excerpts from the book

American Conspiracies

Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies that the Government Tells Us

by Jesse Ventura with Dick Russell

Skyhorse Publishing, 2011, paperback

 

Albert Einstein

A foolish faith in authority is the worst enemy of truth.

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Government is nothing but people, and people lie, especially where money and power are concerned.

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William Burroughs

Paranoia is having all the facts.

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There is a CIA operative inside every state government.

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I'm a skeptic about anything I read officially from the government. They don't tell the whole truth. They often seem to have an entirely different agenda. It's disheartening, to realize that what you read in the newspapers and the history books may not be accurate.

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Franklin D. Roosevelt

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is Fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any controlling private power.

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FDR, after getting elected in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, started implementing his New Deal. He took on the stock speculators and set up new watchdog agencies. He put a stop to farm foreclosures, and made employers accept collective bargaining by the unions. And he took the country off the gold standard, meaning that more paper money could be available to create jobs for the unemployed and provide loans. That outraged some of the conservative financiers... the oligarchs of finance ... considered the new president a traitor to his own class, namely them. Within a year of FDR's taking office, they'd started hatching a plan to get rid of him.

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retired General Smedley Butler, in a speech to an American Legion convention, 1931

I spent 33 years being a high-class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for capitalism. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1916. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City [Bank] boys to collect revenue in. I helped in the rape of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.

In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. I had a swell racket. I was rewarded with honors, medals, promotions .... I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate a racket in three cities. The Marines operated on three continents.

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retired General Smedley Butler to a WWII veterans group

[War is] largely a matter of money. Bankers lend money to foreign countries and when they cannot repay, the President sends Marines to get it. I know--I've been in eleven of these expeditions.

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former House of Representatives Speaker John McCormack, 1971

A well-organized minority can always outmaneuver an unorganized majority.

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Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so.

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Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

The Rhodes Scholarships, established by the terms of Cecil Rhodes' seventh will, are known to everyone. What is not so widely known is that Rhodes in five previous wills left his fortune to form a secret society, which was to devote itself to the preservation and expansion of the British Empire.

... [Funding of this organization later came from groups] associated with J.P. Morgan, and the Rockefeller and Whitney families.

... [The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is] a front for J.P. Morgan and Company.

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Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

[The goal of a cabal of global financiers linked to J.P. Morgan and Company was] nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.

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Georgetown University professor Carroll Quigley in his book "Tragedy and Hope"

[The goal of a cabal of global financiers linked to J.P. Morgan and Company was] nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. Each central bank... sought to dominate its government by its ability to control treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world.

... The American branch of this 'English Establishment exerted much of its influence through five American newspapers (the New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, the Washington Post, and the Boston Evening Transcript).

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The wealthiest CEOs of the world have been coming together [Bilderberg Group] with the political elite from Europe and America since 1954, when they first met at the Bilderberg Hotel in a little Dutch town called Oosterbeek. The Bilderberg deep pockets reach back centuries, to royalty who still believe they're the entitled ones and the rest of us are merely cannon fodder.

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In 2007, an American investigative journalist named John Buchanan found documents from the [congressional] McCormack-Dickstein Committee in the National Archives. These directly linked Prescott Bush [father of George HW Bush] to the power brokers (Morgan, DuPont, Remington, and others) who were behind the plan to get rid of FDR. This got some play in the U.K., but not a word in the mainstream American press.

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Kevin Phillip's book on the Bush family "American Dynasty"

We have no reliable way of knowing exactly why, after 1933, men like Averell Harriman, George Walker, and Prescott Bush, the Dulles brothers, James Forrestal, Henry Ford, and several Rockefellers, maintained investment relationships with Hitler's Germany, in a few cases up to (and even after) Pearl Harbor.

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journalist Carl Bernstein in a Rolling Stone article "The CIA and the Media", 1977, showed how strongly mainstream news organizations were tied to the CIA

By far the most valuable ... associations, according to CIA officials have been with the New York Times, CBS and Time Inc... Over the years, the [CBS] network provided cover for CIA employees, including at least one well-known foreign correspondent and several stringers... A high-level CIA official with a prodigious memory says that the New York Times provided cover for about ten CIA operatives between 1950 and 1966.

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journalist Carl Bernstein in a Rolling Stone article "The CIA and the Media", 1977, showed how strongly mainstream news organizations were tied to the CIA

[Joseph] Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services--from simple intelligence-gathering to serving as go-betweens with spies in Communist countries.

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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.

