American Conspiracies: Lies, Lies, and More Dirty Lies That the Government Tells Us (17 page)

The same year the CIA was formed in 1947, the U.S. helped create Mexico's intelligence service called the DFS. Colonel Carlos Serrano, the brains behind that, was already connected to the drug traffic. Mexico soon became the main way station for smuggling heroin into the U.S. and Canada. Over time, the collusion only increased. Just as in Afghanistan, the CIA “was consciously drawing on Mexican drug-traffickers and their protectors as off-the-books assets.” When Miguel Nazar Haro got busted in San Diego in 1981, the FBI and CIA both intervened because he was “an essential repeat essential contact for CIA station in Mexico City.”
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When DEA agent Enrique Camarena was murdered, the CIA got busy protecting the top traffickers behind it. During the eighties, CIA Director Casey helped keep drug lord Miguel Felix Gallardo safe, because he was passing funds along to the Contras. Gallardo's Honduran supplier was estimated to supply “perhaps one-third of all the cocaine consumed in the United States.”
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Not surprisingly, narco-corruption in Mexico quickly spread to other agencies of law enforcement. By the time Carlos Salinas became president in the nineties, his attorney general's office was “as much as 95 percent ... under narco-control.” DFS agents were regularly escorting narcotics shipments through Mexico, and selling drugs they seized to organizations they favored. The DFS was carrying out high-level busts with the assistance of even higher-level traffickers. Operation Condor, carried out with the CIA's help, did the Guadalajara cartel “a great service by winnowing out the competition.”
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A new class of oligarchs—known as the “twelve billionaires”—sprang up under Salinas's policy of “directed” deregulation. Some of the privatized businesses got “snapped up by traffickers in order to launder and invest the profits from their drug operations.” Citibank helped the president's brother, Raul Salinas, hide his fortune in safe places, and Citibank's role would later be described as “willfully blind” drug money laundering. Now-defunct Lehman Brothers was right in there too, helping Mexico's regional governor Mario Villanueva Madrid go into hiding after he got targeted in a drug-and-racketeering investigation.
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Beginning in the nineties, drug dealers in Mexico were taking charge of half of Colombia's drug trade into the U.S. While Mexico used to be just the trans shipping point from South America, now it was a major producer and distributor. Numerous new cartels came into existence—Sinaloa, Los Zetas, La Familia Michoacana, and more—with its gangs even taking control of cocaine networks in many American cities and clandestinely growing marijuana on our public lands. Today, authorities figure that between $19 billion and $39 billion in proceeds from drugs heads back south every year from the U.S.
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Of course, the death toll figures on what's happening in Mexico's drug war are astounding. Between December 2006 and the spring of 2009, more than 10,780 people were killed.
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And most of the guns fueling the violence are coming from the U.S. About 87 percent of the firearms that Mexican authorities have seized over the last five years can be traced to here, many of them from gun shops and gun shows in the Southwestern border states.
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And these are no longer simply handguns, but now military-grade weaponry and very serious ordnance. How come the manufacturers are not being held accountable for selling these weapons over the border? My wife and I have driven across the border three times and nobody's even stopped us—I could have had a Hummer-full of automatic weapons.

Since Bush-II and Mexican president Felipe Calderon announced their $6 billion Plan Mexico in 2007—with the bulk of the money going to military training and hardware—the production of Colombian cocaine seems to have actually increased.
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To his credit, Obama stepped things up on the drugs-and-guns front, threatening to prosecute any Americans doing business with three of the most violent cartels and looking to seize billions of dollars in the cartels' assets.
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I give Obama praise for renouncing the “war on drugs” phrase, on grounds that it promotes incarceration and not treatment. Before the election, Obama said: “I think it's time we take a hard look at the wisdom of locking up some first time nonviolent drug users for decades.... Let's reform this system.”
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I'm waiting for him to follow through on that promise. To his credit, the Justice Department has released new guidelines that reverse a Bush Administration policy. Now federal officers are instructed not to go after marijuana users or suppliers who are in compliance with states' laws on medical usage.

