WAR ON DRUGS or is it a WAR ON US???

Hate Drugs? You Should Want to End the Drug War
byTONY NEWMAN
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Many people hate drugs. It is easy to see why. Most families have had a loved one with a problematic relationship to alcohol or other drugs. People who struggle with drug problems can cause incredible pain to themselves and their loved ones. Broken marriages, loss of jobs, incarceration and even dying from an overdose are all possible tragic consequences of serious drug problems.

While it might be counterintuitive, people who hate drugs should be at the forefront of ending our nation’s failed drug war. The drug war makes all of the problems I mentioned above much worse.

Drug War = Mass Incarceration and Lack of Treatment

Let’s start with people struggling with drug misuse or addiction. Our drug war doesn’t keep drugs out of the hands of people who want drugs; drugs are as plentiful as ever. But getting caught with drugs can land someone in a cage for many years. Spending time behind bars is not the way to help someone who has a drug problem and most likely will make that person more traumatized. The sad fact is that we spend 50,000 dollars a year incarcerating someone for a drug offense, yet at the same time there is not enough money to offer treatment to people who want it.

Drug War = More Overdose and More Dying
People who have lost a loved one to an overdose feel an unimaginable pain and often want to wipe drugs off the face of the earth. Tragically, the drug war leads to many such deaths. Despite 40-plus years trying to eliminate drug use, there is an overdose crisis in this country right now. Overdose is now neck-and-neck with car accidents as the leading cause of accidental death in the country. Most people who experience an overdose are with friends when it happens and would survive if someone called 911. But because of our drug war, people often don’t call 911 because they are too afraid that the police will show up and arrest them. It is outrageous that we discourage people from calling 911 to save a life because of laws that pit their interest to help someone who is ODing against their motivation to not be arrested.

Another way to save people who are overdosing is to provide them with an antidote called naloxone, which can reverse the effects and restore normal breathing in two to three minutes if administered following an opioid overdose. Unfortunately our society does not come close to doing enough to make naloxone available to people who use drugs and their friends and families.

Drug War = Unsafe Neighborhoods
People who live in neighborhoods with drug dealing out in the open and with violence associated with the drug trade are some of the most vocal supporters of the drug war. Of course people want and need to feel safe in their neighborhoods. But most “drug-related” violence stems not from drug use, but from drug prohibition. That was true in Chicago under alcohol kingpin Al Capone, and it is true now. The killings and violence in many U.S. cities are not from marijuana or other drug use, but because prohibition makes the plants worth more than gold, and people are willing to kill each other over the profits to be made.

Drug War = More Danger for Our Children

Many people may know the drug war is a failure but are afraid to change course because they worry about their children and want to keep them safe. Ironically, the drug war is a complete failure when it comes to keeping young people from using drugs. Despite decades of DARE programs with the simplistic “Just Say No” message, 50 percent of teenagers will try marijuana before they graduate. Young people often claim it is easier for them to get marijuana than alcohol because drug dealers don’t check IDs. Young people also feel the brunt of marijuana enforcement and make up many (and in some places most) of the arrests for marijuana offenses. Arresting young people will often cause more damage than drug use itself. Teenagers need honest drug education to help them make responsible decisions. Safety should be the number one priority. We have dramatically reduced teen smoking without tobacco prohibition and without a single arrest.

Drug Abuse is Bad. The Drug War is Worse

There is no doubt that drugs have ruined a lot of people’s lives. It is understandable why many people hate drugs and want to protect their families. But when you look at the greatest harms from drugs, the drug war and prohibition almost always make the problem much worse – and make our families and communities much less safe. We need the people who hate drugs to actively join the movement to end the war on drugs. Because the war on drugs is a war on all of us.
 
The Afghan Opium Pipeline: Drugs, War and Death

Perhaps President-elect Trump has a valid point about Mexico’s threat to the United States, because the 2016 US National HeroinThreat Assessment notes that “Mexican traffickers have taken a larger role in the US heroin market, increasing their heroin production and pushing into eastern US markets.” It points out that 10,574 Americans died of heroin overdoses in 2014 and that the figure is rising — but there is no mention of heroin coming from Afghanistan, where, as reported in the UN Office on Drugs and Crime 2016 Opium Survey, the area under poppy cultivation increased from 183,000 to 201,000 hectares in 2015-2016, and opium production has risen by 43%.

Percentages can be difficult to picture, but the hard fact recorded by the UN is that Afghanistan’s potential production of opium has increased from 3,300 to 4,800 tons a year, which can lead to a great deal of heroin. As noted by Drug War Peace, it takes 16.7 kg of opium to produce 1 kg of heroin and “the process of making heroin from opium is a simple one.” Therefore the annual production of heroin from Afghan opium is around 300 tons, which results in a lot of money.

It’s not only in Europe, Iran, China, the Central Asian Republics and Russia that the enormous surge in Afghan heroin production has become a dangerous and even critical menace to their citizens. In Afghanistan itself there has been creation and massive growth of drug addiction.

Of course drugs were always known in the region. The hippies of the Seventies used to smoke their way across Asia in their thousands because, as recorded by one historian, they were much attracted to “Afghanistan, the first major destination of the hippie trail, a land where foreigners were made very welcome and where a large proportion of the population used hashish themselves.” Indeed they did, and there was never much harm done, except perhaps to the smokers. Heroin addiction was not in any way a social problem in either Afghanistan or Pakistan at that time, or for many years. But it is, now.

According to Voice of America there are three million drug users in Afghanistan. And, given the state it’s in, and the confusion among the US-NATO military alliance which is trying to tell the country what to do, it seems that there isn’t much that can be done about the catastrophe. The UK’s Guardian newspaper reported Baz Muhammad Ahmadi, Afghanistan’s deputy minister for counter-narcotics as saying that “with the existing equipment, facilities and civilian taskforce, we cannot fight the cultivation of poppy in insecure areas. The challenges of deteriorating security in different parts of the country took away the opportunities to destroy poppy farms.”

In November 2001 President GW Bush, the man who initiated the axis of chaos and despair from Afghanistan to the Middle East, told the United Nations that “I make this promise to all the victims of that regime: the Taliban’s days of harboring terrorists and dealing in heroin and brutalizing women are drawing to a close.”

The pledges of the foolish Bush came to nothing. There are more terrorists in Afghanistan than there were before he ordered the invasion, and the heroin problem is disastrous. (As to brutalized women, the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction noted in October that “fifteen years after the United States ousted the Taliban regime, Afghanistan remains one of the worst places in the world to be a woman.”)

On the drug scene, the New York Times reported six months before the Bush invasion that “the first American narcotics experts to go to Afghanistan under Taliban rule have concluded that the movement’s ban on opium-poppy cultivation appears to have wiped out the world’s largest crop in less than a year . . . The American findings confirm earlier reports from the United Nations drug control program that Afghanistan, which supplied about three-quarters of the world’s opium and most of the heroin reaching Europe, had ended poppy planting in one season.”

But Bush continued lying, and claimed in February 2002 that heroin had provided “significant income to the Taliban.” Much of the American public believed such outrageous lies — and continue to this day to believe government propaganda, faithfully published by the mainstream media which is fed disinformation by “highly-placed sources.”

Cultivation of opium poppies increased, and in February 2004 the then US Assistant Secretary for International Narcotics, Robert Charles, told a Congressional hearing that “Opium is a source of literally billions of dollars to extremist and criminal groups . . . cutting down the opium supply is central to establishing a secure and stable democracy, as well as winning the global war on terrorism.” It seemed that Washington was resolved to “eradicate the [opium poppy] crop in the ground, when it is most vulnerable” while creating “a centrally-directed, standing poppy eradication force” because “there is a need to deal with the drugs that flow over Afghanistan’s borders to world markets.”

But nothing happened, other than that the US spent eight billiondollars on counter-narcotics programs that produced absolutely no results.

In 2007 the European Parliament and the Senlis Council proposedpilot projects to license villages to grow poppy legally, as done in India, Thailand and Turkey, with the objective of transforming the product into medicinal morphine for legal sale on the world market.

The scheme would have required a great deal of work by dedicated experts and, of course, the full cooperation of the military forces of the US-NATO “Coalition” which were trying to enforce stability in the country but achieving little other than growing resentment, militancy and deaths. As the Economist reported at the time, “since January [2007] almost 6,000 people have been killed, a 50% increase on last year. They included 200 NATO soldiers and more than 3,000 alleged Taliban. Insurgent violence is up by 20% on 2006.”

The situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated even further and is verging on the anarchic. The country is terminally corrupt, with the warlords (including, amazingly, Vice President Dostum) gaining ever more power. The Taliban and other insurrectionists control vast areas of the country and the government’s armed forces would collapse were it not for massive US airstrikes and clandestine operations by the thousands of US troops engaged in operation Freedom’s Sentinel, about which there is little reporting in the western media unless, as happened on November 2, the deaths of two US soldiers could not be concealed.

During that operation US airstrikes killed many civilians, but this was ignored by Defense Secretary Ashton Carter who stated that he “was deeply saddened to learn overnight that we suffered casualties in Afghanistan,” noting as an after thought that “some of our Afghan partners also died.”

The Afghan spokesman said that 30 civilians had been killed, and Deutsche Welle reported Taza Gul, a 55-year-old laborer as saying “I am heartbroken. I have lost seven members of my family. I want to know, why these innocent children were killed? Were they Taliban? No, they were innocent children.” The Washington Post noted that “NATO officials had not confirmed or commented on the reported deaths of the civilians” while “photographs published on the Internet showed the bodies of small children crumpled on a blanket and being carried in a cart by weeping adults. Angry relatives of the victims attempted to parade their bodies through the city in a protest caravan to the provincial governor’s residence, but they were stopped by security forces.”

The United States invaded Afghanistan fifteen years ago, and the armies of its NATO allies formally joined it in 2003. In all their time in the country they have been unable to control the production of drugs, to discourage corruption, or to quell violence. Indeed, drug production, corruption and savage barbarity have surged to their highest ever peaks.

Libya was also reduced to chaos by the US-NATO blitz of 2011, yet Secretary General Stoltenberg rejoices that “we have doubled the size of the NATO Response Force, making it more ready and more capable, and established a high readiness Joint Task Force, able to move within a matter of days. We have increased our presence in the east, with more planes in the air, more ships at sea and more boots on the ground. We have established six new headquarters in our eastern Allies, with two more on the way.”

But maybe President Trump will see things differently. There’s nothing he can do about Afghanistan except to withdraw the US military presence, but he can prevent wider conflict by getting out of NATO. As he noted, it’s obsolete — but it’s also extremely dangerous.
 
Scenes from the Drug War


Scenes from the Drug War

Imagine, you’re flying at a height of 34,000 feet somewhere over the Persian Gulf; you see a fighter plane with what appear to be Saudi markings not far off on the port side. Next thing you know, the fellow next to you, with whom you’d been drinking gin and tonic only a moment before, is slumped forward with a machine gun bullet through his heart. The plane’s depressurized from the bullet breaking the window but the pilot manages to land. Two are dead from the salvo, which many witnesses aboard your plane agree came from that Saudi plane.

Of course there’s a big stink because the dead guys are both American. In the end it turns out that, under certain secret protocols in Saudi law, craft (whether maritime, airborne or terrestrial) suspected of harboring substances forbidden by the Koran, like alcohol, can be subject to “interdiction”, i.e. shot up or down. The Saudi pilot claimed he’d waggled his wings at the passenger plane, indicating that it should follow him. Only after repeated efforts to signal had finally fired the fatal.

All a fantasy of course. True, the Saudi royal family doesn’t endorse public consumption of alcohol, but it isn’t in the business of shooting down booze-laden planes, however well informed the Saudi Royal Air Force might be about the consumption of gin aboard the suspect plane. And who knows, the Saudi royal family might even have reservations about the prudence, not to mention legality, of firing on civil aircraft.

But suppose the drug in question isn’t booze but cocaine. And suppose the shooter’s sponsor and legal protector isn’t the puny Saudi royal family but the Government of the United States?

In that case we have as policy guide the decision memorandum signed by President Bill Clinton in June of 1994, bringing “closure”, to use a fashionable term, to acrimony within the administration on this issue. The documents in question are all available from the National Security Archive, whose Kate Doyle sued for them under the Freedom of Information Act.

As the Archive’s preamble to the documents narrates, the U.S. began sharing real-time aerial tracking
information with Colombia and Peru in July of 1990. When the Colombians told the US they were thinking of a shootdown policy for suspected drug planes, the US State Department got nervous about possible legal ramifications, if US advisors were involved, as they undoubtedly would be. So the State Department proclaimed piously that both U.S. and international law precluded the use of weapons against civilian aircraft except in self-defense. The Colombians said they wouldn’t give up on the idea but would shelve it, at least for a while.

Peru adopted a force down policy in 1993, and at the end of that year the Colombians (probably after back channel prodding from the US shootdown faction) said they would now implement the shootdown strategy formulated in 1990. A U.S. interagency group began a review of the new policies in January 1994. On May 1 the Clinton administration, led by the Department of Defense, announced a suspension on the sharing of real-time aerial tracking data with the two governments.

This was the signal for savage hand-to-hand bureaucratic combat inside the US government. On the one side were ranged those departments and agencies deriving funding and a sense of mission in life from the War on Drugs: the State Department’s bureaus of International Narcotics
Matters (INM) and Inter-American Affairs (ARA), not to mention DEA, CIA, Customs, and so forth.

On the other side were the teams at the State Department’s legal department and at Justice, offering the view that it was a perilous strategy to shoot down civil planes and that “mistakes are likely to occur under any policy that contemplates the use of weapons against civil aircraft in flight, even as a last resort.” Veterans at State remembered the tremendous, self-righteous stink raised by the US after the Soviet Union shot down a Korean Airliner (KAL 007) which had penetrated its air space. The State Department cited a 1984 amendment of the Chicago Convention on civil aviation – adopted in the wake of the KAL incident – banning the use of force against civil aircraft.

In the end Clinton characteristically tried to please both factions, while going along with the hawks. On June 21, l994, he secretly okayed US cooperation with Colombia and Peru’s shoot-down/force-down policy, allowing US aerial tracking data to be used in operations against suspicious aircraft “if the President has determined that such actions are necessary because of the threat posed by drug trafficking [sic] to the national security of that country and that the country has appropriate procedures in place to protect innocent aircraft.”

As one bureaucrat happily noted, this Solomonic compromise would “reduce the [US government’s] exposure to criticism that such assistance violates international law.” Colombia and Peru would be instructed that one way to cope with the difficulties presented by international agreements against shooting down civil aircraft would be to declare a “national emergency” as permitted under the relevant conventions. Another stratagem contemplated a campaign to convince nations deemed “aviation partners” to accept a “narrow exception” to international law in cases where “drug trafficking threatens the political institutions of a state and where the country imposes strict procedures to reduce the risk of attack against non-drug trafficking aircraft.”

One element was conspicuous by its absence. Nowhere in the torrent of US advice to Peru and Colombia was there any hint that military and intelligence assistance from the US might be conditioned on a solution to the international legal problems. Significantly, the document notes that, “The President explicitly did not condition the resumption of assistance on a solution to the international law problems associated with the USG’s provision of such assistance.” As the US State Department proudly (but of course secretly) boasted to President Samper of Colombia in December of that year, the Clinton administration had made “a tremendous legal and administrative effort” to get the intelligence sharing arrangements back on track. Ambassador Busby was told to tell President Samper, that “Because narcotics is very important to us, the administration expended a great deal of effort to change U.S. law and permit us to resume our cooperation.”

By the way, the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association did think the policy was a lousy idea.

The world took notice in March of this year when a family of evangelical Baptists, having concluded a bout of predatory spiritual rampages among the hapless Indians along the Peruvian Amazon, was halved in size, after a bullet fatally pierced Veronica and Charity Bower (mother and 7-month infant) while wounding Cessna pilot Kevin Donaldson and sparing the Baptist paterfamilias, Jim Bower, and his son Cory.

Magnanimously, Bower he had “no hard feelings” and could see God at work in their deaths from gunfire by the Peruvian air force. “Cory and I are experiencing inexplicable peace, and to me that’s proof that God is in this,” Bowers told about 600 mourners at the funeral of his wife and daughter. “Our attitude toward those responsible is one of forgiveness. Is that not amazing? It shouldn’t be amazing to us Christians.’ “Roni and Charity were instantly killed by the same bullet. To me that’s pretty amazing. That bullet stayed in Charity’s head, not going through Kevin’s back, causing the rest of us to die.” By sparing him, his son and Donaldson, Bowers said God must have something bigger in mind for them, although he didn’t know what it was.

Of course, if an Amazonian Indian shaman had successfully aimed a heat-seeking missile at the Bowers on the very reasonable grounds (sustainable by profuse historical evidence) that the evangelical Baptists were a threat to the national security of his tribe, there would have been no end of trouble for the shaman.

But this was no shaman, this was the Peruvian Air Force, ordered to fire by a high ranking Peruvian officer on the ground. And this was the CIA, in the sub-contracted guise of Aviation Development Corp, out of Maxwell AFB in Alabama, flying above the Amazon (two Anglos and one Peruvian, not able to talk to each other very well owing to language barriers) telling the Peruvian Air Force that an unidentified plane was approaching Iquitos. And this was long-range US radar based in Vieques, Puerto Rico, advising the CIA subcontractors about the unidentified plane. And this was US Southern Military Command, monitoring the whole scene from its war room in Key West. What a very large mass of people and resources to be watching one small plane which, if you believe Mr Bower, was also being tracked by the mightiest radar of them all, the Big Fellow himself.

It turns out the CIA, the subcontractors and Southcom and Colombia and Peru have been responsible for downing anywhere from 25 to 30 small planes over the passage of the years since 1994. Who were they? No one seems to know and please, the occupants of these planes weren’t murdered in acts of international terrorism and piracy. No, they were “successfully interdicted”, thus bringing a glow of satisfaction to the cheeks of those waging the war on drugs.

Okay. Now you’re in your cruise ship, in the Indonesian archipelago, still sipping at your gin and tonic. Muslims board the boat, ransack your possessions. Yes, they’re dead set against booze

We’ll cut the satirical parable short and remind you that in mid May the US Coastguard ecstatically announced the largest haul in US maritime drug enforcement’s history: an alleged $1 billion’s worth of cocaine, (13 tons) found after five arduous days’ search aboard a freighter in the eastern Pacific the Svesda Maru, a 152-foot trawler flying the flag of Belize. Two Russians and 10 Ukrainians were charged with drug smuggling and jailed at the federal prison in downtown San Diego.

On March 4, another Belize-flagged fishing ship, the Forever My Friend, with 8.8 tons of cocaine, had been towed into San Diego after being seized 250 miles west of Acapulco.

Count up the seeming breaches of laws and treaties here, starting with piracy on the high seas and use of US Navy ships for law enforcement. But it turns out when US Customs or Coastguard is alerted by the US Navy or Air Force to suspicious craft outside territorial waters, they phone the State Department, which phones the nation under whose flag the suspect is floating and gets the green light. So Belize is going to say No?

And just to cope with the Posse Comitatus Act forbidding the US military to be involved in civil law enforcement there was a Coastguard unit aboard the Navy’s ship. You want to ask about the likelihood of a fair and speedy trial for those Russians and Ukrainians now in the federal pen in San Diego?

Want to have the spring’s drug headlines wrapped up for you? The US Supreme Court defies the clear intent of voters in nine states and says medical marijuana is a no-no and a London newspaper reports that in London in 1995 a gram of cocaine cost around $120, but the same amount can now be picked up for about $80. The new drug czar, John Walters, picked after three months by former cocaine dealer George Bush (at Yale, in ounce bags according to one source) says the war on drugs can be won.

Gin and tonic, anyone? CP
 
The CIA and Drugs, Inc.: a Covert History


Gary Webb was a good investigator. He linked a drug dealer in Los Angeles, through Contra suppliers, to CIA officers and Republican politicians. His editor let the story rip, and the “Dark Alliance” series made a mighty impact on Black Americans, who saw it as evidence that the ruling class was as racist as ever.

Webb stuck a stake in the evil heart of the national security state and embarrassed the CIA’s contacts in the mainstream media. All of which was unforgiveable. Pressure was applied, history re-written, and Webb, in despair, apparently committed suicide.

The irony, of course, is that Webb had exposed only a small part of the story. The fact of the matter is that the US government has always managed large portions of the illicit, international drug business, and was doing so long before the CIA came into existence.

Documented cases abound, like the Opium Scandal of 1927, in which a “former” US Attorney in Shanghai provided a Chinese warlord with 6500 Mausers in exchange for $500,000 worth of opium.

Two years later, US Customs inspectors found a huge quantity of opium, heroin, and morphine in the luggage of Mrs. Kao, the wife of a Nationalist Chinese official in San Francisco. At which point Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson hustled Chiang Kai-shek’s ring of drug dealing diplomats out of the country.

The State Department likewise protected a ring of drug smugglers in 1934, and thus allowed heroin to pour into New Orleans. Two historians said about the Honduran Drugs-For-Guns case: “the defense of the Western hemisphere against the Axis powers…reduced to insignificance clandestine attempts to link the managerial personnel of a major cargo airline to smuggling.”https://www.counterpunch.org/#_edn1

As it was in the beginning, it is now and ever shall be: the ruling class’s power resides in its control of the criminal underworld; and since 1947, it has been the CIA’s job to advance and protect the conspiracy.

Consider the Federal Narcotic Bureau’s drug conspiracy case on Bugsy Siegel, which included Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, both of whom had provided services to the US government during the war. The conspiracy had its inception in 1939 when, at Lansky’s request, sexy Virginia Hill moved to Mexico and seduced a number of Mexico’s “top politicians, army officers, diplomats, and police officials.”[ii]

Hill came to own a nightclub in Nuevo Laredo and made frequent trips to Mexico City with Dr. Margaret Chung, an alleged prostitute and abortionist, honorary member of the Hip Sing T’ong, and the attending physician to the Flying Tigers – the private airline the US government formed to fly supplies to Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in Kunming, a city described as infused with spies and opium. As the FBN was well aware, Dr. Chung was “in the narcotic traffic in San Francisco.”[iii]

Chung took large cash payments from Siegel and delivered heroin to Hill in New Orleans, Las Vegas, New York, and Chicago. And yet, despite the fact that West Coast FBN agents kept her under surveillance for years, they could never make a case against her, because she was protected by the American military establishment. Indeed, Siegel’s murder in 1947 may have been a government hit designed to protect its sanctioned KMT-Mafia drug operation out of Mexico. As Peter Dale Scott observed, right after Bugsy was squashed, Mexico’s intelligence service, the DFS, formed relations with the top Mexican drug lord, at which point the CIA “became enmeshed in the drug intrigues and protection of the DFS.” By 1950, Mexican drug lords were receiving narcotics from the Lansky-Luciano connection, which stretched to the Far East.

The CIA’s involvement in the Far East drug trade began with its predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services, which supplied Iranian opium to Burmese guerrillas fighting the Japanese. This is no secret: General William Peers, commander of OSS Detachment 101 in Burma, confessed in his autobiography: “If opium could be useful in achieving victory, the pattern was clear. We would use opium.” [iv]

OSS chief William Donovan and Chiang’s intelligence chief, General Tai Li, tried hard to control drug trafficking in China during the war. To ensure security for KMT smuggling operations, the Americans sent a team to Chungking to train Chiang’s secret political police force. The head of the team, Charles Johnston, was described as previously having spent fifteen years “in the narcotics game.” [v]

Johnston’s team and Tai Li’s agents worked closely with Chiang’s designated drug smuggler Du Yue-sheng. Tai Li’s agents escorted Du’s opium caravans from Yunnan to Saigon, where the Kuomintang used Red Cross operations as a front for selling opium to the Japanese. In so far as national security always trumps drug law enforcement, this operation was afforded the same immunity as OSS Detachment 101.

After the war, the Americans did nothing to stop the French from importing tons of opium from Laos, and selling it on the black market to finance their colonial war against the Vietnamese. During a visit to Saigon in 1948, an FBN agent reported that opium was “the greatest single source of revenue” for the French.[vi]

CIA drug ops took a great leap forward in 1949, when Mao chased Chiang to Taiwan, where KMT gangsters slaughtered thousands of people and set up a worldwide drug ring. To facilitate this particular criminal conspiracy in the name of freedom and democracy, US officials exempted a subsidiary of William Donovan’s World Commerce Corporation from the Foreign Agents Registration Act, so it could supply the KMT with everything from gas masks to airplanes. This subsidiary was accused of smuggling “contraband” to America.

Some of the “contraband” no doubt emanated from the KMT’s 93rdDivision, which had fled from Yunnan into Burma in 1949. In exchange for launching covert raids into China, these enterprising KMT forces were allowed to grow and export opium onto the black-market in Bangkok and Hong Kong. In the same way the Israeli Lobby blackmails and bribes Congress to achieve its criminal ends, the US China Lobby attacked KMT critics and launched a massive propaganda campaign citing the People’s Republic as the source of all the illicit dope that reached San Francisco.

To facilitate the drug trade emanating from its KMT army in Burma, the China Lobby raised five million dollars of private money, which the CIA used to create its drug smuggling airline Civil Air Transport (CAT). The aforementioned General William Peers, as CIA station chief in Taipai, arranged for CAT to support KMT incursions from Burma into Yunnan – and thus enabled the KMT to bring to market “a third of the world’s illicit opium supply.”[vii]

When Burma charged the KMT with opium smuggling in 1953, the CIA requested “a rapid evacuation in order to prevent the leakage of information about the KMT’s opium business.” The State Department announced that KMT troops were being airlifted by the CAT to Taiwan, but most remained in Burma or were relocated to northern Thailand with the consent of Thailand’s top policeman and drug lord. US Ambassador William J. Sebald wasn’t fooled by this chicanery, and rhetorically asked if the CIA had deliberately left the KMT troops behind in Burma to continue “the opium smuggling racket.”[viii]

Suborning the Police

The story of the CIA’s drug empire is the biggest cover-up in American history – even though the basic facts are available in books like Al McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia and Richard M. Gibson’s The Secret Army.

Organizing the cover-up initially depended on the CIA’s ability to suborn the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, which, as the conflict in Vietnam heated up, was forced to investigate the flow drugs from the Far East to America. Thus, in 1963, FBN headquarters sent Agent Sal Vizzini to Thailand to open an office in Bangkok. As Vizzini told me, “Customs was already in Vietnam, but only under the aegis of helping the soldiers. Apart from that, no one’s making cases in Vietnam, because the CIA is escorting dope to its warlords.”

Vizzini’s assertion was validated on 30 August 1964, when Major Stanley C. Hobbs was caught smuggling 57 pounds of opium from Bangkok to a clique of South Vietnamese officers in Saigon. Hobbs had flown into Saigon on the CIA’s new drug smuggling airline, Air America. Hobbs’s court martial was conducted in secret and the defense witnesses were all US army and South Vietnamese intelligence officers. The records of the trial were dutifully lost and Hobbs was fined a mere three thousand dollars and suspended from promotion for five years. As a protected CIA drug courier, he served no time.

The FBN Commissioner wrote a letter to Senator Thomas J. Dodd asking for help obtaining information about Hobbs. But Dodd was stonewalled too, proving that the CIA is able to subvert drug law enforcement at the highest legislative level in the nation.

Later in 1963, FBN Agent Bowman Taylor replaced Sal Vizzini in Bangkok. Taylor was famous for slipping into Laos and making a case on General Vang Pao, commander of the CIA’s private army of indigenous, opium-growing tribesmen. Taylor didn’t know the identity of the person he was buying from: he simply set up an undercover buy, got a flash roll together, and went to “the meet” covered by the Vientiane police. But when the seller stepped out of his car and opened the trunk, and the police saw who it was, they ran away, leaving Taylor to bust the felonious general alone.

“Yep, I made a case on Vang Pao and was thrown out of the country as a result,” Taylor acknowledged. “The prime minister gave him back his Mercedes Benz and morphine base, and the CIA sent him to Miami for six months to cool his heels. I wrote a report to the Commissioner, but when he confronted the CIA, they said the incident never happened.

“The station chiefs ran things in Southeast Asia,” Taylor stressed, adding that the first secretary at the Vietnamese Embassy in Bangkok had a private airline for smuggling drugs to Saigon, as the CIA was well aware. “I tried to catch him, but there was no assistance. In fact, the CIA actively supported the Thai Border Police, who were involved in trafficking.”

Taylor shrugged. “The CIA would do anything to achieve its goals.”

The 118A Strategic Intelligence Network

Not only was the CIA protecting Vietnamese warlords, their Corsican accomplices, and its private armies of opium growers in Laos, Burma and Thailand, it was managing the caravan that moved opium to the world’s biggest market in Houei Sai, Laos.

In 1991, in Chiang Mai, Thailand, I interviewed William Young, the CIA officer who set the operation up.

The son of an American missionary in Burma, Young had learned the local dialects before he mastered English. During World War II, his family was forced to move to Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, where Young’s father taught William Donovan the intricacies of the region’s opium business.

Following a tour of duty with the US Army in Germany, Young was recruited into the CIA and in 1958, posted to Bangkok then Chiang Mai. From Chiang Mai, Young led a succession of CIA officers to the strategically placed Laotian and Burmese villages that would eventually serve as Agency bases.

It was Young who introduced General Vang Pao to his first official CIA case officer.

From his headquarters at the CIA airbase at Long Tieng, on the south side of the opium-rich Plain Of Jars, Vang Pao conscripted 30,000 tribesmen, many as young as 13, into a secret army to fight the Pathet Lao and its Vietnamese allies. In exchange for selling his people as cannon fodder, he was allowed to make a fortune selling opium. Much of the brokering was done at the village of Houei Sai in western Laos. Pao’s front man was the chieftain of the local Yao tribe, but behind the scenes Young set up deals between Pao, the top Laotian generals and politicians, and the KMT generals inside Burma. The Burmese generals operated clandestine CIA radio listening posts inside Burma, and in return were allowed to move 90% of the opium that reached Houei Sai. 

It was a happy arrangement until October 1964, when the Chinese detonated an atomic bomb at Lop Nor. That seminal event signaled a need for better intelligence inside China, and resulted in the CIA directing Young to set up a strategic intelligence network at Nam Yu (aka Base 118), a few miles north of Houei Sai. The purpose of the 118A Strategic Intelligence Network was to use a KMT opium caravan to insert agents inside China. The agents placed by Young in the caravan were his childhood friends, Lahu tribesmen Moody Taw and Isaac Lee. Young equipped them with cameras, and while in China they photographed Chinese engineers building a road toward the Thai border, as well as Chinese soldiers massing along it. Knowing the number and location of these Chinese troops helped the CIA plot a strategy for fighting the Vietnam War.

Once the 118A network was up and running, Young turned it over to CIA officer Lou Ojibwe, and after Ojibwe was killed in the summer of 1965, Anthony Poshepny took charge. A Marine veteran who served with the CIA in the Indonesia and Tibet, “Tony Poe” was the balding, robust model for Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now! Poe also served as a father figure to the junior CIA officers (including Terry Burke, a future acting chief of the DEA) he commanded in the jungles of Laos.

When I interviewed Poe in Udorn, Thailand in 1991, he said he “hated” Vang Pao because he was selling guns to the Communists. But Poe was a company man, and he made sure the CIA’s share of opium was delivered from Nam Yu to the airfield at Houei Sai. The opium was packed in oil drums, loaded on C-47s, and flown by KMT mercenaries to the Gulf of Siam. The oil drums were dropped into the sea and picked up by accomplices in sampans waiting at specified coordinates. The opium was ferried to Hong Kong, where it was cooked into heroin by KMT chemists and sold to the Mafia and Corsicans.

FBN Agent Albert Habib, in a Memorandum Report dated 27 January 1966, cited CIA officer Don Wittaker as confirming that opium drums were dropped from planes, originating in Laos, to boats in the Gulf of Siam. Wittaker identified the chemist in Houei Sai, and fingered the local Yao leaders as the opium suppliers.

By 1966, when FBN Agent Douglas Chandler arrived in Bangkok, the existence of the CIA’s 118A opium caravan was a known fact. As Chandler recalled, “An interpreter took me to meet a Burmese warlord in Chiang Mai. Speaking perfect English, the warlord said he was a Michigan State graduate and the grandson of the king of Burma. Then he invited me to travel with the caravan that brought opium back from Burma.” Chandler paused for effect. “When I sent the information to the CIA, they looked away, and when I told the embassy, they flipped out. We had agents in the caravan who knew where the Kuomintang heroin labs were located, but the Kuomintang was a uniformed army equipped with modern weapons, so the Thai government left them alone.”

As described by Young and Poe, the 118A Strategic Intelligence Network was the CIA’s private drug channel to its Mafia partners in Hong Kong – people like Santo Trafficante, the Mafia boss the CIA hired to kill Fidel Castro, and protected ever thereafter. The same thing is happening today in Afghanistan, with the DEA providing cover for the CIA and military, just as the FBN did in the 1960s.

Which brings me back to Gary Webb. The CIA wasn’t happy that Poe and Young were talking. Poe was told to shut up after his chat with me, and he did. But Young sold his story to a major Hollywood studio for $100,000. And that was unforgivable.

On April Fool’s Day, 2011, Thai police found Bill Young’s corpse. It had been perfectly arranged with a pistol in his one hand and a crucifix in the other.

Maybe he was depressed too?

And it is seriously depressing, the fact our utterly corrupt government, aided by its criminal co-conspirators in the mainstream media, pretends as if the CIA doesn’t deal drugs.
 
America’s New Apartheid


Many people associate the mass imprisonment of a population with authoritarian regimes. Consequently, many Americans are surprised when they learn that the country that incarcerates more of its own citizens than any other is the United States. With 2.3 million prisoners, the “land of the free” has more people in prison than China, which has a population four times the size of the United States. A hugely disproportionate percentage of those incarcerated are African-Americans as Washington’s war on drugs constitutes the latest incarnation of racist policies that have existed since the country’s founding.

The United States has a long and ongoing history of implementing policies ensuring that Blacks are segregated from whites, both physically and in terms of experiencing different rights. While still a British colony, the white settlers, having exterminated much of the indigenous population, imported Black slaves from Africa to work the plantations and to serve as domestic servants. Upon achieving independence from Britain, the new “democracy” with its “Bill of Rights” immediately made evident its hypocrisy to the benefit of privileged white males by continuing the practice of slavery and only allowing white male property owners to vote. In short, there was no “independence” for Blacks.

Our history classes celebrate that white hero Abraham Lincoln’s freeing of the slaves while ignoring the fact that most nations in the Americas had abolished slavery almost half a century before the United States. In fact, only two countries—Brazil and the Spanish colony of Cuba—maintained slavery longer than the “land of the free.” That celebrated champion of freedom, Thomas Jefferson, only freed his slaves upon his death, when he no longer had a need to exploit them. In fact, slavery wasn’t abolished until almost one hundred years after independence. And when slavery was finally abolished in the United States in 1865, blacks still remained second-class citizens under a system of apartheid in which a series of Jim Crow laws kept African-Americans segregated from whites.

It wasn’t until the mid-1960s, one hundred years after the abolition of slavery and almost two hundred years after independence, that officially-sanctioned segregation eventually ended and all Blacks in the United States finally obtained the right to vote and to equal accessto public schools and other public spaces. But the US government soon found another tool for implementing social control over Blacks in order to segregate them from the general white population: the war on drugs. In 1971, President Richard Nixon declared illegal drugs to be “public enemy number one.” During the next two years, drug arrests and incarceration rates increased significantly, with a disproportionate number of those targeted being African-Americans.

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan intensified the war on drugs by declaring that illegal drugs constituted a threat to national security. That same year, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act with very little debate, establishing harsher and mandatory prison sentences for crack and powder cocaine. But the mandatory sentences for crack were much harsher than those for powder cocaine. Consequently, a conviction for selling 500 grams of powder cocaine resulted in a five-year mandatory sentence, whereas only five grams of crack cocaine would trigger the same five-year sentence. In other words, a conviction for possession of crack resulted in a prison sentence 100 times longer than a conviction for the equivalent amount of powder cocaine. Essentially, Congress imposed disparate sentencing laws for basically the same drug, since both crack and powder cocaine are derived from the coca plant. Furthermore, crack became the only drug that carried a mandatory sentence for first offenders.

A quarter of America’s 2.3 million prisoners are in jail for non-violent drug offenses—more than the total number of prisoners in the European Union. In 1980, there were 41,000 imprisoned drug offenders but that number had skyrocketed to more than half a million by 2011, according to The Sentencing Project, a non-profit organization that analyzes the US criminal system. The race and class bias of the 1986 sentencing laws soon became apparent as the ratio of Blacks who were imprisoned compared to whites increased dramatically. Because crack was much cheaper than powder cocaine it became popular in poor urban neighborhoods, many of which were Black. In contrast, most of the principal users of powder cocaine were middle- and upper-class whites living in relatively wealthy suburban neighborhoods. Black neighborhoods have also endured the
militaristic presence of heavily-armed police narcotics squads carrying out “zero tolerance” drug policies. And so, while record numbers of low-level urban drug dealers and users are being sent to prison, most middle and upper class white suburban dealers and users remain free to indulge their habits with little police harassment.

By the late 1990s, despite constituting only 13 percent of the nation’s drug users, Blacks represented 58 percent of imprisoned drug offenders. Furthermore, the majority of these offenders were low-level dealers or users; in fact, statistics released by the United States Sentencing Commission showed that only 11 percent of federal drug offenders were high-level dealers. This rate of incarceration contributed to a social breakdown in many poor inner-city neighborhoods. The number of Black children growing up fatherless skyrocketed, with 70 percent living in single-parent homes without their biological father at the beginning of the 21st century compared to only 14 percent twenty years earlier.

