Birth of the CIA...
The United States has carried on foreign intelligence activities since the days of George Washington, but only since World War II have they been coordinated on a government-wide basis. Even before Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was concerned about American intelligence deficiencies. He asked New York lawyer William J. Donovan to draft a plan for an intelligence service. The Office of Strategic Services was established in June 1942 with a mandate to collect and analyze strategic information required by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to conduct special operations not assigned to other agencies. During the War, the OSS supplied policy makers with essential facts and intelligence estimates and often played an important role in directly aiding military campaigns. But the OSS never received complete jurisdiction over all foreign intelligence activities. Since the early 1930s the FBI had been responsible for intelligence work in Latin America, and the military services protected their areas of responsibility.
In October 1945, the OSS was abolished and its functions transferred to the State and War Departments. But the need for a postwar centralized intelligence system was clearly recognized. Eleven months earlier, Donovan, by then a major general, had submitted to President Roosevelt a proposal calling for the separation of OSS from the Joint Chiefs of Staff with the new organization having direct Presidential supervision. Donovan proposed an "organization which will procure intelligence both by overt and covert methods and will at the same time provide intelligence guidance, determine national intelligence objectives, and correlate the intelligence material collected by all government agencies." Under his plan, a powerful, centralized civilian agency would have coordinated all the intelligence services. He also proposed that this agency have authority to conduct "subversive operations abroad," but "no police or law enforcement functions, either at home or abroad."
Donovan's plan drew heavy fire. The military services generally opposed a complete merger. The State Department thought it should supervise all peacetime operations affecting foreign relations. The FBI supported a system whereby military intelligence worldwide would be handled by the armed services, and all civilian activities would be under FBI's own jurisdiction.
In response to this policy debate, President Harry S. Truman established the Central Intelligence Group in January 1946, directing it to coordinate existing departmental intelligence, supplementing but not supplanting their services. This was all to be done under the direction of a National Intelligence Authority composed of a Presidential representative and the Secretaries of State, War and Navy. Rear Admiral Sidney W. Souers, USNR, who was the Deputy Chief of Naval Intelligence, was appointed the first Director of Central Intelligence. Twenty months later, the National Intelligence Authority and its operating component, the Central Intelligence Group, were disestablished.
Under the provisions of the National Security Act of 1947 (which became effective on 18 September 1947) the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency were established. Most of the National Security Act's specific assignments given the CIA~ as well as the prohibitions on police and internal security functions, closely follow both the original 1944 Donovan plan and the Presidential directive creating the Central Intelligence Group. The 1947 Act charged the CIA with coordinating the nation's intelligence activities and correlating, evaluating and disseminating intelligence which affects national security. In addition, the Agency was to perform such other duties and functions related to intelligence as the NSC might direct. The Act also made the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) responsible for protecting intelligence sources and methods.
In 1949, the Central Intelligence Agency Act was passed supplementing the 1947 Act by permitting the Agency to use confidential fiscal and administrative procedures and exempting CIA from many of the usual limitations on the expenditure of federal funds. It provided that CIA funds could be included in the budgets of other departments and then transferred to the Agency without regard to the restrictions placed on the initial appropriation. This Act is the statutory authority for the secrecy of the Agency's budget. In order to protect intelligence sources and methods from disclosure, the 1949 Act further exempted the CIA from having to disclose its "organization, functions, names? Officials, titles, salaries, or numbers of personnel employed."
The office of Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI) evolved gradually. Until 1953, Deputy Directors were appointed by the Director, and it was General Walter Bedell Smith, the fourth DCI, who established the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence in the role he has since played in CIA. Congress recognized the importance of the position in April 1953 by amending the National Security Act of 1947 to provide for the appointment of the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate. This amendment also provided that commissioned officers of the armed forces, whether active or retired, could not occupy both DCI and DDCI positions at the same time. The DDCI assists the Director by performing such functions as the DCI assigns or delegates. He acts for and exercises the powers of the Director during his absence or disability, or in the event of a vacancy in the position of the Director.
Under these Statutes, the Director serves as the principal adviser to the President and the National Security Council on all matters of foreign intelligence related to national security. CIA's responsibilities are carried out subject to various directives and controls by the President and the NSC.
Today the CIA reports regularly to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, as required by the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980 and various Executive Orders. The Agency also reports regularly to the Defense Subcommittees of the Appropriations Committees in both houses of Congress. Moreover, the Agency provides substantive briefings to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, and the Armed Services Committees in both bodies as well as other Committees and individual members.
http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/ciahist.htm
When the Americans sought to collapse the Soviet Union and bring a final end to the Cold War, they did not do it head on, but chose to bankrupt that nation by luring it into its own version of the Vietnam War–in Afghanistan. So said Zbigniew Brzezinski, who was Barack Obama’s national security advisor throughout his presidential campaign. Brzezinski has also admitted that the Americans deliberately fostered Islamic militants as part of that strategy.
This turned out to be the largest CIA operation in US history; Americans funded and supported the effort of Afghanistan’s Mujahideen, then ennobled by Reagan as ‘freedom-fighters’, and of course now maligned as ‘terrorists’.
The group the Americans chose to operate through was the Hizb i Islami, an off-shoot of the notorious Muslim Brotherhood, the umbrella organization responsible for all factions of Islamic terrorism, including the likes of Osama bin Laden.
Because of this, the 9/11 attacks have been dismissed as “blowback”, but the truth is that American cooperation with the Muslim Brotherhood goes back to WWII. The organization was created prior to that through British assistance. It derives from what is called the Salafi reform movement of Islam, founded by a notorious impostor by the name of Jamal ud Din al Afghani. Afghani agitated against the West on their behalf and assisted in the famous Orabi revolt. The British were then provided with their pretext to invade to ‘stabilize’ the country, and of course, seize the all-important Suez Canal.
The Muslim Brotherhood received training and support from the Nazis prior to WWII, but after the war, control of the organization was passed to the Americans. However, instead of rounding up former Nazis, the American hired them for their indispensable expertise. This was part of an international network known as Odessa, which created “ratlines” to help former Nazis and SS officers escape. Many were brought, under Operation Paperclip, to the US to work for NASA. Others fled to South America, and Italy, where they became part of the notorious Operation Gladio, who were responsible for the violence of the Red Brigades during the 70s, and the death of Aldo Moro. And finally, some left for Egypt, where they continued to train the Muslim Brotherhood.
However, when the MB failed an assassination attempt against the then-Prime Minister Gamal Adbun Nasser, he had them rounded up. During this persecution, the CIA arranged for many members of the MB to be transmitted to Saudi Arabia, an important ally, where they became “religious instructors”. The Saudis have since tried to blame the rise of militancy in their country on this influx of Salafis and Muslim Brotherhood, but the truth is the Saudis are much more closely implicated in these covert affairs.
After the downfall of the Nixon administration, the CIA’s hands were tied. So, in order to bypass congress, it was agreed that Saudi Arabia would use its cash windfall from the Oil Crisis to fund CIA covert activities by proxy.
One of the first projects was the funding of the Contras of Nicargua, who were agitating against the duly-elected Sandinistas. This became part of a larger international CIA operation called Iran-Contra, where the Americans illegally traded arms with the Iranians, and trafficked in Nicaraguan cocaine, funneled through Mena, Arkansas, under Bill Clinton’s watch, and distributed to American ghettos, setting off the crack epidemic. Proceeds of this illicit traffic were used to finance the “Mujahideen” of Afghanistan, of which bin Laden was eventually a key figure.
Likewise, we have to suspect that something deceptive is going on in Mumbai. Blame is being targeted at the Pakistanis, who have long been accused of fostering terrorism. Of course they have. CIA support for the “terrorists” throughout the Soviet war in Afghanistan was coordinated through the Pakistani secret service, the ISI.
On December 3, Outlookindia.com reported that the CIA’s station chief in Delhi approached one of India’s intelligence agencies, the Research and Analysis Wing, and passed on a fairly specific warning;
“In mid-September this year, the CIA station chief in Delhi sought an urgent meeting with his counterpart in R&AW to pass on some critical inputs. This was part of an understanding that Indian and American intelligence had institutionalized in the aftermath of 9/11. From its assets in Pakistan and Afghanistan, American intelligence had come to learn that the Lashkar-e-Toiba was planning to launch a major terrorist attack in Mumbai, which would be carried out from the sea.”
One police officer who encountered the gunmen as they entered the Jewish centre that was attacked told the Guardian the attackers were “white”, although this could mean they were paler-skinned Indians from the country’s north.
“I went into the building late last night,” he said. “I got a shock because they were white. I was expecting them to look like us. They fired three shots. I fired ten back.”
Mumbai locals say the killing spree began at the Leopold Cafe. According to a BBC report, three men walked into the cafe, drank beer, settled their bills and walked out. Then they fished out guns from their bags and began firing. Alcohol consumption is strictly forbidden in Islam.
Gaffar Abdul Amir, an Iraqi tourist from Baghdad, says he saw at least two men who started the firing outside the Leopold Cafe. He was returning to his hotel from the seaside with a friend when he saw two men carrying bags and brandishing AK-47s walking in front of them, shooting.
“They did not look Indian, they looked foreign. One of them, I thought, had blonde hair. The other had a punkish hairstyle. They were neatly dressed,” says Mr Amir.
We will have to keep an eye on the emerging evidence around who is culpable in the Mumbai attacks. But any such claims have to be measured against the backdrop presented above. If they are not, then we must assume that the distortion is deliberate, and designed to fan certain sentiments. Those sentiments would seem to be pressure against Pakistan, as part of the larger recent push by the American administration to bolster the relationship between themselves, Israel, and that “economic miracle”, India. (link)
http://www.terrorism-illuminati.com/archives/29
The radical faction of Islam, known as the Salafi, are a movement created through British intrigue and coordination with occult secret societies, toward fomenting a “Clash of Civilizations”. And though the West is largely unaware of them, they are almost entirely responsible for the extremism that Islam is mistakenly perceived for.
Zarqawi, in his letter to bin Laden, described the Mujahideen, those who have been duped by the CIA to believe they are fighting a “holy war”, as follows: “These are the quintessence of the Sunnis and the good sap of this country. In general, they belong to the Sunni doctrine and naturally to the Salafi creed.”
Interestingly, their most recent response to challenges against their authenticity has been to admit, in part, to their Masonic origins, although apologizing that the men claimed as its founders, Masons and British agents like Jamal Aghani, and Mohammed Abduh, were not its true representatives.
But this is a feeble attempt to disguise their true mischief and service to Western powers. Instead, the Salafi now claim to be devoted followers alone of Abdul Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, whose service as a British agent they have yet to discover.
Islam was essentially consolidated for a period of about 1000 years, until the advent of Wahhabism. Islam developed four primary schools of legal thought, called Math’habs. These developed out of the tolerant attitude that it was possible to arrive at different conclusions based on an appraisal of the very same evidence. At a certain point, nevertheless, the legal development of Islam was eventually closed, called the “Closing of the Doors of Ijtihad”, to avoid any further controversy. That is how the schools were established at a number of four.
These various schools were not considered sects. They were legal schools of opinion, and were each considered orthodox and mutually compatible.
That is, until the 19th century, and the advent of colonialism, and the common British strategy of “Divide and Rule”, which evidently exercised its hand in disrupting this situation. According to the Wikipedia article on Shariah:
During the 19th century the history of Islamic law took a sharp turn due to new challenges the Muslim world faced: the West had risen to a global power and colonized a large part of the world, including Muslim territories. Societies changed from the agricultural to the industrial stage. New social and political ideas emerged and social models slowly shifted from hierarchical towards egalitarian. The Ottoman Empire and the rest of the Muslim world were in decline, and calls for reform became louder. In Muslim countries, codified state law started replacing the role of scholarly legal opinion. Western countries sometimes inspired, sometimes pressured, and sometimes forced Muslim states to change their laws. Secularist movements pushed for laws deviating from the opinions of the Islamic legal scholars. Islamic legal scholarship remained the sole authority for guidance in matters of rituals, worship, and spirituality, while they lost authority to the state in other areas. The Muslim community became divided into groups reacting differently to the change. This division persists until the present day (Brown 1996, Hallaq 2001, Ramadan 2005, Aslan 2006, Safi 2003).
* Secularists believe the law of the state should be based on secular principles, not on Islamic legal theory.
* Traditionalists believe that the law of the state should be based on the traditional legal schools. However, traditional legal views are considered unacceptable by most modern Muslims, especially in areas like women’s rights or slavery.[6]
* Reformers believe that new Islamic legal theories can produce modernized Islamic law [7] and lead to acceptable opinions in areas such as women’s rights.[8]
* Salafis strive to follow Muhammad and his companions, tabiin (followers of the Companions), tabiut tabiin (followers of the tabiin) and those who follow these 3 generations.
An excellent article has now been posted, however, at Salafi Publications, which not only admits, but thoroughly exposes, the Masonic and deviant origins of the founders of the Salafi movement, and their successors, the Muslim Brotherhood.
Instead, they hold to the claim that Salafism derived from the earliest centuries of Islam, from the time of the Salaf, meaning the earliest generations, and referring to the time before the development of the Math’habs. Contrary to their claims though, while it is true that the word “Salaf” refers to these early generations, the use of the term in this manner is a modern development.
This deceptive interpretation of history is derived from Abdul Wahhab, who appeared in the mid-18th century. According to his memoirs, a British spy by the name of Hempher, was assigned to the Middle East in order to discover ways to undermine Islam, with the aim of advancing British control over the region. His mission eventually focussed on the support of Wahhab, and backing him through the Saudi family, through whom he preached the British’s destructive message of Islam.
Essentially, Wahhab’s innovations made it legal for his followers to fight other Muslims, by pronouncing them “unbelievers”, under the pretense of “purifying” Islam, but in reality serving British strategy against the great Ottoman Empire. Wahhab did so by claiming that all of Islamic history, except for the generations of the Salaf, that is, from the time of the Math’habs onward, had fallen out of Islam.
Once adherence of the Muslims had been unbound from their traditional legal schools, it was possible for the British and their agents to come in with their own. And this is the purpose of the Salafi movement. The Saudis were then formally installed in Arabia in 1932, and have since acted as protectors of the oil interests of the Rockefellers, who are regarded as second-in-command within the Illuminati, after the Rothschilds. Particularly since 1973, when the Oil Crisis was orchestrated to enrich the Saudis, they have used the tremendous wealth at their disposal to advance their deviant interpretations. A notorious exponent of which is Bin Laden.
While the Saudis have been under agreement with the CIA to finance many of its covert activities, including the funding of the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, and the support of Islamic terrorists worldwide, many of the Saudi scholars as well as the government are putting on a public face of rejecting terrorism and bin Laden. They claim that terrorism and anti-government activities are contrary to the true tenets of Salafism.
This is not true. At times the purpose of Salafism is to inculcate terrorism, but in general, the purpose of Salafism is to provide a new Math’hab, to estrange the world’s Muslim population from traditional Islam, and thereby lead them wherever Western interests deem fit.
You can download the article, titled Historical Development of the Methodologies of al-Ikhwaan al-Muslimeen And Their Effect and Influence Upon Contemporary Salafee Dawah: Part 8, here:
http://www.terrorism-illuminati.com/archives/21
Iran in the 1950's...
Now we pause briefly to read in and, hopefully, get a bit firmer grasp on just how we got to this point in our relations with the nation and people of Iran.
Our reading material is this special report, Secrets of History: The C.I.A. in Iran — How a Plot Convulsed Iran in ‘53 (and in ‘79), which comes from The Times’s archive. It was produced for the Web site in April of 2000 and helps to explain, in fine detail, the role the United States played in the coup that toppled the elected Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. The report features an article by James Risen that was based on a secret, classified history of the C.I.A.’s role in that plot, along with .pdfs of some historical documents, illustrations including front pages of The New York Times from the period and a number of articles from the Times archive telling the story as it was reported at the time that the events took place.
Given that some sort of military confrontation with Iran could still be on the horizon for the United States, this seems like a good time to dig a little deeper into the history behind this present-day conflict.
Here’s the introduction to the report, by James Risen:
The Central Intelligence Agency’s secret history of its covert operation to overthrow Iran’s government in 1953 offers an inside look at how the agency stumbled into success, despite a series of mishaps that derailed its original plans.
Written in 1954 by one of the coup’s chief planners, the history details how United States and British officials plotted the military coup that returned the shah of Iran to power and toppled Iran’s elected prime minister, an ardent nationalist.
The document shows that:
# Britain, fearful of Iran’s plans to nationalize its oil industry, came up with the idea for the coup in 1952 and pressed the United States to mount a joint operation to remove the prime minister.
# The C.I.A. and S.I.S., the British intelligence service, handpicked Gen. Fazlollah Zahedi to succeed Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and covertly funneled $5 million to General Zahedi’s regime two days after the coup prevailed.
# Iranians working for the C.I.A. and posing as Communists harassed religious leaders and staged the bombing of one cleric’s home in a campaign to turn the country’s Islamic religious community against Mossadegh’s government.
# The shah’s cowardice nearly killed the C.I.A. operation. Fearful of risking his throne, the Shah repeatedly refused to sign C.I.A.-written royal decrees to change the government. The agency arranged for the shah’s twin sister, Princess Ashraf Pahlevi, and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, the father of the Desert Storm commander, to act as intermediaries to try to keep him from wilting under pressure. He still fled the country just before the coup succeeded.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/03/08/secrets-of-history-the-cia-in-iran/
http://www.nytimes.com/library/world/mideast/041600iran-cia-index.html
http://www.iranian.com/History/2000/April/CIA/index.html
This extremely important document is one of the last major pieces of the puzzle explaining American and British roles in the August 1953 coup against Iranian Premier Mohammad Mossadeq. Written in March 1954 by Donald Wilber, one of the operation’s chief planners, the 200-page document is essentially an after-action report, apparently based in part on agency cable traffic and Wilber’s interviews with agents who had been on the ground in Iran as the operation lurched to its conclusion.
Long-sought by historians, the Wilber history is all the more valuable because it is one of the relatively few documents that still exists after an unknown quantity of materials was destroyed by CIA operatives – reportedly “routinely” – in the 1960s, according to former CIA Director James Woolsey. However, according to an investigation by the National Archives and Records Administration, released in March 2000, “no schedules in effect during the period 1959-1963 provided for the disposal of records related to covert actions and, therefore, the destruction of records related to Iran was unauthorized.” (p. 22) The CIA now says that about 1,000 pages of documentation remain locked in agency vaults.
During the 1990s, three successive CIA heads pledged to review and release historically valuable materials on this and 10 other widely-known covert operations from the period of the Cold War, but in 1998, citing resource restrictions, current Director George Tenet reneged on these promises, a decision which prompted the National Security Archive to file a lawsuit in 1999 for this history of the 1953 operation and one other that is known to exist. So far, the CIA has effectively refused to declassify either document, releasing just one sentence out of 339 pages at issue. That sentence reads: “Headquarters spent a day featured by depression and despair.” In a sworn statement by William McNair, the information review officer for the CIA’s directorate of operations, McNair claimed that release of any other part of this document other than the one line that had previously appeared in Wilber’s memoirs, would “reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the national security of the United States.” Clearly, the “former official” who gave this document to The New York Times disagreed with McNair, and we suspect you will too, once you read this for yourself. The case is currently pending before a federal judge. (See related item on this site: “Archive Wins Freedom of Information Ruling Versus CIA”)
There are also some new details on how that US persuaded the shah to agree to the coup, including a statement that Assadollah Rashidian was involved in this effort and that General Schwartzkopf, Sr. played a larger role in this than was previously known. There are also a few details reported in the article that I knew about but chose not to reveal, including that Donald Wilber and Norman Derbyshire developed the original coup plan and that the plan was known as TPAJAX, rather than simply AJAX. (The TP prefix indicated that the operation was to be carried out in Iran.) The NYT article does not say anything about a couple of matters that remain controversial about the coup, including whether Ayatollah Kashani played a role in organizing the crowds and whether the CIA team organized “fake” Tudeh Party crowds as part of the effort. There may be something on these issues in the 200-page history itself.