But isn't it high time for complete reform of our drug policy? We've got a shadow economy happening, friends. One hundred million Americans have sampled marijuana, and that includes almost half of all the seniors in high school. More than 35 million Americans have tried cocaine at some point, and almost as many have taken LSD or other hallucinogenic drugs.
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Meantime, we've got “grows” or “gardens” of pot springing up all across our western states on public lands—and that includes almost 40 percent of national forests. About 3.1 million marijuana plants were confiscated in national forests over a one-year period, September '07 to September '08, carrying a street value calculated at $12.4 billion.
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I mean, how stupid are we? Go back to Chicago and Prohibition, when Al Capone became more powerful than the government because we'd outlawed the selling of liquor. Legalize marijuana, and you put the cartels out of business! Instead, we're going to further militarize our border and go shoot it out with them? And if a few thousand poor Mexicans get killed in the crossfire, too bad. I don't get that mentality. I don't understand how this is the proper way, the adult answer, when they could do it another way. Eventually, after thousands more people get killed, they'll probably arrive at the same answer: legalization. Because there's nothing else that will work.

And legalization would go a long way toward giving us a more legitimate government, too—a government that doesn't have to shield drug dealers who happen to be doing its dirty work. There are clearly people in government making money off drugs. Far more people, statistically, die from prescription drugs than illegal drugs. But the powers that be don't want you to be able to use a drug that you don't have to pay for, such as marijuana. Thirteen states now have voted to allow use of medical marijuana. Thank goodness Barack Obama just came out with a new policy stating that the feds are not going to interfere as long as people are following state law. That's a great step toward legalization.

You can't legislate stupidity, is an old saying I used in governing. Just because you make something illegal doesn't mean it's going away, it just means it'll now be run by criminals. But is using an illegal drug a criminal offense, or a medical one? I tend to believe medical, because that's customarily how addictions are treated, we don't throw you in jail for them. In a free society, that's an oxymoron—going to jail for committing a crime against yourself.

The government is telling people what's good for them and what's not, but that should be a choice made by us, not those in power. Look at the consequences when it's the other way around.

“If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator.”

—George W. Bush, CNN, December 18, 2000

We all know what happened back in 2000, when the Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the presidency by ordering the vote recount stopped in Florida. Al Gore had won the popular vote nationwide by about a half million votes, but couldn't get a majority in the Electoral College without Florida. A lot of us also suspect that John Kerry actually won the presidency in 2004, except for Ohio's Republican secretary of state manipulating the vote totals there in Bush's favor.

Would it surprise you to learn that massive conspiracies were involved in both those elections—and that the Republicans were on the verge of trying to steal it again in 2008? The main reason they didn't was because their key vote-stealer got forced into a court deposition the day before the election—only to die in the crash of his private plane a little more than a month later. His name was Michael Connell. He was Karl Rove's IT (Information Technology) guy, whose computer handiwork helped swing Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 for Bush. We'll get to Connell's story later in the chapter, including some new information that's never been published before.

But let's start with a look back at what happened in 2000. It was around 2:15 AM Eastern time when Fox News led the networks' charge in projecting Bush the winner. The fellow who started this was John Ellis. He headed up Fox's decision team and just happened to be the cousin of W and Jeb, who just happened to be the governor of Florida. “Jebbie says we got it! Jebbie says we got it!” Ellis was heard shouting as he got off the phone with his Florida cousin, and it didn't take more than a couple of minutes before Fox called it that way.
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And within the four minutes after that, like bleating sheep, NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN followed suit. That was when Gore made his phone call to Bush conceding the election, although he reconsidered as the Florida results suddenly tightened up.

