American Conspiracies

by Jesse Ventura

  Spoonamore told us, “Mike was a front-end guy, who built Web sites and really sophisticated databases to track voters. The way computers actually function and talk to each other, he didn’t have the expertise and would have to work with others, like the guys at SMARTech.”32 When he and Connell first met in Washington, Spoonamore didn’t reveal his own interest in the electronic voting world. The two hit it off, and started working together on a couple of unrelated overseas projects. Then, when they happened to be at the same conference in London, somebody pulled Connell aside to warn him that Spoonamore was “an insane guy who opposes voting machines.” Connell told Spoon, “You have some people who are really nervous about you.”

  As they became friends, Spoonamore sensed that Connell was having second thoughts about what he’d been doing for the Republicans. Maybe you’ve followed some of the flap about all of those e-mails of Karl Rove’s that somehow disappeared over time. Well, it was Connell who set up the site used by Rove for 95 percent of his e-mail communication, known as GWB43.com. At the end of a private meeting in 2006, Connell asked Spoonamore what he knew about “the complexity of trying to erase e-mail.” Spoon explained that, in most cases, it can’t be done. Connell pointed in the direction of the White House a few blocks away, saying that he’d “kinda been asked to look at a challenge, whether you could recover or get back e-mails.” Spoonamore recalls: “He was fishing around for what the steps might be. I said, ‘Mike, I’m involved in a lot of stuff to protect people’s privacy and bank accounts, but I don’t use those skills to destroy information. And I would encourage you to tell people to walk away from this because, one, it doesn’t work and, two, the cover-up is always worse than the crime, Mike.’”

  With the 2008 election year coming up, Spoonamore decided to “stop opposing things in the background and go very public.” He approached Arnebeck’s legal team in Ohio and offered himself as an expert witness. He also went to Connell. “I basically said, ‘Mike, there’s a lot of people you work with—and frankly, some of them I’ve worked with as well, and with some I still do—who treat democracy as a game, where if their side wins it doesn’t matter if you cheat. Mike, I don’t think you’re in that camp but I do think you’ve worked very closely with some of the people who are. I intend to spend some of my time and resources and reputation on making their lives uncomfortable. And I’m giving you a heads-up about it.’ Well, Mike didn’t react the way I expected. He reacted by taking my hands and asking to pray, and he said, ‘I don’t think you know how far over your head you’re gonna get.’”

  At that point, Spoonamore didn’t know how involved Connell had been in the Florida 2000 situation. A guy named Roy Cales had been Connell’s top computer expert for a long time. In the summer of 2000, Jeb Bush had appointed Cales as Florida’s first Chief Information Officer, or tech czar, and gave him the authority to take over all of Florida’s government computer systems, which included “unrestricted access” to all election reporting and tabulating computers used by Secretary of State Katharine Harris.33 Cales resigned in early September 2001, after being charged with grand theft in connection with a 1996 forgery.34

  Learning more about this, Spoonamore invited Connell to breakfast. It went on for five hours. Spoonamore revealed he was “going forward with attorneys, and I have no question it’s going to end up in discovery on your desk. I hope we continue with our friendship, but there’s a period of time when this is gonna get ugly.” Spoonamore described whom he believed the guilty parties were, starting with Rove. “You’re really good at this,” he remembers Connell saying. Then Connell admitted he’d gone too far, and there were things he was ready to get off his chest.

  A meeting was arranged with Congressman Conyers’s office. The memo prepared for the House Judiciary Committee said: “Well before the 2000 election, one of Connell’s employees created a ‘Trojan Horse’ software application which, when installed on one computer, allows its remote control by another computer. Prior to the 2004 election in Ohio, Connell administered and developed important parts of the Secretary of State’s computer network including the election results reporting server systems.... During the 2004 (and 2006) elections, Connell routed the election results from the OH SOS office through SMARTech servers in Chattanooga, Tennessee.”35

  Then, at the last minute, Spoon says Conyers’s office “dropped the ball. Mike was going to come forward and talk about everything he’d seen and been asked to do, in regard to voting machines. I even had a senior priest who he really respected, and who he’d never lie in front of, agree to come with him. I have no idea what happened.”