Much more important than the NYT article are the two documents appended to the summary document giving operational plans for the coup. These contain a wealth of interesting information. They indicate that the British played a larger—though still subordinate—role in the coup than was previously known, providing part of the financing for it and using their intelligence network (led by the Rashidian brothers) to influence members of the parliament and do other things. The CIA described the coup plan as “quasi-legal,” referring to the fact that the shah legally dismissed Mossadeq but presumably acknowledging that he did not do so on his own initiative. These documents make clear that the CIA was prepared to go forward with the coup even if the shah opposed it.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB28/
http://www.iranchamber.com/history/coup53/coup53p1.php
For more info read "Confessions of an Economic Hitman" or google "Kermit Roosevelt" "CIA" "Iran".
The events leading to the overthrow of the shah, the hostage crisis, and the invasion of Iran by Iraq to bring the country back in compliance with US and British banking and oil interests...
http://www.iranchamber.com/history/islamic_revolution/islamic_revolution.php
CIA involvement with Iraq...
PHILADELPHIA—If the United States succeeds in shepherding the creation of a post-war Iraqi government, a former National Security Council official says, it won't be the first time that Washington has played a primary role in changing that country's rulers.
Roger Morris, a former State Department foreign service officer who was on the NSC staff during the Johnson and Nixon administrations, says the CIA had a hand in two coups in Iraq during the darkest days of the Cold War, including a 1968 putsch that set Saddam Hussein firmly on the path to power.
Morris says that in 1963, two years after the ill-fated U.S. attempt at overthrow in Cuba known as the Bay of Pigs, the CIA helped organize a bloody coup in Iraq that deposed the Soviet-leaning government of Gen. Abdel-Karim Kassem.
"This takes you down a longer, darker road in terms of American culpability ....
"As in Iran in '53, it was mostly American money and even American involvement on the ground," says Morris, referring to a U.S.-backed coup that brought the return of the shah to neighbouring Iran.
Kassem, who had allowed communists to hold positions of responsibility in his government, was machine-gunned to death. And the country wound up in the hands of the Baath party.
At the time, Morris continues, Saddam was a Baath operative studying law in Cairo, one of the venues the CIA chose to plan the coup.
In fact, he claims the former Iraqi president castigated by President George W. Bush as one of history's most "brutal dictators" was actually on the CIA payroll in those days.
"There's no question," Morris says. "It was there in Cairo that (Saddam) and others were first contacted by the agency."
In 1968, Morris says, the CIA encouraged a palace revolt among Baath party elements led by long-time Saddam mentor Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, who would turn over the reins of power to his ambitious protégé in 1979.
"It's a regime that was unquestionably midwived by the United States, and the (CIA's) involvement there was really primary," Morris says.
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines03/0420-05.htm
The CIA has been organizing "regime change" for 50 years. They have removed many governments that are unfriendly to US corporate interests and replaced them with regimes that are more likely to work closely and slavishly to carry out the economic and geopolitical desires of the US corporate elite.
But the CIA's crimes don't end when a right-wing coup has succeeded. The CIA then has to keep its repressive despots in power in order to ensure that they can put into place and then maintain a variety of unjust economic systems and structures. This is done with arms sales (and outright gifts of "surplus" weapons), glowing diplomatic support, "intelligence support" (sic) and massive economic investment (i.e., pillaging as much profit as possible by exploiting the natural resources that drew them in there in the first place, and handing out some of the spoils to a loyal local elite).
When the corporate media describe the CIA's use of political assassination as if it exists in isolation from mass imprisonment, torture and murder, they cover up the horror, pain and suffering experienced by thousands of ordinary people in countries where CIA-backed blood baths have taken place. They neglect to reveal that when the CIA carries out its high-profile assassination efforts, they also carry out murders of thousands of lesser-known political figures.
It's standard procedure with many coups that thousands of grassroots activists and organizers get rounded up, tortured and killed. Such waves of mass violence make today's serial sniper in Washington look like a Boy Scout. The CIA has used such goons to eliminate its opponents and as a scare tactic to ensure that other citizens, who might otherwise have protested the regime change, decide instead to lay very low in order to stay alive.
An apt example of a real CIA assassination campaign was the "Phoenix Program" in Vietnam. Tens of thousands of people where specifically targetted, tracked down and assassinated, many by snipers. Although Helms held the post of Director of the CIA during the height of this mass serial assassination program, none of the 98 recent stories on Helms, found with the google search engine, even mention Phoenix. Reliable estimates on the total number of people killed by the US in South East Asia during the Vietnam war range from three to five million people. But, of course, there is no mention of Helms culpability in any recent corporate media articles. they say it is taboo to speak ill of the dead, but what they don't say is that it is even more taboo to speak ill of the CIA, or breath word that CIA directors are criminals for overseeing the deliberate murder of millions of innocent civilians.
During Helms' tenure as director of the CIA under President Johnson, he also oversaw the "secret war" against Laos. But, it was no secret for the people of Laos. Over two million tons of bombs were dropped on this small country. The word "Laos" is not mentioned in any of the 98 recent corporate media articles found by google in a search for Richard Helms. Tio much of the world, it's still a "secret war."
Another very good example of a CIA-organized "regime change" was a coup in 1963 that employed political assassination, mass imprisonment, torture and murder. This was the military coup that first brought Saddam Hussein's beloved Ba'ath Party to power in Iraq. At the time, Richard Helms was Director for Plans at the CIA. That is the top CIA position responsible for covert actions, like organizing coups. Helms served in that capacity until 1966, when he was made Director.
In the quotations collected below, the name of the leader who was assassinated is spelled variously as Qasim, Qassim and Kassem. But, however you spell his name, when he took power in a popularly-backed coup in 1958, he certainly got recognized in Washington. He carried out such anti-American and anti-corporatist policies as starting the process of nationalizing foreign oil companies in Iraq, withdrawing Iraq from the US-initiated right-wing Baghdad Pact (which included another military-run, US-puppet state, i.e., Pakistan) and decriminalizing the Iraqi Communist Party. Despite these actions, and more likely because of them, he was Iraq's most popular leader. He had to go!
In 1959, there was a failed assassination attempt on Qasim. The failed assassin was none other than a young Saddam Hussein. In 1963, a CIA-organized coup did successfully assassinate Qasim and Saddam's Ba'ath Party came to power for the first time. Saddam returned from exile in Egypt and took up the key post as head of Iraq's secret service. The CIA then provided the new pliant, Iraqi regime with the names of thousands of communists, and other leftist activists and organizers. Thousands of these supporters of Qasim and his policies were soon dead in a rampage of mass murder carried out by the CIA's close friends in Iraq.
Iraqis have always suspected that the 1963 military coup that set Saddam Husain on the road to absolute power had been masterminded by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). New evidence just published reveals that the agency not only engineered the putsch but also supplied the list of people to be eliminated once power was secured--a monstrous stratagem that led to the decimation of Iraq's professional class.
The overthrow of president Abdul Karim Kassim on February 8, 1963 was not, of course, the first intervention in the region by the agency, but it was the bloodiest--far bloodier than the coup it orchestrated in 1953 to restore the shah of Iran to power. Just how gory, and how deep the CIA's involvement in it, is demonstrated in a new book by Said Aburish, a writer on Arab political affairs.
The book, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite (1997), sets out the details not only of how the CIA closely controlled the planning stages but also how it played a central role in the subsequent purge of suspected leftists after the coup.
The author reckons that 5,000 were killed, giving the names of 600 of them--including many doctors, lawyers, teachers and professors who formed Iraq's educated elite. The massacre was carried out on the basis of death lists provided by the CIA.
The lists were compiled in CIA stations throughout the Middle East with the assistance of Iraqi exiles like Saddam, who was based in Egypt. An Egyptian intelligence officer, who obtained a good deal of his information from Saddam, helped the Cairo CIA station draw up its list. According to Aburish, however, the American agent who produced the longest list was William McHale, who operated under the cover of a news correspondent for the Beirut bureau of Time magazine.
The butchery began as soon as the lists reached Baghdad. No-one was spared. Even pregnant women and elderly men were killed. Some were tortured in front of their children. According to the author, Saddam who 'had rushed back to Iraq from exile in Cairo to join the victors, was personally involved in the torture of leftists in the separate detention centres for fellaheen [peasants] and the Muthaqafeen or educated classes.'
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/217.html
"The coup that brought the Ba'ath Party to power in 1963 was celebrated by the United States.
The CIA had a hand in it. They had funded the Ba'ath Party - of which Saddam Hussein was a young member - when it was in opposition.
US diplomat James Akins served in the Baghdad Embassy at the time. Mr. Akins said, "I knew all the Ba'ath Party leaders and I liked them".
"The CIA were definitely involved in that coup. We saw the rise of the Ba'athists as a way of replacing a pro-Soviet government with a pro-American one and you don't get that chance very often.
"Sure, some people were rounded up and shot but these were mostly communists so that didn't bother us".
http://www.representativepress.org/CIASaddam.html
The following is an excerpt from The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
In this excerpt, Hanna Batatu describes the ferocious violence of the Ba`athists when they came to power in their first coup in Iraq in early 1963. Of special interest is his mention of the lists, which he believes U.S. intelligence provided to the coup-makers. Evidently, the CIA helped bring Saddam Hussein’s thuggish party to power and fatally weakened the prospects for Iraqi democracy. Some reliable sources believe that more than ten thousand were killed and more than a hundred thousand arrested in the coup and the bloody weeks that followed, described by historians Peter and Marion Sluglett as “some of the most terrible violence hitherto experienced in the postwar Middle East.”
(pp. 985-987)
On the reckoning of the Communists, no fewer than 5,000 “citizens” were killed in the fighting from 8 to 10 February, and in the relentless house-to-house hunt for Communists that immediately followed. Ba`athists put the losses of their own party at around 80. A source in the First Branch of Iraq’s Directorate of Security told this writer in 1967 that some 340 Communists died at the time. A well-placed foreign diplomatic observer, who does not wish to be identified, set the total death toll in the neighborhood of 1,500. The figure includes the more than one hundred soldiers who fell inside the Ministry of Defense and “a good lot of Communists.”
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/history/1963cialist.htm
U.S. forces in Baghdad might now be searching high and low for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, but in the past Saddam was seen by U.S. intelligence services as a bulwark of anti-communism and they used him as their instrument for more than 40 years, according to former U.S. intelligence diplomats and intelligence officials.
United Press International has interviewed almost a dozen former U.S. diplomats, British scholars and former U.S. intelligence officials to piece together the following account. The CIA declined to comment on the report.
While many have thought that Saddam first became involved with U.S. intelligence agencies at the start of the September 1980 Iran-Iraq war, his first contacts with U.S. officials date back to 1959, when he was part of a CIA-authorized six-man squad tasked with assassinating then Iraqi Prime Minister Gen. Abd al-Karim Qasim.
In July 1958, Qasim had overthrown the Iraqi monarchy in what one former U.S. diplomat, who asked not to be identified, described as "a horrible orgy of bloodshed."
According to current and former U.S. officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Iraq was then regarded as a key buffer and strategic asset in the Cold War with the Soviet Union. For example, in the mid-1950s, Iraq was quick to join the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact which was to defend the region and whose members included Turkey, Britain, Iran and Pakistan.
Little attention was paid to Qasim's bloody and conspiratorial regime until his sudden decision to withdraw from the pact in 1959, an act that "freaked everybody out" according to a former senior U.S. State Department official.
Washington watched in marked dismay as Qasim began to buy arms from the Soviet Union and put his own domestic communists into ministry positions of "real power," according to this official. The domestic instability of the country prompted CIA Director Allan Dulles to say publicly that Iraq was "the most dangerous spot in the world."
In the mid-1980s, Miles Copeland, a veteran CIA operative, told UPI the CIA had enjoyed "close ties" with Qasim's ruling Baath Party, just as it had close connections with the intelligence service of Egyptian leader Gamel Abd Nassar. In a recent public statement, Roger Morris, a former National Security Council staffer in the 1970s, confirmed this claim, saying that the CIA had chosen the authoritarian and anti-communist Baath Party "as its instrument."
According to another former senior State Department official, Saddam, while only in his early 20s, became a part of a U.S. plot to get rid of Qasim. According to this source, Saddam was installed in an apartment in Baghdad on al-Rashid Street directly opposite Qasim's office in Iraq's Ministry of Defense, to observe Qasim's movements.
Adel Darwish, Middle East expert and author of "Unholy Babylon," said the move was done "with full knowledge of the CIA," and that Saddam's CIA handler was an Iraqi dentist working for CIA and Egyptian intelligence. U.S. officials separately confirmed Darwish's account.
Darwish said that Saddam's paymaster was Capt. Abdel Maquid Farid, the assistant military attaché at the Egyptian Embassy who paid for the apartment from his own personal account. Three former senior U.S. officials have confirmed that this is accurate.
The assassination was set for Oct. 7, 1959, but it was completely botched. Accounts differ. One former CIA official said that the 22-year-old Saddam lost his nerve and began firing too soon, killing Qasim's driver and only wounding Qasim in the shoulder and arm. Darwish told UPI that one of the assassins had bullets that did not fit his gun and that another had a hand grenade that got stuck in the lining of his coat.
"It bordered on farce," a former senior U.S. intelligence official said. But Qasim, hiding on the floor of his car, escaped death, and Saddam, whose calf had been grazed by a fellow would-be assassin, escaped to Tikrit, thanks to CIA and Egyptian intelligence agents, several U.S. government officials said.
Saddam then crossed into Syria and was transferred by Egyptian intelligence agents to Beirut, according to Darwish and former senior CIA officials. While Saddam was in Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam's apartment and put him through a brief training course, former CIA officials said. The agency then helped him get to Cairo, they said.
One former U.S. government official, who knew Saddam at the time, said that even then Saddam "was known as having no class. He was a thug -- a cutthroat."
http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bush/saddam.htm
What follows is an accurate chronology of United States involvement in the arming of Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war 1980-88. It is a powerful indictment of the president Bush administration attempt to sell war as a component of his war on terrorism. It reveals US ambitions in Iraq to be just another chapter in the attempt to regain a foothold in the Mideast following the fall of the Shah of Iran.
http://www.iranchamber.com/history/articles/arming_iraq.php
The CIA begins covert action against the Communist government in Afghanistan, which is closely tied to the Soviet Union. Some time this year, the CIA begins training militants in Pakistan and beaming radio propaganda into Afghanistan. By April 1979, US officials are meeting with opponents of the Afghan government to determine their needs.
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a82afghanopium#a82afghanopium
Afghan opium production rises from 250 tons in 1982 to 2,000 tons in 1991, coinciding with CIA support and funding of the mujaheddin. Alfred McCoy, a professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin, says US and Pakistani intelligence officials sanctioned the rebels’ drug trafficking because of their fierce opposition to the Soviets: “If their local allies were involved in narcotics trafficking, it didn’t trouble [the] CIA. They were willing to keep working with people who were heavily involved in narcotics.” For instance, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a rebel leader who received about half of all the CIA’s covert weapons, was known to be a major heroin trafficker.
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a82afghanopium#a82afghanopium
Another angle...
After serving in the Texas Legislature, he arrived in Washington in 1973 and quickly became known as "Good Time Charlie," "the biggest playboy in Congress." He hired only good-looking women for his staff and escorted "a parade of beauty queens to White House parties." Even Crile, who featured Wilson many times on "60 Minutes" and obviously admires him, describes him as "a seemingly corrupt, cocaine snorting, scandal prone womanizer who the CIA was convinced could only get the Agency into terrible trouble if it permitted him to become involved in any way in its operations."
Wilson's partner in getting the CIA to arm the moujahedeen was Gust Avrakotos, the son of working-class Greek immigrants from the steel workers' town of Aliquippa, Pa. Only in 1960 did the CIA begin to recruit officers for the Directorate of Operations from among what it called "new Americans," meaning such ethnic groups as Chinese, Japanese, Latinos and Greek Americans. Until then, it had followed its British model and taken only Ivy League sons of the Eastern Establishment. Avrakotos joined the CIA in 1961 and came to nurture a hatred of the bluebloods, or "cake eaters," as he called them, who discriminated against him. After "spook school" at Camp Peary, next door to Jamestown, Va., he was posted to Athens, where, as a Greek speaker, he remained until 1978.
During Avrakotos's time in Greece, the CIA was instrumental in destroying Greek freedom and helping to turn the country into probably the single most anti-American democracy on Earth today. Incredibly, Crile describes this as follows: "On April 21, 1967, he [Avrakotos] got one of those breaks that can make a career. A military junta seized power in Athens that day and suspended democratic and constitutional government." Avrakotos became the CIA's chief liaison with the Greek colonels. After the fall of the colonels' brutally fascist regime, the 17 November terrorist organization assassinated the CIA's Athens station chief, Richard Welch, on Dec. 23, 1975, and "Gust came to be vilified in the Greek radical press as the sinister force responsible for most of the country's many ills." He left the country in 1978 but could not get another decent assignment -- he tried for Helsinki -- because the head of the European Division regarded him as simply too uncouth to send to any of its capitals. He sat around Langley for several years without work until he was recruited by John McGaffin, head of the Afghan program. "If it's really true that you have nothing to do," McGaffin said, "why not come upstairs? We're killing Russians."
http://hnn.us/articles/1491.html
The CIA's operational directorate, in other words that's their covert operations, para-military, dirty tricks — call it whatever you want — has for at least 40 years that we can document paid for a significant amount of its work through the sales of heroin and cocaine. — Guerrilla News Network's Interview with Christopher Simpson
ClA-supported Mujahedeen rebels [who in 2001 were part of the "Northern Alliance" fighting the Taleban which became the core of the new Afghani government following the U.S. attack on Afghanistan in late 2001] engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the Soviet-supported government and its plans to reform the very backward Afghan society. The Agency's principal client was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leading druglords and a leading heroin refiner. CIA-supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport opium to laboratories along the Afghan/Pakistan border. The output provided up to one half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe. U.S. officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the drug operation because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies. — The Real Drug Lords
http://www.serendipity.li/cia/blum1.html
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, as is by now well-known by anyone who has cared to be informed, has long been deeply involved in the international trafficking of the addictive drugs heroin and (since the early 1980s, if not earlier) cocaine, the enormous profits from which have financed, and continue to finance, both U.S. covert operations and the U.S. military (via payments to Pentagon contractors).
The main reason why this is not more widely known is that the main players in the U.S. media have always worked to protect the Agency and to keep the American public in the dark as to the nature of its activities (as documented in great detail in Carl Bernstein's article in the October 20, 1977, issue of Rolling Stone: "The CIA and the Media: How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up"). The information you will find on this web page, and the web pages it links to, is not considered by the editors of the New York Times and other mainstream U.S. "news" media as proper for the public to know.
http://www.serendipity.li/cia.html
http://www.ciadrugs.com/
In 1982 the US Government White House with Ronald Reagan in charge at that time Supported Iraqi war efforts by supplying the Iraqi Troops and Saddam Hussein with US Military Intelligence & making sure that Saddam and Iraq troops had enough weapons they needed for war at that time. They also offered Saddam Diplomatic Cover over his War Crimes!
In 1983 & 1984 The Secretary of Defense for the United States of America Donald Rumsfeld went to Bagdad Irak to see how they could be of more help to Saddam Hussein and his troops. When Donald Rumsfeld was making his trips to Iraq it was already known that Saddam Hussein used gas on Iranians prior. This photo shows Saddam And Donald Rumsfeld in video shacking hands and getting along fine. This was from those times and was seen in newspapers, on the news all over. How can people have forgot so fast in the usa!
