What We Know About the Wikileaks Rape Incident

In the interest of full disclosure I should note that I am a conspiracy theorist insomuch as that I theorize that two or more individuals will sometimes conspire to do something in secret. I am also a columnist for the venerable old Skeptical Inquirer and an occasional contributor to Skeptic. Some would find this ironic. Life is full of ironies for the stupid, as P.J. O’Rourke noted back when he was still worth reading.

I wouldn’t go so far as to call a fellow stupid for writing off a given scenario as prima facie absurd simply by virtue of constituting a conspiracy theory, but I would make some assumptions about our dear fellow and the breadth of his historical knowledge or at least his ability to take historical knowledge and apply it in a reasonable way. For instance, I would assume that such a person is unaware that the first noted use of the term “conspiracy theory” comes to us from J. Edgar Hoover, who employed this rhetorical innovation in the course of attributing madness to those who believed in something called the “mafia.” A full accounting of why this is an irony of the non-stupid sort would take quite a bit of time which would be better spent in noting that even the most ardent critics of the very idea of a conspiracy themselves acknowledge the validity of any number of conspiracy facts, such as the ones involving Soviet Russia’s conspiracy to kill millions of its own people. But then the U.S. is not Soviet Russia, and thus to show that such a republic as ours might plan or even carry out conspiracies of the very sort that are so often ridiculed by so many armchair skeptics, we would have to resort to such hotbeds of virulent anti-CIA sentiment as CIA.gov, or to the National Archives, and although such research gathering methods would not require the armchair skeptics to go so far as to leave their very armchairs, typing can be very tiresome, which is why I will cut to the chase and assert here that I was lying earlier about not going so far as to call someone stupid for being opposed to the very concept of conspiracy theories. If you are unfamiliar with such things as Operation Ajax and Operation Northwoods and COINTELPRO and Operation Mockingbird and MKULTRA and the Church Commission, then I envy you for having done something more enjoyable than read through a bunch of poorly-written government documents but I might have trouble giving much weight to your opinions regarding what the U.S. government might be capable of doing in secret insomuch as that it has already admitted to doing many of the things that you claim it would not do. And by “you,” I mean someone else. Some other guy who’s not here.

Let’s go back to Soviet Russia for a moment. Here’s your tractor and shitty apartment. Let’s read some poems. Actually, this sucks, so let’s go forward in time to 1997. Check it out, Prodigy’s playing in Red Square.

Goddamn, Prodigy kicks so much fucking ass live. Okay, now let’s skip forward to 1999. Boom! Boom! A bunch of buildings are being blow up in Russia. Hey, look, police in Ryazan just found a bomb in an apartment and defused it. Oh, good, they arrested three suspects. Oh, snap, they all have FSB identification cards. Oh, look, Moscow has ordered them released. And, hey, here’s a dozen other reasons that the 1999 Russian apartment bombings were clearly the work of Putin’s FSB. Now, many people find it patently absurd that elements of the Russian government might kill other Russians and lie about it in an effort to achieve some perceived political end. I don’t even know what to say to those people other than that Prodigy kicks so much fucking ass live.

Now, let’s skip ahead to this morning, when the news broke that Wikileaks spokesperson Julian Assage had been charged with one count of rape and another count of kind-of rape. And then let’s skip ahead another couple of hours to later this morning, when one of those charges was dropped and the warrant was canceled, immediately after which I had a phone conversation with bestselling author and former covert CIA Directorate of Operations operative Barry Eisler – who, incidentally, has read through the manuscript of my upcoming book in which I go into further detail on the Russian bombings and who found nothing to which to object. Eisler’s initial speculation upon learning the generals of this incident was that it could be an intel operation carried out incompetently, perhaps by the CIA – which, he reminded me, recently fucked up one massive operation to such an extent that dozen or so of its agents have warrants out in Italy. We discussed the various means by which this would have been approached and agreed that the Swedish government probably wouldn’t have been involved itself. Then we talked about some other stuff for a while and I told him to check out that Prodigy video, or rather I meant to but forgot. I’ll tell him next time we talk, when Assage is charged with, like, selling weapons to Iranians. Oops, I’m thinking of Oliver North. I get the two confused sometimes. One of them has his own television show, so I’ll try to remember it that way.

In conclusion, Julian Assange might really be a rapist and it’s possible that neither the CIA nor any other government agency had a hand in any of this and that intelligence agencies never do any of the things to which they now admit to having done on their very own websites. One thing’s for certain, though: Oliver North has a TV show. Plus he raped me. I was all like, “Hey, knock it off,” and he was all like, “NO!”

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