  In July 2008, attorney Arnebeck asked U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to hold onto all of Rove’s e-mails. Rove was identified in the lawsuit as the “principal perpetrator of a pattern of corrupt activity” under the Ohio Corrupt Practices Act. “We have been confidentially informed by a source we believe to be credible that Karl Rove has threatened Michael Connell ... that if he does not agree to ‘take the fall’ for election fraud in Ohio, his wife Heather will be prosecuted for supposed law lobby violations.”

  Then, in September, Connell got issued a subpoena. His attorney, Bill Todd, who happened to also have been legal counsel for Bush/Cheney ’04, said that Connell couldn’t be deposed before the election because he was too busy working for the John McCain campaign.36 Shortly before the November election, Connell appeared with a trio of lawyers before an Ohio judge, who ordered him to give a deposition. With the election one day away, Connell denied any role in recommending the Chattanooga SMARTech company to Ohio officials in 2004, but he did admit for the record that his company had subcontracted with SMARTech.

  This might have shaken up Rove and company. In mid-October, Rove had an article in the Wall Street Journal headlined “Obama Hasn’t Closed the Sale.” The latest Gallup tracking poll showed nearly twice as many undecided voters than in the 2004 election, Rove said, so Obama’s 7.3% lead didn’t necessarily mean that much. McCain, entering the final weekend of the race, predicted a come-from-behind victory, based on how things were looking in battleground states like Ohio. But then suddenly, on Monday night, after Connell gave his deposition, it all changed. The new Rove electoral map predicted a 338-to-200 electoral vote margin in favor of Obama. Rove had basically done a 180-degree turn.37

  Spoonamore told us: “I have had conversations with knowledgeable people who say that there were significant discussions as to whether or not, if they manipulated the election, they’d get caught this time. Their biggest fear, and frankly it was rightfully so, was that there were a number of us who were working to hack into the systems to watch for their hacking.”38

  Personally, I don’t think they dared fix the election, because the people knew overwhelmingly that Obama was going to win. If it would all of a sudden have come back McCain, I think there would have been an outcry in the streets that would have gotten the Bilderberg types upset—if you know what I mean.

  So then, on December 19, 2008, Michael Connell, 45 years old, father of four, went down in the fiery crash of his Piper Saratoga II single-engine plane. He was flying back alone from a meeting in Maryland and only two and a half miles from the Akron airport. The airplane’s right wing clipped a flagpole in the front yard of an empty house before it broke up and set fire to the garage. Connell was thrown out of the burning plane and died instantly. He was an accomplished pilot, flying in decent weather.39 A friend told a reporter that twice over the past two months, Connell had canceled flights due to suspicious problems with his plane.40

  “A number of people with expertise are of the opinion that this was a hit,” Ohio attorney Arnebeck told us. “There is a method called electromagnetic pulse technology, where you can disrupt the electronics in an airplane and it’s very hard to detect, particularly after the fact. The motive would be that Connell was an extraordinary individual in terms of his knowledge and expertise in a fairly vast racketeering kind of conspiracy, in that it involved Karl Rove, business groups, multiple
elections, and a fairly broad geography.”41

  Spoonamore says this: “I found out something about the system that Mike had on board, where he fundamentally had a system without mechanical controls that was computer operated. Eyewitnesses on the ground say all the plane’s lights turned off, the engine stalled. At that point, he would have regained manual control by wire, he flattens it out and tries to fix the problem. But when he turns the engine back on, the plane guns itself and dives into the ground. So what happened? Simple. You program a chip. They changed the chip that runs the plane. Despite the fact that FAA rules require you leave the site alone until daylight, completely document and photograph it, instead they pick up the entire plane and haul it to a Lockheed-Martin hangar. Trust me, by the time the FAA started pulling it apart, the right chip was back in the computer.”

