USA DRUG EMPIRE
USA DRUG EMPIRE
NARCO NEWS
CIA Drugs
Narco Colonialism
CIA Drug Trade
CIA Drugs Facts
The Godfather: CIA and Subsidiaries Exposed in Court Documents As Active Drug Smugglers Using Military Aircraft Washed Through Forest Service
Israel & Russia Drug Flood
Israel Ecstasy
America Admits Drug War Has Failed
Anti-Drug Ads Game
Project Bioshield
HISTORY OF THE OPIUM WARS
Early European Opium Trade (1640-1773)
In this period, opium entered a proto-modern phase in which its capacity for growth as a major commodity first became evident. Significantly, European and Indian merchants played a catalytic role in commercializing and expanding the India-China opium trade.
It is during this era that opium's extraordinarily profitability becomes manifest. Through its peculiar properties, opium is the ideal trade good during this epoch. As an addictive drug, opium requires a daily dose giving it the inelastic demand of a basic foodstuff. Long distance sea-trade in bulk foods was beyond the capacity of current maritime technology, but opium had the low weight and high mark-up of a luxury good like cloves or pepper. In the early modern era, opium combines the reliable demand of a basic food with the logistics of a luxury good. Compounding its profitability, the Chinese emperor reacted to the rise of mass addiction by banning opium and thus denying China the opportunity to produce opium locally to undercut the high price of Indian imports.
European Mercantilism (1773-1858)
The modern era in the global opium trade began in 1773 when the British Governor-General of Bengal established a monopoly on the sale of opium. Over the next 130 years, Britain actively promoted the export of Indian opium, defying Chinese drug laws and fighting two wars to open China's drug market for its merchants.
From the late 18th century onward, opium became a major trade commodity. Under the British East India Company (BEIC), centralized controls accelerated the export of Indian opium to China--from 13 tons in 1729 to and 2,558 tons in 1839. Using its full military and mercantile power, Britain played a central role in making China a lucrative drug market.
In 1773, the British Governor abolished the Indian opium syndicate at Patna and established a colonial monopoly on principles that operated for the next half-century. Under the new regulations, the Company had the exclusive right to purchase opium from Bengal's farmers and auction it for export. Realizing that opium was illegal in China, the Governor barred the Company's ships that called at Canton to load tea from carrying opium, leaving actual sale of the addictive drug to the private European merchants who bid at the Company's Calcutta auctions.
The Company's steadfast refusal to raise Bengal's opium exports beyond its self-imposed quota of 4,000 chests per annum left a vast unmet demand for drugs among China's swelling population of opium smokers. When demand drove the price per chest upward from 415 rupees in 1799 to 2,428 rupees just 15 years later, the East India Company's monopoly on Bengal opium faced competition from Turkey and west India.
Not only did opium solve the fiscal crisis that accompanied the British conquest of Bengal, it remained a staple of colonial finances, providing from six to fifteen percent of British India's tax revenues during the 19th Century.
More importantly, opium exports were an essential component of a triangular trade that was central to England's position as a world power. Trade figures for the 1820s, for example, show that the triangular trade was large and well balanced: 22 million pounds sterling worth of Indian opium and cotton to China; next, 20 million pounds worth of Chinese tea to Britain; and, then, 24 million pounds of British textiles and machinery back to India.
Britain's most daring rivals were the Americans. Barred from bidding at the Calcutta auctions, Yankee traders loaded their first cargoes of Turkish opium at Smyrna in 1805 and sailed them around the tip of Africa to China. Through these efforts, Turkish opium remained an alternative to the Bengal brands until 1834 when the Yankee captains were finally allowed to bid at the Calcutta auctions and abandoned the long haul around Africa.
After the East India Company lost its charter in 1834, its informal regulation of the China opium trade collapsed, allowing profit-hungry American and British captains to take control. Indeed, the Company's demise launched a fleet of new opium clippers to tack to China against the monsoon winds. As the Company loosened its restrictions in the 1820s and then lost its monopoly in 1834, China's opium imports increased nearly ten fold--from 270 tons in 1820 to 2,558 tons twenty years later. Opium addiction spread rapidly, reaching some three million Chinese addicts by the 1830s.
