The CIA’s Involvement with Drug Smuggling

by Dark Politics (Post 2008) – Part 2 

The Pegasus Program

The Pegasus program, initiated by President Harry Truman to spy on other CIA units, revealed numerous illegal activities within the agency. Since the time of its inception, the role of Pegasus substantially changed. Pegasus became an integral part of a drug trafficking operation.

Gene “Chip” Tatum was initially recruited as a member of the top secret Pegasus unit during the Vietnam War. He and 13 others were assigned to Operation Rock, a covert action to secretly enter Phnom Penh, Cambodia in January 1971. The unit received its briefings from various CIA operatives as well as from General Alexander Haig and CIA Saigon Chief William Colby. The objective of Pegasus was to destabilize the Cambodian government by sabotaging the city’s airport. They captured and murdered some unarmed North Vietnamese military personnel. Tatum claimed that he and the other 13 members of Operation Red Rock were also to be killed by Montagnard tribesmen under orders of the CIA. Then their bodies were to be “disappeared.” Thus, American involvement in Cambodia could be denied. However, this CIA plot was not carried out, and the members of Operation Red Rock survived.

CIA Director William Colby

A copy of the “Pegasus files” was given to Congressman Larry McDonald, a member of the Joint Armed Services Committee between 1976 and 1982. McDonald stated that he would reveal startling evidence about the CIA, but ironically, he was killed when KAL 007 was shot down over the Sakhalin Islands.Tatum continued to serve as a CIA operative for the next 20 years. He continued as a member of Pegasus, becoming a deep-cover CIA pilot involved in covert operations, trafficking cocaine during the contra war. Between the early 1980s and 1990 Tatum became directly involved in the drugs-for-arms scam. He claimed that the marked-up arms, which were sold to Iran, were traded for cocaine which was flown back to American bases, especially to Arkansas, Ohio and Colorado.

As a CIA pilot, he was told that he would be contacted by “a man called North.” Col.  Oliver North, who covertly helped to arm the Contras as well as being one of the principle conduits for drug trafficking. Tatum claimed that North’s operation not only involved the Colombian cartels, but it also involved the shipments of cocaine into the United States. In 1985 Tatum flew out of Palmerola Air Base in Honduras. On one flight in February, he was instructed to contact Felix Rodriguez who was a pivotal player in Iran-Contra. Rodriguez informed Tatum that he was to support covert Pegasus missions.

Col Oliver North

When Tatum returned to his home base, he contacted North to advise him of the cocaine. North replied that it was “a trophy of war” and that it was not the Contras — but the “Sandinistas … selling it to fund the military.” North added by stating that “the cocaine was bound for the world courts as evidence” against the Sandinistas. Two years earlier, Tatum had flown similar containers, which were labeled “Medical Supplies,” into Little Rock Air Force Base, and the crates were picked up by Dan Lasater, a close friend of the Governor Clinton. Tatum admitted that he flew several missions out of the American base in Honduras and picked up cocaine containers regularly, sometimes violating Nicaraguan airspace. At this time Tatum began to document all Pegasus trips on the back of his flight logs.

Not long after his association with North, Tatum was transferred to New York to set up a money-laundering operation for funds from the Iran-Contra cocaine pipeline. He was named president of three proprietary construction companies: American National Home Builders, American Constructors, and American Homes.In addition to North and Rodriguez, Tatum was to take orders from Amiram Nir, a former Mossad agent and advisor to Vice President Bush. Tatum was ordered to fly a 200 pound sealed cooler, marked “Vaccine,” to a Contra camp on the Honduran border. When the cooler was being transferred to an Air Force C-130 transport plane, it accidentally broke and 100 bags of cocaine were exposed. Not surprised by this discovery, Tatum stated that he had suspected that the CIA was involved in trafficking cocaine two years earlier.

George Bush Sr.

Pegasus also involved the “neutralizing” of pivotal government leaders during the Contra war. For example, a struggle for power emerged among some Contra leaders. The United States supported Adolfo Calero, while Enrique Bermudez also sought a prominent position in the Contra hierarchy. When Bermudez threatened to expose the role of Vice President Bush in drug trafficking, Tatum claimed that Bush ordered Bermudez assassinated. Another assassination was carried out by Pegasus against Honduran General Gustavo Alvarez Martinez, the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. When Alvarez demanded a bigger split of the cocaine profits, he was murdered in 1989. Tatum also admitted his involvement in the assassination of Amiram Nir, a former Israeli Mossad agent. After Nir was called to testify before a Senate subcommittee, his plane was shot down by missiles from Tatum’s helicopter.

Chamorro

Another Pegasus operation occurred soon after the 1990 Nicaraguan elections. President Bush hand-picked Violetta Chamorro to be the new “president,” and it took a 15 party coalition and $12 million from the Bush administration to defeat Sandinista president Daniel Ortega. After Chamorro’s victory, Tatum stated that another Contra leader, whom he would not name, requested that Bush give him a key position in the new government. By refusing to place him in the Chamorro government, Bush put himself in a vulnerable position. This Contra leader could expose Bush’s involvement in drug trafficking. Thus, a Pegasus unit was assigned to disgrace him in early 1990. Pegasus used the odorless and tasteless drug scopolaphine, which would prevents one from recalling anything which occurred while under its spell. Tatum stated that the former Contra leader was invited to a luxury hotel as a guest of Bush. After the CIA administered the drug, the Contra leader was introduced to an attractive “blonde,” and the two went into a bedroom where a hidden video camera recorded their sexual activity. It turned out that the “blonde” was a male prostitute from New York, and he was later killed that evening. According to Tatum, the scopolaphine worked. Weeks later, the Contra leader was given a copy of the video tape which revealed his homosexual acts.

Tatum claimed that in 1992 Bush instructed him to “neutralize,” presidential contender Ross Perot, but he refused to do so. Tatum turned over a copy of an incriminating tape to Bush, explaining that it would not be publicized as long as the plot was not carried out. As recently as 1994, Tatum was contacted by North, Felix Rodriquez, and CIA director William Colby and was told to surrender all documents and tapes. Tatum refused to do so. Tatum had turned whistle blower. The next year, he was charged with treason. At his trial his attorney refused to call even one of the 80 witnesses Tatum had requested. Later, the attorney admitted that he had been pressured by the Department of Defense. The charge of treason was subsequently changed to that of fraud. Tatum was found guilty and was sentenced to serve a 15 month sentence. In March 1996, an additional charge – conspiring to embezzle – was brought against him. Found guilty once again, Tatum was sentenced to a 27 month concurrent sentence.

THE CIA-CONTRA COCAINE TRAIN

CIA Chief Ted Shackley

After George Bush succeeded William Colby as the head of the CIA under President Ford, Bush appointed Shackley to be his “Chief of Covert Operations Worldwide.” As the Vietnam War was ending Shackley left Southeast Asia in 1972 to head CIA activities in the Western Hemisphere. One of Shackley’s first assignments was to sent Ed Wilson and Manuel Artime to meet with right-wing dictator Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua. However, Somoza’s totalitarian regime lasted only another seven years before being overthrown by the Sandinistas.

Guatemala Narco Routes

In the 1980s, 150 tons of cocaine a year were flowing through Latin America. That generated a business of $29 billion a year and was 12 to 13 times more than America’s largest corporations. Prior to the creation of the Contra drug pipeline, the first to profit from drug trafficking were Bolivia’s “cocaine coup” government of 1980-82. They werte followed by the Medellin cartel, the Panamanian government, the Honduran military and Miami-based anti-Castro Cubans. Two months after Reagan’s inauguration in 1981 the CIA launched its secret war in an attempt to overthrow the Sandinista government. Soon thereafter, the arms-drug caper began. The drug of choice in the 1960s and 1970s was heroin — imported from Southeast Asia. Then in the 1980s, the primary addicting drug became cocaine, and its source was Latin America, the new hub of CIA activities.

Richard Armitage – Bush Crony

In December 1981, Vice President Bush met with the National Security Planning Group in the White House. They discussed and approved a $19 million expenditure to Argentina for the creation of a 500 man anti-Sandinista Contra force. In April 1982, Bush met with Australian Labor leader Hayden to discuss the CIA’s involvement with the Nugan Hand Bank in Australia. Nugan Hand was a money-laundering machine for the Southeast Asia heroin operation that began during the Vietnam War. Defense Department spokesman Richard Armitage acted as bagman, carrying cash from Bangkok, Thailand, to Australia.

The first publicly known case of contra cocaine shipments appeared in government files in an October 22, 1982 cable from the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. The cable passed on word that American law enforcement agencies were aware of “links between (a United States religious organization) and two Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary groups (which) involve an exchange in (the United States) of narcotics for arms.” The material in parentheses was inserted by the CIA as part of its declassification of the cable. The name of the religious group remained secret. Over the next several years of the Reagan administration, the CIA learned of other suspected links between the Contras and drug trafficking. Ironically, “the war on drugs” became an important part of Reagan’s domestic agenda. While the United States sent military aid southward to its surrogates fighting the Sandinista government, the rate of cocaine being transported northward into the states quickly escalated. The CIA was involved in a variety of ways — by air, land, and sea — in bringing cocaine into the United States.

George Bush w/ Crack Bag

CIA operative Gunther Russbacher, who was highly opposed to drug capers, stated that he was at high level meetings which involved drug dealers in Colombia. Russbacher stated that drug kingpins divided their territory into two large groups, the Cali and Medellin cartels. Operation Snow Cone was the CIA’s primary trafficking operation in Latin America. Under this umbrella, Operation Watch Tower was formed. This consisted of low frequency radio beacons which allowed aircraft, loaded with cocaine, to navigate undetected at low altitudes between Colombia and Panama. The CIA used both Boeing 727s and C-130s which were flown by CIA or commercial pilots. According to Russbacher, two captains from United Airlines and one Pan American pilot supplemented their base salaries by flying drugs into the United States.

In 1984, CIA Inspector General Richard Hitz reported that the CIA even intervened with the Justice Department to block a criminal investigation into a suspected Contra role in a San Francisco-based drug ring. In December 1985, Robert Parry and Brian Barger wrote the first news article disclosing that virtually every Nicaraguan contra group had links to drug trafficking. In that Associated Press dispatch they noted that the CIA knew of at least one case of cocaine profits filtering into the Contra war effort, but that DEA officials in Washington claimed they had never been told of any Contra tie-in. After the AP story was released, the Reagan administration attacked it as unfounded and the article was largely ignored by the rest of the Washington press corps. However, it did help spark an investigation by Kerry. Years later in 1995 the Clinton administration quietly rescinded Casey’s narcotics exemption.

THE CONGRESSIONAL SELECT COMMITTEES.

In 1987, a year after the Iran-Contra scandal broke, two committees convened on Capitol Hill. In February John Kerry of Massachusetts persuaded the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, of which he was a member, to launch an official investigation under the auspices of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations which came to be known as the Kerry committee. Kerry also was able to expand the probe to include the possible role of foreign governments in drug trafficking.

In addition the Senate Select Committee, chaired by Senator Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, also investigated alleged illegalities during the Contra War. The committee called very few witnesses, and those who were called were usually asked superficial questions. American military personnel, business people, and mercenaries kept the Contras supplied while the Boland Amendment forbade military assistance after 1984. However, many of these important players never testified before the Iran-Contra committee. According to Florida federal public defender John Mattes, who investigated the resupply network, the Iran-Contra committee made a mistake in questioning only the high officials and did not talk to the lower echelon personnel who aided in the resupply effort. Mattes said that the Congressional committees went to the conspirators North and Poindexter and merely asked if they did anything wrong or if they were guilty of a crime. They never interviewed any mercenaries to question them whom they worked for.

THE COSTA RICA CONNECTION

Sandanistas

The arms-for-drugs operation also thrived in Costa Rica. When the Southern Front against the Sandinista government was established in 1983, Costa Rica was ill equipped to deal with the threat posed by the Colombian drug cartels. Costa Rica had no military and its law enforcement remained limited. Its radar system was so poor that contra planes could fly in and out undetected. The government of Costa Rica only employed civil guards who were underpaid and easily bought. By 1985, Associated Press was running stories which stated that the CIA and contras were involved in drug trafficking. Two years later in 1987, CIA chief for Central America, Alan Fiers, testified that numerous people were involved in drug trafficking. Fiers was largely responsible for cutting off CIA aid to Eden Pastora in 1984 when it appeared impossible that he would fall in with the rest of the contras. Fiers testified before a Congressional committee in 1991 that other higher up military and White House personnel were well aware of drug trafficking by the Contras. Fiers testified: “With respect to (drug trafficking) by the Resistance Forces. … It is not a couple of people. It is a lot of people.”

Costa Rica Narco Routes

The 144-page report included a litany of drug operations out of various Latin American countries. Most of the narcotic traffic was directed by Contra and CIA officials. Morales testified before the Kerry committee that Gary Betzner, his best pilot, flew arms to the Contras from the Fort Lauderdale Airport to Costa Rica. Morales stated that his planes returned frequently loaded with “about 400 or so kilograms of cocaine.” Morales rewarded the Contras with $400,000 in cash and checks in October 1984. By the end of 1985, he swore that cash contributions to the Contras were $4 million to $5 million. When Kerry asked about the origin of the cash, Morales said that “about 100 percent” was drug money. The Kerry report concluded: “There was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through war zones on the part of the Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots, mercenaries who worked for the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout the region.”

El Salvador Civil War

A number of Costa Ricans also became drug traffickers for the Contras. Jaime “Pillique” Guerra owned a crop dusting service as well as an aircraft business in northern Costa Rica. He refueled and repaired planes which originated in Panama and were carrying weapons to the El Salvador regime in its civil war against the FMLN. These planes carried narcotics as well as weapons. Werner Lotz, one of the pilots, was subsequently convicted of drug smuggling. He explained that the drug traffickers were competing over their share of the profits. He stated that the government guards could be easily bought off. Another Costa Rican pilot was Gerardo Duran, who flew a number of missions for the Contras’ Southern Front. However, the United States eventually severed ties with him after he was indicted for narcotics trafficking. In 1987 he was convicted and imprisoned in Costa Rica.

At a 1986 Costa Rican drug trial, CBS News reported that the United States government presented wiretapped telephone conversations with contra leader Huachen Gonzalez. He discussed the large amounts of cocaine which the contras were sending from Costa Rica to the United States. Also in 1986 the Costa Rican government arrested a Cuban exile carrying 204 kilograms of cocaine from an airstrip. He denied any role in these operations but stated that the Contras had asked him to smuggle in arms.

THE JOHN HULL CONNECTION

Contra War – 1980s

Hull’s 8,000 acre ranch, located in northern Costa Rica and just south of the Nicaraguan border, was a refueling and storing place for cocaine which originated from the Medellin and Cali cartels in Colombia. Hull was given a $375,000 “loan” to a build a lumber mill on his ranch. He owned six airstrips which served as a base for the shipment of narcotics. He kept the Contras fed and housed. He also claimed that he could account for the Contra money which was handed down by Contra leader Adolfo Calero. In July 1983, Hull traveled to Washington, D.C. to convince members of Congress that Pastora could not be trusted since he was a front for the FDN. One of the offices which he visited was that of Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana He was introduced to Quayle’s assistant, Robert Owen, and to North. Subsequently, Owen resigned from his position with Quayle and started the United Nicaraguan Opposition (UNO).

Contra War

One of Pastora’s former pilots, Geraldo Duran, told the Kerry committee that he had been arrested in 1986 in Costa Rica for flying drugs to the United States. When the CIA dropped Pastora in 1984, it had to find another source through which to work. That turned out to be Jorge Morales who conspired with an American, John Hull, who owned a multi-acre farm in northern Costa Rica. A leadership struggle within the FDN developed early in the Contra war. Eventually Pastora, leader of the southern front operating out of Costa Rica, broke ranks with Adolfo Calero who was the White House’s choice to run the Contras. As a result of a leadership struggle in the FDN, Pastora soon fell out of good grace with the umbrella Contra organization which operated out of Honduras.

Honduras Narco Routes

Hull was also aided by two Americans, William Crone and Ian Kniloch, the chief of the Contra’s air logistics. Both worked with a paramilitary group known as Huerta Norte. Another Hull neighbor was Bruce Jones who owned a 55-acre ranch next door. Jones testified that Hull received 5,000 rifles, 5 million rounds of ammunition, hand grenades, mines, and mortars from the contras. Jones was a liaison between the CIA and Contras for whom he was supplying millions of dollars in arms. He testified that between May 1982 and May 1984 approximately 100 deliveries of arms and supplies were coordinated by him and Hull. These supplies were kept on Hull’s ranch. Jones maintained that when the planes arrived, he would help unload the drugs and arms in five or ten minutes.

Gen. Richard V Secord

In the 1960s, Ronald Martin worked for the CIA in Miami along with James McCoy, another ex-attaché to Nicaragua. When Contra aid was legally cut by the Boland Amendment in 1984, Martin began organizing North’s role in raising arms for the Contras. However, Martin was shut off when North began to use Richard Secord as the arms broker. According to Calero, Martin and McCoy received $2,095,000 for arms from North. Martin’s attorney stated that the amount was closer to $15 million or $20 million. At least five witnesses testified to the Kerry committee that cocaine was loaded onto planes at John Hull’s ranch. The committee also was told that Hull received $10,000 a month as a courtesy from Oliver North. Yet the Justice Department took no action against Hull for either obstruction of justice or for drug trafficking. In 1989 Hull was arrested in Costa Rica, but the charges against him for trafficking 2,500 kilograms of cocaine were dropped. He was declared a persona non grata and moved to Miami. After 1988 the Justice Department reluctantly indicted some people working for Hull, but soon afterwards these too were dropped.

Felipe Vidal – JM Wave Cuban Assassin

Felipe Vidal and Rene Corvo were Cuban-Americans involved in transporting arms to Hull’s ranch in return for drugs. Revenue from the cocaine was used to purchase military equipment, ammunition, and explosives for the Contras. Corvo testified to the Justice Department that paramilitary supplies were stored in the home of Frank Chanes in Miami and in the garage of Corvo. However, no charges were ever brought against Corvo. Witnesses testified that Corvo stored loaded guns on his premises and that he told friends that he flew clothing and medical supplies to refugees in El Salvador.

Ex-CIA agent Jose Fernandez testified to the Kerry committee that Vidal and Corvo were agency operants. He stated that both were involved in the illicit drug business and that the CIA’s duty was to protect them. Vidal was called a CIA contract agent who had been arrested numerous times in Miami on narcotics and weapons charges. All this evidence gave the Kerry committee adequate evidence to implicate Vidal, Corvo, North, and others as being part of an arms-for-drugs conspiracy. Between 1983 and 1986, numerous pilots made flights out of Hull’s ranch and returned to the United States with millions of dollars in drugs. Many flights landed at Ilopango Air base in El Salvador and at Hull’s ranch. A convicted drug smuggler admitted flying 500 kilograms of cocaine from Hull’s ranch to the United States. “It was arms down, cocaine back . . . with full knowledge of the CIA and DEA.”

John Hull

According to the Kerry report, the main front set up by the CIA that operated out of Florida was SETCO Air. This was a CIA-operated company which ran arms down to Honduras and returned with cocaine. The Kerry report stated that SETCO was the principal company used by the contras to transport supplies and personnel to the FDN, carrying at least a million rounds of ammunition, food, supplies, uniforms, and other military supplies for the Contras from 1983 through 1985. Peter Glibbery, a mercenary hired by Hull to train contras on his ranch, told a Costa Rican court that he was arrested after Hull asked him to set up a Contra training camp on his ranch. He was convicted and imprisoned for violating Costa Rican neutrality laws and illegal possession of explosives. Glibbery said that Hull informed him of a proposed bombing plot at the American embassy in San Jose. According to Glibbery, Hull claimed that mines were needed to do the job. However, Glibbery’s account of his experience on the Hull ranch changed. During a trial in a suit brought by Hull against the two American journalists Avirgan and Honey, Glibbery refused to discuss Hull’s involvement in the assassination plot. Glibbery told a Costa Rican court that he had met Hull and Posey in March 1985. The next day, Glibbery said that he flew to Costa Rica with Hull and the mercenaries. He said Hull identified himself as the liaison officer between the CIA and the FDN. Glibbery told Honey and Avirgan that in April 1987 that Hull had threatened to kill him if he did not repudiate the evidence which he had given to the United States federal investigators.

In May 1987, an Iran-Contra select committee team went to San Jose, Costa Rica but failed to interview Hull. It turned out that they merely called him on the telephone from San Jose, just 30 miles from his ranch. Hull never testified to either congressional committee. However, he could have told the congressional committee who ran the operation and who authorized it. Hull could also have responded to allegations that those running the supply lines through his ranch were engaged in drug trafficking. Hull received $10,000 a month from Contra leader Calero, according to public testimony by Owen. Hull also received $800 a month from the CIA to pay for bodyguards during a time the agency was prohibited from using funds to supply the Contras. Thus, no legitimate congressional investigation was ever launched.

CELERINO CASTILLO

Celerino Castillo III – Former DEA Agent

In 1979, Castillo was hired by the DEA, and after a successful conviction, he was transferred to Central America. After Reagan launched his war against the Sandinistas two years later, Castillo immediately became involved with numerous drug dealers, most of whom were also hired to run arms to the Contras. Castillo’s first encounter was with Socrates Amaury Sofi-Perez, a former Bay of Pigs veteran, who operated a shrimp business in Guatemala City. He smuggled drugs packed in frozen shrimp into Florida and laundered the profits for the Contras. Castillo also had ties to Gerard Latchinian, an international arms dealer. In 1984 Latchinian was arrested for using proceeds from a $10 million cocaine deal to help finance the assassination of Honduran President Roberto Suarez Cordoba. Latchinian’s partner was General Jose Bueso Rosa who helped train Contra soldiers in Honduras.

Luis Posada Carriles

Another associate was Luis Posada Carriles who was arrested in the 1970s for carrying out murders while he was an agent for Venezuela’s DISIP or secret police. After bribing himself out of prison in 1985, Posada was flown by the CIA to El Salvador and paid $3,000 a month by the agency. Posada arranged for pilots to fly weapons to Contra bases in El Salvador and Costa Rica as well to bring drugs on their return trips into the United States. Posada also worked with Luis Rodriquez who operated Costa Rica’s Frigoficos de Puntarenas, a shrimp business which was used as a front to provide $260,000 in aid to the Contras.

El Salvador Narco Routes

Hugo Martinez was yet another one of Castillo’s friends who helped to develop flight plans for contra resupply missions. He informed Castillo that most of the pilots bringing weapons into Ilopango as well as to Contra camps in Honduras and Costa Rica were involved in smuggling drugs back to the United States. One such pilot was Carlos Alberto Amador who had a long record of drug trafficking. Another was Carlos Cabezas whose drug runs had been published in the CIA Inspector General’s report which was published in January 1998. At a December 1981 meeting with members of the inspector general’s staff in San Jose, Costa Rica, Cabeza explained how he raised cocaine money for the contras. Present at that meeting was Julio Zavala, involved in the San Francisco “frogman” case where 430 pounds of cocaine were seized near the Golden Gate Bridge. Zavala asked Castillo to be a middle man in collwecting money from San Francisco drug dealers and flying it back to Central America. Cabezas also set up a network of Contra “mules,” such as airline stewardesses, to bring small quantities of cocaine into the United States. Another drug dealer attendung the December 1981 meeting in San Jose, was Troilo Sanchez who instructed Cabezas to deliver drug money to help feed Contra troops and to support their families.

El Salvador

Castillo met with Vice President Bush at a Guatemalan embassy reception in January 1986. Bush asked what his business was in Central America, and he replied that he was investigating cocaine trafficking. He informed Bush that drug trafficking was occurring at Ilopango in El Salvador. Bush responded by smiling as he shook his hand, and then he walked away. In a February 1989 memo to his DEA superior in Guatemala, Castillo detailed how known traffickers with DEA files used two hangars at the American military installation and how they obtained United States visas despite their backgrounds. According to Castillo, the CIA owned one hangar and the NSC ran the other. In 1994 Castillo said that large quantities of cocaine were being brought into the United States to support the Contras. We claimed that he witnessed cocaine shipments and boxes full of money. Castillo maintained that he knew the names of traffickers as well as their destinations, flight paths, tail numbers, and the date and time of each flight. According to the Kerry report a March 1987 memorandum stated that a number of people, who supported the Contras and who participated in contra activity in Texas, Louisiana, California, and Florida, as well as in Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, claimed that cocaine was being smuggled into the United States. They stated that it was part of the same infrastructure which procurred and transported weapons for the Contras.

THE GEORGE MORALES CONNECTION

In the early 1980s, Morales was a well known contra drug trafficking, transporting cocaine and marijuana from Latin America northward into the United States. In May 1986, Morales was to meet with Vice President Bush to discuss a secret operation. However, the appointment was canceled when the Iran-Contra scandal was about to leak to the public. Morales was dismissed from the CIA and was later was indicted. Morales testified before the Kerry committee that he was well known to Colombian drug traffickers and that his ranch was the key base of an operation which sent cocaine to Miami in exchange for contras arms. Morales also testified that he had delivered 40 M-79 grenade launchers which were flown from Miami to Ilopango Air Base in El Salvador.

