Don't Start the Revolution Without Me!

by Jesse Ventura; Dick Russell

  One day, she was working the chow line, when who came through but somebody she knew—Governor Christie Todd Whitman from New Jersey. She recognized Terry and said, “What are you doing here?” Terry went, “Shhhhhh.” Christie moved on.

  TERRY: I worked at the coroner’s site, mostly in food and also seeing people who had come to receive their benefits. At the four corners, there were little tents set up, and they were still bringing out bodies. The workers could come in and get masks and socks and gloves, eye drops, nose plugs, goggles, hand cream. And teas and coffee and granola bars and aspirin, and bandaids and mercurochrome. Anything they might need out there that they couldn’t just run and get.

  I remember this one guy came in—I was all alone at the time—and I said, “Would you like some coffee or soup?” He said, “Yeah, maybe some soup.” Basically, his job was driving a little truck that had pieces of people that they’d found. The people in there identifying body parts—they’d work twelve or fourteen hour days. Sometimes they’d come up to me and just start spilling their guts. They’d get overwhelmed by it all. It was just so terribly, terribly sad.

  We set up a huge toy shop. Kids could come in with their parents and get free toys and gifts for their families. It was all donated. They had buses bringing people in. The lines were tremendously long. As we would run out of toys, some mothers started stealing from other mother’s baskets.

  But the Salvation Army taught me a huge lesson. When people would come to receive their benefits, they needed two pieces of identification, including a bill from their apartment. This one guy had nothing and he kept yelling at me, “I’d better get some money or I’m going to the press, I’m gonna say the Salvation Army is cheating everybody!” I got really furious. I said, “Just a minute. I have to go talk to my supervisor, because I don’t know how to answer your question.”

  I told my supervisor, “This guy is clearly a scam artist, somebody needs to go out there and have him removed.” She looked at me and said, “Terry, think about this man. He lives in such an awful state of mind in his life that he’s coming here trying to take money away from real victims. If anybody needs help, it’s this man.” Then she went on, “Give him fifty dollars, some free bus tokens, tell him God bless, and send him on his way. I’ll bet you anything he’ll go away happy. It’s not worth causing a big scene.”

  So that’s what I did. And that’s the true meaning of what the Salvation Army stands for, which is really what religion is supposed to be about.

  I never wanted to believe anything different than what we were told about what happened that terrible day. I didn’t really have any doubts at the time. Except for one: Having been in the military, the first question that arose in me, the very day of 9/11, was: Where were our jets? How could our air defense have failed so miserably?

  What happened to Payne Stewart, the golfer who died in a plane crash, makes an interesting analogy. He took off in a private plane from a private airport in Florida and, within a half hour, the tower lost communication with the plane. Within another half hour, they had a fighter jet up on the wing. The jet’s pilot was able to ascertain that everyone in the cockpit appeared to be dead, because they were slumped over. It was later found to have been a mechanical malfunction that apparently killed everyone on board, and the plane was flying on automatic pilot. So the fighter jet just stayed with the plane all the way until it reached South Dakota and ran out of fuel. Of course, if it was going down in a metropolitan area, they would have blown it out of the skies. Since it went down in a wheat field, they let that happen instead.

  Yet on 9/11, when you had four airplanes being hijacked roughly a half hour apart from each other, nobody from our military was up there. Maybe you could buy that the first plane snuck by the radar—but the ones after that? As governor I had been inside air traffic control, and you’ve got a dozen people there looking at these dials, watching every plane in their sector. They know what direction they’re supposed to be going in. And here were four hijacked planes turned directly opposite of their normal flight path. Yet no bells went off, no emergency sirens, no fighter jets scrambled until very late, and then without any coordinates for intercept.

  There were brass at the Pentagon, according to MSNBC reporters, who were forewarned not to fly on 9/11, along with other prominent figures. The Pentagon had actually prepared for such an attack, since it was revealed as a target for a plane back in 1995. By 1999, they had cameras and radar on the roof to detect something like that, according to the Pentagon’s security director. They had an exercise for first responders in Arlington, Virginia, based on a plane crashing into the building. The breakdown in standard operating procedure on 9/11 was unprecedented, uninvestigated, and unaccountable.

  Here’s what The Washington Post reported on August 3, 2006, which is about as close as we’ve come to knowing something is being covered up: “For more than two years after the attacks, officials with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances.... Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concluded that the Pentagon’s initial account of how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the commission and the public.... Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the ten-member commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation.” The compromise they reached instead was for the 9/11 Commission to send unresolved questions on to the inspector generals of both FAA and NORAD, and let them investigate the discrepancies. In 2005 they released their reports—and created a whole new set of excuses and yet another timeline of response events.

  I need to mention my reaction when I saw Michael Moore’s movie, Fahrenheit 9/11. Looking at President Bush’s face reading the Pet Goat storybook to the school kids that morning in Florida, he either froze—or he knew something. The question is, what did Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, tell him when he leaned over to whisper in his ear? Maybe that Cheney was in control of the situation, so not to worry? I couldn’t get over the fact that, after he was told about the planes hitting the Twin Towers, he would just sit there for seven minutes. In a nuclear age, seven minutes is an eternity.