In 2010, Congress finally addressed the 100:1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine by reducing it to an 18:1 ratio and eliminating mandatory prison terms for crack possession. While an improvement, the new sentencing laws still disproportionately impact Blacks and, because they are not retroactive, thousands of drug offenders convicted under the old laws remain incarcerated.

While the mass imprisonment of African-Americans has created a social crisis, particularly in poor urban neighborhoods, it has proven to be an economic boon for corporations and rural communities. Under neoliberalism, the prison system has been largely privatized, thereby turning it into a for-profit industry. And it is not only the corporations that operate the prisons that profit, but also companies that use prisoners as cheap labor to handle their customer service operations. Prisoners are paid as little as fifty cents an hour to work in prison call centers performing the customer service and marketing operations of some of America’s largest and richest corporations. As Microsoft stated in a marketing document, such a set-up “can reduce the burden on corporate marketing.”

Also, in the neoliberal era, rural communities have struggled to survive economically and one solution has been to host prisons. With an average of 35 jobs created for every 100 inmates, local elected officials began viewing prisons as an economic development tool. In the first two decades following Reagan’s intensification of the war on drugs, 213 prisons were opened in rural areas, housing prisoners from distant cities and even other states. Furthermore, many of these prisons were operated by private corporations.

This process has had devastating consequences on poor minority communities in cities. First, it has made it even more difficult for children to maintain a relationship with their imprisoned fathers because of the expense and time required to visit distant prisons. Second, it has undermined the democratic system by shifting federal dollars and elected representation away from urban neighborhoods to rural communities.

One of the incentives to entice rural communities to build these prisons in their backyards has been to allow them to include the prison population in their census count, which translates into more federal funding for the local community. The Wall Street Journalillustrated how this process works in the small Arizona town of Florence, which, according to the US Census Bureau’s 2000 census, had an “official” population of 17,054. However, 11,830 of the town’s residents were prisoners, whose presence translated into about $4 million annually in federal funds for the small community. The town received this funding based on its total population, despite the fact that it bore no responsibility for the cost of housing the prisoners.

The flip side of this coin occurs in communities where prisoners are from, primarily poor inner-city neighborhoods. With increasing numbers of Blacks being sent to distant prisons as a result of mandatory drug sentencing, the census count shows a smaller population, resulting in less federal funding. Given that the census only occurs every ten years, many prisoners return home to live in under-funded urban neighborhoods while rural communities continue reaping the financial benefits from their incarceration.

The disproportionate incarceration of Blacks also has implications for democracy. All but two US states prohibit prisoners from voting while incarcerated and twelve states disenfranchise convicted felons for a specific period of time following their release or for life. As of 2010, disenfranchisement laws meant that six million Americans were prohibited from voting in elections with Blacks constituting a hugely disproportionate percentage of the disenfranchised. In fact, one out of every thirteen African-Americans are banned from voting.

The mandatory sentencing and disenfranchisement laws are not the only forms of legislation that have disproportionately affected minorities and lower economic classes. The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 contains a provision stating that anyone with a felony conviction for using or selling drugs is subject to a lifetime ban on receiving government financial assistance and food stamps. This provision only applies to drug offenders, not to violent felons. Consequently, someone who has served a sentence for murder or rape remains eligible for welfare benefits upon their release.

By 2002, according to The Sentencing Project, there were more than 92,000 women, and by extension 135,000 children, affected by the lifetime ban on receiving welfare and food stamps. While Black and Hispanic women constitute approximately 23 percent of the US female population, they represent 48 percent of women affected by the ban. By 2011, the number of women affected had doubled to more than 180,000. While in recent years some states have opted out of the ban on felons being eligible for food stamps and welfare, more than half still retain the lifetime ban or a modified version of it.

In 1998, Congress enacted a similar ban preventing drug offenders from receiving government grants or financial aid for college education. Tens of thousands of college-bound students have been denied federal aid because of prior drug convictions, often for past misdemeanors such as marijuana possession. As is the case with the lifetime welfare ban, the college aid ban only applies to drug offenders, while convicted murderers and rapists remain eligible for government grants and student loans. As a result of the war on drugs, Black males are almost seven times more likely to go to prison than whites, resulting in a disproportionate number of young Black men being declared ineligible for federal college aid.

Ultimately, US drug-war policies that have utilized mandatory sentencing laws, disenfranchisement and lifetime bans on receiving welfare benefits and student financial aid have disproportionately affected minorities and the lower classes. A Black teenager convicted for a first offense of possessing five grams of crack cocaine could be sentenced to five years in prison, lose his or her right to vote for life, become ineligible to receive welfare benefits and food stamps, and not qualify for student financial aid should he or she want to get an education in order to obtain a decent job.

This dead-end approach generates almost unsurpassable barriers for individuals and families attempting to change their lives, thereby continuing the cycle of marginalization experienced by many Blacks from generation to generation. Furthermore, it could be argued, given that a hugely disproportionate percentage of prisoners are Black, that the exploitation of their labor in prison call centres constitutes modern-day slavery while disenfranchisement undermines the hard-won gains of the civil rights movement. Ultimately, millions of Blacks continue to be segregated through imprisonment and the denial of their basic rights. Though the mechanisms of oppression have changed over time from segregation through slavery to segregation under Jim Crow laws to segregation by incarceration, many Blacks in the United States continue to be treated as second-class citizens in the 21st century.
 
Death Penalty for Drug Dealers? Be Careful What You Wish for, President Trump
byTHOMAS KNAPP
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In his first 2020 re-election campaign appearance in New Hampshire, US president Donald Trump addressed some of his typical bombast to the so-called “opioid crisis.” “If we don’t get tough on the drug dealers,” said Trump, “we’re wasting our time. That toughness includes the death penalty.”

An odd take, considering that one of Trump’s few worthwhile campaign promises was to leave the legal status of marijuana up to the states. That promise should have been kept, and extended to other drugs as well. Instead, he turned Jeff “good people don’t smoke marijuana” Sessions loose as Attorney General, to the country’s injury.

Even more odd, coming as it does from a high-level drug dealer like Donald Trump.

You know, the owner of Trump Winery. And, as of his 2016 campaign financial disclosures, a shareholder in multiple conspiracies to manufacture and traffic in drugs (including opiates) — to wit, Pfizer, Merck, Celgene, and GlaxoSmithKline.

Then again, maybe it’s not so odd. As a major league drug dealer, perhaps Trump is taking his cue from the murderous cartels of Colombia and Mexico. Now that he has the entirety of federal law enforcement and the US armed forces at his beck and call, why not just kill his competitors? Pablo Trumpobar, anyone? El Trumpo?

Or perhaps the sentiment is genuine and he intends, as soon as he gets enabling legislation for the scheme, to turn himself in, plead guilty, don coveralls matching his complexion, and put in one of those legendary McDonald’s orders for his last meal.

Either way, it’s a monumentally stupid idea.

First of all, the War on Drugs is over and drugs won. Continuing to pretend otherwise is just a novel way of setting taxpayer money on fire, a featherbedding scheme for law enforcement. People who want drugs are going to get drugs whether drugs are legal or not. Trump doesn’t have to like it. That’s how it is whether he likes it or not.

Secondly, the main effect of imposing the death penalty for dealing in drugs would be an increase in the general level of mayhem and murder relating to the drug trade. If you’re a drug dealer and already up for the death penalty, why not go ahead and kill anyone who gets in your way — competitors, cops, accidental witnesses, customers you suspect of being informants, etc.? It’s not like they can execute you twice, right? It won’t take long for drug dealers who think that way to replace (posthumously, of course) drug dealers who don’t.

That’s the pragmatic case against Trump’s proposal. The moral case is that both drug prohibition and capital punishment are irredeemably evil big-government crimes against humanity. Worse crimes, by far, than Trump’s own drug dealing activities.
 
Sex, Drugs and the CIA
byDOUGLAS VALENTINE
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[Editors’ Note: We are once again pleased to publish an exclusive investigative report by Douglas Valentine, author of The Phoenix Program, the best book on the CIA’s assassination program in Vietnam. This time Valentine, who has just put the finishing touches on Strength of the Wolf (a history of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the origins of the war on drugs), explores one of the Agency’s more disgusting chapters, the doping of unsuspecting Americancitizens with LSD. With the Bush administration and members of congress from both parties clamoring to unfetter the spy Agency in the wake of 9/11, this cautionary tale from the CIA’s recent past couldn’t come at a more apt time. For more on George Hunter White and the CIA’s MK-Ultra program read our book Whiteout: the CIA, Drugs and the Press.–jsc/ac]

Barbara Crowley Smithe was nineteen years old in January 1953. She was full-figured, sexy and smart, with dark hair, blue eyes, and a trace of Irish freckles. She lived in Manhattan with her husband Eliot Smithe, and their 20-month old daughter, Valerie.

People who knew Barbara said she was a vibrant, happy young woman, but that she became confused about her sexuality, and gradually lost her self-esteem. Her friends did not know why, but she began to have angry confrontations with Eliot. Arguments led to rough fights and a separation in 1957. Two extra-martial affairs engendered a haunting sense of guilt, guilt led to depression, depression dissolved into despair, and ultimately Barbara succumbed to paranoia.

At her psychiatrist’s advice Barbara was admitted to Stony Lodge Hospital in December 1958. Before long she and Eliot divorced, and Valerie went to live with Eliot’s parents. Institutionalized for much of the next twenty years, Barbara died of leukemia in February 1978, without ever telling Eliot the secret she took to her grave–the stunning secret that may very well explain her descent into mental illness.

Indeed, Barbara’s mental breakdown may be traced to the night of January 11th, 1953, when–without her knowledge or consent–she was given a dose of LSD by an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. After that incredible night, her short, sad life was never the same.

MKULTRA

Why would the CIA want to give LSD to a nineteen-year-old woman with an infant in her arms? What did Barbara Smithe have to do with pressing matters of National Security?

The official explanation dates to 1951, when the CIA received an unsubstantiated report that the Soviet Union was about to corner the world market in LSD. The Soviets were thought to be perfecting drug-induced “brainwashing” techniques, and the CIA reeled at the prospect of Russian agents dumping LSD into New York’s water supply, and then using insidious Communist propaganda to turn drug addled American citizens against their own government.

While this frightening scenario never did materialize, the CIA was able to use it as a pretext to start testing LSD on friends and foes alike. The spy agency’s ultimate objective was to develop the capability to entrap and blackmail spies, diplomats, and politicians–ours, as well as theirs.

The CIA called its experimental LSD “mind-control” project MKULTRA.

After a year of conducting MKULTRA experiments in laboratories, the CIA’s researchers decided they needed to start testing LSD in “real life” settings. In order to do this, however, they needed a “front,” so they asked Harry Anslinger, the Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), to provide them with an agent who was capable of finding suitable test subjects within the arcane setting of narcotics control. Subjects were to be FBN informants, drug addicts and drug peddlers, prostitutes, pornographers, and other degenerate underworld characters–in other words, people who were already compromised by their deviant behaviors, and would be unable to complain to the police if they were damaged during the LSD experiments.
The Double Man

The man Anslinger selected for the MKULTRA job was George Hunter White. A highly successful and flamboyant federal narcotic agent since1935, White’s claim to fame was a 1937 undercover case he made against the notorious drug smuggling Sino-American trade association, the Hip Sing T’ong. Posing as John Wilson, the nephew of his “Uncle Sam” (a hitherto unknown hood who was forming a new drug syndicate), White crossed the country contracting with Hip Sing T’ong members for huge purchases of opium.

According to legend, White, a Caucasian, was initiated into the T’ong, swearing to accept “death by fire” should he ever break its sacred oath of secrecy. The investigation climaxed in November 1937 with a series of spectacular mass arrests, including several prominent Mafiosi. The case cemented White’s status as the FBN’s top agent, and subsequently involved him its most important, secret investigations.

At five feet, seven inches tall, and weighing a rotund 200 pounds, White, who shaved his head completely bald, was the image of a tough detective, the kind who made bad guys tip their hats and speak politely to cops. A native of California, he was ebullient and brash, and as a former crime reporter for the San Francisco Call Bulletin, had a nose for sniffing out trouble. And trouble was what White enjoyed more than anything else. Rough and tough and good with his fists, White led his fellow federal agents into many a fight with the country’s most vicious hoods. More importantly, his many newspaper contacts were always available to his publicity hunger boss, and after he extricated Anslinger’s stepson from an undisclosed legal problem, White became the Commissioner’s favorite and most trusted agent.

The main reason White was given the MKULTRA LSD testing assignment, was that he had acquired clandestine drug testing experience during the Second World War. In 1943 he had been transferred from the FBN to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Assigned to the spy agency as a counter-intelligence officer, Major White became deeply involved in OSS “truth drug” experiments, in which distilled marijuana was used in the interrogation of prisoners of war, suspected double agents, and conscientious objectors. White’s ‘truth drug” experiments continued until at least 1947.

White also was selected for the MKULTRA assignment because he was a disgruntled employee. After the war he had returned to the FBN and by 1950 was serving in New York City, where, apart from his work as a federal narcotic agent, he participated in a number of sensitive “political” investigations for the U.S. Government. Among his special assignments, White worked briefly with Assistant U.S. Attorney Roy Cohn and Senator Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) rooting Communists out of the CIA and the State Department, and from mid-1950 until early 1951 he served as the chief investigator for Senator Estes Kefauver (D-TN) in a nationwide expose of organized crime. But White was impetuous and overstepped his bounds. First he incurred Harry Truman’s wrath by attempting to link the President to organized crime in Kansas City. And in early 1951 he was fired from the Kefauver Committee for leaking classified information. But the final blow came a few months later when the Kefauver Committee aired allegations that New York Governor Thomas Dewey had commuted Lucky Luciano’s prison sentence for a sizable campaign contribution. The allegation was base on a memorandum White had written in 1947, and in retaliation, the sullied Governor banished White from New York.

Dewey’s edict was a disappointment to White, whose ambition at the time was to serve as the FBN’s district supervisor in New York. But White was too important to be dismissed offhand: the MKULTRA Program, which was to be established in New York, was already in the works, and so Commissioner Anslinger simply reassigned him as district supervisor in Boston. But White was rarely there. Instead he kept his apartment in New York while awaiting his final security clearance from the CIA. He was still an employee of the FBN, but he was bitter about the roadblock in his narcotic law enforcement career, and was hoping to find steady employment with the CIA. In this spirit George White willingly and energetically embarked on his CIA, MKULTRA assignment.
Partners in Crime

Although George White had notoriety and powerful friends, and existed above the law as one of Espionage Establishment’s “protected few,” he was a deeply conflicted man. His first wife, Ruth, deserted him in 1945, calling him “a fat slob,” and according to psychological reports compiled while he was applying for employment with the CIA, White compensated for that humiliation by seeking attention, and by hurting people. This was the third reason why the CIA accepted him for the MKULTRA job: George White was a sadist-masochist with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol, kinky sex, and power.

The archetypal Double Man, White, however, had the ability to charm as well as to repulse, and on 18 August 1951 he married his second wife, Albertine Calef, a clothing buyer at the Abraham and Strauss department store in Brooklyn. Described as a “bubbly” woman, Tine was born in New York of Egyptian Jewish parents. When interviewed for this article, Tine expressed nothing but devotion to the memory of her former husband. She described him as “effective and punctual, a great raconteur, a voracious reader of non-fiction books, and a very good writer.” According to her, George White was a liberal Democrat who never picked a fight or resorted to strong-arm tactics.

Tine apparently turned a blind eye toward her husband’s deviant behavior. They shared a comfortable apartment at 59 West 12th Street in Greenwich Village, and hob-nodded with politicians, diplomats, law enforcement officials, artists and writers. Tine thoroughly enjoyed the fast company her husband kept, and in order to maintain her exciting lifestyle, she stood by and did nothing when he poisoned Barbara Smithe with LSD. Indeed, when this writer asked her what George White did to Barbara on the night of January 11th, 1953, the 80 plus year old woman descended into a string of expletives that would have embarrassed a sailor. Her tirade left this writer with the firm impression that she was thoroughly capable of having been White’s accomplice in his dirty work.
 
Escaping the Drug War Quagmire


The passage of major reforms in the Rockefeller drug laws last week – the notorious 1973 mandatory sentencing laws that filled New York’s prisons but have not prevented long-term growing drug-related problems – demonstrates the challenge the United States faces in getting out of the drug war trap.

Nelson Rockefeller served as governor of New York from 1959 to 1973. He spent millions in attempts to win the Republican presidentialnomination in 1960, 1964, and 1968 and became Vice President in 1974. Rockefeller was known as a liberal Republican in a party led by people like Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon.

The Rockefeller drug laws – the toughest drug laws in the United States – allowed him to be a tough on drugs politician and respond to Nixon’s call for a “war on drugs.” The mandatory minimum sentences, which covered all illegal drugs from marijuana to heroin, treated possession of over 56 grams as the equivalent of second degree murder.
There are nearly 12,000 people in New York’s prisons incarcerated under the drug laws, most of them minor offenders with no history of violent behavior. It costs New York $520 million a year to imprison them. Almost 90% of those locked up in New York for drug offenses are African American or Latino, despite research showing that the vast majority of people who use and sell drugs are white.

Over thirty-five years the laws cost the state billions of dollars and ruined tens of thousands of lives. And, throughout the time New York saw one drug crisis after another – the cocaine-crack era, multi-generational heroin addiction, a wave of HIV/AIDS-related to drug use, drug-trafficking related crime waves and consistent high levels of overdose deaths. The Rockefeller drug laws were a costly failure but it took decades to even make modest reforms.

Indeed, full repeal of the laws is still opposed, especially by upstate legislators who profit from the prison-industrial complex. The reforms enacted still leave mandatory sentences on the books, but give judges discretion in some cases to require treatment instead of incarceration. Only 1,800 people will be affected by the change because of compromises between the New York State Senate and House.

Rockefeller recalls another drug war Republican – Richard Nixon who set the modern drug war trap. When he was president the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse recommended an alternative path: treat hard drugs as a public health issue and do not treat possession, personal cultivation and non-profit transfer of marijuana as crimes. White House tapes reveal Nixon reacting negatively to the suggestions based on racism, anti-Semitism and hatred for the educated (Nixon to Bob Haldeman: “. . .every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob, what is the matter with them? I suppose it’s because most of them are psychiatrists . . .”)

In response to the unanimous recommendations, Nixon upped the drug war ante, with a special focus on marijuana. Marijuana arrests increased by 100,000 the year after the Commission recommended such offenses not be a crime. And, now, the FBI reports that in 2007 there were 872,720 marijuana arrests – more than for rape, robbery and murder combined – and 90% of those are for mere possession. This for a substance that nearly half the country believes should be legal.

How is their any legitimacy in a law that is so widely opposed resulting in hundreds of thousands of arrests annually? No wonder the United States has the embarrassment of incarcerating 25% of the world’s prisoners while having only 5% of the world’s population.

An interesting parallel with the American experience is the experience of another country that in the same year had a national commission report which made very similar recommendations. The difference, at the outset, unlike Nixon their leaders put in place the recommendations of the commission. Today, the Netherlands has one half the marijuana use rate per capita, one-third the heroin use and one-quarter the cocaine use. In addition, their prison population is one-seventh that of the United States.

The facts are on the side of those who advocate ending the drug war but breaking free of this failed policy has been extremely challenging. Democrats, who many hope would be the alternative to the Just Say No Republican Party, have consistently been afraid to tackle the issue. President Clinton out flanked the Republicans by putting a general in charge of drug policy.

President Obama, who supported decriminalization while in the Illinois State Senate, mocked a question about ending the marijuana war at a recent web-town hall meeting. Obama fielded the most popular questions sent to the White House website where 3.5 million people voted. Marijuana legalization was No. 1 on the list. Obama said:

“I have to say that there was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high, and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve the economy and job creation… I don’t know what that says about the online audience…We want to make sure that it was answered. The answer is, no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy.”

Jack Cole, the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, a group representing thousands of former law enforcement officers opposed to the drug war, said: “Despite the president’s flippant comments today, the grievous harms of marijuana prohibition are no laughing matter. It would be an enormous economic stimulus if we stopped wasting so much money arresting and locking people up for non-violent drug offenses and instead brought in new tax revenue from legal sales, just as we did when we ended alcohol prohibition 75 years ago during the Great Depression.”

Obama picked as vice president, Joe Biden, who as Chairman of the Judiciary Committee put in place mandatory minimum sentences, the harsh disparity between crack and powder cocaine sentencing and the drug czar’s office among other drug war measures. His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, also favors a tough on drugs approach. However, the president did announce he is stopping the waste of federal resources on medical marijuana prosecutions and supports needle exchange to prevent HIV/AIDS. In addition, he has appointed the police chief of Seattle, a city that has put in significant drug policy reforms, as his drug czar.

And, President Obama is facing an aggressive drug war in Mexico where more than 7,000 have been killed in the last 18 months. This would be a good opportunity for the president to point out how violence is one of the side effects of prohibiting drugs. Many cities in the U.S. have seen more prohibition-related violence then Chicago saw during alcohol prohibition. But, instead Obama is mocking the issue and calling out National Guard troops.

Militarization of the drug war on the Mexican border is something that previous presidents have tried and it has always backfired. President Nixon put in place Operation Intercept, searching one out of three cars and trucks crossing the border. The result, marijuana and heroin traffickers switched to air, sea and commerce causing a heroin and marijuana glut. President Reagan used the military to intercept boats and planes bringing marijuana into the United States. The result, traffickers switched to the more profitable and easier to smuggle cocaine causing the cocaine decade of the 1980s. President Clinton used the Marines on the border until they shot and killed a high school student in his backyard while he was herding goats for the town’s cheese co-operative.

What disaster will Obama bring by failing to confront the root cause questions: should drug prohibition continue, does the drug war work, are its costs greater than its benefits and is there a better way forward?
 
This is a older story, but very interesting...


OCTOBER 1, 2015
Private Prisons: Why Bernie Sanders is Right

US Senator Bernie Sanders (allegedly a Vermont Independent, but running for president as a Democrat) and US Representatives Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Bobby Rush (D-IL) introduced bills in Congress last week aiming to “ban private prisons, reinstate the federal parole system and eliminate quotas for the number of immigrants held in detention.” The bills won’t pass, and who knows what devils lurk in their details, but the general direction is right.

Americans should be embarrassed by the propensity of government at all levels to put cage other Americans. We’ve often heard over the last few years that the US government imprisons a higher proportion of its own subject population than any other government on Earth. I doubt that’s true — the remaining Communist regimes and other dictatorships likely don’t honestly account for how many people they incarcerate — but the US certainly leads the “western democracies” in the matter. Nearly one in every 30 Americans is “under correctional supervision,” i.e. in jail, in prison, or on parole or probation.

As a libertarian, I’m all for “privatization.” I’d love to see as many services as possible taken out of government’s hands and left to the private sector.

But “private prisons” aren’t “private” in any meaningful sense of the word. They’re still operated under government supervision and according to government rules; they are still paid for with taxpayer dollars. Fake “privatization” of prisons creates two bad situations:

First, it creates a special interest lobby centered around how much money can be made by sticking people in cages. “Private prison” companies lobby for things like mandatory minimum sentences and a litany of new or revised “tough on crime” laws that put more and more non-violent criminals in their facilities to generate more and more profits. That lobby finances the campaigns of politicians who pass such laws. It’s good for business.

Second, it results in situations where no one is held accountable or responsible for abuses. When, for example a prisoner dies for lack of proper medical care, the politicians blame the “private prison” operators and the operators blame the politicians, round and round in a circle until someone’s wrist gets slapped and everyone forgets about it (until the next such incident).

I won’t vote for him, but Sanders is right on this. We should be looking for ways to minimize, or even abolish, imprisonment, not ways to pretend we’ve “privatized” it.
 
Meet the Private Prison Lobby


As the immigration reform debate heats up, an important argument has been surprisingly missing. By granting legal status to immigrants and ordering future flows, the government could save billions of dollars. A shift to focus border security on real crime, both local and cross-border, would increase public safety and render a huge dividend to cash-strapped public coffers.

This kind of common-sense immigration reform has the multibillion-dollar private prison industry shaking in its boots. Its lobbyists are actively targeting members of congressional budget and appropriations committees to not only maintain, but increase incarceration of migrants — with or without comprehensive immigration reform.

While a broad public consensus has formed around the need to legally integrate migrants into the communities where they live and work, private prison companies Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and The GEO Group, thrive off laws that criminalize migrants, including mandatory detention and the definition of immigration violations as felonies.

CCA and GEO also know that in the current immigration debate they cannot come straight out and say ‘immigrants should be defined as criminals because it makes us rich’—even though it does. CCA comes pretty close to saying this in its 2010 Annual Report, when it warns that “any changes [in the laws] with respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of persons arrested, convicted and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for correctional facilities to house them.”

So most of their work is behind the scenes. Their number-one goal: to assure that no matter what else happens, Operation Streamline—their goose of the golden eggs—survives, with more money than ever.

Border enforcement and immigration reform

Operation Streamline began in 2005, and it imprisons men and women for immigration violations, sometimes up to 10 months or more, and it channels more than $1 billion a year in federal funds to private-run detention centers.

Bob Libal, of Grassroots Leadership, which issued a major report on Operation Streamline’s migrant-to-prison pipeline last year, commented on Operation Streamline and related programs, “These are programs where immigrants lose years of their lives and taxpayers lose billions of dollars, but the private prison corporations are counting on these programs to make profits to pay their executives exorbitant salaries and reinvest their money in lobbying efforts.”

He notes that the problem of decoupling immigration reform from enforcement is a political—and economic—one. “There is no legal reason why we can’t fix our immigration system and legalize people who are here without increasing border militarization and criminal penalties.”

It would seem contradictory for a program that rounds up undocumented migrants to be funded alongside comprehensive immigration reform. Yet both President Obama’s plan and the plan put forward by the Gang of 8 senators call to increase Border Patrol enforcement programs.

Enlace, coordinator of the National Private Prison Detention Campaign, has compiled data on private prison industry money to pressure Congress for more enforcement business in any comprehensive immigration reform bill.

Lobbying for Lock Up

Private prison corporations, especially CCA and GEO, have begun a massive effort to assure that even if immigration reform goes through, the practice of locking people up for immigration infractions will continue.

They have the money and the clout to push their agenda on the hill. Working without fanfare, the private prison lobby has targeted key Congressional representatives, especially on the finance, budget and judiciary committees. Using the lever of hefty campaign donations, lobbyists for these companies have been working for years to get Congress members in their pockets by slipping money into theirs.

First, a brief guide to the private prison lobby. Numbers are from their 2012 quarterly lobby disclosure reports filed with the Secretary of the Senate and Clerk of the House. The Center for Responsive Politics has a useful site where much of this information is posted.

Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, lobbyist for CCA, received $220,000 for its services for CCA in 2012.

Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti Inc., received $280,000 to lobby for CCA in 2012. McBee Strategic Consulting received $320,000 in 2012 from CCA. CCA in-house lobby registered $970,000 in lobbying for 2012.

Navigators Global lobbies for GEO. GEO paid Navigators Global $120,000 for lobbying in 2012. Lionel (Leo) Aguirre was also paid $120,000 for lobbying for GEO.

Among the gang of eight senators, all but Lindsay Graham and John McCain have received significant money from the private prison corporations. The transparency watchdog, Open Secrets, compiled the figures by adding contributions from members, employees, PACs or immediate family members of the organization.

* Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.): Chair of the Rules Committee, Member of Judiciary and Chair of Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Enforcement. In 2012, Schumer received at least $64,000 from lobbyists Akin Gump et al, and $2,500 from Mehlman Vogel. He also received $34,500 from FMR (Fidelity), which owns 5.09 percent of CCA and 8.67 percent of GEO.

* Marco Rubio (R-Fla.): Member of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, and Foreign Relations, received $29,300 from the GEO Group. Wells Fargo (also heavily invested in private prisons) gave Rubio $16,150.

* Bob Menendez (D-N.J): Finance Committee, new chair of Foreign Relations, received more than $39,000 in documented money from private prison lobbyists, with $34,916 coming from Akin Gump, $6,300 from Mehlman Vogel Castagnetti Inc. and $1,000 from McBee Strategic Consulting.

* Michael Bennet (D-Colo.): Finance Committee, received at least $30,794 from
Akin Gump.

The prison lobby also targeted other key members of Congress. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), chair of the Senate Budget committee and member of Appropriations, received $21,600 from Akin Gump; $74,700 from McBee Strategic Consulting.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), who is on the House Budget and Judiciary committees, received money from: Akin, Gump et al ($19,600); and contributions from Mehlman Vogel associates totaling $2,500.

What these lobbyists want for their money is an immigration reform bill that tightens, rather than loosens the criminal net for undocumented workers and their families.

The inhumane and illogical step of pre-deportation detention was invented by the private prison industry. Last year, the Obama administration spent more money on immigration enforcement, including detention, than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined — a staggering $18 billion. The detention centers receive $166 per person, per day in government funds — an amount that would be a godsend to a homeless family or unemployed worker.

Peter Cervantes-Gautschi, director of Enlace, notes, “The private prison industry is swamping the Senate Budget and Appropriations Committees to try to buy them to keep Operation Streamline so they can incarcerate more immigrants in private prisons despite immigration reform.” There is nothing surprising about that, he adds, “That’s their business.”

The national movement made up of local organizations against private detention centers has a simple demand — stop funding private immigrant detention centers. They have blocked construction of new prisons and pressured investment funds and individuals to divest from private prison stock. They have also turned their sights on the politicians that feed federal money into the system.

Maria Rodriguez of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, a member of the divestment campaign, explains that her group is meeting with Florida Congressional representatives to counteract the influence of the private prison lobby.

“In the broadest sense, what we’re trying to do is to show the financial impact on policies and the conversation in the context of immigration reform,” she says.

Are members of Congress being bought off? Rodriguez replies, “I think that when people are being heavily lobbied and when there’s financial interests involved and when our representatives are benefiting from those financial interests directly through lobbying, it compromises their ability to do what’s right for taxpayers and immigrant families.”

Campaign leaders say it’s important for constituents to know the kind of pressure their representatives are under. There’s a lot at stake for the private prison companies. CCA and GEO reported combined revenues of $3 billion dollars in 2011, with nearly half — $1.3 billion — coming directly from federal government, according to 2011 annual reports. They will fight hard for continued incarceration under immigration reform — whether it makes sense policy-wise or not.

The human rights issues involved in locking up migrants for profit, separating families and detaining individuals in poor and humiliating conditions rarely even make it into the debate. Instead, politicians are tempted to curry support among the prison industry and conservatives, with more talk of “enforcement” as the trading chip for citizenship and less talk of human rights.

Meanwhile, citizen groups are hoping that greater transparency and public awareness of the role of private prison corporations will lead to a more lasting and rights-based comprehensive immigration reform, one where for-profit immigrant detention centers become a relic of a crueler past.
 
End the Prison-Industrial Complex, Now!


Most readers probably know the outline of this story: beginning in the 1970s the incarceration rate in America, the proportion of the population sent to prison, started to rise exponentially. The rate of incarceration in America is now the highest in the world. And in absolute numbers the U.S. has gone from having around 300,000 citizens in prison in the late 1970s to about 2.3 million as of last year. This doesn’t include those held in immigrant detention facilities, a number that has also risen exponentially, particularly in the last four years.

Two trends begun in earnest in the 1980s are behind the rise. The ‘war on drugs’ has nominally produced the incarcerated and the privatization of the prison system provides the economic motive for increasing the number of those incarcerated.

In her book The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Color Blindness author Michelle Alexander lays out the racial politics behind the ‘war on drugs.’ In essence, in the 1980s and 1990s political opportunists appealed to white fears and racialized the public health problem of drug abuse for political gain. In so doing, they (re)demonized black America and gave cover to the idea that this county’s legal, penal and policing systems are to prevent ‘crime,’ rather than to produce, legitimize and enforce racial and class oppression.

In fact, drug abuse in America is broad based and racially diverse. White Americans use illegal drugs in approximate proportion to black and brown Americans. The reason why black and brown Americans go to prison for drug violations while white Americans don’t is because of explicitly racist policing such as New York’s ‘stop and frisk’ policy that (illegally) targets black and brown youth and men.

There are no similar policing practices in rich, white suburbs, and therefore no similar rates of drug arrests. Additionally, for those arrested for drug offenses, sentences differ between black and white because of an urban / suburban divide by drug form (e.g. crack versus powder cocaine) that has been racialized.

The privatization of America’s prisons makes explicit the economic basis for the racial and class divide that has led from the ‘founding’ of this country on race-based slavery and genocide to the original Jim Crow laws in the post-civil war South (and ‘soft’ racism everywhere else) to today’s “prison industrial complex’ and ‘New Jim Crow.’

Private prisons are built and run by politically connected capitalists whose profits increase with the number of imprisoned and with the amount of unpaid labor that they are able to extract. This system has replaced slave ‘ownership’ with captive labor that faces social (legal) sanction under the legitimizing strategy of punishment for ‘crimes’ committed. However, if the laws are racist and policing is racist then the system is racist (and classist).

Were ‘crime’ suppression behind the increase in incarceration rates the enthusiastic prosecution of Bush and Obama administration officials for war crimes, torture, false imprisonment, murder and illegal surveillance would be accompanied by near endless prosecutions of Wall Street for financial crimes and industrial leaders for environmental and myriad other crimes. The complete and utter immunity that America’s economic and political elite has from criminal prosecution is clear evidence of the class basis of the legal, penal and policing systems.

In addition to the personal tragedies that the prison industrial complex produces; wasted lives, stolen labor, social exclusion, lost family and community ties, permanent impoverishment, this system is a class crime. Much has been made of the reluctance of Americans to rebel, even under circumstances deemed intolerable. But a large number of Americans who face the material conditions conducive to rebellion are in prison. Maintaining social control in the face of a wildly bifurcated economy where a few live off of the labor of the many is a clear purpose of this system.

The American state is no neutral actor in the political economy. As Ms. Alexander articulates, investigation of the facts finds few ‘accidents’ in the construction of this racist legal, penal and policing system. Seeking redress through ‘official’ channels is, as Malcolm X put it, a diversion. And at this point in history, one’s view of the appropriate solutions is very much a function of one’s analysis of the problems.

The prison industrial complex is a moral and political crime. It is a class crime. It is also a microcosm of the broader systems of capitalist domination, exploitation and control. It ties to declining wages for labor in the face of rising corporate profits. It ties to rising unemployment and the declining proportion of the population in the work force. It ties to increasing indebtedness in the face of more onerous legal repayment requirements. It ties to the increasing discretion of the political elites to imprison us. It ties to increasing surveillance. It ties to racist wars for the economic benefit of the few. In a system based on exploitation, the prison industrial complex is just one more mode of exploitation.

When (former Black Panther) Angela Davis was asked about political violence some decades ago (Swedish television interview) she made the point that black America was the victim of political violence, not the perpetrator. Racist and classist legal, penal and policing systems are the perpetrators of systematic political violence. Self-defense against this political violence is an entirely legitimate political and moral tactic. Additionally, this system represents the interests of capitalist exploitation and domination. One is unlikely to be changed without the other.

In both political and moral terms, ending this prison industrial complex system is an imperative. As in the 1950s and 1960s, we must organize, mobilize and go into the streets. The existing system is the problem, not the solution. And it will be the facts on the ground that matter, not the chatter from politicians and designated leaders (Democrats). This racist, classist prison system must be ended now.
 
Private Prisons and Pharmaceutical Industry Fight against Marijuana Legalization

During the 2016 election season, private prisons and pharmaceutical companies made a number of donations towards anti-marijuana legalization campaigns across the United States in hopes of furthering their agendas. In November 2016, the legalization of recreational marijuana was put up to a vote on the five states’ ballots, California, Nevada, Arizona, Massachusetts and Maine. Among those opposed to the legalization of recreational marijuana, the private prison and pharmaceutical industry made it clear with their large donations that they stand to lose the most.

A 2014 study published in JAMA looked at states where medical marijuana is legal, the number of deaths from prescriptiondrug overdoses is, on average, 25 percent lower than in states where medical marijuana remains illegal. This explains why Big Pharma fears the legalization of recreational and medical marijuana in more states. As a line of defense, major pharmaceutical companies like Insys Therapeutics Inc. dished out hefty donations to anti-legalization campaigns. Insys Therapeutics—which markets the painkiller, Fentanyl—donated $500,000 to the largest anti-marijuana campaign in Arizona in 2016. Fentanyl, a deadly opioid drug, is said to be up to 50 times more potent than heroin. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the number of deaths caused by Fentanyl and other synthetic opioids increased by 72.2% from 2014 to 2015. Other Big Pharma companies that profit from the sale of opioids made similar donations to anti-marijuana legalization efforts in other states.

Pharmaceutical companies are in the business of selling as many pills as possible, with little to no regard for human health and well-being. And similarly, the United States’ private prison companies work to incarcerate as many citizens as their facilitates can fit, and then some. The growing legalization of recreational and medical marijuana poses a threat to private prisons that are going to see more and more beds empty, as marijuana drug sentences will most likely decline. According to an annual report from the Human Rights Watch, law enforcement made 574,641 arrests for small quantities of marijuana intended for personal use in 2015, making up almost half of all drug possession arrests. Even more astonishing, the number of marijuana possession arrests was about 13.6 percent higher than the number of arrests made for all violent crimes combined, including murder, rape and serious assaults.