Morales also told the Kerry committee that he sent approximately $4 million in drug money to the contras. Morales’ story is corroborated by his pilots such as Gary Betzner who made several runs in 1984 from Florida to airstrips in Costa Rica. On one occasion, Betzner unloaded weapons for Pastora’s Contras and proceeded to load his plane with “seventeen duffle bags and five or six two-foot-square boxes filled with cocaine.” Additionally, pilots Geraldo Duran and Marcos Aquado flew arms missions into Costa Rica between 1982 and 1985 and both cited examples of Morales’ drug connections. In 1986 Duran was arrested in Costa Rica for exporting drugs to the United States. Another pilot who was recruited by Morales was Fabio Ernesto Carrasco who was subpoenaed to testify in a drug trial in Oklahoma City in 1990. Carrasco said that between 1984 and 1985, he flew over five drug missions for Morales and that he carried between 300 and 400 kilos of cocaine into the United States on each flight. Carrasco also testified that he and Betzner flew down weapons for the Contras from Florida and that they returned from Costa Rica loaded with cocaine which had been purchased by Contra leaders Octaviano Cesar and Mario Calero. Many of these missions from the United States ended at the Costa Rican ranch of Hull who Morales said was heavily involved in drug smuggling. Carrasco also said that Morales gave millions of dollars in drug money on 30 to 40 different occasions to Contra leader Adolfo “Popo” Chamorro, the nephew of Violetta Chamorro who was later elected president of Nicaragua. Morales also testified that he gave airplanes and cash to the Contras because Popo Chamorro promised to help him with his legal bills in the United States. Morales offered Popo Chamorro an old DC-3 to carry food, arms, boots, and uniforms to Pastora’s Contra soldiers who were isolated in Costa Rica and needed air support to receive supplies. Pastora was desperate, since Calero and White House had severed relations with him in his struggle for power within the FDN. In 1986, Morales was convicted in prison and died five years later.

THE FELIX RODRIQUEZ CONNECTION

Felix Rodriguez

Rodriquez began his CIA career in the late 1950s in Florida. After the aborted Bay of Pigs invasion, he was moved to Vietnam where he worked for Gregg and Shackley. Rodriquez returned to the Western Hemisphere in the early 1980s when Reagan launched his covert war in Nicaragua. He was assigned to oversee the Contra supply effort in El Salvador from 1982 to 1986.

In November 1982, Ramon Milan Rodriquez, involved with the Colombian cocaine cartels, made a $3,690,000 payment to the Contras at the request of Felix Rodriguez, in exchange for protection from prosecution. The next year, Gustave Villolda received a letter of recommendation from Gregg as “combat advisor” to the Contras. Villolda worked along side Rodriguez during the Bay of Pigs invasion and the CIA track down and execution of Che Guevara in Bolivia. In 1984 Gerald Latchinian, co-director with Rodriguez of Giro Aviation, a CIA proprietary airline, was arrested for smuggling $10.3 million in cocaine to finance the assassination of Honduran President Roberto Suazo Cordova. Latchinian contended that this was a CIA operation.

RAMON MILIAN RODRIQUEZ

Ramon Milian Rodriguez

Rodriquez was a Cuban exile and was the principal accountant for the Medellin cartel, handling $200 million a month in drug profits. His business took him from Colombia to Panama and Florida. He claimed that in the 1972 he carried $200,000 in cash from CIA operant Manuel Artime to some of the burglars arrested at the Watergate Hotel. In 1982 he was recruited by Felix Rodriquez to join the contra network for which he contributed approximately $10 million between 1982 and 1985. When Milian Rodriquez was arrested in 1985, his financial papers were seized. In a column under the heading of “CIA,” Rodriquez had recorded $3.69 million in expenditures. Rodriquez used his Ocean Hunter frozen shrimp company, based in Florida, but owned exclusively by his Costa Rican Frigorificos de Puntanenas firm, to move around about $200,000 in this time frame.

THE SANCHEZ FAMILY CONNECTION AND THE SAN FRANCISCO “FROGMAN”

The Sanchez family first involvement in drug trafficking dated back to the San Francisco “frogman” case in 1983. This operation netted 430 pounds of cocaine from a freighter outside of San Francisco Bay. Its crew admitted that it was running drugs from the Contras in Costa Rica. One was an ex-Somoza air force officer who stated that the profits belonged to the Contras. Another stated that he had given thousands of dollars from the drug smuggling to Costa Rican Contra groups and helped to arrange for the shipment of arms to a small Contra group headed by Fernando Chamorro. The United States returned $36,020, which was seized as drug money, after one of the defendants, Zavala, submitted letters from Contra leaders claiming that the funds were really their property.

The Kerry committee found that two of those arrested had ties to the Contras and had received the cocaine from Colombian sources. The committee report implicated higher up Contra leaders who were involved in narcotics traffic. Several members of the Sanchez family were indicted. Court records showed that the cocaine ring’s source of supply included one of the family members, Troilo Sanchez. He was a relative of Aristides, a member of the FDN directorate who earlier had been caught trafficking cocaine. The “frogman” case resulted in the demise of the Sanchez family.

THE HONDURAS CONNECTION

Area of accused DEA murders

Honduras had been the classic example of a banana republic. Most of its economy was controlled by United Fruit and Standard Fruit. New Orleans ran its economy, and soon banana trade routes became drug routes. In 1975, Honduran president General Oswaldo Lopez Arellano received $1.5 million in bribes from the American multinational companies, and in return never paid export taxes amounting to $7.5 million.In the 1980s, Honduras accounted for approximately 20 percent of the cocaine imported by the United States. Costa Rica supplied about 10 percent of America’s cocaine. Between 1982 and 1987, the Reagan administration pumped in $335 million in military aid and $836 million in “economic” aid to Honduras. A Christian Democrat in Honduras’ congress stated that Washington would merely ignore any questions about drug trafficking.

Honduras Narco Routes

Reagan administration officials interceded on behalf of Jos Bueso Rosa, a Honduran general who was heavily involved with the CIA’s Contra operations and faced trial for his role in a massive drug shipment to the United States. In 1984, Bueso and co-conspirators plotted to assassinate Honduran President Roberto Suazo Cordoba This was to be financed with a $40 million cocaine shipment to the United States, which the FBI intercepted in Florida. According to declassified e-mail messages North led an effort to seek leniency for Bueso. The messages indicated the efforts of American officials to “cabal quietly” to get Bueso a “pardon, clemency, deportation, (or) reduced sentence.” Eventually they succeeded in getting Bueso a short sentence in “Club Fed,” a white collar prison in Florida. The Kerry committee report reviewed the case and noted that Bueso was involved in a conspiracy that the Justice Department deemed the most significant case of narco-terrorism ever discovered.

THE MATTA-SETCO-CALERO CONNECTION

This arms for drugs caper emerged in 1983 when Calero was placed in charge of the contras operating out of Honduras. It was at this time that Eden Pastora in Costa Rica was cut off the CIA payroll. Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros was a well-known drug dealer who spent part of the 1970s in a Colombian prison. He returned to Honduras in 1986 after bribing his way out of jail with $2 million. The DEA knew about Matta by 1978 when he was arrested at Dulles airport with 54 pounds of cocaine. However, by 1983 SETCO Matta’s air freight company was used by the Contras to run arms to the Contras in Honduras. According to the Kerry report SETCO was being used as the Contras’ main supplier of weapons in 1984. For these services, Matta was paid by North. The Kerry report also stated: “One of the pilots selected to fly Contra mission for the FDN (Contras) for SETCO was Frank Moss, who was under investigation as an alleged drug trafficker since 1979.” Two years after Iran-Contra broke in the United States the Justice Department extradited Matta who was a suspect in the murder of DEA agent Enrique Camarena in Mexico.

In July 1985, Michael Tolliver, a convicted American drug smuggler who was at a Georgia halfway house, was contacted by Barry Seal. Seal had contacts with the CIA and was released from prison early. He was told that he would receive $75,000 a trip if he were to fly arms from Miami’s airport into Honduras. According to Tolliver, Seal had 28,000 pounds of marijuana when he arrived at Homestead Air Base in Florida. Upon returning from Central America, Seal met “Hernandez” at the Fountainbleau Hotel and was paid $75,000. In October, FBI agents seized 763 pounds of cocaine with a wholesale value of $10 million in southern Florida. Among those arrested was Honduras’ former chief of staff of the army, General Bueso Rosa. In 1987, United States officials confiscated two shipments of cocaine weighing 6.7 tons. United States government investigators stated that it went directly to the doorstep of the Honduran military. The cocaine originated from the Cali cartel with whom Matta dealt directly. In 1987, the DEA had information which linked five top Honduran military officers with drug trafficking but was persuaded not to act since it may have endangered Honduran cooperation in the Contra war. By 1987, it was estimated that Honduras accounted for 20 to 50 percent of all cocaine which entered the United States from Latin America.

THE CUBAN-AMERICAN CONNECTION.

Bay of Pigs

Several groups of Miami-based Cuban-Americans provided direct or indirect support to the Contras when it was prohibited by the Boland Amendment. Rene Corbo was one who provided supplies and training with funds in part from drug money. Two other Cuban exiles, Mario Rejas Lavas and Ubaldo Hernandez Perez, were captured by Sandinistas in 1986. They were reportedly members of UNO/FARN which was headed by Fernando “El Nego” Chamorro. When the Kerry committee requested information on these Cuban-Americans, the Justice Department refused to provide any information on the grounds that the committee was merely carelessly rambling through its open investigations. The Justice Department advised this committee that the matter had been fully investigated and that the committee’s allegations were untrue. In May 1986, members of the Kerry committee met with CIA officials who categorically denied that weapons had been shipped to the Contras on planes involving Corvo. Yet the FBI had learned that Cuban-American supporters had shipped weapons from south Florida to Ilopango Air Base in Honduras as well as to John Hull’s ranch in Costa Rica.

THE DAN QUAYLE-ROBERT OWEN CONNECTION

Dan Quayle

Hull came to the United States in 1983 to convince Congress that Pastora should not be supported since he had allied himself with the Sandinista government. Hull met with Senator Quayle and Owen, his legislative aide. A year later Owen switched jobs and began to work for the Washington D.C. lobbying firm of Gray and Company. He was approached by Contra leader Calero who asked him to take on the task of raising money in the United States through non-profit organizations and companies for the Contras.Owen researched the financial and military needs of the Contras and passed the information on to North. Owen reported that between $1 million and $1.5 million was required on a monthly basis to keep the Contras equipped. In July 1984 purchased weapons from South Africa and returned to the United States where he met with Hull and Calero. Owen promised to provide Calero with $2,500 a month and Hull with $10,000 a month.

Owen also worked primarily with Neil Livingstone, who was responsible to Ed Wilson of the CIA. Additionally, he was North’s liaison, delivering Swiss bank account numbers to Taiwanese government officials who in turn made contributions to the Contras. In April 1985 Owen warned North that Costa Rican-based Contra leader Jose Robelo had the “potential involvement in drug running” and that another Contra, Sebastian Gonzalez, was “involved in drug running out of Panama.” In August 1985 North told Owen that the “DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into the United States.” In February 1986 Owen informed North that another Contra DC-4 was “used at one time to run drugs, and part of the crew had criminal records. Nice group the Boys (the CIA) chose.” Frank Castro, an ex-Cuban and Bay of Pigs veteran, was indicted in the 1970s for smuggling more than a million pounds of marijuana to the United States. Owen stated that Castro was heavily into drugs and that he had furnished Pastora with a DC-3 plane. Castro also hade visited Hull’s ranch in Costa Rica. The Kerry report also corroborated the allegations linking together North and Castro as part of a conspiracy to both gunrunning and drug trafficking.

THE EL SALVADOR CONNECTION

Col. James Steele

Colonel James Steele was the chief American military adviser in El Salvador and senior officer in charge of United States military operations which provided the Contras with weapons out of Ilopango airport. In December 1984, National Security adviser Gregg met with Felix Rodriguez and was given a position in El Salvador as a contra military advisor. The next month Rodriguez met with Bush to discuss the Contra job. In the summer of 1985 Rodriguez flew to Washington D.C. to meet with Gregg and Steele. According to Rodriquez’s testimony before the Kerry committee in 1987, Steele was in contact with Rodriguez from September 1985 through summer 1986. A North memorandum stated that Steele made Rodriguez his deputy and allowed him to use a military car as well as a KL-43 encrption device for secure telephone conversations. In March 1986, Steele met in Honduras with Rob Owen, North’s associate directing the Contra resupply operation from bases in Costa Rica. In a memo to North after the meeting, Owen suggested stockpiling weapons for the contras in Costa Rica at “Cincinnati,” a code word for the United States air base at Ilopango, El Salvador, where Steele was the American commander.

According to a crew member aboard a flight dropping supplies to the Contras in April 1986, Steele helped guide the mission. Nine days later after approximately 10 flights dropped arms and equipment to the southern front, Steele met with North, Secord and retired Colonel Richard Gadd in El Salvador. Gadd stated that Steele’s role suggested that higher officials in the Pentagon may have known and participated in the resupply effort. Mattes claimed that Steele could have testified as to whose authority that he operated in assisting the Contras during a time when the Boland Amendment was in place. Attorneys for the select committees deposed Steele in April 1987, but he was not called to the witness table.

THE PANAMA CONNECTION

Noriega in Call of Duty

Before he seized power as head of state, Manuel Noriega was first recruited by the United States Defense Intelligence Agency in 1959 while studying in Peru. By 1967 he was placed on the CIA payroll. At this time, he worked in conjunction with the United States military, which used Panama as a listening post in Latin America. After a failed coup in 1971 General Omar Torillos, who later became dictator, fled to Miami where he stated that Noriega had “operational control” of the narcotics trade through Panama.The Justice Department dropped the idea to attempt to indict Noriega. In 1976 Noriega was placed on the CIA payroll again, this time at $110,000 a year. When Carter was elected, Noriega was again dropped from the CIA. Carter’s major objective was to pass the Panama Canal Treaty, so all allegations against Noriega were suppressed. However, once the treaty was ratified by the Senate, the Panamanians got the word that America was open for drug trade. In 1980 Noriega was given full control over a special Panamanian intelligence unit. Noriega supplied at least seven pilots to run arms down from Florida. The pilots returned with cocaine.

The real Noriega

Panama Narco Routes

When Reagan took office in 1981, Noriega was immediately brought back by the CIA. His salary was increased, and his salary jumped to $185,000 a year, and by 1985 it reached $200,000. The CIA deposited Noriega’s illegal payoffs in the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), whose name made front page news in the summer of 1991 for laundering money. CIA Director Casey began meeting with Noriega in 1981. Noriega was paid $100,000 for the use of Panama as a middle country to run drugs from Colombia to the United States. His personal pilot, Floyd Carlton, stated that he received $400 per kilogram to run cocaine from Colombia into Panama. However, things turned sour for Carlton in 1985 when $3 million in cocaine was missing on flights into Costa Rica.Noriega supplied pilots and urged Pastora to unite with the Contra organization in Honduras. By 1985, Noriega promised to train Contras in Panama. Noriega met with North in London to discuss plans to set up training for booby trapping, night operations, and sabotage activities against Nicaraguan targets. Noriega stated that he would try to obtain Israeli commandos to work with the Contras. The Kerry report stated: “Noriega put his pilots to work flying weapons from Panama to Costa Rica for the Contras. …Many of the pilots moved mixed cargoes of guns and drugs to bases in Costa Rica, dropped off the guns and flew on to the United States with drugs.”

Invasion of Panama

In 1986 the Iran-Contra scandal broke, now making Noriega expendable. The next year his personal pilot, Carlton, was extradited to the United States. In 1988 Noriega himself was indicted by the Justice Department and was linked to drug trafficking for the first time. The following year the United States invaded Panama, and Noriega was kidnapped and taken to Miami for his trial. The CIA never turned his files over to the Justice Department. After Noriega was brought to the United States, the Bush administration placed Guillermo Endara in power. Endara was director and secretary of Banco Interoceanico which had been targeted by the DEA and FBI, and he named Carlton as a major person who laundered money through that bank from the Medellin and Cali cartels. The CIA also used Banco de Ibereoamerica as a front through which to launder money in Panama. Through this dummy company, North purchased arms from a Syrian drug and arms dealer, Manzer al-Kasser, who had ties to the Medellin cartel.

Bush and Noriega

THE VENEZUELA CONNECTION

Davila

In 1988, the CIA hired General Ramon Guillen Davila to investigate Venezuela’s drug enterprises, primarily the Cali cartel. With the help of the CIA, Guillen set up a drug smuggling operation which involved Venezuelan National Guardsmen. They purchased cocaine from the Cali cartel in Colombia, imported it to Venezuela, and stored it in warehouses which were run by Guillen and funded by the CIA. One CIA agent said “let the dope walk;” that is, to ship it northward into the United States. Another agent, Mark McFarlin, testified in Miami federal court in 1989 that he had informed the Caracas CIA agent chief that 3,000 pounds of cocaine had just been shipped to the United States. When the agent chief was informed that the DEA was unaware of the operation, he responded by telling McFarlane, “Let’s keep it that way.”

Between 1989 and 1992, 22 tons of cocaine flowed from the Guillen network into the Miami. In 1990, DEA agents in Caracas were informed of the illicit activity and made no attempt to intervene. Finally in 1992, United States Customs in Miami terminated the operation when they seized an 800 pound cocaine shipment. One of Guillen’s dealers, Adolfo Romero, was arrested and convicted on drug conspiracy charges. No action was taken against Guillen’s organization, and he simply dropped out of contact with the CIA. In November 1996, the Justice Department indicted Guillen on charges of importing cocaine into the United States. Guillen headed Venezuela’s anti-drug unit while smuggling over 22 tons of Cali and Bogata cartel cocaine into the United States and Europe. After he learned of his indictment, he went into seclusion in Caracas where he received a federal pardon. Guillen contended that Venezuelan cocaine shipments to the United States were authorized by the CIA. He said, “Some drugs were lost and neither the CIA nor the DEA want to accept any responsibility for it.”

EUGENE HASENFUS

Eugene Hasenfus

CIA operant Hasenfus was a “kicker” on a C-123 cargo plane which ran shipments to the Contras over Nicaragua. He would “kick out” the cargo which then parachuted down to the Contras in the field. When the plane was shot down by a hand-held surface-to-air missile, Hasenfus was able to parachute out. The plane’s crew also consisted of a Contra radio operator, American pilot Bill Cooper, and copilot Wallace “Buzz” Sawyer. Sawyer had in his possession the White House phone number of Vice President Bush. Telephone logs from the phone company in El Salvador for the “safe houses” used by the plane crew showed many calls to North’s White House office. Bush’s office was the first place notified after the C-123 crashed. Hasenfus claimed that this was done with the knowledge and approval of Bush. Telephone logs from the phone company in El Salvador used by the plane crew showed many calls to North’s White House office.

It was discovered that the plane was the same C-123 which had been used by Seal to run drugs into the United States. Earlier in 1983, Harry Doan had sold the C-123 to Seal who flew it to Rickenbacker Air Force Base in Ohio. It was there that it was outfitted with hidden cameras by the CIA. Seal then piloted the aircraft to Nicaragua and returned with 1,472 pounds of cocaine. The cameras filmed Federico Vaughan, who was an employee of the Nicaraguan Interior Ministry, helping load cocaine into the plane. Also, the plane’s logs indicated it had flown out of Colombia, home to the Medellin and Cali drug cartels. Flight logs in the plane indicated that it had made trips between Barranquilla, Colombia and Florida in 1985.

Only days after the downing of the aircraft Hasenfus told Nicaraguan authorities that “there were two Cuban nationalized Americans that worked for the CIA that did most of the coordination of the flights and overseeing all operation projects, transportation… also refueling and…flight plans.” Hasenfus identified the two as Felix Rodriguez and Ramon Medina. After Hasenfus was released by the Sandinistas several weeks later, he returned to the United States and testified that he worked for the CIA and that he reported to Gomez (alias Felix Rodriguez) and Medina (alias Luis Posada Carriles) with the knowledge and approval of Bush.

A Reagan administration official, who was familiar with contra activities, claimed that the crew of the C-123 was flying supply missions for the State Department’s Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office, which was responsible for providing $27 million in nonlethal aid to the Contras earlier in 1985.The Kerry committee learned that Southern Air Transport of Miami had provided the plane. Southern Air denied any knowledge, and no charges were brought against this front. The CIA denied any knowledge of Hasenfus and also stated that he was working outside the jurisdiction of the federal government. After several weeks, Hasenfus was released and returned to the United States where he subsequently received no aid or support by the government.

- The Green Chazzan 

*EDITOR’S NOTE:  This article was written during the beginning of the Church Committee investigating illegal activities by the CIA. This article contains Col. Lucien Conein’s statements to members of that investigation committee.

Excerpt From “DEA Shopped For Assassination Gear” by AJ Weberman (1978)

Images of Conein Are Rare

…Lucien Conein at age 17 fled his hometown in Kansas to join the French Foreign Legion during World War II. He would be recruited into the OSS in France where he lived and fought with the Corsican Mafia as part of The Resistance. The Corsican Brotherhood is an underworld organization deeply involved in the international drug trade which proved to be sometimes more dangerous than their Sicilian counterparts.

After the liberation, Conein parachuted into Vietnam to join the OSS Team fighting the Japanese alongside Ho Chi Minh and General Giap. In 1954, he was back in Vietnam fighting his old allies as one of General Edward Lansdale’s Special Forces Team. He helped President Diem consolidate power in Vietnam, but in 1963  he was Henry Cabot Lodges’ liaison at the US Embassy along with the cabal of generals who murdered him. Although Conein married a Vietnamese woman, and was on intimate terms with most of the Vietnamese high command, he was sent back to Washington as most in the CIA considered him ‘unstable’.

Daniel Ellsberg

He soon returned to Vietnam as part of an elite counterinsurgency team which included Daniel Ellsberg. It was this association which brought him to the attention of E. Howard Hunt at the Nixon White House, who knew Conein from OSS and Operation Jedburgh. Hunt consulted with Conein regarding forged telegrams he had produced implicating that Kennedy had ordered the assassination of Diem. For his complicity, Conein was rewarded with a high ranking position at the Drug Enforcement Agency as its liaison to the CIA. He would eventually be promoted to Head of Special Operations of the Strategic Intelligence Section of the DEA.

Conein, when questioned about his activities, was called upon a remark made about the BR Fox Catalog of military assassination equipment indicating that the company was owned by Mitch Werbell…Conein went on to claim that BR Fox was legally licensed and doing work for the US government. In reality, BR Fox was part of the government, an appendage of CIA agent Bernard Spindel, who had worked closely with Jimmy Hoffa. In 1974, the BR Fox Company shared an office with Mitch Werbell in the La Salle Building on Connecticut Avenue in Washington DC. This was during the period that Werbell was negotiating an arms deal with Robert Vesco, a fugitive in Costa Rica. Werbell sold Vesco 2,000 silenced machine pistols but was unable to secure an export license, instead agreeing to build an arms factory in Costa Rica. Werbell reportedly transferred the arms shipment to 12 CIA agents who were used by Conein to conduct paramilitary operations against ‘drug smugglers’.

Mitch Werbell III

Conein denied attempting to appropriate assassination equipment from Werbell despite being a known CIA/DEA assassin in South America. Peer da Silva, former Saigon Station Chief commented: “You have to start out with the premise that Lou Conein is crazy. He worked with me in Vietnam, if work is the word, in CIA we have all kinds of villains and rogues involved as well as heroes, and within reason if you keep them all under control, then people like him can do things that other people cannot do and that is how they survive”. Conein once told journalist George Crile III that the DEA “had no cover as far as breaking laws  and after the damn Church Committee we will have even less. You can’t do it because 12 or 13 years later you might have to stand up there with your balls exposed.”

Document #1

MEMORANDUM: PETE KINSEY (SEN. WEICKER)
SUBJECT: INTERVIEW WITH COL. LUCIEN CONEIN

On January 21, 1975 Senator Weicker and I interviewed Col. Lucien Conein who is currently the head of special operations of the strategic intelligence section of the Drug Enforcement Agency.

Conein said that he retired from the CIA in 1968. In 1969, he went to South Vietnam on his own where he tried to make some money through his connections. Being ‘unsuccessful’ he returned to the US in early 1971. He went to France with his wife for six weeks and returned in April of 1971. Upon his return, he was contacted by the White House regarding his knowledge of opium in Southeast Asia. Egil Krogh was the first person to talk to Conein about this, he asked him about the drug situation and what he would do if he had the responsibility to run counter-operations. Conein prepared a paper in response, outlining his actions and ideas to Krogh.

Krogh asked Conein to set up a drug intelligence organization, explaining that while the White House was receiving input from Customs and the Bureau of Narcotics (BNDD) that he wanted an outsider. Conein wrote a second brief stating that trafficking organizations had to be penetrated using the same clandestine means employed by the CIA in Southeast Asia. Conein then received a call to discuss issues further with E. Howard Hunt in early July of 1971. Hunt guaranteed that Conein’s orders would come directly from the President and be under the legal protection of Executive Privilege. Hunt interviewed Conein at the White House and asked him about Daniel Ellsberg who had worked with him in Vietnam was creating a stir with the Pentagon Papers. Conein said that Ellsberg was thought very highly of, so much so, that he was recruited into Ambassador Porter’s staff.

Conein said that he was surprised when camera crews arrived at his house following the release of the Pentagon Papers. Conein said Bill Gill of ABC handed him a copy of the New York Times and had underlined Conein’s name in numerous places. Conein told Gill that he could not speak with him because of the security requirements placed upon him by the CIA. Gill then told Conein that he would contact the CIA to obtain permission for Conein to talk. The CIA told Gill that Conein’s information was classified.