  I’ve had some Republicans say to me, “Well, what would you have done?” I told them, “Simple. If my chief of staff had walked up to me and said, ‘Sir, the United States is under attack,’ I would have turned to the children very calmly and said, ‘Children, you know my job is very, very important. And you know that emergencies sometimes happen that a president must attend to. There’s an emergency I have to take care of right now. You don’t have to worry about it, we’ll get it under control. And I promise you that on another day, I will come back here and read to you. Okay?’ Then out the door I go.”

  My doubts about the official story have grown steadily over the last couple of years. My son kept telling me about things he was finding on the Internet about 9/11, so I started doing some reading. Often I’d question myself—what am I, a conspiracy nut? as some people get labeled. But I couldn’t shake off the pattern I saw emerging. I wondered, why did President Bush put up roadblocks for two years to any type of investigation? If you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t care whether or not a commission looks into what happened. Naturally, some things need to remain secret from our potential enemies. But why stonewall like Bush did? It seemed our government wasn’t reacting like an innocent victim, but like they were guilty of, or about, something.

  When it comes to the question of “what did they know and when did they know it,” as the old Watergate phrase goes, my B.S. detector antenna goes sky-high. Consider these known facts about the summer of 2001:

  July 26: Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped flying commercial airlines because of a threat assessment.

  August 6: President Bush received a presidential daily briefing that was titled: “Bin Laden Plans to Attack Inside United States,�
� which made clear a plan was imminent that might include the hijacking of commercial planes. The briefing made specific mention of the World Trade Center. Bush later claimed it “said nothing about an attack on America.” Bush went golfing that day and then left Washington for a month’s vacation.

  August 27: A supervisor at the FBI stated just before the attacks that he was trying to keep a hijacker from “flying a plane into the WTC”—by seeking a warrant to search the computer of Zacharias Moussaoui, the “twentieth hijacker.” He was taken to task by FBI headquarters for notifying the CIA. The CIA generated their own memo to offices in Paris and London about Moussaoui in response to the FBI’s query, and said they thought he might be a “possible suicide hijacker.” This was pre-9/11!

  September 10: According to Newsweek, a number of the top brass from the Pentagon suddenly canceled their travel plans for the next morning because of security concerns. San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was warned not to fly that day by his security staff.

  Many people have raised questions about just how the World Trade Center buildings collapsed. Could it have been not the impact of the planes, but a controlled demolition from inside? I don’t claim expertise about this, but I did work four years as part of the Navy’s underwater demolition teams, where we were trained to blow things to hell and high water. I walked the site shortly after the buildings came down, and something about the official story doesn’t add up.

  We are told that a molten, highly intense fuel mixture from airplanes caused fires that brought down these two huge steel-structured buildings. It’s said that the force of gravity drives the top of those buildings down into the lower floors like a huge hammer. But why didn’t the construction debris look like a large stack of “pancakes,” rather than the concrete being pulverized and flying through the air for blocks as it did? Two witnesses, a worker at the Port Authority and a fireman, later said they’d witnessed explosions inside and heard the popping sound of what they believed was demolition—but their statements to the 9/11 Commission seem to have been stricken from the official record.

  Strangely enough, they supposedly never could find the black boxes from the aircraft—which are generally thought to be indestructible. Some reports later from firemen said actually they were found, but all forensic data taken by the FBI for investigation is still locked up by a 9/11 Commission ruling until January 2, 2009, when Bush can reverse the release and leave office.

  The large Saudi Arabian family of Osama bin Laden has long had close ties to the Bush family—and quite a few of them were taken under the FBI’s wing and spirited out of Washington on a private charter when the airports reopened three days after the attacks. The 9/11 Commission concluded that, after the Saudi government requested this out of fear for their safety, the FBI had “conducted a satisfactory screening of Saudi nationals who left the United States.” The commission ignores the fact that some of them had known ties to terrorist activity that should at least have caused them to be detained for questioning.

  Stranger still was an overlooked story that appeared briefly on MSNBC.com, which indicated some of the hijackers might have trained at U.S. Army bases. Well, our military’s School of the Americas once helped train the Central American death squads, so our providing lethal skills to terrorists—excuse me, I mean “freedom fighters”—shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. It’s widely known that bin Laden himself once received CIA training, in the 1980s. He had worked for a family construction company in Afghanistan carrying out CIA and Department of Defense contract work, building caves for the mujahideen rebels who were fighting the Soviet Union. I guess he must’ve got to know those types of hideouts pretty well.

  I’ve got some other problems with The 9/11 Commission Report. It makes no mention that a secret Pentagon project called Able Danger had identified four of the hijackers a whole year before the attacks. Two unit whistleblowers confirmed that. The authorizing orders said Able Danger’s purpose was to “manipulate, degrade and destroy al-Qaeda.” First the commission said its members weren’t informed about this, then it later acknowledged that they were. The commission also failed to mention Condoleezza Rice being warned about al-Qaeda’s plotting by then-CIA Director George Tenet during the summer of 2001.