  To say what happened to Connell was weird timing is an understatement. Here’s a guy getting ready to be a whistle-blower on the biggest series of election frauds in our history. Whether it was an accident or by design, he was silenced. Gee, what bad luck this guy had. Hmmmm. ...

  Spoonamore, for one, is scared that if we continue with electronic voting, stolen elections are going to happen again. He says most of these companies are run by far-right evangelical Christians. “A tiny group of people who call themselves Christians, but who clearly do not believe in Christ’s message or our democracy, seem to repeatedly be behind every questionable voting outcome. They aren’t Christians. They are fascists. Fascists who don’t have the balls to go public, round people up, and kill them, except on very rare occasions—like Mike Connell.”

  WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?

  It’s obvious that, to avoid the specter of vote fraud always hanging over our elections, we’ve got to outlaw the electronic voting machines and return to a system where there’s a “paper trail.” How can we not see the blatant conflict of interest that currently exists, with the computer companies and the vote-counters being dominated by the Republican Party? Give the Democrats enough years in power, and you can bet they’d follow the same pattern. While we’re after real reform, let’s finally abolish the antiquated Electoral College and allow the popular vote to prevail. And let’s open the ballot and the debates to legitimate third-party candidates, and break the stranglehold that big money has on the two-party system.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  WHAT REALLY HAPPENED ON SEPTEMBER 11?

  THE INCIDENT: On September 11, 2001, four airplanes were hijacked on American soil and crashed into the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania.

  THE OFFICIAL WORD: The 19 hijackers were all fanatic Muslim terrorists linked to al-Qaeda and its ringleader, Osama bin Laden.

  MY TAKE: Our government engaged in a massive cover-up of what really happened, including its own ties to the hijackers. Unanswered questions remain about how the towers were brought down, and whether a plane really struck the Pentagon. The Bush Administration either knew about the plan and allowed it to proceed, or they had a hand in it themselves.

  “The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it; ignorance may deride it. But in the end—There it is. ...”

  —Winston Churchill

  I was in my third year as Minnesota’s governor on September 11, 2001. After the devastation of the Pentagon being hit and the Twin Towers falling, I put the National Guard on alert and secured some of our public buildings. The following Sunday morning, we were the first state to hold a memorial for the nearly 3,000 victims. More than 40,000 people showed up on the front lawn of the State Capitol, while a steady rain fell. I’ll never forget Native American shamans beating drums alongside honor guards who represented the police and firefighters and military. It still chokes me up to think about it. Looking out on hundreds of flags fluttering in the breeze, I remember saying at the end of two hours: “We will promote good against evil. And finally, we will together restore our sense of freedom by conquering this enemy!”

  I never wanted to believe anything different than what our government told us about that tragic day. But here is what John Farmer, a Senior Counsel for the 9/11 Commission who drafted the original report, has to say in a new book: “At some level of the government, at some point in time ... there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened.”1 What more do we need? Are we willing to live with another lie to go with the Warren Report, the Iran-Contra cover-up, and many other “official” stories?

  I certainly never expected to think that elements of the Bush Administration were complicit with the enemy. Today, though, I am convinced that some people inside our government knew the attack was going to happen and allowed it to come to pass—because it furthered their political agenda. I don’t necessarily believe that they orchestrated it themselves, although the door is definitely open to that. I say this after expending many hours researching things about the official story that don’t add up, and interviewing a number of witnesses with firsthand knowledge that contradicts what we were told. As a patriotic American, I say this with a heavy heart—and with an outrage that really knows no words. But it’s something we, as a nation, must come to terms with. Otherwise, it could happen again.

  From day one, there was something that puzzled me. You had four airplanes being hijacked on the same morning. Maybe the first one snuck by the radar—but the next three? I’d been inside air traffic control, where you’ve got a dozen people watching every plane in their sector. They know what direction all the aircraft are supposed to be going, and here were four planes going directly opposite of their normal flight path. But we’re supposed to believe that no alarm bells went off anywhere, so no fighter jets got scrambled to intercept the planes. Was everybody asleep at the switch? How could the FAA and our air defenses experience such a miserable failure?

