AK-47 and rocket launcher toting terrorists. They were hanging around them. They were embedded, so to speak, with the enemy. And we were there to take out the enemy, and WikiLeaks made it look like we targeted the partisan political operatives from Reuters. The New York Times is among the several newspapers selected by the criminals at WikiLeaks to publish their anti-American poison. Eric Schmidt, one of the reporters. The headline: ‘In Disclosing Secret Documents, WikiLeaks Seeks ‘Transparency.” Oh, isn’t this just beautiful? Isn’t this wonderful? WikiLeaks wants transparency of US military operations.

‘WikiLeaks.org, the online organization that posted tens of thousands of classified military field reports about the Afghan war on Sunday, says its goal in disclosing secret documents is to reveal ‘unethical behavior’ by governments and corporations.’ Uh, by one government and corporation. Isn’t this always the excuse? See how this always works? Gotta expose corporations, expose the Bush administration, not the US government, the Bush administration. ”We believe that transparency in government activities leads to reduced corruption, better government and stronger democracies,’ the organization’s Web site says. ‘All governments can benefit from increased scrutiny by the world community, as well as their own people. We believe this scrutiny requires information.” Oddly enough it seems to be mostly the US government that WikiLeaks accuses of behaving unethically. Why is that, I wonder? The question answers itself. How come we’ve never seen a leaked document about the government of the old Soviet Union or Russia? They never acted unethically. We’ve never seen on WikiLeaks any documents from Cuba or from the ChiComs, or Iran. Where are the courageous researchers at WikiLeaks? When are they going to scrutinize those countries? Wouldn’t the world community benefit from knowing the corruption going on in the old Soviet Union and Russia, in China, Mongolia, North Korea, Iran? Why is it only the good guys, us? Why is it only the good guys that somehow need to be scrutinized and held up and examined for corruption? And why is it only US corporations that are held to this high standard?