PARRY: Journalism's Shameful Anniversary -- R.I.P. Gary Webb

[Octafish]

Robert Parry of ConsortiumNews.com reminds us of a terrible anniversary, the passing of Gary Webb. DUers should remember the Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter who was lauded for his groundbreaking series detailing how Contra-connected dealers got the inside track on the dope that eventually created the crack cocaine epidemic. Too bad the government chose to “crack” down on honest journalism, as protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. It was only a matter of time before the rest of the Establishment press corpse piled on.

U.S. Journalism's Shameful Anniversary

By Robert Parry
December 9, 2005

One year ago, reporter Gary Webb – his life in ruins – killed himself with a handgun. The tragedy made him the final victim of a long-running cover-up protecting the Reagan-Bush administration’s tolerance of drug trafficking by its client army, the Nicaraguan contras.

But Webb’s death also could be blamed on the fecklessness of modern American journalism. The nation’s leading newspapers had driven the 49-year-old father of three to his desperate act rather than admit that they had bungled one of the biggest stories of the Reagan-Bush era – the contra-cocaine scandal.

Webb might be alive today if the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times had shown the decency to explain the importance of what the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general acknowledged in a two-volume report in 1998.

In that investigation – sparked by Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series for the San Jose Mercury-News in 1996 – CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz found that the spy agency hid evidence of contra-cocaine trafficking in the 1980s, even disrupting federal investigations that threatened to expose the secret.

Though insisting that the CIA didn’t authorize the contra-cocaine trafficking, Hitz’s report revealed that the criminality was even more pervasive than Webb believed (his series had focused on only one contra-cocaine pipeline into California). Hitz’s investigation found more than 50 contras and contra entities implicated in the drug trade.

CONTINUED...'

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/120905.html

DEA Agents Agree: CIA means Cocaine Importation Agency

There’s enough evidence to bust George Herbert Walker Bush and the rest of his right-wing stooges under the RICO Act (Racketeering Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act).

Don’t take my word for it. Let’s hear what the brave agents of the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) have to say:




Celerino “Cele” Castillo III

Celerino "Cele" Castillo, 3rd
Ex-DEA Agent

May 17, 2005

For over a century, our government has made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that we have done to other people in third world countries, especially in Latin America. With the creation of the School of the Americas, a breeding ground for assassins, and the death squads, we have become the greatest human rights violators in the world.

We have become the most hated country in the world, not because we practice democracy or value our freedom. We are hated because our government denies these basic principles to these people. The hate has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism, and as they say, once again, "the chickens have come home to roost" with our own homegrown American made terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles.

When I was posted in Central America as a DEA agent I saw Luis Posada and Felix Rodriguez, another American terrorist, at Illopango airport base in El Salvador. Joining them was a CIA asset Venezuelan advisor Victor Rivera. They had become part of what was known as a CIA apparatus that did not have to answer to anyone. They were involved in everything from drug trafficking to kidnapping to the training of the death squads. It was at the height of the Iran-Contra investigation that I had documented these atrocities to my government. I could not understand how our government had assisted in having Posada escape from a Venezuelan prison, and then placed him at Illopango airport as a CIA asset under the new name of Ramon Medina. He was now working hand in hand with then U. S. Lt. Col. Oliver North.

When I asked about Posada's presence at Illopango, I was once again told that it was a covert operation being run by the White House. I started to learn real fast that just about every time I questioned illegal action, I would be told that it was "a covert operation being run by the White House." And as we found out later, my allegations were facts; that became especially clear when, in 1990, President Bush Sr. pardoned another American-made terrorist, Posada's partner in crime: Orlando Bosch. To the degree that the "war on terror" is a response to actual terrorism, that terrorism is retaliation: the U.S. has exported death and violence to the four corners of the Earth with individuals like Posada and Bosch.

Posada admitted to a New York Times reporter that he organized a wave of bombings in Cuba in 1997 that killed an Italian tourist and injured others. However, he is best known as the prime suspect in the bombing of a Cuban Airlines flight in Barbados in October 1976. All 73 crewmembers and passengers including teenaged members of Cuba's national fencing team were killed.

CONTINUED…

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/hall/contra1.html

Additional resources:

http://www.albionmonitor.com/9612a/ciacontra.html

http://www.drugwar.com/castillonorthmay1104.shtm

www.powderburns.org

Well. Here’s to “Conspiracies In Action.”

Here’s what Michael Levine, DEA had to say about the organization started by Allen Dulles has brought tons of cocaine into the United States of America. Don’t worry, Mr. Conservative. It was at a profit.

Speaking of Capitalism’s Invisible Army:

Michael Levine Interview

by Paul DeRienzo

from THE SH@DOW - box 20298 - NY, NY 10009

Michael Levine is a veteran of 26 years of undercover work for four federal agencies. He is the recipient of many Justice and Treasury Department awards for hi s work undercover, including the International Narcotics Enforcement Officer Association's Octavio Gonzales Award. He is also the subject of Donald Goddard's book Undercover: The Secret Lives of a Federal Agent (Dell, 1990).

Joining the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) after discovering his brother's heroin addiction which eventually killed his brother, Levine was the most successful agent in DEA history. By 1977, he had made 3,000 drug arrests going undercover to set up buy and bust operations against New York City heroin and cocaine dealers. This led to his assignment as DEA station chief in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

By 1989, after having several of his operations stopped by higher ups who allowed his targets to get away, Levine quit the DEA in disgust. Levine then wrote the book Deep Cover (1990, Delacorte Press), describing his experiences that led to his leaving the DEA, exposing the government's phony "War on Drugs".

Levine tells a chilling story of treachery by members of his own agency, and the CIA, men Levine calls the ":suits" who he says use the War on Drugs as a cynical cover for covert foreign policy adventures. Levine says that since he began speaking out against the War on Drugs he has been threatened by high level DEA agents and has been the target of campaigns meant to discredit him.

CONTINUED…

http://www.totse.com/en/conspiracy/institutional_analysis/deajive.html

Additional resources:

http://www.serendipity.li/wod/levine.html

http://www.physicaldream.com/Eyeonsam/Is%20Anyone%20Apologizing%20to%20Gary%20Webb%20by%20Mike%20Levine.htm

So. There we have it. Evidence of no conspiracy as importing cocaine is a matter of national policy.

Well. Hector Berrellez would arrest you if he caught you. He’s another good guy.

Gary Webb

(1955-2005)

EXCERPT…

I had been thinking about looking into the claim that during the civil war in Nicaragua in the eighties, the CIA helped move dope to the United States to buy guns for the contras, who were mounting an insurrection against the leftist Sandinistas. So I called up Hector Berrellez, a guy who worked under Mike Holm in Los Angeles, a guy known within the DEA as its Eliot Ness, and he said, "Look, the CIA is the best in the world. You're not going to beat them; you're never going to get a smoking gun. The best you're going to get is a little story from me."

