American Conspiracies

by Jesse Ventura

  Another story, in the Washington Post no less, tells of how the military anticipates having 20,000 uniformed troops inside the U.S. by 2011, trained to help state and local officials respond to a nuclear terror attack or some other domestic catastrophe. This is part of a “long-planned shift in the Department of Defense’s role in homeland security.”50 Already, an active-duty unit called the Chemical, Biological, Radiological/Nuclear and Explosive Consequence Management Response Force is stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia.51

  And do you know about the “fusion centers?” These are much like InfraGard, but more blatant. There are about seventy “fusion centers” around the U.S.—places where local law enforcement, the private sector and the intel community can share information in the fight against terrorism. One in West Texas finds it “imperative” to report on lobbying groups. Another in Virginia has declared that American universities, singling out several black colleges, have become “radicalization nodes” for potential terrorist activity. In September 2009, Homeland Security announced that these “fusion centers” would now have access to classified military intelligence in Pentagon databases.52

  I’ve gone to some lengths to trace these developments since 9/11, because I’m a lot more afraid of this than an assault by al-Qaeda. What’s going on inside our military also frightens me. More and more, we’re seeing an army run by Christianist extremists and an accompanying cadre of what can only be described as neo-Nazis. Since the endless “war on terror” began, our armed services have been turning a blind eye to their own military statutes. Here’s how a Department of Defense report stated it in 2005: “Effectively, the military has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy pertaining to extremism.” White supremacists are walking as enlisted men around our bases. There are the Hammerskins at Fort Hood and the Celtic Knights in Texas. One spokesman for the National Socialist Movement bragged about encouraging members to sign up for the military: “We can use the training to secure the resistance to our government.”53

  Newsmax is an online Web site controlled by the ultra-right media baron Richard Mellon Scaife, who used to pay people to dig up dirt on Bill Clinton. Recently, one of Newsmax’s columnists (John L. Perry) wrote about a “gaining” possibility that the military would stage a coup to “resolve the Obama problem.” It sounded like a page right out of the financial barons’ plot to overthrow FDR. The coup would be “civilized” and “bloodless,” with a “patriotic general” getting together with the president to let him keep making speeches while a new system of “skilled, military-trained, nation-builders” did “the serious business of governing and defending the nation.”54 Pulitzer-winning journalist Seymour Hersh has also warned that the military is “in a war against the White House—and they feel they have Obama boxed in.”55

  Meantime, you’ve got news commentators like Glenn Beck warning about a looming insurrection. According to the FBI, there have been 5.5 million requests for background checks on potential gun buyers over the past year or so.56 The Southern Poverty Law Center reports “unmistakable signs of a revival of what in the 1990s was commonly called the militia movement.” It’s estimated that 50 new militia training groups have sprung up over the last couple years.57 There are people out there offering prep for what’s coming, like the Front Sight Firearms Training Institute founded by Dr. Ignatius Piazza: “the Millionaire Patriot, wants YOU armed and trained and he is putting his money where his mouth is”—ready to help you get a concealed weapon permit that’s good in 30 states.58

  I suppose, given all the illegal activity that the non-elected Bush Administration engaged in since the millennium, we can’t be too surprised at the reaction. A government that played on people’s worst nightmares to achieve its own ends creates a culture not only of fear, but mistrust to the point of insurrection—which is what they secretly seem to have been longing for.

  I went recently to Corcoran, Kansas, where a civilian is building state-of-the-art underground condos for wealthy people. I think they’ve got 12 units up for sale. These are being built on what used to be sites for launching nuclear missiles, so they were designed to withstand a nuclear attack. They go down 15 stories with about 15 feet of hardened concrete. They’re planned as self-sustaining. They’ll grow their own food and raise fish. They’ve figured out how much everyone can eat per day, to sustain them up to five years. They’ll each have a pool, a workout room, and a movie theater.

  I asked one buyer, “Well, you live in Florida, if the shit hits the fan, how are you going to get here?” He told me, “We have contingency plans.” But if all the electricity’s gone, you’re going to walk? “If we have to,” he said. And you figure people are going to stand out there and hand you food while you make your journey? “We have contingency plans,” he said again.

  A different fellow I interviewed has been a bunker builder for 20 years, for rich people who want a safe shelter under their house to safeguard against hurricanes or tornadoes. He told me about a certain material that only a couple of vendors sell. In the course of the last decade, when he’s tried to get it, he couldn’t. Because the government has bought them out. He said the government is building massive bunkers as fast as they possibly can. Why? What do they know that they’re not telling the rest of us?