Private prisons typically must reach a required quota of inmates per year to be profitable and fulfill contracts, and the legalization of marijuana jeopardizes their entire business. This is why the two largest for-profit private prison companies in the country–GEO Group and CoreCivic (formerly the Corrections Corporation of America)–have spent millions of dollars lobbying politicians since 1989. In 2016, The Obama Administration made an effort to end the government’s dependence on unreliable private prisons by putting in place a plan to phase out current contracts. The U.S. Justice Department found that, “a pool of 14 privately contracted prisons reported more incidents of inmate contraband, higher rates of assaults and more uses of force than facilities run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.” With the inauguration of the Trump Administration in 2017, newly appointed Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced he is rescinding the Obama Administration’s private prison rollback plan. This means the use of contracted private prisons will continue in the United States, and the lobbying efforts of such companies were a success.

While opioid abuse, the privatization of prisons and marijuana legalization all received a fair share of corporate media coverage separately, there is minimal establishment reporting on how Big Pharma and private prison companies oppose marijuana legalization. The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and NPR all produced stories about each of the separate issues mentioned, but failed to establish the connections between opioid abuse, private prisons, and legalization. Independent news sources, such as High Times, reported on how major lobbying efforts directly opposed to marijuana legalization served to benefit these industries’ economic interests.

Sources:

David Bienenstock, “Trump’s War On Weed Will Boost Big Pharma, Private Prisons and Mexican Drug Cartels,” High Times, February 24, 2017 http://hightimes.com/news/trumps-wa...rma-private-prisons-and-mexican-drug-cartels/.

Alfonso Serrano, “Inside Big Pharma’s Fight to Block Recreational Marijuana,” Guardian, October 22, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/sustain...reational-marijuana-legalization-big-business.

Student Researcher: Meghan Nanan (University of Vermont)

Faculty Evaluator: Rob Williams (University of Vermont)
 
GOVERNMENT AND MEDIA HAVE PROPAGANDIZED THE WAR ON DRUGS
July 15, 2015
When President Bush held up a bag of crack cocaine (purchased earlier across the street from the White House) during a prime-time television speech to announce his “War on Drugs” last September, it set the tone for the whole media campaign which is apparently based on deception and the creation of hysteria rather than fact.

As it turned out, the Drug Enforcement Agency set up the deal in a crass bit of PR showboating. Never mind that Lafayette Park never attracted drug dealers of any kind, never mind that the DEA’s hidden microphone didn’t work, never mind that the young drug dealer was lured there only with great difficulty by the drug agents. President Bush got his prop and that was all that mattered. According to Propaganda Review, “A vast array of propaganda techniques and devices are being used to convince Americans that the ‘drug thing’ is the country’s number one problem – a problem that required extraordinary and even unconstitutional measures to solve.”

The media have cooperated with Bush by providing extensive, uncritical coverage of official speeches, press conferences, news leaks, sensationalized drug busts, and TV specials that exaggerate and distort the drug problem.

One of the most effective propaganda techniques, which taps deeply into the American psyche, is the use of wartime symbols and jargon to justify extraordinary measures. And these propaganda techniques are apparently working. According to an ABC News/Washington Post Poll, more than 60% of Americans were willing to give up their own constitutional rights regarding illegal search and seizure to help “fight the Drug War:”

It may be understandable that the Bush and Reagan administrations were willing to wage this Propaganda War since it diverts attention from the budget deficit, AIDS, homelessness, administration scandals and corruption, nuclear weapons, and other domestic and foreign policy problems. But one of the most disturbing questions is why would the media engage in such a misleading and dangerous propaganda campaign?

When Bush was questioned about the sleazy tactics in setting up the Lafayette Park drug deal, he got angry and asked whether the press was siding with “this drug guy.”

That is perhaps one of the scariest aspects of this propaganda campaign — dissenting voices are simply not permitted. Early last year, DEA agent Charles Stowell, during a KCBS interview, compared the publisher of a marijuana grower’s magazine to a child pornographer. And when former Secretary of State George Schulz came out publicly for legalization, the White House said he “has been out West too long.”

This new McCarthyism has chilled public discourse on alternative solutions to the administration’s plans of prosecuting and imprisoning drug users. When was the last time you saw a TV special on legalizing drugs, or corruption in the DEA, or drug trafficking in the White House?

Last year, roughly one thousand times more people died from alcohol and tobacco use than from cocaine, heroin, crack, speed, and marijuana combined. Yet most Americans still consider illegal drugs to be the country’s number one problem.

While the War on Drugs may not be a success, the Propaganda War certainly is.

SSU CENSORED RESEARCHER: JOHN GILLES

SOURCE: PROPAGANDA REVIEW Fort Mason, Building D San Francisco, CA 94123, DATE: Winter 1990

TITLE: “DRUG WAR PROPAGANDA”

AUTHOR: JOHAN CARLISLE

COMMENTS: Author Johan Carlisle raises the disturbing possibility of a society willing to give up its constitutional rights to fight a war it has been propagandized into believing is worthwhile. Carlisle charges that the media have gone along with the government in portraying the drug wars unilaterally as a law enforcement problem. “There have been a few articles in the progressive weeklies which have challenged the party line,” Carlisle said. “The overwhelming consistency of the drug war story on T.V., in the magazines, and in the major daily newspapers reveals the McCarthyesque nature of trying to challenge the party line.” Carlisle suggests that “The general public would benefit a great deal from a national dialog on legalization of drugs — just one of the sides of this story overlooked by the media. Crime, public health, corruption in government and law enforcement, and the staggering social costs of incarcerating millions of casual drug users are but a few of the real costs for the public.”
 
CONTINUED MEDIA BLACKOUT OF DRUG WAR FRAUD
July 15, 2015
While the fire and brimstone of drug war rhetoric continues to saturate the mainstream press, high-ranking drug war insiders continue to come forward in attempts to expose the “war” for what it really is: a battle for the hearts, minds, and tax dollars of the American public. And the media continue to be the government’s apparently willing ally in this war.

The latest to “go public” is Michael Levine, who recently retired from the DEA after 25 years as a leading undercover agentfor various law enforcement agencies. Over the course of his career, Levine has personally accounted for at least 3,000 people serving a total of 15,000 years in jail, as well as several tons of various illegal substances seized. Upon his retirement Levine published a critical expose of the DEA in which he thoroughly documents his journey from true believer to drug war heretic.

Levine documents numerous instances of CIA involvement in the drug trade, State Department intervention, and DEA cooperation with both parties. Levine’s story closely parallels that of Richard Gregorie whose defection from the Attorney General’s office was the fourth ranked “censored” story of 1989.

According to Levine, “the only thing we know with certainty is that the drug war is not for real. The drug economy in the United States is as much as $200 billion a year, and it is being used to finance political operations, pay international debts – all sorts of things.” While not being completely frozen out by the media, not one DEA or other government official would appear to respond to his charges.

Levine’s appearance on The MacNeil/Lehrer show was significant because Terrence Burke (the acting DEA chief), when asked by Lehrer, agreed with Levine that “we (the U.S.), have consistently chosen drugs over communism,” but Burke only agreed to appear on the show after the Levine interview (which was taped) and with the proviso that he would not discuss any of the charges made in the book.

Another strange media non-event was the proposed “60 Minutes” segment on “the drug war fraud”. On January 24, “60 Minutes” producer Gail Eisen called Levine and explained that executive producer Don Hewitt had ordered a “crash production” for a segment on his experience with the DEA. Levine gave “60 Minutes” extensive documentation and he was instructed to get his passport in order to do on location shooting in Panama. He then received a phone call informing him that “60 Minutes” had suddenly and inexplicably dropped the piece.

“The whole drug war is a media war,” says Levine, “It’s a psychological war, aimed at convincing America through the press that our government is seriously trying to deal with the drug problem when they’re not.”

SSU CENSORED RESEARCHER: DENISE MUSSETTER

SOURCE: EXTRA!, 130 West 25th St., New York, NY 10001, DATE: July/August 1990

TITLE: “Ex-DEA Agent Calls Drug War a Fraud”

AUTHOR: Martin A. Lee

SOURCE: THE HUMANIST, 7 Harwood Drive, PO Box 146, Amherst, NY 14226-0146, DATE: September/October 1990

TITLE: “A Funny, Dirty Little Drug War”

AUTHOR: Rick Szykowny

COMMENTS: Investigative journalist Martin A. Lee, co-author of “Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media,” felt the “drug war” issue received minimal exposure. “Charges by Michael Levine, a 25-year veteran of the Drug Enforcement Administration, that the drug war is a fraud, got very little coverage in mainstream U.S. news media – this at a time when the so-called drug war was perhaps the biggest ongoing news story in the U.S. press.” Lee said that his interview with Levine was reprinted in a handful of alternative weeklies, but no mainstream news outlet picked up his charges and explored the serious issues he raised. Rick Szykowny, author of the article in The Humanist, said that the media coverage of the drug war amounted to a propaganda exercise, as the media focused on the Bush Administration’s self-serving pronouncement and rigorously avoided any analysis of either the systemic social and cultural causes of drug use (and abuse) in this country or the political aspects of the “war on drugs”. Szykowny also suggested that “The Bush Administration is the most obvious beneficiary of the mass -media’s uncritical coverage of the drug war – as were the Reagan and Nixon administrations before it. The Drug War is the kind of issue that lends itself quite handily to cynical political manipulation. By declaring “war” on drug abuse – essentially a thorny social (non-military) problem – the Bush administration was able to achieve a number of things. It could foment a kind of crisis mentality in the general public, to the point where the average American supported the suspension of constitutionally protected civil liberties in order to wage that war. It could divert the attention of the American public (and mass media) from far more substantial political issues – and from the fact that the United States government has cynically colluded with international drug traffickers when it has served the interests of `national security.’ The Bush Administration was also able to intervene in the internal affairs of South American nations under the pretext of `going to the source,’ and even invaded Panama to (allegedly) bring Manuel Noriega to trial on drug trafficking charges.”
 
U.S. Government Repressed Marijuana-Tumor Research

Title: Pot Shrinks Tumors; Government Knew in ‘74
Author: Raymond Cushing
http://www.alternet.org/print.html?StoryID=9257

Faculty Evaluator: Mary King M.D.
Student researchers: Jennifer Swift, Licia Marshall,

Corporate media coverage: AP and UPI news wires 2/29/00

A Spanish medical team’s study released in Madrid in February 2000 has shown that tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active chemical in marijuana, destroys tumors in lab rats. These findings, however, are not news to the U.S. government. A study in Virginia in 1974 yielded similar results but was suppressed by the DEA, and in 1983 the Reagan/Bush administration tried to persuade U.S. universities and researchers to destroy all cannabis research work done between 1966 and 1976, including compendiums in libraries.

The research was conducted by a medical team led by Dr. Manuel Guzman of Complutence University in Madrid. In the study, brains of 45 lab rats were injected with a cancer cell, which produced tumors. On the twelfth day of the experiment, 15 of the rats were injected with THC and 15 with Win-55, 212-2, a synthetic compound similar to THC. The untreated rats died 12-18 days after the development of the tumors. THC treated rats lived significantly longer than the control group. Although three were unaffected by the THC, nine lived 19-35 days, while tumors were completely eradicated in three others. The rats treated with Win-55,212-2 showed similar results.

In an e-mail interview for this story, the Madrid researcher said he had heard of the Virginia study, but had never been able to locate literature on it. “I am aware of the existence of that research. In fact I have attempted many times to obtain the journal article on the original investigation by theses people, but it has proven impossible,” Guzman said. His response wasn’t surprising, considering that in 1983 the Reagan/Bush administration tried to persuade American universities and researchers to destroy all 1966/76 cannabis research work, including compendiums in libraries, reports Jack Herer. “We know that large amounts of information have since disappeared,” he says.

Guzman provided the title of the work-“Antineoplastic Activity of Cannabinoids,” an article in a 1975 Journal of the National Cancer Institute-and author Raymond Cushing obtained a copy at the UC Medical School Library in Davis, California, and faxed it to Madrid. The 1975 article does not mention breast cancer tumors, which were featured in the only newspaper story ever to appear about the 1974 study in the local section of the Washington Post on August 18, 1974. The headline read, “Cancer Curb Is Studied,” and was followed in part by, “The active chemical agent in marijuana curbs the growth of three kinds of cancer in mice and may also suppress the immunity reaction that causes rejection of organ transplants, a Medical College of Virginia team has discovered. The researchers found that THC slowed the growth of lung cancers, breast cancers, and a virus-induced leukemia in laboratory mice, and prolonged their lives by as much as 36 percent.”

Drug Enforcement Agency officials shut down the Virginia study and all further cannabis research, according to Jack Herer, who reports on these events in his book, The Emperor Wears No Clothes. In 1976, President Gerald Ford put an end to all public cannabis research and granted exclusive research rights to major pharmaceutical companies. These companies set out-unsuccessfully-to develop synthetic forms of THC that would deliver all the medical benefits without the “high.”

Update by Raymond Cushing

When I was a cub reporter twenty-eight years ago at the daily Advocate in Stamford, Connecticut, my first city editor-a white-haired veteran of the International Herald Tribune named Marian Campbell-told me that the cure for cancer was the holy grail of all news stories.

“Unless they discover the cure for cancer,” she would say over the clackety-clack of the manual typewriters, “this paper goes to press on time.”

What I found out a quarter-century later is that not even the cure for cancer is a big enough story to crack the Berlin Wall of media censorship in this country. Toss in the facts that the cure appears to be a benign substance that has been illegal for 63 years, and that the government knowingly suppressed evidence of its curative powers 25 years, and you get twice the storyæand twice the censorship.

I won’t name the “investigative journalists” who didn’t respond when I sent them this story. I won’t list the numerous “progressive” publications that ignored it. I won’t describe the forbidding sense of professional isolation I endured in the months I tried to place the story.

Suffice it to say that it’s what one would expect in a society that has criminalized its own young for two generations around the cannabis issue simply because we were told to do so.

Thousands of innocent people who are in U.S. prisons for possessing or selling “the cure for cancer” await liberation and reparations. Someday our grandchildren will look back and ask, “What did you do to set the cannabis prisoners free?”

Here’s what any responsible journalist should be doing:

Go to primary sources when evaluating cannabis research. The AP and other news organizations love to elevate “bad science” and suppress “good science” when it comes to cannabis. You have to read the original research articles yourself and make your own judgments.

Investigate and report on the war on children that is a major component of the war on drugs. The marijuana laws are the main tool the police use to persecute minors. No other policy affects more families in more insidious and devastating ways than cannabis prohibition.

Learn about the history of cannabis prohibition and about the pharmaceutical, liquor, and tobacco giants that are behind it. If you don’t know the history of cannabis and hemp prohibition, you’re too ignorant to justifiably call yourself a journalist.

If it turns out-as my story would seem to indicate-that cannabis is the cure for cancer and the government suppressed this information for 25 years (and continues to suppress it), then the body count alone will make this the biggest holocaust in recorded history. Virtually all federal drug policy makers of both parties since 1975-including legislators, presidents and the DEA-will be complicit and criminally liable.

That’s why they don’t want this story covered.

To learn the history of cannabis prohibition, read http://www.jackherer.com. To read my story, type in the address at the beginning of this segment.

Raymond Cushing: raymondcushing@ireland.com
 
This shit is all by design!! If yall cant see whats going on, were worst off than I thought!!

Business is Booming for the Prison Profiteers


Private corrections company The GEO Group celebrated the holiday season by opening a new 1,500 bed prison in Milledgeville, Georgia on December 12th. The $80 million facility is expected to generate approximately $28.0 million in annual revenues.

Though GEO (formerly Wackenhut) is hardly a household name, they are a major player in the private corrections sector, combining a self righteous amorality in profiting from human misery with a ruthless sense of just how to make a buck in this business. The GEO Group is so notorious that they were the target of an Occupy Washington D.C. action in early December. In addition, the United Methodist Church sold off more than $200,000 in stock in GEO Group over the holiday season, judging that holding these shares was “incompatible with Bible teaching.”

While such actions may irritate a few within the company’s rank, the GEO Group is thick-skinned. Over the years journalists have exposed a long history of violence, abuse and corruption in the company’s facilities. Such scandals would have driven most firms out of business, but GEO has always managed to find the way back to prosperity. While the U.S. economy has plummeted in the past eighteen months, GEO has been positioning itself for the future. In addition to opening the Georgia facility, during this period the company has:

  • bought up competitor Cornell Corporation and its prisons in 15 states, an acquisition expected to add about $400 million a year to GEO’s revenues.
  • acquired BI Incorporated for $415 million. BI is the U.S.’ largest producer and provider of electronic monitoring units with 60,000 “customers” for their ankle bracelets
  • begun the intake of new detainees at the 650 bed Adelanto ICE Processing Center East in Southern California. Adelanto West is scheduled to bring a further 650 beds online in August 2012.
  • expanded their first facility, Aurora Detention Center (founded in 1987) from 400 to 525 beds
  • moved ahead with plans to develop a 600 bed Civil Detention Center in Karnes County Texas, expected to generate $15 million in annual revenues
For the first nine months of 2011, GEO reported total revenues of $1.2 billion, an 11% rise over 2010. Shareholders are gloating with the company’s success. A hundred dollars invested in GEO in 2005 would have risen to $322 by 2010. At the top of the profiteers stands long-time CEO George Zoley. The owner of 70% of GEO’s stock, Zoley consistently pulls down annual compensation in excess of $3 million, landing him squarely in the ranks of the one per centers. His Chief Operations Officer Wayne Calabrese, is not far behind at around two million a year.

GEO’s rising profitability is a result of their capacity to change with the times. While the War on Drugs and facility construction were the cash cows of the industry from 1980 to 2001, 9/11 and the sinking economy have shifted the terrain. Immigration and alternatives to incarceration are the new windows of opportunity in the freedom deprivation sector. GEO, as usual, is right on the money. In Zoley’s prosaic jargon, the company is developing a “full continuum of care with leading competitive positions in every key market segment in corrections, detention and treatment rehabilitation services.”

Along with the new centers at Adelanto and expanding Aurora, the acquisition of BI has enhanced GEO’s potential to capitalize on anti-immigrant crackdowns. The takeover included BI’s five year, $372 million contract with ICE for monitoring 27,000 immigrants under Federal supervision but not held in detention centers.

Grabbing BI has also put GEO in a position to take advantage of the early release programs being implemented in California and other states. BI operates a network of daily reporting centers which offer drug treatment, anger management workshops, counseling, and a host of other services to individuals on parole and probation. These centers stand ready to help state agencies address the increasing need for supervision of people released or diverted from prison. In the long run, the large scale privatization of probation and parole functions is an obvious aim.

Further moves in line with the changing times are the firm’s forays into the psychiatric field through their GEO Care division. With mainstream mental hospitals suffering massive cutbacks, GEO Care has found a niche market in facilities for the involuntarily institutionalized, in other words, psychiatric prisons. GEO Care runs three such facilities in Florida alone. Their prize plum is the 720 bed Florida Civil Commitment Center. (Courts impose a civil commitment on those judged a threat to public safety though not convicted of any crime. People with sex offense histories are the most frequent targets.) In addition to its Florida operations, GEO Care has a presence in Texas as well, having gained a contract to run a 100 bed facility for people awaiting trial in 2009.

Predictably, GEO could not have achieved these financial successes without the usual assortment of dirty tricks and influence peddling. The firm’s team of 63 lobbyists has been active in 16 states over the past decade. In the first quarter of this year alone GEO spent more than $100,000 on lobbying in Florida as the legislature was considering a plan to privatize 29 state prisons. Unfortunately for Zoley and company, the initiative stalled this time around but is likely to resurface in upcoming legislative sessions.

GEO complements its lobbying activities with political campaign contributions, which totaled just over $2.4 million between 2003 and 2010.

Perhaps even more worrying than the GEO Group’s political maneuverings, however, are their efforts to export the U.S. model of mass incarceration and immigration detention. In the late 1990s, GEO (then Wackenhut) had a financial stake in Australia’s notorious Woomera Immigration Detention Center. UN Envoy Justice Bhagwati visited the facility and said he felt he was “in front of a great human tragedy.” Barbara Rogalia who worked there as a nurse, echoed these sentiments: “It reminded me of a Nazi concentration camp I visited in Czechoslovakia, now a museum. The only thing that was missing from the gate, at the top near the razor wire, was a sign saying ‘Arbeit macht frei‘ (‘Work sets (you) free’).”

Following massive demonstrations by community activists, a string of uprisings by those detained and a series of escapes the center closed in 2003. A corporate restructuring process ensued and the company’s corrections wing re-emerged as GEO Australia and continues to operate four prisons.

GEO’s ventures in the U.K. have had a slightly smoother landing. In 2011 GEO UK won a contract for prison escort services worth $150 million a year. In addition, they took over management of the 217-bed Immigration Removal Center in Glasgow, Scotland.

GEO Group’s last overseas venture is a 3,000 plus bed prison in the Limpopo Province of South Africa. Not long ago, it appeared that South Africa was preparing to embark on a large-scale prison privatization project, with GEO in the lead. However, a change in cabinet personnel landed Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula as Minister of Corrections. She has declared her intention to keep all facilities in state hands. Unlike in the U.S., at least someone in a national position of power in South Africa is prepared to say no to the private prison industry.

At the moment there doesn’t seem to be a Mapisa-Nqakula emerging in the Obama administration. Instead, the GEO Group looks set to make an increasing variety of projects “shovel ready.” If the halting of private profiteering from freedom deprivation is to become a reality, we will need a lot more Occupiers and political leaders with the courage to listen and act.

 
US War In Afghanistan Fueling Global Heroin Epidemic
March 3, 2017
Since the US overthrew the Taliban government, Afghanistan’s opium industry exploded, fueling the current international heroin epidemic,

Before 2001 when US military action began in Afghanistan, the Taliban government offered subsidies to Afghani farmers who grew food crops instead of heroin poppies. In the summer of 2000, the Taliban government banned the cultivation and production of opium poppies in Taliban-controlled areas. The following spring opium crops decreased significantly, from an estimated 3,276 tons in 2000 to 185 tons in 2001.

The US invasion of Afghanistan left Afghani farmers without prior economic incentives to grow food crops, and many returned to growing more profitable poppy plants. The US and its allies wanted to minimize how many troops they deployed in Afghanistan, so they funded local anti-Taliban fighting groups. Within six months these US-backed warlords helped revive the country’s opium trade and began to take control of it. In 2002, Afghanistan produced an estimated 3,400 tons of opium crops.

In 2015, an estimated ninety percent of the world’s opium poppy production is in Afghanistan, effectively flooding the worldmarket for heroin, one of the most addictive and deadly drugs. From 2002-2013, the CDC reports that heroin-related deaths in the US “nearly quadrupled”; and over 10,000 people in the US died from heroin overdoses in 2014 alone. As Muhawesh concludes, “In the process of waging a ‘War on Terror,’ we lost the ‘War on Drugs.’ Both wars deal in corruption and violence, and they put real human lives on the line.”

Although Afghanistan’s opium output and the heroin epidemic have received considerable coverage in the US corporate press, these reports have focused on blaming local forces in Afghanistan—without acknowledgement that the US helped to establish these factions in order to combat Taliban forces. By pointing the finger elsewhere, the US news coverage of the epidemic has promoted negative views of Afghanistan and its governing forces, to direct attention away from US responsibility. By contrast, in 2014, Rolling Stone reported that the US government knew about, but did not interfere with increased opium production in Afghanistan, because doing so would have derailed its military mission.

Sources: Mnar Muhawesh, “US War In Afghanistan Is Fueling Global Heroin Epidemic & Enabling The Drug Trade,” MintPress News, July 21, 2016, http://www.mintpressnews.com/global-war-terror-created-heroin-epidemic-us-afghanistan/218662/.

Student Researcher: Matthew Acord (Sonoma State University)

Faculty Evaluator: Nicole Wolf (Sonoma State University)
 
THE CHEMICAL INDUSTRY & ITS COCAINE CONNECTION
July 15, 2015
War has always been good for business, and the war on drugs is no exception. During the years of blustering “just say no” rhetoric and swelling drug enforcement budgets, American industry openly and legally collaborated with South America’s cocaine cartels, supplying the chemicals needed to turn coca leaves into cocaine.

The process requires a number of so-called precursor chemicals that are also used for hundreds of legitimate products (which is the implausible defense used by the chemical industry).

During the 1980s, American firms were the leading suppliers of these chemicals to South America. From 1982 to 1988, U.S. exports of the precursor chemicals to the Andean region doubled, and no one in government or business seemed even remotely curious why.

There ought to be a law, and there is, sort of: the Chemical Diversion and Trafficking Act, which was signed by Ronald Reagan in November 1988. The act went into effect in February 1990 after two years of hearings and significant input from the chemical industry.

In fact, some critics of the legislation, like Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, would even say the industry’s lobbyists wrote it. “We looked at the law and saw the loopholes and contacted drug czar William Bennett’s office,” Reid says. “And he simply wasn’t concerned. He sent a form letter in response to my inquiry.”

In its final form, the antidiversion law allows the DEA to screen only the new customers of chemical companies and permits the agency just fifteen days to do so. “And we only get one shot,” says Gene Haislip, the DEA’s director of diversion control. Once cleared, a customer can’t be investigated again.

Since the controls have been implemented, the DEA has denied permission to seventy percent of new customers for these chemicals. In the first six months of 1990, U.S. chemical exports to South America dropped fifty percent.

Picking up the slack, however, is Germany, which has increased its exports to the region by over 400 percent in recent months.

In response to the German connection, legislation has been introduced which would empower the president to ban foreign companies that sell chemicals to the drug cartels from doing business in the U.S. While President Bush has yet to call for such a measure, an equally large question looms: While the media devotes so much coverage to the “war on drugs,” where were they during this battle?

SSU CENSORED RESEARCHER: DENISE MUSSETTER

SOURCE: ROLLING STONE, 745 Fifth Ave., New York, NY 10151, DATE: 11/1/90

TITLE: “By Keeping the Chemicals Flowing, American Industry Kept the Cocaine Cartels In Business”

AUTHOR: LINDA FELDMAN

COMMENTS: Author Linda Feldman feels that the “chemical industry/cocaine connection” has been and continues to be a “censored” story. “The subject of American chemical companies legally selling the cocaine processing solvents to Colombia, to my knowledge,” said Feldman, “was covered only in the Los Angeles Times in December 1989, by writer Doug Jehl. I spoke to Mr. Jehl as part of my research to confirm his sources because he maintained that close to 90% of the solvents were diverted to the production of cocaine. As far as I know, no other article was published or story aired which discussed the American companies’ participation. The general public would benefit (from greater media exposure of the story) by learning that the same mentality which drives businesses to sell poison gas and live bacteria to Iraq, nuclear weapons to unstable governments and irregular baby formula to Third World countries, is also behind the cocaine business. There is no doubt in my mind that cocaine processing would be a small time operation without American chemical companies. The irony that no law was broken only supports the cynical attitude that someone else might step in and do the dirty act anyway. My original article also described the procedure by which coca is made into cocaine. It is pretty grisly. I’m not sure if we could save heavy users from themselves but I sure would bet that anyone considering trying this poison would think twice if they knew exactly how this stuff is manufactured. On the Federal level, Senators Harry Reid and John Kerry would welcome further media exposure of this story. Both of them voiced their frustration to me in not being able to get support for tougher legislation unhampered by chemical company influence.” Feldman concludes with a warning of what might happen to investigative journalists who rock the boat. “Whatever you decide, I am grateful to you (Project Censored) for at least recognizing the importance of the story. The fact it was censored twice makes it more compelling for other writers to pick up their pens. (I might add that I was notified by GTE that the FBI subpoenaed my phone records for the first six months of 1990 and although I can’t prove it and the agent I spoke with denied the relationship, I feel there is a connection between my investigation into cocaine chemicals and the investigation by the FBI.)”
 
Hmm!!!!!



FEDERAL SEIZURE LAWS: MAKING CRIME PAY
July 12, 2015
Since the mid-1980s it has become common practice, for law enforcement agencies to seize property believed to be used or purchased by suspected drug dealers or users. Federal and state asset forfeiture laws have generated millions of dollars in seized drug cash — plus booty such as cars, homes, planes and boats — which have been turned over to local law enforcement agencies. As a result, the laws, perversely, have made police –departments financially dependent on the drug dealing they are supposed to curtail. Lt. Michael Post, who heads the Glendale (California) Police Department’s narcotics unit says that he has seen evidence of other police departments “under pressure to be revenue producers,” to the point where they use shortcuts to seize drug cash but do not follow up on their investigations in an effort to arrest the dealers. And while most officials deny it, the seizure laws certainly can cloud the judgment of local police, leading them to investigate suspects based on their assets rather than their threat to the community.

Since Congress authorized the return of drug assets to local law enforcement agencies in 1984, the program has come under fire from more than one federal agency. In a report issued last June, the U.S. General Accounting Office criticized both U.S. Customs and the Justice Department for inadequate management of the program. Three months later, the Justice Department’s inspector general also complained about the program’s management.

Perhaps more disturbing is that property may be seized without legal concern as to the guilt of the owner, without due process of law, and without any more evidence than “we suspect him/her of drug activity.” This tactic of seizing property was developed to discourage high-stakes, high-profile drug dealers from gorging themselves on drug-profits through extravagant living. It is not surprising, however, that this new-found strategy has been subverted by enforcement groups hungry for the spoils of the drug war.

In one such case, a West-Texas sheriff has been using the seizure laws to develop an “extra jurisdictional” strike force. According to the Texas Observer, Midland County Sheriff Gary Painter is coordinating a group of drug mercenaries. The group tracks down and stings suspected drug dealers outside county lines, then brings the spoils back into Midland County, and reaps the profits. The most troubling question, however, is the legality of “paramilitary” deputies sweeping across the countryside, seizing property without concern for the due process rights of suspects. Apparently as long as these activities are profitable for groups like Painter’s, “freelance” deputies will be encouraged to pillage at will.
 
SWAT Teams Replace Civilian Police: Target Minority Communities
April 30, 2010
Source: COVERTACTION QUARTERLY (CAQ), Title: “Operation Ghetto Storm: The Rise In Paramilitary Policing,” Date: Fall 1997, Author: Peter Cassidy

SSU Censored Researchers: Michael McMurtrey and Jason L. Sanders
SSU Faculty Evaluator: Robert Lee Nichols

In the 25 years since the creation of the first Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) teams in Los Angeles, police forces across the United States have become increasingly militarized. Paramilitary police teams originally only operated in urban areas, but in recent years the number of special task forces throughout the country, including rural police departments, has dramatically increased. A study by Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Police Studies shows that these forces are now responding to many call-outs that could have been handled by regular police officers, and some 20 percent of departments have reported that their special forces are used for community patrols.

The first SWAT teams were begun in the mid-1960s by the then-Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates and were used during civil disturbances in the 1960s and 1970s. As the war on drugs escalated in the 1980s, paramilitary forces were used against drug dealers in many cities. Police agencies around the country organized SWAT or Special Response Teams (SRT) that operate in battle dress uniform with automatic assault rifles, percussion flash-bang grenades, CS gas, and armored personnel carriers.

Experts partially blame the militarization of police forces on the proliferation of military-style weapons in the general public. As gangs and drug dealers became much more heavily armed, the police became increasingly militarized. Cheap war-surplus material was made available as a result of the military spending cuts at the end of the Cold War, and the abundance of military hardware facilitated the trend towards high-tech weaponry on both sides of the drug war.

Professor Peter Kraska, of Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Police Studies, believes that the increasing amount of police violence against citizens will be answered by greater force from armed lawbreakers. This may result in a Cold War-style escalation of arms in the streets of United States. As a result of this increased armament, paramilitary forces have begun maintaining a semi-permanent presence in “dangerous” neighborhoods in order to keep control.

According to the author, paramilitary forces now specifically target minority groups and communities. Joseph McNamara, of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, points to the racism evident in many of the incidents occurring where paramilitary forces are used. Most of the paramilitary operations occur in inner-city neighborhoods. During an “Operation Readi-Rock” raid in North Carolina, an entire block of an African-American neighborhood was isolated. Nearly 100 black individuals were detained, while all whites were allowed to leave the area.

A 1990 raid in Albuquerque started with a commando-style attack on an apartment building and resulted in the death of a suspect who had two marijuana joints on the premises. In 1994, a wrong address raid resulted in the heart failure of a 75-year-old minister in Boston who was chased to his death, and died handcuffed in his own apartment.

On the Mexican border, law enforcement is being reinforced by the U.S,. military. In May 1997, U.S. Marines killed a teenage shepherd tending his flock near the Texas-Mexican border. Police are required by law to announce their presence and fire only if their lives were in danger. Yet in this case, the Marines remained hidden and unannounced as they stalked the high school student for several hours.

The link between community-based civilian police departments and military/paramilitary operations raises serious questions regarding civil liberties in the United States.

UPDATE BY AUTHOR PETER CASSIDY: “The state’s monopoly on force is a privileged commission discharged every day by local law enforcement, an institution which is being increasingly militarized by misdirected government programs and, of course, the highly cultivated perception that crime, civil unrest, and terrorism are out of control, requiring extraordinary measures-even those that resemble artifacts of martial law.

“Few media outlets noticed the story. It resulted in an interview with a Boston Globe reporter who needed a national perspective for a report on a SWAT raid that destroyed a home in Central Massachusetts, and a radio interview in Philadelphia with a talk show host who feared the racist aspect of police paramilitarism. I shared his alarm.

“Drug War-funded training programs that expose local police to military culture continues to expand, acculturating the police to thinking like soldiers. (Also, the President’s budget includes $52.1 million in Fiscal Year 1999 for the Department of Defense [DOD] to continue to provide emergency preparedness training to local police and service agencies in U.S. cities.) Material transfer programs continue to flood police armories with war-surplus weapons that have little law enforcement utility—everything from bayonets to grenade launchers.

“The DOD, meanwhile, is feeling ever more comfortable discussing its new role in providing what one DOD called ‘homeland’ defense (against civil disturbances, biological attack, and terrorist incidents) in a Congressional hearing last summer, and in waging information warfare, enterprises that bring it directly into civil affairs and into plain confrontation with our American traditions.

“The militarization of local law enforcement is but one part of an overall fusion of the law enforcement and defense institutions in the United States that is the greatest threat of the Cold War. Tolerate it much longer and the people will forget that there is a difference between being governed and being garrisoned.”
 
Financially Bloated American Cancer Society Fails to Prevent Cancer
April 30, 2010
Title American Cancer Society: The World’s Wealthiest “Non-profit” Institution
Source International Journal of Health Services, Volume 29, number 3, 1999
Author Samuel S. Epstein
Faculty Evaluator Cindy Stearns Ph.D.
Student Researcher Jennifer Acio-Peters & Lisa Desmond

The American Cancer Society (ACS) is growing increasingly wealthy, thanks to donations from the public and funding from surgeons, drug companies, and corporations that profit from cancer cures. More than half the funds raised by the ACS go for overhead, salaries, and fringe benefits for its executives and other employees, while most direct community services are handled by unpaid volunteers. The value of cash reserves and real estate totals over $1 billion, yet only 16 percent of funds go into direct services for cancer victims. Conflicts of interest affect ACS’s approach to cancer prevention. With a philosophy that emphasizes faulty lifestyles rather than environmental hazards, the ACS has refused to provide scientific testimony needed for the regulation of occupational and environmental carcinogens. The Board of Trustees includes corporate executives from pharmaceutical industries with a vested interest in the manufacture of both environmental carcinogens and anti-cancer drugs.

Coverage 2000

The American Cancer Society continues to conduct business as usual with little mainstream media coverage of its activities. There are a few notable exceptions.

The United Way of Los Angeles has changed its approach toward charitable donations, resulting in the ACS regional office standing to lose about $700,000 in United Way funding. Needless to say, it opposes the fundraiser’s decision. Whether the United Way can adhere to its new policy or must capitulate to the demands of large national institutions like the ACS remains to be seen.

The Ohio Division of the ACS made local and regional news when its chief administrative officer was accused of embezzling nearly half the organization’s $15 million annual budget. Daniel Stephen Wiant wired $6,936,250 from an ACS account to an investment banker in Kufstein, Austria, and then promptly left the country. The ACS Ohio Division was unaware the money was gone until six days later when notified by the FBI. The incident underscores the lax financial control within the organization. As the Columbus Dispatch commented, “[T]he claim by one society official that the organization has ‘superlative’ financial controls is simply unbelievable.” Wiant had a recent criminal record spanning 10 years including convictions in Hawaii, California, and Ohio. The ACS started doing background checks on its employees since Wiant’s hire, especially of those, like Wiant, who are put in charge of finances. Curiously, this incident followed an earlier embezzlement of $150,000 by another individual.

The Dispatch raised the issue of general ACS credibility, referring to a May 1998 survey that showed that while 96 percent of Americans recognize the organization by name, only 5 percent know what it does with its money. In his book, Unhealthy Charities, Thomas DiLorenzo points out that $140 million of the $556 million the ACS raised in 1998 went to administrative and advertising costs.

Information regarding ACS revenues and compensation for high level officials also found its way into print in 2000. A National Journal article listed the American Cancer Society’s 1998 Internal Revenue filings. According to the IRS, the ACS had revenues totaling $241,577,836. The CEO at the time, John R. Seffrin, received a $325,000 salary along with $94,571 in benefits and allowances.

Incidentally, President Clinton’s fiscal year 2001 budget is reported to include an unprecedented funding increase to explore the environmental causes of diseases like breast and prostate cancer. Undoubtedly, some of these funds will find their way to the American Cancer Society. Along the way, the investment practices of charitable foundations in general came under scrutiny. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest charitable foundation with a $22 billion endowment, spends much of its money on efforts to help “improve people’s lives through health and learning.” However, the New York Times discovered that while it supports charities like Cancer Lifeline and ACS, it also owns bonds in the Philip Morris tobacco company.

Tamoxifen, championed by ACS, reappeared in the news. AstraZeneca’s product remains controversial and has been challenged by reportedly more effective drugs, according to the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. The symposium took place in late 1999, yet tamoxifen is still widely used. Despite new information, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is still conducting research on the drug.

