| Wednesday, August 5, 2009 12:40PM | | | | Drugs: Nancy Said No, Ronnie Said Y | Posted By: Robert Flynn
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| Tags: narcotics, contras, Reagan, terrorism, CIA, National Security Council, Oliver North, Saddam Hussein, Battalion 316, | When Ronald Reagan died, his complicit enablers in the media lauded him for his myth-making “city on a hill,” ignoring the condemnation of the International Court of Justice that America had hidden its light under a bushel of terrorism. David Podvin commented, “On air and in print, the truth about the fortieth president was distorted beyond recognition by commentators determined to transform a bad leader (and even worse human being) into a hallowed icon.”
Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker wrote that Reagan “undermined environmental, civil-rights, and labor protections, neglected the AIDS epidemic, and packed the courts with reactionary mediocrities. He made callousness respectable.” Others pointed out that wealth was concentrated in the richest few, Reagan gave amnesty to almost 3 million illegal immigrants to break unions and drive down wages, and required workers and other taxpayers to help finance moving factories and industries overseas. After being president of the Screen Actor’s union, Reagan toured the country on the payroll of corporations denouncing unions and workers.
The health misery index rose. The costs of medical care rose more than inflation. Reagan gave employees and employers less incentive to participate in employer-sponsored insurance. People took on themselves the risks of health and high medical costs.
Nobel laureate Paul Krugman pointed out that despite the high price of oil due to the embargo the average economic growth rate of the Carter administration was slightly higher than the growth rate under Reagan, blessed with cheap oil caused in part by Reagan’s partnership with terrorists. Louis Bayard wrote that Reagan “left the percentage of national income diverted to federal taxes virtually unchanged between 1981 and 1989 -- even as states went scrambling to offset cuts in federal assistance.” The federal debt tripled, reaching 63% of the economy.
Robert Sean Wilentz, author of The Age of Reagan wrote that Reaganism “was a blend of dogma, mythology and mendacity,” and that Reagan expanded “the police powers of the executive branch to a degree that would make even Nixon blanch.” “Reaganism” was politically correct for socialized business, the governmental deregulation that gave control of the economy to international corporations that owed loyalty to no nation and no people, not even their employees. The Saving and Loan collapse made the rich richer as taxpayers picked up the billions of dollars bill that they still pay. When Ken Lay was about Enron's success, he said, “we are entering or in markets that are deregulating or have recently deregulated.”
When Reagan moved into the White House he declared “war on terrorism.” That included support for apartheid in South Africa. He recruited, trained and equipped extreme Islamists to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, supported the Zia ul-Haq dictatorship in Pakistan and ignored Pakistan’s development of nuclear weapons. The extreme fundamentalist Arab state, Saudi Arabia, was his ally in the region, even more than Iraq.
According to a US Senate report, the war on terrorism also included supplying Saddam Hussein with Bacillus Anthracis, cause of anthrax; Clostridium Botulinum, a source of botulinum toxin; Histoplasma Capsulatam, cause of a disease attacking lungs, brain, spinal cord, and heart; Brucella Melitensis, a bacteria that can damage major organs; Clostridium Perfringens, a highly toxic bacteria causing systemic illness; Clostridium tetani, a highly toxigenic substance. Reagan also supplied Saddam with satellite images of Iranian defense forces so that he could use his poisons on them and Iraqi Kurds. Congress tried to impose sanctions on Iraq for human rights violations but Reagan opposed the idea.
Mark Weisbrot reported in the LA Times that in the 1980s, the CIA trained Battalion 316 that tortured and murdered thousands of Honduran political activists while Ambassador John Negroponte and the US Embassy looked the other way. The State Department doctored its human rights reports to omit the crimes.
After the US hostages in Iran were released Reagan sold weapons to their captors. The sale of arms continued although the terrorists kidnapped more Americans, killed more than 240 Marines, and blew up two US embassies. Exposure of the secret sale of weapons to terrorists and diversion of the money to support contras in Nicaragua ended the illegal enterprise. Little was written about the use of drug smugglers and profits from drug smuggling to aid the contras although it was an open secret.
Information regarding contra drug smuggling with protection from the Reagan administration is too vast to cover here. The best sources are the report of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on terrorism and narcotics, chaired by John Kerry, and the CIA Inspector General’s Reports. They can be accessed at the National Security Archives (nsarchive.org). Also valuable is Lost History by Robert Parry, an investigative reporter for both Newsweek and Associated Press, now editor of The Consortium. He and Brian Barger were the first to break the contra/drug story.
In 1985, Francisco Guirola Beeche’s airplane landed in Texas with nearly $6 million in suspected drug money on board. Reagan administration prosecutors released the plane and offered to free Guirola on probation. Federal prosecutors persuaded the judge to approve the deal.(AP June, 1985) A trial might have raised suspicions about Cuban-American Felix Rodriguez who oversaw the contra-supply operations for Oliver North. Rodriguez had been placed in El Salvador by the office of VP Bush.
In June, 1986, the New York Times published articles detailing years of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega's collaboration with Colombian drug traffickers. In August, Oliver North, met with Noriega's representative. North emailed Reagan’s national security advisor John Poindexter that if US officials “help clean up his image” and lift the ban on arms sales, Noriega would “‘take care of’ the Sandinista leadership for us.” At the 1992 trial of former CIA official Clair George, CIA’s Alan Fiers testified that Elliott Abrams and Secretary of State George Shultz supported the plan.
