excerpts from the book
American Conspiracies
Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies
that the Government Tells Us
by Jesse Ventura with Dick Russell
Skyhorse Publishing, 2011, paperback
Albert Einstein
A foolish faith in authority is the worst
enemy of truth.
px
Government is nothing but people, and people lie, especially where
money and power are concerned.
pxi
William Burroughs
Paranoia is having all the facts.
pxiii
There is a CIA operative inside every state government.
pxx
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. It's disheartening, to realize that what you
read in the newspapers and the history books may not be accurate.
p11
Franklin D. Roosevelt
The liberty of a democracy is not safe
if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point
where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself.
That, in its essence, is Fascism--ownership of government by an
individual, by a group or by any controlling private power.
p12
FDR, after getting elected in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression,
started implementing his New Deal. He took on the stock speculators
and set up new watchdog agencies. He put a stop to farm foreclosures,
and made employers accept collective bargaining by the unions.
And he took the country off the gold standard, meaning that more
paper money could be available to create jobs for the unemployed
and provide loans. That outraged some of the conservative financiers...
the oligarchs of finance ... considered the new president a traitor
to his own class, namely them. Within a year of FDR's taking office,
they'd started hatching a plan to get rid of him.
p14
retired General Smedley Butler, in a speech to an American Legion
convention, 1931
I spent 33 years being a high-class muscle
man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short,
I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for
the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912.
I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American
oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic
for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and
Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect
revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American
republics for the benefit of Wall Street.
In China in 1927 I helped see to it that
Standard Oil went its way unmolested. I had a swell racket. I
was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions .... I might have
given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate
a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents.
p14
retired General Smedley Butler to a WWII veterans group
[War is] largely a matter of money. Bankers
lend money to foreign countries and when they cannot repay, the
President sends Marines to get it. I know--I've been in eleven
of these expeditions.
p16
former House of Representatives Speaker John McCormack, 1971
A well-organized minority can always outmaneuver
an unorganized majority.
p17
Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy
and Hope"
There does exist, and has existed for
a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates,
to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists
act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round
Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists,
or any other groups, and frequently does so.
p17
Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy
and Hope"
The Rhodes Scholarships, established by
the terms of Cecil Rhodes' seventh will, are known to everyone.
What is not so widely known is that Rhodes in five previous wills
left his fortune to form a secret society, which was to devote
itself to the preservation and expansion of the British Empire.
... [Funding of this organization later
came from groups] associated with J.P. Morgan, and the Rockefeller
and Whitney families.
... [The Council on Foreign Relations
(CFR) is] a front for J.P. Morgan and Company.
p18
Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy
and Hope"
[The goal of a cabal of global financiers
linked to J.P. Morgan and Company was] nothing less than to create
a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate
the political system of each country and the economy of the world
as a whole.
p18
Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy
and Hope"
[The goal of a cabal of global financiers
linked to J.P. Morgan and Company was] nothing less than to create
a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate
the political system of each country and the economy of the world
as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion
by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret
agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences.
Each central bank... sought to dominate its government by its
ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges,
to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and
to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards
in the business world.
... The American branch of this 'English
Establishment exerted much of its influence through five American
newspapers (the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the
Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, and the Boston
Evening Transcript).
p18
The wealthiest CEOs of the world have been coming together [Bilderberg
Group] with the political elite from Europe and America since
1954, when they first met at the Bilderberg Hotel in a little
Dutch town called Oosterbeek. The Bilderberg deep pockets reach
back centuries, to royalty who still believe they're the entitled
ones and the rest of us are merely cannon fodder.
p19
In 2007, an American investigative journalist named John Buchanan
found documents from the [congressional] McCormack-Dickstein Committee
in the National Archives. These directly linked Prescott Bush
[father of George HW Bush] to the power brokers (Morgan, DuPont,
Remington, and others) who were behind the plan to get rid of
FDR. This got some play in the U.K., but not a word in the mainstream
American press.
p19
Kevin Phillip's book on the Bush family "American Dynasty"
We have no reliable way of knowing exactly
why, after 1933, men like Averell Harriman, George Walker, and
Prescott Bush, the Dulles brothers, James Forrestal, Henry Ford,
and several Rockefellers, maintained investment relationships
with Hitler's Germany, in a few cases up to (and even after) Pearl
Harbor.