  I’m not suggesting that President Obama is a part of such a scheme. He may not even be privy to it. But in the event of a “national emergency,” the bunkers would ensure Continuity of Government. Meantime, in a martial law scenario, all the technology is in place to impose government’s will on the people. James Bamford, an author who specializes in what the National Security Agency is up to, says they’re even developing an artificial intelligence system designed to know what people are thinking! Here come the thought police!59

  Think about what our so-called technological advances really mean. Early in 2009, the National Security Archive in D.C. obtained an “Information Operations Roadmap” under a Freedom of Information Act request. This was signed by Rumsfeld in 2003, and it calls for electronic warfare, in the form of computer network attack specialists and Psyops troops whose specialty is manipulating the beliefs of an enemy. At the Pentagon’s request, a private company called the Lincoln Group planted hundreds of articles in Iraqi newspapers in support of U.S. policy. “Information intended for foreign audience, including public diplomacy and Psyops, is increasingly consumed by our domestic audience. Psyops messages will often be replayed by the news media for much larger audiences, including the American people.” (CIA and FBI computers have already been used to edit Wikipedia entries on things like the Iraq War and Guantánamo.)60 If that’s not Big Brother enough, the document closes with the recommendation that the Pentagon ought to pursue an ability to “provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum . . . disrupt or destroy the full spectrum of globally emerging communications systems, sensors, and weapons systems dependent on the electromagnetic spectrum.” Which translates into being able to KO every telephone, networked computer, and radar system anywhere on the planet.61 Darth Vader, your time may be coming.

  Under the radar, a provision was slipped into the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization bill at the end of 2005. It’s the DNA Fingerprint Act, meaning that if you get arrested at a demonstration on federal property, they can take a sample of your DNA and keep it on permanent file.62 This fits nicely with a billion-dollar FBI project to have a massive computer database containing individuals’ physical characteristics. They call this biometrics, and it gives the government a brand-new opportunity to identify folks at home and abroad. They’re storing digital images of faces, fingerprints and palm types in a climate-controlled underground facility in Clarksburg, West Virginia. They’ll soon be crime-stopping even by analyzing the way we walk and talk.63 At some airports, people who aren’t line-standers at the metal detectors are taking advantage of the “opportunity” to have their irises scanned to prove they’ve passed a background check (that’s called Next Generation Identification).64

  In 2008
a three-judge appeals court, reversing a lower court’s finding, ruled that federal border agents don’t need any special reason to search laptops, cell phones, or digital cameras for evidence of crimes.65 Since Bush had already called for some high-tech measures to crack down on illegal immigration from Mexico, a company called VeriChip came up with a way to “chip the foreigners.” It’s a Radio Frequency Identification Tag, RFID for short, encapsulated in glass and injected hypodermically into your skin. The ID number can be read right through your clothes, by radio waves, from close range. Tommy Thompson, who headed up Health and Human Services under Bush, joined VeriChip’s board after he left the administration and soon was out there extolling the merits of getting chipped as a means for Americans to link up to their medical records. The Pentagon has been entertaining talk of the RFIDs taking the place of the old military “dog tags.” It’s also being marketed as a possible future way to make payments by combining the chip with your credit card.66

  Microchips are already everywhere. They’re putting chips in our credit cards, our cars, department store clothing tags, library books, literally everything but us—and I figure we’re not far behind. I disconnected the North-Star on my vehicle as soon I bought it. I’d rather have to break my window to get my keys, rather than have them know my location every time I drive anywhere. The RFID technology enabling both objects and people to be wirelessly tagged and tracked is on the edge of being a billion-dollar industry. Back in 2003, the Defense Department and Wal-Mart teamed up to move RFID along by mandating their suppliers to put these radio tags on all their crates and cartons. Unlike barcodes, RFID chips don’t fall under federal regulations—and they can be read, without knowledge of the holder, through just about anything except metal and water.

  Big corporations are excited about using miniaturized computers along with radio antennaes to electronically “sniff” you. In 2005, American Express applied for a patent describing how RFID-embedded objects that shoppers carry could send out “identification signals” picked up by electronic “consumer trackers.” In return, the shoppers could be sent video ads offering them “incentives” to buy the products they’d seemed interested in. In 2006, IBM received patent approval for an invention it dubbed “Identification and tracking of persons using RFID-tagged items.” Yet another patent (NCR Corporation) described using camouflaged sensors and video cameras to film your facial expression at counter displays, “which allows one to draw valuable inferences about the behavior of large numbers of shoppers.” Proctor & Gamble went so far as to seek a patent to check out what you’re examining on a lower shelf of the store.

  “With tags in so many objects, relaying information to databases that can be linked to credit and bank cards, almost no aspect of life may soon be safe from the prying eyes of corporations and governments,” says Mark Rasch, who used to head the computer-crime unit at the Justice Department. By putting sniffers in the right places, companies can invisibly “rifle through people’s pockets, purses, suitcases, briefcases, luggage . . . and possibly their kitchens and bedrooms . . . anytime of the day or night.”67

  Under our Constitution and Bill of Rights, government is not allowed to do certain things. Corporate America doesn’t fall under those same rules. So the government is getting the private sector to do the dirty work, violations that they can’t be held accountable for. Then the corporations simply take the information they’ve acquired and turn it over to the government. You might say, what else could they learn? Well, things like this: say you’ve got health care coming up. If they know everything you buy in the store, they might say, “Here’s a candidate for diabetes, look how he eats, let’s pass this along because you could be a risk.”