The FDA has had its own problems with AstraZeneca this past year. In August, they had to caution the makers of tamoxifen against publishing misleading information in journal ads and promotional brochures, which suggesting that their drug was more effective than studies had actually demonstrated. They also understated its side effects. Such advertisements had appeared in journals targeting obstetricians, gynecologists, and other doctors who care for women.

Sources: PR Newswire, December 10, 1999, & March 14, 2000; The National Journal, Inc., January 15, 2000; The Los Angeles Times, January 20, 2000; International Journal of Health Service, Volume 30, Number 2, 2000, “Legislative Proposals for Reversing the Cancer Epidemic and Controlling Run-Away Industrial Technologies, by Samuel S. Epstein; The Plain Dealer, June 8, June 19, & August 24, 2000; The Columbus Dispatch, June 11, & July 8, 2000; The New York Times, June 11, 2000, “Charities’ investing: Left Hand, Meet Right,” by Reed Abelson; USA Today, August 8, 2000.

2000 Update by author Samuel S. Epstein

The American Cancer Society Threatens the National Cancer Program

Operating behind closed doors and with powerful political connections, the American Cancer Society (ACS) is charged with forging a questionable and possibly illegal alliance with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in attempts to hijack the National Cancer Program. The background to the ACS political agenda reveals a pattern of self-interest, conflicts of interest, lack of accountability, and non-transparency, to which the media have responded with deafening silence.

President Nixon’s 1971 National Cancer Act, mandating the National Cancer Program directed by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), is under powerful attack by the ACS, the world’s largest non-religious charity. The ACS is lobbying to replace the 1971 Act by new legislation, assigning responsibility to and requiring coordination between the private sector, patient advocacy groups, and the public sector, the NCI, and CDC. Of major concern are the highly questionable close CDC-ACS relationship and efforts to divert emphasis and funds away from NCI’s peer-reviewed scientific research to CDC’s state and community public health programs primarily focused on screening and behavioral intervention.

The September 26, 1998, “March: Coming Together to Conquer Cancer,” brought several advocacy groups representing 125,000 survivors to Washington, DC. However, it failed to create a community of scientists and patients unified by a common political agenda, and even strained their willingness to collaborate. The ACS was a minor and reluctant player in the march, recognizing that breast, prostate, and other advocacy groups posed a growing threat to its fundraising. However, the ACS deftly used the march to capture its PR fallout by creating the National Dialogue on Cancer (NDC), a purportedly independent forum co-chaired by former President George Bush and Barbara Bush, vice-chaired by Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), and including Governors Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania and Tommy Thompson of Wisconsin. The NDC activities are managed by a 16-member steering committee, with representation from ACS, CDC, NCI, cancer survivors, the underserved, and the pharmaceutical industry, which meets behind closed doors; NCI’s involvement has been nominal, at best.

In turn, the NDC leadership selected a group of more than 100 collaborating partners, including representatives of major advocacy groups, some of whom declined the invitation, while others failed to attend meetings or frankly suspected their agenda as a thinly disguised vehicle for furthering ACS special interests. On August 8, 1999, the NDC shocked its collaborating partners by suddenly announcing the formation of a National Cancer Legislation Advisory Committee to advise Senator Feinstein on rewriting the National Cancer Act. This 25-member committee was co-chaired by Dr. John Seffrin, CEO of the ACS, and Dr. Vincent DeVita, Director of the Yale Cancer Center and former NCI director, without any participation by the Steering Committee and NDC’s collaborating partners. Apart from NDC’s high-handed conduct and supposedly independent legislation committee spinoff, there are major concerns on interlocking ACS-CDC interests. CDC has improperly and possibly illegally funded ACS with close to $3 million for a sole source four-year cooperative agreement, and also the NDC with $100,000. In turn, ACS has made strong efforts to upgrade CDC’s role in the National Cancer Program, and also to increase appropriations for its non-peer reviewed cancer programs.

The relationship between the ACS, NDC, and the Legislation Committee raises fundamental questions on conflicts of interest. As reported in The Cancer Letter, a Washington, DC, newsletter widely read within the cancer establishment, John Durant, former executive president of the American Society for Clinical Oncology, charged: “It has always seemed to me that this was an issue of control by the ACS over the cancer agenda.…They are protecting their own fundraising capacity…against competition by advocacy groups.” More seriously, the leading U.S. charity watchdog, The Chronicle of Philanthropy, concluded: “The ACS is more interested in accumulating wealth than saving lives.”

DeVita, the legislation committee co-chair, is also chairman of the Medical Advisory Board of CancerSource.com, a website launched by Jones & Bartlett (Sudbury, MA) that publishes the ACS “Consumers Guide to Cancer Drugs”; three members of the legislation committee also serve on the same board. Thus, DeVita appears to be developing his personal interests in a publicly-funded forum. The ACS priority for tobacco cessation programs is inconsistent with its industry relationships. According to The Cancer Letter, Shandwick International, via its Division Management subsidiary, which represents R.J. Reynolds, has been a major PR firm for the NDC and Legislation Committee. Also, Edelman PR, representing Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, which handles publicity for Team KOOL Green championship auto racing, was hired by ACS to conduct voter education programs aimed at making cancer a major issue in the 2000 presidential campaign. Further improprieties relate to questionably legal ACS contributions to Democratic and Republican governors associations. “We wanted to look like players and be players,” ACS explained.

More disturbing is ACS’s three-decade track record of indifference and even hostility to cancer prevention. Examples include issuing a joint statement with the Chlorine Institute justifying the continued global use of persistent organochlorine pesticides, and also supporting the industry in trivializing dietary pesticide residues as avoidable risks of childhood cancer. ACS policies are further exemplified by its allocation of less than 0.1 percent of its $700 million annual budget to environmental and occupational causes of cancer.

In this connection, there are also growing and urgent concerns with regard to the NCI’s imbalanced preoccupation with basic research, besides damage control-screening, diagnosis and treatment-with minimal priorities and budgetary allocations for mission research on primary prevention and public outreach on avoidable causes of cancer. ACS, with its NDC and legislation spinoffs, has disqualified itself from any leadership role in the National Cancer Program. The public should be encouraged to redirect its funding away from the ACS to patient and prevention advocacy groups. The conduct of ACS, particularly its political lobbying and possibly illegal relationship to CDC, should be investigated by the House and Senate appropriations and oversight committees. Finally, Congress should ensure that the National Cancer Program directs the highest priority to cancer prevention.

2000 Update by Barbara Seaman, Project Censored National Judge

Dr. Samuel Epstein’s thoroughly documented exposé of pervasive conflicts of interest in the “cancer establishment,” particularly the American Cancer Society (ACS), has already demonstrated a measurable impact. A major step toward full disclosure, which could lead to the reduction of female cancers, was taken on December 15, 2000, when a blue-ribbon government panel-the NIH’s National Toxicology Advisory Committee-voted 8-1 to add prescription estrogens to the official list of “known carcinogens.”

The ACS, along with much of the OB/Gyn establishment, has been so thoroughly influenced, lulled, perhaps even “brainwashed” by the prescription drug industry that 60 years-during which the frequency of hormone dependent female cancers has more than doubled in the United States-elapsed before the official labeling of steroid estrogens as carcinogens could be openly acknowledged. There was no suggestion that estrogen use be restricted or banned, but at meetings of the Toxicology Advisory Committee some scientists did express hope that prescribing physicians might become more cautionary. Toxicologist Michelle Medinsky stated, “They only discuss benefits. Listing might force it on the table…. Is knowledge power or is ignorance bliss? Everyone has to make their own decision.”

My concerned colleagues and I have difficulty understanding why so many well-intentioned environmental cancer-prevention activists often fail to identify the estrogen products themselves in their research radar. Winning pieces on cancer factors in the environment that looked for estrogenic chemicals, phyto estrogens, xeno estrogens, and so on, seemed oblivious to the fact that prescription and veterinary estrogens should be placed in square one. It seems like a waste of research money to examine these other factors without looking simultaneously at exposure to prescription and (in so far as possible) veterinary estrogens in the same populations. To give one example, breast cancer activists on New York State’s Long Island have investigated possible environmental causes of atypically high rates without also including questions on exposure to diethelstilbestrol (DES). In the post-World War II era, Long Island was one of the major “hotbeds” of routine DES-prescribing to pregnant women, based on the unjustified belief that it prevented miscarriages. This practice ended abruptly in 1971, when some of the daughters exposed in utero were diagnosed with reproductive tract abnormalities, particularly vaginal adenocarcinoma, which is often lethal. By 1978, when I served on the U.S. Surgeon General’s task force on DES, an increased frequency of breast cancer in the DES-exposed mothers was also recognized. Twenty-three years later, in 2001, this finding was reconfirmed in the British Medical Journal, Volume 84, Number 1.

“Estrogen Sea”

“Veterinary” estrogens may be incurred through vocational exposure in laboratories and feedlots or through dangerously high dietary consumption of estrogen-fed meat and poultry. But further, most commercial estrogen products are not biodegradable by the stomach acids, and therefore residues are normally excreted in urine. Some eminent European scientists have posited in the Lancet that excreted estrogens in the food chain and water (supplied in the United States not only by women on prescription drugs, but by livestock as well) may have us “swimming in a sea of estrogens.” This, the theory goes, would account for the lockstep rise in certain male cancers, and infertility in some aquatic creatures, along with the rise in female cancers.

In fact, the carcinogenicity of synthetic estrogens in laboratory animals that have similar patterns to humans was established in historic experiments performed by Michael B. Shimkin and Hugh C. Grady, and published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in 1940. In December 1947, less than a decade after estrogen products for treating menopause first came on the market, the Journal Of Obstetrics and Gynecology published Dr. Saul Gusberg’s report on 29 cases of cancers and pre-cancers of the uterus associated with such therapy. By 1971, as mentioned, Dr. Arthur Herbst confirmed the tragic outcome of DES estrogens in pregnancy. In 1975 the FDA commissioner sent emergency notification to all U.S. physicians that four separate studies had confirmed a four- to eightfold increase in uterine cancer in long-term users of estrogens for menopause.

By the 1990s it was demonstrated that adding progestin to the estrogen regimen gives considerable protection against uterine cancer, but, at the same time, raises the patient’s risk of breast cancer to three times greater than taking estrogens alone. The longer a woman stays on hormones, the more her chances of uterine and breast cancer keep rising. If you have a uterus and take estrogens without progestins, you invite cancer of the uterine lining. If you add progestins to the estrogen you avoid the cancer “down there,” but substantially increase your chances of getting it “up front” in your breast.

“Keep Heron Premarin”

The major hormone-product manufacturers, including Ortho (Johnson and Johnson) and Wyeth Ayerst, are vigilant in censoring journalists and physicians who criticize or question their products. Hormone drugs are extraordinary sources of income simply because (unlike drugs for the sick) so many healthy women stay on them indefinitely. (For example, 12 million menopausal and postmenopausal U.S. women take estrogen alone, while 8.6 million take it in combination with progestin. Perhaps another 10 million to 14 million take the birth-control pill.) Ortho is the world’s largest manufacturer of oral contraceptives; while Wyeth-Ayerst’s Premarin (which stands for PREgnant MARes urINe) is the only prescription drug to remain in the top 50 bestsellers for more than half a century, and remained number one in 1999.

I am used to having Ortho and Wyeth Ayerst withdraw their ads from magazines to which I contribute, and their funds from medical conferences that include me on their programs. Indeed, when asked to speak at an event that may have industry sponsorship, I often warn the inviters thatthey may have to cancel me. Industry blacklists have become commonplace, extending to physicians and scientists, as well as journalists, who are deemed “unfriendly.” But what I never expected was that Wyeth Ayerst would succeed in blackballing me at my own journalism school, Columbia University, where I was a Sloan Rockefeller Advanced Science Writing Fellow in 1967-68, the year that I began The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill, the very book that first brought the hormone industry’s wrath down upon me.

By the 1990s Kenneth Goldstein, then teaching the science writing courses, was accepting funds from Wyeth Ayerst for student junkets, sending them to cover pro-estrogen conferences, which they were expected to write up for a Wyeth-Ayerst puff publication on menopause. One student became disturbed about the assignment and contacted me for advice. From the moment I confronted Goldstein, I was repeatedly excluded from speaking at any and all journalism-school panels or forums on medical or population issues. Kenneth Goldstein retired recently, and I am waiting to see whether or not I am to be resuscitated.

A period of public comment follows additions to our federal lists of carcinogens. Manufacturers of hormone products, as well as some doctors who heavily prescribe them will, if true to form, object to this classification and try to have it modified. I hope that Project Censored readers who value full disclosure and informed consent will write to the NIH in support of the Toxicology Advisory Committee’s long- overdue move. Comments on estrogens (supporting or opposing) can be sent to: National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences/National Toxicology Program (NIEHS/NTP), Dr. C.W. Jameson, EC-14, P.O. Box 12233, Research Triangle Park, N.C. 27709. Copies may be sent to Barbara Seaman, c/o Project Censored, Seven Stories Press, 140 Watts Street, New York, NY 10013. The exact language of the recommendation can be viewed in The Federal Register.


Cannabis and Cancer
JEREMY KOSSEN
February 27, 2016
cannabis-and-cancer.jpg

This is part one of a two-part series. Part two examines the evidence thatcannabis can cure cancer.



Cancer has touched the lives of nearly every American, either directly or through a loved one. Although the US Food & Drug Administration hasn’t approved marijuana as a cancer treatment, America’s shifting legal landscape has encouraged many patients to consult their physicians about the effects it can have on cancer and cancer-related symptoms.

The medical benefits of cannabis are no secret. In October 2003, the government patented medical marijuana under US Patent # 6630507, which mentions the antioxidant properties of cannabinoids. The patent also identifies the active chemicals in cannabis that cause drug-like effects on the body, and cites their benefits for patients going through chemo, radiation, or other sources of oxidative stress.






What is Cancer?
Cancer is not one disease, but the name given to a collection of related diseases characterized by an abnormal growth of cells. There are more than 100 different types of cancer that are caused by both external factors (such as smoking, viruses, or carcinogens) and genetic factors (such as genetic mutation inherited from one’s parents). Trillions of cells compose the human body, meaning cancer could start anywhere.

Like humans, cells grow old or become damaged and eventually die. Other cells grow and divide to form new ones to replace these old and damaged cells, but when cancer develops, abnormal cells including the old and damaged ones survive even though they should die. Some of the body’s cells will start to divide interminably and spread into surrounding tissues, creating new cancerous cells that aren’t needed. And since these new cells won’t stop growing and dividing, they are likely to hide in the immune system and form abnormal growths like masses of tissue known as tumors.

Cancerous tumors can spread into and invade nearby tissues because they’re malignant. Although they can be removed, these tumors are likely to grow back. As tumors grow, cancer cells can break off and travel through the blood or the lymph system to any other part of the body to form new tumors — often far away from the original one. This process is known as metastasis.

Benign tumors, on the other hand, don’t spread to or invade nearby tissue and won’t grow back after being removed. Unfortunately, benign tumors in the brain can be life-threatening.



What are the Symptoms of Cancer?
Cancer (and its treatments) leave its host feeling weak and dizzy. Symptoms may differ depending on where in the body the cancer is located, but may include:

  • Blood in pee or stools
  • Bruising
  • Changes in genitalia
  • Coughs lasting more than a month or accompanied by blood
  • Depression
  • Difficulty breathing
  • Difficult bowel movements
  • Discomfort after eating
  • Fever
  • Fatigue
  • Heartburn
  • Lumps or swelling
  • Persistent indigestion
  • Night sweats
  • Spots and growths on the skin or changes in size, shape, and color of an already-existing mole like yellowing, darkening, or redness
  • Sores that won’t heal
  • Weight loss
  • Weight gain
  • Unexplained bleeding
  • Unexplained joint pain





What are Current Cancer Treatments?
Cancer treatment can be costly and time-consuming, often requiring repeat visits to administer treatments in cycles. Doctors will likely begin by performing a biopsy to determine which treatment will be most effective.

Surgery: Surgeries can be performed to remove or debulk tumors and ease the pains and pressure they’re causing. Tumors can sometimes be removed using minimally invasive surgery. Surgeons will often remove some healthy tissue and lymph nodes as well.

Radiation: High doses of radiation can kill cancer cells after weeks of treatment or slow their growth, as well as shrink tumors. Sadly, it can take months for the cancerous cells to die and radiation can leave patients feeling exhausted by killing or damaging healthy cells.

Chemotherapy: Chemo, which is the use of drugs to directly kill cancer cells, became one of the most common ways to treat cancer in the 1940s. It is often administered in cycles. Today, more than 100 drugs are used to treat cancer, while more are being investigated and developed.

Immunotherapy: Immunotherapy is the administration of living organisms to stimulate the immune response, which often leaves the patient with flu-like symptoms.

Hormones: Administered orally, via injection, or during surgery, hormone therapy can be used to stop or slow the growth of cancer cells and reduce or prevent cancer symptoms from arising. It can be used with other treatments to lessen the chance of the cancer returning. Along with nausea, diarrhea, and fatigue, hormone therapy may weaken bones and cause menstrual changes in women.

Heat: Local hyperthermia can destroy small areas of cells (like a tumor), while regional hyperthermia, or whole-body hyperthermia, can be used in conjunction with other treatments to help them work better. Hyperthermia may be created externally, using a machine’s high energy waves aimed at the tumor, or internally, when a thin needle is put right into the tumor to release heat energy.



How Can Cannabis Help Cancer?
Cannabis contains at least 85 different types of cannabinoids, the active chemicals that create drug-like effects throughout the body. The impact of these cannabinoids in treating cancer symptoms as well as the side effects of cancer therapies is so favorable, cannabinoids are synthesized for legal, prescription use. Dronabinol and Nabilone/Cesamet, two synthetic pill forms of THC, are FDA-approved and currently being used to treat nausea and vomiting associated with chemo.

Cannabinoids that are known to benefit people living with cancer include CBC, CBD, CBDa, CBG, THC, and THCa. Cannabidiol (CBD) is known to relieve pain, lower inflammation, and decrease anxiety without the “high” of THC, the primary psychoactive ingredient in cannabis. In Canada, a cannabis extract containing THC and CBD called Nabiximols/Sativex is approved for pain relief in patients with advanced cancer and multiple sclerosis.




According to the U.S. government’s National Cancer Institute, other effects of cannabinoids include anti-inflammatory activity, blocking cell growth, preventing the growth of blood vessels that supply tumors, fighting viruses, and relieving muscle spasms.

NCI also acknowledges that inhaled cannabis is attributed to improved mood and sense of well-being. Studies suggest cannabis can be used for symptom management in cancer patients by preventing vomiting, stimulating appetite, providing pain relief, and improving sleep as well as inhibiting the growth of certain types of tumors.

Other studies leading scientists down promising avenues of cancer treatment include:




Cannabinoid receptors have been discovered in the brain, spinal cord, and nerve endings throughout the body, suggesting cannabis may play a larger role in immunity as well.

Several studies are in progress on the effects of cannabis on cancer in adults, including:

  • Treating solid tumors with oral CBD
  • Treating recurrent glioblastoma multiform with a THC/CBD oral spray
  • Treating graft-versus-host disease with CBD in patients who’ve undergone stem cell transplants
Don’t miss part two of our Cannabis and Cancer series, where we look at whether cannabis can cure cancer.


Can Cannabis Cure Cancer?
JEREMY KOSSEN
March 27, 2016
can-cannabis-cure-cancer.jpg

Given that 39.6% of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their lives, cancers affects nearly everyone. Chances are, someone close to you has battled cancer.



Oncologists, more than doctors in any other discipline within medicine, support the option of recommending cannabis as part of a treatment program for patients suffering from cancer. However, while the positive effects of using cannabis to alleviate cancer symptoms have been well documented, the U.S. government continues to classify cannabis as a Schedule I drug — high potential for abuse and no known medical use. Consequently, the federal government’s position on cannabis stifles much-needed research on cannabis as a “cure” for cancer.




RELATED STORY
Government-Run Cancer Institute Quietly Acknowledges That Cannabis Kills Cancer Cells

Moreover, the federal government’s position has fueled massive misinformation about cannabis as a potential cure for cancer. On the one hand, the federal government officially claims cannabis has no medicinal value. On the other hand, many pseudoscience “cancer quacks” unethically exaggerate claims of cannabis as the ultimate cure for cancer providing unsubstantiated help to thousands of cancer patients.

So what is the truth?

What is a Cancer “Cure?”
On the question of cannabis as a cure, Dr. Abrams, a cannabis advocate and one of the leading oncologists and cancer researchers in the world, cautions on the use of the term “cure”:

“Cure is a huge word in oncology. It usually implies that the patient has survived 5 years without evidence of their cancer. We are able to cure more cancers today than we were when I began my career as an oncologist. That has been through advances in diagnosis and treatment with conventional therapies.”

As a cancer and integrative medicine specialist at the UCSF Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at Mount Zion in San Francisco and an oncologist for more than three decades, Dr. Abrams observes:

“[After] 33 years of being an oncologist in San Francisco, I would guess that a large proportion of the patients I have treated have used cannabis. If cannabis definitively cured cancer, I would have expected that I would have a lot more survivors. That being said, what we do know is that cannabis is truly an amazing medicine for many cancer and treatment-related side effects — nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, pain, depression, anxiety, insomnia.”

Dr. Abrams’ opinion reflects a consensus within the credible oncologist and cancer scientific community: there is no doubt that cannabis is effective at treating cancer-related symptoms and treatment-related side effects, but the jury is still out on whether cannabis can actually “cure” cancer.




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What Are the Best Cannabis Strains for Cancer-Related Symptoms?

If It’s on the Web, It Must Be True, Right?
Because cancer affects so many people, it’s natural to want confirmation that cannabis can, without question, cure cancer. The Web is rich with stories from people who claim cannabis, particularly “cannabis oil,” cured or reversed their cancer. When we asked Dr. Abrams why he thought there are so many anecdotal claims of cannabis curing people’s’ cancer, he cautioned:

“I note that many of the people who are very vocal about how cannabis oil cured their cancers seem to forget that they also received conventional therapies. If people really have used only cannabis oil and can truly document that they have cured their cancer (other than a skin cancer), they need to submit that data to the National Cancer Institute’s Office on Cancer Complementary and Alternative Therapy’s Best Case Scenario website so that evidence can be documented.”

Further, note that many of the numerous articles available that make declarative claims that cannabis cures cancer misrepresent studies, exaggerate claims, or omit key facts.




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Explore the Diverse World of Cannabis Oil and Concentrates

Cannabis Cancer Research Shows Promise, But We Need to Do More
As we search for anti-cancer treatments, the anti-cancer potential of cannabis has been examined in numerous scientific studies on cannabinoidreceptors and endocannabinoids, resulting in promising leads. Significant research has demonstrated that cannabinoids may inhibit or stop the growth of cancers — including breast, brain, liver, pheochromocytoma, melanoma, leukemia, and other kinds of cancer — from spreading or growing. Moreover, cannabinoids have proven to promote apoptosis, the programmed death of tumor cells, while stopping angiogenesis, blood vessel production to the tumor. One study, conducted by Madrid’s Complutense University, showed that in one-third of rats treated, the injection of synthetic THC eliminated malignant brain tumors while extending life in another third.




RELATED STORY
Cannabis and Cancer

The research is promising, but thus far it has been limited to preclinical studies, which are studies of drugs or treatments in animals prior to being carried out in humans. While the preclinical research offers hope, before anyone can confidently claim that cannabis can provide a “cure,” clinical research needs to be done.

Further, because cancer describes a group of diseases involving abnormal cell growth, it’s unlikely there will be a single “cure-all” cannabis remedy. Likewise, naturally-derived or synthetic cannabinoid agonists may be need to be combined with traditional chemotherapeutic regimens or supplemental alternative medicines.

In order for cannabis to find its way into routine clinical cancer treatment, rigorous pharmacological and clinical studies need to be done. And to accelerate this process, the federal government should lift the federal ban on medical cannabis.




RELATED STORY
Cancer Sucks and Cannabis Can Help – If the Feds Would Let It

Paradoxically, the federally-funded National Cancer Institute has warmed up to cannabis as a cancer treatment and has even quietly acknowledged that cannabis has been shown to kill cancer cells in preclinical studies. Nonetheless, the federal government has yet to make any significant strides to align their position with the scientific community and the overwhelming number of Americans.

With more and more states legalizing medical usage and the majority of Americans supporting medical cannabis, we can hope the federal government will finally modify its draconian prohibitory position and if indeed, cannabis can cure cancer, those suffering will no longer have to turn to questionable sources to learn how cannabis may help them.
 
Justice for Sale – Part 1: Declining Faith, Rising Police Violence
February 6, 2015

A series by Nolan Higdon

This is the first article in a five part series examining the US legal system. The series collectively argues that corporate media and political rhetoric have made Americans acquiescent toward corruption in the US legal system. This piece examines how discourse regarding law enforcement related issues in the US has been constructed to justify abuse by the police.

It was another warm August evening in Philadelphia. The year was 1828 and Philadelphia watchman Steve Heimer entered a tavern and placed his order. Heimer was told to be quiet as not to wake the woman sleeping upstairs. He sat on a stool at the bar. The evening went about normally until Heimer uttered in conversation “bloody Irish transports.” Philadelphia’s Irish population had long been viewed as a non-white second class sector of the population. The Irish weavers in the tavern surrounded Heimer. They assaulted and killed him. Heimer became the first US peace officer to be killed in the line of duty. Two days later, a weaver’s banner was placed near the spot of Heimer’s death. Supporters of the slain officer and those holding racial prejudices against the Irish descended upon the site and a violent riot consumed Philadelphia.

Heimer’s death and the riot which ensued are nearly indistinguishable with present-day events. A lethal cocktail of prejudice, police abuse, and violent riots. Contemporary Americans seek to give their opinion on these happenings via social media and taverns. They almost unanimously side with the police officers and their decision to use force. The arguments are “Police Officers have a difficult job,” “you do not know what it is like to be a cop,” and “if the person was not doing anything wrong, they would not have gotten killed.” However, what makes an officers job tough is that they cannot just kill suspects! They have to investigate, arrest, build a case and see it through to a guilty verdict which is much more complex and difficult than just killing the suspect. However, Americans increasingly defend the officers who commit crimes.

This cycle accelerated in the 1970s as politicians justified the expansion of law enforcement by intensifying Americans fear of crime. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon tapped into Americans fear of crime by declaring a “war on drugs.” He created the Drug Enforcement Administration whose budget rose from $75 million in 1972 to $2.02 billion by 2013. Nixon’s successors continued the fight against crime. President Ronald Reagan claimed to be “tough on crime” as he extended sentencing laws, cut access to bail, passed anti-death penalty legislation, minimized the insanity defense, cut access to parole, expanded mandatory minimum sentences, championed mass incarceration, and designated three new federal prisons. Reagan’s successor President George H. W. Bush was elected by attacking his “liberal” opponent for being “soft on crime.” President Bill Clinton added 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in prison funding, $6.1 billion prevention programs, 60 new death penalty worthy offenses, and a ban on education to inmates. President George W. Bush was elected in part due to his record of 152 executions as Governor of Texas.

Corporate news and entertainment in the US tended to define being “tough on crime” as circumventing blockades to justice such as rights and due process. Television shows such as Cops and Worlds Wildest Police Videos serve a heroification process, where police are placed on societal pedestals, beyond criticism, which in turn is a form of propaganda used to justify racial profiling and excessive use of force. Shows like Law and Order SVU argued that the abolition of New York City’s intrusive Stop and Frisk Laws, which allowed police to stop and search anyone for any reason, were allowing the guilty to flee crime scenes. Similarly, Breaking Bad saw heroic police losing their jobs because they broke the law to catch the guilty. Films such as the 2001 Hannibal justified police for using “excessive force.” Other films such as Dirty Harry, Taxi Driver, Die Hard, Eye For An Eye, Shooter, The Departed, and Scream 2 made heroes out of individuals who avoid a trial by killing a suspect. In 2008, the $1 billion box office mega-hit Dark Knight made Batman a hero because he did what the government was forbidden from doing: kidnapping foreign nationals and spying on all citizens. News media was no different, after the events of September 11, 2001, the corporate press argued that civil rights were not a cornerstone of a democratic society, but a tool used to protect those guilty of terrorism at home and abroad. In some communities throughout the US, police have been thrust into the role of judge, jury, and executioner.

However, as Americans were inundated with these fear-inspiring messages, the crime rate actually dropped. Since the late 1970s, crime in the US has consistently decreased. Between 1990 and 2009, the national violent-crime rate was cut in half, property crime dropped by 40 percent. By 2012, the crime rate was at its lowest level since 1963. Despite the drop in crime, since 1989 a majority of Americans have falsely believed crime is increasing; over two-thirds by 2010.

Nonsensically, as the crime rate dropped there was an increase in police budgets and use of force. Swat raids, which were used as a last resort effort in the most dangerous situation, rose 1400 percent from 3000 annually in the 1980s to 50,000 today. 1,500 people die annually from law enforcement related deaths. Americans are nine times more likely to be killed by a police officer than a terrorist. Many Americans blindly support law enforcement’s abusive policing practices.

Examples of such are the 12 year old girl in Galveston, Texas who was falsely arrested and beat by police for prostitution, the father in Minnesota who was tased by police while sitting on a curb waiting to pick up his child from school, Lavar Jones in South Carolina who was shot to death by police without provocation while attempting to pump gas, 22-year-old John Crawford III in Ohio who was shot to death by police at a Wal-Mart for carrying around a toy gun he intended to buy, the six women who were raped by an Oklahoma police officer, and a woman who was beat with baseball bat by a Walnut Creek, California police officer. Incidents like these are why the United Nations has condemned police violence in the US.

The disregard for the judicial process by law enforcement was visible following the death of Michael Brown. Brown was an unarmed teen shot dead by Ferguson, Missouri Police Officer Darren Wilson on August 9, 2014. He joined Andy Lopez, Oscar Grant, and countless others whose death by police caused public outrage. However, police across the nation publically challenge the outrage over Brown’s death. Los Angeles Police veteran Sunil Dutta argued that he can hurt people for any reason because “I’m a cop. If you don’t want to get hurt, don’t challenge me.” Dutta’s line of logic is that the police’s power supersedes the rights of citizens. He is not alone, recently a video showed Miami Police laughing about illegally shooting unarmed peaceful protesters, San Francisco Bay Area police were caught stealing nude photos from suspect’s phones, a Chicago Police officer tortured over 100 African American prisoners, and in Fullerton, California police laughed on video as they beat a homeless woman with schizophrenia. The police in Ferguson quickly grew angry over the criticism surrounding Brown’s death causing one officer to yell at a journalist “I’m Going to F***ing Kill You!”

As has been the trend, the corporate media sought to convince citizens that Wilson was not at fault. As protests over police shootings engulfed the nation, Fox News host, Bill O’Reilly blamed “family culture” not police for the death. Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani argued that black people should take responsibility for the police killings because “white police officers wouldn’t be there if you weren’t killing each other.” Geraldo Rivera of Fox News justified the Brown shooting because Brown was suspected of robbing a convenience store. Eventually FOX News’ coverage relied on made up justifications for Brown’s killing where they falsely reported that Wilson’s eye socket was broken. In fact, months later the corporate media defended a police officer for killing Antonio Martin, two miles from Ferguson. They claimed the teen was armed and a video proved he provoked police. However, witnesses disagreed and the video which was shown by the corporate media actually shows almost nothing of the meeting between police and Martin.

Racism accounts for much of the support and impunity for police abuses. Sixty-five percent of blacks thought the police response to protests in Ferguson Missouri went too far, while only 33% of whites agreed. Citizens, inspired by corporate news coverage, defended Wilson rather than admit, at the very minimum, just this one cop acted incorrectly. In fact, citizens raised $137,000 on the internet for Wilson. His fellow officers wore arm bands of support for him. The grand jury found Darren Wilson not guilty for the murder of Brown. The case hinged on a claim that Brown had rushed and pummeled Wilson who fired his gun in self- defense. After the decision, it was revealed that the female witness who made that claim had lied. She was not in the area during the shooting and had a history of both racism and inserting herself into legal cases. The Ferguson Police had 5 weeks to investigate her legitimacy and did nothing. However, the website Smoking Gun exposed her after 3 days of investigating. After her story was made public, the St. Louis Prosecutor Bob McCulloch admitted that he knew witnesses were lying when they testified.

The revelations of false testimony at the grand jury hearings undermined the corporate media’s support for Wilson. Sean Hannity of FOX had invoked the false witness’s testimony 21 times in his coverage. Thus, the corporate press turned coverage from the victims of police violence to the police killed in the line of duty. In December of 2014, Ismaaiyl Brinsley carried out a murder suicide of two New York City police officers, Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos, in an apparent revenge for the death or Eric Garner. In July 2014, Garner had been approached and choked to death by New York Police on suspicion of illegally selling single cigarettes. The corporate media coverage distracted from victims of police violence, blamed activists for the death of the two NYC Officers, and asked why there was no protests for the death of the police? The lack of protest or violence probably resulted from the fact that the murderer of police was dead. Meanwhile the killer of Brown, Garner, and countless others remains free. Yet, the police blamed their fellow officer’s deaths on critics. At the funeral for the deceased officers, police turned their back on Mayor Bill de Blasio, who had been critical of police abuses, and then booed him at a police graduation ceremony. Their behavior is demonstrative of how police seek to operate– unquestioned by politicians, witnesses, or we the people.

The foundation of the US justice system is a citizen’s access to a trial and due process before the law. No entity, including police, should be above that system. However, beginning in the 1970s Americans understanding of the judicial system was reshaped by politicians and the corporate media. It produced an irrational fear of crime, disillusionment with the judicial system, and a cultural narrative which championed the disregard for due process. This resulted in public acquiescence for police abuse. The next article focuses on how the prison system has expanded and maximized profits off of American’s fear of crime.


JUSTICE FOR SALE- PART 2: FROM ACQUIESCENCE TO PROFIT
February 12, 2015

A series by Nolan Higdon



This is the second article in a five part series examining the US legal system. The series collectively argues that corporate media and political rhetoric have made Americans acquiescent toward corruption in the US legal system. This piece examines how public ambivalence toward an expansion of the legal system has been capitalized upon by the prison industrial complex.

In the 1970s, philosopher Michel Foucault argued that civilizations of the past and present have had an insatiable appetite for justice. The modes of justice experienced cosmetic changes overtime from violently punishing criminals as part of a public spectacle, to a chain gang of workers, to a more soft – but not necessarily humanitarian- version of punishment. Foucault’s discussion mostly focused on how punishments, especially prisons, served the needs of those in power. Foucault’s work also illuminated that historically, people have been obsessed with the idea of justice. However, the ambiguity surrounding the term “justice” allows for it to be invoked as a justification for various degrees of behavior.

The demand for “justice” by the American people has created a profit making opportunity in the capitalist United States. An irrational fear over crime (discussed in Part 1) has allowed for an expansion of the US prison system. In fact the US now has more prisons than colleges. Big profits for the few in the prison industry have resulted in little justice and increased costs and suffering for US citizens. The prison industry increased their revenue by investing in neo-liberal politicians, lobbying for stricter sentencing laws, and hoodwinking tax payers with iron-clad prison contracts. The result is that the US has 5 percent of the world’s population and 25% of its prisoners. One percent of the US population is currently incarcerated, a larger percent than any other western industrialized nation. Incarceration is on the rise in 36 states. If one adds in the citizens on probation or parole; about 2.9% of the adult population are under some form of correctional supervision. Another 70,792 children are in juvenile detention. In 2012, the Supreme Court ruled that the US needed to stop sending minors to jail for life.

This mass incarceration is made worse by the high recidivism rate in the US. Recidivism is the rate at which those incarcerated are re-incarcerated for crimes committed upon release. In the US, two-thirds of inmates are incarcerated after being released. Thus, the prisons system does not provide rehabilitation, it provides a stop for offenders in between crimes. In fact, in Wisconsin, over half of the inmates are incarcerated for parole violations.

Neo-Liberal Industry

Neo-liberalism is a philosophy that calls for reform, particularly when it meets the economic needs of the nation. Neo-liberals support privatization, free trade, open markets, deregulation, and reductions in government spending with the goal of extending private sector control over public life. Neo-liberals conclude that the private sector performs better economically than the public sector. Thus, they support a close relationship between business leaders and politicians to privatize public institutions. In the 1980s, neo-liberals created a political force that coalesced in the candidacy of Ronald Reagan for President. President Reagan instituted an economic experiment of lowering taxes while instituting privatization. As tax revenue decreased, states began having private corporations provide what were historically seen as public services, including inmate dentation.

Prison corporations recognized that citizens’ fear over crime and calls for justice in a time of wide-spread privatization allowed for vast profits to be made. Thus, they would financially support political candidates who would privatize and expand the prison industry. The largest private prison corporations gave a combined $45 million to politicians over the last decade. This resulted in expensive changes to the legal system paid for by taxpayers. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) is the largest private prison company in the US worth $3.8 billion. It is followed by the GEO Group worth $1.52 billion.

The High Cost of Private Industry

Many of the cost-cutting measures neo-liberals applied to prisons have hidden costs for the public. Prison corporations cut costs by firing staff and removing pensions. Thus, the loss in wages and benefits to the regions’ working class is a gain for the private industry. Those same working and poor classes are the ones going to jail, not the rich who profit from the prison industry. Other private prison cost-cutting measures cause expensive health crises such as the cuts to meals that cause inmates to lose 10-60 pounds more than their public prison counterparts. Some cuts also produce costly violence. For example, in Mississippi, assault rates are three times higher in private than public facilities. The ACLU provided a video demonstrating how CCA employees sat by idle and watched an inmate get beat unconscious. Similar episodes have happened in Mississippi, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Florida, and California. New research has found that the private prison industry is not more cost effective than public prisons.

