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The CIA now reigns
supreme in the international narcotics trade arena. Inevitably, the
agency will further infect us with the drug plague; that's simply the
way it does business.
The FBI is all
but out of the narcotics game, gutted in the May-June battle over who
was to blame for September 11. Somebody had to pay for the Bush administration's
falling poll numbers, as the facts surrounding the World Trade Center
and Pentagon attacks finally began to assemble themselves under full
public gaze.
All Americans -
Black Americans, especially - should be terrified at the CIA's bureaucratic
victory. In the course of more than half a century, the agency's European,
Asian and Latin American adventures have led directly to the establishment
and continual expansion of the global drug trafficking network. We have
now reached the point at which U.S. resistance to the drug trade comes
to a full stop.
With the CIA in
charge, the War on Drugs is over.
The effective surrender
came in late May, when FBI Director Robert Mueller announced that 400
drug agents would be "redirected" to the all-encompassing
War on Terror. In addition, the CIA would play a larger role in the
FBI's own "intelligence analysis" functions, thus penetrating
the J. Edgar Hoover Building, itself. The spook agency's victory was
complete.
The FBI's role
on the domestic side of the drug trade - that is, what happens to narcotics
once they have penetrated U.S. borders - has been seriously curtailed.
FBI drug task force manpower is to be reduced by up to two-thirds.
Much more critically,
only the CIA will have the resources to track the global drug highways.
The Drug Enforcement Administration is puny by comparison, and counts
for nothing in President Bush's bogus War on Terror. The DEA has always
gotten stomped in turf conflicts with the CIA.
Under this new
regime, the world is the CIA's oyster, and the drug lords are its friends.
The agency's deepening and multiplying alliances in Latin America and
Asia insure that cocaine and heroin will flood the United States in
unprecedented quantities.
There is, literally,
no one with the will or resources to stem the worldwide flow of drugs
into our cities and towns. In a real sense, Bush's war has succeeded
in defeating the American people.
The criminals
are in charge
In the April 5
issue of Black Commentator, we described the CIA as the virtual architect
of the international drug trade. (See Make
This Amendment) This air, land and sea highway was established through
successive American Cold War deals with criminals, beginning with the
Italian and French mobsters who proved so helpful in undermining strong
socialist and communist European movements after World War Two. The
gangsters were rewarded with impunity in setting up their new drug networks,
including the famed French Connection. The CIA was born into a world
of narco-dealing intrigue, in which the agency became a central player.
Dope gained a strong foothold in the ghettos of the U.S. The CIA made
it possible.
The Vietnam War
saw the CIA evolve into the international arbiter of the heroin
trade. Its Laotian, Thai and Burmese allies were nothing more than heroin
traffickers with guns. The CIA's vast logistical resources were placed
at the disposal of the drug armies, while client governments facilitated
passage of massive shipments through their ports. Over the space of
only a few years and under the agency's guidance, the Asian heroin trade
increased tenfold! That's how the CIA's armies got paid.
The same formula
was later applied in Afghanistan. By now, most Americans are aware that
the $2 - $3 billion the U.S. provided to anti-Soviet fighters - almost
entirely administered by the CIA - eventually gave us the Taliban and
Osama bin Laden. However, the devastation wrought in American cities
was immediate. The CIA's Afghan and Pakistani friends, operating with
total impunity, took only two years to capture 60% of the U.S. heroin
market, from 1979 to 1981.
CIA Afghan chief
Charles Cogan dismissed the domestic narcotics disaster. "I don't
think that we need to apologize for this," Cogan told the press,
in 1995. "Every situation has its fallout."
Back in Afghanistan
with a vengeance, the Bush administration is following the lead of the
very same CIA agents that brought high quality, cheap heroin to American
streets in the early 1980s. Some of these agents are getting old, but
the post-September 11 call to arms put them back in business, as reported
by USA Today on June 17:
The agency pulled
hundreds of retired officers back to active duty, especially those
who had worked in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion there in 1979….