  I know I was surveilled when I was governor of Minnesota. To this day, every time I start appearing on national TV or radio, all of a sudden my phones get weird—you hear clicks on the other end—and my wife can’t get online as quickly and things disappear from her computer. Is this happenstance? It always seems to coincide with when I take a high profile. If you’re at all a dissenter, apparently you will be observed and put under surveillance.

  Doesn’t it also concern you that “We the Rabble” could be looking at a corporatized, militarized future where we’re tracked down by radio-tags and herded into camps for undesirable citizens who won’t go along with the program? Not to worry if you’re part of the elite. The insurance giant AIG has pioneered a special service for customers living in upper-class zip codes. During the 2007 wildfires in Southern California, its Private Client Group paid big bucks to AIG’s Firebreak Spray Systems to have their homes hosed down with a fire retardant—sometimes while the nextdoor neighbor went up in flames. A start-up company called Sovereign Deed, tied into the mercenary outfit Triple Canopy, has since developed our first privatized national disaster response center with a “country-club type membership fee.”68

  Do you realize that, since 2002, there has been a 47 percent increase in American workers classified as security guards? And that as high as one quarter of our labor force is now centered around protection instead of production?69 That’s a culture increasingly based on fear. And, as Benjamin Franklin said in 1775, “Those who give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

  We don’t have to put up with this. When everything is built on lies, it’s built on nothing, isn’t it? It’s a house of cards waiting to fall. I’d like to believe that we as a people can handle the truth. But we don’t have a free media anymore. They’re corporatized and controlled. The proof is in the pudding, when Bush got caught paying off journalists to espouse the administration’s line. You don’t see much investigative reporting like we had in the old days.

  So where do We the People start? I say, by demanding prosecution of the politicians who condoned torture on their lying road into Iraq. And by a new, legitimate investigation into what happened on September 11, a tragedy that’s been used ever since to justify all the lies and undermine our democratic freedoms. With President Obama, we voted for a fresh start, but now we’ve got to hold his feet to the fire and get to the bottom of what’s happened to our country over these recent decades.

  I’ve not written this book because I get off on talking about conspiracies. I’ve written it because, until we face the terrible reality of the assassinations and the governmental drug dealing and the stolen elections and the rest—until we look at how, slowly and insipidly, the most venal of men took control of our nation, we don’t stand a chance of putting things back on track. I’m not saying that knowledge sets us free, but it does force us to wake up and realize that we’re on the brink of losing everything the founders of our country stood for and bequeathed to us.

  “Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing [a people] to slavery.”

  —Thomas Jefferson: Rights of British America, 1774

  “Cherish . . . the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them.”

  —Thomas Jefferson, 1787

  Words to live by. Thank you, Mr. Jefferson.

  EPILOGUE

  “TRUTH BEING THAT WHICH IT IS CAN NEVER BE DESTROYED”

  I close this book with that quote from Gandhi. Because, after I’m long gone, I believe there needs to be a record that some people thought things other than just the status quo of what the government has put out for us all to believe. I think it’s a duty we have to humanity. Even if we’re wrong, we’re right enough to have an alternate opinion. You may not believe everything that’s been written in this book, but it’s certainly scary. Even thinking that a lot of it could be true is scary enough.

  I’ve covered a lot of ground in American Conspiracies, most of it not pleasant to consider. But we can’t simply look the other
way about the dark side of our history. And there’s been no shortage of “dark,” over this last half-century or so. After the Second World War where my father, my mother, and millions of others distinguished themselves, in our leaders’ well-meaning effort to contain Communists and now terrorists, they unleashed something equally threatening. I guess you could call it power run amuck.

  It’s not a newelement, really. You see it in the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, and the big-money forces that wanted to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt. When President Kennedy set out to challenge the status quo on many different fronts, he paid the price with his life. The same was true for the three other great American leaders of the 1960s: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Then Nixon became, in a way, a victim of some of the same forces he’d helped come to power in the Fifties, like the CIA. And the CIA’s ultimate experiment in controlling human behavior, Jonestown, followed at the close of the seventies.

  With the rise of Reagan—not a face that belongs on Mount Rushmore—we saw the first of the neo-cons’ successes in ripping off an election, or at least making sure the incumbent president couldn’t properly fulfill his mandate. Dealing drugs, as a crucial element of our political landscape, came to the fore during the Reagan years. I decided not to delve into the right wing’s ongoing efforts to sabotage Bill Clinton’s presidency, culminating in setting him up to take the fall with Monica Lewinsky, but it’s no stretch to add that to the list of conspiracies.

  The last chapters in this book are, in my view, the most painful and frightening of all. Since the dawn of the new millennium, our democracy has eroded to the point where it’s hanging on by a bare thread. You can trace this directly to the times that George W. Bush and his cronies stole the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections from their opponents, and also to the tragic events of 9/11 that unleashed their assault on our freedoms in the name of protecting them. What’s happened to our economy grew out of that, and now we’re standing at the abyss looking at the still-in-place plans to end America as we’ve known it since 1776.