Conein denied direct contact with Kissinger although he admitted to frequent contact with his aides. He said that he knew Haig from Vietnam and knew John Lehman as well but that others ‘he couldn’t remember or recall’. Conein admitted that Hunt called to verify the conversation with the press and that the CIA had arranged to meet him for debriefing at a local bowling alley. Conein alleged that he was given an envelope with $500 inside with $20 denominations. He scoffed at the amount and reportedly mailed back the envelope with the money to Langley signed ‘Luigi’.

Conein claimed he was contacted by the media again for an NBC white paper being developed on the Diem coup. Conein was told by the White House that they were interested in seeing him interviewed, in particular to relay the prepared information by Hunt as to how they wanted to put Diem’s death on Kennedy. Conein refused, stating that his only interest in the story was to illustrate what the CIA had done to prevent the assassination and that he believed that his interview in December of 1971 did not come out the way he thought it should have.

Conein stated that he was invited to the White House by Krogh in January of 1972, to receive an offer for paid intelligence work. It involved papers and advisement relating to international drug trafficking. Krogh told him after the work was concluded that he could not be kept at the White House but could be transferred into Customs or BNDD. He became a consultant for BNDD Intelligence in June of 1972 until he received a permanent position in December of that year. Conein denied meeting Charles Colson or John Scalin. He said he had learned of Colson posing as ‘Fred Charles’ as a result of the Watergate testimony.

Conein never denied seeing the forged cables produced by Hunt that implicated Kennedy. He said that all cables had been classified Top Secret and could not read all of them because of his security clearance. Conein saw the rest of the cables when approached by them with Steve Lambert from Life Magazine. He said after reading those cables he ‘realized he had been played for a patsy by Henry Cabot Lodge’. Conein said that after he saw that he went home and called Colby at CIA on a secure phone, told him about the cables and what they implied. Colby said that he had never seen the cables either. Conein said the cable showed complicity of the White House in instructions to Lodge to have Diem assassinated but that they may not have been ordered by the President; Conein cited that Lodge’s communique at 6 am was unlikely as Lodge was never awake at 6 am.

Conein said that the BNDD-CIA agreement was terminated in July of 1973 and that he never met Ehrlichman. He stated that after Nixon’s big meeting on narcotics in 1972, the CIA formed a narcotics unit to coordinate intelligence activities. He said that, for example, the CIA in Laos in 1971 were not concerned about drug trafficking and that action was required when Nixon stepped up efforts on international trafficking. Coordination was required so that the President’s initiatives wouldn’t catch the CIA off guard. Krogh was the coordinator at the White House and chaired the oversight committee responsible for overseeing the operations.

At BNDD (now DEA) Conein worked in strategic intelligence. His job was to start assembling the necessary information to develop patterns for drug trafficking organizations. At DEA he now heads up the special operations section which involves training individuals to go into a country to gather intelligence on drug trafficking operations. Conein said the DEA man will establish the operation, the host country will approve and that they will go in-country to train the host countries authorities. Conein said that this involves recruiting in-country nationals and supplying and training them in the use of advanced weapons, electronic bugging and surveillance equipment. Conein specified that he had three men on his staff and 14 individuals in various stages of training.

When Sen. Weicker showed Conein the BR Fox Company catalogue, Conein made an outright comment about Mitch Werbell. He mentioned using bugging devices from Werbell overseas. He stated that Mike Morrissey of BR Fox made such equipment and that he often showed Conein his surveillance and assassination equipment for sale. Conein denied knowing Bernard Spindel but admitted to knowing his wife, he denied ever purchasing anything from Spindel or Werbell. Weicker stated that he believed Morrissey was making the equipment directly for Conein, of which Conein denied and said he would swear under oath. Conein denied ordering the ASTRO series from Werbell, Morrissey or Spindel but that in April of 1974, he ordered bugging and surveillance equipment for use overseas, including 6 modified telephones. He claimed that he never used any of the equipment despite its purchase. He admitted that he first met Morrissey in 1973 and that Morrissey wanted to sell weapons to the Justice Department, Conein stated he was more interested in surveillance equipment. He denied meeting Morrissey on more than four or five occasions. He said that DEA ordered the equipment for him but that they did not use Werbell after that because delivery had been late.

Conein admitted that he knew Mitch Werbell previously from working together at OSS China. He said that Werbell was an arms manufacturer and that he had been to his training camps in Georgia. He said Werbell was a big ‘wheeler dealer’ and had wanted Conein to go to London to discuss importing ‘scrap’ from Vietnam. Conein said Werbell had thousands of weapons and that he specialized in making silencers for various machine guns. Conein then denied that Morrissey had showed him the assassination equipment, implying Werbell and that the equipment was superior because it was electronic. Conein commented that Werbell was ‘once CIA, always CIA’.

Conein then explained to Senator Weicker that he should ask for an FBI investigation and he would voluntarily take a polygraph. He said that Werbell’s company wanted to sell him the equipment because they thought he was still deeply tied into the CIA. Weicker then asked Conein why he did not launch an inquiry after seeing the assassination equipment; Conein replied that BR Fox was legally licensed and doing work for the government. Conein said the only agency that would be interested in the ASTRO line was the CIA. Conein said that he warned Werbell to not allow the equipment to be sold to organized crime as ‘they would have a field day’. Conein also mentioned that Frank Searle from DEA had attended the meeting.

I called Frank at his office at DEA and asked him to join us for a meeting. Searle gave the same story as Conein, stating that he had taken an ‘academic interest’ in the equipment simply because he had never seen anything like it. He said that the ASTRO equipment was demonstrated out of professional pride and that he ‘could not recall’ whether or not Morrissey had sold weapons to Conein or any agency, but he did confirm suspicions that BR Fox was under the CIA. He stated that DEA never approved the operation in which the equipment was intended for use and that as a result of recent Supreme Court decisions on wiretapping that the wiretaps could not be used overseas….”

Lord of The Golden Triangle (8 min each)

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

The CIA’s Secret War in Laos (1960-1970) Best Film Archives

The Secret Government (Bill Moyers PBS 1987)

Excerpts from The Great Heroin Coup

by Henrik Kruger (1981)

Drugs Intelligence & International Fascism

Santo Trafficante

Quote from The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia:

“Heroin Kingpin Santo Trafficante Jr. boarded a jet in the summer of 1968 to seek his new fortune. Trafficante liked what he saw in his Southeast Asian tour. With enough trained chemists, his Mob could be supplied with heroin at fraction of what was then paying out to the Corsicans. But first the smuggling networks had to be worked out and the Corsicans had to be eliminated. That was a job for President Nixon and his White House staff, the BNDD, a White House death squad, and the Central Intelligence Agency.”

The Role of Nixon

Nixon

Control of this effort was placed in the hands of a relative unknown, a young and inexperienced Egil Krogh, a newcomer. Krogh was less than satisfied with existing narcotics efforts, especially those of the CIA, whose intelligence reports, according to Federal Narcotics head Ingersoll, were decisive for the work of the BNDD (Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs). Krogh wanted the White House instead to handle the BNDD’s intelligence work. Nixon’s staff would then decide which drug traffickers to pursue. Krogh’s dissatisfaction was expressed to E. Howard Hunt, who immediately proposed an Office of National Narcotics Intelligence (ONNI) where all narcotics intelligence reports would be analyzed and follow up actions decided.

Conein in Vietnam

Hunt told Krogh he could enlist for the office experienced CIA figures, starting with Lucien Conein as its head. Nixon, however, chose William C. Sullivan instead. Once second to J. Edgar Hoover in the FBI, Sullivan had managed Division 5, which investigated espionage, sabotage and subversion. He also directed Operation CoIntelPro, the bureau’s vendetta against dissident political and cultural groups like the Black Panthers, and had been Nixon’s choice to direct the Huston Plan’s elaborate surveillance of U.S. citizens. Hunt nevertheless found a niche for his friend. Conein was assigned to the BNDD as a “strategic intelligence officer” and came to control overseas narcotics intelligence, originally the domain of ONNI, while Sullivan concentrated on domestic affairs.

The White House now controlled narcotics intelligence at home and abroad, but that still wasn’t enough. Nixon’s staff also sought to control enforcement itself, and that required effective strike forces. In January 1972, the White House set up the Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement (ODALE) according to a plan conceived by G. Gordon Liddy. It became the domestic strike force under Mile Ambrose – whose government career ended with news of his pleasure trip to the ranch of a Texan indicted for narcotics and gun running. ODALE soon became notorious for its record illegal raids, no-knock entries into private homes and beatings of innocent people. Many called them the American Gestapo.

G Gordan Liddy

U.S. Narcs proceeded to wipe out the Corsican’s Turkey-Marseilles-U.S.A. pipeline, especially in South America ignoring Southeast Asia completely. In Vietnam, meanwhile from 1969 to 1970, pot sniffing dogs banished grass from the barracks and 90% pure heroin suddenly became available. 14-year old girls stuffed it in GI’s pockets for peanuts. By 1971, Congress found that 15% of all GI’s returning from Vietnam were addicted. Thus, when agents of French Intelligence were compromised bringing in loads welded into Mercedes bodies, and New York’s finest bragged of bagging the French Connection. The only heroin shortage came from there being 4 times more junkies on Election Day of 1971 than when Nixon was inaugurated.

That Nixon might have been involved is lent credence by the following quote from Dan Moldea:  “a former Nixon aide, not privy to the Haig investigation, says that one his associates in the White House mentioned to him sometime during the impeachment summer, that someone high up, maybe General Alexander Haig, was interested in Nixon’s possible ‘organized crime involvements’. That conversation involved a massive payoff from those in the Army Service Club scandals in Vietnam during 1969 and 1970, The aide says that the service club scandal ripoffs involved the Mafia and millions of dollars and that the main focus of ‘someone high up’ in the White House was on whether ‘the top mafia guy’ who ran ‘all these things in Southeast Asia’ had made payoffs to Nixon. The crime figure, he says, was ‘the one who was apparently known as the so-called mastermind or architect of the Southeast Asian drug trade, and was a very powerful and very well known as a mob leader. According to the government narcotics experts, the central figure in the Indochina Golden Triangle narcotics traffic was Santo Trafficante.”

Chief of OSS China – Paul Helliwell

In my opinion, the central manipulator in the whole narcotics scheme was the CIA or rather a faction within it. It is erroneous to treat the Agency as a monolith. Various lobby groups have their own agents in the company, generating internal power struggles that reflect political polarizations external to the CIA. Equally certain is the fact that one should take the agency’s new benign face with a grain of salt. Within the agency there remains powerful groups promoting continued support of ‘old friends’ in Latin America and Southeast Asia. The China/Cuba Lobby has traditionally been one of the most influential within the CIA and there is little reason to believe the situation has seriously changed. In addition to the CIA’s new official policy there is also an unofficial one. It manifests itself in such matters as the manipulation of the DEA to perform what previously had been CIA dirty work, and in toleration, if not encouragement of a large, apparently independent army of Cuban exile terrorists, available for action in Latin America at the request of the presiding dictators.

The evidence suggests that the forces behind the unofficial policy were able to place many of their loyal CIA agents in the DEA, and in such private intelligence agency covers as Intertel and Wackenhut, where they continue their tasks while letting the agency wash its hands. Intelligence is still gathered by the CIA, but some of the dirtiest operations are now performed by ‘former’ agents. We cannot of course, discount the possibility that the unofficial policy is in fact executed by former agents who had either been purged from the agency or left in protest against its new moderate political line. However that implies that a renegade CIA faction now runs an independent service, aided by lobby interests ie. Not Intertel but as an even more powerful third force. If that is so, I can come up with only one lobby group with the relevant motives as well as the power to back them – The World Anti-Communist League (WACL). The League can mobilize CIA agents closely associated with the China/Cuba/Chile Lobby, especially the large contingent of former agents from the Nazi Gehlen organization, Hitler’s intelligence agency which became the BND, the West German equivalent of the CIA.

 CIA ‘Old Boys’ Work DEA Scam

E Howard Hunt

E Howard Hunt and Lucien Conein pulled off the great heroin coup. Hunt secured Cuban exiles including Barker and Manuel Artime to kidnap and assassinate the independent French Narcotics-for-guns traffickers in Paraguay and the rest of South America, while Conein focused White House attentions exclusively on the Corsicans, with whom he had previous experience as a member of Operation Jedbergh.

Creation of the DEA was intended not consolidate but to obfuscate. To quote Customs Official Ron Rosenbaum:

“BNDD and Customs are finally getting somewhere, they break up the French Connection, and they’re getting big conspiracy cases. Suddenly they [the White House] step in and there is this big shake up, and by the time people get back to work the Mexican Connection is set up, protected and doing big business. What does this say to you?”

The Mexican Connection

Mexican heroin included not just the brown mud locally produced to provide cheap stuff for new users in the States; it included regular transshipments of No. 4 China White from Southeast Asia for the veins of the most discriminating users. The emergence of the DEA was the next to last phase, Hunt and Conein’s CIA agents moved into DEA intelligence and operations. Conein located 12 Latino CIA agents in his Special Operations Group alone. His forces were directed mostly against small time independents, the biggest Cuban network led by Santo Trafficante remained untouched.

That brings us to the last, political phase of the heroin coup, which began with the DEA’s 1974 takeover of the CIA’s Latin American torture apparatus and ended with the formation of CORU, a terrorist army. The brutalities financed by the heroin coup continue. The DEA protects major narcotics dealers. The latter support – financially through gun running – anti-Communist paramilitary groups which work hand in hand with Latin American police and military forces, whose death squads and torturers are supervised by agents of the DEA. There is reason to believe that there are 2 ‘wings’ of the DEA – one of them ‘clean’ and out to bust the other, crooked one – and the split is dated right from the formation of the Agency under Nixon.

Final Consolidation of the DEA

DEA

In July of 1973, Nixon’s narcotics forces were essentially consolidated according to Reorganization Plan No. 2 worked out by former CIA agent Walter Minnick and Egil Krogh. The DEA formed from the ranks of BNDD, ODALE, ONNI and Customs Intelligence. 4,000 operatives including 50 CIA agents (among them Cubans from the ODALE hardcore), 500 customs agents and most of the BNDD staff made the DEA a powerful new agency. No bureau has been as plagued by scandal as the DEA has in 7 years of existence. The exposes and charges run the gamut from trafficking in drugs, teamwork with the Mob, and protection of major traffickers, to thievery, gunrunning, torture and assassination of drug traffickers.

When Lucien Conein became the head of the DEA’s Special Operations Branch he allegedly carried out an assassination program after setting up the DEA’s Special Operations Group (DEASOG) under cover of the B. R. Fox Company housed on Connecticut Avenue in Washington DC. DEASOG shared its Washington office with an old friend and colleague of Hunt and Conein’s from OSS China, the weapons dealing soldier of fortune and specialist in assassination, Mitch Werbel III. Werbell had been a business partner of Conein’s as late as 1974 and they had worked together on providing the DEA with assassination devices. Among Werbell’s other associates were Frank Sturgis, the leaders of the Cuban Exile and Robert Vesco, who, like Werbell, has been charged with bankrolling narcotics smuggling.

Mitch Werbell III

Assassination, it can be argued became a modus operandi under Richard Nixon. The CIA carried out extermination campaigns in Vietnam, Guatemala, Argentina and Brazil – aided in Latin America by local military death squads. The White House appears to have sponsored a secret assassination program under the cover of drug enforcement. It was continued by the DEA, which seemingly overlapped with the CIA in the political arena. Until 1974 the training of torturers and members of Latin American death squads came under the auspices of the CIA and USAID’s Office of Public Safety. Some 100,000 Brazilian policemen, for example, were trained and 523 of them were chosen for courses in the USA. They were trained at the International Police Academy in Georgetown and at a secret CIA center in the same city on R street, under cover of International Police Services Inc. When school was out the prize pupils returned home to moonlight with the death squads.

After Tupemaros guerillas kidnapped and killed the U.S. police advisor Dan Mitrione in Uruguay, Washington’s schools for foreign police came into the limelight and Congress cut off their funding. Nonetheless, training programs and direct assurance through supervision continued. A 1976 investigation authorized by Senator James Abourezk revealed that the U.S. torture academies had not been in fact completely closed down. According to Jack Anderson, Abourezk found such a school had been in operation since 1974 in Los Fresnos, Texas at the site of a former bomb school. Another journalist, William Hoffman, later confirmed the existence of the school for torture at the same site and that it had since moved to Georgia, where it was known as the Law Enforcement Training Center. Interestingly, Conein’s friend Werbell runs his own large training center in Georgia called The Farm. It’s used for, among other things, the training of law enforcement officials.

Lopez Rega

Much of the old police support apparatus was simply transferred to AID’s International Narcotics Control Program (INC) which was controlled by the DEA. In 1974, the DEA utilized 400 agents in Latin America or roughly the number of advisors recalled from the OPS program. INC’s budget for technical equipment abroad jumped from $2.2 million in 1973 to $12.4 million in 1974.The politics of the new drug effort was exposed in 1974 when the man behind Argentina’s notorious death squad, the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (AAA), Social Minister Lopez Rega, appeared on TV with U.S. Ambassador Robert C. Hill to publicize the two nation’s anti-narcotics collaboration with the words “The Guerillas are the main users of drugs in Argentina. Therefore the anti-drug campaign will automatically be an anti-guerilla campaign as well”.

It’s striking how close the various extermination and repression campaigns have been to the narcotics traffic. The Meo Army deployed by the CIA in Laos smuggled large quantities of opium. Lopez Rega and his Argentine AAA henchmen were eventually exposed as keys to a cocaine ring. One of the chief AAA hatchet men, Francois Chiappe, was a lieutenant in the Ricord-David heroin network. He had excellent connections in Peronist circles. A former OAS Commando Delta member in Algeria, he remained in touch with other OAS figures assembled in the Paladin Group, a fascist terrorist combine founded in Spain by the Nazi war criminal Col. Otto Skorzeny. It was among the organizations to which Juan Peron’s grey eminence. Jose Lopez Rega, formed the dreaded AAA terror death squad.

Otto Skorzeny

When the Peronist Hector Campora became President of Argentina in May 1973, Chiappe was released and immediately recruited back into the AAA. When Peron himself returned a month later from 18 years of exile in Spain, an enormous crowd gathered at Ezeisa airport on June 20 to greet him. Among them was a large contingent of Monteneros and other Leftists, security police were well aware of their presence. Police and AAA terrorists led by Col. Jorge Osinde attacked the demonstrators with machine guns and hand grenades. 100 were killed and 300 were badly wounded. The AAA’s prisoners were dragged to the airport parking lot and tortured. Two of the more zealous hatchet men were Chiappe and former OAS Colonel Jean Gardes.

Many of the Corsicans booted from SAC fled to Spain to join the Paladin Group where they learned to work side by side with former OAS agents. Paraguay’s most ruthless officers were exposed as heroin profiteers, and finally as we go to press we learn that dictator, Pinochet, assumed control of Chile’s cocaine trade, then turned it over to his secret police, the DINA, who work with the Cuban Exile group operating under the DEA.

Mitch Werbell and The Mexican Connection

Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo

Alberto Sicilia Falcone, “The Mexican Connection” who was not even Mexican but a Cuban Bay of Pigs veteran, turned up in Mexico in 1973 at the hub of a gigantic heroin and marijuana establishment. He was arrested when it was discovered that he was trading China White for guns to destabilize the Mexican government under Echevarria. On July 2 1975 Sicilia-Falcone was arrested. Under heavy interrogation he claimed to be an agent of the CIA and that the drug ring had been set up on orders from and with the support of the agency. Part of his profits were to go toward the purchase of weapons and ammunition for distribution throughout Central America for the destabilization of ‘undesirable governments’. If true, the U.S. heroin addicts were again footing the bill for clandestine paramilitary operations and Anti-Communist terror campaigns. Sicilia-Falcone and his Syndicate associates were not short of funds, police found two Swiss bank account books in his possession to the tune of $260 million. In the Sicilia-Falcone case the CIA and DEA struggled bitterly against one another. It was sympathetic of the split within the DEA’s own ranks, a split rooted in the effective control of its narcotics division by transplanted agents of the CIA. Since the DEA’s emergence, many agents have resigned in disgust.

Mitch Werbell, as former Number 3 White House Narc under E. Howard Hunt, Conein and Nixon was permitted to operate with impunity. In August of 1976 Lucien Conein’s chum Mitch Werbell (whose BR Fox Company served as cover for Conein’s Special Operations Group) was brought before a Miami federal court on charges of conspiracy to smuggle 50,000 pounds of marijuana a month from Colombia to the United States. Werbell was found innocent and released, just like the Thai opium smuggler and CIA agent, Puttaporn Khramkhruan before him in 1973. He went home to Georgia to pursue his weapons business and law enforcement training camp. According to writer, Hank Messick, 1978 he was involved in Far Right politics with the likes of Major General John K. Singlaub (who was relieved of command after outspoken criticism of President Carter) and members of the American Security Council – the key US link to the Far Right’s national umbrella organization, the World Anti-Communist League (WACL). As reported recently in the New York Times, the beneficiaries of his anti-terrorist training have included members of the Far Right and Anti-Semitic U.S. Labor Party.

General John K. Singlaub

Werbell owns 8 companies, most of them dealing in firearms used by law enforcement and intelligence units. One of the firms, Studies in the Operational Negation of Insurgents and Counter-Subversion (SIONICS), specializes in the production of M10 and M11 silenced machine pistols. The latter 2 weapons, designed by Gordon Ingram and Werbell, are about the ultimate weapons for terror and extermination. Their sales agent was Werbell’s Military Armament Corporation. Together with the Anti-Castro Cuban arms dealers Anselmo Allegro and the mercenary, Gerry Hemming, Werbell founded the Parabellum Corporation in 1971 in Miami. Parabellum was licensed by the government to sell arms to South America. It was also the firm from which Frank Sturgis planned to obtain weapons for Cuban Exiles who were going to disrupt the Miami 1972 conventions.

In 1974 Werbell – according to a motion filed by his own lawyer when Werbell, his son and his company Defense Services Inc. were charged with illicit weapons sales – was involved ‘in a conspiracy among the CIA, Robert Vesco, and various corporations to finance clandestine guerilla activities in Latin America.” Vesco wanted to purchase Werbell’s stock of 2,000 silenced M10 machine pistols. When Werbell failed to secure an export license, he devised a plan to smuggle the weapons to Vesco. The two later negotiated the construction of a factory in Costa Rica which would be licensed to fabricate pistols. Intriguingly in the same period someone was negotiating with a U.S. firm for rights to fabricate in Mexico, fully automatic weapons for clandestine activities in Latin America. That individual was Mexico’s Cuban Exile Heroin Czar, Alberto Sicilia-Falcon, and among the weapons he purchased were the Ingram M10 and 9mm Parabellum.

Although the M10 and M11 could be acquired through special US permission, large numbers of silenced M10’s turned up in the hands of European right wing terrorists from 1975 to 1977. Pierluigi Concutelli, leader of the Italian terrorist group Ordine Nuovo, was arrested in Rome in 1977, police found a silenced M10 in his apartment, which he had used to murder the Roman magistrate Vittorio Occorsio. The magistrate had been shot on the streets of Rome in July 1976 after announcing he would expose the close collaboration between Right Wing groups and the Mafia. However, it was among Spanish terrorists in particular that Werbell’s machine pistols appeared in quantity. Most notably, a sizeable consignment of M10’s sent to Spain under license from US authorities had been purchased by the Spanish Intelligence Agency DGS, who had allegedly coordinated the terrorist attacks.

Robert Vesco

The fugitive billionaire Vesco employed a large contingent of trained Cubans to run his Costa Rican operation. His weapons negotiations coincided with the efforts of the fanatic Anti-Castro leader Orlando Bosch who assembled many of the Cuban cells into the terror group CORU, that would later carry out wet work assassinations for several Latin American regimes. During Bosch’s 1975 drive, a wave of murder struck Miami’s Cuban exile haven. Most victims were opposed to Bosch, and with them removed CORU was firmly established in June of 1976.

Vesco also once employed narcotics agents, in 1972 two bugging specialists from BNDD flew from Los Angeles to New Jersey to sweep Vesco’s house and office of surveillance devices. The sweeping tour had been arranged by an admitted friend of Vesco’s who had also been involved in supplying the fugitive with 2,000 machine guns and helping him establish a weapons factory in Costa Rica.

Heroin and The Strategy of Tension

Mussolini

The great innovative leap beyond the Corsican’s they displaced is that they are fully prepared to utilize the heroin traffic, not just to make money but to promote a strategy of tension. The ‘strategy of tension’ was a concept invented by Benito Mussolini as a way of turning around the Marxist idea of class struggle. Mussolini preached collaboration between workers and capitalists, but in capturing power he welcomed class struggle because the strategy of tension would exploit turmoil and chaos to win over weary middle elements who just wanted peace. When his black shirted Fascisti attacked the communists, it only created more demand for severe law and order measures from the police that he controlled.

It took Mussolini about 6 years to come to power. In his final days of government consolidation he turned against liberal newspapers and other voices of dissent. Locking them up became a moderate alternative to the continued violence of the extreme Fascisti whom Mussolini claimed he had to pacify. This would not be politically possible today, yet by maintaining the plausible deniability of complicity between the three working parts of the War on Drugs politicians (The Big 5 Bloc: Tobacco, Alcohal, Prisons, CIA/Police and Pharma), narcotics agencies and drug cartels, today’s far right wing rising to power on a tide of violence. The beauty of it is while 85% of drug busts continue to be for weed, none of the heat for diverting enforcement from heroin backfire on the narcotics agencies.