The CIA officers
brought with them language proficiency, interrogation skills and Afghanistan
expertise that the commandos could not match. They also had clearance
to do some things the soldiers could not: hand out large satchels
of cash and call in weapons drops to buy information and allegiances
from Afghan fighters.
Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld cannot contain his euphoria at the scope and speed of
America's deployment of "advisors" everywhere he can find
a landing field - most of them either CIA or under agency supervision.
(Special Forces troops often operate under direct agency control.) "That
is why we're cooperating with Pakistan, that's why we're training people
in Yemen and in Georgia and in the Philippines, for them to be able
to do a better job of going after them - the terrorists," Rumsfeld
told the New York Times, June 17.
Nothing has changed
in the past two decades, except the designated enemy. Soviets or "terrorists,"
it's all the same to Rumsfeld, the man with the corporate executive
smile, and Bush, the guy with the crooked one. We refer the reader to
the April 5 issue of The Black Commentator:
We must now expect
a narcotics onslaught from multiple points around the globe, simultaneously.
In the guise of a war on terrorism - which means whatever George Bush
wants it to mean - and at breakneck speed, the U.S. is setting up
shop in several former Soviet Central Asian republics, as well as
the former Soviet Georgia, in the Caucasus. The official excuse is
anti-terror, the real reason is oil and natural gas, but the end result
will be tons of poppy derivatives bound for the United States: the
"fallout."
Indonesia, Yemen and the Philippines are also great places for cultivating
drug enterprises to pay off foreign collaborators in the world war
on "terror." U.S. intelligence agencies are there, in force,
looking for recruits in dark places. We have an idea how they will
be compensated. The same actors that brought us the previous drug
epidemics are in charge of these far-flung outposts, employing identical
modus operandi, infecting yet more regions of the world with their
fatal touch.
Standing
truth on its head
Certainly, little
has changed in Colombia in the two decades since Reagan and his war-dog,
Oliver North, tapped and vastly enhanced the CIA's cocaine connections
to fund the murderous war against Nicaragua. The U.S. crack cocaine
epidemic erupted at precisely this time, the early to mid-1980s.
The Colombian government
remains soaked in cocaine money - the archetypal narco-regime - while
the guerillas of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC, in
the Spanish acronym) are limited to taxing the raw coca crops of the
peasants in FARC territories.
Yet, the U.S. corporate
media relentlessly repeat as fact Bush's bald lie, that FARC guerillas
control the drug trade. This is nonsense. The guerillas dominate remote
areas in about a quarter of the country - taxing peasants is about all
they can handle. The real international drug trade, which refines, packages,
markets and ships the final coca product, is run from offices like any
other multi-billion dollar export business, not from jungle hideouts.
Cocaine travels to the U.S. in planes, ships and Mexican trucks. The
FARC have no air force, no navy, no seaports - in other words, the guerillas
have no access to U.S. or Europeans drug markets.
Rich ranchers fund
the right-wing private paramilitaries that kill most of the civilian
victims of Colombia's 40-year long civil war. The Colombian army closely
coordinates its operations with the paramilitaries. The ranchers are
at the heart of the Colombian drug machinery. Export-import is their
business. Their vast estates are both military bastions and hubs of
the cocaine economy, complete with air and surface transportation links
to coastal cities. This semi-feudal aristocracy will soon enjoy outright
rule over the country, in the person of Alvaro Uribe Vélez, who
will be inaugurated President in August. Heir to a family of rich ranchers,
Uribe is backed by Washington and endorsed by the major U.S. media.
George W. Bush's Latin American champion in the War on Terror is, in
fact, the charismatic leader of the cocaine barons.
The U.S. has never
intercepted any FARC drug shipments. Ever. Such shipments simply do
not exist, because FARC is not a player in the international drug game.