By the time the claims of cost-cutting measures are proven false, states often cannot afford to legally end their contract with the private prison corporation. The contracts obligate states to fill prison beds with inmates or reimburse the company for unused materials. Private prison contracts became national news in 2010 after a three violent criminals escaped from an Arizona private prison for two weeks. If Arizona closed the facility, they would have owed $10 million for breaching their contract, which required the state to keep the prison 97 percent full. Arizona renegotiated a settlement of $3 million for not filling beds with prisoners.Arizona is not alone. A random sampling of 60 contracts between private prison companies and state and local governments found that two-thirds had bed quotas. Most contracts guarantee a 90 percent occupancy rate.

Lobbying for Prison Profits

To keep the prisons full, prison corporations lobby legislatures for harsher laws in hopes of boosting arrest rates. In 2011, the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) argued that private prison corporations have not responded to, but rather created the conditions for a massive increase in incarceration. Senators John McCain, Marco Rubio, and John Cornyn along with Representatives Lamar Smith and Jim Sensenbrenner were the largest recipients of prison campaign funds in 2013. These funds continue private prison corporation’s access to lawmakers.

The lobbying efforts and campaign contributions by the private prison industry often press lawmakers to draft legal changes that will help increase profits for the prison industrial complex. Some of biggest victories for the industry include the passage of LWOP (life sentence without parole) laws. These laws guarantee an influx of prison inmates to corporate, for-profit facilities. They are strengthened by the so-called “Three Strikes Laws” which mandate a LWOP sentence for a third offense. In the 1970s, before the private prison lobbying boom, there were next to no LWOP laws, but by 2014, 40 states in the US had them. The LWOP laws keep citizens locked up at an estimated cost of $1.7 billion dollars more than if LWOP were non-existent. The crimes covered by LWOP can even involve non-violent crimes such as those committed by Jeff Mizanskey, who has served over 20 years of a life sentence in Missouri for non-violent marijuana charges; Nathan Pettus and Damon Caliste, who stole from stores; Alexander Surry who possessed a single crack rock; 74-year old Leopoldo Hernandez-Miranda, who has spent 20 years in jail for marijuana possession; Timothy Tyler, who mailed LSD to an undercover agent; and Clarence Aaron, arrested for introducing a friend to a drug dealer. The increased incarceration rate has resulted in having overcrowded facilities, such as in Ohio, where some of the facilities are at a 130% capacity.

Lobbying by the private prison industry is so effective that in places like California it is becoming unsustainable to maintain current inmate levels and provide a proper healthy environment. In response, California Governor Jerry Brown signed a new contract with the CCA in October 2013 to meet a federal order to reduce overcrowded prisons. The deal cost $28.5 million annually for a federal detention facility in California City is incarcerating 2,304 inmates. It came just one month after California signed a $30-million, three-year contract with Geo Group to create two new facilities. However, the facilities have not been enough to ease tensions. Federal judges in November 2014 ordered California to expand its prison release system to decrease its population.

The CCA acts as an extra-legislative branch to state and federal government bodies using its access to help create laws (and excuses) to lock up individuals. The CCA lobbied against a legal path to citizenship for immigrants in order to keep profiting from its ownership of half of the federal government’s Immigration Detention Centers. The prison industry spent $45 million to gain a $5.1 billion contract for Immigrant Detention Centers. In 2014, less than a year after the CCA lost its prison contract with the state of Kentucky, they created a bill to lock up “the old and infirm” in the bluegrass state; something voters and politicians rejected. As of today, the bill has been discussed in the state capitol, but not approved.

Prison lobbying has resulted in increased costs for taxpayers. Government spending on corrections increased 72% from 1997 to 2007, despite a massive drop in crime. The average state pays about 6.8 percent of their general fund on corrections. Sadly, four states spend more on corrections than higher education: Vermont, Michigan, Oregon and Connecticut. In 2008, California faced a $16 billion budget shortfall, but still spent $8.8 billion on corrections.

Conclusion

Neo-liberals created a market for expanded mass incarceration by preying on citizens’ fears of crime which politicians in turn use to win elections. Private prison lobbyists and the politicians they influence manufactured a false perception of crime and justice. This has resulted in a dramatic and costly expansion of the private prison industry, which transforms citizens into profitable objects. The next article will address how public ambivalence toward a justice system which operates for profit, not the public good, has led to corruption in many US communities.


JUSTICE FOR SALE – PART 3: GREED BREED’S CORRUPTION
February 18, 2015

A series by Nolan Higdon

This is the third article in a five part series examining the US legal system. The series collectively argues that corporate media and political rhetoric have made Americans acquiescent toward corruption in the US legal system. This piece examines how public ambivalence toward a justice system which operates for profit not public good has created a breeding ground for corruption.

On September 15, 2008, the corporate media obsessively reminded viewers that the 158 year-old global financial services giant Lehman Brothers was bankrupt. Reporters wondered How did this happen? How did a reputable firm like Lehman go bankrupt? It did not add up. The Chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers, Richard Fuld, a.k.a. the “Gorilla” for his competiveness on Wall Street, was emblematic of Wall Street success. He had gone from commercial paper trader at Lehman in 1969 to leading the firm by 1994. Yet, in September 2008 he was at the center of the biggest bankruptcy case in US history. Fuld’s leadership had bred a culture of corruption at Lehman. The greedy financial giant ultimately destroyed itself through the falsification of its balance sheets, especially its abundance of risky mortgages. Congressional investigations found that Lehman had “no accountability for failure.” Lehman’s fall from grace contributed to an international financial collapse which cost US taxpayers $613 billion in aid for the nation’s failing institutions and trillions more in other costs.

Lehman like Enron, World Com, Goldman Sachs, Bear Sterns, AIG and countless other companies is an example of how a business’s greedy pursuit of profits breeds corruption. Despite the commonality of profit motives breeding corruption, neo-liberals continue to argue that the US should “run public institutions like a business.” Since the 1970s, neo-liberals have made large strides in achieving their goal of transferring government run institutions to corporations. This includes the prison and related industries. Not surprisingly, the corruption engendered by the privatized justice system’s greedy pursuit of profits has huge costs for tax payers. Yet, Americans remain largely acquiescent toward corruption. This article examines various areas of legal corruption including traffic violations, court cases, and prisons.

Corruption and Death

Corruption in the justice system costs tax payers both financially and physically. For example, at tax payer’s expense, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) employees in Idaho falsified nearly five thousand hours of work to hide that they were understaffed for over seven months. In 2014, the CCA further hoodwinked Idaho tax payers, by charging “thousands of dollars” for medications which did not exist. Similarly, children in Pennsylvania were incarcerated in the Kids for Cash scandal; two judges, Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan took $2.6 million in bribes to incarcerate youths at Mid Atlantic Youth Service Corporation facilities. More than 5,000 youths were incarcerated for such crimes “as stealing DVDs from Wal-Mart and trespassing in vacant buildings.”

Prison industry corruption has come to include a black market for execution drugs. In 2011, the manufacturer of Pentobarbital — often claimed to be part of the quickest and most painless way to execute prisoners — removed the drug from the market for capital punishment. States eager for a replacement began buying untested drugs from unknown manufacturers with public money. Oklahoma, Missouri, and Texas refuse to reveal the sources of their lethal injection drugs which cost over $11,000. The profit to the manufacturers comes with unexpected and painful consequences for the citizens receiving the untested drugs. In 2014, Arizona officials gave death row inmate Joseph Woods, fifteen separate injections of experimental drugs causing him to suffocate to death over two hours. Similarly in 2014, Oklahoma inmate Clayton Lockett, went unconscious 10 minutes after an experimental drug and then died of a heart attack a half an hour later. In 2015, Oklahoma inmate Charles Warner’s last words were “my body is on fire” after being was injected with an unknown lethal injection drug.

The profits made from executions are even more egregious considering that not all death row inmates are guilty. Since 1989, 317 death row convictions have been overturned in 38 states and tens of thousands of suspects have been cleared by DNA. Justice system biases, corruption and racism result in an unknown amount of wrongful convictions annually. The majority of inmates cleared by DNA have been African Americans. In fact, lawyers who are aware of the racial bias in the legal system, often encourage their innocent non-white clients to plead guilty to a crime rather than face a trial. In fact, thirty citizens exonerated by DNA pled guilty to crimes to attain a lighter sentence. In a legal system dominated by the greedy pursuit of profit, bribery engenders wrongful convictions. For example, a wealthy rancher paid thousands of dollars for Johnny E. Webb’s false testimony against Cameron Todd Willingham. As a result, Willingham was found guilty and executed for murdering his three young daughters in a house fire.

Tantamount to the lack of accountability at Lehman, even when corruption is unearthed the legal system is not forced to provide restitution to exonerated inmates. Only sixty-five percent of exonerated inmates are compensated. Many take the Alford Plea which originated from a 1963 case in North Carolina. The plea allows a defendant to declare their innocence in court while simultaneously admitting that the prosecution had enough evidence to prove their guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The Alfred Plea gives defendants a choice between remaining in prison or being released with the promise of no justice for their wrongful conviction. Local courts allow it because it shields them from having to pay any compensation for a wrongful conviction since the defendant admitted that the prosecution had enough evidence to convict. Basically, it is a conditional release, where the court grants an inmate freedom in exchange for giving up their right to sue the local government for its wrongful conviction.

Minor Crimes, Major Profits

The tax payer funded corruption in the legal system includes abuses for traffic violations. Many state and local governments have faced a budget shortfall since the late 1970s. As a result, they have sought to maximize profits for minor crimes such as traffic violations. In 2006 local governments increased traffic citation revenue nearly half a percent for every 1% decline in other revenue. For example, Randolph Missouri, a town of 47 people garners $202,500 or 75% of its annual budget from traffic penalties. Many other local governments add a “surcharge” to traffic violations which add an extra $100 to $2,000 per violation. The result is that in states such as Virginia, violators can pay 2.38 times the cost of the ticket. Similarly, in 2009, California nearly doubled its DMV registration fees.

Just as the prison industry claims to alleviate state costs, red-light camera companies promise to seize more local revenue through the ticketing of violators. Across the US, red-light cameras are being installed at a high rate. They capture videos and images of a car crossing an intersection while the stop light is red and then mail it to the automobile owner’s home address. It is suspected that most people do not go to court upon seeing the evidence of their guilt which saves the city the costs incurred by having a police officer on the street to ticket and a court trial. The red-light cameras have grown in popularity from a 155 city-contracts in 2005 to 689 contracts by 2012. There are two kinds of contracts, the first splits revenue among the city and the red-light company. For example, Berkeley, California, proposed in 2003, by giving the red-light camera manufacturer $48 of every $209 ticket. The other type of contract charges the city a monthly fee for using a companies red light cameras. Every contract is different in its requirements. Some require an agreed upon percentage of guilty verdicts from those ticketed. If that percentage is not met then the city pays a penalty. For example in Walnut, CA, the town is penalized for waiving more than 10 percent of violations. Red light camera manufacturer Lockheed Martin is known for creating contracts with high penalties when states waive too many cases. Even more egregious, contracts are binding, with cities paying huge penalties for terminating them. American Traffic Solutions took home $12 million from Houston in 2010 and $1 million from Baytown, Texas for early termination of their contracts.

Both local governments and the red-light companies seek profits not safety. In Virginia and California, contracts forbid cities from increasing the length of yellow light time which decreases violations and accidents. Lockheed Martin often reserves the right to remove cameras from intersections that have few violations. Thus, demonstrating that the cameras are in place to generate revenue not produce safety by deterring violations. The profits are too large for corporations to use materials at low revenue generating intersections. For example, in California a violation costs $480. In 2010, Los Angeles began to double the amount of red light cameras to 64 intersections. In 2009, LA cited 44,000 drivers for red-light camera violations netting the city more than $6 million.

Despite the large amounts collected, it is often the contracted companies not the city or the state reaping the profit. In 2010, Arizona drivers paid more than $20 million in camera ticket fines, but a majority of the programs cost more to administer than to collect. The costs for running the courts are colossal. California tax payers spend $3 billion annually on their courts, but need an additional $266 million to stay operational, $612 million to be fully functional, and $1.2 billion to be solvent. Where does the money go? It goes to insurance, red-light, and other private companies. An estimated 25 to 50 million traffic tickets are issued annually leading to $3.75 to $7.5 billion in fees coupled with another $3.75 to 7.5 billion in profits for insurance companies.

Profits Breed Corruption

The potentially large profits have bred corruption in the form of bribery. In August 2014, Redflex chief executive officer Karen Finley and contractor Martin O’Malley were indicted in a $2 million bribery scandal. They allegedly bribed Chicago official John Bills with “hotel rooms, car rentals, meals, golf games, computers, and other personal items,” in exchange for his support of a contract in the city. The 10 year contract generated nearly $500 million in tickets.The revelations of impropriety caused the company to lose its red light contract in Chicago and later others in Florida, California, and Arizona.

The need for profits by companies has led to a corrupt redesign of the court system at tax payers’ expense. For example, in Fremont California, when a suspect appears in court to challenge a violation, the citing officer is not present. Instead the prosecutor is a retired officer for the red-light camera company who refuses to answer questions from the defendant. Rather than a defendant making the prosecution prove their guilt – in the tradition of the western legal system- a judge makes the defendant prove their innocence. More egregious, in a clear conflict of interest, since the city depends on the revenue as does the red light company, both the judge and the company representative have a vested interest in a guilty verdict.

Conclusion

The corporate media and politicians have acted as a conduit for neo-liberal rhetoric. Together they inundate the American people with false information which justifies corrupt practices in the legal system. The result is an American populace which is largely acquiescent to the corruption in the legal system. The next article continues to examine corruption in the legal system. However, where this article examined corruption in the public sphere, the next article will examine corruption inside an institution which maintains the legal status quo; Coalinga State Hospital in California.
 
The War Against Black People

In order to contain the oppressed peoples within its colonial possessions, the United States settler‐colonial government has built the most full‐spectrum network of repressive enforcement structures in human history. They include the Police, Sheriff’s, Rangers, Customs, FBI, Homeland Security (including INS), CIA, Secret Service, prison guards, as well as the numerous private security and other protective services. It has also created the largest and most invasive surveillance system in human history. This system includes everything from satellites, police, FBI, and DHS operated surveillance drones, and electronic tracking and monitoring via our cellphones, computers, tablets, email, Facebook, Twitter, and chip‐filled passports, driver’s licenses, and identification cards.

These forces of occupation and repression have been strategically deployed over the last 70 years to wage a grand strategy of “domestic” pacification to sustain the colonial occupation of North America via a never ending series of containment campaigns that amount to nothing less than a “perpetual war”. This “perpetual war” has been known by many names over the last seven decades such as the “Cold War”, COINTELPRO”, the” War on Drugs”, the “War on Gangs”, the “War on Crime”, and most recently, the “War on Terrorism”. This pacification strategy is designed to contain the various peoples’, social, and religious movements that resist the colonial order of white supremacy inside the United States, the post World War II imperialist world‐system, and the vicious strategy of neo‐liberal accumulation by dispossession that it has been aggressively imposing on its citizens, colonial subjects, and the rest of the world. The most visible component of this pacification campaign inside the U.S. has been the astronomical increase in the incarceration of Black people over the last 40 years.

This “perpetual war” intensified both quantitatively and qualitatively after the events of September 11, 2001. Exploiting those events as justification, the United States government launched a new series of imperialist conquests and occupations and further expanded its overall military operations and spending. It has also justified the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, which integrates domestic and international intelligence, surveillance, and repressive institutions of the United States government. Even further it has provided a rational for the implementation of extensive “constitution free zones”, the expansion and deepening of the militarization of the police, and the passage of some of the most repressive legislation in United States history, such as the Patriot, Homeland Security, and National Defense Authorization Acts to name a few.

And the United States government’s grand strategy of domestic containment and pacification via perpetual war shows no signs of either slowing down or coming to an end on its own accord any time soon. Extrajudicial killings are clearly an indispensible tool in the United States government’s pacification pursuits.
 
More than 8000 Black people get killed each year in intra-communal violence, so why pay so much attention to a few hundred killed by police? 

Different issues: We certainly do not intend to minimize the horror and importance of the thousands of Black people who tragically die at the hands of other Black people each year. However, to a large degree, those killings are not directly sponsored or sanctioned by federal, state and local governments. On the other hand, police, sheriffs, security guards and, to a certain extent self‐ appointed enforcers of law (vigilantes) ARE “authorized” by governments and paid for by taxes. They are hardly accountable for these killings and even less frequently charged in a court of law. In contrast, both the victims who survive and the perpetrators of “Black‐on‐Black” crime end up as part of the million Black people incarcerated in the U.S. at any given time. 

State promotion of intra-communal violence: Of course, we are committed to putting an end to the scourge of intra‐communal violence. In order to stop it, we must understand how the state—especially the CIA, its offshoots and other members of the invisible government—has a deep‐rooted responsibility for intra‐communal violence. Drug trafficking either directly thru turf wars, or indirectly by ripping apart the social fabric of Black communities and perpetuating a predatory culture, is the cornerstone of intra‐communal violence. And at least as far back as the 1940’s the CIA’s institutional ancestors cut deals with drug traffickers like Lucky Luciano. Over the decades, the “drug connection has been integral to the U.S. war machine whose purpose is to maintain U.S. global dominance.11 Consider that opium production doubled since the U.S. invaded Afghanistan. Careful research has exposed “US backdoor covert foreign policy as the largest single cause of illicit drugs flooding the world today.”12 

Banking system and drug trafficking: In addition to propping up U.S. foreign policy, drug trafficking is major business for the international and U.S. banking system. Each year, between $500 billion and $One trillion of international drug proceeds are deposited into banks accounts—half of which are in the U.S. After the 2008 economic crash, the head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, reported, “Drug money worth billions of dollars kept the U.S. financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis.”13 U.S. superbanks, like Citibank, are still dependent on hundreds of billions in illicit drug profits which they launder each year.14 

CIA and drug cartels: The US government not only promotes drug trafficking to support and maintain foreign policy and to prop up the US economy. Thru the CIA and other organizations, they also directly manipulate the deadly competition among various drug cartels that overflows into the streets of Chicago, Los Angeles and every other city where gangs engage in fratricidal violence over turf. For example, the CIA has arrested or eliminated a number of major Colombian traffickers. These arrests have not diminished the actual flow of cocaine into the U.S. Rather they have institutionalized the relationship of law enforcement to rival cartels and visibly contributed to the increase of urban cartel violence, both abroad and inside the U.S.15 

Local police and trafficking: At the local level, there is also a form of asymmetric interdependence between law enforcement personnel and “criminals”. In a detailed study of the militarization of police, Balko wrote, “Criminals have been turned into instruments of law enforcement (as paid informants and when making deals to avoid long jail sentences); while law enforcement have become criminal co‐conspirators”.16 (in sting operations and the dealings of corrupt cops.) A number of websites publish information on a litany of scandals where police involvement in drug trafficking and other criminal activity are exposed. At www.policemisconduct.net for the year 2012, they reported police involvement in trafficking in more than 40 towns and cities—ranging from Jasper, AL and Hatboro, PA to large metropolitan areas like Chicago, Atlanta, Dallas, Philadelphia, Houston, Memphis and others where we find high rates of extrajudicial killings. The offenses include tipping off drug dealers about impending raids, actual participation in trafficking, theft of narcotics from dealers, gangs and police storerooms, and providing protection, security and escort services to dealers. Narcotics detectives, vice squads and other special ops units are over‐represented in the list of crooked cops who have a stake in the same drug trafficking that results in the killings of thousands of Black people each year. In 2012, police chiefs in five towns were exposed as drug criminals. Finally, it is important to note, that once these officers are caught, they usually plead guilty and make a deal for sentences that are significantly lower than the sentences received by the “average gangbanger.”
 
'Operation Ghetto Storm': The Enduring War on Black People in the US, Part 1

By: Arlene Eisen
  • missouri_ferguson_protest_reuters_sm_crop1436793397556.jpg_1718483346.jpg

    Protest in Ferguson, Missouri following the killing of Michael Brown. | Photo: Reuters
  • Two years ago today the acquittal of George Zimmerman re-kindled a movement against impunity for police and vigilante killers.
“Once the classic method of lynching was the rope. Now it is the policeman’s bullet … We submit that the evidence suggests that the killing of Negroes has become police policy in the United States and that police policy is the most practical expression of government policy … Force and violence systematically and consistently employed to quell the righteous anger of Blacks is justified by calling murder an exercise ‘law and order’.” — from We Charge Genocide, 1951 Petition to the United Nations edited by William Patterson, endorsed by W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Robeson, Harry Haywood and others.

More than six decades have passed since Patterson’s authoritative study of police killings of Black people. Within that span, the Deacons for Self Defense and others used arms to protect the Black Freedom Movement against vigilantes in the South; the Black Panther Party for Self Defense organized thousands of people based on the demand to end police brutality and murder of Black people; and insurrections sparked by police atrocities rocked every major city in the country.

Then in February 2012, a vigilante, George Zimmerman, killed Trayvon Martin.

Two years ago today the acquittal of George Zimmerman re-kindled a movement against impunity for police and vigilante killers. Yet, despite the outrage over the state’s protection of Zimmerman, and the spotlight on impunity of police who summarily execute Black people on camera, the killing continues with shocking regularity. And the impunity of police, and even vigilantes, proceeds apace.

What makes this modern day lynching a seemingly inoperable tumor woven into the arteries and sinew of the U.S. body politic? This is the first in a three-part series that offers a diagnosis of sorts of our national disease.

A cornerstone of police impunity is the failure of the federal government to require reliable and accurate reporting. Even organizations that have the resources to amass and disseminate the data, still must rely on police accounts of the killings that invariably justify their mayhem. Impunity breathes life into chronic assaults by cops and the state’s privatized killers. In May and June 2012, Operation Ghetto Storm (OGS) documented 30 Black people killed per month by police, security guards and vigilantes. In May 2015, The Guardian’s website counted 26 killed by police alone. Their count for June 2015 is 19. If they followed OGS methodology to include vigilantes and security guards, the total for June 2015 would be at least 28 or one every 25.7 hours for the month.

Initially enraged by the Florida police’s refusal to arrest Zimmerman for the murder of Trayvon Martin, we began to collect names of murdered Black people to demonstrate that Trayvon’s killing was systemic. We found that in 2012, police, security guards and vigilantes killed a total of 313 Black people. Divide the number of hours in a year by 313 and you get one every 28 hours. We called the Report Operation Ghetto Storm (OGS) because the name encapsulates our conclusion that the mission, white supremacist state policies and institutions, high tech military hardware, and military mind-set that characterized the invasion of Iraq also sustain the occupation and war on Black and Brown communities inside the U.S. Security guards and vigilantes, protected by “stand-you-ground”, “self-defense”, the “home as castle doctrine” and other laws, join the 18,000 law enforcement agencies employing approximately 250,000 police and sheriffs in the occupation and containment of Black communities.

The Mission of Police in Black Communities in Historic Context

White supremacy is much more than the ideology or ranting of a right-wing extremist, admirer or member of organizations like the Ku Klux Klan. White supremacy has flowed in the mainstream since the beginning of U.S. history. According to Elizabeth Martinez, an early member of the Black Southern Freedom Movement organization, SNCC and Latina activist,

“White Supremacy is a web of interlocking, mutually-reinforcing institutions - economic, military, legal, educational, religious and cultural - that propel a system of exploitation and oppression of continents, nations, and peoples of color by white peoples and nations for the purpose of maintaining and defending a system of wealth, power, and privilege.”

The groundbreaking historian, Gerald Horne, has demonstrated how the United States – a settler colony based on stolen land and built with stolen labor – was the world’s first nation founded on white supremacy. Its founding heroic democratic myths are lies. The so-called “American Revolution” was, in fact, a counter-revolution by slave owners and land pirates who feared that the British Crown would not allow their profitable white supremacist enterprise to continue. Slavery and slave trade made the development and economy of the United States possible.

The system of slavery enlisted white settlers – including those who owned no land – to control the lives of enslaved Africans. The earliest “law enforcement institutions” or police forces grew from networks of white people whose task it was to contain and control enslaved Black people, especially those who attempted escape. After the Civil War and end of Reconstruction, between 1877 and 1950, white supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, civilian mobs, local sheriffs and police colluded to enforce sharecropping – different from slavery in name only – and to maintain Jim Crow – de jure apartheid and denial of citizenship. They institutionalized a system of omnipresent surveillance, prison plantations and more than 4000 lynchings to terrorize Black people into submission and to re-entrench white supremacist power.

While this state-sanctioned terror was centered in the South, many Northern and Western states were sites of lynching and all practiced some form of slavery and then Jim Crow. White riots or pogroms against Black people mobilized white mobs in many northern cities to contain the Black people who had migrated North during and after World War I. Local police throughout the country enforced ordinances that barred Black people from living in the “Sundown towns” where they worked. Despite numerous proposals, the federal government never passed an anti-lynching law or any other legislation to protect Black people against the excesses of police and white citizen attacks. Rather, when Black people’s tradition of resistance to white supremacy gained strength in the 1960’s, the federal government launched COINTELPRO. Under that program, dissent was criminalized, leaders and militants were assassinated or incarcerated and their activities were disrupted.

This failure to protect Black people’s human rights persists in the toothless pretenses of the federal government to hold police accountable. Operation Ghetto Storm documented how only 12 percent of the extrajudicial killings of Black people might be justified by international human rights standards. That leaves 275 killings that were tantamount to lynching – an astronomical number compared to the heyday of lynching.

As early as 1960, in an essay published by Esquire, James Baldwin explained the mission of the “modern” police in Harlem, New York: “… the only way to police a ghetto is to be oppressive….. Their very presence is an insult, and it would be, even if they spent their entire day feeding gumdrops to children. They represent the force of the white world, and that world’s real intentions are, simply, for that world’s criminal profit and ease, to keep the black man corralled up here, in his place. The badge, the gun in the holster, and the swinging club make vivid what will happen should his rebellion become overt.”

In 2013, the New York State Senate heard testimony that the former NYPD Commissioner Kelly told the NY State governor that his aim was to instill fear in young Black and Latino men every time they left home. A recording made at a Brooklyn Police Station showed that Kelly’s views permeate the NYPD:“If you get too big of a crowd there, you know, they’re going to get out of control, and they’re going to think that they own the block. They don’t own the block, alright? They might live there, but we own the block, alright? We own the streets here.”

Within the last year the uprisings and police response in Ferguson and Baltimore have illuminated how consistent the police’s mission has been over the decades. Whether they are equipped with candy, traditional billy clubs and sidearms or tanks and high tech military equipment; whether their captains give them arrest quotas that require petty harassment or follow the principles of “community policing”, their mission remains the same: to contain, control and force submission of Black people.
 
'Operation Ghetto Storm,' Part 2: The Turning Wheels of State-Sanctioned Killing

By: Arlene Eisen
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    Protesters occupy the Brooklyn Bridge that connects Brooklyn to Manhattan, during a demonstration after the killing of Eric Garner.
This is the second of a three-part series investigating the forces behind the unending war waged primarily by police against Black people.
“Plaintiffs’ decedent’s injuries, losses, and damages complained of, were directly and proximately caused by the acts of Plaintiffs’ decedent, not this Defendant.” – from initial court filing by the Cleveland City Attorney rejecting responsibility for the fatal shooting by police officer Timothy Loehmann who shot Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old child as he sat on a playground swing with a toy gun.

Since George Zimmerman was acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin two years ago, at least 600 Black people have been killed by police, security guards and vigilantes. An unknown number of the parents and other loved ones of those who died have had to endure legalistic contortions and media campaigns that blame the deceased for their own deaths.

This is the second of a three-part series to investigate the forces behind the unending war waged primarily by police against Black people. Here we focus on the ideological and political structures that perpetuate “Operation Ghetto Storm.”

The sickening pattern of vicious violence and humiliation by police that is now on full display in social media leaves no doubt. Police personnel departments throughout the country attract, recruit and maintain men and women who hold Black people in utter contempt. Yet their white supremacist convictions are not the primary cause of the chronic epidemic of police killings. A panel of expert psychologists could screen out all police recruits who display white supremacist leanings and it would hardly improve the rates of police killing of Black people. The acquittal of Zimmerman and failure to charge all but 10 of the officers who killed hundreds of Black people in 2012 is a pattern that persists today with the exoneration of Darren Wilson and other high-profile killers.

This pattern is by design.

It is the product of a web of support for police and vigilante killing under the auspices of legislative, executive and judicial branches of the state from local to federal levels and reinforced by a hegemonic white supremacist narrative.

The Narrative on the Political Stage

Politicians from right to left pander to white supremacist ideology that assumes whiteness as the universal standard for all that’s good and blames Black peoples’ pathology, criminality and other personal failings for their own oppression. While right-wing extremist organizations and Republicans’ policies are overtly racist, Democrats are often not much different.

President Bill Clinton campaigned on a platform of “ending welfare as we know it.” That platform openly pandered to those who agreed with far-right ideologues like Rick Santorum who, years later declared, “I don’t want to make Black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” Clinton also sponsored various get-tough-on-crime policies that exploded the prison population. He deregulated the financial system and launched NAFTA and other globalization measures that resulted in financial ruin that disproportionately affected Black people. More recently major Democratic Party leaders, Harry Reid and Joe Biden, praised Obama’s electability on the grounds that he “had no Negro dialect” and was a “bright and clean and nice-looking guy.”

However, many have argued that as the first African-American President, Barack Obama has been the most disappointing politician to pander to white supremacy. He shrewdly strikes a “balanced” pose, in his speeches, and actions, like his 2013 address at Morehouse. Yet he invariably emphasizes a conservative, neo-liberal privatized approach that holds Black people responsible for overcoming centuries of entrenched white supremacy. In a press conference after the people of Baltimore took to the streets to express their outrage at the police breaking Freddie Gray’s spine, Obama joined the chorus of right-wing pundits and “objective” media who labeled the “rioters as criminals and thugs.”

Look at Dylann Roof’s rationalization for Charleston massacre that obsesses on “black-on-white crime” and on the righteousness of Zimmerman’s vigilantism. Then consider how Dylann’s thinking overlaps with the hegemonic narrative – even propagated by the first Black president – that demonizes, criminalizes and fears Black people. This narrative is manifest in the "justifications” police use for killing Black people, who are all labeled “suspects”. Some 47 percent of police report they shot a Black suspect because they (the police) “felt threatened.” No corroborating evidence was ever given or requested. Fourteen percent of suspects “gave the officer no choice but to fire” because they fled. Only 13 percent of suspects were actually killed in the course of firing a weapon.

Unfortunately, some in the movements against police impunity implicitly acceptpart of a white supremacist narrative. They dedicate their protests to those “innocent/unarmed” victims of police killings. It is tempting, even natural, that community outrage builds on the grounds that the victim was a child, heading to college, or only carrying skittles. But, the focus on unarmed victims implies that it might be acceptable for the police to kill an armed Black person. It undermines movements for justice and human rights by accepting the myth that cops are heroes who protect the community against criminals.

Operation Ghetto Storm (OGS)found that 44 percent of Black people had no weapon at all at the time they were executed. Given the many cases where the public learned that the police misrepresented wallets, lighters, cell phones or pointed fingers as guns, OGS recommended caution in accepting police reports without corroboration. Nevertheless, gun possession is legal in 41 states and even where it is not legal, possession alone is not a capital offense.

Policies that Institutionalize the Black “Criminal” Narrative

The Great Migration away from Southern sharecropping and terror formed the Black communities that the police now occupy. Legislation and regulations from federal to local levels, between 1934 and 1962, denied Black people home loansor even the right to settle anywhere outside ghettoes. In the 1960’s, police departments first created paramilitary units to repress Black rebellions that swept all major cities in the U.S.

In 1971, President Nixon declared the “War on Drugs,” which gave moralistic cover to a raft of laws that criminalized Black life and led to omnipresent policing, surveillance and mass incarceration. In the 1986, President Ronald Reagan issued a national directive that declared “illicit drugs a threat to national security.” And so began a domestic arms race among police departments and indoctrination of police in the win-at-all-costs mentality of a soldier (Radley Balko’s book, The Rise of the Warrior Cop, and widely-circulated articles make an important contribution to this discussion).

Since 9/11, the Patriot Act and its various incarnations strip citizens of our basic rights that protect against all forms of police tyranny, give various agencies carte blanche to monitor citizens’ every move and utterance, justify racist profiling and provided infinite funds to maintain a system of mass incarceration. Edward Snowden’s revelations showed how the behemoth of mass surveillance has taken on a life of its own, multiplying without enabling legislation. Yet it is clear from the record, the main target of all this surveillance is black and brown. Somehow, all the cameras, phone data collection, drones, Fusion Centers and spy networks haven’t been able to detect white faces or prevent amateur attacks, like the one Dylann Roof, announced six months in advance.

Funding Militarization and Political Clout of the Police

The National Rifle Association, Monsanto and organizations controlled by the Koch brothers effectively pressure state and federal legislatures for law-and-order legislation and funding. The same defense contractors whose lobbyists have successfully gorged the military industrial complex and promoted war abroad have expanded their realm to feed the militarization of domestic police.

Lobbyists representing police officers keep a relatively lower profile, but they come out in force to expand their budgets, various “Bills of Police Officers’ Rights,” warrantless wiretaps, use of drones and to oppose drug reform and any encroachment on their authority or impunity. In addition to the millions they may spend, the combination of the public respect that they command in the media and their “expertise” that lawmakers depend upon, give police outsized influence.

The National Association of Police Organizations (NAPO) lists 126 member organizations. The powerful New York City Police Benevolent Association and a number of others do not appear on the list. The International Union of Police Associations (which is a member of the AFL-CIO), the National Fraternal Order of Police, the National Police Benevolent Association – three other national confederations each with their own local and state affiliates – also join the lobby. Their websites feature several themes that are echoed in corporate media: (1) Police are heroic public servants who never stray from their duty to protect citizens from criminals and terrorists and uphold law and order; and (2) Police work is extremely dangerous and requires unconditional public, political and financial support.

Generally their message has prevailed. After a barrage of negative publicity in the progressive press exposing the police use of lethal excessive force in scores of cities, New York, Ferguson, Baltimore, Cleveland, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, Santa Rosa, Oakland and scores of other cities, a national Gallup Poll released June 19 found that only 18 percent of people in the U.S. expressed “little or no confidence” in the police. Even the 34,500 member New York City Police Department – which former Mayor Bloomberg bragged was the 7th largest army in the world – maintained public support after they staged a coup-like work refusal and openly expressed contempt for the people of New York and their Mayor. A June 25 editorial in the New York Times praised Mayor DeBlasio after he caved into the demands of the Police Benevolent Association by hiring 1,300 more officers for “community policing and to fight terrorism.”

Their budgets both reflect and reinforce the political power of police. Law enforcement budgets receive money from a multiplicity of sources which hides the magnitude of their resources.

A former Congressional aid estimated that when federal agencies are combined with state and local agencies, the annual total comes to US$266.8 billion or US$850 per person per year in the United States. This excludes billions more for Homeland Security - and an additional US$72.2 billion a year for national and military intelligence. Then there’s the unaccounted billions more that the Department of Defense, Justice Department, and others distribute to law enforcement agencies in the name of homeland security. In 2012 Stephan Salisbury wrote that the money spent on armoring and arming local law-enforcement since 9/11 could have rebuilt post-Katrina New Orleans five times over with more than enough money left to provide job training and housing for every one of the 41,000-plus homeless people in New York City, 15,000 homeless in Philadelphia and additional tens of thousands of homeless in Detroit, Newark, and Camden. “Throw in some crumbling bridges and roads, too,” he suggested.

In May, with typical fanfare, President Obama announced an executive order which, he claimed, would improve public safety and restore trust in police in places like Ferguson. Executive Order 13688 would, he promised, restrict police departments’ use of tank-like armored vehicles that move on tracks and other military-style gear that “can sometimes give people a feeling like there's an occupying force as opposed to a force that's part of the community that's protecting them and serving them." As if it were the gear, and not the police mission that, for decades, have occupied Black communities and killed Black citizens. However, even given Obama’s logic, the details of his Order reveal that it leaves the billions of dollars worth of military hardware that have already been distributed in place and that future “restrictions” are full of loopholes. Moreover, there is no serious provision for funding, monitoring or enforcing the program.

Meanwhile, military contractors continue to invent and peddle high tech equipment to police departments to more efficiently terrorize those who police are charged with containing. For example, a popular item advertised in Police Onemagazine, along with arms and other military accoutrements, are handcuffs that enable police to deliver an 80,000-volt shock to a detainee. Each set of cuffs cost US$1,500, plus an additional US$400 for each transmitter.

The mythology of police heroism in the face of Black criminality protects the police from scandal when their own white supremacist rants are exposed. For example, in “liberal” San Francisco, investigators discovered repeated exchanges of racist and homophobic text messages among 14 cops. They included salutes to “white power”, and declared, “All n- must f-hang.” Yet thanks to a gentrified public indifference, vigorous defense by the Police Officers’ Association, bungling and bureaucratic complacency that apparently didn’t see the urgency in holding such white supremacist behavior accountable, the offending cops are likely to retain their jobs.

Similar exposures of white supremacist rants by cops in New York, Illinois, St Louis, Cleveland, Ferguson, Fort Lauderdale suggest that the culture is endemic in most departments. Police unions’ protection also extends to the officers after they’ve been fired for “unjustified” extrajudicial killings and physical abuse. A recent exposé in The Atlantic, detailed how around the country, 70 percent of officers’ terminations and suspensions are overturned.