In 1990 before Iraq invaded Kuwait the US Ambassador April Gillespie met with Saddam Hussein. There was no way to be sure if they gave the ok to invade Kuwait at that time. The USA Support of Saddam Hussein was told to have stopped by the American Media and mainstream newspapers in the USA, However some US Corporations continued to trade with Iraq though other foreign means. Later the truth about April Gillespie and Saddam Hussein's meeting was out and many as I believe will tell you it is sure that April Gillespie told Saddam to attack Kuwait.
http://zolaenterprises.com/iraqvideos/SaddamHussein.htm
US ok'd invasion of Kuwait by Iraq...
After the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, April Gillespie, informs Saddam that the U.S. would have no opinion on Iraq's occupation of its "nineteenth province," the U.S. seizes the opportunity to justify its post-cold war internationalism by dubbing Saddam the "new Hitler." After mass slaughter and defeat, crippling sanctions and daily bombardment follow to persuade the Iraqi people that perhaps they would be better off without Saddam. Other observers, however, believe that the sanctions exist to prop up the price of oil.
http://mises.org/story/818
Google "April Gillespie Iraq"
Weapons of Mass Destruction...
Made in the USA
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/USmadeIraq.html#top2
More recent examples in Iraq...
Allawi, 58, who during decades in exile built a party of former Baathists and ex-military officers, was named to become interim prime minister Friday after receiving the backing of fellow Iraqi Governing Council members.
To those who want to build a democratic future on Iraq's authoritarian past, Allawi's record may be worrisome. In postwar Iraq, he fought U.S.-led efforts to disband the old army and purge Baathists from government. And when a Governing Council member was assassinated last year, Allawi moved to ban two Arabic-language satellite TV channels from covering government affairs, saying they had been "irresponsible."
But as an unflinching advocate of a strong Iraqi security service and a strong government, Allawi may be what Jordan's King Abdullah meant when he said recently that Iraq needed a "strong man" to guide it in the coming months.
"Iyad is somebody who is military-minded, wants a strong government, believes in a strong army," said one Iraqi observer, who asked not to be named.
Founder of the Iraqi National Accord, an exile political party, Allawi has long been known for his close ties to the CIA. In fact, some Iraqis interpreted his elevation Friday to prime minister-designate as evidence that the CIA had trumped the Pentagon in the administration's internal war over which agency should shape Iraq. The Pentagon's civilian leadership had backed Allawi rival Ahmad Chalabi for years. Chalabi's home and headquarters were raided last week by Iraqi police, backed by U.S. troops, as part of a corruption investigation.
"As an old-time Baathist, he will be acceptable to many Sunni ex-Baathists, because he is pan-Arab and he is secular and they are pan-Arab and secular," said Amatzia Baram, an Israeli scholar at the United States Institute of Peace who has studied Iraq for decades. "The fact that he worked with the Americans for many years, they will forgive him."
Iraqi Shiites, Baram said, are likely to regard Allawi with greater ambivalence because of his Western lifestyle and his antipathy toward Iran, a nation with which many Iraqi Shiites identify.
Born into a prominent Baghdad Shiite family, Allawi joined the Baath Party as a youth in 1961. By his own account, he fervently embraced the party's philosophy that promoted Arab unity and Arab nationalism. But by 1971, he had become disenchanted with how Iraqi leader Ahmad Hassan Bakr and, later, his successor, Saddam Hussein, distorted what Allawi regarded as true Baathism to build a tyrannical regime.
Allawi's militant stance against the Iraqi regime and close ties with Britain and the U.S. made him a marked man. In 1978, a year before Hussein came to power, knife-wielding assassins believed to be from the Iraqi intelligence services attacked Allawi in his London home as he lay in bed. He fought off his assailants, but suffered serious wounds to both legs.
In 1996, Allawi's party, backed by the CIA, attempted a coup against Hussein that failed. Allawi's supporters and critics alike say his years of exile and his months in the tumult of postwar Iraq have prepared him for what undoubtedly will be the hardest task of his life -- leading his war-ravaged nation from the shadow of Hussein's dictatorship and the trauma of the U.S.-led occupation to its first free elections.
http://articles.latimes.com/2004/may/29/world/fg-allawi29
Latin America drug trafficking involvement...
In a jumbled and hard to follow story in NarcoNews.com,Bill Conroy reports that DEA sources tell him that the "Gulfstream II jet that crash landed in the Mexican Yucatan in late September carrying close to four tons of cocaine was part of an operation being carried out by a Department of Homeland Security agency."
http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=35&contentid=4864
Unlike a court of law, which relies on specific charges, Congress, whose only mandate is to serve the people, may take any issue and go forwards or backwards in time. It may go sideways and change directions. It may call any witnesses it chooses in its efforts to decide what laws to write for the benefit of those it serves, The People.
Volume II of the CIA's Inspector General's report took Congress to the CIA's house. It showed the dead body of its admissions regarding drug trafficking lying bloody in the open doorway. If Congress serves the people it will now enter the house and look around. It will press charges and it will see that criminals are punished for their crimes. It will pass laws designed to make sure that these crimes never happen again.
Use these 143 names as a report card to see what Congress' will really is and who it really serves. Volume II is not closed until the House Intelligence Committee holds hearings. Your calls, letters and e-mails to make those hearings complete and well covered are having a serious impact. Let's see what you can do with this.
"Bo" Abbot - Former CIA/Air America pilot who has openly admitted to having flown drugs for the Agency on CIA aircraft. Now resides is Southwest U.S.
Elliot Abrams - Former Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American affairs. Oversaw Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office for Oliver North and delivered subsidies to firms like Setco and Frigorificos de Puntarenas which CIA Volume II admits were dealing drugs. Worked with Albert Carone who was North's, Casey's and Bush's paymaster and bagman with the Mafia.
Lt. Col. Albert Adame - Deputy Commander Mil(itary Advisory) Group El Salvador. Discussed CIA drug ops with DEA Agent Cele Castillo.
etc. etc. etc....143 names
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ciadrugs/witness_list.html
CONGRESS WILL shortly have to decide whether to bury or deal with explosive new revelations that the Central Intelligence Agency protected major drug traffickers who aided the Contra army in Central America. These new findings go far beyond the original stories which gave rise to them by Gary Webb in 1996.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/06/19/ED58466.DTL
As an ex-DEA agent, I found the complete lack of coverage by mainstream media of what I saw during last month's congressional hearings into CIA Drug Trafficking both depressing and frightening. I sat gape-mouthed as I heard the CIA Inspector General testify that there has existed a secret agreement between CIA and the Justice Department, wherein "during the years 1982 to 1995, CIA did not have to report the drug trafficking by its assets to the Justice Department."
To a trained DEA agent this literally means that the CIA had been granted a license to obstruct justice in our so-called war on drugs; a license that lasted, so the CIA claims, from 1982 to 1995, a time during which Americans paid almost $150 billion in taxes to "fight" drugs. Of course the evidence indicates that they did not stop obstructing justice in 1995 either, but that I suppose is going to be another congressional hearing. As far as the current hearings go, this Catch 22 "revelation" means that all the present hearings are for nothing; that if they are caught violating the drug laws they have been given "secret" license to do so by our Justice Department. This might also explain Janet Reno's recent and unprecedented move in blocking the release of a Justice Department investigation into CIA drug trafficking.
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/ciadrug.htm
Information on the CIA drug smuggling operations listed above was provided by the following CIA and ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence) operatives:
Trenton Parker
Gunther Russbacher
Michael Maholy
Robert Hunt
Documentation confirming the intelligence status of each of these men is attached. This documentation was taken from Rodney Stich's seminal work, Defrauding America.
The information provided by these men, often at great personal risk to themselves and their families, as well as information provided by CIA agents and contract agents such as Richard Brenneke, Stephen Crittenden, Gene Tatum, and Terry Reed, can leave no doubt that the CIA has been involved in drug trafficking on a massive scale and over an extended period of time. Every single member of Congress has known about it, as well as every high-ranking official of the Executive as well as the Judicial branches of our government. And yet not a single member of any government entity has thus far stepped forward to try to put an end to this rampant drug smuggling, despite being confronted with documentary evidence. Let’s call this for what it is: treason.
The reader needs to understand the true breadth of the CIA’s drug operations. Profits from its cocaine, heroin, and marijuana smuggling activities have been estimated at between $10 and $15 billion per year. The economic and social devastation to the United States caused by this illegal activity is incalculable. Indeed, the damage has been so great, that even if the CIA were banished tomorrow, it’s doubtful this country could recover from the harm the CIA-sponsored drug epidemic has already caused.
http://www.wethepeople.la/drugs1.htm
Retired US Navy Lt. Commander and ONI officer Al Martin wrote "The Conspirators: Secrets of an Iran-Contra Insider."
In this book, Martin explains the operations of the Bush Cabal and details the many Iran-Contra-related criminal operations involving Robert Gates, currently the Defense Secretary designate.
“In terms of policy management, (William) Casey formed a series of inter-governmental agency Restricted Access Groups (RAGs). Ultimately three such groups were formed. The top Restricted Access Group 1 was Vice President George Bush -- as it was decided that all narcotics, weapons and money operations vis-à-vis Iran-Contra, would be consolidated under the office of the Vice President.
“Also included in these Restricted Access Groups were then Vice Presidential National Security Advisor, Colonel Donald Gregg, then Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger and Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, who was in charge of the Inter-American Affairs Office (an office which served in no other capacity except being a propaganda tool for the Nicaraguan Contras), Richard Armitage, and Assistant Secretary of State, Bernie Aronson.
http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=35&contentid=4042
http://solari.com/articles/scoop_narco_dummies.htm
http://www.buzzflash.com/interviews/06/03/int06008.html
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-missing9-2009feb09,0,2537684.story
Down by the River, by Charles Bowden (the book's title has reference to the Rio Grande, near El Paso
It is a gripping and gritty account (the language is caustic in parts), but if you want to understand the drug trade, there is no better book.
On page 2 of the book, Bowden notes, "Mexico's three leading official sources of foreign exchange are oil, tourism, and the money sent home by Mexicans in the United States. Drugs bring Mexico more money than these three sources combined."
Charles Bowden: The United States wants a stable Mexico. Mexico is economically dependent on narco dollars to survive. If you could actually shut down the border and stop the importation of drugs into this country, Mexico would collapse. So it’s a show war.
BuzzFlash: What about the argument that they now have increased economic power in petro-dollars?
Charles Bowden: The Mexican oil fields are in severe decline. They’re nationalized and run by one of the most corrupt mechanisms in Mexico – Petroleos Mexicanos, also known as Pemex. Mexico makes more money from drugs than they do from oil, tourism, and the remittances sent back by illegal Mexicans working here. They earn at least $50 billion a year now from selling drugs. They simply can’t live without it. You have to understand the Mexican economy is 4% the size of the United States' economy. Fifty billion dollars is big money in an economy of that size....
BuzzFlash: Is Juarez the city where so many women have disappeared and been found dead and mutilated?
Charles Bowden: Yes. In the same period, 2900 men have vanished. Juarez is a death machine. I did a whole book on it called Juarez, the Laboratory of Our Future. It’s part of the barbarism which they call free trade.
http://www.examiner.com/x-8642-LA-National-Security-Examiner~y2009m4d20-DEA-FBI-and-CIA-are-all-operating-covertly-in-Mexico-Law-enforcement-on-both-sides-corrupt
Openly acknowledged...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_drug_trafficking
(This chapter was omitted from the printed edition of Oklahoma City Bombing and the Politics of terror by David Hoffman)
"This underground empire is controlled by a handful of people for money — that's the only secret of the temple."
— Investigative reporter Danny Casolaro, prior to his murder by the Octopus
The nomenclature of the Lockerbie and World Trade Center bombings provide a unique and unparalleled insight into the dynamics of the Oklahoma City bombing. Each event gives the reader a glimpse of how the Shadow Government operates, utilizing drug dealers, criminals, and terrorists to do its bidding. All three bombings were sting operations that utilized, and were utilized by, terrorists bent on causing destruction. But the question still remained: who was controlling the terrorists? To understand that, one must peer through the doorway of time stretching from WWII to the present. To prepare for the invasion of Sicily during WWII, the OSS (which later became the CIA) collaborated with the Corsican Mafia.
http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=35&contentid=4023&page=2
http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?ChannelID=35
TOP SECRET CIA DRUG SMUGGLING OPERATIONS
http://www.wethepeople.la/drugs1.htm
According to an indictment released over the holidays by Mexico’s Atty. General, Pedro Alfonso Alatorre, already indicted as the cartel’s chief financier, purchased the DC9 (N900SA) airliner, the Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA), and 48 other planes not yet identified for Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel with laundered drug money, using a company he controls which owns currency exchanges at major airports in Mexico.
Now we know who bought the airplanes. The trickier question is: who sold them? The answer, normally, would be, "Their local counterparts in international organized crime."
But these aren't normal circumstances. Why? Because the U.S. doesn't even have any Drug Lords. Ask anybody at the DEA. Apparently, we don't even bother to field a team.
http://www.madcowprod.com/01162008.html
Vietnam Special Forces Air Combat Controller; 25-year CIA deep-cover agent; US Army pilot flying classified missions during the US invasion of Grenada; Iran-Contra pilot flying cocaine shipments labelled as medical supplies; and member of the ultra-secret, international G7-run Pegasus "hit team"...this is the extraordinary story of Gene "Chip" Tatum.
From sensitive, highly secretive (and hitherto largely unknown) Special Forces covert operations in Cambodia, to wandering CIA asset; through to "black ops" activities in Grenada and Oliver North's Iran-Contra "Enterprise", as well as membership in an international "hit team", Gene "Chip" Tatum has seen it all, done it all and is now telling it all.
Tatum claims to know where the skeletons are buried. Above all, he is aware that his testimony implicates serving and former US Presidents plus a whole list of high-level government officials and others in a welter of nefarious activities - including assassination, blackmail, coercion, gun-running, money-laundering and cocaine-trafficking.
Tatum, a lanky Floridian, turned whistleblower following his arrest on a treason charge in early 1995. The charge was both astonishing and patently ludicrous, and was later dropped and replaced by a fraud charge - a drastic step-down. Found guilty, he was sentenced to serve a 15-month sentence. In March 1996, an additional charge - conspiring to embezzle - was brought against him. Found guilty, he was incarcerated in Jesup Federal Correctional Facility, Georgia, where he is serving a 27-month concurrent sentence. Ensuing press interest resulted in one article appearing in the Tampa Tribune on 4 May 1996.
Many questions continue to hang over the conduct of the trial. His defence lawyer refused to call any of the 80 witnesses whom Tatum nominated for the defence. Later, his lawyer freely confessed to having come under pressure from the US Department of Defense. Tatum says the first charge was a set-up to discredit him following his "resignation" from "Operation Pegasus". The second charge he views with greater scepticism and concern.
Tatum's resignation from Pegasus followed his refusal to "neutralise" a leading US political figure in the 1992 US presidential elections. Tatum declares he will not "participate in assassinations of any sort, character assassinations or anything, of American citizens". He goes on to explain that back in 1994, in a telephone conference call involving Oliver North, Felix Rodríguez and the late William Colby of the CIA, he was warned to turn over incriminating documents and tapes he had accumulated for his "retirement". He wryly observes that had he done so, he would probably have been quickly "terminated" in an "extreme" way - a speciality of the Pegasus team of which he was once a member.
Countering this demand, Tatum volunteered to plead guilty on a fabricated felony count and serve a 12-month sentence - so that his credibility would be damaged in the event he ever decided to speak out. His incarceration for the second charge - and especially the six- month sentence of his wife, Nancy - led him to speak out about his life, almost 30 years of which he served as a "black" operative, and to reveal and destroy the command structure of Pegasus. It is an extraordinary story.
http://www.voxfux.com/features/cia_bush_drug_trafficking_murder_pt1.html
An August, 1996, series in the San Jose Mercury News by reporter Gary Webb linked the origins of crack cocaine in California to the contras, a guerrilla force backed by the Reagan administration that attacked Nicaragua's Sandinista government during the 1980s. Webb's series, "The Dark Alliance," has been the subject of intense media debate, and has focused attention on a foreign policy drug scandal that leaves many questions unanswered.
This electronic briefing book is compiled from declassified documents obtained by the National Security Archive, including the notebooks kept by NSC aide and Iran-contra figure Oliver North, electronic mail messages written by high-ranking Reagan administration officials, memos detailing the contra war effort, and FBI and DEA reports. The documents demonstrate official knowledge of drug operations, and collaboration with and protection of known drug traffickers. Court and hearing transcripts are also included.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/nsaebb2.htm
In this section, we examine the degree to which the CIA passed on to the DEA information and allegations on drug trafficking by Contras or Contra sympathizers, and the manner in which the DEA responded to such information. We also examine the information the DEA received from sources other than the CIA about Contra drug trafficking and what the DEA did to pursue these leads.
http://www.usdoj.gov/oig/special/9712/ch11p1.htm
George Bush with legendary CIA agent Felix Rodriguez a.k.a. "Mr. Gomez" who ran the Mexican portion of the Iran-Contra guns and drug running operation.
"The connections piled up quickly. Contra planes flew north to the U.S., loaded with cocaine, then returned laden with cash. All under the protective umbrella of the United States Government. My informants were perfectly placed: one worked with the Contra pilots at their base, while another moved easily among the Salvadoran military officials who protected the resupply operation. They fed me the names of Contra pilots. Again and again, those names showed up in the DEA database as documented drug traffickers.
"When I pursued the case, my superiors quietly and firmly advised me to move on to other investigations."
Former DEA Agent Celerino Castillo
Powder Burns, 1992
The Intermountain Regional Airport at Mena first came to national attention following the crash of a cargo plane in the jungles of Nicaragua. The sole survivor of the crash, Eugene Hassenfuss, confessed to being part of an illegal operation to arm and resupply the Contra forces staged out of the Mena airport, and the scandal known as Iran-Contra erupted across the headlines of the world.
The specific aircraft which crashed in Nicaragua had, during the Vietnam war, belonged to Air America, the CIA proprietary airline that had flown guns to the Laotian Meo in Long Tien, while bringing heroin back. Following the end of the Vietnam war, the aircraft was purchased by legendary drug smuggler Barry Seal, who renamed it the "Fat Lady" and based it at the Mena airport. Following Seal's murder (an obvious setup by the court system), the plane was used in the gun running operation to Nicaragua, ending with the crash.
The fact that guns were being sent to the Contras was itself illegal, under the Boland Amendment. While diverted arms sales were held aloft as the funding mechanism for the gun running to the Contras, the sheer scale of the Contra effort suggested that another, even more clandestine, funding mechanism had to existed. Drug running. To allay this suspicion, Oliver North claimed that he reported any drug activity to the D.E.A. The D.E.A. says he did no such thing. Evidence of drug running connected to the Contra Resupply was made available to the Iran-Contra Special Prosecutor, but it was not followed up.
After the Iran-Contra scandal erupted, individuals began to come forward with stories that the same planes that ferried guns down to Nicaragua were ferrying back cocaine for sale in the United States. Cocaine whose profits were the real source of funding for the Contra's custom made (and numberless) M-16s. These individuals included military personnel such as Eugene Wheaton, and pilots such as Richard Brenneke, and Terry Reed, who claimed they were part of the guns and drugs operation itself. Some, like Chip Tatum, had documents proving their claims. Others were highly respected law enforcement officers and members of government, such as William Duncan, L.D. Brown, and others, who had stumbled on the drug running operation and tried to expose it. Some of those who had knowledge of Mena started to die.
Almost immediately, it became apparent that Mena enjoyed a special status. Every attempt to investigate met with interference. Investigator Russel Welch of the Arkansas Police was ordered to stay away from drug activity at the Mena Airport. Despite a public statement by then-Governor Bill Clinton that he was doing all he could to investigate allegations of CIA drug running at Mena, citizen's groups charged that funding was cut for any investigations that pointed at Mena, and petitioned the Iran-Contra Special Prosecutor to investigate drug running at Mena. He never did.
http://whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MENA/mena.html
The Clinton Administration has actually encouraged drug use. Although he had promised to wage war on drugs, on Feb. 9, 1993 Clinton eliminated 83 percent of the staff at the Office of National Drug Control Policy and halted drug testing for White House staff. In his first year in office, Clinton cut 625 drug- enforcement personnel from the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Immigration and Naturalization Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms; the Customs Service and the Coast Guard. In addition, Clinton cut the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy by 80 percent, from 146 to 25 employees.
