American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [5]
What I regard as the first of three stolen presidential elections in our recent history happened in 1980. That’s when Ronald Reagan’s people made a secret deal with Iran to delay the release of those 52 American hostages being held over there. This is known as the “October surprise,” because that’s what the Republicans were afraid President Carter might pull off—free the hostages and win a second term. Instead, George H.W. Bush and about-to-be CIA director William Casey, among others, arranged to supply Iran with weapons and unblock their assets in U.S. banks. In exchange, the hostages got to stay a little longer under house arrest. Doesn’t the timing of their release—twenty minutes after Reagan finished his Inaugural Address—kinda make you wonder? It sure did me, even at the time.
Next we’ll take a look at our government “on drugs.” At the same time Nancy Reagan was telling our kids to “just say no,” America’s backing of the Nicaraguan Contra movement was being funded mainly by cocaine traffickers and money-launderers. A report by the CIA’s own Inspector General finally confirmed this in 1998, and showed that the operation tracked straight into Oliver North’s office in Reagan’s National Security Council—though, once again, the major media pretty much ignored the story. Of course, the drug trade had been part and parcel of our involvement in the Vietnam War, just as it is today in Afghanistan. The CIA’s secret missions are all financed with drug money, because then they don’t have to account for it. It’s time to end this corruption once and for all, starting with legalization of marijuana!
You can’t talk politics since the millennium without delving into the conspiracies that resulted in George W. Bush stealing two elections. We all know the Supreme Court handed him the presidency in 2000, by stopping the recount in Florida. All but forgotten, though, are the illegal actions taken before the election by brother Jeb (then Florida’s governor) and Secretary of State Katherine Harris that deprived thousands of citizens of their right to vote. Not to mention the touch-screen voting machines, controlled by Republican bigwigs, that suddenly switched votes from Al Gore to Bush.
These machines perpetrated more widespread fraud in 2004. The exit polls and early vote counts showed John Kerry the clear winner in Ohio, until everything shifted around in the middle of the night. That’s when a computer expert named Michael Connell, a crony of Karl Rove’s, transmitted the vote count to private, partisan computer servers down in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Connell can’t tell us about it, though. He was killed in the crash of his private plane soon after the 2008 election, when he was on the verge of blowing the whistle. Many suspect foul play—surprise!
If the Bush-Cheney crowd could thieve elections and bump off potential tattlers, what about September 11? I never wanted to believe anything different than we were told about what happened on that terrible day. Even though, having been in the military, I wondered right away—where were our jets to intercept the four hijacked planes? How could our air defenses have failed so badly? Since then, I’ve done considerable research into the events surrounding 9/11. In 2008 I spent weeks on the road, where my investigative team and I conducted interviews with witnesses for the pilot episode I’d contracted to do of