SNIP…

After a while, the San Jose Mercury News series disappeared except on a few byways of the Internet, Gary Webb was ruined, and things went back to normal. Things like Oliver North's diary entry linking dope and guns for the contras, like Carlos Lehder, a big Colombian drug dealer, testifying as a prosecution witness in federal court during the Noriega trial about the Medellín cartel's $10 million donation to the contras, like the entire history of unseemly connections between the international drug world and the CIA--all this went away, as it has time and time again in the past. A kind of orthodoxy settled over the American press that assumed Webb's work had been thoroughly refuted. He became the Discredited Gary Webb.

SNIP…

HECTOR BERRELLEZ STUMBLED ONTO GARY WEBB'S STORY YEARS before Gary Webb knew a thing about it. ….

In September 1986, Sergeant Tom Gordon of the Los Angeles sheriff's narcotics strike force pieced together intelligence about a big-time drug ring in town run by Danilo Blandón. A month later, on October 23, Gordon went before a judge with a twenty-page detailed statement documenting that "monies gained from the sales of cocaine are transported m Florida and laundered.,.. The monies are filtered to the contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua." He got a search warrant for the organization's stash houses. On Friday, October 24, there was a briefing of more than a hundred law-enforcement guys from the sheriff's office, the DEA, the FBI. That was the same day that President Ronald Reagan, after months of hassle, signed a $100 million aid bill that reactivated a licit cash flow to the beleaguered contras. And on Monday, October 27, at daybreak, the strike force simultaneously hit fourteen L. A. area stash houses connected with Blandón.

That's where just another day in the life of Hector Berrellez got weird. Generally, at that early hour, good dopers are out cold; the work tends toward long nights and sleeping in. As Berrellez remembers, "We were expecting to end up with a lot of coke." Instead, they got coffee and sometimes doughnuts. The house he hit had the lights on, and everyone, two men and a woman, was up. The guy who answered the door said, "Good morning; we've been expecting you. Come on in." The house was tidy, the beds were already made, and the damn coffee was on. The three residents were polite, even congenial. "It was obvious," says Berrellez, "that they were told." The place was clean; all fourteen houses were clean. The only thing Berrellez and the other guys found in the house was a professional scale.

But there was a safe, and Berrellez got one of the residents to open it reluctantly. Inside, he found records of kilos matched with amounts of money, an obvious dope ledger, a photograph of a guy in flight dress in front of what looked to be a military jet, and photographs of some guys in combat. Hector asked the guy who the hell the people in the photographs were, and the guy said, "Oh, they are freedom fighters."

CONTINUED…

http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2004/041217_mfe_webb_1.html

Additional resources:

http://www.ckln.fm/~asadismi/whiteout.html

http://www.csun.edu/CommunicationStudies/ben/news/cia/

Gee. Three DEA agents who never knew of one another’s existence while they worked together in the federal government were united by something crooked. Each, after reporting drug dealing by Contras and other “protected by intel operations,” were left out to hang.

That’s un-American, to expose in public a buddy like that to the criminal element. And drug dealing to fund illegal wars? Gee. That’s Treason.

What are the names of those involved? We know a few jokers: George Herbert Walker Bush, John Poindexter, Oliver North, Elliott Abrams, John Negroponte, Ted Shackley, some other spook named Richard Bissel for starters.

[SpiralHawk]

1. Requiescat in Pace

Brother.

[Octafish]

4. He'd still be with us if we had an honest, loyal , and truthful press.

The powers that be have no use for a real journalist.

Gary Webb put the truth and his country ahead of his own interest.

Esquire published an excellent profile of Mr. Webb:

EXCERPT...

GARY WEBB'S "DARK ALLIANCE" BROKE AN OLD STORY. THE HIStory of the CIA's relationship with international drug dealers has been documented and published, yet it is almost completely unknown to most citizens and reporters. Webb himself had only a dim notion of this record. And so he reacted with horror when the implications of his research first began to become clear to him: that while much of the federal government fought narcotics as a plague, the CIA, in pursuing its foreign-policy goals, sometimes facilitated the work of drug traffickers. "Dark Alliance" is surrounded by a public record that bristles with similar instances of CIA connections with drug people:

* Alan Fiers, who headed the CIA Central American Task Force, testified during the Iran-contra hearings in August 1987, "With respect to the resistance forces…it is not a couple of people. It is a lot of people."

* In 1983, fifty people, many of them Nicaraguans, were caught unloading a big coke shipment in San Francisco. A couple of them claimed an involvement with the CIA, and after a meeting between CIA officials and the U.S. attorney handling the case, $36,000 found in a bedside table was returned because it "belonged to the contras." This spring, when the CIA published its censored report on involvement of the agency with drug traffickers in the contra war (a report that exists solely because a firestorm erupted in Congress after Webb's series), this incident was explained thusly: "Based upon the information available to them at the time, CIA personnel reached the erroneous conclusion that one of the two individuals…was a former CIA asset." Logically, an admission that CIA "assets" can sometimes be drug dealers.

* In 1986, Wanda Palacio parted company with the Medellin cartel and started talking to Senator John Kerry's subcommittee, which was looking into the byways of the contra war and dope. Palacio said she'd witnessed two flights of coke out of Barranquilla, Colombia, on planes belonging to the CIA-contracted Southern Air Transport. She also had the dates and had seen the pilot. She also said Jorge Ochoa, another drug boss, said the flights were part of a "drugs for guns" deal. On September 26, 1986, Kerry took her eleven-page statement to William Weld, who was then the assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division of the Justice Department. Weld allowed that he was not surprised to find claims of "bum agents, former and current CIA agents" dabbling in dope deals with the Colombian cartels. On October 3, Weld's office rejected Palacio's statement and offer to be a witness because of what it saw as contradictions in her testimony. On October 5, 1986, the Sandinistas shot a CIA plane out of the sky and captured one of Oliver North's patriots, one Eugene Hasenfus. Palacio was sitting in Kerry's office when a photograph of Hasenfus's dead pilot flashed across the television screen. She whooped that the pilot was the same guy she'd seen in Colombia loading coke on the Southern Air Transport flight in early October 1985. An Associated Press reporter, Robert Parry, investigated the crash and obtained the pilot's logs, which showed that on October 2, 4, and 6, 1985, the pilot had taken a Southern Air Transport plane to Barranquilla, Colombia. Palacio took a polygraph on the matter and passed.

* Through much of the contra war, SETCO Air, an airline run by Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros out of Honduras, was the principal airline used to transport supplies and personnel for the contras. Hector Berrellez later sent Ballesteros to Marion Federal Prison in Illinois to serve a couple of life sentences for dope peddling.