All 3 levels exploit the air current together. The top – War on Drugs Bloc – (**Editor: The Consortium**) directs the next level down – DEA and Narcotics Officials – against petty groups, individuals and non-conformist states, while keeping outside factors like the press from focusing on the bottom level, which was formed with the trained commando groups – Cuban Exiles, Ex-Iranian and South American intelligence assets, and trained members of various crime syndicates to distribute the heroin and influence the entertainment and media world.

Instead of compromising right wing reputations or upsetting their strategy, the very smack traffic they’re protecting fosters the street crime which new right wing politicians can, in turn, use to get elected or re-elected, by calling for more police, more prisons, more foreign operations and more law & order.

George Bush w/ Crack Bag

Heroin Fascism (**aka Narcostatism**), which was supposed to be far away or ‘over there’, confined to Iran, Afghanistan or the Golden Triangle of Burma, has come home to New York’s Lower East Side with a sense of vengeful economic super exploitation and increasingly cavalier repression of the populace. Not only does it eliminate non-conformists and undesirables, the whole combine sets up sympathetic vibes in widely separated scenes, so that normal people with common sense who wouldn’t listen to the War on Drugs Bloc, and maybe even disparage the DEA, end up being conditioned into surprisingly right wing attitudes in order to ‘get ahead’ within the system.

When we look at the flood of heroin now coming in from the Iran-Afghanistan-Pakistan Golden Crescent, it is said to be ten times more than the early ‘70s flow from the Golden Triangle, and a hundred times more than the Corsican flow from Turkey. The situation has passed its breaking point, how long can the great heroin scandals of 1981 continue to be obfuscated and covered up depends on the sincerity of the investigator and reporters who are supposed to print the truth.

- The Green Chazzan

Excerpt from A New Heroin Conspiracy?

by Dana Beal (1982)

Bayer Heroin

“In a development that is scarcely surprising to veteran observers of the U.S. drug scene, DEA Director Director Peter Bensinger has concurred in an internal evaluation report [that very few] big heroin busts were performed by its Northeastern Office during 1980. Arrest figures for the Northeast Region, which is headquartered in New York but stretches from Maine to Delaware and include such main heroin centers as Newark, Boston, and Philly, have been lagging suspiciously behind the national trend-especially for heroin arrests-despite a ‘disproportionate’ commitment of resources and ‘inordinately high’ operating expenses.

For DEA critics, who predicted a big upsurge of heroin and other hard drugs when the DEA commenced its crackdown on marijuana two years ago, these statistics have significance far beyond confirmation of the critics claim that every time enforcement is diverted into a ‘War on Marijuana’, there is a heroin epidemic. The way gross statistical analysis showed a suspicious drop in heroin seizures specifically during an ‘epidemic’ has fueled suspicions concerning preliminary reports that New York Regional DEA Director John W. Fallon is also being investigated by the FBI on charges that he arranged to “expedite the entry of numerous private citizens into the country through JFK airport”. Are those the first hints of another high-level heroin conspiracy on the order of the classic Arnold Rothstein-Custom Service scandal of 1927? Of course nothing ever happens the same way twice, but once again New York finds itself inundated with smack.

Smack Scandals of 1927

To get beyond banalities about today’s ‘heroin epidemic’ it might be enlightening to consider what happened (and happened many times again) in the 1920’s, the decade heroin was prohibited.

The 20’s is more commonly thought of as the decade of Alcohal Prohibition, but most people don’t realize that Prohibition-just as it hand unintended effects of glamorizing booze and promoting organized crime-made it possible for one man to monopolize smack during those years, and for a small group of officials in the Treasury Department to become rich.

Arnold Rothstein – The original Mr. Big

Today, Arnold Rothstein is remembered as “the man who fixed the 1919 World Series” and inspired Meyer Lansky, but his real claim to fame is that with the help of insiders in the Treasury Department, he protected a monopoly controlling 85% of all smack in the U.S. by skillfully diverting enforcement efforts into Alcohal Prohibition. Trunk-loads of pure heroin were forwarded to Rothstein by cooperative Customs Officials under the protection of the higher ups from Washington, while machine gun wielding G-men routinely executed ‘wets’ apprehending beer brewers in their basements. The whistle was eventually blown, not in D.C., but when a U.S. Grand Jury in New York became suspicious and Arnold Rothstein was shot before he could testify. Before the uproar died down, the papers found out Rothstein had retained a lawyer (to defend himself against Income Tax Evasion) who happened to be the nephew of Colonel McNutt, Chief of Narcotic and Prohibition Enforcement for the Northeastern Region.

Harry J Anslinger

The resulting furor, as ordinary people realized that the Common Man’s booze was being persecuted to protect dope fiends, marked the turning point in attitudes towards Prohibition. But more immediately, it caused the breakup of the Treasury’s enforcement operations into separate alcohol and narcotics divisions, and the elevation of the son-in-law of then Treasury Secretary Mellon, Harry J. Anslinger, from bureaucratic obscurity to new U.S. Chief Narc. With these ‘reforms’ and the end of Alcohol Prohibition, you might expect that concentrated enforcement would’ve finished off heroin in America. But Anslinger’s particular contribution was to push for marijuana prohibition, and by criminalizing each and every instance of the use of marijuana, instead of just manufacture or sales, to insure that marijuana prohibition would be so labor intensive that it absorbed the energies of all 3,000 agents slated for layoff with the Repeal of Alcohal Prohibition.

Meyer Lansky

As for barring further extra-curricular profits by Treasury Department higher-ups who had collaborated with Rothstein, the U.S. Grand Jury in New York was left to complain in 1929 that none of their recommendations had been implemented, and none of the agents who they had suggested be transferred or dismissed were actually dismissed. Rothstein’s scam was soon taken over by a couple of young [upstarts] named Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. Control of U.S. heroin-and following 1947, International Heroin-stayed in their hands or their successor’s hands up to this day, with inestimable historical effect.

 Reign of the French Connection

The “War on Drugs” is a revamped strategy for calculated right wing rule of America involving:

• Creation of a massive, Right Wing political cadre;
• Virtual control over the policies of a federal police agency;
• A coherent attack utilizing a gap in public regard for civil liberties to apply secret police-like terror to a scapegoat groups sufficiently large enough to have a chilling effect on society as a whole.

Only in the past few months has it become clear that the “War on Drugs” was deliberately fabricated in conjunction with top level Nixon-era Narcs and an ex-Nazi heroin and arms smuggling network stretching from Miami and Central Europe to La Paz and Bangkok.

Heroin Fascism [Narcostatism], though less well-known than the Nazi Phalangist or Italian varieties, is a definite historical variant first explored in the book The Politics of Heroin in South East Asia. This study, published in 1972 by Alfred McCoy, suggests that fascism, despite 40 years of ups and downs in France, failed to crystalize into the classic mass totalitarian movement of Spain, Italy or Germany, precisely because of the role of heroin. The Corsican underworld that dealt it, acted as shock troops of reaction in place of the black shirted Fascists and storm troopers. Not only did the gangster taint keep the Fascists from winning elections, the shock troops were dependent upon the bourgeoisie politicians for power and racket protection. If [Narcostatism] precluded the emergence of Nazi-style Phalange, at the cross roads of fascism in Southern France, its less specialized, more traditional, gangster style enabled it to survive 1945 to continue its “anti-communist” work with the post-war sponsorship of the CIA.

The Marseilles Syndicate

For during the war, operatives of the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, had worked successfully with heroin kingpin Lucky Luciano in the invasion of Sicily. Not all Corsican mobsters aided the Gestapo, a significant group had emerged on the side of the French Resistance and the Socialists. It was the Socialists and the ex-Fascists with their gangland connections that the CIA turned to in 1947 to break the Communist unions in Marseilles. It was with the Mafia customers, international CIA sponsorship and political protection, first from the Socialists and then the Gaullists that the ‘French Connection’ came to control heroin manufacture and traffic until the late 1960’s. Then Vietnam and the ascension of Richard Nixon produced, according to McCoy, a revolution in International Heroin, although he and others like EJ Epstein (Agency of Fear) left us unsatisfactorily in the dark as to who came out on top for the rest of the 1970s. Late last year, a freelance Danish journalist named Henrik Kruger published The Great Heroin Coup and largely filled in the blanks.

Conein

What Kruger found was that the far right’s return to power was facilitated by the CIA in alignment with the Mafia:

“The alliance was comprised of the China Lobby, OSS China Hands, ex-Jedbergh Team Members, Cuban Exiles, the Lanksy Syndicate, and CIA hawks pushing for all out involvement in Indochina and against Castro’s Cuba. It coalesced between 1961 and 1963, and its members had three things in common: a right wing political outlook, an interest in Asian opium, and thirst for political power. This last factor led to a common denominator in which the alliance invested heavily: Richard Nixon”

OSS China

The instrument of the great heroin coup was Nixon’s creation, the DEA; but it was this larger coalescence of right wingers who already dominated poppy growing and stateside sales that considered further Corsican control over the traffic intolerable. Whether it was nationalist Cubans, Chinese or Italian Mafiosi veterans of the late 1940’s with vendettas against Sicilian Communists, they collectively viewed the politics of the Corsicans as unforgivably soft on Communism, especially with Castro.

Chiang Kai-Shek

Starting with money from the Chinese Nationalist Party (The Kuomintang) In Taiwan, gleaned from enforcing a heroin “cure” on 20 million Chinese opium addicts before Mao’s takeover, the group formed the World Anti-Communist League (WACL) in 1966 as a counter-force to Castro Tri-Continental Congress on Third World revolutionaries. Later that same year Aginter Press was created in Lisbon as a front for Portuguese and Spanish secret police, the CIA, and the anti-Gaullist French OAS (Organization Armee Secrete). Together, they redoubled efforts to wipe out whole infrastructure of French Intelligence and the Corsican gangsters who ran the heroin trade. For full satisfaction, the World Anti-Communist League, and its subgroups had to wait until DeGaulle was out and Nixon was in. Kruger implied that Pompidou never would have traded off his Corsican capabilities for better relations with the U.S. if he’d known how much it would curtail the capacity of French Espionage to swap guns and drugs for information without it appearing in the budget. The fall of the French Connection was utter and complete by 1973. Kruger’s accomplishment is to have documented its replacement in every operational theater of Europe, Asia, and South America by ex-Right Wingers connected to the World Anti-Communist League.

World Anti Communist League

What he omits is the importance of the Iranian SAVAK and the War on Marijuana in diverting heat from Cuban/CIA heroin dealing nexus – operating in areas where the French Connection never operated or in aspects completely lost to European investigators. Far more crucial in his insights, is that the individuals who took over the heroin trade were not just anti-communist but ideologically Right Wing. The inevitable trends in the business of heroin, the ultimate neo-colonial commodity, has been to generate outright police state consciousness. The DEA soldiers of fortune that Nixon left in power, the Cuban smugglers carefully crafting their web of couriers, both had come to see the wisdom of eliminating all political risk of being shut down. But it had to be sanitized. To operate politically, they would need special organizations to mobilize the right wing base.

The International Right Wing Web

Nixon

The CIA had been acutely embarrassed by the discovery that good portion of those being arrested in Operation Eagle in 1970 (the last real Justice Department operation against the International Heroin Network) were all Bay of Pigs veterans. Indeed keeping enforcement focused on marijuana from 1978 has provided a magic margin of safety for the smack dealings of Mitch Werbell’s protégés. Werbell being the former #3 Narc under Nixon. From the standpoint of building up mass right-wing cadre in this country capable of shifting and directing events, development of the War on Drugs organization solved a number of problems presented by earlier Corsican [Narcostatism].

1. Compartmentalization – Having to use actual gangsters to battle it out with Leftists (ie. Marseilles in the 1930’s) means a constant threat that exposure of their racketeering will compromise the right-wing leadership among the very middle class they seek to attract. [Narcostatism] requires that political [groups] managing the liquidation of the Pro-Marijuana counterculture be buffered from contact with operating levels [to prevent public disillusionment].
2. Keeping the Cuban Exile drugs-for-guns network distinct from the War On Drugs decision makers (via ex-CIA and ex-military) means that the Federal agencies, including DEA) can respond to the dominant public pressure group without having to risk political embarrassment.
3. Growth of a right-wing [Pro-Prohibition] cadre gives the right-wing a highly disciplined group of shock troops with basic right wing attitudes already conditioned and reinforced by their ‘pogrom’ against ‘potheads’ and their collaboration with federal agencies like the DEA. These cadres are designed to recruit Klansmen, right-wing brawlers, street punks, criminals and radicals.

Otto Skorzeny

[The Consortium] is the outgrowth of many years of planning in Madrid by the late ex-Nazi Col. Otto Skorzeny, who worked for the CIA in his fifties. It’s membership consists of former SS agents, OAS terrorists, Argentine and Italian right-winger’s, Cuban exiles, French and British intelligence and organized crime, and both current and former CIA agents, especially with experience in Operation 40 and the coups in Guatemala, Brazil and Argentina. Col. Skorzeny, formerly of the Nazi SS, was leader of the Paladin Mercenary Group until his death in 1975. Dr. Gerhard Hartmut von Schubert, formerly of Joseph Goebbel’s propaganda ministry, was Paladin’s operating manager. The Group was headquartered in Albufera, Spain; using import-export officers owned by Skorzeny, Spanish Intelligence under Col. Eduardo Blanco and the CIA as cover. The relationship between Spanish right-wing operatives with US and Spanish intelligence is highlighted by Spain’s purchase of silenced M10 machine pistols from Mitch Werbell in 1975, soon after the same M10 turned up in the hands of Spanish and Italian right-wing terrorists. It was rumored that Skorzeny effectively controlled Spanish intelligence for many years.

The Consortium

[The Consortium] was crucial towards fulfilling the dreams of not only Skorzeny, but other Madrid exiles like Jose Lopez Rega, Juan Peron’s right hand, and Prince Justo Valerio Borghese, the Italian ex-Fascist money man who been rescued from execution in Italy by OSS agent James Angleton. They, and other right-wing powers throughout North America, Europe and Latin America, envisioned a new world order built on the drug and arms trade.

1978: Genesis of a Heroin Epidemic

Jimmy Carter

The U.S. drug policy hardliners, who in the 40 years since, have never been able to shutdown Mob heroin operations, have instead protected their bureaucratic turf by obscuring the central truth about heroin: like a cold virus, it is always present in the body politic. Someone is always trying to bring it in, because it’s so profitable. This is why the history of [heroin] busts are full of police or intelligence agents caught red-handed dealing it themselves. A heroin epidemic occurs when society’s immune-system – enforcement – is weakened or diverted from the heroin virus (by, say, a frivolous witch hunt against “Wets” or marijuana connoisseurs). Unchecked the virus multiplies in the cellular protoplasm (profits) until the growth medium itself is used up or destroyed…or the body politic reacts in time, and manufactures fresh antibodies.

People get sick of smack and its effects. Early in the Carter Administration, a general reassessment seemed to offer possibilities of abandoning [marijuana prohibition] and producing an even more rational treatment of heroin based on the British model. Presidential Drug Advisor Dr. Peter Bourne felt cocaine could be controlled by making it “too expensive for the Middle Class”. But by December of 1977, the conference of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) – even before the loss of influence by Dr. Bourne and the NORML liberals – it became clear that a hardline Washington consensus was shaping up against smoking in general. Tough-talking HEW Secretary Califano decided that further marijuana liberalization was inconsistent with efforts to tighten up tobacco regulation, and the way was opened for Peter Bensinger and the DEA hardliners to crack down on Weed. ‘Bournegate’ in 1978 ended the liberals cozy arrangement with the centrist ‘drug rehab professionals’ (hired by the government to get kids off of marijuana and on to Thorazine) had the unforeseen result of strengthening right wing elements that NORML erroneously dismissed as ‘lunatic fringe’ even as they shared with Bourne the coke that lost him his job.

Nixon w/Shah of Iran

The ‘War on Drugs’ front organization, soon to be launched by the US Labor Party with cooperation from Black Muslim groups, was blessed by a singular international development which was to make them partners with US Drug Enforcement for reasons of state. The overthrow of the Shah of Iran in January of 1979, besides affecting oil supplies, completely disrupted business as usual in heroin. As authority disintegrated in Iran, the one guarantee against turbulence for the peasants was to plant some poppies. During the waning months of 1978, while the Shah teetered, another better-heeled class frantically converted their wealth into easily portable opiates.

In the U.S., where no less than the New York Post had described the Shah’s sister, Princess Ashraf, as the ‘Dragon Lady’ of doge. She ran a large network outside of Iran of her secret police, the SAVAK, who were already in place to peddle millions of dollars’ worth of smack necessary to reinstate the Peacock Throne. Cheap, pure stuff flooded New York, overdose death’s skyrocketed. Marijuana was out, coke was passe. The New Wave was infatuated in Soho Salons, lines of pure Persian replaced lines of Peruvian flake. Meanwhile, unregenerate U.S. ruling class interests of the Kissinger/Rockefellar stripe moved to confer legitimacy to an anti-marijuana hysteria deliberately designed to divert attention from SAVAK’s fund raising efforts. In June of 1979, facilities at NYU were made available to “prestigious medical conferences” on “new findings about the health hazards of marijuana”. The cream of anti-marijuana pseudoscience gathered with DEA sponsorship to hear reports on half-baked experiments and research, much of it 10 years old and previously discredited.

Figures released by HEW show that for the first time, marijuana use is down slightly among high school students; news reports about the “health hazards of marijuana” were cited as the reason by students who decided to quit. But alas for HEW, use of cocaine, was up among the same students, perhaps in sympathy with the more liberal views on the health hazards of white powders established under Carter.

• The Green Chazzan

EDITORS NOTE: This is the true story, as told by its witnesses, of how NORML intentionally sabotaged marijuana legalization during the Jimmy Carter Administration. NORML’s leader, Keith Stroup, always claimed that he set up President Carter because of his administration’s use of Paraquat on the marijuana fields of Mexico during the late 70’s but as this story will reveal Stroup had far more sinister motivations. President Carter had in fact been using Paraquat to end the Mexican Cartel’s domination of the marijuana industry to create both a pathway and an economic advantage for a domestic marijuana industry within the United States. Stroup, at the behest of the Mexican Cartel’s and his need to maintain a paycheck, sabotaged marijuana reform leading to thousands of growers, vendors and patients incarcerations under the Reagan Administration of the 1980’s. This is the sad but true tale of how the leadership within NORML prevented marijuana’s legalization to save their own jobs and should be remembered by every pro-marijuana American before making a donation to their organization.

Excerpt from The Jimmy Carter Coke Scandal

by Mike Chance and Dana Beal (1978)

Keith Stroup – Head of NORML and Traitor to The Marijuana Movement

The Peter Bourne Affair was the direct fruit of continued associations with cocaine among closely knit Carter insiders who had successfully diverted the 1976 U.S. Grand Jury investigation of cocaine dealing at a recording company headed by key Carter fundraiser Phil Walden. Bourne’s ouster not only blew the lid off their two-year cover-up of drugs and the Carter White House, but signaled Carter’s capitulation to DEA hardliners, as evidenced by his defense of the Paraquat spraying campaign despite the health threat to U.S. [marijuana] smokers. The second act of the Carter cocaine drama began casually enough, with a doctored prescription for Quaaludes for a woman on Peter Bourne’s staff. Suddenly one of Jimmy Carter’s key aides and top troubleshooters found himself front-page around the nation, the subject of another drug scandal.

Dr. Peter Bourne (Left) with President Jimmy Carter

Before the ink was dry on the Quaalude [scandal], follow-up stories had Bourne sniffing cocaine at a chic Georgetown gathering. Worse, the Georgetown bash in question was sponsored by the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) as part of their annual conference – where, according to Gary Cohen of Jack Anderson’s office, Bourne partook of a rock of cocaine “the size of a prune”. In attendance were numerous minor officials of the Carter White House team as well as most of Washington’s ‘hip’ media people, one of whom later characterized it as “the social event of the year”. But while the gossip columnists and social pontificators [balked] at Bourne’s nasal habits; investigators at [the original] High Times, took another look at Bourne’s past. [They had previously published] evidence that a cover-up had occurred during the original Macon Grand jury investigation [known as Waldengate].

Bourne had been director of Georgia’s drug abuse program under, then governor, Jimmy Carter. He not only knew most professionals and prosecutors on the Atlanta/Macon axis, but was one of the earliest Carter Campaign Directors. During the time of [the 1976 election] Bourne was identified as Carter’s chief hatchet man for special campaign problems. Unlike Nixon’s unwieldy corporate-style campaign in 1972, only a handful of ‘Georgia Mafia’ (as Carter insiders were called) knew of the delicate negotiations going on, and perhaps only Ham Jordan was as well suited to talk to prosecutors and separate the wheat from the chaff as to whether Gregg Allman [of the Allman Brothers], Scooter Herring or Phil Walden would face the [court].

Phil Walden

For 4 years, Bourne was Governor Jimmy Carter’s chief drug advisor, as he was to be later at the White House. Instrumental in liberalizing Georgia drug laws and enhancing Georgia’s image as the semi-hip center of the ‘New South’ in the early 1970’s. Bourne was also the nation’s foremost advocate of methadone programs for junkies. To add to his credentials as a middleman with the Grand Jury, Bourne had even, at the peak of Nixon’s War on Drugs been advisor to the White House Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention.

At the same time, Bourne was propelled by his wife Mary King, a liberal feminist, into the ‘hip’ new Southerner crowd of rock musicians, anti-war activists, leftists and local Atlanta glitterati. He was no stranger to Phil Walden, attending many of the famed Capricorn Records parties that Walden [hosted], which featured silver trays heaped with lines of cocaine. Carter’s election in November of 1976 seem to prove his born-again image was impervious to rumors about drugs. At the annual December NORML conference, Bourne gave the keynote address and even took a few discreet puffs without a murmur from liberal reporters present, hoping themselves for drug law reform from the new administration.

Dr. Peter Bourne

During Carter’s first year, a honeymoon atmosphere existed between the administration and the pro-marijuana bloc that had delivered votes in return for promises to decriminalize marijuana. Peter Bourne, Ham Jordan, Jody Powell and others around Carter got to know some of the pro-marijuana leaders personally. NORML head, Keith Stroup, spoke of his closeness to Chip Carter and presented himself as a sensible, controlled lobbyist who could push a sensitive issue like decriminalization without alienating too many of Carter’s crucial moderate supporters. Stroup in fact wrote Carter’s message on drugs, delivered in the summer of 1977, as a call for federal decriminalization.

But after a summer that saw 15,000 people engaged in civil disobedience on the 4^th of July, defiantly smoking marijuana across from the White House [at the Annual DC Smoke-In] – the December 1977 National NORML Conference (the party where Bourne snorted cocaine) was marked by considerable infighting. Carter was intensifying use of the deadly herbicide Paraquat in Mexico [to wipe out Mexican Cartel grows]. Radicals [within NORML] defeated a bid to gain NORML endorsement, based on a decriminalization provision, of the represented criminal code revision once known as “S-1”.

Keith Stroup, head of NORML

Keith Stroup feared a power play by some NORML staffers and the White House to get rid of him [for his radical views and Cartel collaboration]. These staffers, in charge of the day-to-day administration at NORML’s DC offices, were the primary organizers of the National Conference. Stroup, in a ploy to change the flow of the convention, worked with infamous prankster Aron Kay to hit Joe Nellis, chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, with a pie as he gave his keynote address. “Keith paid me for the pie,” Aron recalls. “I only had a quarter, and he gave me $4 dollars. I got a lemon meringue pie.”

Stroup downplayed the plan after Kay let the word get around. But the next afternoon, as Aron sat with the pie, Nellis asserted that international law, in the form of the UN Single Convention Against Marijuana, superseded the US Constitution. Aron, seeing red, ran up to the speaker and let fly with the lemon meringue. In the resulting uproar, the conference coordinator Marc Kurzman took the microphone and denounced Stroup as the provocateur. A few days later, a Bourne aide who had been sitting next to Nellis fired off an indignant letter on White House stationary to stress the severity of the issue. Bob Angarola, general counsel to the Office of Drug Abuse Policy stated clearly that he was “upset…at the unfortunate pie incident”.

‘Crazy’ Aron Kay

“I think they wanted Marc Kurzman to run NORML” stated a bitter Keith Stroup later in New Times Magazine “I told Bourne aides to pass on to their boss, a threat” that was as dangerous to Bourne as Kurzman’s had been to Stroup. He implied that he knew about the recreational drug preferences of certain senior White House aides. He also suggested that those preferences could end up in the newspapers so that the threat could “hit home”.

Stroup then took the offensive, launching the great ‘Paraquat Panic of 1978’, a publicity assault depicting a government resolved to poison those it could no longer afford to imprison. The tide finally turned when Stroup leaked to the press knowledge of Bourne’s drug habits. Bourne was first busted falsifying the Quaalude prescription, then the Washington Post broke the story on July 19 of 1978 that Dr. Peter Bourne was under investigation in Prince William County, Virginia, setting off a number of political mines.