In defense of its commerce, Britain fought two wars along the China coast in 1842 and 1858, forcing the empire to open itself to unrestricted opium imports. In 1838, the Emperor's launched a moralistic anti-opium campaign that threatened Britain's China trade, and London dispatched a fleet of six warships, capturing Canton in May 1839. The First Opium war ended in 1842 with the Treaty of Nanking which required China to cede Hong Kong, and open five new ports to foreign trade. But China still refused to legalize opium.
The fifteen years following the First Opium War brought a new peak in the China trade. Illicit imports of Indian opium nearly doubled, rising to 4,810 tons in 1858. At the Calcutta auctions, frenzied bidding drove opium prices and profits to new heights, making a fast run to the China coast essential and launching 48 new clippers for the opium fleet. Among the 95 clippers in the fleet, the Calcutta's Cowasjee family owned six, the Americans of Russell & Co. had eight, and the British giants, Dent and Jardine, operated a total of 27.
The era of the opium clipper ended when China finally legalized the drug trade after its defeat in the Second Opium War (1856-1858). In negotiations over the tariff provisions of this new treaty that ended the war, the British emissary Lord Elgin forced the Chinese to legalize opium imports.
In the aftermath of legalization, Chinese officials began encouraging local production, and poppy cultivation spread beyond the country's southwest. As addiction spread throughout China, imports of Indian opium rose from 4,800 tons in 1859 to 6,700 tons twenty years later. After peaking in 1880, Indian imports declined slowly for the rest of the century as cheaper, China-grown opium began to supplant the high-grade Bengal brands.
High Imperial Opium Trade (1858-1907)
During this period of high imperialism (1858-1907), Britain loses the near monopoly over the Asian opium trade that it enjoyed under mercantilism and the drug becomes, for the first time in its history, a free-market commodity. Traded in mass volume through unrestricted trade, opium gains new markets in the West and expands its trade in Asia.
To maintain profits and tax revenues, European colonial regimes in establish state opium monopolies throughout Southeast Asia in the 1880s and 1890s, continuing an element of the restrictive mercantilism prevalent in an earlier epoch.
While controls remain over opium sales within the colonies, its international trade is now unrestricted. In Asia, China removes its ban on opium cultivation and thereby undercuts the hyper-profitability of British exports. Now fully commoditized, opium spreads beyond its Asian trade axis to become, through the modern pharmaceutical industry, a major item of mass consumption in the West. Driven by this global commerce, world opium production reaches an historic peak of 41,000 tons in 1907--10 times its level in 1993.
Multilateral Control & Syndicate Crime (1907-1940)
Anti-Opium Movement:
Within the Protestant churches of England and America, a moral reaction to the excesses of a market-driven expansion of drug abuse inspired a global anti-opium movement in the late 19th Century. Inspired by the larger temperance movement, the anti-opium crusade gained its force from the institutional strength of the Churches and its urgency from
(1.) the influence of their China missions which felt stigmatized by the European opium trade; and,
(2.) a moral revulsion against the excesses of alcohol and narcotics. Through the religious origins of the anti-opium movement, the Western, particularly American, debate over drugs becomes bound up in the metaphor of Christian warfare against evil with the parallel political goal of total extirpation.
Law and Body:
For the first time in the modern era, the anti-opium movement, in alliance with the larger temperance crusade, succeeded with new laws from the state restricting the individual's control over the body.
Under the laissez-faire principles of 19th Century social practice, the state did nothing to restrict the individual's right to indulgence. With the passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914, the American state, for the first time, imposed the force of law over the right to use or abuse the body as the individual saw fit. This change in law constitutes a significant turning point in American social practice.
Failure of Prohibition:
The prewar attempt at multilateral controls over narcotics had a mixed result. In the West, the stronger state apparatus could actively influence social behavior and reduce drug consumption through a ban on legal sales. In the colonies with strong, authoritarian states, such as British India, opium restrictions were even more effective than in the West. But in Third World areas with weak states, such as China, the attempt at prohibition produced a florescence of organized criminality.
Thus, in the 1920s, the legal opium trade, whether by states or corporations, yields to a transnational criminal trade with powerful Chinese syndicates in Shanghai supplying organized crime groups in the United State. With the end of alcohol prohibition in 1932, American syndicates became even more dependent upon drug trafficking, elaborating their transnational contacts and expanding the illicit trade.