In Part 3, we will focus on the ways that the courts and Department of Justice perpetuate the war on Black people and on the revolving door that funnels right-wing extremists and military veterans into police departments and back again. Finally, we will look at the implications of this investigation for building resistance and solidarity.
 
'Operation Ghetto Storm,' Part 3: What Can Stop Police From Killing a Black Person #every28hours?

By: Arlene Eisen
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    Gettysburg Police Department Badge | Photo: Gettysburg Police Department
  • Galvanized Black communities in the streets across the country, have finally broken through the “myth of a post-racial America.”
Iraq war veteran Dan Grabow applied for a spot in the Michigan State Police Academy. The top brass are recruiting 400 new troopers and they believe military vets have the right stuff. "I think they're right," Grabow said. "We have the training…. We know how to dress. We know how to do things in stressful situations. A lot of us combat vets have been there and done that," Fox News, March 19, 2012

Grabow is one of thousands of U.S. veterans who have traded their army dog tags for police badges. They are joined by an uncountable number of recruits from white supremacist organizations and individuals who believe in the crusading white supremacist mission of the armies of U.S. Empire.

This is the third of a three-part series that investigates how the extrajudicial killing of Black people is tightly woven into the history, hegemonic ideology and institutions that constitute the U.S.A. Our aim is to contribute to an urgent effort to move the conversation on police “reform” to a strategy for ending the systemic war on Black people (aka “Operation Ghetto Storm”).

What Flag Do They Fight under the Confederate or American Flag?

The answer is both.

Ajamu Baraka pointed out in his June 22 blog that Dylann Roof’s objective to take over HIS country from Black rapists and criminals was ideologically consistent with the ideology of U.S. military propagandists.

“… The irrational, violence-prone racialized “other” occupies a permanent space in the consciousness of so many in the U.S., which is why it has been so easy to mobilize public support for U.S. military interventions and campaigns of political subversion, from Iraq to Venezuela.”

Too often, the affinity between followers of anti-Black groups, veterans of foreign wars and the police is more than ideological. Since the Charleston massacre last month the internet has reposted a flurry of exposés. They feature websites like “Stormfront” with 300,000 registered subscribers and hundreds of white fascist organizations that encourage their members to enlist in the U.S. Armed Forces and police departments. At the same time, extremists actively recruit from inside these military institutions.


White supremacy is chronic and deeply rooted in the Army and its mission. Even the Department of Homeland Security issued a short report in 2009 that pointed out how the return of military veterans from combat correlates closely with the rise in Klan membership. They are only the tip of an iceberg. Nevertheless, Fox News and a horde of politicians denounced the Report. Homeland Security deleted it from its website and the unit investigating domestic terrorism was sharply reduced. Yet there are at least 2.4 million veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even if only a small percentage of them continue to wage a conscious war against people of color at home, the “service and heroism” of soldiers returning from the battles for the U.S. Empire permeate the Zeitgeist of U.S. society.

Federal and local governments give incentives to police departments who hire veterans. A website for the International Association of Chiefs of Police features resources, including guides on how to market and recruit veterans to police departments. The Office of Community Oriented Policing in the DOJ has also set up a program, “Vets to Cops”, to encourage law enforcement agencies to hire veterans. It features available grants, toolkits and other resources. Many local police departments actively recruit veterans, with or without grants from the federal government, and give veterans extra points in the hiring process.

Looking in Vain for Judicial Relief from the Police

The growing list of refusals by local district attorneys to indict police is infamous. Refusals by the Attorney General and Supreme Court are slower in coming to light. Yet, in April 2015, the New York Times documented that “At the Supreme Court, where the limits of police power are established, Mr. Holder’s Justice Department has supported police officers every time an excessive-force case has made its way to arguments.”

A consistent line of Supreme Court precedents set and reflect the prevailing political power as expressed by the U.S. Attorney General, the Department of Justice and their regional appointees. Since 1989, in Graham v Connor, the Supreme Court legalized police use of force whenever that use is judged “reasonable” from the point of view of the officer on the scene. In recent years, a raft of Supreme Court rulings have enhanced police discretion. For example, in May 2014, Plumhoff v. Rickford, the Court ruled that police could more easily justify shooting-to-kill a “fleeing” driver.


Families and protesters seeking “justice” for Black people killed by the police, security guards and vigilantes often place their hope in the Department of Justice (DOJ). In early May 2015, some protesters of Freddie Gray’s killing celebrated when they heard that the Department of Justice had opened an investigation into the Baltimore Police Department. However, a review of the outcomes of DOJ investigations indicates that the DOJ is understaffed, often lacks subpoena power, has limited enforcement power, and most importantly, lacks the political will to challenge their own commitment to settler colonial tradition, the entrenched power of police unions, pro-police politicians and media.

Since the DOJ’s first investigation in 1997, it has reviewed 65 departments, some more than once. With some cities, like Los Angeles, Oakland, Detroit, DOJ investigations drag on for more than a decade. Finally a consent decree is negotiated, departments commit to cosmetic changes, and despite a flurry of media publicity and the threat of court enforcement, records show that police departments go back to business as usual.

The DOJ’s failure to reform or protect the people of Cleveland from “systemic excessive and deadly force by police” is a significant case study. In 2004, the DOJ completed a four-year investigation of the Cleveland Police Department’s excessive and discriminatory use of force. Yet in December 2012, some 62 of Cleveland’s squad cars joined the chase of a Black couple whose only “crime” seemed to be that their car backfired. Community members likened the frenzied pursuit to a lynch mob. In the end, Timothy Russell and Melissa Williams died in a barrage of 137 bullets. Community outcry pressured the DOJ to open another investigation. It didn’t take long for investigators to find systemic discriminatory problems in all aspects of the department’s structure. Nevertheless, the City received a DOJ grant for US$1.25 million to hire 10 new officers and another million for “crime prevention”. The following year, just before then Attorney General Holder formally released a scathing report that exposed the Department’s “systemic deficiencies”, the DOJ granted them another US$1.9 million to hire 15 new officers. In November 2014, they summarily executed 12-year old Tamir Rice as he played on a swing with a toy gun.

Then, in May 2015, Officer Michael Brelo was acquitted of voluntary manslaughter. He was the cop who, in December 2012, had climbed on the hood of Timothy Russell’s crashed car and fired 15 shots, point blank into the motionless couple. These details lead to the inevitable conclusion that rather than enforce Black people’s rights, DOJ investigations serve as pacification programs to placate besieged Black communities.

Building Resistance and Solidarity

Galvanized Black communities in the streets of Ferguson and Baltimore, along with the slow boil of Black people in communities across the country, have finally broken through the “myth of a post-racial America.” They are challenging complacency and denial by the majority of white people. They are forcing a national conversation about racism. Will that conversation lead to an end to the war on Black people? The answer depends on many complicated conditions that cannot be predicted apart from the vision gained from a protracted struggle led by Black people.

Yet, the implications of our study do suggest the need for certain strategic assumptions.

First, body cameras, improved training, reduced military hardware and other “reforms” are cosmetic and cannot change the basic state-sponsored, violent mission of the police. Second, reliance on the Judicial System for substantive justice (or even revenge) will lead to community pacification and eventual frustration. Third, no president or politician whose election depends on pleasing the captains of financial and military industry will seriously commit to ending Operation Ghetto Storm any more than she or he will end the U.S. Empire’s military interventions around the world. Fourth, given the deep roots and pervasive control of the white supremacist hegemonic narrative, a priority is to educate and organize masses of people, block-by-block. The movement must be capable of sustaining a struggle for all oppressed communities to become self-determining with full human rights to life, housing, health, education and dignified employment. Last, with the recognition that survival for most of the people of the world depends on defeating the white supremacist imperial project, building international solidarity becomes essential.

Arlene Eisen is the author of the study called “Operation Ghetto Storm: 2012 Annual Report on the Extrajudicial Killings of 313 Black People by Police, Security Guards and Vigilantes” (Also known as the #every28hours Report) originally published by Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. The revised edition is available at www.operationghettostorm.org She can be reached at arlene_eisen@sbcglobal.net
 
The CIA continues trafficking drugs from Afghanistan

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This is the second part of the interview granted by Friba, RAWA’s representative. Interview by Edu Montesanti, Pravda.Ru Portuguese version

Years ago, former parliamentary, writer and activist for human rights Malalaï Joya pointed out that the CIA continues trafficking drugs from Afghanistan. In an interview by e-mail (censored) to the Brazilian newspaper O Tempo, later sent to me in full also by e-mail, she stated that, “the Afghan narcotics economy is a designed project of the CIA, supported by US foreign policy. There are reports in Afghanistan that even US army is engaged in the drugs trafficking: drug mafia is in the hold of power and supported by the West.” What can you say about it?

We strongly support this statement of Malalai Joya which is based on facts.

The CIA has a long history of being involved in global drug trade in all parts of the world under the control of the US or where it has considerable influence. While a few cases have been investigated and exposed by journalists, the issue continues to remain in the shadows.

The CIA’s history began in the 1980s. Drugs were seen as the quickest and easiest way to earn money to fund CIA proxies and paramilitary forces that served them, in different countries. Gary Webb, the brave journalist who exposed the Nicaraguan Contra drug trafficking scandal and was eventually driven to suicide by an extensive smear campaign by the mainstream media, described the process like this:

“We (CIA) need money for a covert operation, the quickest way to raise it is sell cocaine, you guys go sell it somewhere, we don’t want to know anything about it.”

This tactic worked very successfully in Afghanistan during the Cold War when the Mujahideen forces serving the US were funded through drugs.
Before the US invasion in 2001, the poppy fields were eradicated by the Taliban. Right after the US invasion, drug production began increasing drastically, and today Afghanistan produces 90% of the world’s opium, and on the verge of becoming a narco-state. There are reports of US forces admitting that drugs are flown out of Afghanistan in US planes.

Ahmad Wali Karzai (brother of US puppet Hamid Karzai), the now dead governor of Kandahar province, was at one time the biggest drug dealer of not just Afghanistan, but the region. The whole time, he was on the payroll of the CIA.

There have even been claims from US officers directly involved in drug operations in Afghanistan about the CIA’s involvement. A DEA agent, Edwrad Follis, stated that the CIA “turned a blind eye” to the drug trade in Afghanistan. Most recently, John Abbotsford an ex-CIA analyst and war veteran who fought in Afghanistan confessed that CIA had a role in drug smuggling operations.

Even if we exclude these claims and reports, it is hard to believe that a superpower that boasts the most modern technology in surveillance and intelligence-gathering cannot find opium fields and track supply routes within a country it occupies. The fact that 8 billion dollars have been spent in drug eradication efforts for the past decade but opium production has only soared, is itself an indication that the drug business serves some US interest in Afghanistan, or it would have been finished a long time ago.

Other players in this so-called ‘counter-narcotics’ efforts are private US contractors who earn millions of dollars through counter-narcotic contracts. One of the biggest beneficiaries is the notorious military company, Blackwater (now known as Academi) which according to RT earned 569 million dollars from these contracts. Private contractor companies have a huge share of the profits of the war in Afghanistan, and this failed drug war results in huge profits for them.

In fact, one of the reason for invasion of Afghanistan by the US was to hold its grip on the narcotics business which is the 3rd important trade commodity in terms of income after weapon and oil business.

How sincere is the US in liberating Afghanistan? Do you think the US wish an instable Afghanistan?

US/NATO claims for “liberating” Afghanistan are only cheap slogans and in fact they are invaders and destroyers of “liberation”. The US has no interest in Afghanistan’s prosperity. In fact, instability, insecurity, poverty, illiteracy and other deeply-entrenched social and economic problems help the US and its puppet government to remain in power without any opposition from the people.

In fact, the US government has a bloody hand in the events of the past 4 decades of Afghanistan. They supported and armed blood-thirsty elements in our country and turned Afghanistan to its current disastrous condition. If the US had wanted stability and prosperity, it would have given the billions of dollars of aid to be invested in basic infrastructure, not to fill the pockets of warlords and corrupt NGOs that thrived under US occupation. This gold rush has led Afghanistan to become the most corrupt country in the world, which means not even cents of this aid reaches our people.

The US/NATO try to turn not only Afghanistan but the whole Asia to an instable region in the world. While world economy turns toward Asia with big powers like Russia, China, India etc., the US rely on terrorism as a weapon to block the progress of especially Russia and China and make problems for these countries. Afghanistan has become a center of this power game between the big powers once again. (…)

If I have well understood, you mean that Afghanistan is worse now than before the US-led invasion.

Yes, absolutely. Apart from what I mentioned above, if we only consider the deterioration of the security situation, which is vital for people, more than food and water, all over Afghanistan, we can understand how the situation is worse than before.

Opium is another deadly virus which infects our new generation and is dangerous than Taliban and al-Qaeda. The number of civilians killed in suicide attacks by Taliban, the night raids and airstrikes of US forces, and the crimes of the militias of local warlords in different parts of Afghanistan, increases with every passing year.

The economy of the country is in ruins, controlled by mafia who draw support from powerful Afghan government officials. The US and NATO invaded Afghanistan with tall claims of “reconstruction of Afghanistan”, but we do not see any growth in any fundamental sector of Afghanistan.

Only the mafia and NGOs have grown in numbers and size. Afghans are the second largest group of migrants in the world, as the youth take up dangerous journeys to escape the misery at home. Many youngsters are drug addicts today.

In the more isolated areas, poverty and unemployment has driven young people to join the Taliban and ISIS as they provide basic necessities and sometimes even gives them salaries. Afghan women are as suppressed and under attack as they were under the medieval rule of the Taliban.

Neighboring governments like Iran and Pakistan never has such big and bloody hands in Afghanistan affairs like today.

This is only a brief summary of the disastrous situation of the country but is enough to show the devastation the US has brought upon our country and people.

As you’ve said, both history and current events show that occupation is never successful. What alternatives does RAWA defend to definitely change Afghanistan? Do you see foreign help as productive to really liberate the Afghan people from such too violent characters and groups? If so, who and how could provide a positive help to Afghanistan?

We have always said that the independence of a country is the first condition for democracy, freedom, and justice in a country. There are few, to no examples in history where foreign intervention has liberated or helped a nation, and the past 14 years of the US occupation of Afghanistan is proof of that.

The US not only did not liberate Afghanistan, but imposed on our people their biggest enemies, the fundamentalist criminals. The US is the creator and nurturer of these violent groups. It is a conscious policy of the US government to partner with Islamic fundamentalists wherever it steps in. We saw this in Libya and Syria as well. The US claims to be fighting terror, but the biggest terrorists, the Northern Alliance criminals, were brought to power by the US itself.

This did not come as a surprise though. Right at the beginning of the US invasion of Afghanistan, RAWA declared that the purpose of this aggression is to serve the imperialist aims of the US, and in this ordeal they will partner with the worst enemies of our country. What is of least importance to the US is the wellbeing of Afghanistan and its people. The current situation of our country is proof of that.

The key to freedom and democracy is in a united, organized struggle of our people. An arduous struggle it may be, but there is no other way out of this quagmire either. Only the people of a country can decide their fate and build a system that serves them.

The solidarity of the freedom and peace loving people of the world is very important in strengthening our people’s struggle as well. This will be a long and hard process, but Afghans have no other alternative but to unite and fight for freedom, democracy, justice and liberation.

Does RAWA defend a laic or an Islamic Afghanistan, based on the sharia law?

Secularism has been RAWA’s slogan since it was found. We believe that democracy is meaningless without secularism. Religion has historically been misused as means to maintain the power of those that ruled, and in a society where the people are deeply religious, the combination of state and religion is a particularly dangerous one.

Today in Afghanistan, the biggest tool the current fundamentalists in power use to defend their acts and protect themselves, is Islam. All the fundamentalist criminals in power whitewash their crimes using Islam. It has been used to quench the people’s anger and their desire to rise up and struggle for their rights.

The Taliban have been able to transform innocent young men to deadly suicide bombers by brainwashing them with religious ideas. Unfortunately this misuse of religion has served them quite well.

This is why secularism is vital for our country today, to uproot fundamentalism and build a society free of this deadly virus. Only then can Afghanistan step towards progress and prosperity.

Is misogyny a general sense in Afghanistan, or reduced to the warlords and Taliban?

There is no doubt that Afghanistan is plagued by backwardness, culturally and economically. For centuries, reactionary monarchs injected and used reactionary ideas to maintain their power. However, the past three decades when Islamic fundamentalists dominated Afghanistan, this backwardness has become more common and extreme than ever before.

One of the aspects of Islam widely propagated by Islamic hardliners is the degradation and oppression of women who are seen more like animals than humans. Women are only to be seen as servants who work at home, give birth to children, and satisfy the sexual needs of men.

Family violence is one of the most wearing and most painful problems for women in Afghanistan and most other Muslim countries and it is mostly supported by the hard-liners. This problem partly fed on the Islamic teachings that are given to the men (and women) from their childhood. There are Quranic verses in this respect that:

“Your women are a tilth for you (to cultivate) so go to your tilth as ye will” (2:223)

“Men are in charge of women… As for those form whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart.” (4:34)

There are a lot of such verses in the Quran.

Men justify their mastery and inhuman treatment of women based on these verses. And of course a number of sayings by Prophet Muhammad or other religious sources and large amount of poems and stories incidentally by popular poets reinforce these verses and all together they affect men so badly that if they treat a women with slight humanity and kindness, they feel as if they are committing the biggest sin of their lives! In the mentioned books and sources there are some words of compassion and kindness toward women but they have failed to shield women from the flood of those against them.

In those Muslim countries where secularist principles have found some space within the society the depth of these violence is not as bad as those infested with fundamentalism.

How do you evaluate the mainstream media coverage of Afghanistan? How does RAWA evaluate the international human rights organizations’ and the so-called international community position and acts concerning to the Afghan Cause?

It is no more a secret that mainstream media is used as a weapon in the modern wars. The mainstream media in the world, and especially the US, has served the imperialist purposes inside their countries better than any other tool.

The people of these countries do not have the true picture from the US wars to make proper, informed decisions on them. Afghanistan barely gets any coverage and if it does, it is systematically in line with a general policy of the US.

The crimes of the US forces such as killings and torture and night raids will never be shown, as will the insecurity and instability of our country and the devastating situation of women and people not get any attention. What will be shown is the horrors of the Taliban’s crimes to justify the US’s war, or isolated “success stories” to paint a rosy picture of the situation of Afghanistan.

How often are people encouraged to discuss the US’s involvement in wars abroad by giving them true facts? The same goes for other countries where the crimes of dictators such as Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Bashar Assad are continuously streamed, but the absolute devastation of Iraq and Libya by the US forces and their puppet governments, and the unconditional support of the US for ISIS elements (rebranded under names such as Al Nusra and Al Qaeda) in Syria is never shown. In fact, they find ways to whitewash and cover such actions of the US.

While some international human rights organizations have played an important part in Afghanistan’s four decades of war by documenting crimes, publishing reports and calling the world’s attention to these matters, the same cannot be said for the entire international community.

The international community and their partners in Afghanistan have been only involved in superficial issues that have no relevance for the Afghan people such as short-term projects and establishing useless NGOs. They have not thrown light on any fundamental issues of Afghanistan such as the US occupation, presence of fundamentalists in power, and their crimes. They in fact give a helping hand to the mainstream media of the world to portray the situation in Afghanistan as “better” than it was 15 years ago.

But of course alternative media like Democracy Now! etc. reflect realities, but their reporting is buried under the tones of propaganda pieces aired by big media outlets like CNN, BBC, AP,Fox News etc. who have large coverage and resources to make fool of people.

Who are the greatest Afghans’ enemies?

Afghans are crushed between four enemies today: the US and NATO forces, the Northern Alliance criminals and warlords in the government, the Taliban, and an emerging ISIS.

The US has mothered all of these criminal fundamentalist elements and still has them on a leash for its purposes in the region. This means it is The Northern Alliance criminals enjoy the bulk of Western support, both financial and political which makes them more dangerous than other bands. The viciousness of the Taliban and ISIS is well-known to the world and they get military and financial support through the US, Pakistan and even Iran.

All these enemies are mighty powerful and control different parts of the country. In the battles between these forces, in the gruesome airstrikes, suicide and rocket attacks carried out by them, it is only our people who suffer.

What are RAWA prospects to Afghanistan, before the current reality? What would you like to say to the world and to the West, especially to Americans and their government?

If the political situation of Afghanistan is unchanged, the current situation is only going to become bleaker. The people of Afghanistan will continue to suffer from insecurity, poverty, corruption, unemployment, and other devastating issues. Our people will continue to be victim of the crimes of the US forces, Taliban, and Jehadi warlords. There is only one way the current situation can change and that is for the people themselves to struggle for their rights and a better country, against their prime enemies (US, Taliban, Jehadi warlords).

We have nothing to say to the Western governments who have the blood of our innocent people on their hands. Our message for the peace-loving people of these countries is that they have to see the reality of Afghanistan and all the other countries the US has invaded. What they see as rare news of the catastrophic situation in these countries, is the everyday reality for the people.

They need to pressurize their governments to change this invasions and occupation policy, and stand in solidarity with the people who are the victims of these wars. This international solidarity will strengthen the fight for freedom and democracy in these countries.

They should know that the tax they pay is used by their governments to make Afghanistan and other war-torn countries as hell which will directly impact their lives and make Western countries unsafe, like what we witness today in European cities.
 
These 9 maps show where Canada’s illegal drugs are coming from
NEWS: 8 TYPES OF ILLEGAL DRUGS BEING SHIPPED TO CANADA AND WHERE THEY ARE COMING FROMX

WATCH: Here are several types of drugs that are making its way to Canada and where they are being shipped from.

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Fentanyl originating from China, heroin sent from east Africa, and anabolic steroids from Moldova. Documents obtained by Global News show where these illegal drugs and more are being trafficked from.

A 2016 Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) “drug analysis report,” obtained under access to information legislation, offers a larger picture of how illegal drugs are arriving in Canada.



The documents also offer a look at how the scourge of fentanyl and synthetic drugs like GBL (the precursor for date rape drug GHB), which mainly originate from China, have increased dramatically since 2014. The report notes that outbound drug seizures are included in the final numbers and in some cases the “transit” category may also refer to origin countries in some instances.

And while the opioid crisis continues to spread across Canada, the seizures of other drugs like cocaine and opium have also quietly increased in recent years.

Here are nine maps that show where and how illegal drugs are flowing into Canada.

Fentanyl
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Provinces across the country have faced a spike in drug overdose deaths in recent months, including B.C. which saw 25 deaths and nearly 600 overdoses in June alone. Many of those deaths are attributed to illicit fentanyl, which can be 100 times more powerful than morphine.

“Seizures of fentanyl have increased by 60% in 2015 compared to 2014 and quantities rose by 728%,” according to a CBSA document, which stated the amount of fentanyl seized spiked from 7.2 kilograms in 2014 to 58 kilograms in 2015.

New numbers from the CBSA show roughly 205 kilograms of fentanyl was discovered by border officials in the fiscal year 2016-2017.

WATCH: Ontario doctor who lost everything speaks out on fentanyl addiction ahead of sentence

Ontario doctor awaits sentencing after forging fentanyl prescriptions to feed addiction
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According to the CBSA, “China accounts for nearly 100% of seizures” which are largely delivered through the mail. The agency says the drug is “pressed into pills domestically, cutting costs and risks to local traffickers.”

“It is conceivable that fentanyl supply lines could expand to include Mexico-sourced fentanyl products,” according to the CBSA.

In 2016, more than 2,400 Canadians died of opioid overdoses, according to an estimate from the Public Health Agency of Canada, which said the number is likely much higher.

The surging number of deaths has led to health agencies and governments at all levels rushing to address the growing crisis. In November 2016, the RCMP and China’s Ministry of Public Security announced an intelligence sharing agreementaimed at curbing fentanyl and other synthetic opioids from entering Canada.

WATCH: Historic fentanyl seizure in Edmonton ‘complex’, drug operation ‘innovative’, police say

Historic multi-million dollar fentanyl seizure in Edmonton
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GBL
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Seizures of gamma-Butyrolactone (GBL), which can be processed into gamma-Hydroxybutyric acid (GHB), rose from just over 1,000 litres in 2014 to 3,082 litres in 2015.

“GBL quantities seized in 2015 have significantly increased by 194% as the drug’s popularity as an alternative for alcohol and other drugs,” according to a CBSA document. “GBL can be easily and legally sourced through the Internet, is consumed by a diversified clientele and has a high profit margin once converted to [GHB].”

READ MORE: Designer drug smuggling posing ‘greatest challenge’ to Canadian border agency

The agency says GBL is transported to Canada mainly via the mail and warns that seizures will increase given its popularity as a party drug.

“GBL may gain additional popularity with traffickers, given the high profit margin and that the process of converting GBL to GHB is simple and does not require complex laboratory equipment.

Cocaine
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The majority of the world’s cocaine is produced in just three Andean countries — Colombia, Bolivia and Peru— but its main points of entry into Canada are from the Caribbean islands, the U.S.A. and Mexico, according to the CBSA.

Shipments being smuggled by travellers at airports or in packages on commercial flights remain the most popular modes of transportation, according to the agency.

“Seizures from 2010 until 2015 have remained relatively stable ranging from 300 to 420, and quantities have hovered around 1,000 kg,” the CBSA document said. In 2014, the quantity of cocaine seized spiked to more than 2,300 kilograms thanks to five large marine busts.

READ MORE: Experts alarmed after 40% increase of fentanyl-laced street drugs tested in Canada

The CBSA also found a 35 per cent increase in cocaine quantities arriving from the Caribbean islands, mainly Jamaica and the Dominican Republic.

Cocaine is the second-most commonly used illegal drug in Canada. In the fall of 2016 health experts raised the alarm over a 40 per cent increase in the amount of street drugs that tested positive for fentanyl.

New stats from the CBSA show nearly 2,000 kilograms of cocaine was seized in 2016-2017.

WATCH: Postal workers on high alert over fentanyl risks

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Methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA)
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Seizures of the drug MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, increased dramatically between 2014 and 2015, according to the CBSA, with main transit points being the U.S. and Netherlands.

“In 2015, the number of seizures and the quantities of MDMA smuggled to Canada increased by 109% and 513% respectively,” the CBSA document said, increasing from 732 doses in 2014 to 4,493 doses in 2015.

The mail is the most commonly used method of importing MDA, followed by land and air modes.

Canada has become a known source of the drug, according to the agency, and in 2015 there were significant seizures at “sophisticated” domestic labs across the country, run by organized crime groups.

“Asian organized crime groups are often active in cross-border smuggling of large quantities of MDMA between Canada and the U.S. as well as in the importation of precursor chemicals from source countries such as China, India and Vietnam,” a CBSA report said.

Khat
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Pronounced “cot” or “chat,” khat is a plant native to East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. Users chew the leaves to produce a mild feeling of euphoria or excitement.

The drug is mainly smuggled from countries in East Africa, like Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia, via postal and courier routes.

The CBSA noted a nearly 49 per cent decline in the quantity of the drug coming into Canada between 2014 and 2015.

Heroin
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More than 200 kilograms of heroin were seized by Canadian border agents in 2015, with India, Pakistan, Malaysia, and countries in east Africa like Tanzania, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda being key transit points for heroin that is largely produced in Afghanistan.

“Heroin is emerging as the drug of choice due to being cheaper and more easily obtainable than prescription opioids,” a CBSA report warned, noting that a surge in heroin “directly coincides with shrinking street supplies of OxyContin.

READ MORE: Spate of drug overdoses in Toronto wakeup call

Ontario health officials believe heroin laced with illicit fentanyl is responsible for a number of deaths in the province over the last week.

In the U.S., the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that between 2014 to 2015, heroin overdose death rates increased by 20.6 per cent, with nearly 13,000 people dying in 2015.

Opium
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Opium seizures in Canada rose by 31 per cent from 200 kilograms in 2014 to 262kilograms in 2015, with India, Iran, Iraq, Turkey and the Netherlands as the main trafficking routes, according to the CBSA.

“Due to record high opium crops and a steady increase in quantities since 2012, opium seized in 2016 will likely be higher than 2016; however seizures numbers will remain stable,” the CBSA said.

New numbers from the CBSA show nearly 320 kilograms of opium was confiscated from 2016 to 2017.

The agency noted that the opioid crisis is also a contributing factor in the quantity of opium being sent to Canada.

Anabolic steroids
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Nearly 200 kilograms of illegal steroids were seized by the CBSA in 2015, up from 180 kilograms in 2014, with China, Hong Kong, Moldova, Romania, and the U.S. being the main transit points, according to a CBSA report.

The CBSA notes that while most anabolic steroids are smuggled into Canada via the mail system, ingredients for producing steroids can be found on the internet or “diverted from legitimate sources.”

“Anabolic steroids have a stable consumer market that shows no signs of diminishing,” a CBSA report said.

New statistics from the CBSA show nearly 5,000 kilograms of steroids were seized in 2016-2017.

Meth
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The number of amphetamine seizures has increased by 35 per cent while quantities seized have decreased by 42 per cent between 2014 and 2015, according to the CBSA.

“The abuse of clandestinely produced amphetamines has spread,” a CBSA report says. “Despite an ongoing domestic appetite for amphetamine, due to extensive production of the narcotic in Canada quantities seized are not expected to increase in 2016.”

The postal route still is preferred among traffickers in Canada with the U.S., China, the U.K. and the Netherlands being main transit points.
 
WHO IS CALLING THE SHOTS?



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“The man who reads nothing at all is better educated than the man who reads nothing but newspapers.” Thomas Jefferson

The idea of the United States, at one point, was synonymous with the idea of vision, morality, and leadership. A shining light in a world drowning within corruption and dishonesty. This was at least the perception, that its actions reverberated throughout the free world, illuminating the path for those striving to break free from the shackles government.

The mission of The Last American Vagabond has always been to shine light into the dark corners of society and force the average citizen to think for themselves; to look beyond the biased content regurgitated from mainstream media, and develop one’s own opinion using common sense and deductive logic. Americans find themselves in a country that has shed the extra mental weight of it’s honor and morality, but deftly held on to it’s power. Looking at where this country began, compared to where it currently stands, one can honestly wonder with whom that power currently resides.

The system once set in place, designed to give power to the people, is now only a phantom shell of what it once was. Yet enough of the shell remains allowing those unwilling to accept the obvious truth to continue on their oblivious path into bondage. With the façade in place, cultivating a false sense of democracy and safety, this once potentially great country is being pulled apart from within.

The reality of the situation is painfully visible, to those willing to actually look. A perfect example of this is how the majority of the nation calls for the decriminalization of a cannabis. A plant that can demonstrably be the answer to some of the most pressing problems facing this country, and yet, a blinding show of bureaucracy that leads in intentional circles is all that is seen. States are taking it upon themselves to enact their own laws, which in truth is how this country was meant to function all along, without the interference of the Federal Government. However, today it is a show of defiance. The majority has spoken out and nothing has happened. No action has been taken. In fact, actions have been taken to prevent the majority will. This should be alarming to every American. This is the defining difference between democracy and totalitarianism, or any such tyrannical governmental structure. Financial interest is the primary motivation behind the inaction of this government, but from whom does this motivation derive?

Some would pose the idea that the illegal drug trade throughout the Middle East and Mexico, that which the United States secretly controls, is reason enough to maintain a lack of action even in the face of an uprising. Too much money is being made with far too many involved to simply change position. If this country’s history proves anything, it’s that money dictates the weak. Time has shown that a strong, morally bound leader, could not be more few and far between. Today, those with the qualities of the Founding Fathers, as we remember them at least, do not make it past the Capital steps before their morals become their weakness. As they enter the lion’s den, they are systematically cast out of a world overrun by deceit.

For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence–on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed.” – JFK



The very real possibility that an outside source is dictating the choices of this country is a scary thought indeed, one that many feel is not that far-fetched. The world is beginning to see the blanket of lies that cover this country and much of what it has done in the last fifty years specifically, but in many ways, stretches back much further. From Afghanistan to Libya, those who care to scratch past the barely concealed surface can see the truth behind the carefully cultivated lies, yet sadly, far too many give in to the fear.

The question is why one country over another? What is the driving force behind why the US would willingly ignore the verifiably brutal actions of Saudi Arabia and Israel, actions that regularly take the lives of its own people, while carrying out an openly illegal war in Syria based on highly disputed and unsubstantiated claims, that are far less severe? There are many theories in this regard, much of which is rooted in logic and truth, and much more so than its obfuscaters would like, yet the real point to walk away with today is that we, as the people of this nation, are no longer in control, if in fact we ever truly were.

At the end of the day, it is the duty of the average American to weed through the misinformation and look at the larger picture. Few can say for sure who is truly calling the shots in this country, but it has become painfully clear that the direction has shifted to something other than the fulfillment of the majority will or the protection of Americans. However, America is not lost simply because those who sit in power do not live up to the role. America is an ideal that lives within its believers. The people of this nation have the power within themselves, and there are those out there waiting to see that majority rise once again.
 
The game is the game!!



10 Things You Didn't Know About Britain's Drug Trade


Narcomania: How Britain Got Hooked On Drugs, released earlier this month, is a book that explores the drug industry in Britain, not as the shady 'other world' you see depicted on cop shows but as a huge, interconnected network that touches all corners of our lives.

Here, authors Max Daly and Steve Simpson shared ten things that surprised them about the topic in the course of researching and writing what the Observer has called a 'startingly brave' as well as 'sober and well-researched' book.



1 | Where you live often depends on what drugs you take

Although Britain is an island, we found that it is home to a variety of different drug zones, influenced by local tastes and supply routes. In Bristol and Bath, ketamine is a popular drug, while crystal meth is mainly limited to small cliques in London, Manchester and Brighton. Crack is not big in York, Glasgow or Newcastle, because organized criminals there do not dominate the drug’s supply.



2 | Hotels are five star drug dens

Where Britain’s street markets offer the most stereotypical view of the UK drug market as one of crime and desperation, we discovered teams of elite dealers who specialised in servicing super-rich clients who rent out expensive four-star hotel suits to take drugs and have sex with escort girls. Managers of some of the country’s top hotels turn a blind eye to this trade because they do not want to lose lucrative business.



3 | Drug dealing isn’t easy

Having spent many months interviewing street dealers, middle market brokers and commercial cannabis cultivators we found that that while on paper the drug industry appears a sure money-spinner, staying ahead in such a competitive, violent and obviously illegal market isn’t easy. To succeed you need to be both mentally and physically tough. The role is best summed up by Marco, a self-made narco-entrepreneur, who said he lived the life of heavyweight boxing champ “who could lose his title at any time”.

4 | The days of the drug trade Mr Bigs are numbered

From the start of the modern drug trade in the 1980s, our narco-economy was overseen by a small but influential group of big players from around the country who bossed supply lines coming into Britain. Now old school family syndicates have been superseded by a new generation of multi-cultural and inter-linked entrepreneurial Mr Middles who have access to supply lines and are able to blend into mainstream society.


5 | In some parts of the country police have been told to avoid arresting dealers after 3pm

The battle between the drug gangs and the police is a woefully uneven one in terms of resources. In an age of austerity, some police drug teams have been told to avoid late afternoon arrests, because they cannot afford the lengthy overtime involved. Forces admit they now target visible, low-level drug dealers because more painstaking intelligence operations are too costly.


6 | Crack professionalized the drug trade

Cocaine and crack revolutionised British drug markets in the 1980s - bringing unprecedented profits that made even the sleepiest rural drug markets a target for mobile gangs ‘going country’. Where once drug markets and drug crime were cooped up in zones of decay and unemployment, this professionalized trade now forms the backdrop of everyday life in former seaside resorts and towns of middle England.


7 | The City is a major link in the global drug trade

London’s financial district holds dual status with Wall Street as the world’s money laundering capital. In the nineteenth century, the nation’s coffers were filled with the money made by smuggling illegal opium into China under the auspices of the government-backed East India Company. In 2012 HSBC, Britain’s largest bank, was hit with a colossal fine after it was discovered that Mexican drug lords had laundered billions of dollars through its US arm.


8 | Politicians and police can only openly discuss drug policy when they have no power

Few areas of policy are so influenced by the media. As soon as politicians gain a position of power, any previous controversial views they may have held on drugs vanish. As if by magic, this ‘omerta’ is lifted when they return to the backbenches or retire and are able once again to speak their mind. The same can be said of many retired police chiefs.


9 | Drug dealers outside the school gates is an urban myth

Fuelled by age-old myths which have it that all drug sellers are ‘evil’ predators who entice school kids with cheap drugs, the government created a law to target the school gate pushers. This belies a basic misunderstanding of why people sell drugs (to make money, not to corrupt penniless children) and unsurprisingly, there are no records of an adult being convicted for selling drugs outside a school.


10 | The drug trade is not an underworld but an ‘overworld’

In writing this book, we discovered that the modern drug trade operates largely from within, rather than from the outside. Far from existing in a shadowy world distant from our own, it is deeply embedded throughout society, from council estates and high streets to the corporate world and beyond. That is why it has remained resilient and been capable of adapting to change. As a result, in whichever shape or form, the drug trade is here to stay.


 
The truth is hidden in front of our nose!! They know people dont read, so the truth is hidden in between the lines!!



A Jaw-Dropping Explanation of How Governments Are Complicit in the Illegal Drug Trade



Note: The following interview helps us understand the drug war from a dramatically different perspective than the one the corporate media paints. Instead the traditional portrayal of the war on drugs as a fight between law enforcement and illicit drug dealers, scholar Oliver Villar explains that the illegal drug trade is a tool of empire a means of "social control" as much as profit. Villar, a lecturer in politics at Charles Sturt University in Bathurst, Australia's insight is well worth the read.