p39
journalist Carl Bernstein in a Rolling Stone article "The
CIA and the Media", 1977, showed how strongly mainstream
news organizations were tied to the CIA
By far the most valuable ... associations,
according to CIA officials have been with the New York Times,
CBS and Time Inc... Over the years, the [CBS] network provided
cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign
correspondent and several stringers... A high-level CIA official
with a prodigious memory says that the New York Times provided
cover for about ten CIA operatives between 1950 and 1966.
p42
journalist Carl Bernstein in a Rolling Stone article "The
CIA and the Media", 1977, showed how strongly mainstream
news organizations were tied to the CIA
[Joseph] Alsop is one of more than 400
American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly
carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according
to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Journalists provided
a full range of clandestine services--from simple intelligence-gathering
to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries.
p43
When Oliver Stone's movie "JFK" came out in 1991, the
strongest attacks came from news outlets and journalists with
the longest records of error and obstruction in defense of the
flawed Warren Commission inquiry.
p47
Many of our public figures who've been killed--John Lennon, Malcolm
X, and Dr. King--all seem to be under [US government] surveillance
first and then assassinated later.
p54
In 1999, the [Martin Luther] King family brought a wrongful death
lawsuit in a Tennessee Circuit Court. A nearly month-long trial
ensued. Seventy witnesses were called. It took the jury only two
and a half hours to come back with a verdict that Dr. King was
assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own
government.
p55
The FBI director [J Edgar Hoover[ had a series of meetings with
persons involved with the CIA and military intelligence (MI) in
the three weeks before [Martin Luther] King's assassination ...
there were MI agents as well as Green Berets in Memphis the night
he was shot.
p60
The Army's 111th Military Intelligence (MI) Group was keeping
[Martin Luther] King under round-the-clock surveillance during
the garbage strike in Memphis [in the] spring of 1968. One of
the MI guys, Marrell McCollough, was undercover with the Memphis
police--and ... was also involved in the planning sessions for
the assassination.
... [MLK family attorney William F] Pepper's
investigation found that McCullough went on to work for the CIA
in the 1970s.
p65
Robert Kennedy in a speech in the U.S. Senate, May 9, 1966
A revolution is coming--a revolution which
will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care
enough; successful if we are fortunate enough--but a revolution
is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character;
we cannot alter its inevitability.
p92
In order to climb the ladder of the two political parties in our
current system, you have to condone their corruption... most people,
when they initially start in politics, are good people. They come
into the system wanting to do their job, to change things. But
the longer you stay in the system, the more corrupt you become.
p98
Dan Mitrione [was] an FBI agent and full-time spook operating
undercover with the Agency for International Development (AID).
Mitrione trained Latin American cops in interrogation techniques
that included the use of torture and drugs.
p98
Dan Mitrione [was] an FBI agent and full-time spook operating
undercover with the Agency for International Development (AID).
Mitrione trained Latin American cops in interrogation techniques
that included the use of torture and drugs.
In 1970, he was taken hostage and murdered
by Uruguay's Tupamaros guerrillas. [People's Temple
Reverend Jim] Jones admitted having stayed friends with Mitrione.
He even referred to him several times in taped speeches at Jones
town.
The CIA claimed after Jonestown that its
file on "the Rev. Jimmie Jones" was almost empty. Actually,
the CIA's Office of Security had opened a 201-file on Jones in
the early 1960s, when he took off for Rio de Janeiro. Agency records
showed that file stayed open for ten years, only being closed
for no explained reason after Mitrione was killed. So it seems
pretty likely that Mitrione had recruited Jones into the CIA,
using the Department as his cover.
p114
More than 700,000 of America's estimated 20 million pot-smokers
got arrested in 2008. About half of the 200,000 inmates in our
federal prisons are in there for drug-related offenses. Between
1970 and 2007, we saw a 547 percent increase in our prison population,
mainly because of our drug policies... [In] the new prison-industrial
complex, corporations are now running the show. We as taxpayers
shell out $68 billion every year for prisons, and a lot of that
ends up going into private contractors' pockets.
p114
About half of the 200,000 inmates in our federal prisons are in
there for drug-related offenses.
p114
American banks are collectively the world's largest financial
beneficiary of the drug trade.
p114
The heroin epidemic that ravaged our cities during the fifties
and sixties originated with the CIA out of Southeast Asia. Almost
from the moment of their founding in 1947, the CIA was giving
covert support to organized drug traffickers in Europe and the
Far East, and eventually the Middle East and Latin America. During
the Vietnam War, heroin was being smuggled into this country in
the bodies of soldiers being flown home.
