The Yankee and Cowboy War

Carl Oglesby's The Yankee And Cowboy War is a one of those rare books that is unfortunately out of print but gives us insight into the machinations of the true power structures in this country. I have been able to find only bits and pieces of this work on the internet and would greatly appreciate it if anybody who reads this is able to find additional chapters. I am going to post the introduction here and will follow whenever possible with newly available portions. There is also a good article on Oglesby and the potential for the necessary 'best of the left and best of the right' paradigm smashing alliance piece by Bill Kauffman entitled When The Left Was Right. It will be necessary to build this alliance today in order to fight the fascist police state/war machine.

The Yankee and Cowboy War

by Carl Oglesby

1: Yankees and Cowboys: A Perspective on the Dallas-Watergate Decade

The assassination of John Kennedy and the downfall of Richard-Nixon have both been viewed as isolated moral disasters for American democracy: Kennedy's murder as a demonstration of our continuing national inability or unwillingness to cope with violence; Nixon's downfall as a demonstration of the failure of our democratic institutions to overcome the abuses of secret intelligence and electronic surveillance at the seat of national power.

But these two events represent neither isolated disasters nor a generalized failure of American institutions but something almost beyond the ability of ordinary people even to see, much less control. The two events - Dallas and Watergate - are actually concrete links in a chain of related and ominous events passing through the entire decade in which they occurred and beyond. And this chain of events itself represents only the violent eruptions of a deeper struggle of rival power elites identified here as Yankees and Cowboys.

This book proposes to show that Dallas and Watergate are intrinsically linked conspiracies in a hidden drama of coup and countercoup which represents the life of an inner oligarchic power sphere, and "invisible government," capable of any act in the pursuit of its objectives, that sets itself above the law and beyond the moral rule: a clandestine American state, perhaps an embryonic police state.

We see the expressions and symptoms of clandestine America in a dozen places now-the FBI's COINTELPRO scheme, the CIA's Operation Chaos, the Pentagon's Operation Garden Plot, the large-scale and generally successful attempts to destroy legitimate and essential dissent in which all the intelligence agencies participated, a, campaign whose full scope and fury are still not revealed. We see it in the ruthlessness and indifference to world, as well as national, opinion with which the CIA contracted its skills out to ITT to destroy democracy's last little chance in Chile. We see it as well, as this book argues, in the crime and coverup of Dealey Plaza, the crime and cover-up of Watergate.

How could the clandestine state have stricken us so profoundly? How could we - as we might have fancied, "of all people" - have given way with so little resistance, in fact with so little evident understanding of what was happening? What accounts for the way the various organs of state force-defense and security alike-became so divided - against each other? CIA-Intelligence against CIA-Operations, the CIA, the Pentagon, the FBI, and the presidency at one time or another against each other-what is this internal conflict all about? Why should the country's premier political coalition, formed after Reconstruction and reformed by Franklin Roosevelt, have begun to destabilize so badly in the 1960s and 1970s?

The intensification of clandestine, illicit methods against racial and antiwar dissent as a "threat" to the (secret) state precisely coincided with the intensified use of such methods in conflicts for power and hegemony taking place within the secret state, against a background of declining consensus.

This book proposes to show that Dallas and Watergate are intrinsically linked conspiracies in a hidden drama of coup and countercoup which represents the life of an inner oligarchic power sphere, and "invisible government," capable of any act in the pursuit of its objectives, that sets itself above the law and beyond the moral rule: a clandestine American state, perhaps an embryonic police state.

We see the expressions and symptoms of clandestine America in a dozen places now-the FBI's COINTELPRO scheme, the CIA's Operation Chaos, the Pentagon's Operation Garden Plot, the large-scale and generally successful attempts to destroy legitimate and essential dissent in which all the intelligence agencies participated, aa campaign whose full scope and fury are still not revealed. We see it in the ruthlessness and indifference to world, as well as national, opinion with which the CIA contracted its skills out to ITT to destroy democracy's last little chance in Chile. We see it as well, as this book argues, in the crime and coverup of Dealey Plaza, the crime and cover-up of Watergate.

The Dallas-to-Watergate outburst is fundamentally attributable to the breakdown taking place within the incumbent national coalition, the coalition of the Greater Northeastern powers with the Greater Southwestern powers, the post-Civil War, post-Reconstruction coalition, the coalition of the New Deal, of Yankees and Cowboys.

This is the theme, at bottom, of the entire narration to follow. The agony of the Yankees and the Cowboys, the "cause" of their divergence in the later Cold War period, is that there was finally too much tension between the militarist strategy of the Yankees in the Atlantic and the militarist strategy of the Cowboys in the Pacific. To maintain the two lines was, in effect, to maintain two separate and opposed realities at once, two separate and contradictory domains of world-historical truth. In Europe and the industrial world, the evident truth was that we could live with communism. In Asia and the Third World, the evident truth was that we could not, that we had to fight and win wars against it or else face terrible consequences at home.

As long as the spheres of detente and violence could be kept apart in American policy and consciousness, as long as the Atlantic and Pacific could remain two separate planes of reality wheeling within each other on opposite assumptions and never colliding, then American foreign policy could wear a look of reasonable integration. But when it became clear that the United States could not win its way militarily in the Third World without risking a nuclear challenge in the North Atlantic, the makings of a dissolving consensus were at hand.

I argue in Part Two of this book that the power-elite collision one sensed at Dallas on November 22, 1963, was real. It was no chance collision of a lone political maniac with a lone political star. It was a collision anchored in the larger social dialectic that propels the life of the national ruling elites. The conspiracy to kill JFK and the much larger conspiracy to keep official silence embodied this collision and had their being in this, the opposition of Yankee and Cowboy.

The lines of division became clear early in 1968 with the rapid crystallizing of a whole new front of opposition to the war, that of the "corporate liberals." Formerly, the established liberalism of the sort we associate with Xerox and Harvard had been inclined to defend the U.S. position in Vietnam as a part of its long-standing general commitment to anticommunism. The Yankee lights had made the usual arrangements to provide world banking services to a Free South Vietnam and take the oil from its waters, and it was always clear that there would be no serious objection from the Yankees as a whole if the Vietnam War turned out to be winnable.' But now in 1967-68 a new line of criticism of Johnson and his war policy opened up.

The war's costs had exploded out of all proportion to the original objective, one now heard. No vital American interests were being attacked or defended in Vietnam, after all. Europe was appalled at us. Our European alliances were suffering. Our young people were strenuously alienated. Our economy was hurting. Other problems were lying neglected. We needed to wrap up the bleeding stump and move to a better position. General James Gavin, for example, one of President Kennedy's chief military advisers, developed these and related ideas about the war in various public forums during that period.

But the strategy that was continued by Nixon in 1969 in the aftermath of the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations and Nixon's resultant reelection, was, of course, escalation - the secret air war, the invasion of the "sanctuaries" in Cambodia and Laos, the Christmas bombings, etc. But for a moment in 1968, Johnson had suddenly and strangely abdicated, stopped the bombing, and opened the Paris peace talks, and Robert Kennedy had assembled an electoral coalition reaching from Mayor Daley to the liberal peaceniks, if not Tom Hayden, a New-Politics style coalition that appeared easily capable of beating , the opposition of Yankee and Cowboy.

The lines of division became clear early in 1968 with the rapid crystallizing of a whole new front of opposition to the war, that of the "corporate liberals." Formerly, the established liberalism of the sort we associate with Xerox and Harvard had been inclined to defend the U.S. position in Vietnam as a part of its long-standing general commitment to anticommunism. The Yankee lights had made the usual arrangements to provide world banking services to a Free South Vietnam and take the oil from its waters, and it was always clear that there would be no serious objection from the Yankees as a whole if the Vietnam War turned out to be winnable.' But now in 1967-68 a new line of criticism of Johnson and his war policy opened up.

So whereas there had formerly appeared to be essential agreement at the top of the American power structure on the Vietnam question, now we had two "ruling-class" voices to account for, one demanding more military effort and insisting upon the necessity of the original objective, the other tiring of the frustrations and costs of the attempt, unwilling to sacrifice resources at a yet higher magnitude, and wanting to be free to worry about other things-oil, gold, the Middle East, Europe, the economy, and so on.