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Many of our public figures who've been killed--John Lennon, Malcolm X, and Dr. King--all seem to be under [US government] surveillance first and then assassinated later.

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In 1999, the [Martin Luther] King family brought a wrongful death lawsuit in a Tennessee Circuit Court. A nearly month-long trial ensued. Seventy witnesses were called. It took the jury only two and a half hours to come back with a verdict that Dr. King was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government.

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The FBI director [J Edgar Hoover[ had a series of meetings with persons involved with the CIA and military intelligence (MI) in the three weeks before [Martin Luther] King's assassination ... there were MI agents as well as Green Berets in Memphis the night he was shot.

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The Army's 111th Military Intelligence (MI) Group was keeping [Martin Luther] King under round-the-clock surveillance during the garbage strike in Memphis [in the] spring of 1968. One of the MI guys, Marrell McCollough, was undercover with the Memphis police--and ... was also involved in the planning sessions for the assassination.

... [MLK family attorney William F] Pepper's investigation found that McCullough went on to work for the CIA in the 1970s.

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Robert Kennedy in a speech in the U.S. Senate, May 9, 1966

A revolution is coming--a revolution which will be peaceful if we are wise enough; compassionate if we care enough; successful if we are fortunate enough--but a revolution is coming whether we will it or not. We can affect its character; we cannot alter its inevitability.

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In order to climb the ladder of the two political parties in our current system, you have to condone their corruption... most people, when they initially start in politics, are good people. They come into the system wanting to do their job, to change things. But the longer you stay in the system, the more corrupt you become.

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Dan Mitrione [was] an FBI agent and full-time spook operating undercover with the Agency for International Development (AID). Mitrione trained Latin American cops in interrogation techniques that included the use of torture and drugs.

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Dan Mitrione [was] an FBI agent and full-time spook operating undercover with the Agency for International Development (AID). Mitrione trained Latin American cops in interrogation techniques that included the use of torture and drugs.

In 1970, he was taken hostage and murdered by Uruguay's Tupamaros guerrillas. [People's Temple
Reverend Jim] Jones admitted having stayed friends with Mitrione. He even referred to him several times in taped speeches at Jones town.

The CIA claimed after Jonestown that its file on "the Rev. Jimmie Jones" was almost empty. Actually, the CIA's Office of Security had opened a 201-file on Jones in the early 1960s, when he took off for Rio de Janeiro. Agency records showed that file stayed open for ten years, only being closed for no explained reason after Mitrione was killed. So it seems pretty likely that Mitrione had recruited Jones into the CIA, using the Department as his cover.

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More than 700,000 of America's estimated 20 million pot-smokers got arrested in 2008. About half of the 200,000 inmates in our federal prisons are in there for drug-related offenses. Between 1970 and 2007, we saw a 547 percent increase in our prison population, mainly because of our drug policies... [In] the new prison-industrial complex, corporations are now running the show. We as taxpayers shell out $68 billion every year for prisons, and a lot of that ends up going into private contractors' pockets.

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About half of the 200,000 inmates in our federal prisons are in there for drug-related offenses.

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American banks are collectively the world's largest financial beneficiary of the drug trade.

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The heroin epidemic that ravaged our cities during the fifties and sixties originated with the CIA out of Southeast Asia. Almost from the moment of their founding in 1947, the CIA was giving covert support to organized drug traffickers in Europe and the Far East, and eventually the Middle East and Latin America. During the Vietnam War, heroin was being smuggled into this country in the bodies of soldiers being flown home.

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Toward the end of American involvement over there in 1975 [Vietnam], a former Green Beret named Michael Hand arranged a 500-pound shipment of heroin from Southeast Asia's "Golden Triangle" to the U.S. by way of Australia. That's where Hand had set up shop as vice chair of the Nugan Hand Bank, which was linked by the Australian Narcotics Bureau to a drug smuggling network that "exported some $3 billion [Australian] worth of heroin from Bangkok prior to June 1976. Several CIA guys ... used the Nugan Hand bank to channel funds for covert operations. By 1979, the bank had 22 branches in 13 countries and $1 billion in annual business.

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In the mid- 1980s, [Oliver] North got together with four companies that were owned and operated by drug dealers, and arranged payments from the State Department for shipping supplies to the [Nicaraguan] Contras.

... What became known as the Iran-Contra affair came to light in November 1986. We were selling arms to Iran, breaking an arms embargo, in order to fund the contras.