Obviously there was nepotism involved in Fox News's decision. CBS later said that a “critical” factor in its own call for Bush was the vote count in Florida's Volusia County, where it turned out that more than 16,000 votes had been subtracted from Gore's total by the electronic voting machines. One of Gore's campaign staff got suspicious and found out he was actually ahead in Volusia by 13,000 votes. That's when Gore took back his concession. Later on, the “mistake” was tracked to a company called Global Election Systems. Two months after the election, an internal memo from their master programmer, Talbot Iredale, blamed the problem on a memory card that had been uploaded improperly—and unnecessarily. Iredale said: “There is always the possibility that the ‘second memory card' or ‘second upload' came from an unauthorized source.”
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That phrase “unauthorized source” kinda raises a red flag, doesn't it. This “faulty memory card” was pretty much forgotten once everybody started talking about hanging chads and butterfly ballots. Now I myself am pretty much computer illiterate, but my wife is not. She's not a person that swears often, but every day when she's on the computer, I'm listening to her cuss. That speaks volumes to me on a basic level; it tells me that computers often screw up. Because, let's face it, they're still made by humans, and we're going to make mistakes. So they can be manipulated. When you see all the identity fraud that goes on today, how easy would it be to create voter fraud? It's ripe.

I believe all votes should still be paper ballots and hand-counted. I'm proud to say Minnesota is still that way, and I hope this never changes. Look at it like this: Would you use an ATM machine that didn't give you a receipt? Well, these electronic voting machines don't do that. There's no way to keep a record of whom you voted for, so there can't be a valid recount. When computers can be used to change votes, it challenges the legality of our system. The only way to change that is to go back and make it as primitive as you can, one person one vote.

Changing the vote electronically was far from the only scam going down in Florida in 2000. Journalist Greg Palast was reporting soon after the election about how Katharine Harris and Jeb Bush set out to do some “ethnic cleansing” on the voter rolls ahead of time. You see, Florida has a state law that convicted felons aren't allowed to vote. So they hired a private contractor called Database Technologies (DBT), a division of ChoicePoint, whose board was studded with Republican bigwigs, to look for any crooks who were also registered voters. The database eventually listed 57,700 Florida citizens, and local election supervisors were told to purge them.

Except, more than 90 percent of those people never committed any felonies! More than half of them were either black or Hispanic, and likely to have voted for a Democrat. Early in 2001, when the U.S. Civil Rights Commission became the only agency to look into how Florida handled the disputed election, it concluded there had been a possible conspiracy by Katharine Harris and others. Besides denying the so-called “felons” their voting rights, Jeb Bush had ordered state troopers near the polling sites to delay people for hours while they searched their cars. Two photo IDs were required at some precincts, even though Florida law only required one. In certain black precincts, ballot boxes disappeared or ended up found later in strange places, never having been collected.
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This story ran big in the media—but only across the Atlantic in England. Palast tried to get it into the American media in the weeks when the recount was still happening. CBS told him it didn't seem to hold up. Why? Well, because they'd called Jeb Bush's office to ask.
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The
Washington Post
did run a Page One story, but not until June of 2001—even though they'd had the story seven months earlier, when it might have made a difference.
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Our media should be ashamed of their part in undermining American democracy. You had newsmen like Tim Russert saying, the day after the election, that it was probably time for Gore to “play statesman and concede.”
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Did you ever hear of any media suggesting that Bush call it a day? Not a one!

The dirty tricks just kept on happening. Remember how both sides fought about the counting of absentee ballots from overseas? One Republican operative says there was a long conference call after the election where Bush's boys talked about having some people near overseas military bases organize a little get-out-the-vote drive. They'd be registered voters, of course, but just happened to have forgotten to cast their ballot on election day. So what if it was a few days later? As of November 13, a total of 446 military absentee ballots had arrived; by the 17th, the number had soared to 3,733. Raise any eyebrows that maybe somebody should've been charged with a felony?
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I get a sense of déjà vu when I see what's happened more recently with the disrupters of the Obama Administration's Town Hall meetings on health care. There was a manual recount underway in Miami-Dade County when dozens of screaming GOP demonstrators—shipped in from Washington—started banging on doors and a picture window at the election headquarters. Several people got “trampled, punched or kicked.” Gore had already received a net gain of 168 votes when the canvassing board panicked and stopped the recount. Most of the mob ended up receiving nice rewards within the Republican Party.
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So, on December 12, just when a Florida District Court judge was about to order a complete statewide hand recount, the Supreme Court rendered its decision. Justice Anthony Scalia said he thought that to keep on counting would “threaten irreparable harm to the petitioner [Bush] and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legality of his decision.”
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What legality? I have never understood what precedents the Supreme Court used in doing this. You had a branch of federal government stepping in and interfering with what should be completely a states' rights issue. The feds should have no dog in the fight. I agree with Vince Bugliosi, who wrote that the justices who did this should be put in jail for overstepping their bounds!

