American Conspiracies

by Jesse Ventura

  In the case of Dr. King, his own family has said that they don’t believe James Earl Ray committed the crime. The Kings, in fact, brought a wrongful death lawsuit that resulted in a jury returning a verdict in 1999 that governmental agencies were parties to a conspiracy! If you didn’t hear about that, it’s because nobody from the big media covered the proceedings. And O.J. Simpson’s was the “trial of the century,” with blow-by-blow TV coverage? Here our government declares a national holiday on Dr. King’s birthday, at the same time it’s still publicly proclaiming that he was killed by a lone racist! Maybe that’s because we’re really talking culpability by the police, military, FBI, and organized crime.

  Robert Kennedy was assassinated two months after Dr. King, right after winning the California primary on the way to the Democratic nomination. Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, in front of many witnesses in the pantry ofLA’s Ambassador Hotel, fired a number of times at the senator and appeared to be the sole assassin. Well, turns out that Sirhan’s gun held eight bullets but new audio testing on the only known recording of the shots indicates that there were at least ten fired. But if Sirhan was the assassin, to this day he doesn’t have any memory of pulling the trigger. Even at his trial, lawyers wondered whether he’d been “programmed” through hypnosis or drugs or some combination. Was Sirhan part of MK-ULTRA, a grim CIA program to control human behavior where most of the records were destroyed in 1973? That’s a question we’ll look into later in this book.

  Along comes Watergate, and ultimately the resignation of Richard Nixon. Assuredly a not-so-nice guy who obstructed justice and had his staff commit all manner of illegal acts, was dumb (or arrogant) enough to tape himself, and deserved to otherwise have been impeached and sent to prison if Gerald Ford hadn’t pardoned him. But what if this outrageous chapter of our recent history has an even darker side? What if Nixon was set up? The tapes revealed his obsession with “the whole Bay of Pigs thing,” which many experts believe was code for the Kennedy assassination. As president, he was demanding the CIA release to his White House all of its files on that period. Nixon was nothing if not self-protective, so he may have just wanted to know what dirt the spies had on him. Or maybe he wanted the goods on them. It’s dog-eat-dog in his realm. This much I’ve figured out: a whole lot of the Watergate cast of characters tracks back to the JFK mystery, including some of the burglars who conducted the fateful break-in.

  I know this next chapter might seem “on the fringe,” but we’ve been sold at least a partial bill of goods on the infamous Jonestown “cult suicides” in 1978 where 900-some followers of Jim Jones met their demise in Guyana. The chief medical examiner in Guyana actually concluded that more than 700 of the victims had been murdered. Before he founded his People’s Temple, Jones had some very suspicious ties to the CIA, as well as doing some informing for the FBI. Ever hear about the Jonestown survivors filing a $63 million lawsuit in October 1981? They were alleging that the State Department and CIA conspired to “enhance the economic and political powers of James Warren Jones,” conducting “mind control and drug experimentation.” Hold the Kool-Aid and read on!

  What I regard as the first of three stolen presidential elections in our recent history happened in 1980. That’s when Ronald Reagan’s people made a secret deal with Iran to delay the release of those 52 American hostages being held over there. This is known as the “October surprise,” because that’s what the Republicans were afraid President Carter might pull off—free the hostages and win a second term. Instead, George H.W. Bush and about-to-be CIA director William Casey, among others, arranged to supply Iran with weapons and unblock their assets in U.S. banks. In exchange, the hostages got to stay a little longer under house arrest. Doesn’t the timing of their release—twenty minutes after Reagan finished his Inaugural Address—kinda make you wonder? It sure did me, even at the time.

  Next we’ll take a look at our government “on drugs.” At the same time Nancy Reagan was telling our kids to “just say no,” America’s backing of the Nicaraguan Contra movement was being funded mainly by cocaine traffickers and money-launderers. A report by the CIA’s own Inspector General finally confirmed this in 1998, and showed that the operation tracked straight into Oliver North’s office in Reagan’s National Security Council—though, once again, the major media pretty much ignored the story. Of course, the drug trade had been part and parcel of our involvement in the Vietnam War, just as it is today in Afghanistan. The CIA’s secret missions are all financed with drug money, because then they don’t have to account for it. It’s time to end this corruption once and for all, starting with legalization of marijuana!

  You can’t talk politics since the millennium without delving into the conspiracies that resulted in George W. Bush stealing two elections. We all know the Supreme Court handed him the presidency in 2000, by stopping the recount in Florida. All but forgotten, though, are the illegal actions taken before the election by brother Jeb (then Florida’s governor) and Secretary of State Katherine Harris that deprived thousands of citizens of their right to vote. Not to mention the touch-screen voting machines, controlled by Republican bigwigs, that suddenly switched votes from Al Gore to Bush.

  These machines perpetrated more widespread fraud in 2004. The exit polls and early vote counts showed John Kerry the clear winner in Ohio, until everything shifted around in the middle of the night. That’s when a computer expert named Michael Connell, a crony of Karl Rove’s, transmitted the vote count to private, partisan computer servers down in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Connell can’t tell us about it, though. He was killed in the crash of his private plane soon after the 2008 election, when he was on the verge of blowing the whistle. Many suspect foul play—surprise!