Paraquat Paranoia

Stroup’s Paraquat Propaganda

Bourne had been informed of the script investigation a week earlier and took a leave of absence from the White House, with pay, the morning after the news hit the papers. He was determined to stay on, convinced, along with his White House superiors, that he could weather the storm. He probably could have considering the Quaaludes were not for himself nor for monetary gain. It was embarrassing for the head of the nation’s drug abuse office but it wasn’t akin to Burt Lance’s ‘sticky-fingered’ loan [embezzlement]. Supportive stories appeared within hours, quoting doctors who said the writing of pseudonymous prescriptions was a frequent practice, especially among the rich and influential. The investigation came to a close and it appeared that Bourne would survive.

Consortium and OSS China Agent – Jack Anderson

But that night everything changed with the almost simultaneous publication by [former OSS China Agent] Jack Anderson and the Washington Post of charges that Bourne had been seen by a number of people at a NORML party the previous December; snorting cocaine and toking marijuana. The stories that Stroup had planted months earlier with his allies in the media now blossomed in the summer heat. Bourne and the White House were besieged by questions from reporters: How much dope was there in the White House? Did President Carter get dope from Bourne? How were Gregg Allman and Phil Walden Involved? The New York Daily News, which had run the Quaalude investigation on page 3, now ran the new story on the front page with a 3-inch headline: “Pot, Coke, Tied to Carter Aides”.

The next morning, Bourne resigned – not because of his naïve script mistake, but because of the massive paranoia paralyzing Carter partisans, who assumed the nation would be outraged that a presidential advisor was using cocaine and marijuana. Drugs for pleasure by one who was supposed to be above such things. Worse still, Bourne, in the classic pattern of the exposed individual, turned himself and other aides in, for marijuana and cocaine use. Keith Stroup would receive retribution a few weeks later when NORML chapters across the country voted against his leadership for snitching on a fellow marijuana user, even if that person happened to be Peter Bourne.

Peter Bensinger and the advocates for a total marijuana crackdown were gloriously triumphant; the office of the White House drug advisor itself was simply abolished to make way for total DEA control. The message was clear; elected officials and their appointees were too corruptible to be trusted with drugs, their power was to be given to the keepers of the sacred flame of Law Enforcement.

Peter Bensinger in 1980

As was universally recognized at the time, Carter’s actual concession to hardliners lay in sacking marijuana decriminalization completely. After all, official concern with the fate of one fun loving physician paled in comparison to the bureaucratic interests of the DEA’s 80% appropriations increase for enforcing marijuana prohibition. The outcome of the Bourne Affair resulted in even more serious implications for Stroup: the question of how a Virginia Pharmaceutical Inspector, later found to be a DEA agent, happened to be at the small suburban drugstore to intercept Bourne’s forged Quaalude prescription.

Keith Stroup – DEA Turncoat?

Bourne and the White House had successfully stonewalled the press about Walden in 1976 but the expose by Stroup with Jack Anderson’s help seemed to threaten a firestorm of further charges. The intent of the exposing the drug czar’s involvement in the Quaalude incident became very clear to the press, the charges that Phil Walden used cocaine to fund Carter’s 1976 campaign, previously dismissed as incompatible with a ‘born-again Christian’ presidency, instantly became credible. The story was immediately reopened for investigation by a series of Michael Novak articles in the New York Post.

The threat of exposure by the original campaign finance scandal, originally only known to a small inner circle and the DEA, suddenly became real. With the appointment in December of Phil Walden to the advisory board of NORML, the organization completed its transformation from a marijuana lobby to a campaign committee dedicated to marijuana liberalization through a second Carter term. Unfortunately it was too little too late and Stroup’s damage was done. Dr. Bourne, whose tenure had largely become identified with the abolition of marijuana prohibition, was replaced overnight by DEA hardliner Peter Bensinger, who was already noteworthy for proposing stiffer penalties for marijuana than PCP.

Peter Bensinger

A backlash of recriminations about the ethics of continuing to probe the personal use of drugs, which many reporters had used themselves, stopped the flow of leaks before it spread from the toppling of [the drug czar] to calling into question the [legitimacy] of Carter’s 1976 victory. Bourne’s regrettable involvement with [cocaine] did not turn out to be the last time the Carter camp would be involved in a cocaine scandal. As the first shock of from the discovery of the falsified Quaalude prescription was about to hit the White House on June 28 of 1976, Ham Jordan was being recorded doing lines at Studio 54. He would become the next major player in the unfolding cocaine scandal.

**EDITOR**

The Jimmy Carter Cocaine Scandals, triggered by NORML and Keith Stroup, would lead to a series of other scandals of the Democratic Party throughout the late 70’s and early 1980’s perpetrated by the FBI and DEA called ABSCAM. This scandal, along with the Iranian Hostage Crisis and the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan would ultimately lead to the fall of the Carter Presidency and the election of Ronald Reagan by the Christian Coalition in 1980. Ronald Reagan and the Republicans would lead the largest Anti-Marijuana campaign in the country’s history, going far beyond Harry Anslinger and Richard Nixon’s anti-marijuana programs with arrests for drug offenses rising 126% after 1980.

Reagan

Current Vice President and lead politician for the national police union, Joe Biden, would help Reagan with the introduction of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984, creating mandatory minimum sentencing, civil asset forfeiture for drug related crimes, and increased federal penalties for the cultivation, possession or transfer of marijuana leading to the arrests and incarcerations of millions of American citizens for marijuana possession. Biden is still considered “the head of the police union” in Washington DC and despite appearances, shares little trust with President Barack Obama, a silent advocate of marijuana decriminalization.

Joe Biden speaking at the National Association of Police Associations

US Incarceration Rate

Keith Stroup would go on to create the ‘defend-and-abandon’ model for marijuana crimes as executive director of the National Association for Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), defrauding the helpless growers through intentionally inadequate legal representation. Stroup would later retake power over the NORML Board of Directors in 1994, and would force the resignation of Executive Director Richard Cowan in 1995. Stroup would ‘retire’ in January 2005, citing the need for ‘new blood’ alluding to a transfer of power from himself to other organizations like Americans For Safe Access and the NORML Legal Counsel to continue his legacy of fraud and manipulation over the national marijuana movement.

Merry Christmas and a Happy Chanukkah!

• The Green Chazzan

*EDITOR: From the archives of friends.

Paraquat

By Michael Chance (1978)

Paraquat is everywhere. One encounters it at parties, on street corners, it’s in the media every day. The only place it doesn’t seem to be turning up in abundance is marijuana, where, allegedly, it is poisoning the potheads of America. As a hoax, a story which has no basis in fact but instead feeds off the fears and unknowns in the public mind, the Paraquat Plot was a stone success, encountering no rivals in recent historical media hype. Not even the fearsome tales of LSD causing sun blindness, the 1973 oil cut-off or the swine flu tricked so many people so quickly. And as for deeper ramifications of the paraquat story, the people who perpetrated the lie for personal glory and political power, should have dues to pay.

Now that the smoke has somewhat cleared on the issue, and those people reported to be on their paraquat deathbeds have risen from the grave to rejoin the living, it is time to ponder the significance of this great [charade]. What it means to people who smoke marijuana and what it says about the pro-marijuana organizations charged with providing a touchstone for reality, a responsibility completely abdicated in favor of personal ego trips.

The story first broke in early 1977 with little fanfare. What began as a 10-inch sidebar in an a High Times Magazine article on Operation Condor, the Mexican government’s war against marijuana farmers in small region in the state of Sinaloa, soon mushroomed into a rolling bandwagon that attracted pro-marijuana lobbyists, the right-wing media, politicos and an army of opportunists. By the time the story had reached its peak there were terrified people in hospitals in a half-dozen states who believed they were dying of paraquat poisoning, in part because of the general inclination of doctors [to take advantage of the situation] and partly because the pothead generation is of a particularly suggestible consciousness. Commercial carpetbaggers offering paraquat identifiers and emulsifiers abounded. Indeed, so many testing kits hit the market that a sub-school of knowledge developed on the various merits of the kits themselves. Everywhere, people lived in fear of poisoned weed.

The Paraquat Issue (Top Caption)

At the height of the great Paraquat Panic people turned to “Recognized Laboratories”, as the DEA termed them, to shed light. It just proved to affirm Mark Twain’s observation that “figure’s don’t lie, but liars figure”. One is reminded of the mid-60’s scare stories that appeared in the media claiming scores of acid dazed people were staring at the sun until they burned out their retinas. It was a good scare tactic and stopped a lot of people from dropping acid. Two years later, it turned out the story was a hoax perpetrated by the good Samaritans at a Pennsylvania school for the blind in hopes of ‘saving the youth of America’.

In the case of Paraquat, the media crime of the century, the ‘Recognized Laboratory’ that collaborated with the law enforcement and foreign policy powers was Searle Laboratories in Chicago. Searle Labs benevolently offered to test marijuana for frightened marijuana users. The lab would soon issue a report that became the bible for cops, media sensationalists and NORML spokespeople. The report, sent to the Wisconsin Attorney General’s office, said their analysis of 40 randomly contributed samples of Mexican marijuana yielded paraquat contamination on all but one sample, 39 out of 40. And they claimed to have found that 30% of all ‘exotic pots’ – Hawaiian, Colombian, Thai etc etc. were also tainted with Paraquat.

Let us consider this for a moment, first with the figures for Mexican marijuana. The mathematical possibility of the minuscule amount of marijuana acreage sprayed in Mexico, logarithmically calculated by the amount that was then allegedly harvested in its death throes by the Mexicans in the 214 hours they would have had to harvest and cure the bud – because you cannot pack or ship fresh weed until it is dried or it will turn into compost – calculated against the amount that would have made it by the highly scrutinizing eyes of wholesale buyers (if they were stupid enough once, to miss the mulched and grungy paraquat pot in the world of drug dealing barracudas) would never have another chance to make the same mistake [let alone] wind up on the streets of Chicago to mix at a 95% ratio with the megatons of marijuana there were not touched with Paraquat. The improbability was dimmer than those who unhesitatingly accepted the figures, among them Time Magazine, the national news outlets as well as Frank Fiormonti of New York NORML who used Searle’s figures in a televised editorial. As for the conclusion by Searle that 30% of all ‘exotic pots’ were toxic with Paraquat, that is not simply hyperbolic – but the traditional Big Lie. Paraquat has been used on marijuana only in Mexico. Any marijuana other than Mexican that turned up sprayed would have to have been sprayed by the sender, if paraquat was to be found at all.

If figures provided by Searle weren’t suspect enough, one must always approach with caution as possible propaganda any statements pertaining to law enforcement matters that are issued from Chicago. Chicago is to law enforcement culture as Detroit is to the car and Hollywood to movies; a political, cultural, and media capital for the powerbrokers in these single-industry towns. The Chicago Tribune for instance is the unofficial national FBI leak source. Whenever the FBI wants to float a trial story, an alibi or a hoax, they plant it in The Tribune and other media across the country can pick it up from there. A classic example was provided by the FBI during the 1976 presidential elections, when a mystery story appeared purporting that a group of American radicals and Cuban Exiles were threatening to kill Gerald Ford. A few days later the so-called ‘plot’ was busted, and the FBI promptly pointed to the media coverage which had sprouted from the planted story as evidence that the people they captured were [dangerous] characters. In the news trade, this tactic is called ‘the Tomorrow Machine’, a sophisticated form of psychological propaganda warfare that originated in Nazi Germany.

But this concept is secondary, it is a given that cops and scientists are going to fabricate stories about marijuana. They are the hardware and software of capitalism and its laws, pledged and paid to destroy threats to the medical and investment oligarchy that stand to lose the most with the legalization of marijuana. People who accept and digest such information run the danger of becoming an unwitting asset of the propaganda and its creators. We, however, cannot hold the police, scientists, and media to blame; for it was the pro-marijuana groups, particularly NORML, who pursued the myth the furthest. One of the earliest to fall for the story was High Times Magazine. Aureliano Segundo, Associate Editor in charge of the High Times News Department originally broke the story and tried to keep it from getting out of hand when he realized its political dangers. But, as he claimed, the clamor by the ruling elite of High Times for a sensationalist approach overpowered the voice for a more cautious and factual approach:

“We had known for some time that they were spraying herbicides on the pot, and had wondered if it just killed the pot and dried it, leaving it dead but saleable. For a while there were rumors from our Mexican street sources that Agent Orange left over from Vietnam was being used. I called Craig Pyes, our stringer in that area, and asked him for the poop. He reported back that it was definitely not Agent Orange, but 2,4-D, a similar but less ominous variation.

A few days later – this all happened in the first few weeks of January 1977 – I ran across an editorial in a New Orleans newspaper, the Times Picayune I believe, taking the State Department to task for wasting a fortune in taxpayer money by sending it to the Mexican government to be used against pot. The editorial was based on what they called a secret government report by an Agriculture Department biochemist, Dr. Walter Gentner. Genter had been sent to assess the worth of the Operation Condor, as it was termed. He reported that there was enormous waste, particularly in the prices paid by the government for the herbicides paraquat and 2,4-D. Then, almost as an afterthought, the report mentioned that paraquat could be harmful should it be inadvertently consumed. I called Craig Pyes again and asked him about paraquat. Craig Pyes then contacted Dr. Walter Genter and asked him about the herbicides. He said that he believed they were using Agent Orange because he saw the empty barrels, but it turned out to be 2,4-D; but even then he said the paraquat being used on the marijuana was potentially dangerous. His report said that paraquat had caused more deaths, both intentional and unintentional, than any herbicide I know”

Segundo incorporated this information into a story for the ‘Highwitness News’ section for the June issue of High Times. It mentioned the Gentner Report’s gloomy prediction that paraquat could be dangerous but it ignored the fact that Gentner had meant the danger was to the workers, not the smokers. This was the first link in a chain of deceptions that has enslaved the minds of over 15 million marijuana smokers. Segundo himself has confessed that his actions were based on sensationalist appeal.

“You have to realize the country is obsessed with ‘self’ right now. In times of peace people turn inward, so you have the self-awareness movements, the health movements, the anti-cancer and anti-smoking crusades, all the egotistical and self-centered highlights of the lifestyle that Tom Wolfe calls the Me Generation. I mean, look at the Red Dye Number Two and aerosol spray can scares. This stuff sells magazines!”

Because of High Times four-month lead time, the story went out on the magazine’s news service in January. Scores of underground newspapers ran the story and politicians started climbing aboard the bandwagon as it gained momentum. One of the first was Illinois Republican Senator Charles Percy, who shot off letters to Washington asking if the charges in the underground press were true and what was being done about it. He was told by a State Department official that it was none of his concern. Peter Bourne also got into the act, asking the National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA) to conduct a study of paraquat’s effects on marijuana.

Sen. Charles Percy

For the next few months nothing happened. It being the summer period when most media people busy themselves with rewrites. In October, the story once again took off, owing in large part to High Times revolving news editor A. Craig Copetas, who wrote the story for the New York Daily News, America’s largest selling paper. Later that month the first of two government studies came in. The NIDA study stated that not much paraquat pot could be found coming into the country. Of several shipments generously donated to them by the DEA, they found several ‘partially contaminated’ bales. The study said it was doubtful that paraquat would be harmful if smoked, but that it could be harmful if ingested. They illustrated the point by stating that it would take 32 pounds of contaminated paraquat pot brownies eaten in one sitting to be fatal. Respectable marijuana dealers who worked the Sinaloa region denied that paraquat pot had ever come through their hands. The buyers were testing for it and nobody in Mexico could find any, it was only turning up once it reached stateside.

Regardless of the government figures, it was at this point that the pro-marijuana lobbies should have gotten suspicious. Instead they gobbled up the figures and screamed for more. NORML held a press conference in which the first fifteen pages were verbatim reprints of NIDA and Department of Health shock statements that read like a 50’s movie script about killer weed. High Times Magazine held a press conference in New York saying that not only was the paraquat pot everywhere in America, but that it was a particular danger to school children who could not afford the higher priced Colombian and had to take their chances with Mexican marijuana. Segundo explained:

“I tried to get the owner of the magazine to cancel the press conference, but he insisted that since it was going to be such a big story that we had better be the ones spreading the bad news”

At least two groups, the Yippies and the Confederation, an underground organization of pound and ton dealers who occasionally appeared at marijuana confabs to debate on major topics, quickly branded the Paraquat Panic a red herring. Part of the reason NORML went off the deep end in their acceptance of the government propaganda was because they arrived late on the issue, missing it in the first High Times articles and in the underground press until it was brought to their attention by NIDA and Peter Bourne. The embarrassment at their belated arrival on the biggest marijuana issue since the Marijuana Tax Act was so acute that they tried to make up for it by making outrageous claims. They easily outshined the police in their paranoid descriptions of paraquat pot at a press conference in Washington DC in March of that year.

Dr. Peter Bourne

Keith Stroup declared to a group of skeptical reporters that not only was the US brimming with poison marijuana, but that even the smallest amount would bring about an agonizing death. No matter that marijuana had been sprayed for the past three years without a single person ever sneezing from its effects. Stroup then called for a boycott of all Mexican marijuana, a position applauded by law enforcement agencies and mafiosos looking for higher prices. Stroup became the darling of the right-wing press, quoted more often than not to go cold turkey on marijuana than for advocacy of decriminalization, and he so loved the limelight that he continued to peddle the outrageous fraud long after it was debunked. He went on, at the press conference, to say that no one was safe, not even the rich; the finest Colombian Gold could actually be the tainted Mexican paraquat pot because they looked exactly alike! Even the press corps laughed at this claim, refusing to defame themselves by quoting him in their articles.

Keith Stroup

If there was a shred of doubt that NORML saw paraquat as a wagon to hitch their star to, it deteriorated when the New York Health Department came up with a cheap and easy method to detect paraquat at home. Sensing that such a test could defuse the paraquat issue and destroy their limelight, NORML blasted the tests as unreliable, although several recognized laboratories affirmed they worked. Why NORML chose to disregard labs like Searle in this case while previously touting their fabricated figures is obvious: sensationalism sell and controversy created cash.

At last it seems that the paraquat scare is ebbing. A recent Time Magazine article quoted Searle Lab scientists as saying that there seemed to be more ‘style than substance’ to the Paraquat Panic. The New York Times, which prides itself on not getting taken by the day-to-day ruses headlined a story titled “Mexico Says Marijuana Poison Scare Is Propaganda”. The Mexican government contended, correctly, that “the whole campaign has been orchestrated by groups favoring the legalization of marijuana” in reference to NORML. Mexico’s Deputy Attorney General scoffed at the scare stories: “The traffickers aren’t stupid. They can tell the difference between yellow marijuana and the dark green, unsprayed kind. We’ve found loads of sprayed marijuana dumped by roadsides because the sellers couldn’t find buyers for it.”

He also pointed out that paraquat was not as harmful as suggested, that it was routinely sprayed on vegetables in 23 states, and used in 90 countries to protect sugar cane, tomatoes, cotton and citrus products. He stated that it was used widely in Florida, the Southwest and allowed to be on the citrus and sugar cane that American’s ate daily. Whether or not any of these facts will deter the stampede brought on by special interest groups and sensational journalists remains to be seen. Like the dangers of LSD and swine flu, there are some people who will always believe these theories, who need the Big Lie to substitute for true analysis, who need leaders because they cannot think for themselves, who need the writers, the politicians and NORML. YIP.

Top Headline Again

- The Green Chazzan 

The following is a list of links of US Military, CIA and DEA (BNDD) operations from the Vietnam War to the Invasion of Panama that allowed for the global control of narcotics by US intelligence agencies in the 20th century. We have also included two video documentaries called ‘The Mena Connection’ and ‘Who Is The American Connection’, special thanks to Kevin Saunders & friends for providing this viewing material to our audience.

Operation 40 & Operation JM-Wave (1959-1963)

During the late 1950’s and early 1960’s; French-Corsican and Sicilian heroin traffic into the United States was largely facilitated through the nation of Cuba. Monies made from domestic heroin sales by organized crime were laundered back into Cuban banks to be converted to gold and stored in Havana. When Fidel Castro organized the communist revolution of Cuba, these mob monies were seized. Allen Dulles and John Foster Dulles, the founders of the Consortium organized Operation 40 along with the help of then Vice President Richard Nixon. A group of Cuban Exiles were trained by the CIA to carry out assassinations and terrorism within Cuba to overthrow the government, reclaim the mafia gold holdings and re-establish the French Connection heroin flows. Operation 40 was largely sponsored by Zapata Oil, who held large offshore Cuban oil interests and was owned directly by the Bush family.  Operation 40 would be the precursor to Operation J/M-Wave & the Bay of Pigs in which the CIA operation was sabotaged by President Kennedy to prevent the reacquisition of mob monies and make a severe financial strike against the Anglo-America Consortium.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_40

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKoperation40.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbinger_Group (Zapata Oil)

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKjmwave.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JMWAVE

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/11/26/required-reading-the-bay-of-pigs-operation-jm-wave-part-1/

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/11/27/the-bay-of-pigs-operation-jm-wave-part-2/

The Phoenix Program (1965-1972)

During the Vietnam War, a large covert operation called the Phoenix Program was enacted by CIA Director William Colby to reopen heroin trafficking routes out of the Golden Triangle in Laos, Cambodia, Southern China and Burma which had largely been stopped by VietCong operations during the early 1960’s. The program was described to the American public as an assassination, terrorism and torture program against the VietCong but what wasn’t revealed was the large scale heroin trafficking of China White Heroin through the caskets of dead soldiers, from the Golden Triangle to the California ports of San Francisco, Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego. Many Phoenix Program operatives involved in the CIA heroin smuggling operations would be recruited into the DEA for opening up cocaine trafficking routes in South America during Operation Condor in the 1970’s.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix_Program

http://spartacus-educational.com/SScolby.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Laos

http://legaciesofwar.org/about-laos/secret-war-laos/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vang_Pao

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laotian_Civil_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Secord

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_K._Singlaub

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nugan_Hand_Bank

Operation Intercept (1969)

“Operation Intercept was an anti-drug measure announced by President Nixon at 2:30pm on Sunday, September 21, 1969, resulting in a near shutdown of border crossings between Mexico and the United States. The initiative was intended to reduce the entry of Mexican marijuana into the United States at a time that was considered to be the prime harvest season.” This was the first attempt by the Consortium to manipulate domestic marijuana prices within the United States as part of the beginning of Nixon’s War on Drugs. The price shock crushed many small and mid-level domestic marijuana suppliers who could not afford the dramatic price increase caused by the Nixon market blockade leading to Consortium control over the domestic US marijuana market for the first time. Nixon’s goal was to crush domestic marijuana production and make the US marijuana supply dependent on foreign imports which were largely controlled by Consortium assets (The Cartels). Nixon also used Operation Intercept as a tool of economic blackmail towards the Mexican government to make them compliant and cooperative with the impending Operation Condor which would establish continental narco-trafficking routes from South and Central America into Mexico and ultimately the US domestic market. Operation Intercept was largely an extension of domestic counterintelligence programs to suppress the Middle and Working Class populations during the Vietnam War, these programs were known as COINTELPRO.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Intercept

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO

Operation Condor (1969-1976)

Condor was a mass-scale terror and regime change operation conducted by the CIA and DEA in Central America to establish complete control over the South American narcotics trades. Operation Condor was largely mirrored after previous pro-right wing coups in Europe aided by the CIA in Italy, Spain and Greece and was largely intended to reestablish the international drug trafficking network after the end of the Vietnam War. The end of the Vietnam War, the French Connection and the Nixon Administration through the Watergate Scandal signaled the need for a new ‘Mexican-Colombian Connection’ largely based on the more profitable Cocaine The School of the Americas was created by the CIA and DEA to train cadres of high ranking military officials within the South American nations to stage coup d’etat’s, secret police, counterintelligence, counter surveillance and narco-trafficking operations within their own nations in return for ruling power. The School of the Americas was largely modeled on Operation 40 and Operation J/M-Wave training programs of Cuban Exiles and many of the former exiles were recruited back into the CIA to be utilized as experienced foreign operatives for the missions of Operation Condor. Operation Condor began with the reign of terror in Argentina known as the Argentinian Dirty War and the assassination of Salvador Allende in Chile with by the coup of General Augusto Pinochet. The Argentinian and Chilean Secret Police, SIDE and DINA respectively, served as CIA/DEA intelligence assets to further expand the cocaine narco-trade throughout South America and assist in the toppling of democratic South American governments in favor of cocaine friendly military juntas. Operation Condor was noted for its overthrow of governments in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor#The_.22French_connection.22

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKcondor.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_intervention_in_Chile

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Hemisphere_Institute_for_Security_Cooperation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augusto_Pinochet

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Colombo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Colombia#Post-National_Front_years

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alianza_Americana_Anticomunista

Operation Charly (1977-1986)

Operation Charly was a follow-up operation to Operation Condor to establish the Colombian and Central American cocaine supply routes for the Consortium from South America to Mexico by the CIA and the DEA using Argentinian, Cuban and Chilean paramilitary operatives previously used in Operation Condor. Condor agents were initially used to suppress Sandinista resistance to the cocaine trafficking regime of Anastasio Somoza. After the fall of Somoza during the Nicaraguan Revolution CIA/DEA activities increased with Condor Agents training the Nicaraguan Contra’s to transport Colombian, Peruvian and Chilean cocaine for CIA weapons (later known as Iran-Contra). The CIA would then transport the cocaine to the United States to be sold in the US domestic market to raise illicit non-congressionally approved monies for their global operations, especially the continued support of heroin smuggling in Iran and Afghanistan. To avoid the spread of communist insurgency from Nicaragua, Condor operatives expanded the School of The Americas training program to the militaries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala to ensure the continued flows of cocaine traffic in Central America. Resistance against these Condor trained military regimes would lead to the notoriously brutal El Salvador and Guatemalan civil wars which resulted in the deaths of thousands of civilians.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Charly