It was directly clear that there was a regional component to this difference. Of course there are major points that do not fit the Yankee/Cowboy curve. The West Coast Bank of America, for example, spoke throughout the period of maximum unrest over the war with an essentially liberal voice. And Fulbright is from Arkansas. But on balance, the souls most fervently desirous of decisive military measures to prevent a Communist takeover tended to argue from a Frontierist, China-Lobby kind of position, and the souls most calmly able to accept losses and pull back tended to argue from an Atlanticist, Council on Foreign Relations, NATO-haunted kind of position.

The Yankee/Cowboy split thus suggested itself as a not too simplistic way to indicate in swift, available terms the existence of a rich and complex rivalry, the general cultural disposition of its chief contending principals, and the jointly historical and mythic character of their struggle, commingling John Wayne fantasies with real bloodshed, real genocide.

The profile of these types is best suggested in the persons and relationship of corporate-banker/monopolist David Rockefeller and tycoon entrepreneur Howard-Hughes. An inquiry into their long rivalry is the first step in our exposition of Watergate in Part Three. But the spirit of Yankeeness is given off by many things besides the Chase Manhattan and of Cowboyness by many things besides the Hughes empire. Yankeeness is the Ivy League and Cowboyness is the NFL. Yankee is the exclusive clubs of Manhattan, Boston, and Georgetown. Cowboy is the exclusive clubs of Dallas and New Orleans, Orange County East and West. Yankee is the Council on Foreign Relations, the secret Round Table, Eleanor Roosevelt, Bundles for Britain, and at a certain point, the Dulles brothers and the doctrine of massive retaliation. Cowboy is Johnson, Connally, Howard Hunt and the Bay of Pigs team. Yankee is Kennedy, Cowboy is Nixon.

But I stress my purpose is not to name a concrete group of conspirators and assassins, though I do not doubt that the conspiracies I speak of are actual. My aim rather is to call attention to the persistence of Civil War splits in the current situation and to the historical ideological substance of the positions at play.

It must be often the case, as it was with me and the Yankee/Cowboy idea, that one's fresh insight turns out to be already well mapped and settled. I first proposed the Yankee/Cowboy references in early 1968 but wrote nothing of any account on the theme until a series of articles about Watergate for the Boston Phoenix in 1973 and 1974. A reader of one of those pieces informed me of the similarity of my views with those of Professor Carroll Quigley, a historian at Georgetown.

Quigley is the author of a huge book about the contemporary world, Tragedy and Hope, to which I will return in chapter two. I begin my debt to Quigley here by borrowing the following observation from his summary. Noting that since 1950 a "revolutionary change" has been occurring in American politics, Quigley says this transformation involves "a disintegration of the middle class and a corresponding increase in significance by the petty bourgeoisie at the same time that the economic influence of the older Wall Street financial groups has been weakening and been challenged by new wealth springing up outside the eastern cities, notably in the Southwest and Far West." He continues:

“These new sources of wealth have been based very largely on government action and government spending but have, none the less, adopted a petty-bourgeois outlook rather than the semi aristocratic outlook that pervades the Eastern Establishment. This new wealth, based on petroleum, natural gas, ruthless exploitation of national resources, the aviation industry, military bases in the South and West, and finally on space with all its attendant activities, has centered in Texas and southern California. Its existence, for the first. time, made it possible for the petty-bourgeois outlook to - make itself felt in the political nomination process instead of in the unrewarding effort to influence politics by voting for a Republican candidate nominated under Eastern Establishment influence.... By the 1964 elec¬tion, the major political issue in the country was the financial struggle behind the scenes between the old wealth, civilized and cultured in its foundations, and the new wealth, virile and uninformed, arising from the flowing profits of government-dependent corporations in the Southwest and West.” (Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966)

The whole point of introducing the Cowboy/Yankee language, of course, is to bring precisely that old money/ new money, Atlanticist-Frontierist tension into focus in the plane of current events. The main idea of looking at things this way is to see that a sectional rivalry, derived from the patterns of the Civil War, still operates in American politics, indeed that at the altitude of national power elites, it may be the most sensitive and inflamed division of all, more concentrated than race and class and more basic than two-party system attachments and ideologies. The argument of this book is that the emerging clash of Yankee and Cowboy wills beneath the visible stream of events is the dominant fact of real U.S. political life since 1960. The dissolution of the Yankee/ Cowboy consensus of World War II and the Cold War until 1960 is behind the Dallas of Kennedy and the Watergate of Nixon.

Let us go a step further with these types, Cowboy and Yankee, and sketch a first outline of the differing worlds they see.

The Yankee mind, of global scope, is at home in the great world, used to regarding it as a whole thing integrated in the far-flung activities of Western exploration, conquest, and commerce. The Yankee believes that the basis of a good world order is the health of America's alliances across the North Atlantic, the relations with the Western Democracies from which our tradition mainly flows. He believes the United States continues the culture of Europe and relates to the Atlantic as to a lake whose other shore must be secured as a matter of domestic priority. Europe is the key world theater, and it is self-evident to the Yankee mind that the fate of the United States is inevitably linked up with Europe's in a career of white cultural destiny transcending national boundaries: that a community of a unified world civilization exists, that there is such a thing as "the West," "One World."

The Cowboy mind has no room for the assumption that American and European culture are continuous. The Cowboy is moved instead by the discontinuity of the New World from the Old and substitutes for the Yankee's Atlantic-oriented culture a new system of culture (Big Sky, Giant) oriented to an expanding wilderness Frontier and based on an advanced Pacific strategy.

The Yankee monopolists who first broke faith with the goal of military victory in Vietnam did so in view of what they saw as the high probability of failure and the certain ambiguity of success. The Cowboy entrepreneurs who fought hardest to keep that faith alive did so out of conviction of the necessity of success. Said the multicorporate-liberal Yankee (about 1968): "The United States cannot wage a whining nonnuclear land campaign in Asia. It will destroy its much more essential relations in Europe if in spite of all wisdom its leadership continues to siphon off precious national blood and treasure to win this war. It is necessary to stand down." Said the Cowboy: "Only the strong are free."

The distinction between the East Coast monopolist and the Western tycoon entrepreneur is the main class-economic distinction set out by the Yankee/ Cowboy perspective. It arises because one naturally looks for a class-economic basis for this apparent conflict at the summit of American power. That is because one must assume that parties without a class economic base could not endure struggle at that height. It is then only necessary to recall that antiwar feeling struck the Eastern Establishment next after it struck the students, the teachers, and the clergy-struck the large bank-connected firms tied into the trans-Atlantic business grid. During the same period, industrial segments around the construction industry, the military-industrial complex, agribusiness, the Southern Boom of the sixties and seventies, and independent Texas/ Southwest oil interests-i.e., the forces Quigley calls "new wealth"-never suffered a moment of war-weariness. They supported the Texan Johnson and the Southern Californian Nixon as far as they would go toward a final military solution. (See Steve Weissman and Steve Johnson, Ramparts, August 1974)

Why should this difference have arisen? After a century of Northeastern leadership, and one-quarter century of Cold War unity, why should the national ruling coalition of the old and new owning classes, Yankee and Cowboy, have begun pulling apart? But then we have to go back: What was the basis of their unity to begin with?

William Appleman Williams deals with a variation of this question when he argues that the basis for the long-term general (or "pluralist") coalition of the forces of capitalism (or "plutocracy") with the forces of democracy in American politics is the constant companionship of the expanding wilderness frontier. Williams thus stands the Turner Frontier on its head, correcting it. (William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, 1959)

I add that another and cognate effect of the frontier in American economic development was to preserve the entrepreneurial option long after the arrival of the vast monopoly structures which tend to consume entrepreneurs. In the states whose political-economic histories Marx studied, for example, the frontier was never the factor that it was in America, except as America itself was Europe's Wild West. The rugged individualist self-made rich man, the autonomous man of power, the wildcatter, began to drop out of sight, to lose presence as individual, type, and class, with the rise of the current-day computer-centered monopoly-corporate formations. The tycoon-entrepreneur is of course disappearing as a type in America too, at least as a political force in national life. The Hughes empire, at last, has been corporatized. Old man Hunt is dead. His sons are bringing Harvard Business School rational bureaucracy to the operation. But that only makes it all the more curious that political power continued to emanate from the type and the person, the image and the reality, the ghost perhaps, of a creature like Hughes as late as the second victorious presidential campaign of Nixon. Why should the Cowboy tycoon have persisted so long as a political force, competent to struggle against the biggest banking cartels for control of the levers of national power?