Throughout 1986, the Kerry subcommittee forwarded contra-drug evidence to the Justice Department, including the testimony of FBI informant Wanda Palacio, who gave an eyewitness account of Colombian drug traffickers loading cocaine onto planes belonging to the CIA-connected airline, Southern Air Transport. Palacio was one of the many corroborated witnesses whose information was rejected by Reagan’s Justice Department. When Kerry requested information from the Justice Department, Assistant AG John Bolton stalled. According to a congressional aide, the staff of Bolton, future US ambassador to the UN, worked actively with Republican senators to oppose Kerry's efforts.
Bolton also refused to give documents concerning the Iran/contra crimes, and Attorney General Ed Meese's involvement in them, to the chair of the House Judiciary Committee. According to Hayden Gregory, chief counsel of a House Judiciary subcommittee on crime, when Congressional investigators were probing charges that the Justice Department had delayed an inquiry into gunrunning to the contras, Bolton blocked an arrangement by which his staff had agreed to let House investigators interview officials of the US Attorney's office in Miami.
The House decided to have their own investigation. According to Dennis Bernstein & Leslie Kean, Henry Hyde, House manager in Clinton's impeachment, blamed Congress for not funding the “freedom fighters” and found no fault with the CIA or the Reagan administration. Hyde claimed a report by committee staff member Robert Bermingham cleared the contras of drug-trafficking. The report offered “little documentation, not even identification of witnesses questioned. No excerpts from depositions, no quotes from files, no references to records examined, no citation of which governments had cooperated or how, no explanation of how accounts of drug trafficking were debunked.” Hyde signed off on the report and the media accepted it with a sigh of relief.
In 1984 General José Bueso Rosa and coconspirators hatched a plan to assassinate Honduran President Roberto Suazo Córdoba financed by a $40 million cocaine shipment to the United States, that the FBI intercepted in Florida. Bueso was heavily involved with the CIA's contra operations. Declassified email messages reveal that Oliver North led the behind-the-scenes effort to seek leniency for Bueso. US officials tried to get Bueso freed by “pardon, clemency, deportation, reduced sentence.” Bueso got a short sentence in "Club Fed," a white collar prison in Florida.
The Kerry committee reviewed the case and noted that the man Reagan officials aided was involved in a conspiracy that the Justice Department deemed the “most significant case of narco-terrorism yet discovered.”
The CIA Central American Task Force chief testified, “With respect to (drug trafficking by) the Resistance Forces...We knew that everybody around Pastora was involved in cocaine...His staff and friends (redacted) they were drug smugglers or involved in drug smuggling.” Even after the State Department acknowledged there were problems with drug trafficking in association with Contra activities, the Justice Department adamantly denied there was any substance to the narcotics allegations.
Sworn testimony to the Kerry committee revealed that the contra-drug link dated back to the origins of the contra war in 1980, and the committee heard enough to demand information about Felipe Vidal, a Cuban-American with a criminal record as a narcotics trafficker. The CIA hired Vidal as logistics coordinator for the contras. The CIA withheld the data about Vidal’s drug arrests and kept him on the payroll until 1990.
In January 1986, the Drug Enforcement Administration in Miami seized 414 pounds of cocaine shipped from a contra operative in Costa Rica to Ocean Hunter, where Vidal worked. In 1987, the US attorney in Miami began investigating Vidal, Ocean Hunter and other contra-connected entities. The CIA's Latin American division wanted a security review of Vidal but it was blocked by the CIA's security office. When the US attorney requested information about “contra-related activities” by Vidal, Ocean Hunter and 16 other entities, the CIA responded that that “no information had been found regarding Ocean Hunter.”
The Kerry report in 1989 noted that Oliver North, then on the National Security Council staff at the White House, and other senior officials created a privatized contra network that attracted drug traffickers looking for cover for their operations, then turned a blind eye to repeated reports of drug smuggling related to the contras, and actively worked with known drug smugglers such as Manuel Noriega to assist the contras. The report cited former DEA head John Lawn testifying that North had prematurely leaked a DEA undercover operation, jeopardizing agents’ lives, for political advantage in an upcoming Congressional vote on aid to the contras.
The Kerry Committee concluded that “senior US policy makers were not immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution to the contras’ funding problems...It is clear that individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking. It is also clear that the supply network of the contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers. In each case, one or another agency of the US government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring or immediately thereafter.”
Oliver North claimed to talk show hosts Hannity & Colmes that the Kerry report was “wrong,” that Kerry “makes this stuff up and then he can't justify it.” The Kerry committee was accused of wasting money; his staff was accused of obstructing justice. Newsweek mocked Kerry as a “randy conspiracy buff.” When a reporter at a White House press conference asked about report, a New York Times journalist admonished him to ask a “serious question.”
The heavily documented report of the Kerry Committee was ignored by the corporate media. They preferred Bermingham’s and Hyde’s evidence-free assertions. The only ones interested in the Kerry report were the future Swift Boaters. Kerry’s refusal to ignore a crime that everyone else wanted to bury enraged them, perhaps even more than his heroism in Vietnam. The media failed to note the connection. Reagan’s vaunted “teflon” was the creation of those that future White House spokesman Scott McClellan would ridicule as the “liberal” complicit enablers.
That’s only the beginning. Next: The CIA Comes Clean
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