Bill Clinton was accused of being complicit in the shipment of drugs through Arkansas when he was governor and allowed laundering of drug money through ADFA (Arkansas Development and Finance Authority). He had been tied to the $100 million per-month drug running operation of the "Mena Cartel". Clinton's best friend, Dan Lasater, is the only one involved who went to jail along with Clinton's brother, Roger. After staying in jail only a few short months he was granted a full and complete pardon by Bill Clinton the day after he got out.
http://www.clintonmemoriallibrary.com/druguse.html
Recently discovered deposition by former chief of staff says drug-and gunrunning were known.
When did Bill Clinton first learn there was an alleged drug-smuggling operation -- and one possibly linked to Iran-Contra -- being run from Arkansas? What did he and his gubernatorial staff do when they found out that narcotics as well as guns were being flown brazenly in and out of the remote airport at Mena in southwestern Arkansas?
Both questions have been asked many times and are likely to figure prominently in the Mena inquiry just started by the House Banking and Financial Services Committee. (See "Truth & Consequences," Jan. 29. In a rare public comment Clinton made about Mena when he was Arkansas governor, he insisted he didn't know anything was amiss at Mena until 1988, a couple of years after Iran-Contra operations had ceased and about 24 months after the murder of Barry Seal, the chief Mena narcotics trafficker.
Now an oral deposition by Clinton's former gubernatorial chief of staff, just unearthed by Insight, casts new light on the timing of the then-governor's knowledge about alleged drug smuggling at Mena and prompts questions about why he did not use his authority to stop the illegal activity.
The deposition by Betsey Wright, which has been in the public record for five years but went unnoticed as part of a lengthy tort action, suggests that the Mena problem was well known at the governor's mansion a good three years before Clinton said he first learned about it. According to Wright, the governor's mansion was being inundated as early as 1985 with complaints from both citizens and law-enforcement officers worried about the strange nighttime flights from the secluded Mena Intermountain Regional Airport.
In the deposition, which was taken July 29,1991, for a slander suit brought by former U.S. Attorney Asa Hutchinson, Wright was asked when she first heard of Seal. She responded: "Not too long after I went to the governor's office, when I began getting calls from people in the Mena area of great concern about what kind of activities he was involved in," Pressed about dates, she acknowledges in her deposition that she first heard about drugs and Mena just "prior to `85" and that there was an increase in calls "after `85."
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_n6_v12/ai_17979893/
Barry Seal - gunrunner, drug trafficker, and covert C.I.A. operative extraordinaire - is hardly a familiar name in American politics. But nine years after he was murdered in a hail of bullets by Medellin cartel hit men outside a Salvation Army shelter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he has come back to haunt the reputations of three American presidents.
Seal's legacy includes more than 2,000 newly discovered documents that now verify and quantify much of what previously had been only suspicion, conjecture, and legend. The documents confirm that from 1981 to his brutal death in 1986, Barry Seal carried on one of the most lucrative, extensive, and brazen operations in the history of the international drug trade, and that he did it with the evident complicity, if not collusion, of elements of the United States government, apparently with the acquiescence of Ronald Reagan's administration, impunity from any subsequent exposure by George Bush's administration, and under the usually acute political nose of then Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.
http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/the_crimes_of_mena.htm
The Laguna Journal reported following last September´s crash of a Gulfstream jet operated by the CIA allegedly for torture flights to Guantanamo and to other countries with loose torture laws. That particular aircraft it was found by rescue workers to have contained 4 tons of high grade Columbian cocaine. With the raging war on drugs and terror authorities on both sides of the border are on the take. In a war that has cost billions of American tax dollars and a business that is believed by many to profit in the hundreds of billions it is no wonder that officials from the street cops in the borders cities to the highest levels of both governments are benefiting financially from the illegal trade of smuggling drugs, humans, and terrorist into the U.S. via Mexican drug cartel smuggling routes.
More U.S. officials and cops have been caught in criminal activities then ever before.
Customs supervisor Walter Golembiowski and Officer John Ajello face narcotics, bribery and conspiracy charges after they were arrested for helping smuggle drugs and contraband through New York´s John F. Kennedy International Airport.
"The investigation has led to the indictment and prosecution of more than 20 people — "from distributors to overseas sources of supply" — and the seizure of more than 600 pounds of imported hashish and other drugs from the United States and France," according to a CNN report.
Some Mexican legislators claim there is already clandestine covert action taking place in Mexico by the Americans and has taken many different forms reflecting the diverse circumstances in which it is being used.
However the circumstances have eroded to such a point that many Mexican leaders that have no ties with the cartels are desperate and are encouraging an out right overt U.S. military boots on the ground operation, and accelerate training using U.S. military, CIA, DEA, FBI and U.S. Police advisers.
According to a high ranking Mexican official who wants to remain anonymous indicated that the U.S. Mexican border is a primary focal point for military operations. "There are U.S. Army Special Forces secret operation bases both in Mexico and the United states, run by the California National Guard, who are on temporary border reconnaissance missions and are due to end within the next month or so."
http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/63452
For more google - "Mena" "Clinton" "drug trafficking"....if you really want to dive deep then add "Oklahoma bombing"...
Based on media coverage at least, name the largest industry in America that never contributes to political campaigns, never tries to influence politicians, never is involved in political corruption and has no lobbyists in Washington? In other words, name the cleanest business in America - that is, if you believe the media
The answer: the illegal drug trade.
For example, the Review has been among the lonely voices raising the possibility that drug and mob money may have played a much larger role in the current fiscal crash than has been noted.
It is clear the media doesn't want to touch this matter. But they've had a setback with the testimony of financial investigator and Madoff whistleblower Harry Markopolos. Talking Points Memo notes: "Markopolos elaborated while being questioned by lawmakers, alleging Madoff 'had a lot of dirty money' from the Russian mafia and Latin American drug cartels."
In the end, Markopolos realized he had done the mobs a favor. Here's part of a Q&A with Rep. Gary Ackerman:
ACKERMAN: I'm talking about, when you talk about the Russian mob and organized crime, these are people who invested through European investors or European feeder funds?
MARKOPOLOS: Correct. And I didn't fear of them, and I didn't think they were going to come after me, I want to make this perfectly clear to all those Russian mobsters and Latin American drug cartels out there. . .
ACKERMAN: You're talking directly to them.
MARKOPOLOS: I was acting on your behalf trying to stop him from zeroing out your accounts. I'm the good guy here. Just like to make that clear.
http://prorev.com/2009/02/story-media-wont-touch.html
WHO WAS REALLY FLYING THOSE PLANES ON 9-11?
Hours after the 9-11 attacks, authorities began to find clues conveniently left for them to stumble upon. The Boston Globe reported that a copy of the Koran, instructions on how to fly a commercial airplane and a fuel consumption calculator were found in a pair of bags meant for one of the hijacked flights that left from Logan. 64
Authorities also received a "tip" about a suspicious white car left behind at Boston's Logan Airport. An Arabic-language flight training manual was found inside the car. 65
How fortunate for investigators that the hijackers "forgot" to take their Koran and Arab flight manuals with them! Within a few days, all "19 hijackers" were "identified" and their faces were plastered all over our television screens.
Then, like a script from a corny "B" spy movie, the official story gets even more ridiculous. The passport of the supposed "ringleader" Mohammed Atta, somehow managed to survive the explosion, inferno, and smoldering collapse to be oh-so-conveniently "found" just a few blocks away from the World Trade Center! 66
It is obvious that this "evidence" was planted by individuals wishing to direct the blame towards Osama Bin Laden. How is it possible that Arab students who had never flown an airplane could take a simulator course and then fly jumbo jets with the skill and precision of "top-gun" pilots? It is not possible and the fact is, the true identities of the 9-11 hijackers remains a mystery. In the days following the disclosure of the "hijackers" names and faces, no less than 7 of the Arab individuals named came forward to protest their obvious innocence. 67
That's right! Seven of the nineteen "hijackers" are alive and well. They were victims of identity theft, some of whom had had their passports stolen. They were interviewed by several news organizations including the Telegraph of England. Here's an excerpt from David Harrison's Telegraph story entitled:
Revealed: The Men With Stolen Identities:
"Their names were flashed around the world as suicide hijackers who carried out the attacks on America. But yesterday four innocent men told how their identities had been stolen.
The men - all from Saudi Arabia - spoke of their shock at being mistakenly named by the FBI as suicide terrorists. None of the four was in the United States on September 11 and all are alive in their home country.
The Telegraph obtained the first interviews with the men since they learnt that they were on the FBI's list of hijackers who died in the crashes in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
All four said that they were "outraged" to be identified as terrorists. One has never been to America and another is a Saudi Airlines pilot who was on a training course in Tunisia at the time of the attacks. Saudi Airlines said it was considering legal action against the FBI for seriously damaging its reputation and that of its pilots." 68
The story of these identity thefts was also briefly reported by ABC 69 and BBC (England) 70 The FBI does not deny this. Nobody denies this fact because it is easily verifiable. Instead, the US media and government just ignore this inconvenient little fact and keep right on repeating the monstrous lie that the hijacker identities are known and that 15 of them were Saudis.
CNN revealed that FBI director Robert Mueller openly admitted that some of the identities of the 9-11 hijackers are in question due to identity theft. Here's what CNN reported on September 21:
FBI Director Robert Mueller has acknowledged that some of those behind last week's terror attacks may have stolen the identification of other people, and, according to at least one security expert, it may have been "relatively easy" based on their level of sophistication. 71
This opens up a whole Pandora's box of unanswered questions. First and foremost of which is this: why would Osama Bin laden, the Saudi Arabian caveman, steal identities? To cover his tracks you say? Next question: why would a Saudi Arabian, attempting to cover his tracks, steal the identities of....fellow Saudi Arabians??? What would be the point? Why go you through the trouble of stealing identities that would point back to you? Why not steal Greek identities, or Brazilian identities, or Turkish ones? A much more logical conclusion is that non-Arabs stole these identities as part of a "false flag" operation designed to point the blame at Arabs, and Saudi Arabs in particular.
What kind of a corrupt character is FBI boss Mueller? He initially admitted that false identities were involved with 9-11, but then he allows the media to keep naming these innocent, and alive, Arabs as the hijackers? Why doesn't he correct them? More on the slimy Mr. Mueller later on!
Now I'm really going to rock your faith in the false religion of 9-11. In February of 2000, Indian intelligence officials detained 11 members of what they thought was an Al Qaeda hijacking conspiracy. It was then discovered that these 11 "Muslim preachers" were all Israeli nationals! India's leading weekly magazine, The Week, reported:
On January 12 Indian intelligence officials in Calcutta detained 11 foreign nationals for interrogation before they were to board a Dhaka-bound Bangladesh Biman flight. They were detained on the suspicion of being hijackers. "But we realized that they were tabliqis (Islamic preachers), so we let them go", said an Intelligence official.
The eleven had Israeli passports but were believed to be Afghan nationals who had spent a while in Iran. Indian intelligence officials, too, were surprised by the nationality profile of the eleven. "They say that they have been on tabligh (preaching Islam) in India for two months. But they are Israeli nationals from the West Bank," said a Central Intelligence official. He claimed that Tel Aviv "exerted considerable pressure" on Delhi to secure their release. "It appeared that they could be working for a sensitive organization in Israel and were on a mission to Bangladesh," the official said. 72
What were these 11 Israelis doing trying to impersonate Al Qaeda men? Infiltrating?...perhaps. Framing?...more likely. But the important precedent to understand is this: Israeli agents were once caught red handed impersonating Muslim hijackers!
This event becomes even more mind boggling when we learn that it was Indian Intelligence that helped the US to so quickly identify the "19 hijackers"! On April 3, 2002, Express India, quoting the Press Trust of India, revealed:
Washington, April 3: Indian intelligence agencies helped the US to identify the hijackers who carried out the deadly September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, a media report said here on Wednesday. 73
Ain't that a kick in the ass?!! Did you catch that? The Indian intelligence officials that were duped into mistaking Israeli agents for Al Qaeda hijackers back in 2000, were the very same clowns telling the FBI who it was that hijacked the 9-11 planes! Keep in mind that Indian intelligence has an extremely close working relationship with Israel's Mossad because both governments hate the Muslim nation of Pakistan.
http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=112&contentid=654&page=2
History
The Persian Gulf was an important transportation route in antiquity but declined with the fall of Mesopotamia. In succeeding centuries control of the region was contested by Arabs, Persians, Turks, and Western Europeans. In 1853, Britain and the Arab sheikhdoms of the Persian Gulf signed the Perpetual Maritime Truce, formalizing the temporary truces of 1820 and 1835. The sheikhs agreed to stop harassing British shipping in the Arabian Sea and to recognize Britain as the dominant power in the gulf. These sheikhdoms thus became known as the Trucial States. An international agreement among the major powers in 1907 placed the gulf in the British sphere of influence.
Although oil was discovered in the gulf in 1908, it was not until the 1930s, when major finds were made, that keen international interest in the region revived. Since World War II the gulf oil fields, among the most productive in the world, have been extensively developed, and modern port facilities have been constructed. Nearly 50% of the world's total oil reserves are estimated to be found in the Persian Gulf. It is also a large fishing source and was once the chief center of the pearling industry. In the late 1960s, following British military withdrawal from the area, the United States and the USSR sought to fill the vacuum. In 1971 the first U.S. military installation in the gulf was established at Bahrain.
The long-standing Arab–Persian conflict in the gulf, combined with the desire of neighboring states for control of large oil reserves, has led to international boundary disputes. Iraq and Iran argued over navigation rights on the Shatt al Arab, through which Iran's main ports and most productive oil fields are reached. Iran and the sheikhdom of Ras al-Khaima contested ownership of the oil-rich islands of Abu Musa and Greater and Lesser Tunb at the entrance to the gulf. Iranian forces occupied these islands in Dec., 1971, infuriating Iraq. The much-contested rights over the Shatt al Arab led Iran and Iraq into an 8-year war in the 1980s (see Iran-Iraq War). In 1984 American and other foreign oil tankers in the gulf were attacked by both Iran and Iraq. The security of Persian Gulf countries was threatened throughout this war.
When Iraq invaded Kuwait in Aug., 1990, the Persian Gulf was once again a background for conflict. International coalition ground forces were stationed in Saudi Arabia and neighboring gulf countries in the Persian Gulf War (1991). Before Iraq was expelled from Kuwait in Feb., 1991, Iraqi soldiers set fire to over 500 Kuwaiti oil wells and dumped millions of barrels of oil into the Persian Gulf, causing an environmental crisis and threatening desalination plants throughout the area. The area again was the scene of warfare in 2003 when U.S. and British forces invaded Iraq. The Persian Gulf's vast oil reserves make the area a continuing source of international tension.
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/world/A0860321.html
Why would Iraqi's set fire to the oil fields? Take production out of the system and raise the price for the Saudi's to benefit?
Saudi Arabia
- House of Saud history...
http://rantwraith.blogspot.com/2005/02/frontlines-house-of-saud-history.html
More, more, and more...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/shame-of-the-house-of-saud-shadows-over-mecca-474736.html
http://www.ibnsaud.info/main/9450.htm
Iran...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kermit_Roosevelt,_Jr.
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/06/11/us/kermit-roosevelt-leader-of-cia-coup-in-iran-dies-at-84.html
http://www.counterpunch.org/sasan08192003.html
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a1998huntingheroin
http://www.historycommons.org/searchResults.jsp?searchtext=cia+drug+trafficking&events=on&entities=on&articles=on&topics=on&timelines=on&projects=on&titles=on&descriptions=on&dosearch=on&search=Go
http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a04ciadrugprofits#a04ciadrugprofits
http://home.att.net/~south.tower/KCBushIalibi1.htm
Venice, Florida, where three of the four terrorist pilots learned to fly, is the biggest September 11 crime scene that wasn’t reduced to rubble. Yet it has until now received no serious scrutiny for what it might reveal about the nature of the 9/11 attack. Investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker went searching for evidence that Mohamed Atta and his Hamburg cadre received outside help while they were in the U.S., as authorities initially stated, from a shadowy ‘global network,’ or even from foreign governments.
What he found was a massive cover-up-in-progress in Florida designed to conceal the true story of what was going while Mohamed Atta and his Hamburg cadre conspirators made Venice, Florida their 'home away from home' base for a year and a half. The book is packed with revelations, many of them stunning:
* On the morning of the 9/11 attack there was an attempt on the life of President George W. Bush at the hotel where he was staying in Sarasota, Florida by four Arab men...
* Mohamed Atta had an American girlfriend, with whom he lived for two months in Venice, FL., who was intimidated into silence by the FBI...
* Terrorists, strippers and mysterious German associates mingling together in wild booze and drug fueled party weekends in Key West...
* The mysterious ‘money man’ behind the purchase of Huffman Aviation in Venice had his Lear jet seized at gunpoint by DEA agents, with 43 lbs. of heroin onboard... the same month Mohamed Atta arrived at his school.
Far from merely being negligent or asleep at the switch, the available evidence indicates the CIA was not just aware that hundreds of Arab ‘flight students’ began pouring into Southwest Florida in 1999, but was running the operation.
http://www.madcowprod.com/blog/books.html
“The 9/11 Truth Movement gives one insight why the term ‘conspiracy theorist’ came to be shorthand for "discredited whacko" in the invisible guidebook of mainstream media,” wrote Sander Hicks. “Suddenly, it’s not hard to understand why the obvious anomalies in the JFK assassination never received proper attention in accepted media channels.”
"If you have just as many nutty theories about the driver of the limo turning around and shooting JFK as you have honest scientific inquiries about the real probability of multiple shooters, the wheat drowns in the chaff.”
Today's disinformation offensive on the real questions about 9.11 that must be answered, however, is not the first time Americans have been manipulated through being asked to “see the flash.”
So there's a paper trail. This is good news, but first, let's begin our journey with a visit to the psy-ops murk of Saudi Genesis. What's being lost in the White Noise is the news that evidence constituting inconvenient knowledge about the 9/11 attack continues to seep to the surface...It just isn't being noticed much anymore.
Here’s a real clue to unraveling 9/11, a huge gold nugget, in fact, tucked unnoticed in a 9.11 third anniversary recap in the Chicago Tribune:
“Despite his comfortable origins, Atta was notorious for his frugality,” says the Sept 12, 2004 story, headlined “Kind teacher to murderous zealot; Acquaintances saw hijacker transform.”
“And yet his (Atta’s) bank and credit card records show repeated contributions to Islamic charities working in the Balkans, the mark of a devoted Muslim. In what appears to be a more noteworthy act of generosity to someone he barely knew, in 1995 Atta lent a Turkish baker, Muharrem Acar, some $25,000 to help Acar open a bakery.”
“Acar told the BKA that Atta didn't even ask for a promissory note when he made the loan.
“I don't know why El-Amir had so much money," he said. "I did not want to know either. I heard later that his father was a lawyer. Maybe his family supplied him well."
Where did penniless grad student Mohamed Atta get $25,000 in 1995, years before the official story has him joining Al Qaeda? Where did Atta get access to so much cash that 25k was no big deal?
Discovering who the terrorist ringleader’s paymaster was back in 1995 would be a huge piece of the puzzle. Following a money trail is not brain surgery either... Government prosecutors find answers to questions like that all day long... when they want to.
Clearly, the revelation in “Welcome to Terrorland” that a Lear Jet with 43 lbs of heroin on board belonged to the man whose flight school Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al Shehhi had only recently begun attending was a bit of dashed bad luck for someone.