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_American_crisis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemalan_Civil_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_Civil_War

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Revolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Reorganization_Process

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Honduras

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_activities_in_Nicaragua

The Iran-Contra Affair (1985-1987)

Iran-Contra was an international Drug-For-Arms network created by high ranking members of the Consortium, among them former members of Operation Jedburgh, OSS China, Operation 40, Operation J/M-Wave, The Phoenix Program, Operation Condor, Operation Charly and military intelligence operatives that participated in the Iranian Revolution. The network was masterminded by General Richard V. Secord, Vice President George HW Bush, General John K. Singlaub, Colonel Oliver North, and Manuel Noriega with the assistance of Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger and National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane. The network consisted of cocaine supplied by Colombian Drug Cartels to former paramilitary operators from Operation Charly transported to the Nicaraguan Contras to be traded with the CIA for heavy arms during the Nicaraguan Civil War. The CIA would then transport the cocaine into Mexico, where it would be transported from the Yucatan Peninsula to be flown to Mena, Arkansas to be sold on the US streets, primarily in Florida and Georgia. The CIA would also use the cocaine to create and manufacture crack cocaine in Nicaragua and Mexico, which would be then transported to the streets of Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Washington DC, New York, Detroit and Philadelphia. The monies raised by these operations were used to conduct illegal arms sales to Iran through Lebanon and Israel, through the Iranian terror groups Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad in exchange for high quality and high priced Iranian, Iraqi and Afghan heroin which was made inaccessible due to the Iranian Civil War, the Iran-Iraq War and the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/11/24/required-reading/

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/12/07/required-viewing/

http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/9712/

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran-Contra_affair

http://spartacus-educational.com/USAirancontra.htm

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_trafficking_in_the_US

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_trafficking

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Anti-Communist_League

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_V._Secord

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKsecordR.htm

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singlaub

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKsinglaub.htm

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_North

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Freeway%22_Rick_Ross

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Poindexter

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrections_Corporation_of_America

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contras

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_trafficking

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKowenR.htm

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKbosch.htm

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Iraq_War

Invasion of Panama (1989)

The Invasion of Panama was a military operation ordered by the leader of the Consortium President George H.W. Bush to silence rogue Consortium agent General Manuel Noriega of Panama who had been instrumental in the transportation of cocaine from Colombia into Central America during Operation Charly and the Iran-Contra Affair. Noriega had been a CIA operative since Operation 40 and had threatened to divert cocaine traffic away from the United States after his role in the Iran-Contra Scandal had been revealed. In 1988, the DEA indicted him on federal drug charges and the White House, under George Bush, began a propaganda campaign to label Panama’s government a ‘narco-kleptocracy’. In an attempt to blackmail President Bush, Noriega threatened to reveal his involvement Consortium activities which included narco-trafficking with the DEA, laundering drug money and exposing his special relationship with the CIA if he was not allowed to retain power. Bush responded by ordering a full scale invasion of Panama in 1989, on the pretext of protecting the Panamanian people and the Panama Canal while putting an end to the ‘narco-dictatorship’ of Manuel Noriega. US forces successfully deposed Noriega from power and arrested him. Noriega was put on trial in 1992 and convicted, with evidence from his trial largely censored by the CIA as classified material to prevent Noriega from speaking on his long history of being involved in Consortium activities. Noriega upon his release in 1999 was extradited to France to stand trial for a money laundering charge and was reconvicted in 2010. He was then extradited to Panama in 2011 where he suffered a ‘brain hemorrhage’.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_drug_trade_in_Panama

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manuel_Noriega

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_invasion_of_Panama

http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKbushG.htm

http://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/11/30/required-reading-a-brief-history-of-the-cias-involvement-with-drug-smuggling-part-2/

VIDEO DOCUMENTARIES

Who The American Connection (Part 1 & 2) – Featuring former DEA agents Pat Saunders & Jerry Laveroni (1975)

Part 1

Part 2

The Mena Connection (1995)

- The Green Chazzan

The Bay of Pigs & Operation J/M-Wave        

The Bay of Pigs and The Kennedy Assassination by Dr. Webster Tarpley (1992)

Presidential Portrait of JFK

“…JM/WAVE …proliferated across [Florida] in preparation for the Bay of Pigs invasion. A subculture of fronts, proprietaries, suppliers, transfer agents, conduits, dummy corporations, blind drops, detective agencies, law firms, electronic firms, shopping centers, airlines, radio stations, the mob and the church and the banks: a false and secret nervous system twitching to stimuli supplied by the cortex in Clandestine Services in Langley. After defeat on the beach in Cuba, JM/WAVE became a continuing and extended Miami Station, CIA’s largest in the continental United States. A large sign in front of the […] building complex reads: US GOVERNMENT REGULATIONS PROHIBIT DISCUSSION OF THIS ORGANIZATION OR FACILITY.

Donald Freed, Death in Washington (Westport, Connecticut, 1980), p. 141.

The review offered so far of George Bush’s activities during the late 1950′s and early 1960′s is almost certainly incomplete in very important respects. There is good reason to believe that Bush was engaged in something more than just the oil business during those years. Starting about the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in the spring of 1961, we have the first hints that Bush, in addition to working for Zapata Offshore, may also have been a participant in certain covert operations of the US intelligence community.

Bush Sr.

Such participation would certainly be coherent with George’s role in the Prescott Bush, Skull and Bones, and Brown Brothers, Harriman networks. During the twentieth century, the Skull and Bones/Harriman circles have always maintained a sizable and often decisive presence inside the intelligence organizations of the State Department, the Treasury Department, the Office of Naval Intelligence, the Office of Strategic Services, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Indeed, the Harriman and related Anglophile financier factions of Wall Street have generally regarded those parts of the state apparatus dealing with intelligence and covert operations as their own very special property, property which had to be kept seeded with control networks in order to be effectively steered from above. For George Bush to interface with the intelligence community while ostensibly engaged in his business career would be coherent with that well-established pattern.

A body of leads has been assembled which suggests that George Bush may have been associated with the CIA at some time before the autumn of 1963. According to Joseph McBride of The Nation, “a source with close connections to the intelligence community confirms that Bush started working for the agency in 1960 or 1961, using his oil business as a cover for clandestine activities.” 1 By the time of the Kennedy assassination, we have an official FBI document which refers to “Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency,” and despite official disclaimers there is every reason to think that this is indeed the man in the White House today. The mystery of George Bush as a possible covert operator hinges on four points, each one of which represents one of the great political and espionage scandals of postwar American history.

These four cardinal points are:

1. The abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, launched on April 16-17, 1961, prepared with the assistance of the CIA’s “Miami Station” (also known under the code name JM/WAVE). After the failure of the amphibious landings of Brigade 2506, Miami station, under the leadership of Theodore Shackley, became the focus for Operation Mongoose, a series of covert operations directed against Castro, Cuba, and possibly other targets.
2. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963, and the coverup of those responsible for this crime.
3. The Watergate scandal, beginning with an April, 1971 visit to Miami, Florida by E. Howard Hunt on the tenth anniversary of the Bay of Pigs invasion to recruit operatives for the White House Special Investigations Unit (the “Plumbers” and later Watergate burglars) from among Cuban-American Bay of Pigs veterans.
4. The Iran-contra affair, which became a public scandal during October-November 1986, several of whose central figures, such as Felix Rodriguez, were also veterans of the Bay of Pigs.

George Bush’s role in both Watergate and the October surprise/Iran-contra complex will be treated in detail at later points in this book. Right now it is important to see that thirty years of covert operations, in many respects, form a single continuous whole. This is especially true in regard to the dramatis personae. Georgie Anne Geyer points to the obvious in a recent book: “…an entire new Cuban cadre now emerged from the Bay of Pigs. The names Howard Hunt, Bernard Barker, Rolando Martinez, Felix Rodriguez and Eugenio Martinez would, in the next quarter century, pop up, often decisively, over and over again in the most dangerous American foreign policy crises. There were Cubans flying missions for the CIA in the Congo and even for the Portuguese in Africa; Cubans were the burglars of Watergate; Cubans played key roles in Nicaragua, in Irangate, in the American move into the Persian Gulf.”  Felix Rodriguez tells us that he was infiltrated into Cuba with the other members of the “Grey Team” in conjunction with the Bay of Pigs landings; this is the same man we will find directing the contra supply effort in central American during the 1980′s, working under the direct supervision of Don Gregg and George Bush.  Theodore Shackley, the JM/WAVE station chief, will later show up in Bush’s 1979-80 presidential campaign.

CIA Chief Ted Shackley

To a very large degree, such covert operations (and the great political scandals attendant upon them) have drawn upon the same pool of personnel. They are a significant extent the handiwork of the same crowd. It is therefore revealing to extrapolate forward and backward in time the individuals and groups of individuals who appear as the cast of characters in one scandal and compare them with the cast of characters for the other scandals, including the secondary ones that have not been enumerated here. Howard Hunt, for example, shows up as a confirmed part of the overthrow of the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, as an important part of the chain of command in the Bay of Pigs, as a person repeatedly accused of having been in Dallas on the day Kennedy was shot, and as one of the central figures of Watergate. (One wonders what secrets, after all, were contained in Howard Hunt’s safe, the contents of which were so conventiently “deep sixed” by FBI Director Patrick Gray.)

E Howard Hunt

George Bush is demonstrably one of the most important protagonists of the Watergate scandal, and was the overall director of Iran-contra. Since he appears especially in Iran-contra in close proximity to Bay of Pigs holdovers, it is surely legitimate to wonder when his association with those Bay of Pigs Cubans might have started.

1959 was the year that Bush started operating out of his Zapata Offshore headquarters in Houston; it was also the year that Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba. Officially, as we have seen, George was now a businessman whose work took him at times to Louisiana, where Zapata had offshore drilling operations. George must have been a frequent visitor to New Orleans. Because of his family’s estate on Jupiter Island, he would also have been a frequent visitor to the Hobe Sound area. And then, there were Zapata Offshore drilling operations in the Florida Strait. On all of these activities, the official “red Studebaker” biographical material and the Zapata Offshore annual reports are extremely cryptic.

Prescott Bush

The Jupiter Island connection and father Prescott’s Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones networks are doubtless the key. Jupiter Island meant Averell Harriman, Robert Lovett, C. Douglas Dillon and other Anglophile financiers who had directed the US intelligence community long before there had been a CIA at all. And, in the back yard of the Jupiter Island Olympians, and under their direction, a powerful covert operations base was now being assembled, in which George Bush would have been present at the creation as a matter of birthright.

During 1959-60, Allen Dulles and the Eisenhower Administration began to assemble in south Florida the infrastructure for covert action against Cuba. This was the JM/WAVE capability, later formally constituted as the CIA Miami station. JM/WAVE was an operational center for the Eisenhower regime’s project of staging an invasion of Cuba using a secret army of anti-Castro Cuban exiles organized, armed, trained, transported, and directed by the CIA. The Cubans, called Brigade 2506, were trained in secret camps in Guatemala, and they had air support from B-26 bombers based in Nicaragua. This invasion was crushed by Castro’s defending forces in less than three days.

Allen Dulles

Before going along with the plan so eagerly touted by Allen Dulles, Kennedy had established the pre-condition that under no circumstances whatsoever would there be direct intervention by US military forces against Cuba. On the one hand, Dulles had assured Kennedy that the news of the invasion would trigger an insurrection which would sweep Castro and his regime away. On the other, Kennedy had to be concerned about provoking a global thermonuclear confrontation with the USSR, in the eventuality that N.S. Khrushchev decided to respond to a US Cuban gambit by, for example, cutting off US access to Berlin.

According to some accounts, the code name for the Bay of Pigs was Operation Pluto. 4 But Bay of Pigs veteran Howard Hunt scornfully denies that this was the code name used by JM/WAVE personnel; Hunt writes: “So perhaps the Pentagon referred to the Brigade invasion as PLUTO. CIA did not.” But Hunt does not tell us what the CIA code name was, and the contents of Hunt’s Watergate era White House safe, which might have told us the answer, were of course “deep-sixed” by FBI Director Patrick Gray. One code name frequently used by CIA Miami Station personnel appears to have been “Don Eduardo,” roughly the Spanish equivalent of “Mr. Edward” or perhaps “Mr. Ed.” According to reliable sources and published accounts, the CIA code name for the Bay of Pigs invasion was Operation Zapata, and the plan was so referred to by Richard Bissell of the CIA, one of the plan’s promoters, in a briefing to President Kennedy in the Cabinet Room on March 29, 1961.  Does Operation Zapata have anything to do with Zapata Offshore?

Formerly Zapata

More on Zapata & George Bush : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbinger_Group

Then there is the question of the Brigade 2506 landing fleet, which was composed of five older freighters bought or chartered from the Garcia Steamship Lines, bearing the names of Houston, Rio Esondido, Caribe, Atlantic, and Lake Charles. In addition to these vessels, which were outfitted as transport ships, there were two somewhat better armed fire support ships, the Blagar and the Barbara. (In some sources Barbara J.) 8 The Barbara was originally an LCI (Landing Craft Infantry) of earlier vintage. Our attention is attracted at once to the Barbara and the Houston, in the first case because we have seen George Bush’s habit of naming his combat aircraft after his wife, and, in the second case, because Bush was at this time a resident, booster, and Republican activist of Houston, Texas. But of course, the appearance of names like “Zapata,” Barbara, and Houston can by itself only arouse suspicion, and proves nothing.

After the ignominious defeat of the Bay of Pigs invasion, there was great animosity against Kennedy among the survivors of Brigade 2506, some of whom eventually made their way back to Miami after being released from Castro’s prisoner of war camps. There was also great animosity against Kennedy on the part of the JM/WAVE personnel.

David Atlee Phillips

During the early 1950′s, E. Howard Hunt had been the CIA station chief in Mexico City. As David Atlee Phillips (another embittered JM/WAVE veteran) tells us in his autobiographical account, The Night Watch, Howard Hunt had been the immediate superior of a young CIA recruit named William F. Buckley, the Yale graduate and Skull and Bones member who later founded the National Review. In his autobiographical account written during the days of the Watergate scandal, Hunt includes the following tirade about the Bay of Pigs: “No event since the communization of China in 1949 has had such a profound effect on the United States and its allies as the defeat of the US-trained Cuban invasion brigade at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961.”

OSS China

Out of that humiliation grew the Berlin Wall, the missile crisis, guerrilla warfare throughout Latin American and Africa, and our Dominican Republic intervention. Castros’ beachhead triumph opened a bottomless Pandora’s box of difficulties that affected not only the United States, but most of its allies in the Free World. These bloody and subversive events would not have taken place had Castro been toppled. Instead of standing firm, our government pyramided crucially wrong decisions and allowed Brigade 2506 to be destroyed. The Kennedy administration yielded Castro all the excuse he needed to gain a tighter grip on the island of Jose Marti, then moved shamefacedly into the shadows and hoped the Cuban issue would simply melt away.9

Hunt was typical of the opinion that the debacle had been Kennedy’s fault, and not the responsibility of men like Allen Dulles and Richard Bissell, who had designed it and recommended it. After the embarrassing failure of the invasion, which never evoked the hoped-for spontaneous anti-Castro insurrection, Kennedy fired Allen Dulles, his Harrimanite deputy Bissell, and CIA deputy Director Charles Cabell (whose brother was the mayor of Dallas at the time Kennedy was shot).

During the days after the Bay of Pigs debacle, Kennedy was deeply suspicious of the intelligence community and of proposals for military escalation in general, including in places like South Vietnam. Kennedy sought to procure an outside, expert opinion on military matters. For this he turned to the former commander in chief of the Southwest Pacific Theatre during World War II, General Douglas MacArthur. Almost ten years ago, a reliable source shared with one of the authors an account of a meeting between Kennedy and MacArthur in which the veteran general warned the young president that there were elements inside the US government who emphatically did not share his patriotic motives, and who were seeking to destroy his administration from within. MacArthur’s warned that the forces bent on destroying Kennedy were centered in the Wall Street financial community and its various tentacles in the intelligence community.

General Douglas MacArthur

It is a matter of public record that Kennedy met with MacArthur in the latter part of April, 1961, after the Bay of Pigs. According to Kennedy aide Theodore Sorenson, MacArthur told Kennedy, “The chickens are coming home to roost, and you happen to have just moved into the chicken house.” 10 At the same meeting, according to Sorenson, MacArthur “warned [Kennedy] against the committment of American foot soldiers on the Asian mainland, and the President never forgot this advice.” 11 This point is grudgingly confirmed by Arthur M. Schlesinger, a Kennedy aide who had a vested interest in vilifying MacArthur, who wrote that “MacArthur expressed his old view that anyone wanting to commit American ground forces to the mainland [of Asia] should have his head examined.” 12 MacArthur restated this advice during a second meeting with Kennedy when the General returned from his last trip to the Far East in July, 1961.

Kennedy valued MacArthur’s professional military opinion highly, and used it to keep at arms length those advisers who were arguing for escalation in Laos, Vietnam, and elsewhere. He repeatedly invited those who proposed to send land forces to Asia to convince MacArthur that this would as good idea. If they could convince MacArthur, then he, Kennedy, might also go along. At this time, the group proposing escalation in Vietnam (as well as preparing the assassination of President Diem) had a heavy Brown Brothers, Harriman/Skull and Bones overtone: the hawks of 1961-63 were Harriman, McGeorge Bundy, William Bundy, Henry Cabot Lodge, and some key London oligarchs and theoreticians of counterinsurgency wars. And of course, George Bush during these years was calling for escalation in Vietnam and challenging Kennedy to “muster the courage” to try a second invasion of Cuba. In the meantime, the JM/WAVE-Miami station complex was growing rapidly to become the largest of Langley’s many satellites. Its center was at the former Richmond Naval Air Station south of Miami, which had been a base for antisubmarine blimps during World War II. During the years after the failure of the Bay of Pigs, this complex had as many as 3,000 Cuban agents and subagents, with a small army of case officers to direct and look after each one. According to one account, there were at least 55 dummy corporations to provide employment, cover, and commercial disguise for all these operatives. There were detective bureaus, gun stores, real estate brokerages, boat repair shops, and party boats for fishing and other entertainments. There was the clandestine Radio Swan, later renamed Radio Americas. There were fleets of specially modified boats based at Homestead Marina, and at other marinas throughout the Florida Keys. Agents were assigned to the University of Miami and other educational institutions.

Henry Cabot Lodge – Ambassador to Vietnam

The raison d’être of the massive capability commanded by Theodore Shackley was now Operation Mongoose, a program for sabotage raids and assassinations to be conducted on Cuban territory, with a special effort to eliminate Fidel Castro personally. In order to run these operations from US territory, flagrant and extensive violation of federal and state laws was the order of the day. Documents regarding the incorporation of businesses were falsified. Income tax returns were faked. FAA regulations were violated by planes taking off for Cuba or for forward bases in the Bahamas and elsewhere. Explosives moved across highways that were full of civilian traffic. The Munitions Act, the Neutrality Act, the customs and immigrations laws were routinely flaunted. 13 Above all, the drug laws were massively violated as the gallant anti-communist fighters filled their planes and boats with illegal narcotics to be smuggled back into the US when they returned from their missions. By 1963, the drug-running activities of the covert operatives were beginning to attract attention. JM/WAVE, in sum, accelerated the slide of south Florida towards the status of drug and murder capital of the United States it achieved during the 1980′s, when it became as notorious as Chicago during Prohibition.

It cannot be the task of this study to even begin to treat the reasons for which certain leading elements of the Anglo-American financial oligarchy, perhaps acting with certain kinds of support from continental European aristocratic and neofascist networks, ordered the murder of John F. Kennedy. The British and the Harrimanites wanted escalation in Vietnam; by the time of his assassination Kennedy was committed to a pullout of US forces. Kennedy, as shown by his American University speech of 1963, was also interested in seeking a more stable path of war avoidance with the Soviets, using the US military superiority demonstrated during the Cuban missile crisis to convince Moscow to accept a policy of world peace through economic development. Kennedy was interested in the possibilities of anti-missile strategic defense to put an end to that nightmare of mutually assured destruction which appealed to Henry Kissinger, a disgruntled former employee of the Kennedy administration whom the president had denounced as a madman. Kennedy was considering moves to limit or perhaps abolish the usurpation of authority over the national currency by the Wall Street and London interests controlling the Federal Reserve System. If re-elected to a second term, Kennedy was likely to have re-asserted presidential control, as distinct from Wall Street control, over the intelligence community. There is good reason to believe that Kennedy would have ousted J. Edgar Hoover from his self-appointed life tenure at the FBI, subjecting that agency to presidential control for the first time in many years. Kennedy was committed to a vigorous expansion of the space program, the cultural impact of which was beginning to alarm the finance oligarchs. Above all, Kennedy was acting like a man who thought he was president of the United States, violating the collegiality of oligarchical trusteeship of that office that had been in force since the final days of Roosevelt. Kennedy furthermore had two younger brothers who might succeed him, putting a strong presidency beyond the control of the Eastern Anglophile Liberal Establishment for decades. George Bush joined in the Harrimanite opposition to Kennedy on all of these points.

JFK

After Kennedy was killed in Dallas on November 22, 1963, it was alleged that E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis had both been present, possibly together, in Dallas on the day of the shooting, although the truth of these allegations has never been finally established. Both Hunt and Sturgis were of course Bay of Pigs veterans who would later appear center stage in Watergate. There were also allegations that Hunt and Sturgis were among a group of six to eight derelicts who were found in boxcars sitting on the railroad tracks behind the grassy knoll near Dealey Plaza, and who were rounded up and taken in for questioning by the Dallas police on the day of the assassination. Some suspected that Hunt and Sturgis had participated in the assassination. Some of these allegations were at the center of the celebrated 1985 defamation case of Hunt v. Liberty Lobby, in which a Florida federal jury found against Hunt. But, since the Dallas Police Department and County Sheriff never photographed or fingerprinted the “derelicts” in question, it has so far proven impossible definitively to resolve this question. But these allegations and theories about the possible presence and activities of Hunt and Sturgis in Dallas were sufficiently widespread so as to compel the Commission on CIA Activities Within the United States (the Rockefeller Commission) to attempt to refute them in its 1975 report. 14

According to George Bush’s official biography, he was during 1963 a well-to-do businessman residing in Houston, the busy president of Zapata Offshore and the chairman of the Harris County Republican Organization, supporting Barry Goldwater as the GOP’s likely 1964 presidential candidate, while at the same time actively preparing his own 1964 bid for the US Senate. But during that same period of time, Bush may have shared some common acquaintances with Lee Harvey Oswald.

Republican Super-Racist – Barry Goldwater

Between October, 1962 and April, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald and his Russian wife Marina were in frequent contact with a Russian emigré couple living in Dallas: these were George de Mohrenschildt and his wife Jeanne. During the Warren Commission investigation of the Kennedy assassination, de Mohrenschildt was interviewed at length about his contacts with Oswald. When, in the spring of 1977, the discrediting of the Warren Commission report as a blatant coverup had made public pressure for a new investigation of the Kennedy assassination irresistible, the House Assassinations Committee planned to interview de Mohrenschildt once again. But in March, 1977, just before de Mohrenschildt was scheduled to be interviewed by Gaeton Fonzi of the House committee’s staff, he was found dead in Palm Beach, Florida. His death was quickly ruled a suicide. One of the last people to see him alive was Edward Jay Epstein, who was also interviewing de Mohrenschildt about the Kennedy assassination for an upcoming book. Epstein is one of the writers on the Kennedy assassination who enjoyed excellent relations with the late James Angleton of the CIA. If de Mohrenschildt were alive today, he might be able to enlighten us about his relations with George Bush, and perhaps afford us some insight into Bush’s activities during this epoch.

George de Mohrenschildt

Jeanne de Mohrenschildt rejected the finding of suicide in her husband’s death. “He was eliminated before he got to that committee,” the widow told a journalist in 1978, “because someone did not want him to get to it.” She also maintained that George de Mohrenschildt had been surreptitiously injected with mind-altering drugs. 15 After de Mohrenschildt’s death, his personal address book was located, and it contained this entry: “Bush, George H.W. (Poppy) 1412 W. Ohio also Zapata Petroleum Midland.” There is of course the problem of dating this reference. George Bush had moved his office and home from Midland to Houston in 1959, when Zapata Offshore was constituted, so perhaps this reference goes back to some time before 1959. There is also the number: “4-6355.” There are, of course, numerous other entries, including one W.F. Buckley of the Buckley brothers of New York City, William S. Paley of CBS, plus many oil men, stock brokers, and the like. 16

In 1957, de Mohrenschildt was approved by the CIA Office of Security to be hired as a US government geologist for a mission to Yugoslavia. Upon his return he was interviewed by one J. Walter Moore of the CIA’s Domestic Contact Service, with whom he remained in contact. During 1958, de Morhenschildt visited Ghana, Togo, Dahomey; during 1959 he visited Africa again and returned by way of Poland. In 1959 he married Jeanne, his fourth wife, a former ballet dancer and dress designer who had been born in Manchuria, where her father had been one of the directors of the Chinese Eastern Railroad. During the summer of 1960, George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt told their friends that they were going to embark on a walking tour of 11,000 miles along Indian trails from Mexico to Central America. One of their principal destinations was Guatemala City, where they were staying at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion in April, 1961, after which they made their way home by way of Panama and Haiti. After two months in Haiti, the Mohrenschildts returned to Dallas, where they came into contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, who had come back to the United States from his sojourn in the Soviet Union in June, 1962. By this time de Mohrenschildt was also frequenting Admiral Henry C. Bruton and his wife, to whom he introduced the Oswalds. Admiral Bruton was the former director of naval communications, and had superintended a comprehensive modernization and reorganization of the navy’s means of keeping in touch with ships, planes, missiles, submarines, and the like.