One of the main consequences of multilateral controls was the rise of organized crime that blunts the effectiveness of drug prohibition, forcing consumption to the social margins in the First World and production to the spatial margins in the Third. Although repression does reduce both production and consumption, the high profits inherent in the opiates traffic remain to sustain criminal syndicates which now act as an unintended market response to limit state control over the drug trade.
Despite all these considerable drawbacks, multilateral controls do have their successes. By limiting the power of states and corporation to traffic in drugs without restriction, the League of Nations did effect significant reductions in the gross consumption and production of narcotics.
Through these efforts, the constant, century-long upward trajectory in drug abuse was finally broken, and, for the first time since the 18th century, both use and production began to decline. Through these efforts, world opium production declined from 41,600 tons in 1907 to 16,600 tons in 1934, while licit world heroin production, much of it for recreational use, dropped sharply from an 20,000 lbs. in 1926 to only 2,200 lbs. in 1931.
Although the political parameters of the world drug trade in the prewar era were distinct, the legacy of multilateral controls, today found in the UN Commission on Drug Abuse Control, might well prove a viable alternative to our recent attempts at bilateral eradication.
War & Transition (1940-1947)
Developments in the drug trade during World War II show, as China would after the war, that perfect coercion can have an influence, direct and dramatic, on the international heroin trade. Massive wartime security over ports, impossible in peacetime, meant an end of drug smuggling to the United States. By implication, less than perfect coercion will little impact on the global narcotics traffic and will, under most circumstances, produce minor seizures that will serve as a surcharge that will be passed on to consumers.
Cold War Opium Expansion (1948-1972)
Production Areas:
External intervention in the remote tribal areas along the Asian opium zone contributed to the rise of drug lords and their armies, allowing them to position themselves for a massive expansion of local opium production. By providing arms, logistics, organization, and political protection, external alliances created the preconditions for a later leap in opium production in Burma and Afghanistan.
Chinese Eradication:
During the Cold War era, the most dramatic change was the sudden and complete eradication of opium in China. Under a powerful communist state, perfect prohibition works and produces a major change in the opium trade, eliminating the source of some 85 percent of prewar world supply. This extraordinary event has, however, no real lesson for capitalist democracies struggling with the problem of drug abuse. To extract some tenuous policy prescription from the Chinese Revolution would serve to trivialize a major historical event.
Origins of US Bilateral Suppression (1973-1979)
Bilateral Suppression & Crime:
During the mid 1970s, the US attempt at bilateral suppression of opiates
(a.) expanded international criminal networks;
(b.) increased global opium production; and
(c.) encourages a spread of heroin consumption to new regions of the globe.
Limits of Bilateral Suppression:
Although bilateral operations in Turkey during the mid 1970s represent the greatest success of any US drug war, the policy implications are limited. In retrospect, Turkey's suppression worked because, like Iran or British India before World War II, the government licensed and controlled opium cultivation. Moreover, the opium farmers were ethnic Turks, the majority population, working at the epicenter of the nation-state, not an alienated ethnic minority, armed and insurgent.
This combination of a strong state and weak local resistance made this exercise in bilateral suppression effective. These conditions are not, however, likely to be replicated anywhere else in the world. Similarly, the strong French state could eliminate the Corsican laboratories in Marseilles when US pressure was insistent. Elsewhere--in Burma, Afghanistan, or Pakistan--the state is weak and ethnic resistance to opium eradication is strong, making future bilateral operations in these critical areas problematic.
Production Increase In Asian Zone (1979-1989)
Rise of the Drug Lords:
During this period, highland drug lords, for the first time in the history of the traffic, began to act as independent entrepreneurs, responding creatively to market opportunities and taking significant initiatives to expand production and markets for their product.
In Burma, for example, opium production increased exponentially from 550 tons in 1981 to 2,500 in 1989, in large part through the efforts of leading warlords like Khun Sa who controlled some 75 percent of the country's heroin production by the late 1980s. Although there, of course numerous underlying ecological and economic factors, Khun Sa's centralization of control over the Shan revolt and his determination to expand heroin production had a significant impact on the global traffic and the US drug problem. Similarly, the emergence of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar as the dominant rebel leader in Afghanistan created a parallel figure of power who could control much of the country's opium production, heroin processing, and export.