As others have argued, the Frontier was a reprieve for democracy. We may note here that it was also a reprieve for capitalism as well, whose internal conflicts were constantly being financed off an endless-seeming input of vast stretches of natural riches, having no origin in capitalist production. All that was needed was for the settlers to accept the genocidal elimination of the native population and a great deal became possible-the purple mountains, the fruited plains. And generation after generation of American whites were able to accept that program. The Indian wars won the West. The railroads and highways were laid. The country was resettled by a new race, a new nation.

Energies of expansion consumed the continent in about two centuries, pushing on to Hawaii and Alaska. There is no way to calculate the impact of that constant territorial expansion on the development of American institutions.

There is no way to imagine those institutions apart from the environment created by that expansion. It is a matter our standard national hagiography paints out of the picture, though we make much of the populist-saga aspect of the pioneering (never "conquering") of the West. How can we congratulate our national performance for its general democracy and constitutionalism without taking into account the background of that constant expansion? We do not teach our children that we are democrats in order to expand forever and republicans on condition of an unfrozen western boundary with unclaimed wilderness. To the extent that the American miracle of pluralism exists at all, we still do not know how miraculous it would be in the absence of an expanding frontier, its constant companion till the time of the Chinese revolution.

The war in Asia has its internal American origin in the native reflex to maintain the Western Frontier on the old terms and to do so at all cost, since our whole way of life hinges on the Frontier. What the late-blooming Yankee liberal critics of the Vietnam war refused to hear and recognize between the lines of the prowar arguments of the more philosophical Cowboy hawks was this essential point about the importance of Frontier expansion in American life from the beginning.

In the nature of things, the American Frontier continued to expand with the prosperity it financed. Now, in our generation, it has brought us to this particular moment of world confrontation across the Pacific, fully global in scale for both sides, fully modern in its technological expression far both sides - the old Westward-surging battle for space projected onto the stage of superpowers.

The success and then the successful defense from 1950 to 1975 of the Asian revolutionary nationalist campaigns against further Western dominance in Asia-China, Korea, Vietnam-means that all that is changed. What was once true about the space to the west of America is no longer true and will never be true again. There will never be a time again when the white adventurer may peer over his western horizon at an Asia helplessly plunged in social disorganization. In terms of their social power to operate as a unified people and in the assimilation of technology, the Chinese people are, since 1950, a self-modernizing people, not colonials any more. And instead of a Wild West, Americans now have a mature common boundary with other moderns like ourselves, not savages, not Redskins, not Reds, only modern people like ourselves in a single modern world. This is new for us, a new experience for Americans altogether.

Our national transformation from an unbounded to a bounded state will of course continue to stir the internal furies. No one interpretation of the event will be able to establish itself. No one will agree what the end of the Frontier means, what it will lead to, what one ought to do about it. But all will agree that it is upon us and past, whether it is called one thing or another. And now after Vietnam, as though it were not clear enough before, it is apparent beyond any possibility of doubt that whatever this force of Asian self-modernization is, whether it is evil br good or beyond good and evil, it is assuredly not a force that United States policy-makers can manhandle and manipulate and hold back through diplomatic chicanery and military force. Even if it were still advisable for the United States to stop "the march of Asian communism," if that is what we are really talking about, it is not possible for the United States to do that. Look and see: China, Korea, Vietnam.

I have not written this book to say at the end, choose sides between Cowboy and Yankee for Civil War II. My less bloody belief is that ordinary people all over the map, Northeast by Southwest, have a deep, simple, and common need to oppose all these intrigues and intriguers, whatever terms one calls them by and however one understands their development. But this need of course must be recognized, and that is why I write: to offer an analysis of the situation of domestic politics from the standpoint of power-elite collisions taking place at the top, and then, at the end, to suggest that democracy's first response must be to demand a realistic reconstruction of the assassination of President Kennedy. To comprehend his murder (as with the murder of Lincoln) is to comprehend a very basic event in the history of American government, as well as the crimes that came after it. The comprehension of these covert political actions is the absolute precondition of self-government, the first step toward the restoration of the legitimate state.

More broadly I write to say that we are the American generations for whom the frontier is the fact that there is no more frontier and who must somehow begin to decide how to deal with this.

What shall America do about the loss of its wilderness frontier? Can we form our nation anew, on new, non-expansionist terms without first having to see everything old swept violently away? The unarticulated tension around, that question undermined the long-standing Yankee/Cowboy coalition and introduced, with President Kennedy's assassination, the current period of violent and irregular movement at the top of the power hierarchy. It is the precipitous and at the same time unfocused character of this question of the closed, lost frontier that has created such a challenge, such a threat, to traditional American values and institutions, the threat of a cancerously spreading clandestine state within.

Jesse Ventura on American Conspiracies

“We are, excuse my French, in deep shit today because of this head-in-the sand mentality”


-Jesse Ventura

I have always liked Jesse Ventura. His improbable election as Minnesota Governor has to be one of the greatest political stories of our time. Never mind the much more celebrated Republican gangster backed dirty takedown of  California Governor Gray Davis that installed a tough guy movie stare by the name of Arnold Schwarzenegger in Sacramento That was a well plotted and extremely well executed coup against a sitting Governor. Jesse Ventura was legitimately elected and his bombastic and it was his outspoken, principled style of governance that made Ventura stand out. Well versed in flamboyant performances from his former careers as a wrestler and actor he went from politics to the punditry before MSNBC cancelled his show due to his opposition to the policies of the Bush-Cheney Axis of Evil. Ventura was shown the gate along with Phil Donahue as the nation was duped into following the plans of the Project For The New American Century and their hunger for global domination in the aftermath of the false flag ‘terrorist’ attacks of September 11, 2001 which have been used as the rationale to transform what was once "the land of the free and the home of the brave" into a militarist, fascist police state of cowards, rats and quislings.

Ventura has always been that which is most hated in the doomed lemming colony that is  post-9/11America - an independent thinker not afraid to tell it like it is. Ventura is also a man whose patriotism can’t be impugned by the demagoguery of the chickenhawk neocon fascist filth that passes for purveyors of political discourse in this country because unlike the cowards with their multi-million dollar cable and radio media contracts he is a U.S. military veteran who served with honor in Vietnam. The buckets of sleaze typically used by the stooges in the pocket media that are used to electronically tar and feather anyone who has dared to either question the official government conspiracy theories or even worse, tell the truth about this long-ago rotted throughout system don’t apply to Jesse Ventura. Sure, there are the standard snide accusations by the bullshit artists who serve the oligarchy that he is crazy but his heroic service to the country while a member of the U.S. Navy’s Underwater Demolition Team pretty much rules out the sort of cowardly brutality that brought down guys like Gary Webb or more recently the horrific mass bludgeoning of poor old Helen Thomas. It still sickens me to think of that courageous old woman whose flesh was picked from her aging bones from the vultures jackals in the state controlled media to the delight of all of the elite politico snobs whose tickets have been punched by their eagerness to kowtow to power while their morality has been checked at the door of one of those D.C. cocktail parties that they so enjoy. Ventura has gravitas and brass balls but it is still more than a wee bit amazing for a nationally known personality to actually get any play whatsoever by researching the cherished pejorative “conspiracy theories” and to be allowed to get away with it. Jesse Ventura not only pulls it off but has to the amazement of those of us who understand how the system really works actually has been increasing his visibility.

I am writing this piece to comment on American Conspiracies, the book that Ventura wrote along with Dick Russell that should be a shot across the bow of those responsible for all of the rottenness in this country since at least the day that President John F. Kennedy was  gunned down in cold blood, like an animal in a public spectacle for daring to threaten the interests of the scum that actually run this place. Coming on the heels of his successful seven episode run of the Tru TV program Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura the book is an easily digested, wide ranging examination of a number of the more prominent and flagrant actions of the shadow government. By easily digested, I in no way intend to demean the actual writing as something less than intellectual, it’s just that when researching these sort of things (as I do) one runs into some very difficult data to break down, convoluted and deep texts that would overwhelm novices. Ventura’s book is not one of those tomes and it should be a valuable resource for all who question just how it is that the United States of America has become a fascist, war-crazed, corrupt and polluted empire of avarice, immorality and destitution in 2010. This book is a great jumping off point for more in depth research and should if nothing else be either a confirmation or an eye opener that something has gone seriously wrong here in the Homeland.