p115
Toward the end of American involvement over there in 1975 [Vietnam],
a former Green Beret named Michael Hand arranged a 500-pound shipment
of heroin from Southeast Asia's "Golden Triangle" to
the U.S. by way of Australia. That's where Hand had set up shop
as vice chair of the Nugan Hand Bank, which was linked by the
Australian Narcotics Bureau to a drug smuggling network that "exported
some $3 billion [Australian] worth of heroin from Bangkok prior
to June 1976. Several CIA guys ... used the Nugan Hand bank to
channel funds for covert operations. By 1979, the bank had 22
branches in 13 countries and $1 billion in annual business.
p116
In the mid- 1980s, [Oliver] North got together with four companies
that were owned and operated by drug dealers, and arranged payments
from the State Department for shipping supplies to the [Nicaraguan]
Contras.
... What became known as the Iran-Contra
affair came to light in November 1986. We were selling arms to
Iran, breaking an arms embargo, in order to fund the contras.
p119
The Reagan-Bush gang is gone, and Clinton is now president. [In]
1996 the San Jose Mercury News came out with a remarkable 20,000-word
series by reporter Gary Webb that he'd been researching for more
than a year. It described a pipeline between Colombian cartels,
middlemen, and street gangs in South Central L.A. that involved
tons of crack cocaine... The crack was being funneled to a young
new-millionaire named "Freeway" Ricky Donnell Ross,
who supplied it to the Crips and Bloods and beyond... How involved
was the CIA in the crack epidemic then raging across our country?
p121
The CIA is into drugs ... because they can get money to operate
with, and not have to account to Congress for what they're doing.
p121
[The Bank of Credit and Commerce International] BCCI ... was involved
in drug-money transactions ... ClA Director [William] Casey was
relying on BCCI to distribute American assistance to the Afghan
mujahideen who were fighting the Russians at the time. Except
most of the aid went to the faction controlled by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,
who was probably the leading heroin trafficker in the world. Pakistani
president Muhammad Zia in 1983 let local traffickers put their
drug profits into BCCI.
... BCCI was the seventh biggest bank
on the planet when it collapsed, shortly after the Soviets withdrew
their troops from Afghanistan.
p122
according the United Nations
Money made in illicit drug trade has been
bused to keep banks afloat in the global financial crisis.
p122
Dennis Dayle, a forms DEA agent in the Middle East, at an anti-drug
conference
In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement
Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations
almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.
p125
Beginning in the nineties, drug dealers in Mexico were taking
charge of half of Colombia's drug trade into the U. S.. While
Mexico used to be just the trans shipping point from South America,
now it was a major producer and distributor... between $19 billion
and $39 billion in proceeds from drugs heads back south [to Mexico]every
year from the U.S.
p125
[In Mexico] between December 2006 and the spring of 2009, more
than 10,780 people were killed. And most of the guns fueling the
violence are coming from the U.S.. About 87 percent of the firearms
that Mexican authorities have seized over the last five years
can be traced to here, many of them from gun shops and gun shows
in the Southwestern border states. And these are no longer simply
handguns, but now military-grade weaponry and very serious ordnance.
How come the manufacturers are not being held accountable for
selling these weapons over the border.
p143
John Farmer, a senior counsel for the 9/11 Commission who drafted
the original [9/11] report
At some level of the government, at some
point in time ... there was an agreement not to tell the truth
about what happened [on 9/11].
p43
Jesse Ventura
I am convinced that some people inside
our government knew the [9/11] 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.
p43
Jesse Ventura
I am convinced that some people inside
our government knew the [9/11] attack was going to happen and
allowed it to come to pass--because it furthered their political
agenda.
p144
NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] ... had been
ordered to stand down [on 9/11]. Then LAX [Los Angeles International
Airport] 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... [President] Bush ... was reading 'My Pet Goat' to the
school kids in Florida, so the only other person it could be was
Dick Cheney.
p144
September 11 [2001] 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
... 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.
p145
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... 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. And when the call
came into the Pentagon on 9/11, nobody answered the phone!
p145
According to the 9/11 Commission, [Vice-President Dick] Cheney
didn't arrive underground at the PEOC (Presidential Emergency
Operations Center) until almost 10 AM. [Transportation Secretary
Norman] 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, an Mineta recalled that a young man came 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.
p148
a firefighter who got dug out of the rubble on 9/11
The one thing that always troubled me
is, why were they in such a hurry to remove all the evidence?