CONTINUED...

http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2004/041217_mfe_webb_1.html

A true man.

[blm]

13. The BFEE used its minions in the press to take down everyone who worked

to expose them.

Webb, Parry, Kerry.

BFEE planted false stories against these men that carried on for years, and the NEWS MEDIA knew it and went along with it anyway.

[Octafish]

19. What bothers me most is how so few Americans know about this...

... or anything of import.

Here's one prominent researcher's take:

Crack, the Contras, and the CIA:

The Storm over "Dark Alliance"

by Peter Kornbluh

After Gary Webb spent more than a year of intense investigative reporting and weeks of drafting, his editors at the San Jose Mercury News decided to run his three-part series late last August, when the nation's focus was divided between politics and vacation. The series, DARK ALLIANCE: THE STORY BEHIND THE CRACK EXPLOSION, initially "sank between the Republican and Democratic Conventions," Webb recalls. "I was very surprised at how little attention it generated."

Webb needn't have worried. His story subsequently became the most talked-about piece of journalism in 1996 and arguably the most famous--some would say infamous--set of articles of the decade. Indeed, in the five months since its publication, "Dark Alliance" has been transformed into what New York Times reporter Tim Weiner calls a "metastory"--a phenomenon of public outcry, conspiracy theory, and media reaction that has transcended the original series itself.

The series, and the response to it, have raised a number of fundamental journalistic questions. The original reporting--on the links between a gang of Nicaraguan drug dealers, CIA-backed counterrevolutionaries, and the spread of crack in California--has drawn unparalleled criticism from the Washington Post, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. Their editorial decision to assault, rather than advance, the Mercury News story has, in turn, sparked critical commentary on the priorities of those pillars of the mainstream press.

Yet in spite of the mainstream media, the allegations generated by the Mercury News continue to swirl, particularly through communities of color. Citizens and journalists alike are left to weigh the significant flaws of the piece against the value of putting a serious matter, one the press has failed to fully explore, back on the national agenda.

DRUGS AND CONTRAS REDUX

Although many readers of the Mercury News articles may not have known it, "Dark Alliance" is not the first reported link between the contra war and drug smuggling. More than a decade ago, allegations surfaced that contra forces, organized by the CIA to overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, were consorting with drug smugglers with the knowledge of U.S. officials. The Associated Press broke the first such story on December 20, 1985. The AP's Robert Parry and Brian Barger reported that three contra groups "have engaged in cocaine trafficking, in part to help finance their war against Nicaragua." Dramatic as it was, that story almost didn't run, because of pressure by Reagan administration officials (see "Narco-Terrorism: A Tale of Two Stories" CJR, September/October, 1986). Indeed, the White House waged a concerted behind-the-scenes campaign to besmirch the professionalism of Parry and Barger and to discredit all reporting on the contras and drugs.

CONTINUED...

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/storm.htm

Glad that we have so many on DU who give a damn.

[blm]

25. There are some but, even some here think it's just old news and can't

wrap their brains around the facts and the characters involved, so they don't even bother.

Sad, because that is exactly what BushInc and the media NEED them to do.

[Octafish]

32. A short history of the CIA's involvement with drugs and their reasons...

It is almost impossible to believe. People in my own family disregard what I tell them -- let alone what their own eyes and ears tell them -- to believe the crapola that comes from their television screen. As J Edgar Hoover put it:

"The individual is handicapped by coming face-to-face with a conspiracy so monstrous he cannot believe it exists."

The CIA and Drugs

By Gary Sudborough 12/01/2003 At 04:13

A short history of the CIA's involvement with drugs and the reasons for it.

Journalist Gary Webb did a series of investigative reports for the San Jose Mercury-News detailing how the CIA was involved in importing cocaine into the United States and funneling that drug to poor inner-city neighborhoods, using the proceeds to finance the terrorist Contra army in Nicaragua. Further confirmation of the CIA's role in cocaine importation is provided by two former DEA agents, Michael Levine and Celerino Castillo. Michael Levine wrote a book called The Big White Lie, where he documents how the CIA forced the DEA to back off prosecuting large cocaine dealers in Bolivia because the CIA was backing a coup by these same drug dealers to overthrow the leftist government in Bolivia. This so-called cocaine coup also involved the participation of Nazi war criminals like Klaus Barbie and the anticommunist Moon organization. Celerino Castillo gave testimony that Cuban exile and CIA agent Felix Rodriguez was using the Ilopango air base in El Salvador to smuggle arms to the Contras and cocaine back to the United States as part of Oliver North's operations against the Sandinistas. Once again DEA agent Celerino Castillo was told by the CIA to back off from any interference with Felix Rodriguez's cocaine smuggling. It is patently obvious that defeating leftists is greatly preferred over any efforts in the so-called War on Drugs.

The economic and strategic motivations for the CIA allowing crack cocaine to flow into inner-city ghettos will likely remain hidden. The British imported opium into China not only because it was profitable to the East India Company, but because opium made the Chinese more docile, less able to organize resistance and hence, easier to exploit. It is no accident that cheap crack cocaine went into the poor inner-city neighborhoods, where there is a more restive, discontented population. The CIA was very aware of the violent rebellions by the black populations of these ghettos in the 1960s that caused large sections of major American cities to be burned to the ground. They certainly would want to prevent this from happening in the future.

In addition, drugs provide a source of income for the ruling elites in other countries, who then allow the large, multinational corporations to utilize the cheap labor power and natural resources of that country. In other words, drugs have a definite relationship to child labor, sweatshops, environmental pollution, etc.

It should be mentioned that the CIA has a history of facilitating not only cocaine smuggling, but heroin and opium smuggling as well. The CIA used its airline called Air America to fly out heroin for the Hmong people in Indochina. The reciprocal agreement was that the Hmong people would fight the communists and the CIA would transport and market their drugs. Naturally, the first market was the GIs in Vietnam, many of whom became addicted to heroin. Previously, the CIA transported heroin for the Nationalist Chinese, who were attempting to invade China from Burma after their defeat by the Chinese communists. The CIA allowed the Afghan warlords to smuggle their opiates as part of the war against the socialist government in Afghanistan and subsequently, the war against the Soviet Union, when they invaded Afghanistan. After World War 2, the CIA gave the Sicilian and Corsican Mafia control over the heroin trade in Europe in return for the use of their thugs to break up the radical, communist dockworker's unions in Italy and France.

It is obvious that the drug trade can have several advantages for imperialism. It can help win the support of disaffected ethnic groups or gangsters in the worldwide war against leftists and the prevention of socialism coming into existence anywhere and proving a viable alternative to capitalism. It provides a source of enrichment for the ruling elites in client-states, who reciprocate by allowing multinational corporations to use the natural resources and labor power of that country with no regard to wages, working conditions, safety regulations or environmental protection. It further enriches the large banks, who launder a lot of drug money. Finally, it is useful in altering the mental state of poor people in the imperial country, who might get ideas about organizing and rebelling against their oppression.