  So is this another whitewash like the Warren Commission? The 9/11 Commission politely informs us that “conspiracy theories play a peculiar role in American discourse. Whenever there is a particularly surprising, traumatic, and influential moment in our history, people are left with unsettling questions.” As an example, they go on to cite “conspiracy theorists [who] propagate outrageous notions that Kennedy was assassinated by the CIA, or some shadowy secret society of the rich and powerful.” Outrageous notions? I find it outrageous that these commissions allow themselves to become part of the cover-up.

  I want to believe that bin Laden and al-Qaeda were responsible for the 9/11 attacks, but now I have doubts. If they were responsible, I am beginning to think it was not without some knowledge of those impending attacks on our side. There are historical precedents for this occurring. Some evidence exists that FDR and Churchill were privy to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but needed a catalyst to bring America into World War Two. In recent years, we’ve learned two startling and very alarming things from declassified information. In 1962, Operation Northwoods was a plan drawn up by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The idea was to stage terror attacks—including the use of hijacked airplanes—and, if necessary, kill American citizens and then blame it on Castro’s Cuba to justify our invading the island.

  Then there was the famous Gulf of Tonkin incident in 1964. We were told that American ships were attacked by the North Vietnamese. Now we know that the incident was manufactured by the CIA and Pentagon in order to gain support for escalating the Vietnam War. If the United States government was prepared to stage such a gargantuan event in leading our nation to war then, why would they refrain from doing so again today? Might we look at this as a trend, going into these wars under false pretenses?

  A think tank called the Project for the New American Century, composed mainly of right-wing ideologues, wrote a report pre-9/11 titled Building America’s Defenses. It promoted a vast expansion of the military budget, along with intervention plans to make us an empire. The document contains this line: “The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event—like a new Pearl Harbor.”

  Is that what 9/11 was? The 9/11 Commission Report states that “the Bush administration had repeatedly tied the Iraq War to September 11th. . . . The panel finds no al-Qaeda-Iraq tie.” Bush then did some backpedaling, saying: “This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam [Hussein] and al-Qaeda. We did say there were numerous contacts. . . .” That reference was to alleged meetings between bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence in Sudan back in the mid-nineties, information obtained during torture of an unreliable source, according to the book Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, by Michael Isikoff and David Corn.

  It also turns out that another link exists between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. They used the same banker, BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. This was the same dirty offshore bank that the CIA, under President Reagan, used to help finance bin Laden, run guns to Hussein, and move money around in the Iran-Contra operation. And, when George W. Bush got in some trouble over his oil investments in 1987, one of the bank’s biggest Saudi investors assisted in bailing him out. BCCI collapsed in 1991, after stealing what’s been estimated as somewhere between 9.5 billion and 15 billion dollars.

  What I’ve raised here are just a few of the questions being asked by experts and citizens all over the U.S. Maybe no one will ever know what really happened that day. One thing I feel really strongly about is that you should never listen to just one side of a story, whether that be the official side or the conspiracy side. Especially when it has affected our wh
ole way of life and our reputation as a fair and free country around the world. Look, listen, read, explore, discuss, and do everything you can to find the truth, and then make your decisions based upon all the evidence you have. Question everything.

  CHAPTER 12

  At Conception Bay

  “Judge me by my policies. Judge me by my commissioners, and judge me by the work that we’re trying to do—not a feeding frenzy of media so that you can get ratings and make money.”

  —Jesse Ventura, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer,

  February 14, 2000

  Not too far below Mulegé, traveling a meandering stretch of Highway 1, one of the most breathtakingly beautiful spots that I’ve ever witnessed appears suddenly from around a bend. It’s called the Bahía de Concepción. Conception Bay. It’s vast, with a series of small islands in the middle. Looking across it, you see a mountain range—the southern end of the Sierra de Guadalupe—and, until you spy the opening, at first you can’t tell whether this is a lake or the ocean.

  It is a calm day, no wind. Far below us, probably 200 feet or more, the tranquil, turquoise waters are so clear that we can see all the way to the bottom. A couple is snorkeling down there, and even their shadows are visible. “Terry,” I say, in a near-whisper, “this is almost too much to handle. I don’t think I can concentrate on the road.”

  I used to say that I would someday retire to the surfing beaches of Hawaii, but this spot is more captivating than anything I can imagine; a “desert Polynesia,” as the tourist brochures say. I decide to make the first turnoff we can, and find a place to park the camper.

  Terry recognizes a frigate bird passing overhead. In the near distance, we think we catch the spouting of a whale. There don’t seem to be many facilities for visitors, but at the base of one rise, a dirt road lead off toward the bay. I edge the camper onto it, and momentarily we emerge at a cove. We are alone. Alone on a glistening, white sand beach. Pelicans dove for fish. Fiddler crabs race along the shoreline.