American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [4]
One aspect I’ll be scrutinizing, when it comes to Oswald, is whether there were in fact two of them. This is one of the most intriguing parts of the case, because it clears up the fact that a number of witnesses saw Oswald in different places at the same time. It also raises some huge questions about how the military and the CIA might have been using Oswald—and a look-alike—in their intelligence games. The use of “doubles” is a classic intel modus operandi.
The assassinations of Malcolm X (1965) and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (1968) also are not what the official versions would have us believe. When Malcolm X was gunned down in New York’s Audubon Ballroom, it looked then like a clear case of a power struggle within the Black Muslims. The men convicted of the killing were all fanatic followers of Elijah Muhammad, from whom Malcolm had split away. We didn’t know at the time about COINTELPRO and other secret FBI programs actively disrupting civil rights organizations. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, it turns out, was extremely worried about an alliance between Malcolm and Martin. The night before his assassination, one of Malcolm’s murderers is said to have met with an FBI undercover agent. And the CIA was heavily involved with shadowing Malcolm’s every move.
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