CONTINUED...

http://india.indymedia.org/en/2003/01/2772.shtml

Thanks for everything, blm. Knowing you and yours are on the case makes it much easier to continue following their traitorous trails.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

2. Thanks for posting this. RIP, Gary Webb.

[Octafish]

5. Poppy and Baby Doc still do all they can to protect drug kingpins...

...like Posada Carriles, a guy DEA agent Celerino Castillo eyeballed loading Contra support planes headed for the USA loaded with dope. Posada Carriles also was a mass murderer and terrorist.

The CIA and the Bombing of Cubana Flight 455

Why Bush Wants to Harbor Posada Carriles

By TOM CRUMPACKER
Counterpunch
June 16, 2005

Recently declassified (partially blacked out) CIA, FBI and State Department reports (see National Security Archive Briefing Book #153, Peter Kornbluh) indicate that former CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles had been trained by CIA in demolition and explosives in the early 1960s. He was ostensibly in the US military, February 1963 to March 1964, which was the cover CIA gave its training agents then. During the 1960s, as a salaried agent he ran a school in Florida training others in his trade, financed by CIA. He also did forays to other countries to do covert bombings and assassinations. CIA was using him as an "operative" in Caracas 1976. In 1972 he had listed his permanent residence as Miami. When he left Florida for Caracas to work with the Venezuelan intelligence agency DISIP, he had with him a supply of CIA bomb-making materials and explosive devices. On the date of the bombing of Havana bound Cubana flight 455, October 6, 1976, he had supposedly left DISIP and was operating a private detective agency in Caracas.

The reports suggest that the Cubana bombing was a joint DISIP-CIA project and CIA was involved in the planning. They refer to meetings in Santo Domingo in the summer and in Caracas in early September involving agent Posada and his partner Orlando Bosch and top DISIP officials, at which discussions were held about bombing Cubana flights, also the Letelier car bombing which occurred in Washington, DC in mid-September. At the time, Bosch was head of CORU, a new umbrella organization of violent anti-Castro groups in US which CIA had urged them to form. He was also involved with "Condor" operations, a CIA supported super-secret web in South America which exterminated and disappeared many leftists.

CIA had been kept informed of previous attempts by its agent Posada to bomb Cubana airliners in the summer. In late September Posada (referred to "informant") reported: "We're going to hit the Cubana airliner." On October 1, our State Department -- at Posada's request and under a special procedure -- issued a US visa for the week of the bombing to one of Posada's two employees who placed the bomb in the plane restroom at the Barbados stop, then left the plane. The other Posada employee-bomb-planter had a secret Caracas CIA telephone number in his belongings when arrested in Trinidad after sending this message to Bosch: "A bus went off the cliff and 73 dogs died." These reports were not made available to the Venezuelan officials who prosecuting Bosch and Posada in the 1980s.

No one warned Cuba or potential passengers of the impending attack. George Bush, Sr. was the CIA Director at the time of the bombing. He was Vice President when Posada was allowed to escape from jail during his trial in Venezuela (CIA bribed his guards when the evidence started to implicate them) and report to Col. Oliver North in El Salvador to work on the Nicaraguan Contra supply operation being run out of the White House. Bush, Sr. was President when he pardoned Bosch against the recommendation of his own Justice Department, thereby harboring him in Miami.

In 1976 CIA was aware the Bush family had important connections in the oil business and was dealing with key politicians in Venezuela. Jeb Bush (now governor of Florida) was establishing himself in Caracas with the Commerce Bank of Texas, owned by Bush family friend (later Secretary of State) James Baker. When Bosch arrived in Caracas on September 14, 1976, after a visit with Pinochet officials in Chile, then Venezuelan President Perez allowed Bosch and Posada to conduct fundraising and operate freely in Venezuela, even contributing funds to their projects.

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/crumpacker06162005.html

Gary Webb cared.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

11. Back in 1977, when I was in Officer Candidate School in Newport, RI,....

...I talked with a classmate that was a Marine switching to the surface Navy. He told me about personally seeing trunkloads of pot being smuggled out of Vietnam on Air America when he was there on guard duty. The stuff was being sent directly to the States.

From some of my reading, I've learned that the OSS learned of the financial "benefits" of selling drugs from the 1940s French Mafia and turning that into an untraceable cash pipeline for their field operations. As you know, the OSS later became the field operations (and wet work) component of the CIA. They naturally took their "fund-raising" tactics with them.

[Octafish]

20. Here's what a brother officer is known for...

... Luis Posada Carriles served in the United States Army -- officially for a year. In addition to blowing up civilian airliners as an "anti-Castro Cuban exile," DEA agent Celerino Castillo reported Posada Carriles was directly working to import cocaine into the United States of America. A real patriot, Posada Carriles is protected by the Bush Family Evil Empire:

LUIS POSADA CARRILES

THE DECLASSIFIED RECORD

CIA and FBI Documents Detail Career in International Terrorism; Connection to U.S.

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 153

EXCERPT...

Washington D.C. May 10, 2005 - Declassified CIA and FBI records posted today on the Web by the National Security Archive at George Washington University identify Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles, who is apparently in Florida seeking asylum, as a former CIA agent and as one of the "engineer(s)" of the 1976 terrorist bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455 that killed 73 passengers.

The documents include a November 1976 FBI report on the bombing cited in yesterday's New York Times article "Case of Cuban Exile Could Test the U.S. Definition of Terrorist," CIA trace reports covering the Agency's recruitment of Posada in the 1960s, as well as the FBI intelligence reporting on the downing of the plane. The Archive also posted a second FBI report, dated one day after the bombing, in which a confidential source "all but admitted that Posada and Bosch had engineered the bombing of the airline." In addition, the posting includes several documents relating to Bosch and his suspected role in the downing of the jetliner on October 6, 1976.

Using a false passport, Posada apparently snuck into the United States in late March and remains in hiding. His lawyer announced that Posada is asking the Bush administration for asylum because of the work he had done for the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1960s. The documents posted today include CIA records confirming that Posada was an agent in the 1960s and early 1970s, and remained an informant in regular contact with CIA officials at least until June 1976.

In 1985, Posada escaped from prison in Venezuela where he had been incarcerated after the plane bombing and remains a fugitive from justice. He went directly to El Salvador, where he worked, using the alias "Ramon Medina," on the illegal contra resupply program being run by Lt. Col. Oliver North in the Reagan National Security Council. In 1998 he was interviewed by Ann Louise Bardach for the New York Times at a secret location in Aruba, and claimed responsibility for a string of hotel bombings in Havana during which eleven people were injured and one Italian businessman was killed. Most recently he was imprisoned in Panama for trying to assassinate Fidel Castro in December 2000 with 33 pounds of C-4 explosives. In September 2004, he and three co-conspirators were suddenly pardoned, and Posada went to Honduras. Venezuela is now preparing to submit an official extradition request to the United States for his return.

