This book is a head turner. The topics covered will make your hair stand on end like it was electrified. Jesse Ventura has clearly set out to become the national conscience of our country. He feels compelled to attempt to expose truth everywhere he finds falsehoods being disseminated. There is one thing we can be certain of and that is that our government has been spreading lies by distortion, falsehoods, and deleing material facts for as long as we have been a country. This is entirely not unexpected since the first rule of government; any government is to preserve itself in power.
Ventura has been a former in your face governor of Minnesota, and I found him to be a breath of fresh air whether I agreed with him or not. Dick Russell has written more than a half dozen books, most of which have been about conspiracy and several in particular about the JFK assassination. I have found him to be forthright as well. The book is organized into 63 separate files spread through five different themes. Those themes are:
Part I Our Scandalous Postwar History
Part II Government, Military, and Corporate Secrets
Part III Shady White Houses
Part IV 9/11
Part V The War on Terror
You can see from the above the different conspiracies that are being covered, to determine whether or not you as a reader would have a particular interest in reading about these specific areas. I am personally familiar with more than 90% of the documents in the book, having read many of them in their original format. By the way, the documents you will be looking at are photocopies of the originals. This is both good and bad. It is bad from the standpoint that the fonts, writing, and formatting of the document may make it difficult to read. The positive aspect is that you are looking at copies of originals so there can be no disputing that what you are seeing is an ACTUAL document, and these are the real words that were written as outlandish as many of them seem to current readers. They are nevertheless TRUE.
In our country today are almost 900,000 individuals with top secret security clearances. The precise number is 854,000. In 1996, the government withheld from public inspective about 5.6 million documents labeled top secret. By last year that number had expanded to a mind boggling 55 million documents. There are 16 million new ones labeled top secret every year. There are still several hundred thousand documents being withheld regarding the JFK assassination in spite of the fact that it occurred in 1963, as absurd as that may seem.
What you will be shocked to hear is that the Obama Administration in the end seems to be as secretive as the previous Bush Administration was known to be. Our current President is really serious about punishing those who leak, and keeping secrets. Recently the Pentagon spent near $50,000 to buy up the entire edition, 10,000 copies of a first printing of a book called "Operation Dark Heart" by Anthony Shaffer which had to deal with Afghanistan.
Now this is recently. In the past I have seen direct evidence where certain elements in the US government bought out all existing books regarding the Kennedy assassination. This explains why sometimes when you are searching for an old book on the JFK topic and you scan the used book buys on Amazon, the prices are extraordinarily high for these books. Since they have been intentionally bought up by government sources, the handful that is left seem to sell for hundreds of dollars. An excellent specific example of this are works by scholar Peter Dale Scott like "Drugs, Oil and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Columbia, and Indochina". It sells for an absurd $101 new on Amazon. Somebody is making sure the information is very expensive to obtain.
Just some of the topics covered in Jesse Ventura's book include:
* Stand down orders were issued on 9/11 to prevent military planes from responding to the developing crisis.
* Bush stole the elections in both 2000 and 2004
* The CIA launched an entire propaganda campaign to buttress public acceptance of the JFK lone gunman theory.
* The CIA developed and printed an assassination manual
* Operation Northwoods several decades ago was developed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to stage an attack on America, and make it look like Cuba had done it. This is particularly wild when you think about it. The document is real however, which in retrospect makes you wonder, what were the Joint Chiefs thinking at the time.
* We have special operations forces secretly fighting in Pakistan while members of the Pakistani government openly support the Taliban in their fight against America.
* My favorite is the CIA document that reveals there is no way to fix the corrupt Afghanistan government because our ally is actually the chief corruptor. Recently an Afghan Minister was caught by our people trying to leave the country with $52 million in American hundred dollar bills which was our money. They let him go with the cash when all was said and done.
My Problem or Caveat with the Book
I believe this book is very worthwhile. The documents are real. You have the photocopies in front of you, and there is usually about a page introduction for each document written by the authors. My problem is simply that the one page introduction is not nearly long enough to do anything called justice to the document or topic being covered. In other words, next to no effort went into the books preparation. Each of these endlessly fascinating topics which I have looked at myself could require a book to cover the topic. At the very least in my opinion, 4 or 5 pages should have been written to introduce the topic covered by the document.
Most readers are clearly not going to take the time to ferret out more information about these documents. It is therefore incumbent upon the authors to give the reader what the reader needs, and that is a more thorough understanding of the topic covered. Several more pages would have done the trick. These topics are just too important for the authors not to have done this. It would have also lent a great deal more credibility to what will be any reader's natural skepticism at much of what is being alleged in the book.
CONCLUSION:
As Americans we are heirs to the greatest republic man has yet to create. We are each responsible for our country, its wellbeing and what we pass on to the next generation. Each of us needs to know about the dark side of our country as well, and the topics covered in this book deal with the dark side. They are not pretty to read about, and some are indeed frightful, but we must be able to handle these documents, and what they mean, and help make our country a better country for it. I applaud the authors' efforts to bring these documents to light. An extraordinary Supreme Court Justice named Louis Brandeis once said that sunlight is the best disinfectant, and that certainly seems true at what is contained in this book. Thank you for reading this review.
Richard Stoyeck
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