  I want to tell you a short story about a guy named Charles Lewis, who my writing colleague Dick Russell interviewed recently in Southern California. Until two months before September 11, Lewis had worked at LAX as the Quality Control Manager for Kiewit Pacific Construction on its Taxiway “C” project. A large part of his duties involved security in the Airport Operations Area, or AOA. There he got to know employees of various agencies—the LA World Airport Police, the LAPD, California Highway Patrol, the FBI, U.S. Customs, and others.

  When the 9/11 attacks occurred, Lewis was a deputy inspector for the city of LA during a seismic retrofit of the LA Hilton Towers Hotel, only a few minutes from the airport by car. After making sure the hotel construction crew went home, Lewis rushed over to LAX’s Guard Post 2, because he was one of very few people who knew how to fix certain parts of the new security systems in case any problems developed.

  Lewis estimates he arrived at about 6:35 AM (PT—9:35 AM Eastern), not long after the second plane struck the World Trade Center. As on other days, there was “chatter” on LAX Security walkie-talkies and he could easily hear what they were saying, sometimes both sides of the conversation. Lewis remembers: “The first thing I noticed was that the guards—and that day they were the LA World Airport Police and the FBI—were very upset and agitated because apparently no one [from FAA] had notified NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command]. They were making calls and demanding to know why not. Eventually word came back that NORAD had indeed been notified, but they had been ordered to stand down. Then LAX Security wanted to know who could have made that order. And word came back that it was from the highest level of the White House. Later on, watching television, I knew the order didn’t come from Bush because he was reading ‘My Pet Goat’ to the school kids in Florida, so the only other person it could be was Dick Cheney.”2

  It turns out there were some “war games” taking place that morning. September 11 was the second day of Vigilant Guardian, an exercise of the Joint Chiefs and NORAD that simulated planes being hijacked in the Northeastern United States. Another drill, called Northern Vigilance, had shifted some fighter jets to Canada and Alaska to monitor Russian MIGs flying training missions. This one put “phantoms” on military
radar screens that would look real to the participants in the exercise. “We fought many phantoms that day,” Richard Myers of the Joint Chiefs later testified to Congress.

  But could the attack have been scheduled intentionally to coincide with those war games? If so, this raises a couple of questions. Either there was a major intelligence leak, whereby the terrorists realized the war games would be a good cover for their operation. Or else some people in the administration knew of the attack ahead of time and let it proceed simultaneously, knowing the confusion this would cause.

  Between September 2000 and June 2001, on 67 different occasions fighter jets were sent to intercept aircraft that had lost radio contact or their transponder signal or were flying off course, usually within ten minutes of any sign of a problem.3 (Contrary to what some people think, presidential approval wasn’t needed to intercept or even shoot down an aircraft.) Then, on June 1, 2001, the existing hijacking response procedures were changed to require approval by the secretary of defense before responding to a situation with lethal force.4 And when the call came into the Pentagon on 9/11, nobody answered the phone!

  The stand-down order that Charles Lewis heard about was confirmed by none other than Norman Mineta, transportation secretary at the time. According to the 9/11 Commission, Cheney didn’t arrive underground at the PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operations Center) until almost 10 AM. Mineta, however, said the Vice President was already down there when he arrived at about 9:20 AM. Richard Clarke and Cheney’s photographer indicated the same thing. That was before the Pentagon had been hit, and Mineta recalled a young man coming into the PEOC three times to tell Cheney how far out the plane was from Washington. After the third report, according to Mineta, the young fellow asked, “Do the orders still stand?” and Cheney responded, “Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?” The 9/11 Commission chose to ignore Mineta’s testimony and went so far as to remove it from the video archive. Instead, they had Cheney ordering, almost 45 minutes later than Mineta said, the inbound aircraft be shot down. Except, by then, all four planes had already gone down.5