To excerpt from Ventura’s opening section:

Let’s start out by defining what a conspiracy is. My 2,347 – page Webster’s New Universal Unabridged Dictionary says: “a planning and acting together secretly, especially for an unlawful or harmful purpose, such as murder or treason.” Synonyms include plot, cabal, connivance, collusion. Hard to swallow? Thin of the Roman senators who knocked off Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. But I guess we’ve come a long way since then, right? Think Operation Northwoods, circa 1962. We’ll get to that in due course – Seven Days in May, that novel about a military takeover during the Kennedy years, wasn’t far off the mark.

In America, it is the ultimate heresy to dare to question the official line. There are always operatives and ambitions tools, lackeys and stooges eager to slap the “tin foil hatter” tag on those who dare to ask the forbidden questions. During the nearly five years of my time spent writing on co-called liberal and progressive blogs the condemnations were many and scornful by those who didn’t want to tolerate any questioning  ofthe big lie of the American Reichstag Fire that was 9/11. To embrace such audacious forms of thought was feared and censored lest many of the sellouts ricked their chance to be associated with their Democrat party saviors as mouthpieces once they regained political power. I learned some things while writing and hanging with those people, you will be crucified for daring to speak on a number of subjects, one being the false flag event that took down the World Trade Center and implemented the always strong undercurrent of fascism in this society, another would be daring to question the intentions of our special friends in Israel, their complicity in domestic spying, the bullying, intimidation and harassment by the Israeli fifth column in America and the skewed media coverage of all things Israel here in America. I am going to leave that entire topic for another time but it sets off the now typical accusations of anti Semitism and blog-swarms and beatdowns are used as a standard tactic at most of the larger ‘left’ blogs. There are of course some exceptions but I have yet to have posted anywhere that the chilling effects of self-censorship aren’t felt. The inability to get the truth out in this flag-swaddled lemming colony is maddening futile and has driven many a good writer to walk away out of frustration. I did it for awhile and more notably the great Paul Craig Roberts, a true conservative and a principled man who chose loyalty to country over party and ideology during the early years of the Bushreich.

While there has been some great progress in getting out the truth (thank God that we still have the internet),  the poisonous hydra that is the American gangster state continues to reconfigure, regenerate and counter any progress with disinformation, buying off those who are for sale with the lure of access and the prominence of being a house pet for the establishment in places like Howard Kurtz’s insipid Washington Post media notes column.Therefore it is easier to slander, harass, suppress and inevitably exile completely. Take for example the vaunted 'liberal' cyber Mecca that is Daily Kos, a brutal form of repression exists there and over the years a good many have been denounced with much savagery for essentially bringing up inconvenient topics that could alienate the deep-pocketed Democratic establishment talent scouts. I find Markos Moulitsas-Zuniga and his ilk to be about as left-wing as Stalin, not to single out his place alone but as the old saying goes, the baboon that climbs the highest tree tends to show more ass and just because McDonalds is the largest restaurant chain on the planet it doesn't mean that it is necessarily good for you to eat there so to me it is a fitting analogy for most of the so-called "A list" liberal/progressive blogs. While there have been great strides made towards exposing the long-running criminality in this country since the advent of the internet, it is under siege and it is only a matter of time until this wonderful resource is censored as well. When the Orwellian foot stomping up and down on a human face inevitably comes to take away most of the internet it will be under the guise of national security as such crackdowns always are. The increasingly vile and treasonous Senator Joseph Lieberman and his cronies have been working tirelessly for years to justify the great suppression of discourse and learning that is necessary for the fascist cancer to reach the next stage, and that will be open tyranny. There is a Lieberman attempt to give whoever happens to be the president the power to use an internet “Kill Switch” and this must be fought no matter what the cost because when the ability to publish the truth is gone then hope will be gone as well. The technologies to suppress the internet along with the total surveillance society have already been beta-tested in China and the implemention is imminent here in Der Heimat.

But I digress…

American Consipracies, while far from being the comprehensive documentation of the longtime operation of the dark networks that are driving driving policy and that have existed in this land while operating out of open view is nonetheless offers a very good synopsis. The book covers the Banker Plot, the four 1960's political assassinations that shook the country, Watergate and the CIA's war on Nixon, mind control and the Jonestown massacre, the three stolen elections that ensured that the Bush family would openly rule over the country for 20 years, the complicity of the government or more appropriately elements of the government in the illegal narcotics trade, the big lie of 9/11, Wall Street's rigged game and the ongoing transformation of the U.S. into a fascist dictatorship where no rights to privacy will be respected much less tolerated. I will elaborate on a few of these but due to space and time constraints as well as the overwhelming amount of material I will be unable to go into too much depth at this time on any specific chapter.

“I spent 33 years in the Marines. Most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism.”



- General Smedley D. Butler


No serious attempt to examine the modern American fascist state can omit the historical context that is necessary to adequately explain our current level of deterioration. Mr. Ventura comes out of the gate with that extremely important yet completely subverted piece of our history that is the plot to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt for his challenge of the establishment elite with his New Deal policies. Ventura cites Jules Archer's book The Plot to Seize the White House as his introduction to this suppressed but vitally important tale. With many of the nation's leading industrialists, finance oligarchs and the big business interests standing to lose much due to the policies of the traitor to his class, it became imperative to those whose foremost loyalty was to money rather than country take preemptive action. These were sort of men who so openly worshipped the fascist regime of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini that he was featured in a fawning article in Fortune Magazine. The wealthy elite had no problems in assisting Hitler either and the complicity of major American corporations and Wall Street bankers in building the Nazi war machine is well documented albeit not well known. The decision was made that Roosevelt be brought to heel and that the putsch (known as The Business Plot) be led by a well-respected military man who would have the credibility with the forces that would be assembled for a march  on Washington and settled on General Smedley D. Butler. Butler's popularity came from his years of service in the military where he was the most decorated Marine in American history as well as his support for the Bonus Army. Butler was approached but his loyalty to the concept of American democracy far outweighed any amount of money or power that the traitors could give to him. He gathered information on the plotters and blew the whistle on the whole thing. They had attempted to recruit the wrong man, Butler's disillusionment with big money using the military to plunder resources and put down legitimate governments had driven him to write his famous tract War Is A Racket in which he proclaimed that:

"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses."

While Butler's honorable exposure of the planned coup busted up that particular component of the racket, he was dismissed and ridiculed by the sycophants and lackeys of power in the press. The Congressional panel that investigated the plot, The McCormack-Dickstein Commitee as is typical when there are threats to the establishment (Warren Commission, Kean Committee) pretty much whitewashed the entire matter while the plotters were let off the hook lest the real owners of America be exposed.

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence--on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.



- President John F. Kennedy

On the Kennedy, King and Malcolm X assassinations, it is far too much to take any sort of an in-depth look at any of those extremely complex and societal altering events in this particular piece. Mr. Ventura does not provide any new information but does a service a service by challenging the official government conspiracy theories which are protected by a media firewall. It is impossible to over emphasize the importance of the state-sanctioned murders of these four men and the altering of the trajectory of history in their aftermath. It was these four killings that provided cleared the path for the rise of American fascism and the militarizing of society. With the festering wound that is the Vietnam war still influencing American politics and being used by a cynical network of operatives to rub salt into the never healed wounds of the embittered it must be noted that all four of these leaders posed a threat to the establishment in that they would end the war years and thousands of deaths much earlier than the blood barters and moneychangers would have desired.