It didn’t help that the plane had been flying weekly milk runs to Venezuela and back for 30 consecutive weeks before getting caught.
That the pilot’s day job was as chief pilot on Venezuela’s Air Force One only made things worse….
That the co-pilot was himself reportedly a DEA agent stationed in Guyana was yet more bad luck…
The fact that the flight school owner actually has a close connection with the Reverend Falwell made this a sticky wicket of potential major consequence.
Did someone go a little queasy in the stomach at the discovery that a key player in the 9/11 terrorist conspiracy had been implicated in the biggest narcotics bust in the entire sordid history of Central Florida?
We like to think so.
Because when you’re going after people who could be charged with 3000 counts of 1st degree homicide, its important to savor the little victories. Because when you're waging a 9.11 info war with powerful people with a lot to lose, there may not be any bigger ones. Especially when they order up a circus:
http://www.madcowprod.com/MC6812004.html
It’s déjà vu all over again...
And enough to give anyone old enough to remember Vietnam a nightmarish sense of having been right there—exactly there—before.
The surge in Iraq is not what it was advertised to be—a last gasp effort to clutch victory from the jaws of defeat—but a transparent ploy to subvert the will of the American people as expressed in the last election.
A bait and switch tactic successfully employed in 1968 to make Richard Nixon President was dusted off. Nixon was elected because he had—he said—a secret plan to end the Vietnam War, and Americans, rocked by a decade of assassinations and what was nearly a nuclear war over Cuba, were desperate to convince themselves that —for once—he 'might could' be telling the truth.
Of course, he wasn’t. By the time the last helicopter left the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, it had taken longer to end the Vietnam war than it took to fight and win World War II.
(And even that wasn’t long enough for Howard Hughes, who was reportedly frantically looking for someone to bribe to keep it going a little longer.)
There is a direct echo of this today in Iraq.
Allied armies swept across France and Germany, across North Africa, up the Burma Trail in South Asia, and island-hopped across the Pacific in less time than its taken to clear the road in from the airport in Baghdad.
During our lifetimes America has begun measuring its wars—not in years—but in generations. Baby boomers were the Vietnam Generation. Whatever they’re calling teenagers today will one day be remembered as the Iraq Generation. Or maybe the Iraq-Iran Generation.
The question that needs to be asked isn’t why they do it... It’s how. How did we get here?
“Those who control the present, control the past,” George Orwell wrote.
How they do it is by “preparing the battlefield.”
We’ve just finished a summer-long post-graduate course in how they do it, facing the very real prospect of being hounded out of business after being hauled (once again) into court.
Instead of reporting the latest in the various outrages we’d normally be following: the 5.5 -ton Homeland Security Cocaine One DC9; the murder beef in South Florida for which Jack Abramoff is apparently getting a “pass;” the criminal dereliction of our national press in covering the story of the 9/11 terrorist conspiracy at its base of operations in Venice, Florida…
We spent our summer vacation preparing to go to court. And what we learned there is that--right now-- they are preparing the battlefield for a struggle that will take place after the Bush Administration leaves office, over what happened in Venice, Florida in the 18 months before the 9/11 attack.
A Sarasota County Courthouse was the site two weeks ago of the latest skirmish in the organized effort to suppress, discredit, and/or remove from the public record evidence unearthed during our investigation into the activities and associates in Florida of Mohamed Atta’s cadre of terrorist hijackers during the 18-month run-up to the 9/11 attack.
A roll call of the effort to date includes:
*two lawsuits;
*the emergence of a “second Mohamed" in Venice, a French-Tunisian man who—despite looking nothing like Mohamed Atta—claimed it was he who had been misidentified as the terrorist ringleader by numerous witnesses, including an American girl, Amanda Keller, with whom he lived for several months;
*a brief and unconvincing retraction of her highly-detailed account from Keller herself, in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, one of three newspapers which initially reported her account, and the corroborating accounts of a half-dozen credible eyewitnesses;
*and a concerted attempt to roll back the startling information that a half-dozen of Atta’s closest associates while he was in Florida weren’t Arabs, but German, Swiss, and Austrian.
http://www.madcowprod.com/09112007.html
TAMPA (Bay News 9) -- There are radical Islamic web sites now being hosted by U.S. companies and possibly even in Tampa.
Sarasota private investigator Bill Warner said last year he discovered what is known as one of the largest jihadist web sites currently online being hosted through a web company in Tampa.
"This is how you sign up with al-Qaida now," Warner said. "You don't have to go to Pakistan or Afghanistan anymore. You do it on the Internet. Explosives training, arms training, everything you need is on these web sites 24/7; jihad central."
Web hosting companies in the U.S. have expanding bandwidth and security encryption, exactly what terror organizations such as al-Qaida are looking for.
http://www.baynews9.com/content/36/2008/2/26/327798.html
The FBI also claims that they've been unable to figure out where Mohamed Atta was living between January and May of 2001. But numerous eyewitnesses told them where Atta had been living, so the real question becomes:
Why are they lying?
"These guys had money flowing out their ass," Amanda Keller recalled in our interview. "They never seemed to run out of money. They had massive supplies of cocaine. Whenever they’d run out, they’d go over to the flight school. I followed them one day with Sabrina (another German friend of Atta's) to see where they were going, and saw them go into Florida Flight Training."
The Florida Flight Training Center is owned by Arne Kruithof, one of the two 'Magic Dutch Boys' who run flight schools at the Venice Airport. The other is Rudi Dekkers, who has not been charged with any 9/11-related crime as yet, at least that we're aware of.
Rudi currently makes frequent charter flights down and back to Columbia, we're told. Could those two facts be somehow related?
This may explain a suspicious circumstance which has provoked much speculation in the aviation community: How did Dekkers, all of whose various businesses have utterly failed, somehow still manage to live in a $2.5 million mansion in a private gated community?
If the Hilliard/Dekkers operation had a 'green light' from the DEA at the Venice Airport, perhaps that would explain the "rumor" that Dekkers had other sources of income.
We learned of the mysterious "Green Light from the DEA" because of a controversy at the Lynchburg, VA Airport. A big government contract was inexplicably awarded to a non-existent dummy front company which authorities said had been “housed” inside Huffman Aviation at the Venice Airport, even though no one there had every heard of it.
"No one here had ever heard of Britannia Aviation before," one told us. "And this is a very small airport."
Venice aviation executives professed amazement. After calling a DEA source, this aviation executive told us, to ask what he knew about Britannia Aviation, “all hell broke loose.”
"This guy got all excited as soon as I asked," the executive stated. "He immediately wanted to know why I was so interested in Britannia. Finally he reluctantly told me that Britannia had a 'green light' from the DEA at the Venice Airport, whatever that means. He also said the local Venice Police Department (which has mounted round-the-clock patrols at the Airport since Sept 11) had been warned to leave them alone."
Indications that the FBI also has "guilty knowledge" about Atta were everywhere in the aftermath of the attack. Especially suspicious was the widely-reported fact that the FBI was at Huffman Aviation with search warrants at 2.30 a.m. the night after the attack. Turns out, the FBI was on the scene even earlier than that...
"How do you think the FBI got here (Huffman Aviation) so fast after the attack?" asked one Huffman Aviation insider. "They knew what was going on here. Hell, they were parked in a white van outside my house less than four hours after the buildings collapsed."
"We heard that 16 of the 19 terrorists had been on Interpol's Most Wanted list," this aviation executive continued. "But early on I gleaned that these guys had Government protection. They were let into this country for a specific purpose. It was a business deal."
"The FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools," read a Washington Post headline one week after the attack. "Federal authorities have been aware for years that suspected terrorists with ties to Osama bin Laden were receiving flight training at schools in the United States," the article stated.
What they left unanswered was why they did nothing to shut it down.
http://www.madcowprod.com/02212006.html
Now if you are still reading and want to dive deeper....here we go....The Safari Club
Investigative journalist Joseph Trento will later report that in 1976, the Safari Club, a newly formed secret cabal of intelligence agencies (see September 1, 1976-Early 1980s), decides it needs a network of banks to help finance its intelligence operations. Saudi Intelligence Minister Kamal Adham is given the task. “With the official blessing of George H. W. Bush as the head of the CIA, Adham transformed a small Pakistani merchant bank, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), into a world-wide money-laundering machine, buying banks around the world to create the biggest clandestine money network in history.” BCCI was founded in 1972 by a Pakistani named Agha Hasan Abedi, who was an associate of Adham’s. Bush himself has an account at BCCI established while still director of the CIA. French customs will later raid the Paris BCCI branch and discover the account in Bush’s name. [Trento, 2005, pp. 104] Bush, Adham, and other intelligence heads work with Abedi to contrive “a plan that seemed too good to be true. The bank would solicit the business of every major terrorist, rebel, and underground organization in the world. The intelligence thus gained would be shared with ‘friends’ of BCCI.” CIA operative Raymond Close works closely with Adham on this. BCCI taps “into the CIA’s stockpile of misfits and malcontents to help man a 1,500-strong group of assassins and enforcers.” [Trento, 2005, pp. 104] Soon, BCCI becomes the fastest growing bank in the world. Time magazine will later describe BCCI as not just a bank, but also “a global intelligence operation and a Mafia-like enforcement squad. Operating primarily out of the bank’s offices in Karachi, Pakistan, the 1,500-employee black network has used sophisticated spy equipment and techniques, along with bribery, extortion, kidnapping and even, by some accounts, murder. The black network—so named by its own members—stops at almost nothing to further the bank’s aims the world over.” [Time, 7/22/1991]
http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=safari_club_1
Since 9/11, there has been a heightened level of discussion on the possibility of nuclear terrorism, particularly in light of the A.Q. Khan network and the smuggling of nuclear technology from Pakistan to a number of other countries. This broadcast sets forth information that demonstrates the complicity of the Safari Club in the development of the “Islamic Bomb.” An outsourcing of U.S. intelligence functions to Saudi Arabia and (to a lesser extent) Pakistan, the network was the principal element in the CIA’s support network for the Muslim mujahideen that drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Of course, it was that conflict that spawned Osama bin Laden as a warrior. In this program, the development of the Pakistani “Islamic Bomb” by the A.Q. Khan network is seen as a quid pro quo for Pakistani and Saudi help in fighting the Soviets. In addition to the fact that the Saudis were in effective to control of the A.Q. Khan network’s operations, the show demonstrates that CIA assets associated with that network were allowed to operate in the United States until well after 9/11!
Program Highlights Include: The important role of the BCCI in the financing of the A.Q. Khan network’s operations (the BCCI milieu is deeply involved in the events in, and around, 9/11); U.S. pressure on British investigators to abandon their investigation of the A.Q. Khan network; the operations of Nazir Ahmed Vaid, an apparent CIA asset whose operations on behalf of the A.Q. Khan network continued in the United States until after 9/11; the George W. Bush administration’s relaxing of sanctions imposed on Pakistan by the Clinton administration because of its efforts at promoting the spread of nuclear technology; the participation by the Theodor Shackley/Thomas Clines/Edwin Wilson network in the Afghan Mujahideen support effort.
http://spitfirelist.com/?p=150
Continuing with analysis of the Fifth Column that assisted the Islamo-fascists who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks, the program accesses information from a VERY important new book Prelude to Terror by Joseph J. Trento. In this book, the author sets forth information about the Safari Club, an “outsourced” intelligence network in which the Saudis financed a privatized espionage establishment that dominated American intelligence operations for the better part of a quarter of a century. Utilizing the Saudi GID and the Pakistani ISI as proxy agencies, this network ran the Iran-Contra, Iraqgate and Afghan mujahideen efforts. The most significant outgrowth of this network was the birth of al Qaeda, with all that has resulted from its conception. One of the points that Trento makes is the fact that outsourcing U.S. intelligence operations eliminated the necessary function of counterintelligence—monitoring one’s allies in order to verify their loyalty and competence. The failure to conform to this basic tenet of intelligence has haunted the U.S., and will continue to do so. It is important to note that the elder George Bush and the Reagan administrations were at the core of the Safari Club. The Safari Club was specifically created to circumvent Congressional and even Presidential oversight!
http://ftrsummary.blogspot.com/2005/08/ftr-522-safari-club.html
While Cindy Sheehan was being dragged from the House gallery moments before President Bush delivered his State of the Union address for wearing a t-shirt honoring her son and the other 2,244 US soldiers killed in Iraq, Turki al-Faisal was settling into his seat inside the gallery. Faisal, a Saudi, is a man who has met Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants on at least five occasions, describing the al Qaeda leader as "quite a pleasant man." He met multiple times with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.
Yet, unlike Sheehan, al-Faisal was a welcomed guest of President Bush on Tuesday night. He is also a man that the families of more than 600 victims of the 9/11 attacks believe was connected to their loved ones' deaths.
Al-Faisal is actually Prince Turki al-Faisal, a leading member of the Saudi royal family and the kingdom's current ambassador to the US. But the bulk of his career was spent at the helm of the feared Saudi intelligence services from 1977 to 2001. Last year, The New York Times pointed out that "he personally managed Riyadh's relations with Osama bin Laden and Mullah Muhammad Omar of the Taliban. Anyone else who had dealings with even a fraction of the notorious characters the prince has worked with over the years would never make it past a U.S. immigration counter, let alone to the most exclusive offices in Washington." Al-Faisal was also named in the $1 trillion lawsuit filed by hundreds of 9/11 victims' families, who accused him of funding bin Laden's network. Curiously, his tenure as head of Saudi intelligence came to an abrupt and unexpected end 10 days before the 9/11 attacks.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x306462
Question for you....if drug production has gone up 600% since we invaded and pushed the Taliban out....how is that possible if the Taliban is responsible for the drugs?
Blow by blow major events in CIA history...
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWcia.htm
http://www.mindcontrolforums.com/history-cia-atrocities.htm
Whistle blowers...
Iran/Contra whistleblower Celerino “Cele” Castillo III was scheduled to report to prison on March 5, but the power of justice has intervened on his behalf.
A federal judge in San Antonio, at a hearing held late last week, ruled that Castillo's report date to prison should be extended until July 20. The judge, W. Royal Furgeson Jr., issued his ruling over the objections of a federal prosecutor, who argued that Castillo should be sent to prison because he was a “danger to the community.”
http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/bill-conroy/2009/02/prosecutor-claims-irancontra-whistleblower-danger-society
Credible sources who were close to Gary Webb have stated that he was receiving death threats, being regularly followed, and that he was concerned about strange individuals who were seen on multiple occasions breaking into and leaving his house before his apparent 'suicide' on Friday morning.
Webb, a Pullitzer prize winning journalist, exposed CIA drug trafficking operations in a series of books and reports for the San Jose Mercury News. He was found dead on Friday morning in what the police said was an apparent suicide.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2004/141204webbmurdered.htm
NEW YORK The death of investigative reporter Gary Webb has been confirmed as a suicide, according to a coroner's statement. There has been speculation that he may have met with foul play because he had received two gunshot wounds to the head, The Sacramento Bee reported Wednesday.
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/december2004/151204deathconfirmed.htm
Latest coverage...
http://blackvoternet.com/drugs.htm
“Al-Qaida is the top secret code name of special covert operations of the U.S. CIA, Israeli Mossad, British SIS, Indian RAW. Al-Qaida is a fake name, an imaginary illusion, a deceptive fraud, a fictitious hoax and a fraudulent scam of the unlawful war of terror, which is still being cunningly and clandestinely supported and promoted by the CIA, Mossad, SIS, RAW, and the Corrupt Mercenary Media (CMM) to frame, blame, defame, harm and kill Pakistanis, Kashmiris, Afghans, Arabs, Muslims and other innocent humans by falsely and maliciously labeling them as the Al-Qaida militants, extremists, or terrorists. Actually, Al-Qaida or Al-CIA-da is the CIA. Al-Qaida is the Mossad. Al-Qaida is the SIS. Al-Qaida is the RAW. Al-Qaida is the ISI. Al-Qaida is the CMM. The CIA, Mossad, SIS, RAW, ISI and the CMM are the real Al-Qaida or ‘the Evil 6′. For the sake of international peace, reform or abolish the CIA, Mossad, SIS, RAW and the ISI; oppose and expose the CMM; and end the illegal war of terror now to reduce global terrorism. Indeed, imperialistic military occupation of any country, state, or nation is state terrorism. Civil terror is a natural reaction to government terror.” - Professor Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, president of JUD, Pakistan.
http://www.thepeoplesvoice.org/TPV3/Voices.php/2009/05/07/lahore-attack-mossad-aamp-co-strikes-aga#more3686
Produced and directed by Irish filmmaker and former BBC producer Jamie Doran, the film tells the story of thousands of prisoners who surrendered to the US military’s Afghan allies after the siege of Kunduz. According to the film, some three thousand of the prisoners were forced into sealed containers and loaded onto trucks for transport to Sheberghan prison. When the prisoners began shouting for air, U.S.-allied Afghan soldiers fired directly into the truck, killing many of them.
The rest suffered through an appalling road trip lasting up to four days, so thirsty they clawed at the skin of their fellow prisoners as they licked perspiration and even drank blood from open wounds. Witnesses say that when the trucks arrived and soldiers opened the containers, most of the people inside were dead. They also say US Special Forces re-directed the containers carrying the living and dead into the desert and stood by as survivors were shot and buried. Now, up to three thousand bodies lie buried in a mass grave.
Outraged human rights groups and lawyers are calling for an investigation but the U.N. special envoy to Afghanistan refuses any U.N.-backed investigation until the Afghan government can protect witnesses. Two of the witnesses in the film have already been killed.
http://www.wariscrime.com/2008/12/12/video/afghan-massacre-the-convoy-of-death/
Speculation about the mysterious origin and funding of the so-called Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has continued for decades.
The history of FEMA as an illegal unconstitutional entity has been most recently exposed in an unprecedented lawsuit against the CIA and its alleged drug trafficking and money laundering operations.
In September 1998 a $63 million lawsuit (Case No. 98CV11829JLT) was filed by Massachusetts attorney Ray Kohlman on behalf of former Green Beret Bill Tyree.
Kohlman, a former legal investigator for attorney William Pepper in the Martin Luther King murder trial of James Earl Ray, filed a 101-page complaint on behalf of his client.
The suit, replete with five inches of affidavits and appendices, names the Central Intelligence Agency, former Massachusetts Governor A. Paul Celucci, former Massachusetts Attorney-General Scott Harshbarger, former CIA director and US President George Bush and self-admitted government assassin D. Gene Tatum as defendants in a far-reaching case involving US Government sanctioned drug smuggling, murder, and coverup.
Bill Tyree is currently serving a life sentence for the murder of his wife -- a case eerily similar to that of Dr. Jeffrey McDonald, a Ft. Bragg doctor who was framed for the murder of his wife and children in the early 1980s.
"In the mid 1970s, while serving in Panama, Tyree and other Green Berets were led into Colombia under the command of Green Beret Colonels Cutolo and Baker to plant radio beacons, so that plane loads of cocaine could fly below Colombian and US radar, and land undetected in Panama," writes former LAPD officer Mike Ruppert in his newsletter (From the Wilderness, P. O. Box 6061-350, Sherman Oaks, CA 91413, http://www.copvcia.com).
"Orders for these missions came from the CIA's Ed Wilson and Tom Clines," continues Ruppert. "Tyree had been a part of many secret missions and was losing his taste for it. His wife was keeping a diary [for which she was presumably murdered, and which later disappeared]."
"Five Special Forces Colonels -- Cutolo, Baker, Malvesti, Rower and Bayard -- have died under mysterious circumstances since. The heart of the Tyree documentation consists of an affidavit allegedly written by Colonel Cutolo who was also Tyree's commanding officer at Fort Devens, Mass. at the time of Tyree's arrest. Both were then with the 10th Special Forces."
http://www.stewwebb.com/Legal%20Lawsuit%20Alleges%20FEMA%20Funded%20by%20Laundered%20Drug%20Profits.html
(Dec.1, 2008) Afghanistan now supplies over 90 percent of the world’s heroin, generating nearly $200 billion in revenue.