According to Peter Kornbluh, who directs the Archive's Cuba Documentation Project, Posada's presence in the United States "poses a direct challenge to the Bush administration's terrorism policy. The declassified record," he said, "leaves no doubt that Posada has been one of the world's most unremitting purveyors of terrorist violence." President Bush has repeatedly stated that no nation should harbor terrorists, and all nations should work to bring individuals who advocate and employ the use of terror tactics to justice. During the Presidential campaign last year Bush stated that "I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world." Although Posada has reportedly been in the Miami area for more than six weeks, the FBI has indicated it is not actively searching for him.

CONTINUED W/Excellent links and resources...

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB153/

Gee. No wonder this stuff doesn't make it on CNN or Fox.

Thank you for your service, Media_Lies_Daily. The United States Navy has helped keep our nation free since 13 October 1775.

[Beam Me Up]

3. We need a sorrowful sighing 'smiley' or something.

I'm to black to say anything profound. RIP, Gary.

[Octafish]

6. Most ALL the press jumped on Webb for telling the TRUTH about crack.

Why?

Gary Webb told the truth. And that meant Uncle Sam's CIA turned a blind eye to their surrogate army's illegal cash cow.

EXCERPT...

Documentation of Official U.S. Knowledge of

Drug Trafficking and the Contras

The National Security Archive obtained the hand-written notebooks of Oliver North, the National Security Council aide who helped run the contra war and other Reagan administration covert operations, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed in 1989. The notebooks, as well as declassified memos sent to North, record that North was repeatedly informed of contra ties to drug trafficking.

* In his entry for August 9, 1985, North summarizes a meeting with Robert Owen ("Rob"), his liaison with the contras. They discuss a plane used by Mario Calero, brother of Adolfo Calero, head of the FDN, to transport supplies from New Orleans to contras in Honduras. North writes: "Honduran DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into U.S." As Lorraine Adams reported in the October 22, 1994 Washington Post, there are no records that corroborate North's later assertion that he passed this intelligence on drug trafficking to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

* In a July 12, 1985 entry, North noted a call from retired Air Force general Richard Secord in which the two discussed a Honduran arms warehouse from which the contras planned to purchase weapons. (The contras did eventually buy the arms, using money the Reagan administration secretly raised from Saudi Arabia.) According to the notebook, Secord told North that "14 M to finance came from drugs."

* An April 1, 1985 memo from Robert Owen (code-name: "T.C." for "The Courier") to Oliver North (code-name: "The Hammer") describes contra operations on the Southern Front. Owen tells North that FDN leader Adolfo Calero (code-name: "Sparkplug") has picked a new Southern Front commander, one of the former captains to Eden Pastora who has been paid to defect to the FDN. Owen reports that the officials in the new Southern Front FDN units include "people who are questionable because of past indiscretions," such as José Robelo, who is believed to have "potential involvement with drug running" and Sebastian Gonzalez, who is "now involved in drug running out of Panama."

* On February 10, 1986, Owen ("TC") wrote North (this time as "BG," for "Blood and Guts") regarding a plane being used to carry "humanitarian aid" to the contras that was previously used to transport drugs. The plane belongs to the Miami-based company Vortex, which is run by Michael Palmer, one of the largest marijuana traffickers in the United States. Despite Palmer's long history of drug smuggling, which would soon lead to a Michigan indictment on drug charges, Palmer receives over $300,000.00 from the Nicaraguan Humanitarian Aid Office (NHAO) -- an office overseen by Oliver North, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams, and CIA officer Alan Fiers -- to ferry supplies to the contras.

CONTINUED...

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB2/nsaebb2.htm

His Zen.

[Voltaire99]

7. Webb was one of the good ones.

Superb account of his reporting and fate in Cockburn and St. Clair's Whiteout.

[Octafish]

10. Where were his professional colleagues?

They mostly all stayed silent, in fear of losing their jobs.

Cowards. Traitors, too, as the Constitution stipulates the free press as a necessary pillar for a free country.

Here's Counterpunch's excerpt from Whiteout

December 17, 2004

CounterAttack

How the Press and the CIA Killed Gary Webb's Career

By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

(What follows is an extended excerpt from Chapter Two of our book Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press. AC / JSC)

The attack on Gary Webb and his series in the San Jose Mercury News remains one of the most venomous and factually inane assaults on a professional journalist's competence in living memory. In the mainstream press he found virtually no defenders, and those who dared stand up for him themselves became the object of virulent abuse and misrepresentation. L. J. O'Neale, the prosecutor for the Justice Department who was Danilo Blandón's patron and Rick Ross's prosecutor, initially formulated the polemical program against him. When one looks back on the assault in the calm of hindsight, what is astounding is the way Webb's foes in the press mechanically reiterated those attacks.

There was a disturbing racist thread underlying the attacks on Webb's series, and on those who took his findings seriously. It's clear, looking through the onslaughts on Webb in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, that the reaction in black communities to the series was extremely disturbing to elite opinion. This was an eruption of outrage, an insurgency not just of very poor people in South Central and kindred areas, but of almost all blacks and many whites as well. In the counterattacks, one gets the sense that a kind of pacification program was in progress. Karen De Young, an assistant editor at the Washington Post, evoked just such an impulse when Alicia Shepard of the American Journalism Review interviewed her. "I looked at (the Mercury News series) when it initially came out and decided it was something we needed to follow up on. When it became an issue in the black community and on talk shows, that seemed to be a different phenomenon." Remember too that the O. J. Simpson jury decision had also been deeply disturbing to white opinion. In that case, blacks had rallied around a man most whites believed to be a vicious killer, and there was a "white opinion riot" in response. Now blacks were mustering in support of a story charging that their profoundest suspicions of white malfeasance were true. So in the counterattack there were constant, patronizing references to "black paranoia," decorously salted with the occasional concession that there was evidence from the past to support the notion that such paranoia might have some sound foundation.

Another factor lent a particular edge to the onslaughts. This was the first occasion on which the established press had to face the changing circumstances of the news business, in terms of registering mass opinion and allowing popular access. Webb's series coincided with the coming of age of the Internet. The Miami Herald, another Knight-Ridder paper in the same corporate family as the Mercury News, had been forced to change editorial course in the mid-1980s by the vociferous, highly conservative Cuban American presence in Miami. The Herald chose not to reprint Webb's series. However, this didn't prevent anyone in south Florida from finding the entire series on the Internet, along with all the supporting documents.

