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A Few Good Men

But how many are there?

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Tom Cruise wants to know the truth. Jack Nicholson says he can't handle it.

Something bad's happened in the US military. Something's being covered up. Tom Cruise is called in to uncover the truth. He runs into a wall of conspiratorial silence everywhere. This wall is so deadly it ends up costing lives.

Jack Nicholson sits atop a military hierarchy at an outpost outside the territorial US - in another country - and insists he's protecting the US. The mind begins to boggle.

Nicholson sits in an office in another country that the US preempted from that other country over 100 years ago. What that other country felt about the whole thing was immaterial. They either went along with the whole thing or they were crushed.

Now Nicholson is sitting there, keeping his dirty secrets and dictatorially threatening his lackeys to keep those secrets as well, and Tom Cruise has to somehow break through that wall of silence.

Sound familiar?

Cablegate

The revelations of the ongoing 'Cablegate' might seem innocuous on the surface but a student of conspiracy might have seen something lurking below that surface. It all appears to be so much gossip - as opposed to the blitzkrieg releases from WikiLeaks up to now. But those previous releases only smarted and only briefly, despite the horrific tales they told. This release attacks the sinister powers within the powers where it hurts most - their very communication channels.

Obama and Cameron have both resisted demands from Nick Clegg and the United Nations to investigate war crimes and torture. This has been easy to do in the climate in those countries of late and it's been helped along by the effective media blackout in the one country. As Per Bjurman in New York City noted, people in the US didn't really bother about WikiLeaks until Thanksgiving week when they suddenly started choking on their turkeys.

And the reason for this is obvious: Cablegate hits the evil in all these governments where it hurts - it disintegrates their communication channels. Suddenly they all hate each other, can't trust each other, can't keep their dirty secrets hidden from the public anymore.

The revelations have just begun. El País in Spain, the Guardian in the UK, Le Monde in France, the New York Times in the US, and Spiegel Online in Germany (with an excellent English language edition) all have copies of the full quarter of a million cables and it doesn't really matter a hoot if the WikiLeaks mirrors are up and running - the timetable's already been set, not fully 1% of the cables have been released, there are still over 250,000 remaining, and rain simply won't stop.

Sentiments are different this time too. Along with the usual slew of wackos calling for people to be arrested or assassinated or both are the overwhelmingly supportive comments from all around the world against such ideas. There may have been signs of indifference (or at least ignorance) about things up to now but there's no longer any doubt what the great majority feel today.

They want the truth and dammit they know they can handle it.

Hey Joe

Things feel like a time warp at times. Back to an era few were even around for but which most have read about and learned to fear. The McCarthy era in the US, a time of ultimate paranoia. Filmed so many times by a Hollywood that got hit especially hard by it all.

The past few months - and especially in the past week - we've seen any number of Joe McCarthys creep out of the woodwork: Mark Thiessen, Jonah Goldberg, Todd Schnitt, types from the Hoover Institution and other TLAs all with the word 'democracy' in their names; we've seen a picture of Julian Assange in the sights of a sniper rifle with blood spurting out of his head.

Such are the rumblings of a militaristic society with mottos like 'Honour Bound to Protect Freedom', so painfully reminiscent of 'Protecting Freedom Around the Globe for 400 Years' (even though the country they represent isn't hardly half that old) and not to forget that all-time Top of the Pops: Arbeit Macht Freiheit.

Joe McCarthy lives.

Of course there are a few good men who speak out against the hysteria, their voices almost drowned out by the noise of the unruly ignorant mob: Ron Paul, Glenn Greenwald, journos from outside that country. But their voices are hard to hear, hysteria being the Gaga song of the day.

Amazon US shut down the WikiLeaks servers; PayPal close the WikiLeaks account; the US Library of Congress are blocking WikiLeaks IPs (but can't hope to ever get at them all); and federal agencies have been ordered by the White House to not look at WikiLeaks documents.

The truth hurts and some people obviously don't think they can handle it.

The Information War

First was the Great War; then came the War to End All Wars, followed by the Cold War, each at least threatening to be more cataclysmic than the last. This on a planet where the species highest on the food chain ostensibly can't handle the situation.

And now we have the Information War. And it's a real war alright. Don't doubt it for a second. This war is about the right of people to know. They've been lied to, hoodwinked, bamboozled for far too long. They've seen their democracies become more and more corrupt. They've known it, sensed it, felt it - and now they have the absolute proof. Black on white. They won't settle for anything else. Not ever again.

'Public servants': the term has a nostalgic ring to it. But it's been far too long their 'public servants' have lorded it over them like a ruling class, an international clique. And now things are changing. And the rules of war are new as well. And the 'public servants' can't keep up. They're the underdogs now. And they're going to lose.

Things always work out for the better. Remember that. Things might take a long time but they always irrevocably work out for the better. Because - to quote Tom Cruise - they want the truth and they can damn well handle it.