Since the U.S. invasion on Oct. 7, 2001, opium output has increased 33-fold (to over 8,250 metric tons a year).
The U.S. has been in Afghanistan for over seven years, has spent $177 billion in that country alone, and has the most powerful and technologically advanced military on Earth. GPS tracking devices can locate any spot imaginable by simply pushing a few buttons.
Still, bumper crops keep flourishing year after year, even though heroin production is a laborious, intricate process. The poppies must be planted, grown and harvested; then after the morphine is extracted it has to be cooked, refined, packaged into bricks and transported from rural locales across national borders.
To make heroin from morphine requires another 12-14 hours of laborious chemical reactions. Thousands of people are involved, yet—despite the massive resources at our disposal—heroin keeps flowing at record levels.
Common sense suggests that such prolific trade over an extended period of time is no accident, especially when the history of what has transpired in that region is considered.
While the CIA ran its operations during the Vietnam War, the Golden Triangle supplied the world with most of its heroin. After that war ended in 1975, an intriguing event took place in 1979 when Zbigniew Brzezinski covertly manipulated the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan.
Behind the scenes, the CIA, along with Pakistan's ISI, were secretly funding Afghanistan's mujahideen to fight their Russian foes. Prior to this war, opium production in Afghanistan was minimal.
But according to historian Alfred McCoy, an expert on the subject, a shift in focus took place. "Within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world’s top heroin producer."
Soon, as Professor Michel Chossudovsky notes, "CIA assets again controlled the heroin trade. As the mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant poppies as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories."
Eventually, the Soviet Union was defeated (their version of Vietnam), and ultimately lost the Cold War. The aftermath, however, proved to be an entirely new can of worms.
During his research, McCoy discovered that "the CIA supported various Afghan drug lords, for instance Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The CIA did not handle heroin, but it did provide its drug lord allies with transport, arms, and political protection."
By 1994, a new force emerged in the region - the Taliban - that took over the drug trade. Chossudovsky again discovered that "the Americans had secretly, and through the Pakistanis [specifically the ISI], supported the Taliban’s assumption of power."
These strange bedfellows endured a rocky relationship until July 2000 when Taliban leaders banned the planting of poppies. This alarming development, along with other disagreements over proposed oil pipelines through Eurasia, posed a serious problem for power centers in the West.
Without heroin money at their disposal, billions of dollars could not be funneled into various CIA black budget projects. Already sensing trouble in this volatile region, 18 influential neo-cons signed a letter in 1998 which became a blueprint for war—the infamous Project for a New American Century (PNAC).
Fifteen days after 9-11, CIA Director George Tenet sent his top-secret Special Operations Group (SOG) into Afghanistan. One of the biggest revelations in Tene'’s book, At the Center of the Storm, was that CIA forces directed the Afghanistan invasion, not the Pentagon.
In the Jan. 26, 2003, issue of Time magazine, Douglas Waller describes Donald Rumsfeld's reaction to this development. "When aides told Rumsfeld that his Army Green Beret A-Teams couldn't go into Afghanistan until the CIA contingent had laid the groundwork with local warlords, he erupted, 'I have all these guys under arms, and we've got to wait like little birds in a nest for the CIA to let us go in?'"
ARMITAGE A MAJOR PLAYER
But the real operator in Afghanistan was Richard Armitage, a man whose legend includes being the biggest heroin trafficker in Cambodia and Laos during the Vietnam War; director of the State Department’s Foreign Narcotics Control Office (a front for CIA drug dealing); head of the Far East Company (used to funnel drug money out of the Golden Triangle); a close liaison with Oliver North during the Iran-Contra cocaine-for-guns scandal; a primary Pentagon official in the terror and covert ops field under George Bush the Elder; one of the original signatories of the infamous PNAC document; and the man who helped CIA Director William Casey run weapons to the mujahideen during their war against the Soviet Union.
Armitage was also stationed in Iran during the mid-1970s right before Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini overthrew the shah. Armitage may well be the greatest covert operator in U.S. history.
On Sept. 10, 2001, Armitage met with the UK’s national security advisor, Sir David Manning. Was Armitage "passing on specific intelligence information about the impending terrorist attacks"?
The scenario is plausible because one day later—on 9-11—Dick Cheney directly called for Armitage's presence down in his bunker. Immediately after WTC 2 was struck, Armitage told BBC Radio, "I was told to go to the operations center [where] I spent the rest of the day in the ops center with the vice president."
These two share a long history together. Not only was Armitage employed by Cheney's former company Halliburton (via Brown & Root), he was also a deputy when Cheney was secretary of defense under Bush the Elder.
More importantly, Cheney and Armitage had joint business and consulting interests in the Central Asian pipeline which had been contracted by Unocal. The only problem standing between them and the Caspian Sea's vast energy reserves was the Taliban.
Since the 1980s, Armitage amassed a huge roster of allies in Pakistan’s ISI. He was also one of the "Vulcans" - along with Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and Rabbi Dov Zakheim - who coordinated Bush's geo-strategic foreign policy initiatives.
Then, after 9-11, he negotiated with the Pakistanis prior to our invasion of Afghanistan, while also becoming Bush's deputy secretary of state stationed in Afghanistan.
Our "enemy," or course, was the Taliban "terrorists." But George Tenet, Colin Powell, Porter Goss, and Armitage had developed a close relationship with Pakistan’s military head of the ISI—General Mahmoud Ahmad -- who was cited in a Sept. 2001 FBI report as "supporting and financing the alleged 9-11 terrorists, as well as having links to al Qaeda and the Taliban."
The line between friend and foe gets even murkier. Afghan President Hamid Karzai not only collaborated with the Taliban, but he was also on Unocal’s payroll in the mid-1990s. He is also described by Saudi Arabia’s Al-Watan newspaper as being "a Central Intelligence Agency covert operator since the 1980s that collaborated with the CIA in funding U.S. aid to the Taliban."
Capturing a new, abundant source for heroin was an integral part of the U.S. "war on terror."
Hamid Karzai is a puppet ruler of the CIA; Afghanistan is a full-fledged narco-state; and the poppies that flourish there have yet to be eradicated, as was proven in 2003 when the Bush administration refused to destroy the crops, despite having the chance to do so.
Major drug dealers are rarely arrested, smugglers enjoy carte blanche immunity, and Nushin Arbabzadah, writing for The Guardian, theorized that "U.S. Army planes leave Afghanistan carrying coffins empty of bodies, but filled with drugs."
Is that why the military protested so vehemently when reporters tried to photograph returning caskets?
*** Victor Thorn is a hard-hitting researcher, journalist and the author of many books on 9-11 and the New World Order. These include 9-11 Evil: The Israeli Role in 9-11 and Phantom Flight 93.
ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED
http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/cia_and_heroin_158.html
http://www.conspiracyplanet.com/channel.cfm?channelid=35&contentid=5666
The Duplicity of the War on Drugs
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"The first casualty when war comes is the truth." - Sen. Hiram Johnson - 1917
The intent of this essay is to demonstrate that the War on Drugs [under the Reagan/Bush administrations] was America's first great psy-war campaign perpetrated against its own people and that such abuse of power is likely to happen again. To demonstrate that psychological warfare techniques were employed requires understanding subtle sequences of disparate, but related, events. It involves asking questions as to the motivations, skill, expertise and knowledge of those involved.
At the height of the war on drugs, President George Bush held up a bag of cocaine in his first televised speech to the nation in September 1989. In December 1989, George Bush ordered the invasion of Panama to overthrow its narco-militarist dictator, Gen. Manuel Noriega. In the July 16, 1990 Newsweek, the scope of the war on drugs seemed ready to expand from Panama into future military actions against the powerful Colombian drug cartels. At face value, indeed the war on drugs seemed to be stemming the flow of cocaine into the United States. However, as a matter of fact, for the whole decade of the 1980's, casual and popular use of cocaine fell out of favor, and overall use steadily decreased. Yet as overall American consumption of cocaine in the mid '80's dwindled, the Reagan and Bush administrations were calling for an escalation in fighting drugs, declaring that America was awash in illegal drugs. The 1980's was a remarkable decade in international events: the Cold War was coming to an end, and the U.S. military-industrial complex was facing spending cuts, with myriad economic ramifications. The U.S. had gone through its longest period of peace since the end of World War I, and many Americans were calling for a Peace Dividend. While it may seem coincidental that the war on drugs was contemporaneous with the end of the Cold War and was punctuated by the Iran-Contra affair, a closer look at the war on drugs reveals disturbing patterns.
Critics of the Cold War have long pointed out that the Cold War was a convenient vehicle for the military-industrial complex to acquire an increasing share of the federal budget, regardless of the decline in threat posed by the Soviet Union. The war on drugs, it has been noted, arrives with all the familiar rubrics of constant threat and ceaseless terror. The difference being it is an internal war.
Other Western countries have drug addiction problems addressed by doctors and treatment clinics, but only the U.S. has a war on drugs. As ex-DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agent Michael Levine has commented, "with the fade of communism (the Pentagon and CIA) are building a pretext for maintaining their budgets." (Esquire, March 1991, pg. 136) Indeed, after Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, the rhetoric of the war on drugs changed, with the Bush administration declaring victory in the war against drugs late that year. Only mere coincidence, or had the Bush administration found it no longer needed the War on Drugs, having found the Butcher of Bagdhad?
During the Reagan years, as the Cold War started to wind down, the administration was pursuing the Contra covert war in Central America against Nicaragua and the leading Marxist Sandinista party. While this covert war was being waged by the CIA and the U.S.-supported Nicaraguan Contras, there were reports, as early as 1986, of the CIA and Contras being involved in drugs-for-guns barter arrangements. There is a wealth of evidence there was an even more unseemly side to the already patently corrupt Iran-Contra affair. Investigations paralleling the Iran-Contra hearings have delved further into the accumulated evidence of Contra involvement in drugs-for-guns deals and alleged monetary transfers to the Contras from the drug cartels. It has been documented by Senator John Kerry's Congressional Committee investigation that while the interdiction efforts were increased, illegal drugs, especially cocaine, were being smuggled into the U.S. by CIA-Contra airplanes and boats under the cover of gun-running operations.
The Colombian cartels, confronted by the escalation of the "War on Drugs," were able to continue trafficking despite increased U.S. interdiction efforts. The corresponding increases in interdiction efforts and the increased availability of cocaine has not escaped the mention of Princeton University Prof. Ethan Nadalmann: "Indeed, if (the interdiction and enforcement) efforts have accomplished anything in recent years, it has been to make marijuana more expensive and scarcer and to make cocaine cheaper, more potent, and more available." (Foreign Policy Magazine, Summer 1988)
The Nicaraguan Contra civilian leadership chose their base in Miami in the 1980's, where the cocaine cowboys were already established and renowned during the 1970's for the violence that is associated with the illegal cocaine trade. Southern Air Transport (S.A.T.), a ClA-affiliated freight airline operating out of Miami has been implicated in drug-running, evidence of which comes from many sources. Notably, in Congressional testimony Wanda Palacio, an FBI informant, has stated that she witnessed drugs being exchanged for guns on an S.A.T. plane in Barranquila, Colombia.
Corroborating this testimony is an Associated Press story of Jan. 21, 1987, which states the October 1986 S.A.T. plane crash in Nicaragua revealed flight logs indicating that the pilot, Wallace Sawyer Jr., had been flying from Barranquila, Colombia to Miami, Florida in early October 1985. Eugene Hasenfus, an Air America veteran and sole survivor of that crash, filed suit against White House National Security Council (NSC) aide Richard Secord and S.A.T. for expenses and damages, claiming S.A.T. and Secord were his employers. Secord in turn contends that Mr. Hasenfus' real employer was Ronald Reagan and the actual chain of command was Reagan-Poindexter-North-Secord.
Then there were the allegations coming from Costa Rica regarding White House involvement in the drug trade. The Central American country of Costa Rica lies on Nicaragua's Southern border, which made Costa Rica strategically important during the Contra insurgency in Nicaragua. In that time, the Northern region of Costa Rica bordering with Nicaragua was the site of extensive CIA and Contra activity. In the wake of the Iran-Contra affair, White House NSC staff members Lt. Col. Oliver North, John Poindexter, and Richard Secord were banned-for-life from entering Costa Rica in 1989, after the Costa Rican legislature implicated the NSC staff members in guns and drug smuggling. Former Contra leader Eden Pastora has said "I knew that much of what went through (CIA operative John Hull's northern Costa Rica ranch's) airstrips was related to narcotics trafficking" as part of a "Colombia-Costa Rica, Costa Rica-Miami connection." (Cockburn, p. 177) These White-House NSC members, along with John Hull, were indicted in a Costa Rican court as accessories to murder in the La Penca bombing and assassination attempt on Eden Pastora, which resulted in the death of an American journalist. North, Poindexter and Secord were never extradicted or arraigned in Costa Rica.
Evidence of White House premeditated involvement in drug trafficking is provided by examining the unusual covert action background of key Iran-Contra players, dating back to American involvement in Laos. Air America - the CIA's Thailand-based Vietnam-era airline - was notorious for its participation in heroin trafficking as a part of funding and supporting the CIA's secret war in Laos during the Vietnam war. This profound bit of history has been the focus of much commentary by historians, and has been confirmed by many sources. (Regarding the recent controversial August 1990 comic movie, "Air America", former Air America pilot Jack Smith spoke out on Entertainment Tonight, substantiating the movie's essential truths.)
Since controlling the Laotian opium fields determined who would control Laos, the CIA put all of its support behind their chosen drug lord, Vang Pao, and the amount of opiates that came out of Laos tripled. As it turns out, Richard Secord (CIA Special Operations Group Deputy Wing Commander in Laos), Lt. Col. Oliver North, Richard Armitage, and John Singlaub were all veterans of the secret war in Laos (Cockburn). The presence of several Laos secret-war veterans who emerged as key NSC players in Iran-Contra exceeds the realm of mere coincidence. In the October 1986 S.A.T. plane crash which yielded Eugene Hasenfus and the U.S. Government embarrassment, an old Air America operations manual was found. (Cockburn p. 221)
Public record documents that General Manuel Noriega was on the CIA payroll in the early to mid 1970's, as well as the 1980's. An important point mostly ignored in the mainstream press, however, is the Congressional testimony by George Bush's own NSC advisor, Donald Gregg, that George Bush (then Pres. Gerald Ford's CIA Director) met with Noriega and other Panamanian officials sometime in 1976. This meeting with Noriega took place well after Noriega had been implicated in the intelligence community as a drug trafficker in the DEA's June 1975 DeFeo report. Meeting with a foreign official, CIA Director George Bush would have been fully briefed on Noriega's dossier. Later, Jimmy Carter's CIA director, Adm. Stansfield Turner, ended payments to Noriega; however, Noriega's CIA pay checks resumed when Reagan/Bush took office in l980. (1990 PBS Frontline on Noriega)
It is interesting to note at this point that George Bush was the Drug Czar during his tenure as Vice President under Pres. Ronald Reagan. In NSC memos discovered in the-Iran-Contra investigation, it has been revealed that George Bush's NSC advisor Donald Gregg was aware early on of Contra involvement in the drug trade.
Could ex-CIA chief George Bush, at that point Vice President and Drug Czar, be unaware of such goings-on when his reporting subordinate was quite aware of Contra involvement in the drug trade?
And the pattern continues: During the first two years of the Bush presidency, William Bennett, Bush's first Drug Czar, was criticized by members of Congress for his apparent indifference to Federal judicial and legal loopholes which permitted U.S. companies to export unusual volumes of cocaine processing chemicals to Latin American countries harboring cocaine production laboratories. Mr. Bennett had been an outspoken proponent of escalating the war on drugs, and yet on this important front of anti-drug policy, Mr. Bennett was apparently negligent. (Rolling Stone, "Between the Lines", October - November 1990)
It's doubtful that the concurrence of the Contra war in Nicaragua with the emergence of crack cocaine were mere coincidences. It has been long aknowledged that heroin's prominence and availability during the Vietnam war was contributed by the trafficking of opiates in Laos and Southeast Asia. Sadly, covert wars and drug trafficking go hand in hand.
Ex-CIA field officer John Stockwell has commented, "We cannot forget the Senate Kerry Committee findings of cocaine smuggling on ClA/Contra aircraft, the DEA reports on the number of prosecutions in which the CIA has intervened to block prosecution of drug smugglers, the note that escaped Lt. Col. Oliver North's shredder that $14 million of drug money had gone to the Contras, or the CIA's 20-odd-year relationship with Manuel Noriega." (Austin American Statesman, op-ed editorial) Nor has this escaped the comment of ex-DEA agent Michael Levine: "God knows how many secret elements are out there working under the guise of the drug war. Oliver North was the latest example. His operation was hip-deep in Contra drug smuggling. He was banned from Costa Rica for his involvement with drug runners. The DEA documented fifty tons of Contra coke that was being routed into the U.S. by a Honduran connection. An agent bought two kilos in Lubbock, Texas, and made the arrest. The CIA comes quickly to the rescue. A closed hearing is held. Case dismissed." (Esquire, March 1991, p 136)
Leslie Cockburn has documented that since drug trafficking was facilitated via an unhindered CIA-Contra network unencumbered by increased U.S. border interdiction efforts, the effect was "... involvement of the CIA and the related White House covert operations network in drenching America in cocaine and other narcotics ..." (Cockburn, p.187) And since overall cocaine use declined in the '80's, it was the cheaper and more-addictive Crack cocaine that came into prominence. As the shipments of South American marijuana declined as a result of increased interdiction efforts, cheap cocaine came to the fore to replace marijuana as the drug of choice for drug users and drug smugglers alike.
Ronald Reagan's Secretary of State George Schultz, Reagan's former U.N. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick, conservative economist Milton Friedman, and columnist and editor of the National Review, William F. Buckley, Jr., all sharply departed from the administration's anti-drug cant by arguing the brief for decriminalization of drugs. At the height of the war on drugs rhetoric, these orthodox conservatives apparently intentionally diverted the course of the drug war rhetoric by proposing the opposite extreme of what the Bush administration was promoting. What could prompt a handful of GOP party loyalists to not only depart from lip-syncing the party line, but also to voice an opinion 180 degrees opposite of the Bush administration's declared policies? Was there something about the war on drugs that bothered them, that would lead them to propose something radically different?
Surely the knowledge of the Contra drug smuggling of the late 1980's and the emergence of crack cocaine in 1985 would have led the Reagan-Bush administration to anticipate the wave of cheaper drugs and drug-related violence similar to what occurred in Miami in the l970s, the difference being that crack cocaine is appropriate for down-scale markets (i.e. poorer neighborhoods). While the mass media increasingly emphasized minority drug use and drug-related crimes in the mid- to late-1980's, the CIA and Contras freely smuggled cheap and potent crack cocaine for down-scale markets while border interdiction efforts escalated, increasingly limiting drug cartel trafficking to less bulky and more easily smuggled cocaine.
This suggests that the Reagan administration, with prescience and malice aforethought, conspired in feeding Americans both the cocaine and the cocaine hysteria, and that psy-war intrigues have now become tools to manipulate American politics (remember the use of disinformation in the Reagan years).
Looking at the accumulated evidence that the Contras and the CIA engaged in cocaine smuggling to fund the covert war in Nicaragua, suspicion arises concerning the apparent coincidence that CIA-Contra drug smuggling was contemporaneous with the "war on drugs". From a CIA covert action in Latin America the cocaine has made its way NORTH (ala Oliver North) to the American consumer, who is consistently portrayed as African-American by the mass media, even though the majority of cocaine consumption is by whites. The disturbing prospect arises that this "war on drugs" was nothing more than CIA-style psychological warfare which sought to acquire as much as possible of the sum total of our civil liberties while particularly targeting minorities.
