Please find my complete review here:American Conspiracies - A Review by Liam Scheff

Excerpts:

What Is Conspiracy?

From the Latin for ’spirare,’ and ‘con,’ or ‘to breathe’ ‘with,’ we get the smaller idea: we breath the words of possibility together. We plan, we stir our imaginations into designs. We then make the leap from thought to matter, by invoking movement, creating action.
Do people conspire on the large scale? We know they do. We’ve seen it in business, finance and politics, in an endless, repeating loop. We’ve witnessed one (or two (or three)) ‘assisted’ elections at the presidential level since 2000. Lower offices regularly go to the best-financed and best-lawyered.

Outside of the U.S. is a world plagued by topsy-turvy elections, bordering on coups and governmental take-overs. How often do you find a pattern of Western interest in these places? Dig into this history and you’ll find the sticky fingers of intelligence agencies, U.S., British and Soviet, pulling strings and enabling puppet players. And before there was the 20th Century, there was all of history.

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It takes remarkable personal courage to come out against the mean, to write about unpopular ideas, to talk about probable conspiracies – and so it can’t be said that Jesse Ventura doesn’t have guts. But let it be known that he’s got a very good head on his shoulders too.[....]

Why do ‘lone nut assassins’ always have three names? So we’ll remember them, says Ventura. But did you know that in addition to John Wilkes Booth, eight individuals (including one woman) were tried and convicted in the plot against the 16th president? It seems we’ve been forgetting the conspirators for 150 years.

From Lincoln, Ventura moves to an attempted industrialist’s coup against President Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, and introduces the reader to General Smedley Butler, whose “War is a Racket” is a firebrand’s manifesto, sure to be enjoyed by all who read it for its snarling savaging of corruption.

From 1933 on to 1962, a successful coup: President John Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, when his motorcade slowed on its route – altered so that the car would roll slowly through an area beneath taller buildings and a grassy hill (an area that would allow a triangulation of fire). Kennedy was killed, according to the official explanation, by one lone-nut assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, a former marine who had defected to Russia, but was allowed re-entry into the US with his new Russian wife without complaint or constraint by U.S. authorities. He was a man with CIA and FBI contacts, involved in contradictory brands of pro and anti-communist propaganda, who had a bizarre habit of turning up in several countries at the same time (suggesting that his name was used by more than one agent).

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The 9/11 conspiracy is the most well-known in the world today. (The attacks on U.S. buildings with hijacked airplanes was a conspiracy according to both the mainstream and its critics). The official version states that nineteen Middle-Eastern (mostly Saudi Arabian) hijackers flew four planes into three buildings and one field in two states and the Capitol (New York, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C.). In New York, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were hit by one plane each; Building Seven of the WTC was not; all three buildings collapsed while exploding or imploding at free-fall speed into low-lying piles of rubble and billowing clouds of atomized concrete and metal, which filled the air for weeks and blanketed surrounding areas.

One hijacker’s passport was found, somehow intact, on the ground beneath the vaporized tower, the rest were known, somehow, within hours of the events, and their profiles circulated. It has been reported by mainstream sources that at least three of the presumed hijackers have shown up after the events of 9/11 in other countries, working at their day jobs, with no ties to terrorism, and have asked to be taken off the list of 9/11 terrorists. Telephone calls were made from airplanes that later were shown practically incapable of transmitting cell phone signals as were apparently received by some recipients on the ground; some official cell-phone stories have been changed since 2001.


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American Conspiracies” is well-organized, honest, provocative and worth reading. It takes up fourteen topics in fourteen succinct, well-informed chapters. Numbered references are organized in an easy-to-use endnotes. The Governor’s personal experiences and anecdotes are lively and instructive. Quotes and references are searchable at the book’s end.

Ventura opens each chapter with three points: “The Incident,” “The Official Word,” and “My Take,” and ends with a question: “What Should We Do Now?”

His answers tend to go to the following: Think critically, understand history, and talk about it. Don’t be swayed or crushed by taunts of “conspiracy theorist.” Talk openly and press for legal change where change is available, because you love your country and you want it to survive with a functional Constitution, a more honest banking system, and opportunity for citizens to feel both liberated and inspired to achieve their dreams in our troubled nation.


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