When the country’s four most socially conscious, liberal and moral voices are all silenced within a span of several years that alone is evident of something much greater than the ludicrous “lone nut” assassin theories that are accepted at face value by a dumbed down, in denial nation rendered incapable of critical thinking and obsessed with fear and bling bling. Lee Harvey Oswald, Sirhan Sirhan, and James Earl Ray were patsies, just as certainly as the box-cutter armed Muslims who were allegedly able to board four jetliners on September 11, 2001, circumvent the national air defense system and fly the planes with such great skill, precision and dare-deviltry that even seasoned military veteran pilots would be in awe into their targets were. That Americans swallow this malarkey hook, line and sinker is indicative of the successful indoctrination programs in the educational system and the mass media in producing lemmings incapable of critical thinking; a reverse master race if you would, only one that perfectly serves the needs of the oligarchy and the Empire. The four assassinations, well-planned, impeccably carried out and successfully covered up are the raw essence of how this system of interlocking networks that serve powerful interests really works once the false veneer of star spangled, revisionist history myth of American exceptionalism is stripped away. Historically, this is the way that every Empire works, troublesome meddlers like the Kennedy's and King are simply and expediently done away with and potentially dangerous rebels like X are put down like rabid dogs. It is no different here and no different today, only the means have changed. The Sixties assassinations were crude, much in the same way that the Nazis methods were crude, it is no longer necessary to engage in such ugly and barbaric forms of eliminationism when a simple campaign of character assassination can be conducted in a propagandized media. Troublemakers are eliminated much more efficiently courtesy of a myriad of sexual scandals that are broadcast by a media propaganda machine that would give Joseph Goebbels a hard-on. There is always the ability to manufacture dirt on those who threaten the system, a massive and unlawful high tech system of surveillance combined with the ages old trick of sexual seduction are a powerful combination and just as effective as a bullet through the brain minus the messy cleanups conducted by commissions put together to spackle a coat of whitewash over it all. And for the others, there are always the fortuitously convenient accidents (especially small plane crashes), heart attacks, strokes or other mishaps that ensure Joseph Stalin's maxim that "death solves all problems, no man, no problem".

"But what's important in this whole thing is that our policy has always been consistent..."

-Oliver North

Another chapter of American Conspiracies deals with a taboo but incredibly important subject and that is the long running involvement of the American establishment in the illegal drug trade. First and foremost the important thing to remember about the fake moral argument against drugs is entirely bogus in that in America the most socially damaging drug, alcohol is completely legal and available to everyone cheaply. Another extremely addictive and dangerous drug (at least in long term health care terms), nicotine is also legal and available to all. Of course the government is able to reap the benefits from taxing both of these drugs (in the case of the lung darts the taxes are skyrocketing and this is an extremely regressive form of taxation) so there is much hypocrisy in the illegality of marijuana, narcotics and other drugs. The dirty secret is that narcotics is a currency in the domain of the shadow government and the benefits of associated money laundering drug profits are big business to corrupt American banks. The entire war on drugs is as much a fraud as the phony war on terror and the benefits to the massive for profit prison system by enforcing draconian drug laws and militarizing police has created a mammoth industry in America to ensnare non-violent offenders, feed them into a carnivorous judicial system always looking for fresh meat, turn them into revenue streams for large corporations and allow for the big boys to profit by picking and choosing winners in the global drug trade.

Ventura speaks of the hypocrisy and wastefulness of the American drug war but also provides a bit of historical context on how the use of drugs has been used to generate profits for covert operations that can then be kept off of the books in a way to circumvent Congress. There is some mention of the historical fact that during World War II that the OSS (later to become the CIA) recruited gangsters and drug traffickers the likes of Charles 'Lucky' Luciano with his Sicilian connections to assist in the war effort. The name of this effort was Operation Underworld and Jewish kingpin Meyer Lansky was also involved, this is notable due to Lansky's ongoing involvement with the shadow government, up to and after his organizaton's ouster from Cuba during the revolution that put Fidel Castro into power. An interesting name that is not only connected to Lansky but also to much of the seedier aspects of the intelligence-organized crime connections that had worked to use the illegal drug trade to finance what were ostensibly anti-Communist black operations but in reality were conducted for the benefit of the ruling class is a man named Paul Helliwell, another connected OSS old boy. Helliwell is notable for running air transport companies with connections to narcotic trafficking as well as a player in the anti-Castro cabal that included such other players as Howard Hunt, Ted Shackley and Thomas Clines.

The early alliances with Syndicate and global drug trafficking figures continued to metastasize throughout the system during the Vietnam war where many of the shadow government figures who had earlier worked on the Cuba project were sent. During the war the black ops specialists were integral figures in the Southeast Asian drug trade in the Golden Triangle. Ventura doesn't spend much time on all of this which is completely understandable due to the convoluted and secretive nature of the networks. Some more in-depth resources that can be of use in researching this history is Alfred McCoy's The Politics of Heroin, which is subtitled CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade and the works of  Peter Dale Scott, both of whom are experts in the study of the geopolitical implications of the deep state interaction with the illegal drug trade and I would strongly recommend them to anyone who happens to read this and who is interested in following up on learning how things really work as well as integral looks as the real history of the American Empire.

Mr. Ventura briefly discusses some of this history including refrences to two of the more notorious drug laundering banks that were used by U.S. intelligence (notably CIA) for doing business, Nugan Hand Bank and BCCI. Probably the most flagrant abuses of the system to use illegal narcotics to fund black operations came during the administration of the sainted Ronald Reagan who presided over one of the dirtiest and most out of control gang of thugs in U.S. history. Not that the Gipper probably knew much of what was going on, with his notorious incuriosity, his long career as a corporate pitchman turned extreme right avatar and his training as an actor he was the perfect front for the likes of Vice President and longtime CIA operator George H.W. Bush and shadow government operatives including Lt. Colonel Oliver North, William Casey and Richard Secord. With Reagan already doddering and slipping between fantasy and reality (likely the early stages of Alzheimer's disease) he was the textbook example of plausible deniability and his regime was filled with cowboys with no respect for the Constitution as well as an incubator for the neoconservatives who would play an integral part in the life changing event of 9/11.

Iran-Contra and Oliver North's involvement in illegal arms and narcotics trafficking to finance a dirty war in Latin American where tens of thousands were tortured and slaughtered to protect the interests of a corrupt oligarchy by U.S. backed terrorist death squads (that Reagan referred to as "freedom fighters" and had the audacity to compare to the Founding Fathers) is what Ventura focuses on. The audacity of the Oliver North operation was at best a deliberate flouting of American ideals and at worst an example of the institutionalized sort of wanton criminality that has been allowed to poison our democratic system ever since the successful coup d'etat that was executed when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Iran-Contra was the blueprint for the post-9/11 world of lawlessness, fascism, propaganda, corruption and immorality that will eventually prove to be a terminal cancer of the American system. Once the lid was blown off of Iran-Contra by reporter Robert Parry (who now runs the outstanding Consortium News website) and Brian Barger there was outrage and numerous Reagan administration officials including Ollie North were charged and convicted with crimes. There was intense opposition from shadow government figures who would decades later prove to be instrumental in the undermining of America from within during the George W. Bush regime, in order to counter the exposure of the gross violations of the law exposed during Congressional investigations there was a Minority Report produced defending the Iran-Contra criminals by a certain Dick Cheney along with his longtime enforcer David Addington.

The long-term societal implications of North and company's playing fast and loose with drugs and guns was manifested in the crack cocaine explosion which thanks to the work of the late investigative journalist Gary Webb with his legendary Dark Alliance series that ran in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996 was an offshoot of the support of the Contras. South Central Los Angeles street gangs and Columbian drug cartels were running an operation in which profits were channeled back to Reagan's "freedom fighters", which the CIA while not directly involved in the planning, control and distribution networks nonetheless protected the operation. The devastation wrought by the crack cocaine epidemic in America had a willing accomplice in the CIA and shadow government operations. Of course Webb had to be destroyed for even daring to write a story as potentially damning as this and destroyed he was, driven out of the profession and into disgrace by the full fury of a pocket media long manipulated by the CIA (see Operation Mockingbird and Carl Bernstein's 1977 expose The CIA and the Media), primarily the Washington Post. Webb, his ability to earn a living and reputation savagely destroyed by embeds masquerading as jounalists eventually was driven to suicide - that is if it is possible to shoot oneself twice in the head with a .38 caliber revolver. As Ventura puts it:

Well, you'd think Gary Webb should have gotten a Pulitzer. Instead, he got torn apart by the big media. In page-one articles, the Washington Post, New York Times, and LA Times insisted that the Contra-cocaine smuggling was minor, and that Webb was targeting the poor CIA, when he'd never said that the CIS, per se, was arranging the drug deals, only that it was protecting the Contra dealers.