Even though overall cocaine use steadily decreased throughout the past decade, our government and press declared a drug epidemic requiring a crackdown, while the Reagan administration's covert war pumped crack cocaine into the inner cities, thus further destabilizing ommunities already afflicted by poverty and violence. If one assumes that the Reagan-Bush administration understood the consequences of CIA and Contras smuggling cheap and potent cocaine into America unhindered, then one should look at the effects this activity had directly upon the poverty-stricken communities afflicted by the drug trade. The drug trade directly exacerbated the effects of inner-city crime and made the cities increasingly unstable and unsafe.
If the ghetto drug dealers are the young capitalists who could, under better circumstances, become community leaders, the influx of cheap cocaine and the increasing poverty makes these possible ghetto leaders emerge faster as outlaws, the result being that they are eliminated. What better way to undermine your enemies? What better way to fund covert actions? And what better way to grandstand about crime, morality, and values?
THE WAR ON DRUGS, THE MEDIA, AND RACE
But as the White House covert war went about poisoning Americans with drugs, the burden of addiction belonged to a relatively small number of Americans, and the media reported the melodrama of a war waged by politicians and policemen - not by scientists and doctors. All too frequently the rhetoric of the war against drugs played to the prejudices and fears of a society beset by racial frictions.
One need not look far to see the pattern of miscasting the focus of the war on drugs on African-Americans. Almost every time one opens up one of the major weekly magazines, or watches network news, the story of the war on drugs is supplemented with pictures of African-Americans being arrested by the police. At times, the script of the war on drugs is insidious, as in a Dec. 3, 1990 TIME Magazine article on the war on drugs: "Recognizing that the war on drugs has singled out the poor, Bennett has urged state and federal authorities to come down harder on middle-class users. He considers 'casual' drug users 'carriers' who are even more infectious than addicts because they suggest to young people 'that you can do drugs and be O.K.'" (pg. 48)
In this article, the assumption is made that middle-class users are "casual" users and the poor are the "addicts." While Bennett admits to bias against the inner-city poor, immediately adjacent to this paragraph is a photograph of a downcast black woman in handcuffs with the caption "... the myth is that drug use is primarily a ghetto habit." Every photograph in the article is of African-Americans - dead, imprisoned, or injecting drugs. Nowhere in the article are to be found photographs of white drug users. On pages 46 and 47 of the TIME article, the charts show that as crack-cocaine prices decreased during the 1980's arrests increased - again making the association with more affordable drugs and crime.
However, no charts are to be seen indicating the decrease in overall drug use throughout the decade. But again, on page 46, TIME makes the association between "hard-core addiction," poverty, and race: "While the U.S. has made significant progress in curbing casual drug use, it has made far less headway on the problems that most trouble the public, hard-core addiction and drug-related violence. Last year the National Institute on Drug Abuse estimated that the number of current users of illegal drugs had fallen to 14.5 million from 23 million in 1985. But while there was a dramatic decrease in the number of occasional users, the number of people who used drugs weekly or daily (292,000 in 1988 vs. 246,000 in 1985) had escalated as addiction to crack soared in some mainly poor and minority areas.
Now in examining these statistics, the article does mention that in the period 1985 - 1990 there were 8,500,000 fewer users of illegal drugs, but between 1985 and 1988, there were 46,000 more daily and weekly users of drugs, which TIME, again, attributes to crack. The TIME article attributes the upward trend, which differs from the downward trend by 2 orders of magnitude. to "crack ... in some mainly poor and minority areas."
The bias of the TIME article is clear: Even though the increase in frequent users is a mere 0.5% of the overall decline in drug use, TIME blurs the distinctions between kinds of illegal drugs and the difference between drug use and drug abuse. Without even backing up these claims with any statistics, TIME exaggerates the increase in frequent drug use and portrays minorities and ever-cheaper crack cocaine as the source of the presumed drug scourge. The TIME article admits that whites account for 69% of cocaine users. but buries that important little factoid in the middle of the article and doesn't even delve into cocaine use by whites. Might drug consumption be the same for both whites and blacks of the same socio-economic groups? One study indicated that drug use is higher among white high school students, for the very simple reason that the white teenagers have more money to spend on drugs than black teenagers. It is disturbing that the media consistently break down drug use and abuse statistics into racial groups rather than economic groups. Black community leaders have decried the apparent media bias in over-reporting "drug-related" crimes in black communities and under-reporting the illicit drug trade in white communities. They note that when the economics of the illegal drug trade is analyzed it is readily apparent that black communities could not possibly be the locus of America's drug trade, for the very simple reason that these communities do not have the kind of disposable income required to support America's illicit drug habit.
According to a 1989 National Bureau of Economic Research survey, two-thirds of all inner city male youth, both black and white, believe that they can make more money from crime than from legitimate work - double the percentage of a survey conducted 10 years earlier. But since young minority males have been disproportionately targeted by the war on drugs, they are the ones serving increasingly long prison sentences for drug offenses.
Minority leaders understand all too well that casting their communities as major centers of the drug trade perpetuates the notion that minority neighborhoods are plagued by poor welfare-dependant rabble who waste public assistance on instant gratification rather than attempting to better themselves. In media over-emphasis upon inner-city drug problems, people in minority neighborhoods are disproportionately portrayed as threats and dangers to society. Taxpayer anger and resentment, already expressed in disastrous cuts in social and education programs, is further inflamed and aggravated by media images of minorities engaged in violence and self-destructive behaviors.
DISMANTLING THE ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT RACE
Even though the association between crime and poverty have been long established, the media report crime rates and social problems as though the white majority and racial minorities are on an equal socio-economic playing field. Reporting these statistics according to race, the media represents by default that crime and other social problems are correlated with race. But if the media were really interested in a fair and unbiased presentation of crime in America the media would ask whether a significant difference exists between the crime rates and public assistance incidences of both impoverished minorities and poverty-stricken whites. It may be more revealing to compare economic groups rather than racial groups, since the comparison would reveal a stronger relationship between social problems and economic strata as opposed to social problems and race. One would think it incumbent upon the media to inquire as to whether whites living in poverty behave any differently than their minority counterparts who find themselves in equal economic straits.
The media persist in reporting the relatively higher public assistance and incarceration rates of the minority populace beleaguered by poverty as though economics has nothing to do with social problems, leaving the audience to assume that the overriding contributing factor to crime and dependence upon public assistance is race. When one takes into account the acknowledged fact that a vastly greater proportion of minorities than whites live in poverty, a lower crime rate will be attributed to the total white populace since poor, middle class and wealthy whites are lumped into the wealthier white majority. The adverse effects of poverty (i.e. crime, drug abuse, etc.) will be more pronounced for minorities as a whole, when statistics are broken down strictly by race, failing to factor in economic status. So by token of their relative wealth, whites are portrayed by the media as somehow more virtuous than minorities even though the media never addresses the obvious question as to whether economically disadvantaged whites are as likely as to be welfare mothers, pregnant teens, drug dealers or absentee fathers. While there is no doubt that serious problems afflict minority communities, and these problems are not to be downplayed for the sake of opposing government policy, the question remains whether it is accurate or fair to emphasize race when so many other conspicuous variables are involved.
In the sensationalism of the war on drugs, if one cannot "just say no" then one is lacking in moral capacity, and, since the venal media declares that all inner-city crimes have become drug-related crimes, premature death is then the inevitable result of the idleness and hedonism of the darker races. The perception that welfare dependence fosters idleness, drug use, and violence in turn leads to the conclusion that welfare recipients are taking advantage of other citizens and offering nothing in return, which of course absolves the middle-class of obligations in the form of taxes and concern for fellow citizens. Those who wish they didn't feel pangs of conscience about the socioeconomic distances between the inner city and the suburbs can be comforted by media double-think about race - believing that the segments of society most plagued by violent crime, poor health, shortened life span, and poor education are the most deserving of such circumstances. Indeed, poor whites exhibit greater high school drop-out rates than do poor blacks.
In letting misconceptions about race justify repudiation of responsibility for the barriers and poverty experienced by minorities, responsibility is ultimately relegated to minority children who had no say about the world into which they were born. How often have we heard the sentiment expressed that "they have more children than they can afford?" In the rhetorical manipulation of resentment against "welfare mothers," their children are bestowed a heritage as society's "excess baggage," despite the fact that single women (and men) are denied access to federal welfare, and the reason federal welfare is grudgingly disbursed is to give succor to the children in poverty who are blameless for the circumstances into which they were born. But despite glaring inaccuracies in their rhetoric conservative politicians (most notably Ronald Reagan) exploited an existing substrate of prejudice by using anecdotal rhetorical ploys like "welfare mothers," a hot-button image that became a metaphor for the oft-depicted absentee fathers, pregnant teens, high drop-out rates, crime, vagrant hedonism, etc. - phenomena that in the minds of the middle class become indistinguishable from race.
The media is complicit in promulgating this image, neglecting to mention that the majority of welfare recipients are white, failing to examine the incidence of the same social problems amongst white counterparts of poor minorities, and conveniently forgetting the effects of America's historic racial legacy that impacts minority communities to this day. The media reinforce the assumption middle class "news consumers" harbor that the disproportionate burden of poverty upon minorities is an artifact of some imagined lack of industry on the part of an ethnic minority.
Federal assistance in the form of Aid to Families with Dependent Children, by the way, is capriciously withdrawn if the woman tries to budget costs by cohabiting with a man who may or may not be the children's father, or who may or may not even be the woman's lover. In a country with a 50% divorce rate, when presented the choice between her children's well being and a potential male partner whose presence entails forfeiture of AFDC (provided he cannot stay one step ahead of welfare investigators) the woman is compelled to choose against marriage and for the children if his income is less than the monthly AFDC check.
Barely maintaining some modicum of objectivity, the mass media have obsequiously followed the government's script of the war on drugs. Having saturated the public with images of African-Americans indulging in drug use or being arrested by the police, the media still neglect to even mention that the majority of illegal drug consumers are white or that the majority of the illicit drug trade occurs in white communities. If media intent is to be judged by its actions, I am inclined to think the media expect the "news consumer" to infer that the overriding factors contributing to violence in the inner city are drugs and race, that the worsening appearance of the inner city is a result of an indigenous idleness and amoral hedonism rewarded and reinforced by what is in fact paltry federal assistance to poor families.
But even though the children in impoverished minority neighborhoods are future citizens and are blameless for their parent's econoinic situation, it is anticipated they will ultimately repeat the cycle of welfare dependency, which in effect justifies denying them, their parents, and their communities desperately needed funds. This self-fulfilling prophecy relegates America's children to a category where nothing is owed to them in the form of education, health care or respect, since conventional wisdom expects them to be another generation of social parasites.
MINORITIES AND VOTING
Martin Luther King III, the son of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., has said the reason Dr. King was assassinated was that Dr. King was asking for redistribution of wealth and power (remember that a 1979 Congressional Committee determined that there were indeed conspiracies to kill Martin Luther King and JFK). It has been argued that the real enemies of U.S.-based multinational monied interests are minorities who have been denied equal educational access in the past, who are in dire need of infusions of public money into their school systems, and who, once educated, would start voting in increasing numbers in favor of greater social programs and a redistribution of power in America.
How valuable is education in drawing a person into political or civic life? Politicians are well aware of the correlation between the likelihood of voting and economic and educational background. Politicians know even though more than half of the total electorate, voting and nonvoting, makes less than $30,000 per year family income, more than half of the votes actually cast are by voters with family incomes greater than $30,000 per year, skewing election results according to higher income and education. If American education were to improve across the board, one might assume that whether or not incomes showed a corresponding improvement, voting rates would increase most in those sectors currently receiving inferior education.
The media provide the easy explanation for inner city violence as the result of drugs, which reinforces the Calvinist notion that minority neighborhoods are plagued by welfare dependent rabble who presumably lack the motivation to better themselves and waste public assistance on instant gratification. This also fuels tax payer anger and resentment, justifying repudiation of responsibility for the general plight of minorities. In this double-think, minorities become undeserving of desperately needed tax dollars, education, health care, etc., and deserving of more prisons, longer prison sentences, and shorter life span. Under the doctrine that the poor should be motivated by the unremitting spur of their poverty while the wealthy should be motivated by the opportunity to acquire yet more wealth, those who are most educated, wealthy, and politically involved owe nothing to the segments of society who have sacrificed the most for America's perceived wealth. After all, if we were to better educate minorities resulting in their voting in increasing numbers, consider the political ramifications if they did not also realize commensurate increases in income or opportunities (I'm certain conservative policy analysts are well aware of the implications inherent in a more democratic society).
American demographers predict current ethnic minorities will constitute the majority some time next century, so it's not hard to imagine why the right wing has sought to undermine, distance, and alienate them from the electoral process. Were education reform finally delivered to all Americans under the principle that society should deliver the education necessary for democratic rule, then candidates of both political parties would have to vie for those precious voter market shares by focusing on real issues, which is contrary to the nature of the media contests necessarily funded by monied interests who want to retain the status quo.
THE WAR ON DRUGS AND POLITICIANS
While the media can be accused of complicity in the exaggerations and myths of the war on drugs by failing to report actual drug-use trends, many politicians are guilty of outright malfeasance in cynically manipulating war on drugs rhetoric. Boston University President John Silber in response to questions on why he didn't announce his crime-control plans in a mostly black Boston neighborhood said "Well, I will tell you something about that area. There is no point in my making a speech on crime control to a bunch of addicts." His comment was in reference to the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Roxbury, Mass. He later recanted his remark after a widespread outcry ensued.
President Bush in his September 1989 televised speech to the nation, attempted to escalate the rhetoric of the war on drugs by holding up a bag of cocaine purchased from a Washington, D.C. resident in Lafayette Park - just across the street from the White House. It was a stage prop to signify how the scourge of drugs had pervaded society, and that the plague of drug dealers had finally washed up upon the innocent shore of the White House lawn. This was exposed for the fraud it was when it leaked out that DEA agents had to lure the drug dealer to Lafayette Park in order to have the arrest occur across the street from the White House. When George Bush was caught by reporters in his little cocaine-bag trick, his response was, "I don't understand - I mean, has somebody got some advocates here for this drug guy?" Bush's little cocaine-bag trick was analogous to the larger intrigue apparently perpetrated by the CIA and the media: the most easily scapegoated elements of society were fair game in an attempt to justify prolonging the military-industrial complex and expanding the scope of America's internal security apparatus. This media image confirms the worst that can be imagined by the middle class about the neighborhoods populated by racial groups whose plight would otherwise demand more state charity - as opposed to an escalation of the war on drugs which will further enrich the coffers of the military and police agencies.
He thought he was playing to a willing audience, very much in the same manner Ronald Reagan demonstrated gutter-level ethics by using cryptoracist rhetorical ploys like "welfare mothers." In the supply-side logic of Reaganomics, the poor should be motivated by the unremitting spur of their poverty and the wealthy should be motivated by the opportunity to acquire yet more wealth. The media have conveyed, for mass consumption, the Calvinist fallacy that drug-use and poverty are the products of laziness and immorality and the appointments and comforts of the consumer life-style are symbols of American virtue.
THE WAR ON DRUGS AND LAW AND ORDER
Naturally, the cities of America, which witnessed prohibition-related violence in the 1920's and 30's, bear the costs of similar violence today, as poverty continues to take its toll on a growing underclass. The conditions of chronic poverty (remember, 20 million people in America suffer from hunger) only aggravates the human desires for escapist self-intoxication, and intensifies criminal greed modeled after and justified by Donald Trump, Samuel Pierce, Ivan Boesky, Michael Milken, Oliver North, or corrupt military contractors. The rule of law breaks down slowly in a spiral that starts from the top.
In states like Florida, tougher anti-drug legislation has resulted in astonishing numbers of first-time drug offenders serving increasingly longer mandatory sentences, thereby pressing the early release of inmates convicted of violent crimes. The statistics are breathtaking in that they demonstrate how obviously misguided the current drug strategy has become.
George Bush's current Drug Czar, Bob Martinez, during his 1986 - 1990 tenure as Florida's governor managed to push through tough legislation that entailed mandatory one-year to three-year prison terms for persons convicted of selling drugs near college campuses, public parks, or using, buying, or selling drugs near or in housing projects.
But while the number of inmates convicted of drug offenses for the period 1985 - 1990 jumped 580% for simple possession and 700% for low-level drug activity (i.e. purchase/sale), the number of high-level drug traffickers (i.e. drug kingpins) remained constant in the 5-year period at 1,000 inmates. According to two FSU researchers, the majority of current arrestees have no prior criminal record. Despite Martinez's accomplishment of building more prisons in his 4-year tenure than were built in the previous two decades, Florida prison populations surged with first-time drug offenders serving mandatory sentences. The resulting overcrowding was eased via a variety of sentence- reductions and early-release programs, resulting in the duration of murder sentences dropping by 40%, robbery sentences dropping by 42 percent, and overall prison sentences dropping by 38%. Florida, with all of its new laws and new prisons, now has its convicts serving the lowest percentage of their prison sentences in the country - 32.5%. (Mother Jones, July/August 1991) It seems that not only is the war on drugs biased and duplicitous, but is also stupid and lost.
But in examining the relative performance of our system, the U.S. currently has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world, exceeding South Africa's and the Soviet Union's. Indeed there are more American black males in prison than there are in college. In 1990, a Minnesota drug-enforcement law was found racially biased and unconstitutional by the Minnesota Supreme Court, because it imposed harsher penalties upon illicit users of crack cocaine (predominantly African-Americans) than consumers of more-expensive powdered cocaine (mostly caucasians). And note that crack cocaine is essentially the same as freebasing powdered cocaine - a practice popular among caucasian cocaine users. A similar existing Federal law imposes harsher sentences on crack-cocaine convictions than powdered-cocaine convictions.
Looking back at the past decade, we find that the number of Americans in prison doubled from 500,000 to 1 million. that the majority of convicts are imprisoned for drug offenses (not violent crimes), and while 80% of drug users are white, and as of 1990, the majority of prisoners are black. More disturbing yet, 1 in 4 black males in their twenties are incarcerated or on parole or probation, but 1 of 5 black males between the ages of 16 - 34 are in prison, or on parole or probation, which indicates that the broader age range finds young black males staying out of the criminal justice system, and that black males who came of age in the Reagan era were those most targeted by the war on drugs. Between 1985 and 1988, prosecutions of white juvenile drug offenders dropped 15 percent while jumping 88% for their minority counterparts. When assembled, these statistics have prompted many to call the government's war on drugs a "race war," never mind the long-acknowledged lopsided trend of minorities receiving harsher prison sentences than white counterparts convicted of equal crimes.
With astonishing numbers of young minority males convicted of drug offenses paroled from crowded jails, the effect is not to jail them, but to bar them from voting and to further incumber them in finding employment or advancing themselves economically as a result of the stigma of their criminal records. But while drug treatment programs are eminently more humane and more economical (1/4th the cost of prisons), and realize vastly lower recitivism rates (1/4th the recidivism of prisons), the emphasis is not upon bettering the lives of citizens who run afoul of our drug laws, but to create a criminal justice debacle that will take years to rectify.
But the racial aspects of the war on drugs are accompanied by an equally insidious specter: the steady erosion of our civil liberties. Under federal drug laws, agents can - without a formal court indictment - confiscate your home, car, and the funds with which you would retain an attorney so to defend yourself! And the government is not obliged to return that property if you are acquitted. Your lawyer may be subpoenaed to testify against you, so lawyer-client privilege is no longer inviolate.