George Bush, Condoleezza
Rice and the entire, shameless media chorus scream wild fictions in
the face of truth. They are absolutely unconcerned that the rest of
the world knows perfectly well that they are lying. The Bush administration's
propaganda, like Colombia's drugs, is strictly for U.S. domestic consumption.
The FARC must
be narco-terrorists, because George Bush says so. Up is down, and down
is up.
Governance
by lying
The CIA thrives
in this Alice in Wonderland world. The Drug Enforcement Administration,
on the other hand, deserves our sympathy, even pity. The DEA is made
up of cops who don't stand a chance of carrying out real police work
in the CIA's domain. On June 19, the DEA's dedicated lawmen were reduced
to weak mimicry of the White House political line, as they announced
a "first" in the decades-long war against Colombia's FARC
guerillas, the purported kingpins of cocaine:
DEA Director
Asa Hutchinson today announced the arrest of Carlos Bolas, a Colombian
national and a leader of the Colombian narco-terrorist group, Fuerzas
Armadas Revolucionaries de Colombia (FARC), for drug trafficking….
For the first
time we have not only indicted a member of a terrorist organization
involved in drug trafficking, but we have also arrested him.
Bolas, who may
or may not be a high-ranking member of FARC, was arrested in the airport
of the capital city of Suriname, one of South America's least influential
countries. He and three companions, also alleged to be FARC, were not
in possession of any drugs. They had been picked up for carrying false
passports. Bolas was later found to be on a U.S. wanted list and was
turned over to the Americans.
The airport event
represents the sum total evidence of narco-trafficking by FARC, a movement
that has been fighting for two generations against the rulers of their
country, the cocaine capital of the world. Colombia is also the third
biggest recipient of U.S. aid dollars, right behind Israel and Egypt.
Any sane person must realize that the U.S. is on the wrong side of the
Colombian war, and that no American War on Drugs exists. In our April
5 issue, the Black Commentator discussed the consequences of this betrayal:
Ultimately, our
own people, neighborhoods and institutions will sicken and die, "fallout"
victims in far greater numbers than perished at the World Trade Center….
We are most concerned
about the permanent civil strife that drugs have brought to the United
States: the one million men and women of color behind bars, largely
because of drugs; the neighborhoods and entire cities rendered economically
unviable by successive drug plagues; the drug-fueled AIDS crisis;
the narco-based police state tactics that have been routine in African
American communities since long before the World Trade Center was
destroyed; the Black-on-Black crime that has disfigured basic human
relations among our people. The list goes on, endlessly.
This is the terror
that stalks Black America. This is the battle that demands our uncompromising
commitment. We will get nowhere unless we force a change in U.S. foreign
policy. That can only come from the U.S. Congress.
The U.S. is now
at the beginning of the fifth wave of CIA-facilitated drug inundations.
The first, born of the agency's post-World War Two collaboration with
European mafia, established the trans-Atlantic heroin route. Next came
the CIA's most notable contribution to the Vietnam War, the massive
Southeast Asian connection that produced the Great Heroin Epidemic of
the late Sixties and early Seventies. Less than a decade later, Afghan
and Pakistani allies of the CIA flooded the inner city with more potent
and cheaper heroin. Just a few years later the fourth wave broke over
America, as crack cocaine made its debut, courtesy of the CIA's associates
in Latin America.
The fifth flood
has begun. It is already too late to stop it, and there is no U.S. agency
that is capable of intervening on our behalf. Bush's global war has
left the American public naked to an entire world of drug sources. New
routes are being established as you read this commentary. The CIA sits
atop its white powder mountain, dispensing impunity to its criminal
friends.
Now you know what
was at stake in the CIA-FBI bureaucratic war in Washington, four weeks
ago. The bad guys won - big time. September 11 wasn't really the issue.
Note: To read
the official announcement by the DEA Director of the arrest of FARC
member please go to the link below:
http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/pubs/pressrel/pr061902.html