  If the Bush-Cheney crowd could thieve elections and bump off potential tattlers, what about September 11? I never wanted to believe anything different than we were told about what happened on that terrible day. Even though, having been in the military, I wondered right away—where were our jets to intercept the four hijacked planes? How could our air defenses have failed so badly? Since then, I’ve done considerable research into the events surrounding 9/11. In 2008 I spent weeks on the road, where my investigative team and I conducted interviews with witnesses for the pilot episode I’d contracted to do of a new series for truTV. And I’ve come to a frightening conclusion. Either the Bush Administration had advance knowledge and let the attack happen, in order to justify their future agenda including going to war against Iraq, or they orchestrated the terrorist plot themselves. I know that sounds radical, if not treasonous—but there’s a whole “truth movement” out there that thinks the same thing, and is demanding answers. The 9/11 Commission, it’s now abundantly clear, was involved in the same massive cover-up as the Warren Commission. Toward the end of this book, I’m going to tell you what I learned firsthand, and what I’ve determined to be the strongest evidence of a 9/11 conspiracy.

  Now, thanks to those same Bush people, our economy has gone into a free fall and we’re in the biggest crisis of that sort since the Great Depression. Is it a stretch to include how this came about in a book on conspiracies? I don’t think so. Something definitely smells about how Bush Treasury secretary Henry Paulson ended up making Goldman Sachs—the company he served as CEO until 2006—the dominant player among investment bankers through the bailout. Then there’s the role of the New York Fed under Timothy Geithner (now Obama’s treasury secretary) when it came to loaning AIG billions to pay back certain “special” creditors. The company deemed “too big to fail” is, if truth be known, rotten to the core—and with longstanding ties to the CIA.

  The simple fact is, for 20 years Wall Street was run by shady dealers who pushed the laws to their limits and then flouted them openly until they became blurred beyond any possibility of enforcement. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the government agency set up to regulate our capital markets, ended up totally captured by the financial elites. And the Federal Reserve that’s supposed to safeguard our currency? Nothing but a
ccomplices in the biggest swindle of all time! This is, to my thinking, about as big a conspiracy as you can imagine—and one with deep historical roots that need to be dug up and exposed.

  We’ve got a Clean Air Act, how about a Clear-the-Air Act that gives us a fighting chance to restore the republic and the ideals we once stood for? In the concluding chapter of this book, I want to talk about my biggest fear—that certain people may be just waiting in the wings for enough disgruntled hungry citizens to rise up, so the real crackdown can begin. I’m sure that’s not what President Obama wants to do, and I hope he’s able to set us back on course, but the legal groundwork was laid under Bush for a whole new ball game. In fact, ten months before 9/11, Donald Rumsfeld approved an updated version of the army’s so-called Continuity of Government plan—with ways and means to suspend the Constitution in the event of civil unrest. Secret memos drafted by Bush’s team would allow a president to send the military to wage war against American citizens; to drag people from their homes and, without trial, hold them at some Guantánamo-type facility indefinitely. Basically, to kiss the Bill of Rights goodbye.

  So brace yourselves, folks. Even with a change of administration for the better, we’re not out of the woods. Like the poet Robert Frost once wrote, “The woods are dreary, dark and deep.” And we’d better be prepared for a rough ride through the wilderness that’s been closing in around us. That’s why I’m putting together this book. We need to understand where we’ve been—and it’s not a pretty picture—in order to know where we need to go.

  When some people refer to me as a conspiracy theorist, I respond laughingly and say, “Well, the government is, too.” For the most part, they’ve never proven any of their “theories.” Right now I’m a skeptic about anything I read officially from the government. They don’t tell the whole truth. They often seem to have an entirely different agenda. That’s disheartening, to realize that what you read in the newspapers and the history books may not be accurate. I think the other side of the story needs to be published somewhere. And whether or not people believe it, at least it should be out there.

  So let’s begin with the hour of America’s first great crisis, the Civil War, and what we need to remember about the assassination of our greatest president, Abraham Lincoln.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE FIRST NOT-ALONE-NUT: JOHN WILKES BOOTH

  THE INCIDENT: The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre, in Washington, on April 14, 1865.

  THE OFFICIAL WORD: The president was shot in the back of the head at point-blank range, by a prominent actor named John Wilkes Booth, who escaped on horseback and was later killed by a soldier while hiding in a barn. Eight coconspirators were also caught and found guilty by a military court.

  MY TAKE: The plot is likely to have gone well beyond those who were rounded up, but except for Booth we don’t hear much about any others in our history books. Besides leaders of the Confederacy, the conspiracy to kill Lincoln probably included people within his own cabinet.

  “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

  —Abraham Lincoln’s Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862

  I had the occasion very recently to be sitting with my nephews, who are of later junior high or first-year high school age. They’re here in Minnesota, part of the same public school system that I was. I wanted to get a sense of whether they’re still learning the same things in the history books today. So I asked them what they knew about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. It was funny because one nephew immediately said, “Oh, we just got done with that,” so it was fresh in his mind.