The Reagan and Bush era Supreme Court has upheld police powers to detain and interrogate travelers who bear a resemblance to "drug couriers," to engage in surveillance, including secretly taping conversations and sifting through garbage. An anonymous tip is now sufficient grounds for a search warrant, meaning the police no longer have to verify that their source is reliable. New anti-crime legislation entails granting the police the power to submit as admissible evidence any property gained as a result of entering your home without a warrant. The new legislation also includes extending mandatory death sentences to include drug convictions which do not involve a homicide, and to limit federal death sentence appeals thereby speeding executions. The U.S. Supreme Court has recently ruled that a mandatory life sentence for a first-time drug offender acting as a drug courier is not cruel and unusual punishment. But apart from the violence of the drug trade, the number of deaths attributed directly to illegal drugs in 1985 was 3,562, whereas 520,000 people die each year strictly from the health effects of our legal drugs, tobacco and alcohol.
Even when the violence of the drug trade is taken into account, the figure surges up towards 15,000 deaths per year, which still pales in comparison to the violence and premature deaths attributed to alcohol. But even though no drug is as renowned for its association with violence and premature death as alcohol, surely Americans want to retain their freedoms to use and abuse alcohol. Indeed, given the well- known physically addictive nature of both cigarettes and alcohol, it is interesting to note that marijuana is not addictive. Strictly by virtue of marijuana's illegal status, it serves as a vertical marketing tool for other illicit - and addictive - drugs. One need to look no further for a finer example of the hypocrisy of our government's policies regarding substance abuse and addiction, than the unseemly spectre of our government's subsidies of the tobacco-growing industry. The cigarette manufacturers however, expect healthy profits, since the remaining market of addicted cigarette smokers will easily bear cigarettes manufacturers' price hikes.
Indeed, in the face of a declining market of cigarette smokers in the U.S., our cigarette manufacturers are seeking new markets. So, in the course of recent trade negotiations with Thailand the U.S. government, apparently looking after the interests of U.S. tobacco growers, recently threatened to impose stiff trade penalties if the Thai government didn't ease its prohibition of tobacco use in that southeast Asian country.
THE WAR ON DRUGS AND FREEDOM
The current wave of drug testing via urine specimens by corporations will not detect occasional cocaine use but will detect occasional marijuana use - marijuana being the drug-of-choice for what the right wing considers political heretics. These are of course, the same liberal heretics, according to arch-conservatives like Jesse Helms, who want to give jobs away to blacks, who were unpatriotic spoiled brats who protested against the Vietnam War and used drugs, who allowed an epidemic of abortions, and who are responsible for the general decline of morality and patriotism in the country. And the drug testing ostensibly required to qualify for employment may be a cover for corporations and insurance companies to winnow out employees who are pregnant, have diabetes, etc., while providing no guarantee that the results of the tests will be applied equitably or fairly.
And despite the obvious drug scandal lurking behind Iran-Contra, no one in their right mind dare openly oppose the war on drugs for risk of being suspect as a heretic, liberal, or worse, a DRUG USER. In this political atmosphere reasoned debate about drugs is stifled and open dissent casts suspicion on anyone opposed to a governmental drive to acquire enhanced powers of repression and control. Too embarrassed to even utter a squeak of opposition to an obviously cynical abuse of our rights, the population is cowed into accepting the goverment's fear campaign and grows to regard the complaints of civil rights advocates as somehow either naive, liberal, fringe, militant, or radical.
The scope of this impingement upon civil rights has extended to the criminalization of millennia-old American Indian ritual use of hallucinogenic peyote cactus buds in religious practice. The ritual use of hallucinogenic plants in the Native American Clourch was legal until recently, but now that religious freedom has been abrogated by the war on drugs.
FREEDOM AND SECURITY
The devastating violence of the Prohibition era finally prompted nullifying the Prohibition amendment; the rum-running gangster violence was far more devastating than the social costs associated with legal alcohol. The question is, what is it that is so different about other addictive drugs? If one were to compare the escalation of inner city violence associated with the illicit trade of highly addictive drugs, and the alternative of legalizing the drugs so that payment schedules would no longer be enforced with hand guns, it seems the choice would be for legalizing the drugs. While there would be some increase in drug use and addiction as a result of legalization, the destructive violence associated with the drug trade would be eliminated. In communities afflicted with drug abuse and paralyzed by poverty and violence, eliminating the violence is paramount. If the alternative of legalization entails a marginal increase in drug addiction and a decrease in drug-related violence, then it seems the truly rational alternative is to accept a few more addicts in return for fewer deaths.
But in lieu of a rational discussion about the pro's and con's of legalization, we have been treated to a barrage of rhetoric and demagoguery. Rather than try to clarify the issue, rather than attempt to answer to the desperation of communities besieged by poverty and violence, our policitians lambast anyone who calls into question the failed policies that have lead to this awful situation. Repeatedly, I have observed politicians cloud the issue with rhetoric and polemics, refusing to discuss the benefits and trade-offs of legalization, annointing themselves sole purveyors of canonical truth. In the interest of the status quo (i.e., minimal taxes for the rich and upper middle class in fortress suburbia), our politicians have scape-goated minorities so to justify denial of their plight or the need to spend the money required to extract them from the mire of inadequate education and health care. In the portrayal of the poor as deserving of their plight and undeserving of the assistance of society, the polity has been infected with the deadly pale cast of theocracy, thereby leaving us the lurid spectre of an increasingly violent society.
It seems that the greatest threats to freedom in America are the habits of liberty, citizen responsibility and tolerance falling into disuse. If one turns on the T.V., the media promote the perception that T.V.'s. stereos, CD players. VCR's, fast food, microwave entrees, cars and expressways expand the scope of freedom that one may enjoy, while the same media has portrayed as threats to these freedoms tax-hungry liberals and welfare-dependent neighborhoods riddled with drug dealers. As the average American adult watches 30 hours per week of T.V., he is increasingly isolated from civic life and perceives his world via a one-way conversation with the sensationalist mass-media. In that one's Constitutional freedoms and social-contract obligations are replaced by consumer pseudo-freedoms, one's status as a consumer supplants one's status as a citizen. Political expression of anything other than what has been espoused by "experts" falls in the realm of the imprudent, and aspirations or opinions that counter the "conventional wisdom" are oddball, selfish, misguided, or misinformed. If not regarded as "normal," "bipartisan," "acceptable," "efficient," "strong," or "tough," other ideas become regarded as anomalous. The labels "liberal," "weak," "anti-family," etc., pre-empt any doubts or criticism of what the ivory tower technocrats and policy analyst priesthood has determined to be the final shining ultimate truth. And if confronted with evidence that casts doubt upon the wisdom or efficacy of current policy, the status quo is defended by either clouding the issue with some tangential matter or avoiding an honest response or concession with a reliable thought terminating cliche. Our politicians conduct opinion polls, much in the manner that marketing research is done for our clothes and our cars, to parade that ephemeral mandate of the people missing when 50% of the electorate didn't bother to vote (a viable well-funded organized third party could easily take advantage of such a large proportion of non-voters if they were convinced that voting would be in their best interest). In election time, emotional rhetorical "hot buttons" (i.e. drugs, flag desecration, Willie Horton. ACLU membership, reverse discrimination) are determined via marketing research to determine which voting blocks can be motivated to vote and which voting blocks can be alienated and dis-motivated into not voting.
With costly media contests necessarily funded on both sides by monied interests, the republic comes to resemble an oligarchy, with each party becoming increasingly interchangable, offering safe opinions in return for the largesse of well-to-do political donors.
The Democrats, nominal party of opposition in the past decade and presumably friends of civil liberties, have become timid and as a result Congress has abdicated more and more of its power to the executive branch, a capitulation with profound ramifications. The myriad voices that are necessary to democratic rule are homogenized into the incomprehensible circuitous babble of politicians who listen not to the electorate, but rather select the voters meeting the criteria of the political marketing surveys.
But if the mass media were to offer its "consumers" an honest examination of what the war on drugs has so far entailed, how long would popular support last for an unjustifiable war on our civil rights? Under the pretense of fighting drugs and violence, the government has acquired enhanced police powers. A September 1989 Washington Post opinion poll showed more than half the respondents were willing to "give up some freedoms" in order to fight the war on drugs - including informing on family members, universal mandatory drug testing, military involvement, etc. The cynicism of the war on drugs might have passed as a lesson in how absurd the rancor and rhetoric of democracy can get at times, but foremost it stands as an ominous milestone. When one accounts for the steady erosion of our civil rights, the Iran-Contra affair, the CIA-Contra intrigues, the widespread media complicity in promoting war on drugs rhetoric while ignoring the CIA-Contra involvement in the drug trade, the war on drugs has been immediately damaging to the habits of liberty and has sought to make the most basic tenets of our Constitution null and void.
As the U.S. Government has been deprived of the USSR as an enemy, our leaders must conjure up new threats so that we may require their leadership. The war on drugs ostensibly attacked drug use and abuse, but in the end it sought to acquire as much as possible the sum total of our civil rights. In selecting the most easily scapegoated elements of society and the poorly understood illness of drug addiction, the government rallies one group of people against another by offering protection from a government- proclaimed epidemic that would supposedly spread, if left unchecked, to the innocent realms beyond the inner cities.
In offering protection from a social problem better addressed by doctors and education, the same government which promised to get big government off our backs has succeeded in expanding its available powers of repression and control and has scapegoated and marginalized a racial minority. If one were to watch the evening news in recent years, one might have drawn the conclusion that the greatest threat to our internal security was an epidemic of drug abuse and related violence, and the villains responsible for this awful plague were Narco-militarists in Central and South America, and the darker races in America's inner-cities. This widely broadcast notion set the precedent for further incursions upon privacy and civil rights in the future. But just as the Reagan administration was found to have violated its own declared policy of combating terrorism and terrorist attacks by dealing arms to declared terrorists, a deeper look into the war on drugs reveals a government partnership with drug traffickers while presumably fighting drugs.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Linguistics Professor Noam Chomsky has noted: "If the media proceed to expose the probable U.S. government complicity in the international drug racket, that will (cause the administration serious problems) given the effort to exploit the drug problem as an additional device to mobilize the public and bring it to accept the strengthening of state power and the attack on civil liberties that is yet another platform of the conservative agenda." (Culture of Terrorism, p. 186) President Dwight Eisenhower warned in his farewell address to the nation on January 17, 1961: "In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist." But monied interests who buy the mass media have convinced many voters that taxes are being wasted on social programs presumably rewarding poverty and encouraging minority idleness leading to drug dependency and violence. It's the same monied interests benefiting from increased spending on the corrupt military-industrial complex at the expense of social programs, childhood nutrition, and education.
In light of the Iran-Contra intrigues and the psychological warfare schemes of the war on drugs, it can be argued that Eisenhower's greatest fear has come true. We must heed the 1961 omen and take care that we do not submit to a demagogue offering security in exchange for freedom, for we will find ourselves in a situation where we are neither secure nor free. Democracy only works if all the groups collectively welcome each other and accept each other's interests in addition to their own. Otherwise, the polity evolves into something other than democratic, and the buffer against turmoil that the habit of compromise provides is diminished.
The only viable long-term alternative for the U.S. is to treat all of its people as though they are indeed citizens. The dangers of a selfish oligarchy using smoke and mirrors tactics is that the resulting mass alienation of the public from the democratic process leaves the republic vulnerable to the increasing incidence of demagoguery. It must be widely recognized that all Americans' destinies are intertwined and all are inexorably linked and responsible for one another. The alternative is reaping a crop of tragedy from the iniquities that have been sown, and that prospect could come sooner than we think.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
John Stockwell: Lecturer on CIA operations; former CIA field case officer
Harpers Magazine: Editor Lewis Lapham's November 1989 rant about the dangers and hypocrisies of the war on drugs
Associated Press, Jan. 21,1987
Associated Press, Oct. 3, 1988
Esquire Magazine, Michael Levine, March 1991
Spin Magazine, Michael Levine, May I June 1991
Foreign Policy Magazine, Prof Ethan Nadalman, Spring and Summer 1988
Newsday, June 28, 1987
The Pittsburgh Press, May 12, 1988
Rolling Stone, November issue, 1988
Rolling Stone, Between the Lines. October -November 1990
TIME Magazine, Dec 3, 1990
Village Voice, Oct. 11, 1988
Z Magazine, December 1990
Mother Jones Magazine, July / August 1991, "Just Say Whoa! to George Bush's race-based war on drugs ..."
Humanist Magazine, The Empowerment Project, June 1991
Christopher Robbins: Air America, 1979 edition. Inexplicably Robbins has deleted from his 1988 edition of Air America many references and quotes that occurred in his original 1979 edition regarding direct CIA involvement in drug smuggling in Laos and Southeast Asia. Robbins became embroiled in controversy when he spoke out against the 1990 movie Air America, and was roundly criticized by former Air America pilot Jack Smith, ex-ClA agent John Stockwell, and journalist Andrew Cockburn.
Alan Moore & Bill Sienkiewicz: Brought to Light, Eclipse Books
Noam Chomsky: The Culture of Terrorism, South End Press
Joy & Siegel Hackel: In Contempt of Congress, Institue for Policy Studies, 1987
Avirgan, Tony & Honey: La Penca: Report of an Investigation
Avirgan. Tony & Honey: La Penca: On Trial in Costa Rica
William Blum: The CIA: A Forgotten History
Marshall Scott and Hunter: The Iran-Contra Connection, South End Press
CATO Institute: The Crisis in Drug Prohibition
Michael Levine: Deep Cover, Delacorte Press, 1990
Henrik Kruger: The Great Heroin Coup, South End Press
Jonathan Kwitny: The Crimes of Patriots, Norton & Co.
Alfred W. McCoy: The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, Harper & Row
Leslie Cockburn: Out of Control, Atlantic Press
Leslie Cockburn, CBS West 57th Street Programs: John Hull's Farm Bordering on War. June 25, 1987; The CIA Connection: Drugs for Guns, April 6,1987; CIA Front Dealing Drugs, July 11, 1987
Leslie & Andrew Cockburn, PBS Frontline: Guns, Drugs & the CIA, May 17, 1988; Helena Kennedy & Richard Bradley, The Heart of the Matter, BBC TV
Bill Moyers: "The Secret Government: The Constitution in Crisis", PBS, Bill Moyer's Journal, Nov. 4. 1987
Charles Stuart: Murder on the Rio San Juan, PBS, Frontline, April 19, 1988
Barbara Trent & Gary Meyer: Cover-up: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair, NIPI Home Video
The Shadow Government, Christic Institute Home Video
PBS Frontline on Noriega - 1990
http://www.friendsoffreedom.com/Writings/DupeOfDrugWar.html
What drug trafficking allegations was CIA aware of, and when, involving Southern Front Contras? How did CIA respond to this information, and how was this information shared with other U.S. Government entities?
The Southern Front Trafficking Reports
http://www.fas.org/irp/cia/product/cocaine2/south.html
CIA on Campus
http://www.cia-on-campus.org/
List of books for more extensive research and reading...
Compromised : John Cummings, Terry Reed (1994)
The True Story of the Bilderberg Group : Daniel Estulin (2009)
Dark Alliance : Gary Webb (1999)
Welcome To Terrorland : Daniel Hopsicker (2007)
Out of Control : Leslie Cockburn (1987)
A Very Thin Line : Theodore Draper (1992)
Every Spy a Prince : Dan Raviv, Yossi Melman (1990)
Barry & 'the Boys': The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History by Daniel Hopsicker
For a more detailed list see my recommended reading list....
http://yophat.blogspot.com/2009/05/reading-list.html
WTC 7 side show while I'm on the soapbox...
Fire Protection Systems
The fire protection features in WTC 7 included sprinklers, smoke control systems, fire detection systems, compartmentalization, egress systems and structural fire protection measures. There were two main exit stairways, about 4 feet 10 inches wide. There were approximately 30 elevators serving the various levels of the building.
WTC 7 was fully sprinklered. The sprinkler system on most floors was a looped system fed by a riser located in Stair 2. The primary water supply for the suppression system was a dedicated fire yard main that looped around most of the complex. This yard main was supplied directly from the municipal water supply.
A cementitious spray-on fireproofing (SFRM) provided 3-hour fire resistance for the columns and a 2-hour fire resistance for the floor-ceiling assemblies.1,2 The trusses were likely protected in a manner similar to the columns. Concrete floor slabs provided vertical compartmentation to limit fire and smoke spread between floors.1
High-rise buildings are designed to survive a fire, even if the fire has to burn to extinction. This means the structural systems need to endure fire for the entire time it takes for all combustibles to be consumed.
In addition, recent results from full-scale fire experiments in UK has shown that steel-frame buildings may endure fire longer than their design would indicate. This unexpected performance has been attributed to a number of factors such as whole building behaviour, redistribution of loads, and tensile membrane action, which are not accounted for in conventional methods of evaluating fire resistance. Thus, protected steel-frame high-rise buildings exposed to uncontrolled fires had performed well until the collapse of WTC 7.
Given the number of fires observed in WTC 7 after the collapse of WTC 1, it is likely there was some damage to the structural members on the south side of WTC 7. Also, the impact of debris might have caused significant breakage and damage to the glass facade. As the fateful day progressed, the continuous burning of fires on several floors exposed the various structural elements to high temperatures and reduced their strength.
Fire Growth
Since the sprinklers were not operating and firefighting was curtailed, the uncontrolled fires burned throughout the day. At 3:30 p.m., large plumes of darker smoke, characteristic of oil fires, were rising from the north and east faces of the lower floors of the building. By 5:00 p.m., significant amounts of dark smoke were rising from the lower floors. Approximately one hour before collapse, the smoke became dark gray and appeared to be much more buoyant. These observations indicate that prior to collapse, the fire size and heat output in WTC fires might have been higher than that of typical office building fires. The reason for the apparent change in fire behaviour at mid-afternoon is not known but the presence of fuel tanks may have been a factor.
Fire Protection
Tall buildings rely on three basic fire defence mechanisms to resist failure: sprinkler systems, active firefighting and passive fire protection for structural members. WTC 7 was a fully sprinklered building but the high intensity of the fires and water demand on the main WTC site meant the WTC 7 sprinklers were either ineffective or non-operational.
The curtailment of firefighting due to fire department overload meant the WTC 7 fires were allowed to progress. The fireproofing, the last level of defence, provided passive fire protection to structural members for a certain amount of time. However, the continuous advance of the uncontrolled fires on different stories weakened the structural members. Therefore, the failure of the first two basic fire defence mechanisms significantly contributed to weakening the structural system that resulted in the collapse of WTC 7.
Steel loses its load-carrying capacity (or about 50 percent of its original strength) at 538°C (1,000°F) when exposed to an ASTM E-119 standard fire that is often used as a benchmark for building fires. External fire protection (fireproofing) is applied to the steel structural members to provide the required fire resistance ratings. Figure 3 shows the variation of strength and stiffness in steel as a function of temperature. The WTC fires, burning on multiple floors simultaneously, may have been more severe than the ASTM E-119 standard fire.
The collapse of the 47-storey steel-framed WTC 7 occurred approximately seven hours after the collapse of WTC 1. Fire development and fire resistance issues played a major role in the collapse of WTC 7. The debris from the collapse of the twin towers, while it did not cause significant damage to the structural system of WTC 7, might have initiated fires at multiple floors. The diesel fuel present in the building must have contributed to some of the massive fires especially in the later stages. The fire intensity and heat output generated from these fires was much more severe than typical building fires. The loss of fire defences, including sprinklers and active firefighting, further contributed to weakening the structural members.
http://irc.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/pubs/fulltext/prac/nrcc44753/nrcc44753.pdf
Here's the plausible scenario created to substantiate the collapse of WTC 7.
Anyone played with fire? Tried to collapse a wood building? Ever seen any building in the world collapse because of fire? All at once?
What are the odds of all the support pillars getting an equal dose of heat (enough to surpass the SFRM....& weaken the steel beams to the point of shearing) to weaken all of the support pillars to the point that they collapse at the same time?
About the same as 9-11 being an "outside" job!
Here's your blow by blow run down with links to reports...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/conspiracy_files/7437516.stm
Here are the issues with the plausible scenario...
http://whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/fema_report.html
More on WTC 7....
http://yophat.blogspot.com/2009/05/why-wtc-7.html
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