Oswald

It is established that between October, 1962 and late April, 1963, de Mohrenschildt was a very important figure in the life of Oswald and his Russian wife. Despite Oswald’s lack of social graces, de Mohrenschildt introduced him into Dallas society, took him to parties, assisted him in finding employment, and much more. It was through de Mohrenschildt that Oswald met a certain Volkmar Schmidt, a young German geologist who had studied with Professor Wilhelm Kuetemeyer, an expert in psychosomatic medicine and religious philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, who compiled a detailed psychological profile of Oswald. Jeanne and George helped Marina move her belongings during one of her many estrangements from Oswald. According to some accounts, de Mohrenschildt’s influence on Oswald was so great during this period that he could virtually dictate important decisions to the young ex-marine simply by making suggestions. Oswald was in awe of de Mohrenschildt, according to some.

According to some versions, de Mohrenschildt was aware of Oswald’s alleged April 10, 1963 attempt to assassinate the well-known right-wing General Edwin Walker. According to Marina, de Mohrenschildt once asked Oswald, “Lee, how did you miss General Walker?” On April 19, George and Jeanne de Mohrenschildt went to New York City, and on April 29 the CIA Office of Security found that it had no objection to de Mohrenschildt’s acceptance of a contract with the Duvalier regime of Haiti in the field of natural resource development. De Mohrenschildt appears to have departed for Haiti on May 1, 1963. In the meantime Oswald had left Dallas and traveled to New Orleans. According to Mark Lane, “there is evidence that de Mohrenschildt served as a CIA control officer who directed Oswald’s actions.” Much of the extensive published literature on de Mohrenschildt converges on the idea that he was a baby sitter, handler, case officer, or control agent for Oswald on behalf of some intelligence agency.  De Mohrenschildt’s pedigree evokes haunting parallels to the typical figures of the PERMINDEX networks of Georges Mandel, Ferenc Nagy, Max Hagerman, Max Seligman, Carlo d’Amelio, Lewis Mortimer Bloomfield, and Clay Shaw, to which public attention was called during the investigations of New Orleans district attorney James Garrison. It is therefore highly interesting that George Bush’s name turned up in the personal address book of George de Mohrenschildt. The Warren Commission went to absurd lengths to cover up the fact that George de Mohrenschildt was a denizen of the world of the intelligence agencies. This included ignoring the well-developed paper trial on de Mohrenschildt as Nazi and communist sympathizer, and later as a US asset abroad.

Photo of Bush at CIA

The Warren Commission concluded:

The Commission’s investigation has developed no signs of subversive or disloyal conduct on the part of either of the de Mohrenschildts. Neither the FBI, CIA, nor any witnesses contacted by the Commission has provided any information linking the de Mohrenschildts to subversive or extremist organizations. Nor has there been any evidence linking them in any way with the assassination of President Kennedy.

On the day of the Kennedy assassination, FBI records show George Bush as reporting a right-wing member of the Houston Young Republicans for making threatening comments about President Kennedy. According to FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act and related FBI documentation, Bush received a highly sensitive, high-level briefing from the Bureau:

Date: November 29, 1963
To: Director Bush

Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Department of State
From: John Edgar Hoover, Director
Subject: ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY NOVEMBER 22, 1963

“Our Miami, Florida, Office on November 23, 1963 advised that the Office of Coordinator of Cuban Affairs in Miami advised that the Department of State feels some misguided anti-Castro group might capitalize on the present situation and undertake an unauthorized raid against Cuba, believing that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy might herald a change in US policy, which is not true.

Our sources and informants familiar with Cuban matters in the Miami area advise that the general feeling in the anti-Castro Cuban community is one of stunned disbelief and, even among those who did not entirely agree with the President’s policy concerning Cuba, the feeling is that the President’s death represents a great loss not only to the US but to all Latin America. These sources know of no plans for unauthorized action against Cuba.

An informant who has furnished reliable information in the past and who is close to a small pro-Castro group in Miami has advised that those individuals are afraid that the assassination of the President may result in strong repressive measures being taken against them and, although pro-Castro in their feelings, regret the assassination.”

Castro

This FBI document identifying George Bush as a CIA agent in November, 1963 was first published by Joseph McBride in The Nation in July, 1988, just before Bush received the Republican nomination for president. McBride’s source observed: “I know [Bush] was involved in the Caribbean. I know he was involved in the suppression of things after the Kennedy assassination. There was a very definite worry that some Cuban groups were going to move against Castro and attempt to blame it on the CIA.” 20 When pressed for confirmation or denial, Bush’s spokesman Stephen Hart commented: “Must be another George Bush.” Within a short time the CIA itself would peddle the same damage control line. On July 19, 1988 in the wake of wide public attention to the report published in The Nation, CIA spokeswoman Sharron Basso departed from the normal CIA policy of refusing to confirm or deny reports that any person is or was a CIA employee. CIA spokeswoman Basso told the Associated Press that the CIA believed that “the record should be clarified.” For the CIA to volunteer the name of one of its former employees to the press was a shocking violation of traditional methods, which are supposedly designed to keep such names a closely guarded secret.

This revelation may have constituted a violation of federal law. But no exertions were too great when it came to damage control for George Bush. It makes perfect sense for George Bush to be called in on a matter involving the Cuban community in Miami, since that is a place where George has traditionally had a constituency. George inherited it from his father, Prescott Bush of Jupiter Island, and later passed it on to his own son, Jeb.

Bush and Noriega

- The Green Chazzan 

US Surgeon General Backs Medical Marijuana

“…The nation’s top doctor on Wednesday suggested an openness to wider use of medical marijuana, saying the drug might offer some medical benefits. “We have some preliminary data showing that for certain medical conditions and symptoms that marijuana can be helpful,” Surgeon General Vivek Murthy told “CBS This Morning.”

http://thehill.com/regulation/administration/231717-surgeon-general-backs-medical-marijuana

US Drug Czar Approves DC Legalization

“…U.S. drug czar Michael Botticelli, though banned from supporting marijuana legalization due to federal law, says that the nation’s capital should be able to implement its own laws using its own funds, even if that does indeed mean legalizing marijuana…”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/06/michael-botticelli-marijuana_n_6633638.html

Justice Department Goes After Marijuana Mafia in Oakland

“…Lawyers for U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag appeared in court Tuesday in an effort to shut down a medical marijuana collective in Oakland, California, despite federal guidance discouraging U.S. prosecutors from going after state-legal cannabis operations…”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/03/harborside-melinda-haag-appeal_n_6608768.html

Marijuana Proven To Be Effective Against Depression

“..Research has suggested that cannabis may be a promising treatment option for a number of different physical and mental health conditions, from post-traumatic stress disorder to chronic pain. A study released this week suggests that depression can be added to that list…”

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/06/marijauna-depression_n_6622126.html

Cannabis Advocate: Ohio Bill Doesn’t Go Far Enough

“…The leader of an Ohio families’ group that has been campaigning to get medical marijuana for sick children said Thursday a bill introduced this week in the state House does not go far enough to provide relief to the ailing…” 

http://www.cincinnati.com/story/news/2015/02/05/cannabis-advocate-ohio-bill-go-far-enough/22940019/

Santa Ana Lottery

“…Thursday afternoon’s lottery was a result of the city-backed, voter-approved measure that says dispensaries can operate only in two industrial areas…”

http://www.latimes.com/local/orangecounty/la-me-0206-pot-shop-lottery-20150206-story.html

Cypress Hill Rapper Wins Marijuana Lottery

“…. Hip-hop group Cypress Hill gained fame in the 1990s with marijuana-themed songs like “Dr. Greenthumb.” Now one of its members might become a real Dr. Greenthumb after he and 19 other applicants won a city lottery Thursday to put them on a path to legally distribute medical marijuana in Santa Ana….” 

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/city-650380-marijuana-lottery.html

800 Plants Seized in Washington

“…Detectives in Washington state busted a massive, illegal marijuana grow-house that was cultivating pot next-door to a day care center, and helping to undercut the state’s legal marijuana market…”

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/wash-deputies-find-800-pot-plants-day-care-article-1.2105478

Republicans Must Fold on Marijuana To Stay Relevant

“…those who want to see a Republican in the White House should take note – millennials could be the deciding vote in 2016, and marijuana law reform could be a key issue….”

http://www.newsday.com/opinion/oped/marijuana-legalization-could-unlock-millennial-votes-for-gop-in-2016-steven-moore-1.9912281

In 2015, corruption, abuse and violence among US law enforcement agencies became an issue of discourse at the American dinner table, as deep reservations have spread across the public in regards to their relationship with those “sworn to protect”. Many deadly police shootings occurred with the deaths of several minors, young men and women alike totaling nearly 1,000 deaths (according to the Washington Post) and 10% of those killed were unarmed and not in the process of committing a crime but merely ran from police out of the fear of being murdered. While police shootings and violence have taken a front run in the media, medical marijuana growers and patients are no strangers to such encounters with law enforcement. The medical marijuana industry has endured the edge of the spear of police corruption for several years if not decades counting the passage of medical marijuana laws in the late 90’s and 2000’s. Despite a voter mandate and the implementation of a regulatory structure, again and again, marijuana patients and growers have found themselves subjected to the deadliest side of law enforcement abuse, with such tactics as murder, racketeering, theft, fraud, entrapment, wrongful imprisonment, illegal search and seizure, unlawful surveillance, bribery, extortion and other forms of severe abuse of power.

Why has corruption become so endemic in recent times among our police forces? The first key is the Patriot Act. The Bush Administration literally swept away anti-corruption incentives in favor of ‘anti-terror’ and ‘domestic terror’ incentives, allowing the police in many cases to sidestep the fourth amendment. Many jurisdictions and counties throughout the country took the liberty of interpreting the new rules as they saw fit, conducting their own authorizations of domestic surveillance and using the atmosphere of fear to justify expansion of budgets and more importantly, armaments.

Asshat-In-Chief

The second key was the change in recruiting policies that took place during the Bush Administration, it began with the federal government reducing the standards for military admittance, allowing ex-felons, known hate groups and known members of gangs and organized crime to serve in the ranks during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In many cases these criminals were promoted to higher rank for their willingness to perform acts of violence against civilians that other more tempered soldiers were not. Police departments petitioned the government to lower their recruiting standards as well to permit the entry of these ex-felon soldiers, many coming back with mental duress from combat, into the police forces upon their return home using veteran employment and Iraqi policing experience as a justification. These new officers were far more prone to violence, brutality, corruption and hate than their prior counterparts and many were promoted due to their views on race and domestic policing.

Joe Biden speaking at the National Association of Police Associations

The third key was the continual recruitment of these personalities into law enforcement well after 2008, mainly due to the success of the Fraternal Order of Police in planting their top lobbyist, Senator Joe Biden, into the position of the Vice Presidency. The police union nationwide saw this a carte blanche opportunity to no longer ‘to protect and to serve’ but simply to rule by fear, violence and corruption. This was supported by the fact that Congress obstructed the placement of federal judges by President Obama, and many of the corrupt Bush appointees were able to continue to make rulings that protected the expansion of police misuse of power, including the acquittal of many murderers serving on the force. The ongoing corruption has led to penetration by foreign organized crime organizations, most notably the Mexican Cartels, who have used their newfound influence in law enforcement to expand their power to whole municipalities as shown by DEA research published in 2015.

DEA Corruption Report

http://www.dea.gov/docs/dir06515.pdf

So now that we know the police forces are riddled with corrupt, war-torn and psychologically unstable officers, let’s focus on their abuse of the medical marijuana industry in both current events and in retrospect:

1. Yuba County Sheriff, California – NET-5 Transporting Apprehension (2015)

Officer Christopher Mark Heath

A recent case, near and dear to our hearts that epitomizes the corruption within policing today. This month Yuba County Sheriff’s Deputy Christopher ‘Mark’ Heath, a veteran narcotics officer of the Yuba County Sheriff’s NET-5 drug and gang task force was caught transporting 200 pounds of medical marijuana, taken from NET-5 raids, in Pennsylvania by a local anti-narcotics task force. Heath was en route to New York, where the medical marijuana could fetch a price anywhere from $6,000 to $8,000 a pound. Heath was looking at anywhere from $1 million to $1.6 million in stolen marijuana profits. Whether other NET-5 or Yuba County Sheriff’s Deputies conspired to assist Heath in transporting is still pending investigation but industry insiders know that this is most certainly the case.

NET-5 is a notoriously corrupt anti-marijuana trafficking task force that has been known to ‘tax’ marijuana transporters and local growers alike for several years now, by conducting raids and seizures in violation of California’s Medical Marijuana Law if growers fail to pay or supply them. Yuba County itself is a sparsely populated farming county with most high paying jobs coming from government work with the local air force base or the county itself. The per capita income rate is about 40% less than the California average and like many parts of California, lower income populations have turned to medical marijuana to relieve the financial stress produced by the outfall of the ongoing financial crisis. Yuba County also sponsors FACT, an anti-marijuana group in the area that documents and publicizes police raids and seizures in the county.

Links on Heath Case

http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2015/12/30/yuba-county-deputy-accused-of-transporting-hundreds-of-pounds-of-marijuana-to-pennsylvania/

http://www.appeal-democrat.com/news/yuba-county-deputy-suspected-of-pennsylvania-marijuana-delivery/article_ddb93030-af2b-11e5-9d15-c7348145fa1f.html

http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2015/12/30/yuba-county-deputy-accused-of-transporting-hundreds-of-pounds-of-marijuana-to-pennsylvania/

Links on NET-5 Raids

http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2013/06/04/marijuana-grow-discovered-at-gas-station-in-yuba-city/

http://www.appeal-democrat.com/news/public-safety-briefs-m-marijuana-bust-in-foothills/article_1d5efafe-4159-11e4-9394-0017a43b2370.html

http://www.yubacountyfact.com/?q=headlines&page=2

http://www.chicoer.com/article/ZZ/20141009/NEWS/141009424

http://www.appeal-democrat.com/news/yuba-county-sued-for-third-time-over-pot-penalties/article_1975c8da-ae8d-11e5-8100-772524fd384e.html

2. Santa Ana, California – Municipal Corruption (2015)

Santa Ana, a city notoriously influenced by Mexican Drug Cartels, not excluding Mayor Miguel Pulido and City Attorney Sonia Carvalho, imposed a state and federally illegal lottery in early February to issue 20 zoning and operating permits for medical marijuana collectives within the city to friends, financial associates and cartel front men associated with Pulido, Carvalho and other members of Santa Ana city council to fast-track their operations and justify the elimination of competition. The Santa Ana Police, since the issuing of these permits, have followed Long Beach’s lead by becoming the Mayor’s personal hit squad for taking out collectives that have taken suit with the city over these illegal measures, using the gang unit and anti-narcotics units to shut down anyone competing against the 20 collectives. In late May, the corruption was unveiled at the Sky High collective when Santa Ana Gang Unit utilized itself as an intimidation force to shut down the collective but was caught on camera conducting the raid, which featured several officers illegally partaking in edibles and stealing product.

Mayor Pulido (right) with his cabal

The illegal lottery occurred as part of Measure BB, sponsored by the City Council, the Santa Ana police and Cartel front men; the cities success at the ballot was in large part due to the mishandling of the counter-initiative by OC NORML, who may or may not have sabotaged their own efforts due to institutional corruption and arrogance. OC NORML suspiciously opened a brand new office in the Downtown district of Santa Ana, without opposition, following the City’s victory, let alone NORML’s reputation for selling out local growers and farms for political influence and funding.

See more about the history of NORML’s Lies and Dirty Tricks:

https://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/12/24/when-the-grinch-stole-christmas-how-norml-sabotaged-marijuana-legalization-in-1978/

Statements made against the city by OCWeekly Magazine and Attorney Matthew Pappas revealed that “The mayor has a pecuniary interest in [at least] one of the collectives. Prior to the election, there were limousine services and gifts provided to officials. We have evidence of that. People were approached to pay a $25,000 amount and were told they would win the lottery.”

OC Weekly continues:

“Rather than forcing lottery players to go through a lengthy background check, something that might have greatly reduced the number of applications, city officials allowed individuals to submit an unlimited number of applications per location on behalf of various corporate entities. The city’s somewhat-cynical operating theory is that corporations are people, and thus each one, no matter how fictional or freshly conceived or who actually owned it, has the right to its own lottery ball….”

“Predictably, most of the 20 winners were deep-pocketed entrepreneurs, some of whom purchased 100 or even 150 balls to increase the odds of winning. The winners included some high-profile names such as Cypress Hill’s B-Real. Many winners formed legal partnerships, raised money from investors and paid the city with money orders; the Weekly also interviewed eyewitnesses who described successful applicants who drove to City Hall in flashy cars with their girlfriends in tow, hauling shopping bags stuffed with enough cash to purchase dozens of lottery balls.

The Weekly also uncovered allegations of attempted influence peddling by Pulido’s personal attorney and former Orange County Democratic Party chairman Frank Barbaro, as well as aggressive solicitation of campaign donations by both Pulido and powerful Democratic Party operative Melahat Rafiei, whose brother is among the 20 winners. Furthermore, to raise cash for the Measure BB campaign and thus lay the groundwork for the lottery, the city worked with Randall Longwith, a prominent medical-marijuana attorney whose brother-in-law, David Dewyke, happens to manage the Clinic Patient’s Association. The large-scale dispensary operated in Santa Ana without a permit for several years, until it was finally shut down by the police in late May–one of the last such dispensaries left in the city.

Campaign-contribution records obtained by the Weekly show Dewyke was by far the largest contributor to Measure BB, writing checks totaling $57,000–single-handedly footing nearly a third of the roughly $181,000 campaign bill. (Dewyke also gave $10,000 to the Measure CC campaign.) According to limo-company operator and custom-car designer Vini Bergeman–who lives in a 20,000-square-foot mansion in Panorama Heights and is a former associate of John Gotti, as well as a former business partner of Dewyke’s–Dewyke frequently borrowed his vehicles, saying he needed them to wine and dine city officials involved in Measure BB.

Female Officer Who Threatened Patients

The Atlantic Magazine also chimed in by pointing out the presence of corruption in the police union over the marijuana issue and the intended abuse of some of the patients present during the raid:

“On-duty police officers appear to be eating edible pot products—OC Weekly transcribes words they spoke while egging one another on. (“Those candy bars are pretty good,” one said. “I kinda feel light-headed though.”) Other dialogue offers a number of insights into the subculture of this narcotics unit. Take the woman with an amputated leg that police encountered on entering the dispensary. “Did you punch that one-legged old benita?” one police officer asks another. The other cop laughingly replied, “I was about to kick her in her fucking nub.” These are people Santa Ana taxpayers empower to use lethal force at their discretion….”

“What’s new is the way that the cops caught misbehaving on camera and the police union that represents them have responded to an internal police investigation—not with embarrassment, contrition, and public apologies, as would befit trustworthy people of good character, but with shameless, discrediting chutzpah: They’ve sued to keep now public video of their indefensible behavior from their overseers!

A lawsuit, filed last week in Orange County Superior Court by three unidentified police officers and the Santa Ana Police Officers Association, seeks to prevent Santa Ana Police Department internal-affairs investigators from using the video as they sort out what happened during the May 26 raid of Sky High Collective,” the Orange County Register reports. The article goes on to characterize the lawsuit’s claims:

The lawsuit argues that the video doesn’t paint a fair version of events. The suit also claims the video shouldn’t be used as evidence because, among other things, the police didn’t know they were on camera. “All police personnel present had a reasonable expectation that their conversations were no longer being recorded and the undercover officers, feeling that they were safe to do so, removed their masks,” says the suit.

The dispensary also did not obtain consent of any officer to record them, the suit says. “Without the illegal recordings, there would have been no internal investigation of any officer,” the suit says.

To sum up: These police officers are complaining that after rushing into this business with guns drawn, forcing employees outside, and using a crowbar to pry visible surveillance cameras off the walls, they were not warned—by the same employees they forced out—that their efforts to disable all surveillance cameras failed, rendering their decision to eat the business’s products visible to its owners. As well, they’re arguing that, though on-duty cops, they had a reasonable expectation of privacy, having failed to account for their own incompetence at disabling surveillance.

But even more galling is that last bit about how “without the illegal recordings, there would have been no internal investigation of any officer,” as that’s only true if one assumes that all cops present would cover for one another’s egregious misbehavior and sign off on a police report that misrepresented the raid. That isn’t a bad assumption, given that police subculture is rife with cops who fail to report on the misconduct of fellow police officers, but it’s really something to see police officers invoke that reality, even implicitly, in an attempt to wriggle out of accountability.

And most galling of all is the fact that this tactic is going to work temporarily. “A Superior Court judge indicated Tuesday that he plans to issue a temporary restraining order that would prevent the Santa Ana Police Department from using video of officers misbehaving during a pot-shop raid as the department investigates the officers’ actions,” the Voice of OC reports. “According to court documents, Judge Ronald Bauer so far agrees with officers’ claims that they would suffer ‘irreparable harm’ if the department is allowed to use video that the Santa Ana Police Association argues was obtained in an illegal eavesdropping operation.”

Santa Ana Police even went as far as to quash the video for their own internal affairs investigation. Maybe it’s the City of Santa Ana, not the medical marijuana community, that deserves to have an investigation of its own and not just a local one, but a federal one.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/08/the-chutzpah-of-a-police-union-in-orange-county-california/400502/

http://www.ocweekly.com/news/exactly-who-won-santa-anas-medical-marijuana-lottery-6479501

http://www.ocweekly.com/news/full-video-of-santa-ana-dispensary-raid-shows-even-more-cops-eating-pot-edibles-6455382

http://www.ocweekly.com/news/santa-ana-pot-store-where-cops-allegedly-ate-edibles-shut-down-by-cops-6781707

http://www.thecannabist.co/2015/08/05/santa-ana-marijuana-dispensary-raid-video-internal-affairs/38964/

3. Sullivan City, Texas – Top Narc Caught Taking Marijuana From Raid (2015)

Police officers conducting a raid against a marijuana grow site removed marijuana from the scene with permission from the police chief. Unbeknownst to these investigators, the grow has cameras on-site and filmed one officer removing marijuana in bottles of rubbing alcohol. The Department had already been under suspicion of marijuana trafficking for the cartel and a good cop, upon review of the footage, elected to turn in the corrupt cops to the Texas Rangers authority. The police department attempted to cover up the misappropriation leading to a raid by Texas Rangers against the Sullivan City Police Department. The local Valley News tells us more:

“Officer Angel De La Mora grabbed a handful and stuffed the marijuana inside a bottle of rubbing alcohol. “It was a stupid, dumb mistake,” de la Mora said months later during an interview. “But there’s more to it.” Police Chief Miguel Martinez stood by the door, watching de la Mora take handful after handful of marijuana. Police Inv. Reynaldo Cortes also stood nearby, occasionally chatting with the chief. They weren’t concerned about two security cameras that recorded the incident on May 21. If a police sergeant hadn’t tipped off the Texas Rangers, nobody would have missed the marijuana.

 “For me, it was more of a Barney Fife deal,” said attorney Ricardo Salinas, who represents de la Mora — referencing the dimwitted but well-meaning deputy from “The Andy Griffith Show.”

“I don’t believe that him or the chief really meant to do anything wrong,” Salinas said. “Ignorance of the law is no excuse, but I don’t think it’s really worth pursuing.”

 The Texas Rangers apparently didn’t agree.Nearly three weeks later, the Rangers raided the Sullivan City Police Department and seized the surveillance footage.They also presented Sullivan City with a search warrant that placed the police department on notice: The Rangers believed the incident may have constituted theft by a public servant, a state jail felony, and abuse of official capacity, a Class A misdemeanor. While the raid surprised Sullivan City administrators, problems with the police department aren’t anything new. The troubled police department went through five police chiefs during the past five years. In June 2010, federal agents arrested Chief Hernan Guerra Jr., who pleaded guilty to drug trafficking. Frustrated with city politics, Interim Chief Carlos Lucio left just 14 months later. The City Commission fired Chief Jose Anaya for unprofessional conduct. And Chief Juan Alejandro resigned after Sullivan City administrators asked him to stop sleeping at the department. That left Sullivan City with veteran patrolman Miguel Martinez, who got the top job primarily because the City Commission knew he would stick around.

 Constant turnover allowed de la Mora and other officers with questionable records to avoid scrutiny for years. “To me, it wasn’t a police department per se,” said Joe Cantu, a semi-retired Rio Grande Valley lawman who spent a year working for Sullivan City. “It was just a bunch of guys who carry guns and badges and aren’t properly trained.”

Several local officers, including former police Chief Hernan Guerra Jr., have been caught working with smugglers. In June 2010, federal agents arrested Guerra for working with a Tamaulipas-based drug trafficking organization. Guerra helped the organization dodge Border Patrol agents and kept Sullivan City police away from drug shipments. He also rigged city vehicle auctions for drug traffickers. In exchange, the smugglers paid him $500 to $2,000 every month, according to federal court records. He pleaded guilty and received a 10-year prison sentence. “You seemed to scoff, really, at getting caught,” said U.S. District Judge Randy Crane, according to a transcript of the April 2011 sentencing hearing. “You didn’t care. You were going to do it anyway. I remember being appalled listening to some of the things you were saying on wiretaps.”

