American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies that the Government Tells Us

263 Pages·2011·1.63 MB·English

by  Jesse Ventura

American Conspiracies
Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies that the Government Tells
Us
Jesse Ventura
Copyright © 2010 by Jesse Ventura and Dick Russell
All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner
without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief
excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to
Skyhorse Publishing, 555 Eighth Avenue, Suite 903, New York, NY 10018.
Skyhorse Publishing books may be purchased in bulk at special discounts for
sales promotion, corporate gifts, fund-raising, or educational purposes. Special
editions can also be created to specifications. For details, contact the Special
Sales Department, Skyhorse Publishing, 555 Eighth Avenue, Suite 903, New
York, NY 10018 or [email protected].
www.skyhorsepublishing.com
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ventura, Jesse.
American conspiracies : lies, lies, and more dirty lies that the government tells
us / by Jesse Ventura, with Dick Russell.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
9781602398023
1. Conspiracies--United States. 2. Conspiracy theories--United States. I. Russell,
Dick. II. Title.
HV6285.V46 2010
973--dc22
2009052309
Printed in the United States of America
“A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.”
—Albert Einstein
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Praise
INTRODUCTION - WHY I’M WRITING ABOUT CONSPIRACIES IN
AMERICA
CHAPTER ONE - THE FIRST NOT-ALONE-NUT: JOHN WILKES
BOOTH
CHAPTER TWO - THE BIG-MONEY PLOT TO OVERTHROW FDR
CHAPTER THREE - THE KENNEDY ASSASSINATION: BIGGEST
COVER-UP OF MY LIFETIME
CHAPTER FOUR - THE ASSASSINATION OF MALCOLM X
CHAPTER FIVE - THE MURDER OF DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.
CHAPTER SIX - THE ASSASSINATION OF ROBERT KENNEDY
CHAPTER SEVEN - WATERGATE REVISITED: THE CIA’S WAR
AGAINST NIXON
CHAPTER EIGHT - THE JONESTOWN MASSACRE
CHAPTER NINE - ″OCTOBER SURPRISE″: THE FIRST STOLEN
ELECTION
CHAPTER TEN - YOUR GOVERNMENT DEALING DRUGS
CHAPTER ELEVEN - THE STOLEN ELECTIONS OF 2000, 2004 (AND
ALMOST 2008)
CHAPTER TWELVE - WHAT REALLY HAPPENED ON SEPTEMBER 11?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN - THE WALL STREET CONSPIRACY
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - THE SECRET PLANS TO END AMERICAN
DEMOCRACY
EPILOGUE - “TRUTH BEING THAT WHICH IT IS CAN NEVER BE
DESTROYED”
FURTHER READING
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
WHY I’M WRITING ABOUT CONSPIRACIES
IN AMERICA
First of all, let’s talk about what you won’t find in this book. It’s not about how
extraterrestrials are abducting human beings, or the Apollo moon landing being a
colossal hoax perpetrated by NASA, or that Barack Obama somehow is not a
natural-born American citizen. I leave these speculations to others, not that I take
them seriously. What this book will delve into are a number of things you don’t
see on TV or read about in the papers. The fact is, the media—the fourth branch
of government that our founding fathers anticipated would speak truth to power
and keep our democracy on track—has at least since the assassination of
President Kennedy systematically ignored any “conspiracy theory” that might
rock the Establishment’s boat. We are, excuse my French, in deep shit today
because of this head-in-the-sand mentality.
Let’s start out by defining what a conspiracy is. My 2,347-page Webster’s New
Universal Unabridged Dictionary says: “a planning and acting together secretly,
especially for an unlawful or harmful purpose, such as murder or treason.”
Synonyms include plot, cabal, connivance, collusion. Hard to swallow? Think of
the Roman senators who knocked off Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. But I guess we’ve
come a long way since then, right? Think Operation Northwoods, circa 1962.
We’ll get to that in due course—Seven Days in May, that novel about a military
takeover during the Kennedy years, wasn’t far off the mark.
Clearly, there’s something going on in our national psyche that the New York
Times and the Washington Post don’t want to examine. Look at the popularity of
The X-Files, or Mel Gibson in the movie Conspiracy Theory. Not that I think we
should all booby-trap our doors and hide behind our file cabinets, but sometimes
those “lone nuts” turn out to be right! I’m tired of being told that anybody who
questions the status quo is part of the disaffected, alienated element of our
society that ought to wake up and salute the flag. Maybe being patriotic is about
raising the curtain and wondering whether we’ve really been told the truth about
things like September 11.
I guess my questioning of the “official” line goes back to my school days,
being taught that we had to fight in Vietnam to stop the domino effect of
Communism. That’s what I learned in school, but my father—who was a World
War II vet—took the exact opposite position at the dinner table. He said that was
a load of crap, that the Vietnam War was all about somebody making big money
off it. At first I thought my dad was crazy, because I could not believe they
would lie to me in school. I fought with him over it, and he’d keep doing his best
to debunk what I was saying.
When I, in turn, went into the service and learned a whole lot more about
Vietnam, I had the good fortune to come home and tell my father that he was
right. Especially growing up in the Midwest, you never even contemplate that
your government might not be telling the truth. You don’t realize until you get
much older that government is nothing but people—and people lie, especially
where money and power are concerned.
The next prong in the fork was, when I got out of the navy and went to junior
college one year, Mark Lane came to give a talk and I happened to hear him that
night. That was the first time I ever paid attention to someone saying that what
they told us about President Kennedy’s assassination might not be true. I’d been
in junior high school when JFK was shot, and I remember the announcement
over the loudspeakers and being sent back to our homerooms and then school
was dismissed. Like most everybody else, I saw Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey
Oswald on TV, but I never questioned the Warren Commission’s report that this
disaffected ex-Marine had acted alone.
After hearing Mark Lane that year, I was at the height of my wrestling career
during the 1978 congressional hearings into the assassination and didn’t really
start delving into any of this until wrestling changed in the mid-1980s. All of a
sudden, I was no longer driving to towns, but flying. Sitting on airplanes all the
time becomes extremely boring, so I started reading. Besides Mark Lane’s
Plausible Denial, I remember Jim Marrs’s Crossfire and then a whole bunch of
other books. When I’d see anything about the Kennedy assassination in the
bookstores, I’d buy it.
So as I got older and started looking back at the Sixties, where every assassin
was supposedly a “lone nut,” I began thinking how could that be? These nuts
who never told anybody anything or planned with anyone else, but just felt the
need to go out and commit murders of prominent individuals—John and Robert
Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The odds of that, I figured,
simply defied all logic.
It made me wonder who’s really running the show. Especially when you look
at things they now admit never happened, like the Gulf of Tonkin incident that
drew us into the Vietnam War. These things, as portrayed by our government and
media, seem to be smaller segments of a bigger picture. It almost seems like a
game of chess sometimes, where you don’t understand the significance of one
move until maybe a decade or two later and start to see the results of how things
turned out differently.
You can bet that during my four years as the independent governor of
Minnesota (1999 to 2003), I was shielded from plenty of information, because
they figured this guy will come and go. At the same time, I had some personal
experiences that would tend to make a sane public servant start looking over his
shoulder. (As William Burroughs once said, “Paranoia is having all the facts.”)
The first inkling that certain people inside the federal government were out to
keep an eye on me came not long after I took office. Sometime early in 1999, I
was “asked” to attend a meeting in the basement of the Capitol building, at a
time when the State Legislature was not in session. I was informed that the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was conducting a training exercise that they
hoped I’d be willing to participate in. Well, by this time I knew that the CIA’s
original mission statement from 1947 meant they were only supposed to operate
outside the U.S. The FBI was the outfit with domestic jurisdiction. But, being an
ex-Navy SEAL and a patriotic citizen, I basically felt I should cooperate.
Besides, I was curious as to what this was really all about.
Down there in the bowels of the building, some “fledgling” CIA operatives sat
waiting for me in a conference room. There were 23 in all; I counted heads.
They ranged in age from right out of college to what looked like retired people,
both men and women, a very diverse group. Your average middle-class
neighborhood types—except all of them were with the CIA, which was kind of
chilling when you think about it. I was placed in the middle of a big circle of
chairs, and they all sat there staring at me, with notebooks on their laps.
Well, before they could start asking me questions, I said I had a few for them.
First of all, what were they doing here, in the FBI’s territory? Nobody seemed to
want to say. Then I started going around the room, asking for their names and
their job descriptions. Maybe three or four answered, but the others dummied up.
Either they’d describe what they did without identifying who they were, or
neither. Considering that I’m an elected governor, I thought this was not only
rude, but rather brash. So I told the group, “Well, being that you’re not being too
cooperative with me, it’s going to be difficult for me to cooperate with you.”
They asked their questions anyway, and it was interesting. They all focused on
how we campaigned, how we achieved what we did, and did I think we truly
could win when we went into the campaign? Basically, how had the independent
wrestler candidate pulled this off? Sometimes I answered and other times I
didn’t, just to mess with them a little. They remained very cordial and proper.
Nobody raised their voice or made me feel I was being interrogated. But I’ve got
to say, it was one of the strangest experiences of my life. I was baffled by the
whole experience.
When I got home that day, I called my friend Dick Marcinko. He wrote all the
Rogue Warrior books, created the anti-terrorist SEAL Team Six, and I figured
he’d probably know more about how the CIA operates than anybody else I knew.
Dick started laughing as I told him the scenario of what had happened. I asked
why he thought this was so funny.
“Well, I’m not privy to exactly why they were there,” he said, “but I could
give you my educated guess.” He went on, “They didn’t see you coming. You
were not on the radar screen. And all of a sudden, you won a major election in
the United States of America. The election caught them with their pants down,
and their job is to gather intelligence and make predictions. Now, next to Bill
Clinton, you’re probably the most famous politician in America.”
Then Dick added this: “I think they’re trying to see if there are any more of
you on the horizon.”
So were they trying to gather information to insure this would never happen
again? I wondered: Was I that much of a threat?
Not too long after that meeting, I found out something else and it stunned me.
I revealed this for the first time in my memoir, Don’t Start the Revolution
Without Me!, and it raised a lot of eyebrows. It just so happens there is a CIA
operative inside every state government. They are not in executive positions—in
other words, not appointed by the governor—but permanent state employees.
While governors come and go, they keep working, holding down legitimate jobs
but with a dual identity. In Minnesota, this person was fairly high up, serving at
the deputy commissioner level.
I wasn’t sworn to secrecy about this, but only my chief of staff and I were
allowed to know his identity. I had to go meet with the person and later, when