The word "pacification" is not inappropriate to describe the responses to Webb's story. Back in the 1980s, allegations about Contra drug running, also backed by documentary evidence, could be ignored with impunity. Given the Internet and black radio reaction, in the mid-1990s this was no longer possible, and the established organs of public opinion had to launch the fiercest of attacks on Webb and on his employer. This was a campaign of extermination: the aim was to destroy Webb and to force the Mercury News into backing away from the story's central premise. At the same time, these media manipulators attempted to minimize the impact of Webb' s story on the black community.

Another important point in the politics of this campaign is that Webb's fiercest assailants were not on the right. They were mainstream liberals, such as Walter Pincus and Richard Cohen of the Washington Post and David Corn of the Nation, There has always been a certain conservative suspicion of the CIA, even if conservatives ­ outside the libertarian wing ­ heartily applaud the Agency's imperial role. The CIA's most effective friends have always been the liberal center, on the editorial pages of the Washington Post and the New York Times and in the endorsement of a person like the Washington Post's president, Katharine Graham. In 1988 Graham had told CIA recruits, "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.com/webb12172004.html

Webb was different than most "professional journalists." He gave a real damn.

[Swamp Rat]

8. I believe Gary Webb was "silenced."

[Octafish]

12. They have ways of making people kill.

Even themselves.

Going by his background and personal drive, there is little doubt that a program was employed to push Webb.

First the government and media organs attacked his work as a personal affront on the integrity of the United States.

Then his employers treated him like a pariah.

Then his colleagues refused to work with him.

Then he found a job as a PR flack and that went sour.

Then his marriage crumbled and he lost what he loved most, his family.

Then they started the real mind games.

Book Review:

Search for the Manchurian Candidate

by John Marks

Based on 16,000 pages of FOIA documents supplied by the CIA
(This document as of June 23, 2001)
For the story of the MKULTRA CHILDREN see:
A Nation Betrayed by Carol Rutz

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This book is one of the very best describing the MKULTRA government intelligence mind control programs. The visitor unaware of MKULTRA needs to keep in mind that 8 adult victims, out of several hundred adult and child victims, did successfully sue the CIA and WON. MKULTRA is not a hoax, and several hundred adult AND CHILD victims still await compensation and an official apology from the U.S. and Canadian governments.

http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/lsd/marks.htm ...is an ON LINE version in case you can't find a copy to read or purchase.

The main uses of this book for psycho-electronic experimentees are:

* to provide the experimentee with historical knowledge which can defeat the excuse, used by police and psychiatrists, that anyone who thinks government harasses citizens needs psychiatric treatment
* to provide the experimentee with historical precedent for public education efforts
This book shows clearly that morally bankrupt people in positions of authority are not particularly rare, and the moral bankruptcy extends even to torturing fellow citizens.

CONTINUED w/LINKS...

http://www.raven1.net/manchcan.htm

They, for those new to the subject, are members of the Secret Government, the Bush Crime Family serves.

[Arkham House]

15. Like Danny Colisaro...

[Octafish]

31. Those who research the Bush Crime Family do so at their own risk.

The following is from a DU thread from a year ago or so...

Seems journalists who look into the Bush Transnational Criminal Enterprise, or “Octopus,” end up in a bad way.

Gary Webb "shot himself in the head" Friday morning, according to the police. His own "colleagues" didn't even see fit to put his suspicious death on page A-1. The cowards.

http://india.indymedia.org/en/2003/01/2772.shtml

What Webb did to hurt the BFEE's feelings is he tied the CIA's Iran-Contra gang to the crack cocaine epidemic in America's major metropolitan areas. To the Bush gang, telling the truth made Webb an enemy.

http://www.parascope.com/mx/articles/garywebb/garyWebbSpeaks.htm


Here are a few others who actually had the guts to investigate the Bush Family Evil Empire:


Daniel “Danny” Casolaro — Researched BCCI and the Inslaw/PROMIS Affair, found that George HW Bush had ties going around the world and back through Iran-Contra, Iraq-gate, the October Surprise, Watergate, Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs and Dallas. A “suicide.”

http://www.cjr.org/archives.asp?url=/91/6/octopus.asp


Abbie Hoffman — Yippie of the 60s turned into an investigative reporter in the 80s, researched and wrote about “October Surprise” allegations involving George HW Bush, Bill Casey and Robert Gates doing a deal with the Ayatollah Khomeini to delay the release of the hostages in 1980. The pretty good overview appeared in Playboy in 1992. A “suicide.”

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_cr/h920205-october-clips.htm


Steve Kangas — Researcher and writer who started “Liberal Resurgent” web site dedicated to naming names like Richard Mellon Scaife and telling the truth about what was happening to America. Wrote the seminal “The Origins of the Overclass” which detailed the role of the CIA in preserving the privileged positions of the nation’s wealthiest individuals and corporations. A “suicide.”

http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-overclass.html


Jim Hatifield — Researcher and writer who penned “Fortunate Son,” an unauthorized biography of George W Bush that included allegations of cocaine use, planted by Karl Rove, who knew that Hatfield, an ex-con would be discredited. The last thing Hatfield wrote “Why Would Osama Want to Kill His Ex-Business Partner?” that detailed bin Laden threatening to crash a plane loaded with explosives into the G-8 summit in Genoa Italy in July 2001. Bush slept offshore aboard a US warship and the meeting was guarded by SAMs. A “suicide.”

http://www.onlinejournal.org/Special_Reports/Hatfield-R-091901/hatfield-r-091901.html


Mark Lombardi — Artist and researcher who developed “Global Networks” or “Social Network Diagrams” which illustrated and chronicled the relationships between many of our day’s shadiest characters, institutions and treasons. One of his works graphically charted Osama bin Laden, Sheik Salim bin Laden, James R Bath, Texas Gov George W Bush and HARKEN Energy. A “suicide.”

http://www.steamshovelpress.com/altmedia18.html


There are many more examples of brave journalists who’ve investigated the Octopus and turned up “suicided.” As time permits, I'll add them to the GD thread here:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=104&topic_id=2819427&mesg_id=2819427&page=

Daniel Casolaro, a patriot and a good man.

[DemonFighterLives]

9. Nomination Number 5

What a mess!
Rest in Peace Gary Webb.

Excellent work as usual Octafish! They can run and try to hide, but the people want truth and honesty back.
:dem:

[Octafish]

14. America still has a chance.

Webb proved that the Truth still matters.

Crack, Cigarettes, and the arrival of Gary

"Journalists are revolutionaries and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.”

By George Sanchez

March 3, 2003

EXCERPT...