  He basically related the same story I’d studied back in the 1950s. This actor named John Wilkes Booth came up behind President Lincoln in the theater, shot him in the back of the head, yelled something as he leapt down onto the stage, fell, and broke his leg. He then snuck away and they tracked him down later and set the barn on fire where he was hiding, then shot and killed him. That was the extent of it.

  Well, after doing the research for this book, I knew differently. It’s not even a theory. There were eight people tried and convicted by a jury and punished. Four of them were hung, and the other four sent to prison. All coconspirators of John Wilkes Booth. Why did my nephews not know a thing about that? Why is that eliminated from what’s being taught, along with the fact that the plotters had also targeted the vice president and secretary of state on the same night that Lincoln was killed. Here was a classic case of a conspiracy going through the court system, yet my nephews today—just as I was earlier—are led to believe that Booth was a lone assassin who had no cohorts. It was just the action of a lone nut.

  Our history textbooks and our schools are averse to telling the whole story. In the back of my mind, this raises the issue: is the Lincoln assassination a setup to where that becomes the norm for our way of thinking? That the only people who ever gun down our leaders are upset over a particular issue that compels them to kill? In this case, of course, Booth was a Southern sympathizer, angered about losing the Civil War. Later, Lee Harvey Oswald would be a die-hard Communist, James Earl Ray a jailbird racist, and Sirhan Bishara Sirhan a fanatic Palestinian. This becomes the pattern. I see the simplification as part of the dumbing-down of our people.

  So what follows in this chapter is what my nephews ought to have been informed about. First, how far-reaching the Lincoln conspiracy really was remains unknown to this day. For sure, some of the evidence links the plotters to the Confederate leadership. But it also looks like Booth had advance information about Lincoln’s movements from someone inside the president’s cabinet. And Dr. Samuel Mudd, at whose house Booth took refuge afterwards, wasn’t some kindly country doctor carrying out his Hippocratic Oath by setting the broken leg of a stranger. He’d been in the conspiracy up to his neck.

  Unlike the assassins a century later, Booth was well-known around the country. He was an American matinee idol who made the then-princely sum of about $20,000 a year at the peak of his theater career. Lincoln even saw him once in a play at Ford’s Theatre called The Marble Heart, and was so impressed he asked to meet Booth backstage. Booth declined. 1 Maybe he already had something else in mind.

  As Lincoln once put it, “There are a thousand ways to getting at a man if it is desired that he should be killed.” As early as when he took the train to Washington for his inauguration, a paramilitary group was prepared to kill him when his train stopped in Baltimore. The plan was discovered and Lincoln warned ahead of time, so he was already tucked away in a hotel in Washington. But he still resisted the idea of having bodyguards. 2

  The next plot we know about involved biological warfare. That’s right, it’s not a new idea. A group in Canada—which was a haven for Confederate spies—had the notion to spread clothing infected with yellow fever into certain Northern population centers. Lincoln was to receive a poisoned expensive dress shirt from an anonymous admirer. The whole scheme was pretty hare-brained and never got off the ground, but the Confederate leadership apparently knew about it and didn’t bat an eye before it fell apart. 3

  Things got serious after some papers were found on the body of a Colonel Dahlgren, who was killed on a raid while trying to free some Union prisoners. The papers said that, once the Union made it into the Confederate capital, Richmond, “it must be destroyed and Jeff Davis and cabinet killed.” 4 Of course, this could have been a made-up excuse. But Jefferson Davis is said to have had his agents prowling around the White House area by September 1864, monitoring Lincoln’s movements. They were looking to kidnap the president and hold him hostage.

  Booth hooked up with the conspirators somewhere around this time, after he joined a rebel spy network called Knights of the Golden Circle. 5 His first scheme was to abduct Lincoln from the presidential box at Fo
rd’s Theater, but the president didn’t show up that night. Then, when Booth found out about Lincoln planning to visit some convalescing soldiers at a hospital on a sparsely traveled road, they decided to try to nab him from his carriage. Again, Lincoln changed his plans at the last minute. Instead—talk about ironies!—he went to give a speech at a ceremony held in the same hotel where Booth was living! 6

  As late as the end of March 1865, Booth still had a kidnap operation in mind. In one of the books I read about the assassination, it was speculated that “the fall of Richmond and Lee’s surrender may well have caused Booth to conclude that capturing Lincoln no longer had a strategic purpose.” 7 Then there was another plot that didn’t involve Booth—to blow up the White House during a meeting of the cabinet.

  On the night of April 14, Booth met with three of his coconspirators around eight o’clock. This was the first any of them knew about something other than a kidnapping. George Atzerodt was to kill Vice President Andrew Johnson; Lewis Powell, accompanied by David Herold, was to take out Secretary of State William Seward at his home. They were all to make their escape from the Capitol on horseback into Confederate territory. 8

  The story goes that, before he went into the theater, Booth went to bolster his courage in a nearby bar, where a drunken customer told him: “You’ll never be the actor your father was.” 9 To which Booth replied: “When I leave the stage, I will be the most famous man in America.”