After it was too late, the
Washington Post
published a piece about how if all the votes had been recounted in all 67 counties, Gore would probably have been in the White House. A study cited by CBS and AP, conducted by the University of Chicago, reported: “Under any standard that tabulated all disputed votes statewide, Gore erased Bush's advantage” and won by a narrow margin.
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Ho-hum, I guess, the deal was already done.

Of course, Gore won the national popular vote from the get-go. How can you get a half million more votes than the other guy and lose? The presidential is the only election where we allow that to happen. We should have gotten rid of the Electoral College long ago. It was fine back in the days when everybody was still on horseback. We now have cars and airplanes, and it's time to leave an antiquated system behind. Who's profiting from keeping it going? As a third-party guy, I was hoping 2004 would bring the opposite result: Bush would win the popular vote and Kerry would take the Electoral. Maybe that would have brought them to the table to abolish the whole thing.

But 2004, it turned out, was even more blatant election theft than in 2000. The exit polls were predicting a huge victory for Kerry. But, by late that night, somehow Bush had taken a decisive lead and Kerry conceded on the day after. “There is no evidence of vote theft or errors on a large scale,” the
New York Times
“informed” us. The
Washington Post
called any talk of vote fraud “conspiracy theories.”
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Bull-crap. For starters here's what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. later documented: “Nearly half of the 6 million American voters living abroad never received their ballots—or received them too late to vote—after the Pentagon unaccountably shut down a state-of-the-art Web site used to file overseas registrations. A consulting firm called Sproul & Associates, which was hired by the Republican National Committee to register voters in six battleground states, was discovered shredding Democratic registrations. In New Mexico, which was decided by 5,988 votes, malfunctioning machines mysteriously failed to properly register a presidential vote on more than 20,000 ballots. Nationwide, according to the federal commission charged with implementing election reforms, as many as 1 million ballots were spoiled by faulty voting equipment—roughly one for every 100 cast.”
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The electronic voting machines played an even bigger role in the 2004 election, with 36 million votes being cast on the touch-screen systems owned by four private companies that use their own proprietary software. Three of those companies had close ties to the Republican Party. One of them, Diebold (including employees and their families) had contributed at least $300,000 to GOP candidates and party funds since 1998. The company's CEO, Walden O'Dell, had gone so far in a fund-raising e-mail as to promise to deliver Ohio to Bush in '04!
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With enemies like that, Kerry could have used a few friends demanding a return to paper ballots.

Ohio was where Bush's “victory” put him over the top in the electoral college. From 12:20 in the morning until around 2 AM, the flow of information in Ohio mysteriously stopped while the vote count switched dramatically to Bush's side.
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A comfortable 118,000-vote-plus official margin in Ohio then gave him a second term as president. But what really went down? “Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives, shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines, and illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency.”
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Lou Harris, who basically invented modern political polling, said: “Ohio was as dirty an election as America has ever seen.”
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The fellow in charge of the vote-counting was Ohio secretary of state J. Kenneth Blackwell, who also happened to be the co-chair of Bush's reelection committee there. And nobody seemed concerned about a conflict of interest? Back in 2000, Blackwell had been Bush's “principal electoral system adviser” during the Florida recount, where I guess he took some lessons from Katharine Harris. When Congressman John Conyers looked into what took place in Ohio, his report in January 2005 set forth “massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies in Ohio. ... caused by intentional misconduct and illegal behavior, much of it involving Secretary of State J. Kenneth Blackwell.” Conyers told RFK Jr. that Blackwell “made Katharine Harris look like a cupcake.”
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