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The Reagan-Bush gang is gone, and Clinton is now president. [In] 1996 the San Jose Mercury News came out with a remarkable 20,000-word series by reporter Gary Webb that he'd been researching for more than a year. It described a pipeline between Colombian cartels, middlemen, and street gangs in South Central L.A. that involved tons of crack cocaine... The crack was being funneled to a young new-millionaire named "Freeway" Ricky Donnell Ross, who supplied it to the Crips and Bloods and beyond... How involved was the CIA in the crack epidemic then raging across our country?

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The CIA is into drugs ... because they can get money to operate with, and not have to account to Congress for what they're doing.

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[The Bank of Credit and Commerce International] BCCI ... was involved in drug-money transactions ... ClA Director [William] Casey was relying on BCCI to distribute American assistance to the Afghan mujahideen who were fighting the Russians at the time. Except most of the aid went to the faction controlled by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was probably the leading heroin trafficker in the world. Pakistani president Muhammad Zia in 1983 let local traffickers put their drug profits into BCCI.

... BCCI was the seventh biggest bank on the planet when it collapsed, shortly after the Soviets withdrew their troops from Afghanistan.

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according the United Nations

Money made in illicit drug trade has been bused to keep banks afloat in the global financial crisis.

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Dennis Dayle, a forms DEA agent in the Middle East, at an anti-drug conference

In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.

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Beginning in the nineties, drug dealers in Mexico were taking charge of half of Colombia's drug trade into the U. S.. While Mexico used to be just the trans shipping point from South America, now it was a major producer and distributor... between $19 billion and $39 billion in proceeds from drugs heads back south [to Mexico]every year from the U.S.

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[In Mexico] between December 2006 and the spring of 2009, more than 10,780 people were killed. And most of the guns fueling the violence are coming from the U.S.. About 87 percent of the firearms that Mexican authorities have seized over the last five years can be traced to here, many of them from gun shops and gun shows in the Southwestern border states. And these are no longer simply handguns, but now military-grade weaponry and very serious ordnance. How come the manufacturers are not being held accountable for selling these weapons over the border.

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John Farmer, a senior counsel for the 9/11 Commission who drafted the original [9/11] report

At some level of the government, at some point in time ... there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened [on 9/11].

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Jesse Ventura

I am convinced that some people inside our government knew the [9/11] attack was going to happen and allowed it to come to pass--because it furthered their political agenda. I don't necessarily believe that they orchestrated it themselves, although the door is definitely open to that.

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Jesse Ventura

I am convinced that some people inside our government knew the [9/11] attack was going to happen and allowed it to come to pass--because it furthered their political agenda.

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NORAD [North American Aerospace Defense Command] ... had been ordered to stand down [on 9/11]. Then LAX [Los Angeles International Airport] Security wanted to know who could have made that order. And word came back that it was from the highest level of the White House... [President] Bush ... was reading 'My Pet Goat' to the school kids in Florida, so the only other person it could be was Dick Cheney.

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September 11 [2001] was the second day of Vigilant Guardian. an exercise of the Joint Chiefs and NORAD that simulated planes being hijacked in the Northeastern United States

... Could the attack have been scheduled intentionally to coincide with those war games? If so, this raises a couple of questions. Either there was a major intelligence leak, whereby the terrorists realized the war games would be a good cover for their operation. Or else some people in the administration knew of the attack ahead of time and let it proceed simultaneously, knowing the confusion this would cause.

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Between September 2000 and June 2001, on 67 different occasions fighter jets were sent to intercept aircraft that had lost radio contact or their transponder signal or were flying off course, usually within ten minutes of any sign of a problem... Then, on June 1, 2001, the existing hijacking response procedures were changed to require approval by the secretary of defense before responding to a situation with lethal force. And when the call came into the Pentagon on 9/11, nobody answered the phone!

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According to the 9/11 Commission, [Vice-President Dick] Cheney didn't arrive underground at the PEOC (Presidential Emergency Operations Center) until almost 10 AM. [Transportation Secretary Norman] Mineta, however, said the Vice President was already down there when he arrived at about 9:20 AM. Richard Clarke and Cheney's photographer indicated the same thing. 'That was before the Pentagon had been hit, an Mineta recalled that a young man came into the PEOC three times to tell Cheney how far out the plane was from Washington. After the third report, according to Mineta, the young fellow asked, "Do the orders still stand?" and Cheney responded, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?" The 9/11 Commission chose to ignore Mineta's testimony and went so far as to remove it from the video archive.