Lars Schall: What has been your main motivation to spend 10 years of your life to the subject of the drug trade?

Oliver Villar: The main motivation goes sometime back. I think it has to do firstly with my own experiences in growing up in working class suburbs in Sydney, Australia. It always has been an area that I found very curious and fascinating just to think about how rampant and persuasive drugs really are in our communities, and just by looking at it in more recent times how much worse the drug problem has become, not just in lower socio-economic areas, but everywhere.

But from then on, when I finally had the opportunity to do so, I actually undertook this as a PhD thesis. I spent my time carefully looking at firstly what was written on the drug trade, but as coming from Latin America, I was very interested in particular in the Latin American drug trade as well.

So I looked at the classic works such Alfred W McCoy's Politics of Heroin, Peter Dale Scott's Cocaine Politics, Douglas Valentine's The Strength of the Wolf, and works that related not just to the drug trade, but from various angles including political science perspectives to see what we know about drugs.

I found there were a lot of gaps missing, and there was a lot written on Asia, on Central America, particular from the 1980s, if you recall the Iran-Contra theme and scandal, but nothing really on where drugs actually come from. Eventually my research took me to Colombia, and in the Western hemisphere at least, cocaine became that subject of investigation. I looked at it from a political economy perspective, and so from there on you can kind of get an idea about some of the influences in my background in eventually taking that much time to do it.

LS: Does the drug trade work very differently than people usually assume?

OV: Well, yes. What do people usually assume? Well, it's a criminological subject of investigation, it's a crime approach, it's criminals, it's pretty much a Hollywood kind of spectacle where it becomes clear who the good and the bad guys are. But what I found, it's far more than just simply criminals at work.

What we do know, if you go back to the history of the global drug trade, which I did pursue, you find that states, not just individuals or criminals, were also part of the process of production and distribution. The most notorious example is the British colonial opium trade, where much of that process was happening in a very wide scale, where the British not only gained financially but also used it as a political form of social control and repression.

What did they do? In China they were able quite effectively to open up the market to British control. This is just one example. And from there on I looked at other great powers and the way they also somehow managed to use drugs as a political instrument, but also as a form of financial wealth, as you could say, or revenue to maintain and sustain their power. The great power of today I have to say is the United States, of course. These are some of the episodes and investigations that I have looked at in my new book.

LS: From my perspective as a financial journalist it is remarkable to see that you treat cocaine as just another capitalist commodity, like copper, soy beans or coffee, but then again as a uniquely imperial commodity. [1] Can you explain this approach, please?

OV: Again drawing upon past empires or great powers, it becomes an imperial commodity because it is primarily serving the interests of that imperial state. If we look at the United States for instance, it becomes an imperial commodity just as much as opium became a British imperial commodity in a way it related to the Chinese. It means the imperial state is there to gain from the wealth, the United States in this case, but it also means that it serves as a political instrument to harness and maintain a political economy which is favorable to imperial interests.

We had the "War on Drugs", for example. It is a way how an imperial power can intervene and also penetrate a society much like the British were able to do with China in many respects. So it is an imperial commodity because it does serve that profit mechanism, but it is also an instrument for social control and repression.

We see this continuity with examples where this takes place. And Colombia, I think, was the most outstanding and unique example which I have made into an investigative case study itself.

Another thing worth mentioning is what actually makes the largest sectors of global trade, what are they? It's oil, arms, and drugs – the difference being that because drugs are seen as an illegal product, economists don't study it as just another capitalist commodity – but it is a commodity. If you look at it from a market perspective, it works pretty much the same way as other commodities in the global financial system.

LS: Cocaine has become one more means for extracting surplus value on which to realize profits and thus accumulate capital. But isn't it the criminalized status of drugs that makes this whole business possible in the first place?

OV: We have to think about what would happen if it was decriminalized? It would actually be a bad thing if you were a drug lord or someone to a large extent gaining from the drug trade. What happens if it is criminalized is that you are able to gain wealth and profit from something that is very harmful to society. First of all, it will never be politically acceptable for politicians to say: You know, we think that the war on drugs is failing, so we decriminalize it. That would be almost political suicide.

We know it is very harmful to society, and by keeping it criminalized it leaves a very grey area, not only in the studies and investigations that I've noticed on the drug trade, but it also leaves a very grey area in terms of how the state actually tackles the drug problem.

In many ways for law enforcement it allows a grey area in order to fight it. For instance, we can look for example at the financial center, which gains predominantly from it. But it also allows the criminal elements, which are so key to making it work, flourish.

And by not touching that, by largely ignoring the main criminal operation to take form and to operate, then what you are doing by criminalizing drugs is that you are actually stimulating that demand. So there is also that financial element to the whole issue as well. That's why this business is actually possible by that criminalized status.

LS: Do you think that those who were responsible to make cocaine or opium globally illegal were unaware that they were creating a very profitable business with that arrangement?

OV: If you are looking at the true pioneers who started much of the cocaine trade in South America, these were drug traffickers from places like Bolivia, which had a clear monopoly of coca production, and also at the people that formed the cartels in the 1980's like the Medellin cartel or the Cali cartel and other groups, I think they were not aware of the way things would eventually turn out.

But the other element, the state element, which made it part of their imperial interests to allow the drug trade to flourish, I think they perhaps had some sense – just looking at things in retrospective, of course – that this would be a very profitable business within that arrangement.

At the time of the 1980s in Latin America, it was pretty much seen as a means to fund operations, and at that time these were essentially counter-insurgency operations in the context of the Cold War. There was no real big ambition to say "We will create the drug trade because it is a very large business opportunity." I think it just became that because it was something that was of convenience – and that's exactly what we see now in how the banks operate today: it's of financial convenience, why get rid of it? Out of these historical patterns it has become what it has become, but for different reasons.

I don't think that even Pablo Escobar would have imagined just how enormous the global drug trade would become. They were largely driven by self-interests and their own profits. But then the state made it much bigger and made it into a regional institutionalized phenomenon that we see to this day. And we can see also how the state in parts of South America, like Bolivia with the 1980 Cocaine Coup as it was known, and also the rampant institutionalization of cocaine in Colombia, has become very much part of this arrangement.



But then again, it would not have been possible without the imperial hand of particular the United States and the intelligence agencies. There we have that imperial commodity and imperial connection as well. They didn't work alone, in all these criminal elements, of course, there was an imperial hand in much of all of this, but why it happened, I think, is the matter of debate.




LS: Catherine Austin Fitts, a former investment banker from Wall Street, shared this observation once with me:


Essentially, I would say the governments run the drug trade, but they're not the ultimate power, they're just one part, if you will, of managing the operations. Nobody can run a drug business, unless




the banks will do their transactions and handle their money. If you want to understand who controls the drug trade in a place, you need to ask yourself who is it that has to accept to manage the transactions and to manage the capital, and that will lead you to the answer who's in control. [2]


What are your thoughts on this essential equation?

OV: Going back to my emphasis on the state, coming from a political science background, this is what some criminologists would say, that this is state-organized crime, and the emphasis is the state. And again if we go back to the global history of the drug trade, this isn't something new. If we look at piracy, for example, that was another form of state-organized crime sanctioned by the state because it served very similar means as the drug capital of today serves as well.

So yes, the state is very much involved in managing it but it cannot do it alone. You have the US Drug Enforcement Administration, for example, which is officially the law enforcement department of the US state in charge of combating the drugs; and you also have other intelligence agencies like the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] that are involved in fighting drugs, but also, as I have seen in my studies, actually allowing much of the drug and financial operations to continue.

We saw recently similar things unfolding in Mexico with the operation "Fast and Furious", where CIA arms were making their way to drug cartels in Mexico. We can draw our own conclusions, but what we do know is that the state is central to understanding these operations, involving governments, their agencies, and banks fulfilling a role.

LS: How does the money laundering work and where does the money primarily go to?

OV: We know that the estimated value of the global drug trade – and this is also debated by analysts – is worth something between US$300 billion to $500 billion a year. Half of that, something between $250-$300 billion and over actually goes to the United States. So what does this say if you use that imperial political economy approach I've talked about? It means that the imperial center, the financial center, is getting the most, and so it is in no interest for any great power (or state) to stop this if great amounts of the profits are flowing to the imperial center.

What I find very interesting and very valuable are the contemporary events that are unfolding right now, the reports that even come out in the mainstream media about Citigroup and other very well-known money laundering banks being caught out laundering drug money for drug traffickers across South America and in Mexico as well, as the so-called war on drugs is unfolding.

The global financial crisis is another example, because the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime came out and said it was thanks to the global drug trade that the financial system was kept afloat, where all this money was being pumped in from were from key imperial financial centers like New York, like London and Switzerland, and so on. In this case, money laundering is simply beyond again that criminology framework; it does involve that imperial state perspective, and I think that's the way it remains because of these benefits.

LS: Do you think that "lax policies" are responsible for the fact that large multi-national banks are laundering drug profits? [3]

OV: If you think again about the criminalized status of drugs, it's criminalized in society, but when it comes to the economic and financial sector, which should be criminalized, it is actually decriminalized. So we have some kind of contradiction and paradox where it would be great if it would be criminalized, but when it comes to the financial sector, it is actually fine – it's lax, it's unregulated, and we know that the US Federal Reserve, for example, can monitor any deposit over $10,000, so it's not that they don't know – they know what's going on.

It rolls back to your previous question. It continues to benefit the imperial global architecture, particular in the West, and so it becomes a lax policy approach towards these money laundering banks because they wouldn't have it any other way, there is much resistance to it.

Since Barack Obama came to power in 2008 and the financial crisis took hold thereafter, we've heard a lot of promises from Western leaders that they would get tough and so on, yet today we see that nothing much has changed. We've had now this episode with Barclays in the UK and the price fixing [of the important London Interbank Offered Rate] – this goes on.

Of course, they prefer to have this contradiction and paradox in place, because this is in fact what is allowing the drug profits to come in. If the government would take this problem seriously and would actually do something about these money-laundering banks, we would see a real effort to fight the drug problem, but that is not going to happen any time soon.

The last time we ever heard there was a serious effort to do this was in the 1980s and only because of much pressure, where George Bush Sr was forced to act in what was known as "Operation Greenback".

What happened was that they started to find an increasing number of drug money-laundering receipts in Florida and other southern parts of the United States. This started to work, they put pressure on the financial companies which were actually involved in that process – and then he suspended it all, the whole investigation. That would have been an opportunity to actually do something, but of course it was suspended, and ever since we haven't seen any serious effort, despite the rhetoric, to actually do something.

LS: Why is it that the [George W] Bush and Obama Departments of Justice have spent trillions of dollars on a war on terrorism and a war on drugs, while letting US banks launder money for the same people that the nation is supposedly at war with"? [4]

OV: That is another issue that is part of the contradiction of imperialism, or the process that I call "narco-colonialism". The stated objectives are very different to the real objectives. They may claim that they are fighting a war on drugs or on terror, but in fact they are fighting a war for the drug financial revenue through terror, and by doing that they have to make alliances with the very same people who are benefiting from the drug trade as we see in Colombia.

The main landlords and the business class who own the best land have connections with right-wing paramilitaries, which the DEA knows are actually exporting the drugs, and have direct connections to various governments and presidencies throughout recent Colombian history. These are the same people who are actually being given carte blanche to fight the war on terror in the Western hemisphere – yet this is a contradiction that no one ever questions.

So I think it's not about fighting the real terrorists, it's about fighting and financing resistance to that problem, and in Colombia there has been a civil war for quite a number of years. It's really the same paradox; it's funding the very same state mechanisms to allow the whole thing to continue.

LS: What should our readers know about the political economy of the drug trade created by the war on drugs?

OV: What we should know is that there needs to be a complete restructure and revision in the way we examine the drug trade. First of all, it's not crime that is at the center of the political economy, but it is the state, imperialism and class – that I think is essential, or at least I find it very useful in examining the drug trade.

We can see that clear in Colombia, where you have a narco-bourgeoisie which is essentially the main beneficiary there. These aren't just the landlords, these are also the paramilitaries, key members of the police, the military and the government; but also the connection to the United States, which is a political relationship, which is financing them to fight their common enemy, which is at this point in time the left-wing guerrillas, predominantly the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, the FARC.

So this again goes back to your previous question about this contradiction: why are trillions of dollars being waged to fight the drug trade in Colombia, but also in Afghanistan, when like in Colombia, everybody knows Afghanistan has a very corrupt regime and many of them are drug lords themselves who are the main beneficiaries in that country?

It has little to do with drugs, it has little to do with terrorists, it has everything to do with empire building, of which the main beneficiary is the United States.

LS: Since you already mentioned it, what is the major importance of the narco-bourgeoisie in Colombia seen from a market perspective?

OV: This goes again back to the notion of who is managing the drug trade, and Catherine Austin Fitts' perspective includes the government, and I sympathize with that approach, but we must bring class to that political economy of drugs. Why is class important? Why is a narco-bourgeoisie important? Well, it's because without a class that not only is growing, producing, and distributing the drugs and has the state resources to do so thanks to US financial assistance and military training and operations, we would not have a cocaine trade.

So the narco-bourgeoisie is essential and the main connection to that imperial relationship that the United States has. Without that kind of arrangement there would be no market in Colombia. So from a market perspective, these are the people who are essentially arranging and managing the drug trade in order to let the cocaine trade actually flourish. In the past, the same kind of people were fighting communists; today they are fighting "terrorists" supposedly.

LS: You are arguing in your book that the war on drugs is no failure at all, but a success. How do you come to that conclusion?
OV: I come to that conclusion because what do we know so far about the war on drugs? Well, the US has spent about US$1 trillion throughout the globe. Can we simply say it has failed? Has it failed the drug money-laundering banks? No. Has it failed the key Western financial centers? No. Has it failed the narco-bourgeoisie in Colombia – or in Afghanistan, where we can see similar patterns emerging? No. Is it a success in maintaining that political economy? Absolutely.

So I have to say when we are looking at it from that political economy / class basis approach with this emphasis on imperialism and the state rather than simply crime, it has been a success because what it is actually doing is allowing that political economy to thrive.


I mean, we have to ask the question: how can such a drug trade flourish under the very nose of the leading hegemonic power in the Americas, if not the world, the United States? You had the Chinese Revolution, you had even authoritarian regimes, fascist regimes, that were able to wipe out the drug trade. Why can't the Western powers with all the resources that they have put a dent on it?



But instead they have actually exacerbated the problem. It's getting worse, and the fact is there is never a real end in sight, and they don't want to change their policies, so someone is clearly benefiting and suffering from this.

The logic, if we can call it that, is the conclusion that it is part of that paradox and part of their interest to maintain this political economy. We can look at it from a different angle, if you like.





Look at oil, our dependence on hydrocarbons. We know that is bad for our environment, we know what scientists call "Peak Oil", and we know we will have problems with that form of energy system, but it continues. So is it in their interest to stop this? No, it isn't. This is what I see as the very fabric of capitalism and imperialism, and that the logic becomes the illogical and the conclusion becomes part of the contradiction. That's why I don't see it as a failure at all but very much in the interest, stubbornly or not, of US imperialism to drag on this war on drugs.

LS: Can you tell us some of the reasons for the period in Colombian history that is called "La Violencia" and how it played a role ideologically in the Cold War as it was fought in Colombia?

O.V. "La Violencia" was a period in Colombian history and probably the only time that the Colombian state acknowledged that the country was in a war with itself, a civil war, if you will. In 1948, there was a popular liberal candidate named Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, a populist leader, who was promising land reform, and he promised at least to the landless and the poorest in Colombia that something would change in the country.

Since then, an ultra-conservative and reactionary oligarchy has remained in power in Colombia. What this candidate stood for was some shake-up in the system. Gaitain was assassinated, conservatives were blamed for the assassination, and from there on we saw a civil war that dragged on up until 1958, when you saw the nucleus of the main body of armed resistance, which is now the FARC, take shape.

Ideologically, the Cold War was seen as a way to justify the state repression which continued. Something like 300,000 people were killed in "La Violencia". But not much changed afterward. After 1958, there was no end to the class war. This was basically a war between those with land and those without land, which is important to understand in the political economy of cocaine in Colombia: that's the land, the problem of land. And this dragged on after 1958. So rather than viewing it as a problem that's historical involving land, they saw it as a problem of communism, but of course, once the Cold War ended there needed to be a justification to drag on this repression.

Conveniently, we increasingly heard terms like the "war on drugs", "narco-terrorism" – and that provided ideological ammunition for the United States and the Colombian state and its ruling class to target the same revolutionary and main forms of resistance in Colombia. This included trade unions, student associations, peasant organization, and the same kind of what are considered subversive elements in Colombia.

So the "war on terror" you could say is a continuation of very much the same rational that the state was using during "La Violencia". It is a continuing problem, which continues to be resolved by the state with force, which means to treat the security problem through military repression. So it's a serious problem in the wake of this political economy because violence becomes the means in which this political economy can be maintained.

LS: When did the cocaine business actually begin big time in Colombia? According to the book Cocaine: Global Histories, before cocaine was made illegal by the single convention of the United Nations in March 1961 it came primarily from Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand. [5] Why was the shift taking place then from Asia to Colombia, Peru and Bolivia?

OV: In the context of the Cold War, it wasn't just simply an ideological war, it was also very much a real war in where there was resistance to capitalist and financial arrangements that were implemented throughout the world financial system at that time.

In Asia we know, of course, there was the Vietnam War; we also had the Chinese Revolution beforehand, as I have mentioned before, and we know that drugs became a way to finance much of the counterinsurgency operations that were going on. We know for example that Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of the Kuomintang who fought Mao Zedong in the Chinese civil war and the Chinese Revolutionary process, was a drug trafficker himself. Many of the contacts that the CIA had in Vietnam, particular in South Vietnam, were also deeply enmeshed in the drug trade.

What was known as the World Anti-Communist League at that time drew much of these alliances and organizations together in order to finance much of their operations. But when the Vietnam war eventually draw to a close, what did we see? We began to see a shift, not only with counter-insurgency operations against what was seen as communist insurgencies, but also in drug trafficking operations.

This was essentially the time where I noticed, and this was of vital importance for the book, that the same kind of arrangements were emerging in Latin America. The regional section of World Anti-Communist League was the Confederation in Latin America, which was then headed by Argentina, particularly the military junta of 1976, and they saw by learning from lessons in Asia that by allying themselves and by managing drug operations themselves, and so forth, and by using the same elements to finance these operations against the communists, they could do the same.

From there we saw some very important unfolding of history, which was the great concentration of operations within the drug trade, in Bolivia in particular with the Cocaine Coup of 1980, where you even had former Nazis who were employed and used with their experience to undergo these operations. [6] The Colombians, long before they became the main cocaine production center, saw this as an opportunity to get involved and take advantage of the situation. From there we saw the beginnings of the modern cocaine trade in Latin America which is now global, and has reached a global scale.

LS: What function had in their time famous drug lords like Pablo Escobar? What was the secret of his success in particular?

OV: As an entrepreneur he did see the events, particularly in Bolivia, I think, as an opportunity. Before then it was marijuana, not cocaine, that was the main drug at that time in the late 1970's. He saw a great opportunity to actually invest. He was the first to really begin to use small planes to traffic and smuggle cocaine into the United States. He became famous and a pioneer because he saw the opportunities at least from a capitalist perspective – what this would bring for what would became the Medellin Cartel.

He became after the Bolivian chapter the clear cocaine monopolist from the 1980s and so on. I think it had to do with his experience in the marijuana trade which allowed it to happen. He also made contacts with the very Bolivians who were providing him with the supply of coca. It was his far-sightedness to take full advantage of the situation.

LS: Despite the US claims that it is engaged in a war against drugs in Colombia, it is in fact engaged in an anti-insurgency war against the left-wing FARC guerillas, is this correct?

OV: This is correct. What is known as "Plan Colombia" was a program first devised by president Bill Clinton, and, as I explained, from the Cold War onwards we had that growing drug problem in Colombia. What Clinton saw as the solution to deal with the insurgency was to say: Let's give it a drug package. What "Plan Colombia" did though was under the mask of the war on drugs it actually made it into a military package itself. Most of the money had military operations and training in focus. So what this did since the late 1990s is in fact make it a war against the FARC guerrillas.

You have to take into account that the FARC have been there long before the cocaine trade appeared in the 1980s or the cocaine decade when it became big time. And so by focusing on the FARC, they can also be blamed for the drug trade. The New York Times is good at that, they see them seen as narco-terrorists. So the Colombian state can say: Well, we are fighting a war on drugs and terror, and the United States can also say: Well, they are our key partners in the Western hemisphere in this war. And they can also gear themselves to deal with the broader politics in the region, to deal with Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and other nations which are fast becoming much more independent and left-leaning.

So it brings in a whole lot of other politics into question, but by fighting the FARC as the main threat to the Colombian state it deals with it in a very military way. They are a threat indeed, because they are not simply as they are called narco-terrorists, they are a group that has been indigenous to the history of Colombia, which past presidencies have actually acknowledged. But since September 11, 2001, there has been this increasing radicalization by the ruling class in Colombia to see no other alternative but finally to destroy the FARC once and for all.

LS: Which has come, sadly enough, as a high price to the Colombian population in general.

OV: Yes, we are looking at horrific statistics that go way beyond the state crimes of the 20th century in Latin America. Up until now it was Central America, Guatemala who held the record of victims from state-terror – 200,000. Second came Argentina with 30,000. Colombia has experienced 250,000 victims of state-terrorism in the past two presidencies alone, so since 2002 onwards. So this is quite horrific. Also the effects on trade unions are quite horrific. More trade unionists are killed in Colombia than in the whole world combined. It has the lowest rate of unionization in the whole continent. It has actually come to the point where there are not many more unionists to murder.

Yet, this is not an issue, this is not a problem, and much of the world does not know much about this. It is quite ironic if we look at the war on terror in the Middle East, where we are hearing a lot of news about the Assad regime in Syria, the "rebels" there, and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya was also terrible so we had to go in there and support the "rebels" – yet, we got the world's oldest rebel organization, more than half-a-century old, which has popular support among the poorest in Colombian society, and that is why they are able to continue the fight, and it's not drugs or terrorism, no.


Where is the support for the rebels in Colombia? Where is the debate about Colombian democracy? So the FARC become the target of the counter-insurgency-"counter-terror" war which both Washington and Bogota see as their number one priority there.

LS: Throughout the implementation of "Plan Colombia", the private military companies (PMCs) which waged the "war on drugs" also made huge amounts of money. Is the "war on drugs" a business model for them, and has the "war on drugs" thus to continue as long as possible in order to perpetuate the profits that can be gained from it?

OV: It is very much a business model. I like that terminology because the Fortune 500 too are involved. Why is it a business model? We know that the narco-bourgeoisie manages the affairs of the drug trade at the colonial center, if we are going back to that narco-colonialism concept that I have used before, but who handles the rest of the operations for the empire, or from a US state perspective? Who else has the technology? Who is involved in executing the so called war on drugs?



These are essentially private-military companies, at least since "Plan Colombia" and with a history. That would be DynCorp and other key private-military companies like MPRI that had been involved, for example, in the aerial spraying of the coca crops in Colombia and military training. We know that rather than actually doing something about drug operations, what happened was that the very same firms were merely strengthening those involved in drug smuggling operations, and this is an ongoing problem which we have seen in this war on drugs, as I have documented in my studies.

This also means that these private companies are also involved in that financial arrangement that Catherine Austin Fitts suggested earlier on regarding the financial center. So the financial center is not just the financial system, but the main corporations and banks that are heavily involved in doing this. So by having these same private-military companies engaged in the war on drugs, they then can also invest their profits in the imperial center and play a role in managing the drug trade for the US imperial state.

LS: From A to Z, so to speak.

OV: Yes. You have a collaboration happening between the narco-bourgeoisie in Colombia and the imperial center by using private-military companies which have been involved in much of that history. If we go back to the history of what we do know about the Iran-Contra scandal, for instance, we see that many of these companies were sold off after they were used as contractors by the CIA, they were privatized by the very same companies that had been involved in "Plan Colombia" since the late 1990's.

These are the same people and same companies that were actually involved in past criminal operations. I don't see that simply as a coincidence. I see it as a continuity in how this is actually taking place.

LS: So I guess the real question is if the inter-linked "war on terror" / "war on drugs" is actually an effective way to keep competition small and under control?

OV: Yes, it's about control, it's about what Peter Dale Scott would describe as "managing market share". It is really the imperial state through its agencies, but also by taking care of the financial center and also the operations through the PMCs they are deciding who gets the market share.

In the 1980s we saw a process where the Medellin cartel pretty much had unregulated control for their operations, but then we also saw the liquidation of Pablo Escobar and the handing over to the Cali Cartel, who also withered away for the Colombian state. Now we have an ongoing issue with Mexico replacing Colombian cartels as distributors with the same kind of episodes, and we hear analysts and officials basically saying again, yes, it's the imperial state that is involved in all of this. It is about control, and more specifically, it's the control of market share, which I think is essential to understand.

LS: Usually, where there are important commodities like oil and/or drugs in large quantities, the US intelligence services and the US military are never far away. Therefore, is oil another reason to link "the war on terror" and "the war on drugs" in Colombia?

OV: Well, if there ever is any commodity like oil that is of financial value definitely any imperial power will take advantage. This is a long history in itself. What I find interesting is that drugs are never considered. But if there are wars fought over oil and other commodities, why not drugs? In fact, if you re-examine the history of the global drug trade, what is happening in Colombia is pretty much the same kind of wars for commodities that have been fought since the dawn of time. Essentially, it is a fact that this is where the intelligence services go out and do the kind of cornerstone work in service of the commodity; in this case, I have to say, it is drugs.

LS: Why is the drug situation in Colombia by and large out of the news compared to the 1980s?

OV: Well, I think it's the case because now Mexico is seen as the problem. In a way it serves as a distraction, and drugs are no longer seen as a state security problem in Colombia. It has been officially a success. You look at any report by the United States or even the United Nations on the Colombian situation, they say it has been a success; since 2008, they say, there was an 18% decline in drug production. But what it doesn't say is that there hasn't been a decline in drug use or drug distribution. Where are all the drugs coming from then? In fact, it's the Mexicans doing the distribution for the Colombians now. So by distracting the focus and diverting the attention to Mexico, what it is doing is allowing a rerun of the same episode of the 1980s in Colombia, by ignoring Colombia and manufacturing unrealistic figures.

We will eventually see an arrangement, a compromise emerging in Mexico, and we will hear statements from the DEA and the White House saying how successful the war on drugs was, but we will also see the same kind of arrangements happening there with some cartels being taken over.

We will see the same key people in positions of power who are benefiting from the drug trade and who'll be the official selected drug lords. At the moment, we are seeing that struggle of market share that I have mentioned earlier, where the state, in particular in the imperial center, has a great hand in influencing and shaping the events.

And by ignoring Colombia, by normalizing Colombia, by saying it is a stable country and a formal democratic state, they can actually switch the attention on Mexico and also claim success that everything is going right. And by doing that they can also use Colombia as a model for Afghanistan and Central America, and we hear much discussion about this.

But again we will see the same kind of patterns emerge in which the same people will be involved, the same people will be benefiting, and the same people will be targeted, when people are resisting rather than maintaining that political economy.

LS: Related to the drug war raging in Mexico, what are your thoughts on the claim by a Mexican official that the CIA manages the drug trade? [7]

OV: It's the state, but in particular the armed bodies of the state, like the intelligence agencies, which as political entities are able to actually police these kinds of operations. How else can it be done? What is the history? What we know from researchers like Peter Dale Scott and Douglas Valentine is that this has been true since at least the 1970s in the Latin American context. [8]

And I would have to agree to some extent that it manages it, because it decides as a policy maker how and for whom the market share will actually be determined. Again, in Mexico this is what we see right now. How the events unfold will determine who will get that market share, who will be the monopolists, and who will be the official drug lords. It has nothing to do really with what we hear in the media.

LS: So the CIA is in the drug trade something like the middle-man for the financial sector?

OV: Yes, I think that analogy would be quite useful. As a middle-man, as a liaison and enforcer, and as also a communicator between these various criminal elements before the drug trade shapes itself into a form that is both beneficial and subservient to US imperialism.
 
This is a 20yr old article, but it has a lot of good information.. Read it or not!!!



Wall Street, CIA and the Global Drug TradeFormer Los Angeles policeman Mike Ruppert blows the whistle on Wall Street's role in laundering drug money for CIA enterprises, and warns that Colombia could be the centre of the next regional conflict.

From our web page at: www.nexusmagazine.com

An interview with Michael C. Ruppert
by Guerrilla News Network © 2000

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Please introduce yourself.

I'm Mike Ruppert, and I'm the publisher of From The Wilderness newsletter and an ex-LAPD narc and general troublemaker fighting corrupting and evil influence around the world.

When you created the newsletter, what were you responding to and what were your intentions?

Well, in March of '98, it was about four months after I confronted CIA Director John Deutch at Locke High School on world television--he had come to Los Angeles to talk about allegations about CIA dealing drugs. I stood up on CNN and ABC Nightline and I said: "I am a former LAPD narcotics detective. I worked South Central and I can tell you, Director Deutch, that the Agency has dealt drugs in this country for a long time." And the room exploded, and what I saw at that time was there was a crying lack of knowledge in the body politic about how much evidence there really was about the criminal activities of the Central Intelligence Agency, specifically about dealing drugs. I said: "Wait a minute; I can pull out a little newsletter and say, 'If you look at this document, here's the proof for that.'" Because a lot of people were running around with the vague notion that maybe the CIA were bad guys and had done some things wrong, and they didn't know how much actual proof there was. So that's been the mission: to present the real proof that's irrefutable about what goes on.

Let's talk about your experience on the beat and what you confronted as a citizen trying to do right in the streets--must be pretty wild as it is.

I haven't been a policeman now for a long time. I graduated from the LA Police Academy class of 11/73, hit the streets in January of '74 in South Central Los Angeles. It was a vastly different world then; there was no cocaine and we had six-shooters and straight batons and nobody had a radio that you carried around with you. But the world has changed enormously. I specialised in narcotics quickly, and heroin was the predominant drug on the street in my area; it was Mexican brown heroin in those days.

And what happened to me was that I met and fell in love with a woman who was a contract CIA agent, a career agent. Now, I come from a CIA family and they had tried to recruit me, so this was not unexpected to me, but I began to see that she was protecting drug shipments and that the Agency was actively involved in dealing drugs. This happened with her in Hawaii, Mexico, Texas and New Orleans, and I kept saying I'm a narc, that I'm not going to overlook drug shipments. That's what basically set me on the irreversible course of events that determined the rest of my life. That was 1977.

You imagine someone in the CIA as thinking about protecting the country, or at least imagine the intelligence community as something that's ordered around national security. What do you think it is that triggers them to want to reconcile drug shipments in the country in line with that pursuit?

Well, they don't even have to reconcile it. That's what took so long to figure out, but what we teach now with From The Wilderness is that it wasn't just CIA dealing some drugs to fund covert operations. It is that drug money is an inherent part of the American economy. It has always been so, as it was with the British in the 1600s when they introduced opium into China to fund the triangular trade with the British East India Company.

The point about the drug trade is not that the CIA dealt a few drugs during the Contra years to fund the covert operation that Congress didn't want it to engage in. The CIA has dealt drugs for all 50 years of its existence--50 plus years, even before it was the CIA. And the point is that with 250 billion dollars a year in illegal drug money moved, laundered through the American economy, that money benefits Wall Street. That's the point of having the prohibitive drug trade, which the CIA effectively manages for the benefit of Wall Street.

Just before the Contra war, the annual cocaine consumption in this country was about 50 metric tons a year; let's say back in 1979. By 1985, it was 600 metric tons a year. We are still consuming 550 metric tons of cocaine a year in this country, and the money that's generated from that is used...let's say some drug dealer in Colombia calls General Motors and buys a thousand Suburbans--GM doesn't ask where it came from. Philip Morris is now being sued by 28 departments (the same thing as states) in Colombia for smuggling two billion dollars worth of Marlboro cigarettes into Colombia and getting paid for it with cocaine money! That money boosts Philip Morris's stock value on Wall Street; General Electric the same way...it's documented in the US Department of Justice.

So the purpose of the Agency being involved in the drug trade has been to generate illegal cash, fluid liquid capital, which gives those who can get their hands on it an unfair advantage in the marketplace.

So when you hear the term "War on Drugs"...

Well, it's not a War on Drugs. It's a War on People. Consider this: Joseph McNamara, a former chief of San Jose from the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, published some really telling figures. In 1972, when Richard Nixon started the War on Drugs, the annual federal budget allocation was 110 million dollars a year for enforcement. In fiscal year 2000, 28 years later, the budget allocation was 17 billion dollars a year, and yet, in the year 2000, there are more drugs in this country, they are cheaper, and they are more potent than they were in 1972. That has to tell you that there's some other agenda going on here.

Going back to the idea of China and the Opium War, it is described also as a war on the people of China, to bring them to a state of passivity where they couldn't actually be a force. Do you see in some way the drugs that come in satisfying a racist goal--with the crack laws especially in black inner city populations?

There are a number of ways to look at that. For the British, the introduction of opium into China was a means to an end. China was a homogeneous culture. When the British arrived there, they were these Caucasian heathens. The Chinese didn't want anything to do with them; they didn't want to give up their tea, they didn't want to give up their silk, and the British said "We can't have this". They went to India and grew the opium poppy in east India, in the foothills of the Himalayas, and smuggled it to China. And what they did over the course of a hundred years was they converted China from a homogeneous culture that was unified, into a society of warlords fighting for turf to see who had which drug-dealing regions.

If you look at what happened in South Central LA in the 1980s, the model is exactly the same; it didn't change. When I talk about narcotics, I come from several different angles. It's not just that I am a former narcotics investigator with the LAPD; I am also a recovering alcoholic who has sponsored men in recovery for 17 years. I've served on the board of directors of the National Council on Alcoholism. Alcohol is a drug. I have written more than 35 articles in the US Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence on treatment of addiction, recovery from addiction. The issue with drugs is this: people are going to get addicted no matter what you do, and a certain percentage of any population will always get addicted.

What the Agency has done (and I have written specifically on this; it's on my website), through institutions like the Rand Corporation and UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute and a number of academic projects which the CIA has funded, is they have deliberately engaged in pharmacological research to find out which drugs are most addictive. For example, in 1978-79, long before the cocaine epidemic hit here in the United States, research scientists from UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute, some of whom, like Louis Jolly West, who were very closely tied to the MK-ULTRA program, were doing research in South America where South American natives were smoking basuco, which has the same effect as crack cocaine. And the addiction was so strong that they were performing lobotomies and the people were still smoking the basuco or the paste in Colombia; and they knew that because NI and the Rand Corporation brought that data back.

So the CIA knew in 1980 exactly what the effects of crack were going to be when it hit the streets.

Who benefits most from an addicted inner-city population?

It's not just who benefits most; it's how many people can benefit on how many different ends of the spectrum.

We published a story in my newsletter From The Wilderness in May of 1998 that was written by Catherine Austin Fitts, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing [and Urban Development, HUD]. She produced a map in 1996, August of 1996--that's the same month that the Gary Webb story broke in the San Jose Mercury News. It was a map that showed the pattern of single family foreclosures or single family mortgages--HUD-backed mortgages--in South Central Los Angeles. But when you looked at the map all of these HUD foreclosures, they were right in the heart of the area where the crack cocaine epidemic had occurred. And what was revealed by looking at the HUD data was that, during the 1980s, thousands of middle-class African American wage-earning families with mortgages lost their homes. Why? There were drive-by shootings, the whole neighbourhood deteriorated, crack people moved in next door, your children got shot and went to jail and you had to move out. The house on which you owed $100,000 just got appraised at $40,000 because nobody wanted to buy it and you had to flee; you couldn't sell it, so you walked on it. And what Catherine's research showed was that someone else came along and bought thousands of homes for 10 to 20 cents in the dollar in the years right after the crack cocaine epidemic.

So the economic model is the same one that's always been in play for the ruling elite: use the poor people's money to steal their own land. You get the poor people to buy the drugs, using their money; you take that money to bring in more drugs, which destroys their property value, and then you steal it back. And the same thing has happened not only in Los Angeles; it has happened in Washington Heights in New York. As a matter of fact, it's been documented by a fabulous researcher, Professor John Metzger at the University of Michigan, who is one of my subscribers; he has a doctorate of urban planning. It was discussed in the Kerner Commission Report in 1967 after the Detroit riots, where it became US government policy that no more than a quarter of the population of any major inner city should be minority. "Spatial deconcentration" they call it, which really sounds Nazi to me, but it's in the Kerner Commission Report.

So the plan is literally to kill, loot...let me make it real simple...it's "Kill the Indians, take the land, take the wealth". So it is something of a misnomer or a misconception to believe that all of the cocaine or all of the crack cocaine was only used by African Americans. There was almost as much crack being used by whites as there was by African Americans, certainly in terms of total consumption.

Whites probably consumed more cocaine than African Americans, but they consumed powder. And what we saw was a deliberate effort by the Agency or Agency-related organisations to make sure that the large quantities of the cocaine, and the high-quality cocaine, got into the inner cities like Los Angeles. It was protected. And that's what I saw with the LAPD. I saw the hands-on working relationship, the interface between local police departments and the CIA.

I was first recruited when I was a senior at UCLA. The Agency flew me to Washington and said: "Mike, we want you to become a CIA case officer. You've already interned for LAPD for three years, you interned for the chief, your family was CIA, your mother was NSA. We want you to go back to the LAPD, and being an LAPD cop will just be your cover."

Now the Agency has done that; we've documented it in New Orleans, in New York, in police departments all across the country. And I've seen the interface where the CIA will deal very quietly with local agencies to protect their drug operations. That's one of the reasons they have to do it; it weeds out competition.