Note is also given to the interesting fact that much of the Contra connected drug smuggling was being done at a small airport in Mena, Arkansas while a certain Bill Clinton was in the Governor's mansion (of course the establishment always takes care of it's own - see Arlen "the magic bullet" Specter among others) and that when drug smuggler Barry Seal was gunned down by the Medellin cartel that he had then Vice President George H.W. Bush's private phone number in his car. Also noted is the "good war" being conducted by the Democrats and President Barack Obama in Afghanistan is another extension of the octopus of corruption that encompasses the deep state and the global drug trade (see Peter Dale Scott's Afghanistan: Heroin Ravaged State) and begs the question of WHY are we really there? Forget the hokum about fighting the evil terrorists and al CIAda, the profits from drug money laundering are essential to the system and to maintaining the financial oligarchy. See recent stories from The Guardian: Drug Money Saved Big Banks in Financial Crisis and Bloomberg: Banks Financing Mexico Drug Gangs Admitted in Wells Fargo Deal. I couldn't agree more with Ventura when he states:

The hypocrisy of or federal drug policy has to be seen for what it is. When millions of dollars from illegal drug sales are bineg used to fund government agencies like the CIA and beign laundered through our leading banks, isn't it time to rethink this situation?

It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.



-Joseph Stalin

I give kudos to Ventura for writing about the three stolen Presidential elections of the past three decades (one, the Reagan coronation was technically more of a manipulation) in detail, too many are in denial over the election fraud that has taken place in what is falsely pimped off as the world's greatest democracy. While relegated to separate chapters, October Surprise: The First Stolen Election and The Stolen Elections of 2000, 2004 (and Almost 2008) the central theme is the disregard for the very concept of fair elections that is embodied in the fascist Republican party. Never has one American political party so exemplified an utter contempt for democracy, the Constitution, international law, economic fairness, human rights and even the most basic human dignity than the Republican party that rose to power with Reagan. It is vile, dispicable, racist, dishonest and corrupt in every manner and in 2010 with the ongoing obstructionism, the Stalinist purity purges and the virulent brand of  Christian white nationalist supremacy has evolved into something every bit as dangerous as Adolf Hitler's Nazi party. With the USA on the verge of economic and structural collapse due to years of Republican undermining of the pillars of a free society and the economic system that had once built the world's greatest middle class the disease of fascism is only becoming more deeply embedded with each passing day and lacks only the imminent spark that will ignite the coming conflagration. The foaming at the mouth racist Tea Party movement, originally an honest libertarian concept that was thoroughly infiltrated and hijacked by the worst elements in America to become the de-facto brownshirts of the Republican party are growing ever closer to an outbreak of mass violence including vandalism, pogroms and hate crimes that will be reminiscent in every way to the Nazis. This is the way that the system operates, once the illegitimate Bushreich was forced by Constitutional limits to relinquish open power the shadow government that Cheney is an integral part of, left a stay-behind network, reminiscent of an American version of Operation Gladio. The mobilization of the remnants of the GOP base which has been radicalized by the right-wing propaganda colossus (primarly FOX News) and sanctioned by the corporate media and will be used to allow the fascist Republicans to seize power, either electorally or though subsequent and inevitable acts of violence that are a necessity to such an openly contemptous political party

But I digress....

The first stolen election that Ventura discusses is the 1980 October Surprise secret deal between Reagan and Bush operatives and the Iranian ayatollahs to thwart the reelection chances of Jimmy Carter by holding the American embassy hostages seized during the Islamic uprising that installed Khomeini into power. With the hostage drama playing out to mass media coverage since November 4, 1979 when the embassy was stormed and the Carter administration working desperately to negotiate their freedom which likely would have given him a second term and halted the Republican fascist insurrection it was determined that there would need to be a preemptive action. That preemptive action was the secret deal to hold onto the hostages, depriving Carter of a political victory and virtually ensuring that Reagan and Bush would seize power. While it has never been definitively proven (as most successful clandestine operations are never proven) there has been much investigation into what was in effect treason. There were a series of secretive meetings in Paris presided over by CIA operator and later director William Casey that culminated in the deal to ship military weaponry to Iran using Israel as a conduit if the hostages were held until after the 1980 elections. With none other than Poppy Bush signing off on the deal (denied vehemently but there are accounts as well as a 21 hour gap in his itinery per Secret Service logs) and ensuring that the ursuping of democracy through nefarious means would be pulled off the entire plan was pulled off with crackerjack effectiveness by the seasoned CIA pros.

So, the hostages were held onto a bit longer, Iran go their weaponry to use in their war against Iraq (another of those conflicts where the U.S. profits from arming both sides, notably by later supplying chemical weapons to Saddam Hussein) and the hostages were released to massive media fanfare within an hour or so of the swearing in of Ronald Reagan. While the spinners and debunkers of the Mockingbirds in the media have done with those who dare to question the October Surprise what they did to Gary Webb, those who asked the serious questions about the Kennedy assassination and later to those who would question 9/11 there have been credible accounts by credible sources that lay it all out. Former National Security Council member Gary Sick wrote a New York Times editorial entitled The Election Story of the Decade years after the fact and other investigative journalists have pursued the story with diligence but as with most dirty deeds that have occurred in America it has largely been relegated to be flushed down the memory hole. In an interesting note, the October Surprise has been linked as an integral piece to the INSLAW/PROMIS scandal and 'suicided' writer Danny Casolaro was investigating this very connection when his body was found in a West Virginia hotel room in 1991. INSLAW's highly advanced PROMIS software was stolen by Reagan administration Justice Department officials and a guy named Earl Brian was allegedly allowed to profit off of a pirated version of the software as a reward for his role in the October Surprise. Ventura doesn't get into any of this but it is a huge piece of the puzzle and reaches into the highest levels of governments both past and present. Perhaps it was too much or perhaps the trail of dead bodies of those who have previously tried to dig deeply into this nexus of evil that Casolaro named "The Octopus" is enough to discourage anybody from straying down that particular path.

The other chapter deals with the theft of the 2000 and 2004 elections that resulted in two terms for George W. Bush as U.S. President. While many liberals and especially Democrats are squeamish about calling a spade a spade and admit that both elections were rigged - it's easier to just blame it all on Ralph Nader - and work to ensure that controls be put into place not only to prevent the theft of elections in the future but in also investigating and prosecuting the criminals associated with the schemes. I understand that it's all party of the silly-assed mentality here in the world's largest lemming colony to "look forward, not backwards" as our glorious leader Mr. Obama likes to insist but it is only another example of how the USA is no longer a land of laws, only impunity for well-connected criminals. Bill Clinton failed to hold George H.W. Bush and the rest of the devious Iran-Contra scum to account and Obama is doing his part in allowing the war criminals, thieves, murderers, torturers and pathological liars of the Bush-Cheney Axis of Evil to slither off into the darkness as well. That is the way that it works in America anymore, plain and simple.

Rather than rehash much of the material regarding the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004 there is plenty that has already been written on the subject, notably by investigative journalist Greg Palast who in his revelatory book The Best Democracy Money Can Buy exposed the massive vote suppression scheme in Florida where Secretary of State Katherine Harris's office used private contractor DBT/ChoicePoint to conduct voter roll purges ostensibly under the pretense of cleaning up the voter roles to remove convicted felons. The work done by ChoicePoint however focused mostly on removing legally registered to vote blacks and Hispanics who traditionally vote Democrat from roles. Ventura uses the term "ethnic cleansing" when referring to this operation that would like professional gamblers paying off athletes to 'shave points' in order to keep the final margin close enough for the fix to be pulled off. Of course it also helped that George W. Bush's brother Jeb just happened to be the Florida Governor at the time and that Bush family cousin John Ellis who conveniently happened to work for FOX News called the election for Bush in the wee wee hours of the morning on November 8, 2000, followed by the other networks in true lemminglike fashion. The fix was in, had been in and this is summed up in the words of the late, great Hunter S. Thompson:

"There was one exact moment, in fact, when I knew for sure that Al Gore would Never be President of the United States, no matter what the experts were saying -- and that was when the whole Bush family suddenly appeared on TV and openly scoffed at the idea of Gore winning Florida. It was Nonsense, said the Candidate, Utter nonsense. . .Anybody who believed Bush had lost Florida was a Fool. The Media, all of them, were Liars & Dunces or treacherous whores trying to sabotage his victory. . . Here was the whole bloody Family laughing & hooting & sneering at the dumbness of the whole world on National TV. The old man was the real tip-off. The leer on his face was almost frightening. It was like looking into the eyes of a tall hyena with a living sheep in its mouth. The sheep's fate was sealed, and so was Al Gore's."

