I recently received a message from a colleague asking about recent attacks on the credibility of Julian Assange and the Wikileaks "cablegate" documents. Gordon Duff of Veterans Today recently posted "Wikileaks the Hoax". Without any real evidence, Duff, like many others would like to use conspiracy theory to delegitimize the Wikileaks revelations. In this case, people like Duff (a Marine Vietnam veteran and Senior Editor of Veterans Today with "extensive experience in international banking along with such diverse areas as consulting on counter insurgency, defense technologies or acting as diplomatic officer of UN humanitarian groups") believe that the Wikileaks are an Israeli-led conspiracy to support U.S./Israeli foreign policy.

Here was my response:

In my view, the answer is simple--what we are seeing is a classic disinformation campaign (remember CREEP and Watergate?). Remember, A) a "good source" of information does not equal All the information B) most of the Wikileaks documents are clearly identified as "confidential" to "unclassified" and not the Government's most secret documents marked "Top Secret", where most likely the state secrets associated with Israel and other most sensitive documents reside.

Assange and Wikileaks have stated that point often and is clearly stated on the site (you know, when it is not being shut down by various forces; governments, corporations, etc. who clearly see this real information as threatening). C) the revelations of even these documents marked "confidential", "Not for other nations" to read, or "unclassified" but not meant for distribution are so threatening that both the right and the left wing of the Bourgeois governments are going all-out to harass, criminalize, and, most important, delegitimize Wikileaks, especially in the minds of people who will be the greatest audience for these revelations--all us folks who already know of the underhanded anti-democratic nature of U.S., European, Israeli--in a word, Imperialist--governments (in this sense, "left" and "right" only means progressive or non-progressive oppression).

Why Would You Think That This Disinformation Campaign Would Only Be Conducted Within the "Legitimate" (in the eyes of imperialism) channels? The history of the working class and other liberation movements is replete with disinformation campaigns where "trusted" sources are led by various means to believe that a truth stated is really unreliable or that there is some deeper conspiracy involved. "They" would like for you not to believe that "what you see is what you get".

In this world of social and class struggle, it is Not Sufficient to believe your ears and eyes. We must also understand the nature of our society and the nature of its implacable enemy--the capitalist rulers. "They" will do anything to maintain their rule, especially when the truth comes out (no matter how incomplete). They are indeed like that fictional "wizard" behind the curtain telling us not to pay any mind when they have been exposed.

I agree that not all the secrets have been exposed. It is not the issue. The issue is that even the modicum of what has been exposed is especially revealing--to us and to the capitalist rulers, which is why there is such an onslaught to negate, delegitimize, or otherwise obscure what we have actually seen with our own eyes--both our physical eyes and our "mind's eye" that is born of long experience.

The revelations of Wikileaks are not Earth-shattering because of what has been revealed in fact, but what has been revealed about the patterns of interaction between imperialism, its minions, and how they work insidiously to control the world with their guns, "butter", lies, and most important, their agenda of continued profit-taking at the expense of the World. The U.S. has been revealed for its hypocritical, cynical, and organized role Against democracy in the "modern" world. We should not be surprised that they will try to make victims, or the speakers for that victimization, into the criminal. For them, it is absolutely criminal that someone would dare expose them and, even more, be successful at doing so.

Steady, Everyone, we are on the verge of a worldwide movement toward democracy and the only real obstacle to that is our gullibility in thinking that there is "fairness" in the interaction between labor and capital, oppressor and the oppressed, democrats and Democrats (or their Republican partners). Remember, in the meantime that imperialism is trying to delegitmize Wikileaks, "they" are continuing their wars of murder and plunder, the devastation of our environment (directly or implicitly in their "reform" that protects capital), the apartheidization of capitalist society, and the wholesale assault on the idea that all people deserve a meaningful life free of hunger, poverty, and want. The capitalist class wants to hoard all the wealth that We create and they also want to hoard all the rights that all of us deserve.

Don't let go of those fundamental truths now that the curtain has been opened and the true nature of our so-called democratic society has been revealed.

Manuel Barrera, PhD