Now the people who go on from CIA training and become police officer covers, are they not inherently crooked? Is it for money or do they actually believe there's a benefit here?

Well, we were talking earlier before about Lenny Horowitz and his great book, Emerging Viruses. He has a quote in the front of that book that's one of my favourite quotes of all time; it's from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. And Solzhenitsyn says that men, in order to do evil, must first believe that what they are doing is good, otherwise they can't do it.

Now, not everybody in a local police department who connects with the CIA is a case officer. The Agency will use contractors. They'll approach guys who have military specialties and they'll hire them on the side. There are some like LAPD Chief Daryl Gates, who I believe was a case officer his whole life--and we can go there later if you want to. Others are just contract employees, but they brainwash themselves. And it's easy to believe--it's one of the worst human vices of all--that if you're making all this money and you have power, then you're doing it for a good cause. So there's an aspect of delusion about it, but it is one that becomes extremely vicious when you try to bring it out of denial.

The guy who goes and buys the house at the cheap rate, how is he really connected to the CIA who are bringing in drugs from Nicaragua? Some people would say that's a simplified version of a conspiracy theory. How would you respond to those people?

This is all documentable, this is provable, this is not speculation. We can trace this money very quickly; it's very easy to do. That's one of the reasons we've been so dangerous at From The Wilderness, because this is not speculation. Did the guy who was operating the roundhouse that turned around the train that was rolling to Auschwitz know what was going on in the shower room? I'm not making that argument, but it was all part of the system that produced the same net result. And what you find repeatedly--one of the things that we'll be seeing more of, I think, in From The Wilderness and certainly I've seen excellent research on this--is that one of the biggest investors in HUD multi-family units and HUD mortgages is Harvard University. It is a huge corporation that has a long list of ties to organised crime. Well, you take major firms like Harvard or related investment firms that also turn out to be huge campaign contributors, and they find out that there are 200 houses on the market for 20 cents in the dollar and they don't ask how it got that way; they just follow the money.

I was at the Shadow Convention where I interviewed a number of very famous people--Jesse Jackson, John Conyers, Maxine Waters, Arianna Huffington, Scott Harshbarger of Common Cause, a great many very important American people. I talked to them about the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in July of 2000 confirming that there was evidence that CIA was ordering drug dealing by a Contra leader, Reynato Peña. And it was funny, because I got all these political answers.

But one guy I talked to was a guy named Rex Nutting, who was the bureau chief of CBS Market Watch--he is the head guy for CBS for the stock market. And we're sitting back in the room--I'm waiting for Huffington to get free--and I'm talking to this guy about the fact that Richard Grasso, the Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, last July went to Colombia and cold-called on the FARC guerrillas and asked them to invest their drug money in Wall Street. And Rex Nutting says: "Well, of course they always go where the money is. It's obvious."

The drug money is always going through Wall Street. Wall Street smells money and doesn't care where the money comes from; they'll go for the drug money.

And we jokingly laughed that the National Security Act that created the CIA in '47 was written by a guy called Clark Clifford, who was a Wall Street banker and lawyer. He's the guy that brought us BCCI. The job of writing the outline for CIA, the design for the Agency, was given to Clark Clifford by John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles--both law partners in the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. In '69 after Nixon came in, the Chairman of SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] was William Casey--the same guy who was Ronald Reagan's Director of Central Intelligence. And the current Vice President in charge of enforcement for the New York Stock Exchange, Dave Dougherty, is a retired CIA General Counsel. The CIA is Wall Street, and vice versa. When you understand that, and that money is the primary objective, everything else just falls into place.

What is the character of our governing body that's taken on this apparatus? What times do we live in?

Well, this is the Roman Empire. This is the Roman Empire before the fall. There is no question. I have written extensively in From The Wilderness and we've been right...we talk about a thing called a map. Have you ever had the experience where you're reading a map--you're trying to go to a party or some place you've never been before--and you follow this map and you read it, and you see that according to the map you're supposed to be at 34th and Main, and you look up at the street sign and it says 34th and Main? You feel good.

But if you look up at the street sign and it says Fifth and Broadway, you get this real sinking feeling inside. Everybody, most of the world, is operating from a bad map. From The Wilderness has a good map because we've been able to predict what's going to happen; we can explain it and make sense out of it.

The map that we're following--and this is where I agree wholeheartedly with Le Monde in Paris, a fabulous publication that's about to give us a pretty decent endorsement in September [2000], this month--is that organised crime is probably the lubricating force for the entire world economy right now. There's a trillion dollars a year in organised crime money. That trillion dollars a year is liquid, and if you think of money--criminal money, drug money--as water, which is thin, it can flow very quickly from point A to point B. And in the world markets, where you apply money is where you control business. You control markets. You control banks. You control interest rates. Drug money flows fastest. Money that is not criminal money has to go through regulations and banking systems. It has to go through taxations. It's tracked. The lawyers follow it. That money moves like molasses.

So those who have access to the cheapest capital always win. That's why if you don't play with drug money in the world economy today, you can't play at all. That's why, as we have documented, drug money was going directly into Al Gore's presidential campaign. Why? Because the Republicans, going as far back as Reagan, were using drug money, and that's how they put Reagan into office--with Bill Casey. If you don't play in that mode, you can't play at all. But the analogy I use is that it's like a snake eating its own tail: it's got to stop sooner or later.

We were faced with a huge economic lapse in 1997 when the Asian economies collapsed and the whole world held its breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop in the American markets. Well, it didn't drop. But you know why it didn't drop? Because we went to war in Kosovo. We blew up several hundred billion dollars worth of bridges, refineries and factories. The KLA controls 77 per cent of the heroin that's entering into Western Europe. We loosened up that money. American companies got all these new contracts to rebuild the refineries, the bridges, and the economy was saved.

Now we're going to war in Colombia--we have already taken combat casualties--but it's not sustainable because Colombia is and will become another Vietnam. And South America is already saying "We're not going there".

So I think we're on the brink of some really serious economic upheavals in the US economy that are essential, because the system cannot last. The way I see it, this is this very much like Rome. And I see some big changes coming very soon.

Obviously you deploy information in the desire that people might become conscious of it and make a change. What do you think when the average American says, "Why is this not in the major media and, if it's true, then it's gotta stop"? What do you say?

As far as the major media go, it's real simple. First of all, if you look at what just happened with AOL and Time Warner who own CNN. We have proven in From The Wilderness that CNN flat lost a lawsuit over the use of sarin gas during Vietnam. The Tailwind suits were settled and the former producer, April Oliver, just bought a six-bedroom house. I mean, CNN cannot afford to tell the truth, because what happened when they tried to tell the truth is that Henry Kissinger and Colin Powell picked up the phone and scared Ted Turner to death by threatening his stock value on Wall Street.

It's very interesting to note that one of the companies I track as far as laundering drug monies go--General Electric--happens to own NBC. Now, everybody knows that GE brings good things to life; they make DVDs, VCRs, television sets, telephones. When drug money in South America says they'd like to buy 100 million dollars worth of TVs and DVDs so that someone laundering drug money in Colombia can open a chain of appliance stores and make that money legal, GE asks absolutely no questions about where that money is coming from. As a matter of fact, there are no requirements for Wall Street to report drug money being invested.

If you and I go to a bank and we take in $10,001 in cash, the bank has to fill out a currency transaction report because you might be laundering money. GE can accept a check for 100 million dollars from the biggest drug lord in the world, and there is no requirement in the world that GE report that to anybody. But with a thing called the "price-to-earnings ratio" on their shares, a hundred million dollars in net profit for GE in South America--which was very easily done last year--equates to, at a price-to-earnings ratio of thirty to one, an increase in GE's stock value of three billion dollars.

So we're living in a hugely inflated bubble, and not one of the major media outlets in this country--all of which are publicly traded corporations afraid of takeover, trying to maximise profits--can afford to tell the truth. That's why we see these great opportunities for little organisations like From The Wilderness, and you guys, and everybody else that's coming up now--because what we're peddling is the truth, and what we find is that the truth sells!

Very well said. So now the second part of the question is this: what do you think the reaction of the American people will be when a critical mass of people actually digests this information in a rational way?

Denial is not a river in Egypt! There's gonna be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth. There are several ways that I describe this. America is hopelessly addicted to its consumerism and blinded by the fact that the good things that we enjoy in our lives are at the price of slave labour in Indonesia, East Timor and all over the world. But we're blind to that--the same way that a drunk on a barstool is blind to the fact that he's drunk. Alcoholics don't stop because they don't know when to stop, they don't know how. One is too many and ten thousand not enough.

There are two models that I use to describe what happens in the American culture. One of them is we're like a family in which the father is molesting the youngest daughter, and everybody in the family conspires in a conspiracy of silence to scapegoat the youngest daughter because they're afraid of what's going to happen to the family if they speak out or, worse yet, they think "Oh my God, he's going to come after me". America very much works that way.

But the other way that I look at it is that we have to hit a bottom. Something is going to have to break. Something's gonna have to fall out--something's gonna have to destabilise the equilibrium here before people will even begin to look at what's going on. Yes, we've made some enormous progress over the last five years because there's a real hunger for good information, but as far as reaching the vast majority of the American people goes, something's gonna have to knock 'em off their barstool!

Cool. How would you characterise our "democracy", the two-party system? Is there any truth to the fact that we elect our officials?

No. It's a joke. There are two ends of the same party. There are two factions. There's what I like to call a Clinton faction--even though he is leaving office--and a Bush faction. But they are like the Genoveses and the Gambinos. If I am going to be the shopkeeper who is going to be oppressed, it doesn't make any difference to me whether there's a Gambino or a Genovese sticking a gun in my face and taking the money out of my pocket. We rationalise this by saying, "Well, they keep the economy good, etc., etc." That's the blind spot.

But no one in the American political system is allowed to rise to the level where they can seriously compete for the White House unless they are already compromised. Period. I know; I've been there. I was the press spokesman for the Perot presidential campaign in Los Angeles County in 1992. I had known Ross Perot before--we had spoken on issues of the POWs, the CIA and drugs--and what I found out is that I have yet to meet a millionaire who has my best interests at heart. And what I saw done was Ross had no intention of winning; it was all fixed even as far back as '92. I don't think we've had a fair election in this country since John Kennedy, even if that was fair, so...

Can you explain some of the political adventures or misadventures that brought the CIA to the public eye around drug dealing?

Well, if you go back historically, the Agency has been real active in Central America since the Second World War. I mean, the Agency was down there, even before it was CIA, with United Fruit and all the major landowners in Central America. In 1979, Anastasio Samosa, the dictator of Nicaragua, was overthrown by the Sandino movement--the Sandinistas. They were a "Marxist" movement, and Ronald Reagan mobilised the country to stave off this alleged threat of communist imperialism on America's doorstep. It was a whole lot of rubric and Congress didn't really want to get involved in it deeply. Congress passed some amendments to the Military Appropriations Act. They were known as the Boland Amendments, and were passed first I think in 1981 and again in 1984; they were Boland 1 and 2, which limited direct military aid to the Contras, the people fighting the Sandinistas.

And so the CIA and Ronald Reagan and Bill Casey and George Bush (Vice President George Bush) were running the whole operation; we know that now. They circumvented the will of Congress and there was this explosion of drug trafficking all throughout Central America, coordinated by the CIA. And we now have the CIA's own documents, and I can show you one later. It's the CIA's Volume 2 of their own Inspector-General's Report from 1998 where, in its own words, the Agency admits that of the 58 known Contra groups, 58 were involved with drugs. And that the Agency dealt with them; it protected six traffickers, kept them out of jail. One guy moving four tons of cocaine a month was using a bank account opened by White House staffer Oliver North. Other CIA assets were caught moving 200 kilos at a time--200 kilos is not personal use--and he was saying, "Well, I can't tell you what I'm doing because I'm doing it for the National Security Council"--that's the White House organ that oversees the Central Intelligence Agency. So we saw this huge explosion.

The point I make in my lectures is that in the mid- to late '70s, we in America--those of us who are old enough to remember--dealt with cartels but we didn't deal with drug cartels, we dealt with oil cartels. We had an oil crisis and it almost crippled the American economy. We had been subsidised by very cheap oil that we acquired by, in a sense, exploiting other countries. Well, then we had cartels of cocaine and we went from 40 to 50 metric tons a year to 600 metric tons a year. And that money was moved through Wall Street and became, in effect, the capital that replaced oil in the US economy.

How do you characterise the true governance in the world, and is this national or international?

Well, I think some of this is really traceable. Some people talk about something called the Illuminati. I've never met any Illuminati. When people start to talk to me about the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderbergers--those are all readily identifiable groups of people who are the wealthiest of the wealthy in the world. And we find the Rothschilds and there are groups of wealth in the world that are so powerful that political movements don't ever touch them. And yes, they are in effect a guiding unseen hand. I have yet to see one individual person--I don't think there's a Mr Big somewhere, like in the Wizard of Oz, pulling levers--that's responsible for all the evil. I've never yet found one person who, if they were killed, would take away all the evil.

I want to talk about Clinton for a bit because it's incredible that most people don't even understand Mena. Is he not the ultimate millennial politician, and can you just tell us a little about who he really is?

Bill Clinton... Well, first of all, he was up to his eyeballs in CIA cocaine in Mena, Arkansas. Again, it's provable; the Wall Street Journal covered it. The New York Times covered the aspects of that. Gary Webb in his fabulous book, Dark Alliance, produced documents showing that CIA contracts at the Mena airport were negotiated by the Rose Law Firm--Hillary's law firm. There is no question that Bill came up in that milieu. My democratic drug money piece also covered this, showing that the CIA has been under Clinton control, funnelling money into the Democratic Party.

Bill Clinton is a guy who came up with this driving ambition to become President. He would do anything to be President. And he did do anything to become President. He is a lean, mean, vicious, ruthless streetfighter. Yes, he came from humble beginnings; his mother was a nurse, there was drinking in the background, his father died in a car crash. Some people have speculated that his real father might be Winthrop Rockefeller--who knows? But he is not a guy who came up in the fourth-generation in-bred George W. Bush style, you know, who has never had to fight a fair fight in his life. And my personal belief is that one on one, or politically even, the Clinton faction would kick the Bush faction every time--except the Bush faction just has lots more money!

Clinton played the games he had to play. I firmly believe that Bill Clinton was connected to the CIA as far back as when he was at Oxford. I believe his trip to Moscow was not to protest the war. I believe it was to spy on Americans. He was making his bones. And I've documented this very completely, about how Bill Clinton blackmailed his way out of the impeachment with the proof in the CIA investigations that Reagan and Bush had been dealing cocaine and ordering it, that Bush was involved in it first-hand; and that's where we got it--volume two of the report.

The big side-story of this is that the Gary Webb story was broken in August '96. We were promised all these investigations. [Democrat Congresswoman] Maxine Waters jumped in and was running all around the country screaming about CIA and cocaine. In March of 1998, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, did a walking tour of South Central and Maxine received a 300-million-dollar empowerment grant. Then, in May, Maxine Waters received a "smoking gun" letter from Reagan Attorney-General William French Smith to Bill Casey, where it said the CIA no longer has to report drug trafficking by its agents! It's in writing!

Then, in October of '98, CIA Inspector-General Frederick Hitz released a report...well, actually, he didn't release it; he had finished a report as far back as May or June of '98 and it was classified as Top Secret; and it was left to the CIA Director George Tenet to declassify it for public consumption. Well, George Tenet works for Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton appoints the head of the CIA. Head of the CIA takes Clinton's orders. That report--that CIA report that absolutely destroys George Bush--is a public document; you can access it off my website copvcia.com, and I have these extracts that I sell. It was released to the public on October 8, 1998, one hour after Henry Hyde's committee on the judiciary voted to start the impeachment of Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton picked up the phone and said: "They're gonna impeach me? George Tenet, CIA, release the report that sinks George Bush; we'll see how far they want to go." Click. Maxine Waters stops screaming about CIA and drugs, and she starts supporting Bill Clinton.

Now the interesting thing that my investigations have revealed is that one of the people who helped negotiate the smoking-gun memorandum was a guy on the Attorney-General's staff named Ken Starr. That's the guy who was prosecuting Clinton! Clinton was blackmailing the Republicans. Both sides played the same game, and Clinton basically says: "You wanna take me down? I'll bring the whole government down!"

I had six hits on my website on February 11, 1999, when the Senate was doing the trial of Bill Clinton. They were reading my stories on the impeachment, and that's when the whole story caved in.

What would you say to young people now? Do we have to be guerrillas? Once we get what you're saying, what should we do?

Follow the money. Understand how money works. If you have a sense in some part of your body, some part of your soul, that something's not right, you're probably right. Something isn't right. I grew up in the '50s and '60s and, you know, one of the things was to question authority. Question authority. Do not accept the mind control that's being fed to you; just don't do it!

With Colombia, explain how that war is being constructed and how it is being played out in the press?

Let's work on the structure of the war in Colombia first. I think that's far more important to understand why Colombia is like Vietnam. There are so many similarities between Colombia and Vietnam. First of all, Colombia will be a regional conflict like Vietnam was. The Vietnam War was not just Vietnam; it was North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Guam, China, the whole surrounding region. And the Colombian conflict will be Colombia, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Panama, maybe even Mexico, Puerto Rico certainly. We've admitted that we are going to stage for invasion or for intervention in Puerto Rico when we go in. Marines are now training and they've been landing on Colombian beaches. You haven't been hearing that.

One of the reasons why Colombia is like Vietnam is because we already have about 300 Special Forces Green Beret advisers on the ground, training Colombian troops, but we have maybe 500 to 1,000 former--and I use that term real loosely--CIA Special Forces personnel who have supposedly retired from the military and are now working for two corporations: Dyncorp and MPRI. And they're in Colombia as "civilian advisers" but they're going out on combat missions. They're flying airplanes, they're shooting, they're being shot. We've had Army personnel shot down already. About a year ago we had an Army plane shot down by a SAM [surface-to-air missile].

We have major investment corporations like Nicholas Brady's Darby Investments. Nicholas Brady was George Bush's Secretary of the Treasury. He has just opened a billion-dollar investment partnership with a group called Corfinsura, based in Medellín, Colombia, to build roads and dams. And it's like what we saw in Vietnam with major companies like Brown & Root going in to build Cam Ranh Bay, making billions of dollars in profit.

So we're going in to suck out. You see, for twenty or thirty years now, the drug money has been building up in Colombia. There's trillions of dollars in equity that's accumulated and it's become a threat to Wall Street's control, so we have to go down and blow the country up to take the money back to make sure it doesn't become powerful. Venezuela is not going along with this, like Cambodia would not go along with the Vietnam War and Laos wouldn't either. President Hugo Chavez is denying overflight to American planes, so we're gonna sabotage the Venezuelan economy! This is going to suck us into a hemispheric conflict just like Vietnam.

This is the difference. With Vietnam, we were told we were going in to fight the evil Communists. Well, we don't have any more Communist bogeymen. I mean, China is there but it's not really a military threat unless you're on the far right and totally needing lithium. But what we see is that we're being told that we're going to fight the evil drug lords. Well, the American Press even now is having trouble selling that to the American people. And even now, in the first or second week in September of 2000, we're starting to have body counts turn up in the news. It's just like Vietnam, but the Press is having a real hard time dealing with it. This is the sign of the end of the road for this system. It's starting to crumble right now.

But they are reporting this like Vietnam. And I will never forget the coverage from Vietnam exactly the way it played out, because these were my high school classmates that were dying. And it's sounding very similar right now.

Last question. What is the power of money? At the end of the day, drugs means money. Talk a bit about that and what it does to policemen, or to law and order?

Well, I think it's the whole system. Most rank-and-file policemen on the street are not what I would call innovative free-thinkers. They aren't the kind of guys who would see an opportunity to go illegal and just kind of do that on their own initiative. They have to see or sense that it's going on in a climate that allows them to get away with it. So we see the corruption working throughout society. When drug money is going directly into Wall Street--well, why not, you know, if you're a cop...
 
Six Things You Need To Know About America's Illegal Drug Trade: Who's Using What Where And At What Cost -- ConvergEx Study

An analysis of recent surveys and research studies places the size of the illegal U.S. drug market at $200 billion to $750 billion per year, with most estimates coming in between $400 billion and $500 billion. The analysis also found that the current decade has logged the heaviest drug use per person per year in U.S. history, each region has its favorites, there are regional favorites, and the most avid drug users are not teens.

Here are six other facts about the illegal U.S. drug trade, according to a report released Monday by market strategists at ConvergEx Group, a global brokerage company based in New York.

1. Prices are the same on the black market as they are at brick-and-mortar dispensaries. Pot users can expect to pay about as much at a dispensary as they will on the street for an ⅛ ounce of marijuana. Competition from the street keeps dispensary prices low because street dealers don’t have to pay taxes or building costs.

2. Illegal producers make a killing on markups. In the U.K., heroin sold in smaller quantities on the street can sell for 60 times its bulk price. Cocaine can sell for 18 times and marijuana for about 3.5 times their respective bulk prices.


complete with luxury cars, jewelry, high-end spirits and clothing.

4. Drugs generate profits for suppliers and costs for the state. The cost to the U.S. on account of the drug trade is enormous. About 330,000 of the U.S.’s 1.6 million prison inmates in 2012 were doing time for drug offenses, at an average annual cost of $25,000 per inmate -- a total of $8.2 billion.

5. Drugs raise health care costs by $11 billion annually. The cost rises to $193 billion when accounting for crime-related costs and lost productivity at work, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Prescription narcotics abusers who see multiple doctors cost insurers between $10,000 and $15,000 per user.

6. Legalization would positively impact the economy. Legalizing marijuana -- and potentially other illegal drugs -- would have a net positive effect on the economy by generating sales tax revenue for state and local governments and saving money on incarceration costs. The Cato Institute estimates that yearly tax receipts could amount to about $8.7 billion.
 
The Pentagon’s Biggest dirty secret

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City of London and narcotics trade
by Preston James
Over the years some who have retired from working inside the upper levels of Intel and Defense have claimed that the core controllers of the Pentagon are themselves under the control of a secret occult-linked drug trafficking group.

This group is also believed to run the Israeli-American Terror machine and the private central Banking Systems run out of the City of London.

This group controls most of the World’s political systems through private Fiat central banking while waging wars to extend power and generate massive profits not otherwise possible.

But there have also been claims that this powerful group of “World Money-changers” originally gained much of its foreign power from creating and maintaining a large international opium trafficking network or cartel hidden behind a City of London Proprietary Intel operation.

Some historians believe that this large Opium trafficking group operated through a proprietary Intel front known as the British East India Company.

Anyone who wants more information about the World’s largest opium Trafficking Cartel should get a hold of the well respected classic, Dope Inc. and read it. Many secrets are contained in this book which some claimed sent Henry Kissinger into a tizzy fit.

It is now generally recognized that the *RKM is an inter-generational family-based private international central Fiat banking group insiders refer to as the “World Money-changers”, or “the Baby” because it is at the nexus of the revived mystery Babylonian Talmudic Banking system, also known as the “money from nothing” Babylonian Money-magick system.

Once the Rothschild Family took over the City of London after Waterloo, their main goal adopted was to hijack and then revitalize the British Empire which was beginning to fail and shrink. But they intended to do so in a covert way so that each of the captive nations truly believed they were becoming independent.

The exceedingly crafty plan they developed was to set up a secret private central banking network to replace the visible British Colonial governments. But in order to do this they deemed it was necessary to gain secret control over most of the underworld crime groups in these colonies and use this criminal network to build up the strength of their secret empire.

The RKM leaders recognized that in order to this they would have to entice these underworld crime networks with a new extremely lucrative illegal business as partners with themselves. They were able to gain control over the criminal underworld using their new found Opium trade. Once they had gained control over these underworld crime groups with illegal drugs, they thinned them out and consolidated power by “getting rid of” those too independent or who wouldn’t follow their directives exactly to a “T”.

The RKM Opium Cartel was then able to use these underworld crime networks to distribute their newly developed illegal narcotics trade to more and more of the public and increase revenue and power substantially. The RKM soon realized that it could quite quickly use the opium trade for clandestine purposes to debase societies and easily access their resources. If this was insufficient to get complete control over a nation well then they would use false-flag terror to start wars and conflict whenever necessary to gain cheap access to the natural resources of these nations and further their own agenda of world domination.

The vehicle they chose was Turkish opium which one of their members had discovered. Smoking it had the ability to stop time, take away anxiety and severe physical pain, while producing euphoria and a complete “care not” attitude. But the best part was that it could quickly become addicting in many users, necessitating regular use. Opium trafficking thus could generate huge profits but could also serve as an extremely effective weapons of subversion, debasement of a nation, actually it could be used as a major covert weapon of war.
One of the battles in the first of two Opium Wars between England and China.
Opium was first tested as a weapon of subversion, profit-making and a covert weapon of war against China. The Chinese government quickly caught on to this and went to war twice to stop this which is now known as the Opium Wars. China lost due to a powerful British Naval Task force but a sort of checkmate was reached where Chinese Opium sales were limited.

England had been spending massive amounts of their gold and Silver in China importing large amounts of silk, and and wanted to get as much of it back as possible. This was one of their main motivations for trafficking opium to China.

Through this experience trafficking Opium in China much was learned and it was found that the best way to maximize such trafficking to nations unlike China which had governments which could be more easily corrupted.

And it was decided that in order to maximize profits government officials would have to be bribed to make Opiates illegal, while paying off the government agency heads and key police to look the other way, with periodic arrests of anyone attempting to compete independently. Sometimes when certain crime kingpins in their drug network became too powerful and started challenging the opium Cartel’s authority these folks would be busted and sacrificed to keep them from challenging the Cartel and also to fool the public that the government was really trying to stop illegal narcotics.

Opiates and even cocaine were legal in the USA before the Opium Cartel bribed officials to make it illegal, while simultaneously bringing their Cartel into major cities through the underworld crime groups they had co-opted. This same strategy was used to outlaw alcohol consumption in America during prohibition and like outlawing Opiates and other narcotics and the far less harmful drug marijuana, it failed miserably. Prohibition permitted the underworld to grow incredibly and provided a huge boost to the power of the RKM which was their secret master controller.

Americans got to the point where they just would no longer put up with prohibition of alcohol anymore and it was repealed. What many do not realize is that the same AmericanRKM anointed bloodline family supported prohibition through front groups like the Women’s Temperance League and also was behind the Women’s Suffrage Movement. Although Women’s Suffrage was a good idea but was done actually to bring more tax revenues into the USG and increase the profits of the RKM Banksters.

We now know for certain that the group that controls this international secret Opiate and Narcotics Trafficking Cartel that works through the Pentagon, the City of London and Israel and control the Israeli-American Terror Machine is an inter-generational “bloodline” group of families families who are actually the nexus of a small Worldwide death-cult based organization, best described as a Luciferian Death Cult.

There are many mysteries surrounding the small group of inter-generational families who run the *RKM World Control grid. Many wonder where they get their power, why are they obsessed with trafficking in illegal narcotics and especially opium as we know they did in the Vietnam War (via the CIA’s airline Air America) or as they are now using the US Army to protect and harvest the Opium crop in Afghanistan and fly it all over the World in remote controlled Global Hawks. Of course no of this could have been done without full Pentagon backing at the highest levels.

We know now for certain that the secret power control group which runs the *RKM is a small but powerful group of inter-generational drug trafficking familieswho historically started with opium and expanded to traffick in every other drug which they made sure was made illegal by the laws they manipulated and bribed politicians to pass. This group became powerful by being willing to use secret assassins, a wide range of covert murder technologies and large bribes coupled with serious threats to accomplish their goals. They became specializing in forming alliances with the underworld criminal groups in almost every nation of the World, and if no such groups wee present then they worked hard to create corruption to create underworld crime groups.

Sadly, this powerful incredibly powerful wealthy Opiate Cartel has expanded into other narcotics trafficking and even marijuana and many dangerous brain damaging drugs such as crystal meth or “bath salts”, but it has done this using Cutouts by setting up subordinate drug cartels in Mexico and South America, sometimes using alliances with the Fourth Reich. many now realize that the CIA was hijacked by the Bush Crime Cabal (aka BCC or Scherf Crime Cabal) after they ran the Assassination of JFK. The BC was set up and worked in unison with the RKM in America.

The opium Cartel loves to work through Cutouts to avoid visibility. This is their specialty. Then where things get unstable they get the Cutouts fighting and murdering each other or have Law Enforcement take them down.

And we now know about Yale University’s Skull and Bones which has its own private island and meet in the windowless building they call the Tomb at Yale and was built on the vast fortune of the Russel Trust, made by its extensive opium trafficking, especially to China.

We know that the Skull and Bones is an occult linked, Luciferian death Cult and part of the secret opium Cartel because one of their members gave all his secret papers and his special wooden clock to his daughter before he died. This material was secretly shared with Professor Antony Sutton who used the material to publish a book on this incredibly powerful Luciferian death cult.

We now know for certain that the Pentagon and the CIA bring over 95% of all illegal drugs into America through multiple sources. I have been told by good sources who know that the typical payoff made to the authorities totals 10% of the net take for the Cartel.

We also know for certain that the secret RKM Opium Cartel used the Pentagon and the CIA to traffick drugs out of Vietnam using Air America the former CIA Airline and also inside the abdominal body cavities of American Soldiers Killed in Action. Any Soldier who saw this going on and went to superiors was usually thanked and told there would be a complete secret investigation so don’t tell anyone else and then they would be quickly murdered in a mysterious jeep accident.

Colonel James Sabow was allegedly murdered by his next door neighbor for refusing to look the other way on this Pentagon Drug trafficking for the Opium Cartel. His brother, a respected physician and a true American hero like Colonel Sabow believes this and has never stopped his quest to get justice for Colonel Sabow.

Many thousands, probably millions have ended up murdered because of this powerful, wealthy RKM Opium Cartel that has infested Planet earth with incredible evil that is unimaginable to most normal human beings. Every place this Opium Cartel distributes its good, death, perversion and debasement of humanity seems to follow.

Retired honest DEA officials have told their friends and some associates that if the Pentagon and CIA stopped all Trafficking in illegal drugs the Wall Street Banks would collapse in less than a month because all their massive drug money laundering which is sadly their number one business would be cut off.

Heroin is now cheap all over the World. Why is this so? The reason is that the RKM Opium Cartel is using the Army to guard the opium crop in Afghanistan and remote control USAF Global Hawks to transport it all over the World and into the USA. This is the reason heroin is making a big comeback into American cities, with a vast easy to get supply at low prices making its spread and popularity a certainty.

How many working in the Pentagon know that it is controlled by this secret Opium Trafficking Cult run by inter-generational “bloodline” families? Actually most do not know this or that they are dupes locked into their roles by the snare of power, money, status and camaraderie. We do know however that their have been many Israeli-American “Israeli-first” Dual Citizens “tribal members” who have been propelled by the Opium Cartel into the highest Pentagon positions where they can serve as Traitors to America. These Traitors actually know and many are consciously working to undermine America out of a deep and secret Babylonian Talmudic hatred and drive for revenge against American Goyim and American society.

Insiders have claimed that the reason Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Moammar Khadafy’s Libya were destroyed is because they refused to submit to the RKM’s Opium Cartel. same for the Taliban in Afghanistan that the Pentagon attacked because they refused to allow Opium Production despite the fact the USG officials claimed they were the Opium Traffickers which we now know they were not and would never allow it.

Could this be one of the main reasons why Israel and the Pentagon have been so obsessed with destroying and Balkanizing Syria and Iran, in addition to the RKM’s age motive to inflict blood revenge against “Persia” for wiping out Khazaria in 1,000 AD because they wouldn’t stop their massive road warrior behavior?

Conclusion:

Is the Pentagon actually the biggest secret cutout for the Opium Cartel of the RKM and the one which does most of its dirty work? If so, this means that only a handful or less top Policy-makers of the RKM call all the shots and actually are in full scale but secret control of the Pentagon, its war-making machinery and its drug trafficking on behalf of the RKM’s Opium Cartel.

And it seems that whatever the Pentagon cannot do for the RKM’s Opium Cartel, the CIA will do, especially when it comes to end-user distribution chains and sub-cartels, as well as staging Gladio-style False-Flag attacks and MK-ultra mass-shooting, some real mixed with virtual only. But the CIA will also fight secret wars for the RKM’s Opium Cartel.

If you think the Pentagon exists to defend America as it claims, you are sadly mistaken. It is there only to further the agenda of the opium Cartel and serve as its big and powerful enforcer when it send its representatives to lay down its law with a “take the silver or get a bullet” choice for its demands.

The Pentagram design was chosen as the design plan for the Pentagon in order to access the “teaming power of Lucifer” for the Opium Cartel and the RKM because they are both occult Luciferian organizations run by the same several top Luciferians who just happen to be head of the Opium Cartel and serve as the RKM’s top policy-makers. How disgusting it truly is that this sinister truth has been kept from the American People by the RKM’s complete control over their Controlled Major Mass Media (CMMM) owned by six media moguls who answer to a large RKM linked investment house.

Some insiders have said that if the small number of kingpins and top Policy-makers that run this international Opium Cartel for the RKM were brought to final justice, the whole RKM system would collapse in short order.

Others have said that if the US Petro dollar was laid to waste by the rest of the World that is ow building major firewalls against it, the RKM would also collapse.

Others have said that if the US Federal reserve System was cancelled and all assets seized and clawed back and all American monetary production and distribution was transferred into the real US Treasury with real Constitutional money issued at no interest, the whole RKM system would collapse.

Others have said that if the the members of Congress who signed AIPAC Loyalty Oaths to place Israel first before the USA were indicted, arrested, and convicted for Treason and Sedition for taking that illegal Oath. that would end the RKM.

And now we have some Intel insiders that believe that the Russian Federations checkmate against the Israeli-American Terror machine in Syria is actually a complete checkmate against the Opium Cartel of the RKM and unless mitigated by the RKM through the Pentagon will become the RKM’s Waterloo.

In any event it seems as if the whole World is now ganging up on the RKM and their days of power are likely limited. When The RKM has already been exposed now to most of the World and fallen from grace except in America, but that is now beginning to change. As the RKM is isolated, exposed and collapses, the Opium Cartel, its crown jewel will become history.

As various states are now legalizing marijuana for medical reasons as well for recreational use, this is starting to seriously cut into the RKM’s Opium Cartel’s profits and the financial shares that go to top Pentagon and “Company” officials and certain elected politicians. it’s only a matter of time and marijuana will be legal in every state and treated like alcohol with dependency recognized as a medical disorder. This alone is going to seriously stress the opium Cartel and that is why the Pentagon attacked Afghanistan and is still there, because the Opium Cartel Kingpins knew this was coming and planned a way to compensate for these losses.

It is quite interesting that Putin’s Russian federation has worked hard to book out the RKM opium Cartel. Could this be one of the reasons he has checkmated the Israeli-American Terror Machine run through the Pentagon in Syria. Perhaps he sees this as a great opportunity to help protect his investments in his loyal Ally Syria and also to deal a major blow to the RKM’s Opium Cartel which is perhaps the core group of the World’s biggest death cult and most deadly parasite and asset-stripper upon the human race that has ever surfaced.

* RKM is an abbreviation to represent the Rothschild Khazarian Mafia, a term coined by VT Financial Editor Mike Harris whose VT radio show is on Tuesdays and Thursdays 7-9 PM CST. Mike Harris started using this descriptive term Rothschild Khazarian Mafia (RKM) after extensively researching the true but hidden history of the nation of Khazaria and its connection to Rothschild World Zionism now centered in the City of London. He also discovered the long held hatred that the RKM has harbored since 700 AD for the non-Khazarian Russians that is still a major motive for the RKM today in its quest to encircle and once again destroy Russia, once again steal all its assets like in 1917, and enslave the Russians that remain alive also just like when the Khazarians (aka the Bolsheviks) took over in 1917.

The RKM operates out of the City of London, a separate nation inside the UK which has its own police force and diplomats and pays no taxes to the UK government, like the Vatican, but has worldwide power through its private central banking system which uses FIAT money issued and placed in circulation (lent out for use at interest/pernicious usury).

The RKM has deeply infiltrated America and hijacked its manufacturing and distribution of money and most of its institutions of government, uses the US Military to fight its proxy wars for Israel and to earn massive profits. The RKM uses UK, Israeli and American Intel factions and especially the Pentagon to traffick in massive quantities of illegal narcotics to generate massive “off the books” money for black ops and payoffs to politicians and government officials they “own”.

And it has now been recently disclosed by former Representative Cynthia McKinney (a true stand up American Hero) that any newly elected member of Congress receives a visit from AIPAC and must sign a Loyalty Oath to place Israel’s security first even before America’s or they will be denied political funding and AIPAC will make a well funded effort to vote them out of office.

Obviously until Members of Congress stop taking and obeying these illegal, unConstitutional, treasonous and seditious oaths to Israel, the USA will remain little more than an Israeli/RKM provincial territory and servant. Former US Congressman Gus Savage went public with how AIPAC manipulates elections. Anyone who studies the actual situation with AIPAC and wealthy RKM moguls controls American elections will quickly learn how AIPAC and its operatives violate numerous election laws and actually function as a foreign based espionage front inside America.

This subject is terribly depressing. For those who have time and interest music can help neutralize the negativity of this subject that must be dealt with and finally is. For those who like the late and incredibly great Gary Moore, here is one of his best songs.

After seeing Gary Moore perform, Joe Bonamassa, the amazing guitar prodigy and the best Blues Guitarist and performer anywhere right now, remarked that watching Gary Moore perform was like a storm descending on your head. The influence of Gary Moore in Joe Bonamassa’s performances is sometimes notable, and it is known that Joe has had very high regard for Gary Moore’s musical ability.
 
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