Gary Webb speaks at the
Narco News School of Authentic Journalism

Standing a bit more than six feet tall, he’s an average looking guy. He smokes more Marlboros than you’d expect of an Investigative Reporter from the United States of America and his pale skin, light brown hair, and trim moustache make him pretty indistinguishable from the next gringo. That’s all right though, because Gary Webb doesn’t carry himself as anything other than the next guy.

His 1996 three-part investigative series for the San Jose Mercury News was, to put it lightly, explosive. For a year, Webb followed a trail that would eventually lead him to the roots of the crack cocaine epidemic that had crippled the African American community in the United States. Searching through the muck and mud, Webb kept at it. With each turn more outrageous than the last, Webb ultimately brought to light a truth that had been kept secret for more than a decade and one that could have feasibly destroyed Ronald Reagan’s presidency.

When Webb and the San Jose Mercury News did bring “Dark Alliance” to light, there were a few more unexpected turns.

“Dark Alliance,” wrote HotWired Magazine, “is making digital and media history. The Mercury News is demonstrating for perhaps the first time how the web and the traditional press can fuse to good effect —and that there’s still a chance to break modern media’s parochial instincts and return some power to journalists outside of Washington and New York…”

CONTINUED...

http://www.narconews.com/Issue29/article657.html

He also proved that the media whores in DC and NYC don't call ALL the shots.

[DemonFighterLives]

17. I liked this section

“Journalists are revolutionaries and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise,” said Webb to the group. “You have to fight to change the world,” he continued.

Gary Webb is as authentic as they come. He’s a reporter open to anything. And why not? Anything can lead you to something and that something could be the big one—and if not, then that something’s at least another story.

For a reporter to hold the memory of a small, dime-a-dozen story about the tragic death of some unknown man is a sign of something. It’s the proof of heart in a very cold industry. It is the mark of a reporter who carries with him a little bit of each story and leaves each source a little bit of himself. It is the preview of a reporter who would toil for years on a story that had the potential to destroy his career while exposing the moral corruption of the government of the United States of America and never once back down.

:dem:

[rman]

16. kick for truth

[Octafish]

18. Robert Parry has researched the subject most extensively...

... and he has developed quite an archive:

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/crack.html

An example:

Contra-Cocaine: Evidence of Premeditation

June 1, 1998

By Robert Parry

New evidence, now in the public record, strongly suggests that the Reagan administration's tolerance of drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan contras and other clients in the 1980s was premeditated.

With almost no notice in the national press, a 1982 letter was introduced into the Congressional Record revealing how CIA Director William J. Casey secretly engineered an exemption sparing the CIA from a legal requirement to report on drug smuggling by agency assets.

The exemption was granted by Attorney General William French Smith on Feb. 11, 1982, only two months after President Reagan authorized covert CIA support for the Nicaraguan contra army and some eight months before the first known documentary evidence revealing that the contras had started collaborating with drug traffickers.

The exemption suggests that the CIA's tolerance of illicit drug smuggling by its clients during the 1980s was official policy anticipated from the outset, not just an unintended consequence followed by an ad hoc cover-up.

Before the letter's release, the documentary evidence only supported the allegation that Ronald Reagan's CIA concealed drug trafficking by the contras and other intelligence assets in Latin America. The CIA's inspector general Frederick P. Hitz confirmed that long-held suspicion in an investigative report issued on Jan. 29, 1998.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/crack12.html

Thanks for the truth kick, rman. Thanks also for giving a damn.

[rman]

26. thank you

for the encouragement

and the link

[H2O Man]

21. It's a shame.

The general public doesn't suspect the true source of the huge supply of drugs in this country. I'm not talking about some college students bring pot to their campus. It's not the old hippies growing weed in their back lawn that are also flying plane-loads of white powder into this country. There is a funny pattern, though ..... a war in Southeast Asia, and heroin hits the US in large quantities; war in Central America, and large quantities of cocaine are imported.

Uncle Sam subsidizes the tobacco industry directly, and the alcohol industry indirectly. The next step is pretty obvious.

[Octafish]

22. Drugs are a good way of dumbing down, dividing and discouraging a people.

Of course, there are other uses, like driving:

Sex, Drugs, Mind Control, and Gitmo

It just gets darker every day.

By Prof. Pan

According to an article in the New Yorker (one of the only major publications still gutsy enough to publish critical, investigative journalism), the ghosts of Gottlieb, Cameron, and the other architects of MKULTRA and BLUEBIRD are alive and well and continuing their devastating psychological abuse and experimentation. A new generation of psychologists and physicians are turning the Hippocratic Oath on its head in their attempts to shape and modify behavior -- much of it under the guise of "extracting information" from "terrorists" (some of whom are innocents caught up in the post-9/11 dragnet). It doesn't take much reading between-the-lines to see what is actually happening behind the scenes at Guantanamo -- and what is taking place is ugly and deeply disturbing, and all too familiar to students of the more sinister threads of history.

Many of the revelations in the New Yorker article ("The Experiment," by Jane Mayer, July 11 & 18, 2005 -- not yet available online, but here's an interview with the author) are familiar, but there are hints of techniques that mirror the most horrific (and mostly ignored) abuses at Abu Ghraib and the historical accounts of government-sponsored mind control. Baher Azmy, a professor at Seton Hall Law School who is representing one detainee states in the article, "The whole place appears to be one giant human experiment." (p. 62)

The people behind these psychological abuses and experiments are known as Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, or BSCTs (commonly called "biscuits"). Originally, BSCTs served as therapists and dispensed psychotropic drugs to soldiers, and evaluated their combat readiness. Post 9/11, however, their mission was altered -- instead of helping soldiers, their talents were turned to interrogation and psychological torture under the umbrella of military intelligence.

Mayer also unearths the role of the military's highly classified "Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape" (SERE) program, originally developed by the Air Force at the end of the Korean War (not coincidentally at the same time as the birth of U.S. mind control programs in response to the return of "brainwashed" POWs). The SERE program subjects soldiers to high-stress simulations of stressful detention and torture, in order to prepare them for the possibility of capture. In a familiar post-9/11, rabbit hole inversion, however, SERE was "reverse-engineered" to facilitate the psychological torture of GITMO prisoners. All of the data designed to aid U.S. soldiers was turned on its head and put to use -- by scientists and medical professionals -- to break open the minds of U.S. detainees. One classic example is the mistreatment of holy books. Indeed, according to Mayer, the Koran desecration incidents are a classic SERE tactic. Christian U.S. troops undergoing SERE training were forced to witness the shredding of a Bible -- a tactic long before the Rovian disinfo blitz that sent Newsweek cowering like a beaten dog for daring to comment on the practice.