The capacity of powerful warlords such as these to both produce and export has had a growing influence on Western heroin markets--sending vast new supplies of Burmese heroin to America and giving the Sicilian mafia a major new role as brokers for South West Asian heroin to Europe and the United States.
Failure of Tolerance:
While bilateral attempts at suppression may compound the problem beyond the target nation, extreme tolerance or simple inaction over drugs within a producing nation had led to an explosive growth in opium cultivation.
After 1984-85, the Burmese government capitulated to the drug lords and Khun Sa formed a powerful new opium army--a combination that led to a surge in the country's opium production from 550 tons in 1981 to 2,500 in 1989. Similarly, Afghanistan, the collapse over government control over the countryside since the early 1980s is another apt case of the same proposition. The lesson: if a government abandons any attempt at suppression in its opium areas, the capacity for increased production is restrained only by land and labor.
Failure of Drug Wars:
If the United States is to purse a strategy of international repression, then focusing on a single drug seems a prescription for long-term failure. By focusing on cocaine in Colombia and, in effect, ignoring heroin in Burma, the United States allowed Burma's opium production to grow without restraint, creating an ample supply of an alternative narcotic for the US market.
Global Proliferation of Opium (1989-1994)
Globalization:
In the early 1990s, world opium supply is growing without any apparent restraint. Since all opium produced is always consumed, rising supply is now a powerful force driving a sharp increase in world heroin consumption, creating powerful demands that may, in turn, yield further production increases in Latin America or Central Asia.
In the 1990s, we are perhaps witnessing a recurrence of the pattern first evidenced in late 18th Century China: once mass opiate addiction is introduced to a market, demand becomes nearly insatiable and serves to stimulate further increases in global supply.
Opium Production & Consumption:
In the past decade, both production and consumption of opiates have increased in established zones and spread quickly into new areas.
Prognosis:
If current trends continue, there is no reason that world opium production, and consumption, should not double every five years into the foreseeable future.
SOURCES:
http://opioids.com/opium/history/
US Heroin War
Opium Connection
http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/heroin/opiwar1.htm
AFGHANISTAN OPIUM
In the news today, June 22, 2003, a story from London's Independent newspaper reports that Afghanistan has regained its title as the world's biggest heroin dealer. It says:
"Afghanistan is still the source of almost all of the heroin sold in London, even though Britain has poured millions [of taxpayers dollars] into [supposedly] trying to stamp out the war-wrecked country's resurgent drugs production business."
"Opium poppies are springing up from the plains to the mountains of Afghanistan in far higher quantities than in the final year of the Taliban, which the USA and Britain overthrew, while vowing to end the region's narcotics trade. Opium - from which heroin is extracted - is produced on farms only a few dozen miles from the capital city of Kabul, headquarters to the international effort to end the heroin trade and rebuild the country."
"...The cultivation of opium reached its peak in 1999, when 225,000 acres - 350 square miles - of poppies were sown... The following year the Taliban banned poppy cultivation, declaring it to be "un-Islamic" - a move which cut production by 94 per cent... By 2001 only 30 square miles of land were in use for growing opium poppies. A year later, after American and British troops had removed the Taliban and installed the interim government, the land under cultivation leapt back to 285 square miles, with Afghanistan supplanting Burma to become the world's largest opium producer once more."
I think it should be obvious to all thinking people at this point that the governments of Britain and the United States are profiting from heroin and have turned Afghanistan into one big Killing Field, the products of which will help destroy the Western World, just as they at one time destroyed China's civilization.
Orwell says in "1984" that "an evil sect named the Brotherhood" controlled all the governments of the world and that its goal was to "destroy the societies in which they lived" and that one of the ways they did this was "by distributing habit forming drugs".
Orwell had personal knowledge of the evil that governments do in this regard in that he himself was born on a poppy plantation in Motihari, northern India. His father, Richard Blair, worked for the Foreign Service as an "assistant sub-deputy opium agent, 1st grade." That's a fancy name for "drug dealer for the Crown". It was his job to make sure the British Government's poppies got to factories in Calcutta, where they were processed into opium that was then exported to China. In 1880, when Orwell's father started work in India, there were 15 million confirmed opium addicts in China. The Chinese Empire collapsed, from within, in 1912.
