American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us (16 page)

I can't exempt Bill Clinton from possible knowledge about some of this. A little airport in Mena, Arkansas, happened to have been a center for international drug smuggling between 1981 and 1985. That's when Clinton was governor of the state. Barry Seal, who had ties to the CIA and was an undercover informant for the DEA, kept his plane at Mena and “smuggled between $3 billion and $5 billion of drugs into the U.S.”
²⁰
Seal was also part of the Reagan administration's effort to implicate the Sandinistas in the drug traffic, though he was actually smuggling weapons to the Contras. He ended up brutally murdered by his former employers with Colombia's Medellin cartel, in Baton Rouge, on February 19, 1986. Among the articles found in Seal's car were then-Vice President Bush's private phone number.

Clinton said he learned about Mena after that, in April 1988, even though the state police had been investigating the goings-on there for several years. In September 1991, he spoke publicly about “all kinds of questions about whether he [Seal] had any links to the C.I.A ... and if that backed into the Iran-Contra deal.” But Seal's contraband in Mena generated hundreds of millions that needed to be money-laundered, and his papers show that he dealt with at least one big Little Rock bank. Several inquiries into Mena were stifled, and IRS agent Bill Duncan told Congress in 1992—during the Clinton presidential campaign—that his superiors directed him to “withhold information from Congress and perjure myself.”
²¹
Looks like Clinton may have been tainted by the Iran-Contra madness himself.

Okay, the Reagan-Bush gang is gone, and Clinton is now president. It's 1996 when the
San Jose Mercury News
comes out with a remarkable 20,000-word series by reporter Gary Webb that he'd been researching for more than a year. It described a pipeline between Colombian cartels, middlemen, and street gangs in South Central L.A. that involved tons of crack cocaine. Webb's article featured Oscar Danilo Blandón, a drug importer and informant who'd testified in federal court that “whatever we were running in L.A., the profit was going to the Contra revolution.” Blandón also said that Colonel Enrique Bermudez, the CIA asset leading the Contra army against the Sandinista government, was aware that these funds came from drug running. Except the CIA had squelched a federal investigation into Blandón in the name of “national security.” The crack was being funneled to a young new-millionaire named “Freeway” Ricky Donnell Ross, who supplied it to the Crips and Bloods and beyond. When Ross got nailed and went to trial in 1996, the prosecutors obtained a court order to prevent the defense from questioning Blandón about his CIA connections. All of which raised a huge question: how involved was the CIA in the crack epidemic then raging across our country?
²²

Well, you'd think Gary Webb should have gotten a Pulitzer. Instead, he got torn apart by the big media. In page-one articles, the
Washington Post
,
New York Times
, and
L.A. Times
insisted that Contra-cocaine smuggling was minor, and that Webb was blowing it all out of proportion. They made it look like Webb was targeting the poor CIA, when he'd never said that the CIA,
per se
, was arranging the drug deals, only that it was protecting the Contra dealers.

In 2009, a new book came out that makes my blood boil. It's called
This Is Your Country on Drugs
, and among other revelations, it tells of how the
Washington Post
“had facts at its disposal demonstrating that the [Webb] story was accurate,” except they ended up on the editing-room floor. That's because National Security correspondent Walter Pincus made sure they would. Pincus, it turns out, had “flirted with joining the CIA and is routinely accused of having been an undercover asset in the '50s,” a charge the journalist once called “overblown.”
²³

Here's another example of the media's role in the cover-up: the
L.A. Times
, two years earlier, had profiled “Freeway” Ricky as South Central's first millionaire crack dealer. But, two months after Webb's series tied Ross into the Contra network, the
Times
turned to a whole new slant. Ross, the paper said, was but one of a number of “interchangeable characters.”
²⁴

So Gary Webb was basically drummed out of journalism by his “brethren” at the larger papers. Who gives our media these mandates to arbitrarily destroy someone's credibility, blackball them because they've written something controversial? I guess people forget the simplicity of the First Amendment—it's there to protect
unpopular
speech. Because popular speech doesn't need protecting.

In 2004, Gary Webb's body was found and it was ruled a suicide. I call this a tragedy that should weigh heavily on the consciences of those who intentionally destroyed his reputation. Or maybe it was actually murder: Webb was shot
twice
in the head with a vintage revolver—meaning he would have had to have cocked the hammer of the revolver back after being shot in the head at point-blank range with a .38.

It's a proven fact that the CIA's into drugs, we even know why. It's because they can get money to operate with, and not have to account to Congress for what they're doing. All this is justified because of the “big picture.” But doesn't it really beg for a massive investigation and trials and a whole lot of people going to jail? This includes the big banks that allow the dirty money to be laundered through them.

Let's take a longer look at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International—or, as our current defense secretary Robert Gates once called BCCI, the Bank of Crooks and Criminals.
²⁵
As CIA deputy director twenty years ago, Gates was in position to know. But when US Customs Commissioner William von Raab was getting ready to arrest some folks involved with drug money laundering at a BCCI subsidiary in Florida, “Gates failed to disclose the CIA's own use of BCCI to channel payments for covert operations, which the customs chief learned about only later—and thanks to documents supplied to him by British customs agents in London.”
²⁶

