American Conspiracies by Jesse Ventura with Dick Russell, Hardback, 228 pp. Skyhorse Publishing  $24.95 ISBN 978-1-60239-802-3 

“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 for one have never believed in conspiracy theories but be forewarned: Ventura will knock the wind  out of you with a body slam.  The straight talking ex-Minnesota governor and gung-ho Navy SEAL has produced an extremely troubling account  of recent American history guaranteed to make you ponder the unthinkable.

In clear conversational style free of New World Order quackery, UFO cover-up theories, Flat Earth Society cretinism and Lou Dobb’s birther nonsense, Ventura throws a brutally  harsh spotlight on the damning inconsistencies with the official line on September 11, TARP, the War on Drugs and the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and Dr. King, to name a few.   But he doesn’t stop there.  He relates being queried by the Central Intelligence Agency in the basement of the Minnesota Capital  upon winning the race for governor in 1999 and creepy occurrences with his wife’s computer and telephone.

In  facile prose Ventura narrates the untimely deaths of Michael Connel, a Bush and Rove confidante who knew too much about Global Election Systems and the disputed presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, and Gary Webb, the journalist responsible for the CIA cocaine connection expose in the San Jose Mercury News.  He laments the government intimidation of journalists like Daniel Estulin and the use of  the no-fly list as a tool to harass people who have no connection to terrorism.

Ventura is troubled by the incest between the CIA, AIG, Goldman Sachs and the Treasury Department and is convinced the timing of the Elliot Spitzer prostitution scandal is no happenstance; it broke only when Spitzer the Wall Street crusader pushed too hard against AIG, the firm with deep historical ties to the CIA.  Ventura goes on to ask whether he has put his own life in jeopardy by writing such things.  He is not being melodramatic.

Approach the book as a skeptic, but Ventura’s accurate account of the Gulf of Tonkin (non) incident, Operation Northwoods and MK-ULTRA will force you to consider whether the recent Shazad/Times Square Bomber case is a just a hoax to pressure the Pakistani government to send troops to Waziristan and the Korean boat torpedoing incident an inside job to keep U.S. troops on Okinawa indefinitely.  In any event, you will never listen to the news the same way again.

The book contains no less than twenty pages of information source notes and four pages of supportive further reading.  However, some of the sources have low standards of journalistic accuracy and probably had an ax to grind.

Two thumbs up and five stars for American Conspiracies.

Daniel Bruno Sanz writes on a wide range of topics. His essays and market forecasts have appeared in six languages.  To download a free copy of his books, please go to www.scribd/dbsanz.com