Orwell was one year old in 1904 when he left India with his mother and sister, and he only saw his father every five years or so when he came home on leave. He probably didn't find out about the nature of his father's work until many years later but knowing Orwell it had a profound effect on him. No doubt his five years spent in Burma from the ages of 19 to 23 also opened his eyes to Britain's role in the heroin trade there. It may be part of the reason he seemed to do penance with his life - suffering with the poorest of the poor and fighting against the powerful forces the only way he could - through his writing.
As the old adage goes: "Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it". It seems the Western World is in the process of a major attack on its civilization through heroin, cocaine and dangerous chemical and pharmaceutical substances. It's a force to be reckoned with. Too bad for us that the force is generated from within our own governments. It makes it tougher to beat. ~ Jackie Jura
SOURCE: http://www.orwelltoday.com/afghanheroin.shtml
CIA, COCAINE & CRACK
In August of 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published a three-part investigation by Gary Webb into the U.S. government's links to the trade in crack cocaine in South Central Los Angeles. Webb's investigation uncovered links between the Central Intelligence Agency's covert war against Nicaragua and convicted Los Angeles drug dealer "Freeway" Ricky Ross, whom the Los Angeles Times in 1994 had dubbed the "one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles' streets with mass-marketed cocaine." (20 December 1994 p. A20)
The (admittedly sensationalized, but basically accurate) story generated much controversy, and heated denials from the mainstream media (in particular the local paper of record, whose editor Shelby Coffey III couldn't bear the thought of someone else beating his paper out on a major story in his own backyard). This vehement denegation, however, is largely inconsistent with the historical record (some of which has been, and continues to be, reported in these same papers).
This web site is part of a long-standing research project of mine. As a scholar working at the interstices of speech communication and cultural studies, I have been investigating the public discourse surrounding the "war on drugs" as an exercise in disciplinary social control. This site is a database of information, evidence, and other resources that have helped guide me in this research project, and will hopefully help others working along the same lines.
The 1998 CIA budget was 26.7 billion dollars.
Ongoing Congressional investigation into the allegations raised in Gary Webb's August 1996 series of articles in the San Jose Mercury News, entitled 'Dark Alliance', that detailed the relationship between one crack kingpin in South Central Los Angeles and his CIA/Contra connected supplier.
CIA, Crack & Cocaine
CLASS ACTION LAWSUIT FILED AGAINST CIA/DOJ ON BEHALF OF CRACK COCAINE VICTIMS
CIA Targets Blacks for Crack
The CIA Report that admits cocaine trafficking!
QUOTATIONS
"I have put thousands of Americans away for tens of thousands of years for less evidence for conspiracy with less evidence than is available against Ollie North and CIA people. . . . I personally was involved in a deep-cover case that went to the top of the drug world in three countries. The CIA killed it."
Former DEA Agent Michael Levine
CNBC-TV, October 8, 1996
"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 Subcommittee found that the Contra drug links included:
* Involvement in narcotics trafficking by individuals associated with the Contra movement.
* Participation of narcotics traffickers in Contra supply operations through business relationships with Contra organizations.
* Provision of assistance to the Contras by narcotics traffickers, including cash, weapons, planes, pilots, air supply services and other materials, on a voluntary basis by the traffickers.
* Payments to drug traffickers by the US State Department of funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the Contras, in some cases after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies."
- Senate Committee Report on Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy (Chaired by Senator John F. Kerry)
"Honduran DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into US"
- Lt. Col. Oliver North (August 9, 1985)
"I really take great exception to the fact that 1,000 kilos came in, funded by US taxpayer money."
- DEA official Anabelle Grimm, during a 1993 interview on a CBS-TV "60 Minutes" segment entitled "The CIA's Cocaine." The 1991 CIA drug-smuggling event Ms. Grimm described was later found to be much larger. A Florida grand jury and the Wall Street Journal reported it to involve as much as 22 tons.
PHOTO ALBUM
The evidence of our government engaging in drugtrafficking is immense. And it reachs into the White House. Here is a bit of photographic evidence for you to consider. If these were isolated events, it would be easy to dismiss it. After all, mistakes are made. But these are just a few of dozens and dozens of evidentiary bits that would cause any reasonable person to conclude that it is true. Our government, while telling us that it is using the 18 Billion a year in tax money to fight the WAR ON DRUGS, is actually using it to expedite its drugtrafficking activities.