At one time BCCI had more than 400 branches in 78 countries and assets of over $20 billion. Most everywhere, “BCCI systematically relied on relationships with, and as necessary, payments to, prominent political figures,” as a Senate report put it. The bank had started out in Pakistan in 1972, with much of the start-up funding being provided by the CIA and the Bank of America. By the early 1980s, the National Security Council's man charged with tracking terrorist financing, Norman Bailey, said “we were aware that BCCI was involved in drug-money transactions,” but the NSC took no action. Probably because CIA Director Casey was relying on BCCI to distribute American assistance to the Afghan mujahideen who were fighting the Russians at the time. Except most of the aid went to the faction controlled by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was probably the leading heroin trafficker in the world. Pakistani president Muhammad Zia in 1983 let local traffickers put their drug profits into BCCI.
²⁷
John Kerry's committee came across the bank's role in drugs and started to investigate, but received basically zero “information or cooperation provided by other government agencies.”
²⁸

BCCI was the seventh biggest bank on the planet when it collapsed, shortly after the Soviets withdrew their troops from Afghanistan. The mainstream media had started reporting on BCCI's activities early in 1991—“The World's Sleaziest Bank” was the headline on
Time
magazine's cover story. Soon the Bank of England pulled the plug and regulators started shutting down BCCI's offices in dozens of countries. It was also the largest Islamic bank, and one fellow said to have lost a lot of invested money when BCCI fell apart was Osama bin Laden.
²⁹
After that, to make up for his missing revenue, bin Laden started cooperating with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghan warlord who was taking profits from drugs and putting them into Islamic terrorist movements.
³⁰

This brings us up to the present, and what's going on today in Afghanistan and Mexico. I'm going to rely first on a recent article by Peter Dale Scott, called “Afghanistan: Heroin-Ravaged State.”
³¹
He says that's how we should think of Afghanistan, rather than as a “failed state.” One statistic he cites is that in 2007, according to our State Department, Afghanistan was supplying 93 percent of the world's opium, the illicit production of poppies bringing in $4 billion—more than half the country's total economy of $7.5 billion.

But even though 90 percent of the world's heroin is originating in Afghanistan, their share of the proceeds in dollar terms is only about 10 percent of that. It's estimated that more than 80 percent of the profits actually get reaped in the countries where the heroin is consumed, like the U.S. According to the U.N., “money made in illicit drug trade has been used to keep banks afloat in the global financial crisis.”

So who's making out like bandits? It's a familiar story. Drug trafficking is tolerated in exchange for intelligence, simple as that. Here's what Dennis Dayle, a former top DEA agent in the Middle East, said at an anti-drug conference a couple years back: “In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.”

After 9/11, when the U.S. sent troops to Afghanistan that fall of 2001, “the Pentagon had a list of twenty-five or more drug labs and warehouses in Afghanistan but refused to bomb them because some belonged to the CIA's new NA [Northern Alliance] allies.”
³²
The CIA mounted its anti-Taliban coalition by recruiting and sometimes even importing drug dealers, many of them being old assets from the 1980s. Friends, family, and allies of Afghan president Hamid Karzai are heavily involved. It recently came out that Karzai's brother is not only involved with the drug trade, but has been receiving regular payments from the CIA for the last eight years!
³³

Another of the traffickers, Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, who was the country's defense secretary and may be its next vice president. He was a general when the U.S. swept into Afghanistan after 9/11, worked closely with the CIA, and got rewarded with millions in cash. Except by 2002, the CIA was well aware that Marshal Fahim was into the heroin trade—long before the invasion, and after becoming defense minister. “He now had a Soviet-made cargo plane at his disposal that was making flights north to transport heroin through Russia, returning laden with cash.” So what was the Bush Administration's response? “American military trainers would be directed to deal only with subordinates to Marshal Fahim.”
³⁴
Gee, I'll bet
they
were clean! As clean as Karzai's brother anyway.

Pakistan's ISI intelligence service, which we'll be talking about again in terms of financing the 9/11 terrorists, is another big player. One expert says there is an ISI-backed Islamist drug route of al Qaeda allies that stretches across all of North Central Asia.
³⁵
Richard Holbrooke, who is now Obama's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, wrote in an op-ed in 2008 that “breaking the narco-state in Afghanistan is essential, or all else will fail.” Holbrooke also said that it's a complete waste of money to aerial-spray the poppy fields, which costs about a billion dollars a year, as this only serves to strengthen the Taliban and al Qaeda with the local people.

Of course, Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon under Bush-II “fiercely resisted efforts to draw the United States military into supporting counternarcotics efforts” because they feared this “would only antagonize corrupt regional warlords whose support they needed.” Now, under Obama, supposedly “fifty suspected Afghan drug traffickers believed to have ties to the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon target list to be captured or killed.”
³⁶
But at the same time, the CIA and the DIA now say that the Taliban are getting much
less
money from the drug trade than was previously thought, and “that American officials did not believe that Afghan drug money was fueling Al Qaeda.” The question this raises in my mind is: then who's making off with the profits? Karzai's brother, Marshal Fahim, the Pakistani government, and some people in the CIA maybe?

The heroin trade took a dive at the beginning of this century because the Taliban put them out of business. When that poppy supply was put on hold for awhile, isn't it ironic that some of the big banks tumbled? Is it because that dirty money wasn't getting laundered through their establishments? But apparently, we think it's better to be in bed with the heroin producers than work with the Taliban.

Now let's turn our attention closer to home, and our neighbor Mexico. “Even in the last decade, when it has become more fashionable to write about Mexico as a ‘narco-democracy,' few, if any, authors address the American share of responsibility for the staggering corruption that has afflicted Mexican politics.”
³⁷
Drug trafficking in Mexico actually dates back to the Harrison Anti-Narcotics Act of 1914 that made it illegal here at home, coupled with Mexico's revolution making its northern section pretty much ungovernable.