Once the perception that Bush had indeed beaten Gore was propagated then no matter how desperately that the Gore campaign tried to contest the results they would be decried as blowing sour grapes, or as the great bumper sticker sloganeers like Frank Luntz so effectively distill it down to being "Sore Loserman". Despite the withering propaganda machine backing Bush there were still efforts to recount the vote in Florida but then the fascist Republcans began to send in the brownshirts. A manual recount in Miami-Dade County was shut down when dozens of angry shrieking white men descended en masse to hector, harass and intimidate the canvassers. It was spun in the corporate media as citizen outrage (much like the later Tea Bagger bunds that shut down town hall meetings last summer on behalf of vermin like Dick Armey) but later it was revealed that most if not all of them were GOP Congressional staffers and operatives, several frm Tom DeLay's office. The recount was shut down by Katherine Harris and thrown into the corrupt pit of snakes that is the U.S. Supreme Court where power was formally awarded to George W. Bush and the New American Century had it's first man on the white horse.

The 2004 election was similarly gamed in the state of Ohio, a good resource for this outside of Ventura's book would be Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s piece Was the 2004 Election Stolen? , there were dirty tricks aplenty, malfunctioning (intentionally?) electronic voting machines and more "ethnic cleansing" with GOP provided "caging lists" that identified minority voters who could potentially be intimidated by thugs at the polling places. Ventura also alleges, as have others that Karl Rove and Company were hellbent on doing the same thing in 2008 but out of fear that they would get caught this time refrained from doing so. It is of great interest that a technical wizard for the Republicans, a guy named Mike Connell was being pressured by authorities over his role in Ohio during the 2004 elections and this likely spooked Rove. We'll never know what Connell knew about stolen elections, he was killed when his private plane crashed in December 2008 - no man, no problem.

"A coup consists of the infiltration of a small but critical segment of the state apparatus, which is then used to displace the government from its control of the remainder."


-Edward Luttwak

An act of catastrophic terrorism that killed thousands or tens of thousands of people and/or disrupted the necessities of life for hundreds of thousands, or even millions, would be a watershed event in America’s history. It could involve loss of life and property unprecedented for peacetime and undermine Americans’ fundamental sense of security within their own borders in a manner akin to the 1949 Soviet atomic bomb test, or perhaps even worse. Constitutional liberties would be challenged as the United States sought to protect itself from further attacks by pressing against allowable limits in surveillance of citizens, detention of suspects, and the use of deadly force. More violence would follow, either as other terrorists seek to imitate this great "success" or as the United States strikes out at those considered responsible. Like Pearl Harbor, such an event would divide our past and future into a "before" and "after."

-Philip D. Zelikow (co-author of "Catastrophic Terrorism" and 9/11 Commission Executive Director)

Two of the final chapters of American Conspiracies, What Really Happened on September 11? and The Secret Plans to End American Democracy are really related and for the sake of brevity I will discuss them both at the same time. To begin with, the official government conspiracy theory on the 'terrorist' attacks of September 11, 2001 is hogwash. There is absolutely no way that 19 so-called Muslim fanatics could with the help of only box-cutters and GPS tracking devices successfully hijack four jetliners and carry out those highly effective attacks. The obvious number one hole in the official conspiracy theory, at least in MY opinion is that this would have been impossible, not only would the so-called amateurs have been unable to acquire such precision flying skills in small, independent flight schools but to do so without triggering any sort of intercept protocol is ludicrous. But this is America so anything is believed if the sheep and lemmings see it on TV. On TV Bruce Willis and a motley crew of oil patch roughnecks can be trained to be astronauts who will be able to successfully fly around the moon, reach the sufficient level of gravity defying inertia to overtake a mammoth planet destroyer sized asteroid hurtling towards Earth and then blow up the asteroid therefore saving the human race from extinction. In America that is accepted as reality as surely as the mythical and overhyped skills of the 19 'terrorists' - in reality, real reality, it's total bullshit.
 
There are more holes in the official government conspiracy theory of what really happened on September 11, 2001 than there are the reasoning capability of the average American right-winger. Not only were the 19 Muslim fanatics able to pull off their amazing feats of aerial attack but the accounts that the purportedly devout religious fanatics is in and of itself more total bullshit. There are accounts that these supposed holy warriors enjoyed getting drunk, snorting cocaine, hanging out in strip clubs and soliciting the services of prostitutes - this is hardly behavior that is conducive to being prepared to go to Allah. As with Lee Harvey Oswald and other patsies, there are already cover stories in place preparing to be rolled out to a traumatized populace, in a matter of days the names of all of the alleged hijackers were released along with a damning trail of evidence found in rental cars in the parking garages of Boston's Logan airport and Washington's Dulles airport containing such material as flight manuals, instructional videos on flying aircraft, Islamic prayer books, damning letters of intent/suicide notes and more box-cutters. There was also the ludicrous account of the 'terrorist' passport that survived the fiery inferno of the plane hitting the World Trade Center and was 'found' on the street below. There is WTC 7 and the failure to account for the 47 story buildings collapse as well as video that is very reminiscent of a controlled demolition, the frantic effort to remove all of the evidence of the collapsed WTC buildings and get it the hell out of the country, the nonsense about what really happened to United 93 and most importantly how not one of the planes was subject to normal procedures to intercept, re-route and as a last resort shoot down hijacked airliners. There is just no way to get into the real details of it all here, so massive is the evidence that contradicts the official story. Ventura does a good job of summing it up in a 21 page chapter but the contradictions are as voluminous as they are obvious.
 
As with the assassination of President Kennedy it is much simpler to wonder WHY instead of WHO or HOW. The very workings of the Deep State, the National Security State and the elements that have come to control it are what really need to be examined, for it is very obvious that when the works and ideologies of the neoconservatives, the PNAC group, the Military Industrial Complex and the oligarchy that 9/11 is more of an exercise in amoral 'the ends justify the means' thinking than in anything rooted in national security. The entire war on terror concept is something to sell to the rubes, an extension of Plato's noble lie and the theories of men like Leo Strauss as embraced by the neocons and men like Zbiginew Brezinski, Henry Kissinger and the rest of the elite whose value systems and vision is more concerned with projection of the power of Imperial America, the securing of natural resources and access to strategic geopolitical regions have no qualms with the blood sacrifice of a few thousand pawns, slaves or as Herr Kissinger relishes in describing lesser beings than he as: "useless eaters".
 
One of the great linquistic tricks of the professional shills and debunkers is to somehow twist an argument about a false flag event staged by rogue elements of the government into somehow being an accusation that the entire thing was known about and carried out by George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Bush of course is an idiot, a spoiled child of privilege who just happened to be a convenient front man for the agents of the true powers in this country. Cheney of course would have been involved, that much is a near certainty given his history, his affiliations as well as his levels of access. It was Cheney who was in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center while Bush was rushed out of the Florida classroom and away from My Pet Goat to be flown around for hours while the emergency plans were implemented, these were critical hours in ensuring that all would go as planned. Excerpting from a 1969 Time Magazine article on Edward Luttwak's Coup d'etat: A Practical Handbook entitled How To Seize a Country:
 
Unlike a revolutionary assault from the outside, Luttwak notes, a coup is an inside job, done by a government's own members. It involves minimal manpower and bloodshed. As in judo, the secret is to use leverage and make a state overthrow itself. Bureaucracy facilitates this by severing the loyalties that once personally bound rulers and their servants. A modern bureaucrat follows impersonal orders; if his immediate boss is subverted, the bureaucrat tends to obey orders blindly, even orders designed to topple his own government. According to Luttwak, a coup requires three preconditions: 1) a highly centralized government with a seizable seat of power, 2) a passive people not likely to react to a takeover and 3) the assurance that no foreign power will intervene.
 