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.
Clouds Over George Bush [Robert Parry]
George Bush to Los Angeles drug operation
AL GORE AND HILLARY CLINTON POSE WITH DRUG TRAFFICKER JORGE CABRERA
Jorge Cabrera, a drug smuggler, has emerged as one of the most notorious supporters of President Clinton's re-election campaign.
These historic photos first surfaced briefly during President Clinton's last reelection campaign. Just as quickly they vanished into the ether. In return for a $20,000 donation to the Democratic National Committee (part of which came from cocaine smuggled to the United States from Columbia according to Republican investigators), drug trafficker Jorge Cabrera was invited to dinner with Vice President Gore. A little over a week later, he was invited to a Christmas reception and met and posed with First Lady Hillary Clinton. According to the New York Times, April 4, 1997, at the time these photos were taken, Cabrera had two felony drug convictions. Since that time, he was arrested for smuggling 3 tons of cocaine into Florida. He pled guilty and was sentenced to 19 years in prison.
CLINTON COCAINE CHRONICLES:
Clinton Cocaine Hole
ARKANSAS GOVERNOR BILL CLINTON, PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH, CIA DRUGS FOR GUNS CONNECTION
MENA
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 (a probable setup by the court system), the plane was used in the gun running operation to Nicaragua, ending with the crash.
Why Does George W. Bush Fly in Drug Smuggler Barry Seal's Airplane?
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.
Politicians elected on a promise to investigate Mena quickly broke those promises.
Appearing before Congress, Former IRS Criminal Investigator William Duncan testified that
he was ordered to suppress information about Mena by his superiors, and that investigations into Mena were shut down on orders from the US Attorney!
Even a Congressman, US Representative Bill Alexander, whose appeal to Bill Clinton for investigative funding was ignored, charged that he had found interference in the Mena affair from the IRS!
Angered by what appeared to be a cover up, Alexander threatened budget cuts on non-cooperative agencies, then directly challenged Richard Thornburgh, the Attorney General Of The United States, to look into Mena. Thornburgh promised he would investigate. He never did.
The IRS works for the Department of the Treasury. Hence, it was worth noting that following US Representative Bill Alexander's complaints of IRS interference, another division of the Treasury Department, the Customs Bureau, issued the following memo, requesting that all records, especially paper records relating to activities at Mena be sent to Washington D.C.. Included in the memo was the request that Customs be notified if no records were found in the individual offices.
Click for full size picture.(352K)
Here is a transcript of the first paragraph.(A capital X signifies an unreadable character)
"The House Committee on Banking and Financial Services is
requesting Customs to make available to the Committee all
documents and communications in Customs possession related to
alleged money laundering and drug activities occurring at Mena
Airport, Arkansas. Attached for your review and action is the
Committee's letter and several attachments listing individuals,
firms, case numbers etc. The Committee requests Customs search
its records for information and documents related to the
information contained in the Attachments to the Committee's
letter."
Even the press seemed to have a blind spot where Mena was concerned. Writer Roger Morris (author of "Partners In Power") and Sally Denton wrote a well-researched article entitled The Crimes Of Mena. This story, based on Barry Seal's surviving records, had been fact checked and cleared for publication by the legal staff of the Washington Post, when it was suddenly spiked without explanation by Managing Editor Bob Kaiser, a fellow Skull & Bones alumni with ex CIA chief George Bush.
With only a few notable exceptions like Jack Anderson, and Sarah McClendon, along with a few small town newspapers like the Ozark Gazette, The Guardian, the mainstream press's silence has been deafening.
This self-imposed blindness towards Mena by the America media did not go unnoticed by the foreign press, most notably among them London Telegraph journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard.
Mena is a current issue. The recent revelations of highly questionable fundraising practices in the 1996 election, coupled with the suspicious deaths of four 1992 Clinton fundraisers, raises the ugly possibility that the American Presidency, like those of Columbia and Mexico (and so many others), has been bought and paid for with drug money.