Yet that tactic pales when compared to some of the other, more suggestive, techniques alleged in the article, such as:

A prisoner is shown a picture of a telephone. A psychologist asks him what it is. When he answers that it's a telephone, the psychiatrist angrily responds: "It's not a telephone -- it's a bomb!" What kind of exercise is this, and what is the purpose of it? The prisoners lawyer claims it has only one goal: to make the prisoner believe he is insane. (p. 63) Induction of cognitive dissonance is a trademark technique of mind control.

CONTINUED w.links for the interested...

http://www.charm.net/~profpan/2005/07/sex-drugs-mind-control-and-gitmo.html

Dissonance. Cognitive dissonance. Sounds a lot like life in today's America.

Plus narcotrafficking is very lucrative. For the connected, that is.

[H2O Man]

24. Malcolm used to say

that all of those drugs are simply social novacaine, that allow our enemy to yank something more valuable than our teeth out of our heads. Without the novacaine, we would put up a fight to save those teeth. But doped up, we sit with stupid grins and blood dripping down our chins.

[blm]

28. Oh man...ain't that the truth.....

Keep on....

[Guy Whitey Corngood]

23. I need to stop bullshitting and finish reading Dark Alliance. n/t

[Octafish]

29. 'The Strength of the Wolf' also sheds light on the subject...

People can learn so much, just by opening their eyes and ears.

The evidence implies there are criminal elements directing U.S. policies, abroad and at home.

"Just as Every Cop Needs a Criminal"

The Secret History of the War on Drugs

By RON JACOBS
Counterpunch
May 14, 2004

A Review of The Strength of the Wolf,
By Douglas Valentine (Verso 2004)

Corruption, addiction and murder on a large and small scale. This is the story that Douglas Valentine chronicles in his new book The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs (Verso, 2004). Valentine, who is also the author of the definitive story of the US counterintelligence program in Vietnam known as Operation Phoenix (The Phoenix Program), does a thorough job of detailing the crooked and sordid history of the original US agency created to fight the so-called war on drugs. That agency, for those who don't know the history or have only known the Nixon-created Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), was the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). Created for fundamentally racist reasons, the FBN was the brainchild of Harry Anslinger-an ambitious law-and-order type guy who devoted his life to protecting America's upper classes. Anslinger built he agency based on white Americans fears and, in doing so, changed the society's perspective on drugs from one where virtually everything was legally available to one where the government tried to control every aspect of drug distribution. It is Anslinger and his agency that is responsible for America's current conception that drug abuse is a police problem and not one better left to health professionals.

Valentine's central thesis is explained in the book's introduction. Briefly stated, it is this: "federal drug enforcement is essentially a function of national security, as that term is applied in its broadest sense: that is, not just in defending America from its foreign enemies, but preserving its traditional values of class, race and gender at home, while expanding its economic and military influence abroad." As the book delves deeper into the story of how this thesis worked out in practice, it becomes clear that this did not always mean that the big-time drug dealers got arrested. Indeed, if they had the right connections and skills (such as those skills required for assassination and those connections that might serve the counterintelligence capabilities of the US), not only were these men not arrested; they were protected in all their enterprises, legal and otherwise.

It's a tawdry to downright demonic story that comes out in these pages. From questions about the role of big time heroin manufacturers and traffickers in the subversion of governments and democratic movements to stories about MKULTRA (a secret program developed by the CIA to find drugs to use in brainwashing) LSD experiments on unsuspecting citizens, this book makes it clear that nothing is as it seems in the "war on drugs." For those who fight battles in this war on a daily basis, be they cops or users, this is not news. The depth of the deception and inhumanity may be, however. The more one reads of Valentine's work, the more it becomes clear that honest agents and cops have little place in this business. More than once, the reader is provided with the story of an agent's years of hard work setting up and tracking a big-time trafficker being blown or destroyed some other way because of that trafficker's connections and use to the national security state.

What is remarkable about this story is that it holds surprises even for those who consider themselves hardened to the realities of government skullduggery. For example, the government's complicity with various Mafia bosses and their Cuban cohorts make it all but inevitable for questions to be raised about the intelligence community's involvement in the JFK assassination. In addition, there are several passages that raise the issue of Israel's role in international drug smuggling since before its inception in 1948-an involvement, which Valentine believes, continues under the aegis of the Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad. Of course, this makes perfect sense if one considers the history of US intelligence "encouraging" its surrogates involved in counterrevolutionary work to use drug trafficking profits to buy guns and other weaponry. After all, US intelligence and Israeli intelligence are more than brothers in arms-they are two arms of the same body.

The tone of The Strength of the Wolf is summed up best with a quote from a conversation Valentine held with FBN agent Jim Attie thirty-five years after he retired. "I'm not proud of what I did. It was a dirty job. It was a form of amorality, and to this day I feel tremendous guilt and have unending nightmares as a result of what I did as a narcotic agent." Unfortunately, Valentine's book makes it clear that many agents don't have such qualms. This history makes it abundantly clear that those who directed them certainly didn't. All of which leaves us common folk with the nightmare of their policies

CONTINUED...

http://www.counterpunch.org/jacobs05142004.html

Readers are leaders, Guy Whitey Corngood.

[G_j]

27. ~~

[Octafish]

30. Two big money-makers: War and Drugs...

Ask Afghanistan...

The Spoils of War: Afghanistan's Multibillion Dollar Heroin Trade

Washington's Hidden Agenda: Restore the Drug Trade

by Michel Chossudovsky
May 5, 2005
GlobalResearch.ca - 2005-06-14


Since the US led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, the Golden Crescent opium trade has soared. According to the US media, this lucrative contraband is protected by Osama, the Taliban, not to mention, of course, the regional warlords, in defiance of the "international community".

The heroin business is said to be "filling the coffers of the Taliban". In the words of the US State Department:

"Opium is a source of literally billions of dollars to extremist and criminal groups... utting down the opium supply is central to establishing a secure and stable democracy, as well as winning the global war on terrorism," (Statement of Assistant Secretary of State Robert Charles. Congressional Hearing, 1 April 2004)

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), opium production in Afghanistan in 2003 is estimated at 3,600 tons, with an estimated area under cultivation of the order of 80,000 hectares. (UNODC at http://www.unodc.org/unodc/index.html ).An even larger bumper harvest is predicted for 2004.

The State Department suggests that up to 120 000 hectares were under cultivation in 2004. (Congressional Hearing, op cit):

"We could be on a path for a significant surge. Some observers indicate perhaps as much as 50 percent to 100 percent growth in the 2004 crop over the already troubling figures from last year."(Ibid)

CONTINUED...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20050614&articleId=91

On the other side of the planet, about 15 years ago, I met then-exiled-for-the-first time Jean Bertrand Aristide. He said all Poppy had to do to restore him to power was to pick up the phone. Poppy refused. So the coup-leading generals stayed in charge of the country, protecting the 1-percent who own 99-percent and their cocaine transportation franchise.