Rebel of the Week: John Logan Jones, Retired Air Force Intelligence Analyst Who Supports Wikileaks
January 12th, 2011
John Logan Jones is a retired American serviceman with top secret clearance who served in the American Air Force from 2005 to 2009 as an Afghan-Pashtu linguist and intelligence specialist. He has since then come out in support of Wikileaks and the free flow of information as well as taking up a number of libertarian causes like sound money and a Paulestinian reading of the Constitution, and has worked with groups such as Young Americans for Liberty. (He’s also a big fan of Silver Circle!)
Last week a post of his entitled “I am a US Air Force Intelligence Veteran of the War in Afghanistan and I support Wikileaks,” from his blog “Crushing Bastards,” and earned him 22,000 unique views who were subsequently exposed to other libertarian ideas. For this effort and his courageous and credible stance in favor of an open society, John Logan Jones is Silver Underground’s Rebel of the Week.
He states:
“I volunteered to protect this country under the impression that my government followed the will of the American People and adhered to the US Constitution. As it turns out, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were never constitutionally declared and despite public opinion being against the two wars they continue to grow more destructive. My experiences in these wars differed greatly from the propaganda the American people were sold by America’s mainstream media outlets; many times I would return from a mission to see wild inaccuracies being reported on Fox/CNN/MSNBC about the very operation I had just been supporting. Wikileaks has helped shine light on the true nature of these illegal wars and the policymakers that perpetuate them, for this I am thankful.”
It is always refreshing to see people in positions of power take principled stands like the one above, and our rebel also takes an interesting and nuanced position on Cablegate. He takes the perspective that the documents which were released served the purpose of exposing the disingenuous and less-successful-than-portrayed execution of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and none of the information directly exposes American troops to danger from the information.
In fact, the main result of the release of information was to show an egregious disconnect between what was being shown in the media and how the war was actually being conducted. Like the American war in Vietnam and Southeast Asia the current wars’ results appear far better than they are in reality. The leaked documents have confirmed that this is not true, and our Rebel of the Week happens to think that the American people deserve to know the truth about the unconstitutional, illegal and unjust wars which are perpetuated in their name and with their money. We at Silver Underground tend to agree with such sentiments.
Oh, and John? You’re going to give the fine people of Reddit an AMA, right? 
