American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us by Jesse Ventura, Dick Russell Page A

Second Gunman Almost Certainly Shot at Kennedy”—on page 37, right alongside the classified ads. Later, a Times editorial said that the committee seemed “more interested in inflaming than informing.” And whenever there were intimations of conspiracy in the media, the finger pointed elsewhere—like a CBS documentary, “The CIA’s Secret Army,” which strongly hinted that Fidel Castro had ordered Kennedy’s murder in retaliation for the attempts on his own life.
    When Oliver Stone’s movie JFK came out in 1991, the strongest attacks came from news outlets and journalists “with the longest records of error and obstruction in defense of the flawed Warren Commission inquiry.” 23 Are we surprised? They’ll cheerlead for Posner’s and Bugliosi’s books, but I’ll bet you a free lunch they’re not going to be reviewing this one anytime soon.
    WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?
    One lesson we can take away from the tragedy in Dallas is that the federal government shouldn’t be allowed to supersede state and local laws, when it comes to having an “official” investigation into events as momentous as a presidential assassination or a terrorist attack. We also need to pay close attention to how our big media stopped doing their job as the eyes and ears of our democracy, refusing to acknowledge that something might be going on beyond a “lone nut” assassin. The pattern of denial continues, and we the people must demand thorough investigation and honest, unbiased information.

EPILOGUE
“TRUTH BEING THAT WHICH IT IS CAN NEVER BE DESTROYED”
    I close this book with that quote from Gandhi. Because, after I’m long gone, I believe there needs to be a record that some people thought things other than just the status quo of what the government has put out for us all to believe. I think it’s a duty we have to humanity. Even if we’re wrong, we’re right enough to have an alternate opinion. You may not believe everything that’s been written in this book, but it’s certainly scary. Even thinking that a lot of it could be true is scary enough.
    I’ve covered a lot of ground in American Conspiracies , most of it not pleasant to consider. But we can’t simply look the other way about the dark side of our history. And there’s been no shortage of “dark,” over this last half-century or so. After the Second World War where my father, my mother, and millions of others distinguished themselves, in our leaders’ well-meaning effort to contain Communists and now terrorists, they unleashed something equally threatening. I guess you could call it power run amuck.
    It’s not a newelement, really. You see it in the plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln, and the big-money forces that wanted to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt. When President Kennedy set out to challenge the status quo on many different fronts, he paid the price with his life. The same was true for the three other great American leaders of the 1960s: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Then Nixon became, in a way, a victim of some of the same forces he’d helped come to power in the Fifties, like the CIA. And the CIA’s ultimate experiment in controlling human behavior, Jonestown, followed at the close of the seventies.
    With the rise of Reagan—not a face that belongs on Mount Rushmore—we saw the first of the neo-cons’ successes in ripping off an election, or at least making sure the incumbent president couldn’t properly fulfill his mandate. Dealing drugs, as a crucial element of our political landscape, came to the fore during the Reagan years. I decided not to delve into the right wing’s ongoing efforts to sabotage Bill Clinton’s presidency, culminating in setting him up to take the fall with Monica Lewinsky, but it’s no stretch to add that to the list of conspiracies.
    The last chapters in