While 9/11 may not have been an actual coup d'etat, at least not in the context of an entire takeover of a state by a cabal of plotters, a military junta or a government in waiting it was the golden opportunity for a certain faction, a government within a government to assert their power and their vision for the future absent any form of resistance.
 
 

 
 
“The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.”
 

-Hermann Goering

In closing his book, Mr. Ventura gets to the current state of affairs in our terminally corrupted and rapidly closing society. Thanks to the pretense of the war on terror the United States is now in the final stages of completing what has been at least a half-century long usurping of the power of the people in order to use the state to best represent the privileged, well-moneyed fascists. The 'terrorist' attacks of 9/11 and the now set in stone forever justification to plunder the planet, kill inhabitants of those countries that don't fall in line and implement the American Empire by military force that serves big banks and corporations is something that absent and unpredictable and catastrophic event will continue for at the rest of the lives of everyone who is reading this today.

The wars of the Bush-Cheney administration in Iraq and Afghanistan continue and in the case of Afghanistan has been escalated by Barack Obama and his administration. There is also an undeclared war in Pakistan as well as the looming threat of a ruinous war with Iran, goaded on by the right-wing lunatics in charge of the Israeli government as well as the resurgent neoconservatives who will soon be returned to power by the ingorant and short-sighted who are so easily duped. Economic troubles are continuing to worsen despite the establishment media's propagand of the glorious recovery which in effect was nothing more than a rescue for the corrupt and greedy Wall Street gamblers whose schemes have been allowed to strip-mine this lemming colony for decades. With the economic malaise comes hopelessness and with hopelessness comes desperation, a populace already conditioned to hate each other by highly paid establishment demagogues will have no problem when the next 'terrorist' attack occurs, there will be no shortage of patsies nor of scapegoats and any resistance will be snuffed out by either the police state that is now in place courtesy of a decade of fear-mongering or by organized mobs turned loose with the sanctioning (unofficial of course) of those who will be running the state apparatus when the time comes.

The Bush-Cheney regime took full advantage of their opportunities to justify a creeping tyranny here in a place that in the aftermath of the American Reichstag Fire was renamed as "The Homeland”. For those who could have stood in the way of the rising fascist tide there were ruined careers as networks and newspapers began to fire reporters who were not sufficiently loyal to the new crusades. There were the neo-McCarthyist stigmas of not being sufficiently patriotic, attacks by vicious thugs in the right-wing propagandized media and for those who were in a position of power,there were letters laced with weapons grade anthrax. The horror and carnage of 9/11 were exploited by a virulently fascist Republican party to bludgeon highly traumatized Americans into an eerie sort of passive and non-inquisitive populace to support nationalism, jingoism, the worship of the military and most importantly the bloodlust to support the illegal invasions and occupations.

Accompanying the imperialist shock and awe blitzkrieg was an evisceration of the civil liberties, privacy rights, presumption of innocence and freedoms enjoyed in America by a surveillance/intelligence explosion all using the ‘terrorist’ attacks as a rationale. It was one that was sadly accepted by far too many, both without and within the cowardly and corrupted government. Ventura elaborates on a good deal of this in his final chapter including the acceptance and codifying of torture as national policy (I might add that this could not have been accomplished without the monumentally successful propaganda provided by such TV programs as the enormously popular 24 with ‘head crackin’ Jack Bauer), elimination of Habeas Corpus as well as the essential revocation of the Posse Comitatus Act. In addition to the erosion of the Constitution which was just a “goddamned piece of paper” according to one George W. Bush. The phony war on terror saw an explosion in private security (or more appropriately mercenary) contractor corporations such as Blackwater (Xe) and Triple Canopy among others that operated without any legitimate oversight. Blackwater would become especially notorious with the trigger happy goons that the company employed being involved in numerous murders of civilians in Iraq. CEO Erik Prince’s history as a ‘Christian’ zealot only contributed to the war of civilizations them that was being sold by the compromised media and resonated especially strongly with the dead-enders, haters and thugs that now have moved from the Republican base to the Tea Party.

Ventura also writes of some of the history of the shadow government in examining the history of FEMA and the connections to the Reagan administration, most notably the previously mentioned Oliver North and the REX 84 program that would have suspended the Constitution under the premise of an emergency response to an unknown incident (s) triggering widespread civil disorder. When you hear highly paid shills for fascism like Glenn Beck and Michelle Bachmann ranting insanely about concentration camps they are only acting as disinformation agents who minimize the existence of such facilities which there have been and continue to be plans for the roundup and imprisoning of dissidents, troublemakers and others that the establishment deems to be dangerous when the time comes. Can it happen here? It already has, go and read up on Manzanar or any of the other detention camps where tens of thousands of innocent Japanese American citizens were interned during World War II. REX 84 was just one of a host of contingency plans such as Cable Splicer and Operation Garden Plot. All such programs are functional parts of the shadow government or more formally known as the Continuity of Government (C.O.G.) programs that were put into place ostensibly as a way to maintain a functional command structure in the event of a Cold War era decapitation strike. In essence these programs served as a parallel command structure to the official government. The involvement of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld with C.O.G. is now well known and the existence of such an entity runs counter to anything even remotely resembling American ideals. There is much more in depth material on this entire subject than is possible to go into here and Ventura merely scratches the surface in his book.

The current state of the union with an ongoing looting spree by the Wall Street criminals with of course the full compliance of their whores in governement is a state of chaos and anger. Combine the destruction of the middle class by the moneychangers with environmental damage caused by the B.P. oil fountain at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico which has real potential to affect an already depleting food supply, mass structural unemployment, a failed legitimate political system and an addiction to war that knows no bounds and the future, as Leonard Cohen sang, is murder. Just as Obama and his corrupt and incompetent administration have done absolutely nothing to fix the economy for real people who are unable to shovel millions upon millions of dollars into lobbyists and political campaigns the real failure has been in allowing the worst abuses of his treasonous predecessor to go unchecked. With political cowardice, pervasive corruption and out of his now completely in over his head amateurism rapidly eroding whatever legitimacy that the terminally failed goverment has left it will be very soon that the berserkers will multiply and will emerge with a champion who will be as deserving of the title of the "new Hitler" as those who are regularly affixed with it out of necessity to launch unprovoked military attacks are not. The powers of the police state only continue to expand as do the tools of oppression that American lemmings are now being indoctrinated to accept. There are the new naked body scanners in the nation’s airports (likely coming soon to stadiums, shopping malls and public checkpoints near you), the imminent crackdown on freedom of speech and assembly, surveillance cameras multiplying exponentially, the continuing militarization of the police, programs like InfraGuard and TIPS, fusion centers, DNA databases and the coming implantable chips and devices that will be sued to suppress, control, track and eradicate freedom that are at the ready to be rolled out when the time comes…and it is coming very, very soon.

It will all be done under the premise of fear and the sales pitch will once again be that the American sheeple are going to need the government to keep them safe. Safety is understandable by those who have been terrorized for life by the state run media but there is also the unspoken need by many to use the powers of the police state to facilitate the roundup and eradication of those who are scapegoated like black and brown people, Muslims, gays and the intensely hated liberals. As Goering so eloquently put it, "it works the same in any country."

In conclusion, Jesse Ventura gets so much of it right in American Conspiracies but the advanced state of decay has become so irreversible and deeply embedded into virtually every institution that a lot is left out. It was a bit disappointing that Ventura didn’t get to the assimilation of Nazi war criminals into the American intelligence services in the post WWII years under the guise of fighting communism, or the October Surprise related PROMIS software storyline that is the very nexus of the police state. The PROMIS software and it's derivatives (notably Main Core) have been used to provide the state and it's agents with the ability to use high-technology to conduct illegal surveillance, set up blackmail traps and manipulate financial markets, it is this ability to spy and control that is at the very heart of any dictatorship. Hopefully there will be a sequel or better yet ongoing efforts by others to circumvent the entire corporate, state-controlled, elitist media to get out the real truth.