American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us (28 page)

So where do We the People start? I say, by demanding prosecution of the politicians who condoned torture on their lying road into Iraq. And by a new, legitimate investigation into what happened on September 11, a tragedy that's been used ever since to justify all the lies and undermine our democratic freedoms. With President Obama, we voted for a fresh start, but now we've got to hold
his
feet to the fire and get to the bottom of what's happened to our country over these recent decades.

I've not written this book because I get off on talking about conspiracies. I've written it because, until we face the terrible reality of the assassinations and the governmental drug dealing and the stolen elections and the rest—until we look at how, slowly and insipidly, the most venal of men took control of our nation, we don't stand a chance of putting things back on track. I'm not saying that knowledge sets us free, but it does force us to wake up and realize that we're on the brink of losing everything the founders of our country stood for and bequeathed to us.

“
Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing [a people] to slavery
.”

—Thomas Jefferson:
Rights of British America,
1774

“
Cherish . . . the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them
.”

—Thomas Jefferson, 1787

Words to live by. Thank you, Mr. Jefferson.

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 this book are, in my view, the most painful and frightening of all. Since the dawn of the new millennium, our democracy has eroded to the point where it's hanging on by a bare thread. You can trace this directly to the times that George W. Bush and his cronies stole the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections from their opponents, and also to the tragic events of 9/11 that unleashed their assault on our freedoms in the name of protecting them. What's happened to our economy grew out of that, and now we're standing at the abyss looking at the still-in-place plans to end America as we've known it since 1776.

It's about time people understand that, like anything in life, there's more than one side to any story. This book presented an opportunity to tell the other sides to many stories and then say, you be the judge. Look at the big picture over time, and try to do so with clear judgment, without letting your emotions make the determination or your patriotism interfere.

I consider myself a patriot, loyal to the values that built this country that I served as best I could as a Navy SEAL, a mayor and a governor. But I'm outraged when I hear about people like Van Jones being dismissed from his government position for signing a petition calling for an unbiased investigation into 9/11. What is our country turning into, when you can't dissent from any official opinion? That's again why I felt so compelled to write this book, because it's bigger than even these stories—bigger, in that we're not allowed to talk about them, or criticize.

Also, we've got to have a more open government. Why can't those 10,000 documents on Able Danger be released? The old excuse of “national security”? Shouldn't there be some elected board that would say, “Okay, tell us why this falls under national security and we'll make the determination whether it truly does, or is this simply a political cover-up?” When the government starts keeping too many secrets for us, that's a big step on the road to losing more of our liberties.

I'm sure I'll be attacked as the messenger disseminating this information. Well, it's not based on my opinion, folks, it all came from documentation. It was a matter of putting together the pieces that the media no longer pays attention to. So let the powers that be come at me. I'm not backing down. I'll continue to fight against the “special interests” that have taken a choke-hold on our democracy. If you want good government, you've got to have an involved citizenry. You've got to have people willing to tell—and hear—the truth, much as this might shatter our illusions and trouble our sleep.

Do you ever think that maybe our country needs a Truth Commission, to understand the crimes that were committed “in our name” over these recent decades? My hope is that some of you will stand with me in calling for accountability. The only way we can truly move forward is to come to grips with a recent past that's brought us to the brink of losing it all.

Maybe we ought to put ourselves in the position of the little Vietnamese farmer who did nothing but raise his rice. They handed him an AK-47 and in came the powerful United States, and we dropped more armaments on Vietnam that we did in World War II. We threw everything we had at this little rice farmer—and we couldn't beat him, could we? When push came to shove, he outlasted us. Why? Because he had the resolve for freedom. That Vietnamese farmer wanted to self-govern, not be part of colonialism. Maybe we, in the United States, should start viewing our government as colonialists. Now the rest of us, in our own country, are becoming the colony. And somehow, some way, we've got to reclaim our nation.