Why did they take away everything from the site as fast and expediently
as possible?
p150
former air force fighter pilot Russ Wittenberg about what hit
the Pentagon on 9/11
We don't know what it was, but you can
tell what it wasn't [a 757 aircraft].
p150
Major General Albert Stubblebine, retired Commanding General of
the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command
I have had a lot of experience looking
at photographs. l don't know exactly what hit it [the Pentagon]
but I do know from the photographs I have analyzed, it was not
an airplane. For one thing, if you look at the hole that was made
in the Pentagon, the nose penetrated far enough so that there
should have been wing marks on the side [of the building.
... Whenever there's a plane crash, things
are strewn about. So where are the seats, the luggage? The wings,
vertical stabilizers, and engines were never fully recovered.
A number of parts to a 757 are pretty much indestructible, but
not a single piece has ever been positively identified as originating
with Flight 77.
p151
Colonel George Nelson, who during 30 years of service in the air
force served as an aircraft accident investigation board member.
With all the evidence readily available
at the Pentagon crash site, any unbiased, rational investigator
could only conclude that a Boeing 757 did not fly into the Pentagon
as alleged. In all my years of direct and indirect participation,
I never witnessed nor even heard of an aircraft loss, where the
wreckage was accessible, that prevented investigators from finding
enough hard evidence to positively identify the make, model, and
specific registration number of the aircraft--and in most cases
the precise cause of the accident.
p151
Colonel George Nelson, who during 30 years of service in the air
force served as an aircraft accident investigation board member.
With all the evidence readily available
at the Pentagon crash site, any unbiased, rational investigator
could only conclude that a Boeing 757 did not fly into the Pentagon
as alleged.
p154
The official story [of 9/11] is that, for the first time in history,
the black boxes were not recovered. Not from any of the four planes...
Also for the first time in history, no attempt was made to reconstruct
the planes with whatever parts they could find.
p154
After 9/11, not a single employee at the FAA or NORAD got punished.
In fact, all the major military men involved received promotions.
They included General Richard Myers, who was named Chairman of
the Joint Chiefs.
p156
Not one shred of evidence produced in a courtroom leads to the
conclusion that [Osama] bin Laden spearheaded [the attacks on
the WTC and Pentagon].
p164
Theodore Roosevelt, 1895
Too much cannot be said against the men
of wealth who sacrifice everything to getting wealth. There is
not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting
American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle,
bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only
to the basest uses.
p168
The Federal Reserve ... controls our monetary policy. By changing
the supply of dollars in circulation, they have influence over
interest rates, mortgage payments, whether the financial markets
boom or collapse, and basically whether our economy expands or
stumbles. But the Fed is only partly an institution of government.
The stockholders in a dozen different Federal Reserve banks in
different regions of the country are the big private banks.
The Federal Reserve was created by Congress
in 1913, after a financial panic that led to a secret meeting
at banker J.P. Morgan's private resort, off the coast of Georgia
at a place called Jekyll Island.
... What emerged was a cartel agreement
with five objectives: stop the growing competition from the nation's
newer banks; obtain a franchise to create money out of nothing
for the purpose of lending; get control of the reserves of all
banks so that the more reckless ones would not be exposed to currency
drains and bank runs; get the taxpayer to pick up the cartel's
inevitable losses; and convince Congress that the purpose was
to protect the public. It was realized that the bankers would
have to become partners with the politicians and that the structure
of the cartel would have to be a central bank.
p183
Henry Wallace, vice president of the United States, 1944
With a fascist the problem is never how
best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the
news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group
more money or more power. American fascism will not be really
dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists,
the deliberate poisoners of public information. They claim to
be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed
by the Constitution.
p201
George Orwell, 1984
In vast laboratories in the Ministry of
Peace, and in experimental stations, teams of experts are indefatigably
at work searching . ... for breeds of disease germs immunized
against all possible antibodies.
p202
Justice Department attorney John Loftus in his 1982 book "The
Belarus Secret"
Nazi germ warfare scientists came to America
[and] experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread
rare diseases... the US. tested some of these poison ticks on
the Plum Island artillery range off the coast of Connecticut during
the early 1950s.
... Plum Island was experimenting with
Lone Star ticks and the Cayenne tick, feeding them on viruses
and testing them on pigs in 1975 and 1976--exactly when Lyme disease
first showed up across from the island. At that time, the Lone
Star tick was otherwise only found in Texas. Nobody can explain
how it's happened to migrate all across the Eastern seaboard.
Along with its cousin, the deer tick, the Lone Star variety is
known for spreading Lyme disease.
... Germ labs like Plum Island pose a
bigger threat to our country than any terror group... Lyme disease
... is the fastest-growing infectious illness in America after
AIDS.
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