American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [120]
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.
It’s about time people understand that, like anything in life, there’s more than one side to any story. This book presented an opportunity to tell the other sides to many stories and then say, you be the judge. Look at the big picture over time, and try to do so with clear judgment, without letting your emotions make the determination or your patriotism interfere.
I consider myself a patriot, loyal to the values that built this country that I served as best I could as a Navy SEAL, a mayor and a governor. But I’m outraged when I hear about people like Van Jones being dismissed from his government position for signing a petition calling for an unbiased investigation into 9/11. What is our country turning into, when you can’t dissent from any official opinion? That’s again why I felt so compelled to write this book, because it’s bigger than even these stories—bigger, in that we’re not allowed to talk about them, or criticize.
Also, we’ve got to have a more open government. Why can’t those 10,000 documents on Able Danger be released? The old excuse of “national security”? Shouldn’t there be some elected board that would say, “Okay, tell us why this falls under national security and we’ll make the determination whether it truly does, or is this simply a political cover-up?” When the government starts keeping too many secrets for us, that’s a big step on the road to losing more of our liberties.
I’m sure I’ll be attacked as the messenger disseminating this information. Well, it