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a firefighter who got dug out of the rubble on 9/11

The one thing that always troubled me is, why were they in such a hurry to remove all the evidence? Why did they take away everything from the site as fast and expediently as possible?

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former air force fighter pilot Russ Wittenberg about what hit the Pentagon on 9/11

We don't know what it was, but you can tell what it wasn't [a 757 aircraft].

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Major General Albert Stubblebine, retired Commanding General of the U.S. Army Intelligence and Security Command

I have had a lot of experience looking at photographs. l don't know exactly what hit it [the Pentagon] but I do know from the photographs I have analyzed, it was not an airplane. For one thing, if you look at the hole that was made in the Pentagon, the nose penetrated far enough so that there should have been wing marks on the side [of the building.

... Whenever there's a plane crash, things are strewn about. So where are the seats, the luggage? The wings, vertical stabilizers, and engines were never fully recovered. A number of parts to a 757 are pretty much indestructible, but not a single piece has ever been positively identified as originating with Flight 77.

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Colonel George Nelson, who during 30 years of service in the air force served as an aircraft accident investigation board member.

With all the evidence readily available at the Pentagon crash site, any unbiased, rational investigator could only conclude that a Boeing 757 did not fly into the Pentagon as alleged. In all my years of direct and indirect participation, I never witnessed nor even heard of an aircraft loss, where the wreckage was accessible, that prevented investigators from finding enough hard evidence to positively identify the make, model, and specific registration number of the aircraft--and in most cases the precise cause of the accident.

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Colonel George Nelson, who during 30 years of service in the air force served as an aircraft accident investigation board member.

With all the evidence readily available at the Pentagon crash site, any unbiased, rational investigator could only conclude that a Boeing 757 did not fly into the Pentagon as alleged.

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The official story [of 9/11] is that, for the first time in history, the black boxes were not recovered. Not from any of the four planes... Also for the first time in history, no attempt was made to reconstruct the planes with whatever parts they could find.

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After 9/11, not a single employee at the FAA or NORAD got punished. In fact, all the major military men involved received promotions. They included General Richard Myers, who was named Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

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Not one shred of evidence produced in a courtroom leads to the conclusion that [Osama] bin Laden spearheaded [the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon].

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Theodore Roosevelt, 1895

Too much cannot be said against the men of wealth who sacrifice everything to getting wealth. There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensible to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune, and putting his fortune only to the basest uses.

p168
The Federal Reserve ... controls our monetary policy. By changing the supply of dollars in circulation, they have influence over interest rates, mortgage payments, whether the financial markets boom or collapse, and basically whether our economy expands or stumbles. But the Fed is only partly an institution of government. The stockholders in a dozen different Federal Reserve banks in different regions of the country are the big private banks.

The Federal Reserve was created by Congress in 1913, after a financial panic that led to a secret meeting at banker J.P. Morgan's private resort, off the coast of Georgia at a place called Jekyll Island.

... What emerged was a cartel agreement with five objectives: stop the growing competition from the nation's newer banks; obtain a franchise to create money out of nothing for the purpose of lending; get control of the reserves of all banks so that the more reckless ones would not be exposed to currency drains and bank runs; get the taxpayer to pick up the cartel's inevitable losses; and convince Congress that the purpose was to protect the public. It was realized that the bankers would have to become partners with the politicians and that the structure of the cartel would have to be a central bank.

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Henry Wallace, vice president of the United States, 1944

With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. American fascism will not be really dangerous until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the deliberate poisoners of public information. They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution.

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George Orwell, 1984

In vast laboratories in the Ministry of Peace, and in experimental stations, teams of experts are indefatigably at work searching . ... for breeds of disease germs immunized against all possible antibodies.

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Justice Department attorney John Loftus in his 1982 book "The Belarus Secret"

Nazi germ warfare scientists came to America [and] experimented with poison ticks dropped from planes to spread rare diseases... the US. tested some of these poison ticks on the Plum Island artillery range off the coast of Connecticut during the early 1950s.

... Plum Island was experimenting with Lone Star ticks and the Cayenne tick, feeding them on viruses and testing them on pigs in 1975 and 1976--exactly when Lyme disease first showed up across from the island. At that time, the Lone Star tick was otherwise only found in Texas. Nobody can explain how it's happened to migrate all across the Eastern seaboard. Along with its cousin, the deer tick, the Lone Star variety is known for spreading Lyme disease.

... Germ labs like Plum Island pose a bigger threat to our country than any terror group... Lyme disease ... is the fastest-growing infectious illness in America after AIDS.


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