SOURCE SITES:
MENA
The Crimes Of Mena
THE BUSH-CHENEY DRUG EMPIRE
As described by the Associated Press, during "Iran-Contra" Congressman Dick Cheney of the House Intelligence Committee was a rabid supporter of Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North. This was in spite of the fact that North had lied to Cheney in a private 1986 White House briefing. Oliver North's own diaries and subsequent investigations by the CIA Inspector General have irrevocably tied him directly to cocaine smuggling during the 1980s and the opening of bank accounts for one firm moving four tons of cocaine a month. This, however, did not stop Cheney from actively supporting North's 1994 unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate from Virginia just a year before he took over the reins at Brown and Root's parent company, Dallas based Halliburton Inc. in 1995.
As the Bush Secretary of Defense during Desert Shield/Desert Storm (1990-91), Cheney also directed special operations involving Kurdish rebels in northern Iran. The Kurds' primary source of income for more than fifty years has been heroin smuggling from Afghanistan and Pakistan through Iran, Iraq and Turkey. Having had some personal experience with Brown and Root I noted carefully when the Los Angeles Times observed that on March 22, 1991 that a group of gunmen burst into the Ankara, Turkey offices of the joint venture, Vinnell, Brown and Root and assassinated retired Air Force Chief Master Sergeant John Gandy.
In March of 1991, tens of thousands of Kurdish refugees, long-time assets of the CIA, were being massacred by Saddam Hussein in the wake of the Gulf War. Saddam, seeking to destroy any hopes of a successful Kurdish revolt, found it easy to kill thousands of the unwanted Kurds who had fled to the Turkish border seeking sanctuary. There, Turkish security forces, trained in part by the Vinnell, Brown and Root partnership, turned thousands of Kurds back into certain death. Today, the Vinnell Corporation (a TRW Company) is, along with the firms MPRI and DynCorp (FTW June, 00) one of the three pre-eminent private mercenary corporations in the world. It is also the dominant entity for the training of security forces throughout the Middle East. Not surprisingly the Turkish border regions in question were the primary transhipment points for heroin, grown in Afghanistan and Pakistan and destined for the markets of Europe.
A confidential source with intelligence experience in the region subsequently told Michael Ruppert that the Kurds "got some payback against the folks that used to help them move their drugs." He openly acknowledged that Brown and Root and Vinnell both routinely provided NOC or non-official cover for CIA officers. But we already knew that...
From 1994 to 1999, during US military intervention in the Balkans where, according to "The Christian Science Monitor" and "Jane's Intelligence Review," the Kosovo Liberation Army controls 70 per cent of the heroin entering Western Europe, Cheney's Brown and Root made billions of dollars supplying U.S. troops from vast facilities in the region. Brown and Root support operations continue in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia to this day.
BROWN & ROOT
Halliburton Corporation's Brown & Root is one of the major components of the Bush-Cheney Drug Empire. The success of Bush Vice-Presidential running mate Richard Cheney at leading Halliburton, Inc. to a five-year, US$3.8 billion "pig-out" on federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans is only a partial indicator of what may happen, now that the Bush ticket has won the US presidential election.
A closer look at available research, including an August 2, 2000 report by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) (www.public-i.org), suggests that drug money has played a role in the successes achieved by Halliburton under Cheney's tenure as CEO from 1995 to 2000. This is especially true for Halliburton's most famous subsidiary, heavy construction and oil giant Brown & Root. A deeper look into history reveals that Brown & Root's past - as well as the past of Dick Cheney himself - connects to the international drug trade on more than one occasion and in more than one way.
Last June, the lead Washington, DC, attorney for a major Russian oil company connected in law enforcement reports to heroin smuggling, and also a beneficiary of US-backed loans to pay for Brown & Root contracts in Russia, held a $2.2 million fundraiser to fill the already bulging coffers of presidential candidate George W. Bush. This is not the first time that Brown & Root has been connected to illegal drugs, and the fact is that this "poster child" of American industry may also be a key player in Wall Street's efforts to maintain domination of the half-trillion-dollar-a-year global drug trade and its profits. And Dick Cheney, who has also come closer to illegal drugs than most suspect and who is also Halliburton's largest individual shareholder ($45.5 million), has a vested interest in seeing to it that Brown & Root's successes continue.
Of all the American companies dealing directly with the US military and providing cover for CIA operations, few firms can match the global presence of this giant construction powerhouse which employs 20,000 people in more than 100 countries. Through its sister companies or joint ventures, Brown & Root can build offshore oil rigs, drill wells and construct and operate everything from harbours and pipelines to highways and nuclear reactors. It can train and arm security forces and it can now also feed, supply and house armies. One key beacon of Brown & Root's overwhelming appeal to agencies like the CIA is that, as it proudly announces from its own corporate web page, it has received the contract to dismantle ageing Russian nuclear-tipped ICBMs in their silos. Furthermore, the relationships between key institutions, players and the Bushes themselves suggest that under a George "W" Administration the Bush family and its allies, using Brown & Root as the operational interface, may well be able to control the drug trade all the way from Medellín to Moscow.
Originally formed as a heavy construction company to build dams, Brown & Root grew its operations via shrewd political contributions to Senate candidate Lyndon Johnson in 1948. Expanding into the building of oil platforms, military bases, ports, nuclear facilities, harbours and tunnels, Brown & Root virtually underwrote LBJ's political career. It prospered as a result, making billions on US Government contracts during the Vietnam War. The Austin Chronicle, in an August 28, 2000 Op-Ed piece entitled "The Candidate from Brown & Root", labels Republican Cheney as the political dispenser of Brown & Root's largesse. According to political campaign records, during Cheney's five-year tenure at Halliburton the company's political contributions more than doubled to $1.2 million. Not surprisingly, most of that money went to Republican candidates.
Independent news service Newsmakingnews also describes how in 1998, with Cheney as Chairman, Halliburton spent $8.1 billion to purchase oil industry equipment and drilling supplier Dresser Industries. This made Halliburton a corporation that will have a presence in almost any future oil drilling operation anywhere in the world. And it also brought back into the family fold the company which had once (also in 1948) sent a plane to fetch the new Yale graduate George H.W. Bush to begin his career in the Texas oil business. Bush the elder's father, Prescott, served as a managing director for the firm that once owned Dresser: Brown Brothers Harriman.
Bush-Cheney Drug Empire
BUSH-CHENEY DRUG EMPIRE
The Bush Machine And The Drug Cartel
George Bush's Drugging Of America: How It Was Accomplished
George Bush's Phone Number Found In Drug Smuggler's Trunk
George Bush's Phone Number Found in Drug Smuggler's Trunk - Affidavit of Sam Dalton
Affidavit of Gene Tatum
KingPin Indictment Of George Bush
Justice Department Memorandum Identifies George Bush As Drug Trafficker:
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CIA CONFIRMS DECADES OF CIA DRUG TRADE
Since WeThePeople originally published the results of Bradely Earl Ayers investigation of CIA proprietary Southern Air Transport, the CIA itself has confirmed the results of his investigation in Volume II of its Inspector General's report. Yet more proof, if any were needed, that what the small army of former DEA, CIA, and FBI agents and whistlblowers has been saying is true: The CIA has been up to its neck in the drug trade for decades.
Verbatim from Volume II of its Inspector General's report:
800. Background. Southern Air Transport (SAT) carried a variety of equipment, supplies and humanitarian aid for the FDN during the 1980s.
801. Allegations of Drug Trafficking. A January 21, 1987 memorandum from ADCI Robert Gates to Morton Abramowitz, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, stated that the U.S. Customs Service had advised CIA that the Customs office in New Orleans was investigating an allegation of drug trafficking by SAT crew members. The Gates memorandum noted that the source of the allegation was a senior FDN official. The memorandum indicated that the FDN official was concerned that "scandal emanating from Southern Air Transport could redound badly on FDN interests, including humanitarian aid from the United States."
802 .A February 23, 1991 DEA cable to CIA linked SAT to drug trafficking. The cable reported that SAT was "of record" in DEA's database from January 1985-September 1990 for alleged involvement in cocaine trafficking. An August 1990 entry in DEA's database reportedly alleged that $2 million was delivered to the firm's business sites, and several of the firm's pilots and executives were suspected of smuggling "narcotics currency."
803. Information Sharing with Other U.S. Government Entities. As previously noted, a January 21, 1987 memorandum from ADCI Robert Gates to Morton Abramowitz, Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research, reported that U.S. Customs had informed CIA that the Customs office in New Orleans was investigating an allegation of drug trafficking by SAT crew members.
CIA Drugs
50 Years of Drug Dealing by the CIA