“Former Sullivan City police Officer Juan Sotelo said he witnessed de la Mora’s dark side on March 10, 2012. While working off-duty security at Jaguars — an Edinburg strip club with nude dancers — Sotelo said he spotted de la Mora. “Officer Sotelo stated that Officer de la Mora was heavily intoxicated and appeared to be under the influence of an illegal substance, due to the fact that he observed a white substance on his nose,” according to records from an internal investigation conducted by the Sullivan City Police Department. Sotelo later filed a lawsuit against Sullivan City, claiming the department retaliated against him for reporting wrongdoing.

 His attorney, Javier Pea, provided the confidential internal investigation to KGBT-TV, which independently verified the document’s authenticity. The police sergeant who investigated the incident confirmed Sotelo’s story by contacting another officer who worked off-duty security at Jaguars that night, according to the report. Afterward, the sergeant bought an off-the-shelf drug test from Walgreens and asked de la Mora to submit a urine sample. De la Mora tested positive for cocaine, according to the internal investigation. He resigned effective immediately. However, the Walgreens drug test wouldn’t stand up to legal scrutiny. Sullivan City had botched the investigation.”

Fewer than two months later, de la Mora reapplied to the Sullivan City Police Department. He submitted the standard 13-page job application, which asked: Have you ever used marijuana or any other drug not prescribed by your physician? “Yes,” wrote de la Mora, according to a copy of the application obtained through a public information request. “Cocaine. The situation was an ordeal.” Sullivan City hired him back anyway. Nearly all drug trafficking and immigrant smuggling cases involve cars, Lucio said, adding that the department would file civil forfeiture proceedings against the vehicles. Money from the vehicle auctions funded equipment and other police department expenditures. “Sullivan City can’t support itself on the citations,” Lucio said, referencing traffic tickets. “It can’t. The money is in forfeitures.” For the cash-strapped city, forfeiture funds have become so important the police chief talks with the City Commission about seized vehicles at monthly meetings. “That’s why they wouldn’t let him go: Because the police department is a business,” Lucio said. “And anyone who says otherwise is lying.”

 De La Mora went on to claim he was stealing the marijuana for a relative, for medical use but given his track record of corruption, nobody took the bait.

http://valleycentral.com/news/local/why-a-cop-who-seized-tons-of-marijuana-stole-a-handful–and-how-sullivan-city-handled-it

The Drug Policy Alliance made a general comment on asset forfeitures and police corruption stating:

“Ever wonder why police spend so much time enforcing failed drug laws?  To find the answer, you just need to follow the money.  Funding schemes and asset forfeiture laws have given law enforcement agencies strong financial incentives to continue the drug war.  Because funding for drug task forces is often based on the number of arrests made and the amount of property seized in drug busts, the easiest way for local police to up their numbers and boost their careers is to target low-level drug offenders, not violent kingpins.  To create arrest opportunities, police routinely rely on untrustworthy informants, conduct dangerous home invasions on flimsy evidence, frame suspects and commit perjury.  Asset forfeiture laws allow law enforcement agencies to seize property with minimal proof, putting the burden instead on suspects to prove their own innocence.  Because these assets often go straight into the coffers of the enforcement agency, these laws have created financial incentives for property seizures that encourage corruption.”

4. Phoenix, Arizona – Police & Courts Entrap Medical Grower (2015)

Kyle Catlin

Kyle Catlin, a medical marijuana grower, patient caregiver and medical marijuana activist in the state of Arizona is currently facing trial along with his brother for two cases in Tucson for growing marijuana for sick, elderly and disabled patients. Catlin’s arrest was due to a personal vendetta by local law enforcement authorities, against Catlin’s father a seasoned marijuana veteran who managed to evade arrest and incarceration for several years. The local authorities were so vengeful in going after Catlin that the judge in his trial refused to allow Catlin’s lawyer to reference the state marijuana law. Since Catlin is a state licensed caregiver the marijuana law would have protected his civil rights but the corrupt judge refused to allow the law to be brought into court stating that in Arizona the marijuana law was not an affirmative defense.

According to Tucson Weekly:

“In April 2012, Catlin was pulled over by Tucson Police officers, allegedly for speeding. What really happened, according to Catlin, is a young man had gotten in trouble earlier over having some weed, and he told the cops he had gotten it from Catlin. The police officers interrogated Catlin, and he ended up showing them the two ounces of weed he carried in his backpack (law says you can carry up to 2.5 ounces), and his medical marijuana card. “At some point I asked ‘Am I under arrest?'” he says. “I heard a police officer lie and say that I had said that there were more (marijuana) jars at my house, when I was never asked anything about marijuana at my house,” he says. The cops searched his pockets and found two cell phones and cash, which they saw as sufficient probable cause to search his home.

They found 147 marijuana plants, weed in jars and a gun in Catlin’s safe. Overnight, he was charged with four felonies: possession of weed for sale, attempt production, possession of drug paraphernalia and possession of a deadly weapon during the “commission of a drug offense.” According to the indictment document, law enforcement found more than two pounds, but less than four pounds of weed for each cultivation, production and possession, roughly adding up to 15 years if given the maximum sentence. Marijuana paraphernalia would be at least four months but no more than two years. A grand total of close to 20 years in prison if given the max, according to the marijuana advocacy group NORML.”

Catlin w/patient

“A few months into pre-trial for case one, Catlin’s home was searched again. The investigators overseeing the case found recent information about his healing center— Arizona Medical Marijuana Caregivers—online, and that’s how they justified another search warrant. “They destroyed my house, ripping posters down, and breaking glass water pipes all over the house,” he says. Catlin was pinned with 10 felonies. Among them, “illegally conducting an enterprise that sold and/or possessed for sale amounts of marijuana and cannabis … to customers,” the indictment says. It lists Catlin as the boss, who employed an “associate” to deliver marijuana, and “arranged appointments between the runner and customer for the purpose of selling marijuana.” There was also another charge for possession of marijuana for sale, possession of drug paraphernalia, and conspiracy to possess and sell. “Here I am trying to prove that what I am doing is legal, and I’m getting in trouble. I’m not doing anything illegal, but it appears to (the judge) that I am,” he says. The trial for case one begins on Oct. 13. If he’s found guilty of all or any charge, he’ll face trial two with previous convictions.”

Sheriff Joe

Kyle’s problems are an extension of the municipal and statewide corruption by law enforcement and judicial authorities. Just a little dig into the local marijuana community and we were able to uncover that many Arizona state officials and the local elite have ownership stake in the largest medical marijuana dispensaries in the state and that such persons include famous public figures like Sheriff Joe Arapaio, JP Holyoak of the hedge fund Holyoak Wealth Management, and most notoriously the so called “anti-corruption figure” Representative Ted Downing of Tucson and his relatives. Downing has been perceived as the invisible hand behind Catlin’s trouble in court as Catlin was a direct competitor to Downing’s associated dispensaries in Tucson, Sedona and Cottonwood; he has only admitted to ownership stake in the Sedona dispensary and in a production facility in Cottonwood. Suspicion of Downing has been present ever since the indictment of Downing’s sons for diversion of campaign funds for personal use in 1997 and again in 2011, shattering his anti-corruption image and putting him on the list of corrupt public officials that misuse their political power for personal gain.

Rep. Ted Downing

Other advocates have attempted to speak out against the misuse of authority. The Phoenix New Times primarily blames the regime of Governor Jan Brewer and a rogue AZ DEA in a 2012 article for the stunted growth of AZ’s industry:

“The state of medical marijuana in Arizona is messed up. Governor Jan Brewer partly is responsible for that. After a thin majority of voters passed Proposition 203 in 2010, Brewer canceled the dispensary portion of the program, claiming that state workers would be prosecuted for administering it. A federal lawsuit she filed in May 2011 was an obvious attempt by the Republican marijuana foe to get the law declared unconstitutional. It failed. Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Richard Gama, in examining a lawsuit by would-be dispensary owners, ordered Brewer to implement the program as voters intended.”

Brewer

“A few Valley clubs and/or collectives have been raided by police and shut down. But more keep popping up. At least one, the Arizona Cannabis Society in El Mirage, re-opened after a raid. Prosecutions have been fewer. After the federal Drug Enforcement Agency raided Tempe’s Arizona Go Green Co-op, state Attorney General Tom Horne’s office dropped charges against the owner, James Chaney, and an employee. Bill Hayes, one of the founders of the Arizona Cannabis Society, is yet to be charged after his outfit was busted by Phoenix police in May. And Garry Ferguson, whose Tempe club had the distinction last year of being the first such business to be raided, never was charged.

County Attorney Bill Montgomery, an ambitious conservative who wants the medical-marijuana law canceled by the feds, voters be damned, is moving forward with prosecutions of employees of two cannabis clubs… Montgomery is trying to force the issue, possibly in conjunction with police and the state Attorney General’s Office. Fact is, the question about the legality of the clubs still is to be determined in Arizona, as authorities well know.”

“Despite the threats of prohibitionists, the names of 97 companies and groups that will be authorized to sell marijuana in Arizona were pulled from a lottery-style air-blower by the state Department of Health Services on August 7. The lucky applicants were culled from a total of 426 who each paid $5,000 for the opportunity to be in the running. The losers get $1,000 back.”

Sound familiar?

Links:

http://verdenews.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&ArticleID=54182

http://verdenews.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=58407

http://m.eastvalleytribune.com/news/article_bf812142-4ccb-5d62-a835-f9ccf617e36d.html?mode=jqm

http://wc.arizona.edu/papers/91/7/01_2_m.html

http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/allan-sobol-arizonas-medical-pot-martyr-6455298

5. Long Beach, California – A Nationwide Model For Police Corruption (2008 to Current)

Mayor Bob Foster

Ah yes, Long Beach; the birthplace of the medical marijuana industries problems.

The City of Long Beach was the first city in the United States to racketeer medical marijuana dispensaries under the architecture of former Mayor Bob Foster, Police Chief Jim McDonnell (now LA County Sheriff), City Attorney (and Irish Mob affiliate) Bob Shannon, La County Supervisor Don Knabe, Attorney Matt Knabe, Business Relations Manager Erik Sund (known KKK affiliate) and the Long Beach Police Officer Association led by Narcotics Detective and underworld killer, Det. David Strohman. Long Beach was formerly the jewel of the medical marijuana industry and the top pioneer in dispensary operation, but this all came to a grinding halt when city insiders became deeply threatened by the level of competition that their own dispensaries faced.

John Morris courtesy of OC Weekly

Mayor Foster, City Attorney Shannon and local OC crime boss John Morris along with local grower Carl Kemp, shared interests in several of the local dispensaries in Long Beach that were not performing well due to the subpar quality of their indoor marijuana. Morris, the notorious owner of Long Beach’s Legends bar in Belmont Shore, peddled his influence to several members of the Long Beach City Council in order to push for an illegal lottery that would determine who would be allowed to stay and who would be forced to go.

*Courtesy of OCWeekly Marijuana Super Investigator Nick Schou:

John Morris (right) partying with Mayor Bob Foster

“His pitch to City Hall: work with someone you know, rather than open the door to strangers from out of town who might turn out to be shady characters. “How are we going to make this truly work in Long Beach so it’s not gangbangers doing it?” Morris figured. “Let’s bring the community into this thing so everyone knows who we are.” Since marijuana collectives aren’t allowed to make a profit in California, Morris says, he planned to open at least four different storefronts throughout the city, each affiliated with a nearby charity, including Long Beach Memorial Foundation; the city’s skate-park program, run by ex-councilman Mike Donelon; and Long Beach Gay and Lesbian Center, whose director, Ron Sylvester, recalls talking to Morris and being excited about the concept. I brought it to our board of directors and got back to John and told him that we’d love to be a beneficiary,” Sylvester says. “I kept an eye on what was happening legislatively, and, of course, we’re disappointed that it hasn’t come to fruition. When he met with city attorney Shannon about the project, Morris brought his lobbyist, Matt Knabe, whose father, Don Knabe, sits on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors.”

“To create a nonprofit called the Fourth Street Collective at 1069 Wardlow St., Morris reached out to Christine Donelon, wife of the former city councilman who ran the skate-park charity Morris hoped to fund. Another was tax accountant Osvaldo Lainez, who handled returns for both Morris and Dee Andrews, a Long Beach councilman. Lainez is also the president of the nonprofit Chicar, which has won tens of thousands of dollars in Port of Long Beach donations, ostensibly for helping to organize the city’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade, which is steered by Andrews.”

Bob Shannon

In late 2010, City Attorney Shannon held a rigged lottery in City Council that essentially forced the dispensary owners to bribe the city into retaining their operating permits, in addition requiring a $15,000 application fee. The lottery was immediately legally challenged thwarting the Morris Syndicate’s plans to fix competition as widespread corruption was alleged by other dispensary owners. In retaliation, Morris’s associate Mayor Bob Foster ordered David Strohman of the Long Beach POA to form a special anti-marijuana task force that would begin to raid, shake down and intimidate the dispensaries that dared to defy the illegal lottery.

“Larry Parks, who owned the 1 A.M. collective, [2] first became suspicious about the city’s program weeks earlier, when he paid a $2,000 consulting fee to Morris’ attorney, Violas.

“I wanted to get his thoughts about the lottery process and what he thought my chances were,” Parks recalls. “He wanted me to hire him for $2,000 a month and told me his clients don’t get bothered by the city. He called it ‘good lawyering’ and said he’d need $5,000 here and $5,000 there to spread around.” Violas claimed to be “good friends” with Erik Sund, Long Beach’s business-relations manager and director of the city’s medical-marijuana program. “Mr. Violas told me that if I paid him money, he would be able to guarantee acceptance of my patient-cooperative group’s application for a Long Beach city permit,” Parks later stated in a sworn deposition. “When I asked him how he could do this, he told me . . . my group might have to make monetary contributions to city projects or to city officials.”

“Mike Genera refused to pay the fee to enter the lottery; soon after, the city began sending code-enforcement officers to his collective, threatening his landlord, and issuing him up to $50,000 in fines over a period of several months. The police also showed up and filed misdemeanor charges—violating the city’s marijuana ordinance—against his security guard and manager. “They used every kind of tactic that you can imagine,” Genara says. “It was just so overwhelming.”

Dallas Alexander, who operates the Dank City Collective, also paid only a token fee of $500 to the city, instead of the $15,000. “I was summarily rejected,” he says. Not long thereafter, the police raided his shop while he was on his way to work. “They broke down my door with no warrant,” he says. “They basically robbed me. They took whatever they could in money. I saw Erik Sund walk out with a bag of my merchandise. They arrested three of my people who were working, but they were out in a couple of hours.”

Until she voluntarily closed the dispensary late last year, Katherine Aldrich operated 562 Collective in the north Long Beach neighborhood of Bixby Knolls. She also refused to pay the city’s permit fee and didn’t participate in the lottery. On Feb. 14, 2011, the police raided her collective while she was taking her daughter to the orthodontist. Security footage filmed during the raid shows plainclothes officers accompanied by Sund standing in her lobby. No arrests were made, but Aldrich received a fine. The cops returned again three months later, again without a warrant. When her employees refused to open the safe, police arrested them but left empty-handed. Sund was present for that raid, too.”

Eleven dispensaries immediately found themselves getting served with official city letters demanding $40,000 a month in payments to the City Attorney’s office or face a ‘federal raid’ citing a power to deputize LBPD officers as federal narcotics agents. Strohman and his corrupt POA conspirators began a system of identifying, surveilling, capturing and in some cases assassinating members of the Long Beach and San Pedro marijuana industries including growers, transporters, and dispensary workers alike.

The city’s counterattack came to a grinding halt when they caught the attention of the FBI following the shooting and killing of a corrupt federal law enforcement official, who attempted to kill internal affairs investigators at the Downtown Long Beach Federal Building. According to the LA Times: “ The ICE agent, whose name has not been made public, shot and killed Ezequiel Garcia in February 2012 after Garcia opened fire during a meeting about his job performance. He fired at least six shots at his boss before he was shot dead. Kevin Kozak, the Los Angeles field offices second in command, was severely injured. The shooting left the seventh-floor office in Long Beach riddled with bullets.” This incident sparked a yearlong investigation that disturbed city officials, fearing that their RICO violations of the Long Beach marijuana collectives would be uncovered due to the attention being garnered by the lottery lawsuits. Foster and Shannon’s immediate reaction was to pass a citywide ban on medical marijuana collectives and they entrusted Chief McDonnell and Detective Strohman with carrying out the elimination of over a hundred collectives that operated throughout the city targeting both the collectives, their suppliers and even resorting to intimidating and harming their patients.

Marijuana Super Advocate Joe Grumbine

“According to the lawsuit, one of the officers, Dave Strohman led a team of cops who raided the NatureCann collective on March 21, 2012, using a battering ram to knock down the door. “The police officers entered guns drawn and ordered everyone on the ground,” the lawsuit states. “They immediately arrested everyone (four volunteers) for violating LBMC Chapter 5.89,” the city’s ordinance banning marijuana clubs. The lawsuit adds that Strohman and his team “interrogated those arrested,” then seized “all medical marijuana, cash registers, computers and patients records” and that the club was “utterly destroyed.” Elsewhere, the suit claims Strohman routinely failed to provide exculpatory evidence, such as information showing that the clubs were legal under state law, when filing search warrant affidavits. Another cop mentioned in the lawsuit is Oscar Valenzuela, a detective whose prior claim to fame is star witness for the prosecution against Joe Byron and Joe Grumbine, both of whom have the distinction of being the only Long Beach pot purveyors who were prosecuted for doing the same thing that city-permitted clubs were going, i.e. selling pot. (The two men were convicted, but have won the right to a new trial thanks to judicial misconduct).”

Further Reading on LBPD Police Corruption by advocate Chief Stephen Downing:

http://www.longbeachcomber.com/story.aspx?artID=5241

https://thegreenpulpit.com/2014/05/30/long-beach-corruption-unveiled-local-news-connects-police-and-city-council-to-marijuana-rackets/

The dispensaries connected to the city were allowed to remain open for a longer duration in order to recover losses and assume profits before the ban became permanently in effect in late 2013. Since that time, Long Beach held city elections in 2014 that were heavily monitored by the marijuana community for anti-corruption. Most notorious was the highly illegitimate election of City Attorney Charlie Parkin, a relative of RICO co-conspirator Bob Shannon, who has continued to hamper efforts to restore medical marijuana within the city.

Councilwoman Price – Drug Crusader

Despite attempts by Councilmen Lena Gonzalez, Suja Lowenthal, Rex Richardson and Mayor Robert Garcia to restore the cities medical marijuana business program they have faced staunch opposition led by former prosecutor, anti-marijuana advocate and racist blue blood Susan Price, representing the wealthy 3^rd District;  8^th District Councilman Al Austin, who was miraculously elected despite his very public displays of illiteracy at council meetings; 5^th District Councilwomen Stacy Mungo, a queen bee follower who was subject to attack ads by Americans For Safe Access during the election and retains a bitter resentment towards the industry and Councilman Dee Andrews of the 7^th District who is still trying to cover up his involvement in Mayor Foster’s extortion racket. City Council must have a 6 member majority to pass the marijuana law and the final decision may lie in the hands of new Councilman Daryl Supernaw although it appears he has been negatively influenced by the Suzie Price Clique. There is no doubt that Ms. Price intends to sabotage the medical marijuana program to undermine Mayor Garcia, as it is known that she has made statements in private regarding her desire to become the Mayor of Long Beach. Mrs. Price’s prejudices against marijuana and marijuana patients comes from her deep entrenchment as a prosecutor and her racist attitudes towards the black and Latino communities within Long Beach.

Aaron Herzberg, Marijuana Racketeer in Santa Ana and Long Beach

The opposition to Mayor Garcia’s initiative by Price forced the creation of a highly corrupted city commission, of whose members are dually involved in Mayor Pulido’s racketeering of Santa Ana dispensaries. They seek to reinstate the city insider dispensaries while taking away grow rights from individual patients within city limits. Despite a voter mandate authorizing the restoration of the city’s medical marijuana ordinance, Ms. Price used council procedure to force the commission and stall implementation in order to maintain the ban. Meanwhile, Officer Strohman has successfully eliminated marijuana competition within the delivery serves, and most deliveries now operating within Long Beach city limits are owned by members of LBPD or their children.

Links:

http://www.dailybreeze.com/article/ZZ/20100920/NEWS/100928606

http://www.ocweekly.com/news/long-beach-offers-collective-punishment-6424622

http://articles.latimes.com/2013/mar/16/local/la-me-ice-shooting-20130316

http://www.presstelegram.com/health/20150211/long-beach-medical-marijuana-task-force-to-help-write-new-pot-shop-law

The ‘Long Beach Model’ of corruption has been exported to municipalities and law enforcement agencies throughout Medical Marijuana states and this has been seen with the subversion of marijuana law by county and city authorities throughout California, Oregon, Washington, Arizona, Colorado and possibly many more states to come.

Will 2016 be the year when the marijuana industry says enough is enough?

• The Green Chazzan

*EDITOR’s Note: We are beginning a new series today called ‘The Truth’, probably our most controversial and groundbreaking series on the marijuana industry yet. We begin with an article from the 1970’s, it is strongly encouraged that readers review our section Required Reading to help put the puzzle pieces together as our new articles are released. Shalom!

Miami Kingpins Jack Up Prices by Al Kammerer (1977)

“ Disguised as big marijuana buyers from the Midwest, a team of investigative reporters recently penetrated the marijuana market [in Florida], discovering that is has been totally taken over by a few wealthy businessmen who boast combined assets totaling hundreds of millions of dollars and there is evidence that these businessmen are receiving direct government protection. Searching into the reason why pot prices have risen 70% or more in the last 2 years, the investigators found what one of them described as ‘a really classic price fixing conspiracy, a veritable OPEC of a marijuana cartel”.

The investigators report that the situation in Miami, which is the American delivery point for most Colombian marijuana, defies the claim of ‘experts’ that a clandestine, compartmentalized cannabis scene could never be cornered. In fact, the marijuana monopoly has apparently manipulated the media and market psychology so masterfully this year that speaker after speaker rose at a recent NORML confab, to deplore the “drought”…more than 2 months after the market broke with an actual glut of marijuana. High prices have been maintained, and the glut has been covered up in the months since.

Like California peach growers who burn trees to keep prices high, the Miami group reportedly warehouses mountains of [marijuana], leaving it to sour and mold until their price is met. One of the investigators, who spoke of experiencing close calls in various criminal circles, is in the process of gathering evidence implicating government and local ‘business’ community figures in a Capone-like web of intrigue and corruption involving the control of [marijuana].

The investigator said that:

“The marijuana cartel is like the diamond cartel. Since diamonds are always in demand, the cartel offers packets at dictated prices that are three times the actual cost, take it or leave it. Being rebellious over the situation only leads to being banned from trading. When interest and cash flow drop due to boredom, low quality or whatever, they cut loose enough good stones, or in this case, [good bud], to draw investors back into the market, where they can again be swamped with bunk goods. It’s a den of thieves, Miami. The middlemen use brainwashing techniques of sensory deprivation and random disturbances by locking the buyer up in motel rooms for days to break down their resistance. You begin seeing and hearing things, so when the phone rings it’s like being struck by a gong”

He goes on to explain how the ‘bunk pot’ is sent to the consumer while prices remain high as ever:

“Even with high grand merchandise, a package deal where they lay some of the bunk on you is the rule with these jerks. Once the intimidated buyer has committed his money, the monopoly vanishes again behind their mercenary middlemen. They sweat you out until you are ready to be plucked like a turkey.”

‘Commercial Grade’

He opened an attache full of cash and rummaged around until he found a tattered address book. He explained that the number he was about to call a swarthy, heavily muscled gentleman from Hallendale, which was known for its mob connection scene. Apologizing for the weed we were smoking, he volunteered to get his source on the phone if we would pretend to be one of the many stuck with commercial, inferior grade cannabis. When he reached his man, a spirited exchange ensued until he put his hand over the mouthpiece and said “Just tell him you’re stuck with the last and can’t look at anything but gold”

It was somebody heavy on the phone. In the next 5 minutes, we were offered credit, free delivery to anywhere in the U.S. – up to 200 pounds plus the removal of seeds and shake, if we would simply help them sell off their commercial pot. But when we suggested that taking bad stuff, even on a front, always meant losses and that we wanted gold, we were simply told: “The golds and reds* are in, but we have to move off the rest of this commercial stuff before they will cut it loose”.  We objected that ‘marijuana was a vegetable’ and that warehousing it would cause it to lose potency. “That’s alright” said the contact “they are putting all the good weed in big freezers this year”. 

*Acapulco or Colombian Gold and Panama Red”

In a classic capitalist coup, some super-rich marijuana kingpins in Miami have developed so much excess buying power that they can warehouse pot for months, opening and closing the doors at will, to dictate both price and flow. The marijuana moguls have so much buying capacity that only in the commercial grades is there enough around for a smaller buyer to invest in. they have so much capacity that they can even hold the good stuff off of the market…or allow just enough gold or red to trickle out at super premium prices that prices on commercial grade do not sag too much.

To explain the rise of a Miami-based cartel, insiders point to the fact that is become much harder in the last few years for independents to bring in boats and planes elsewhere, and those who did it cheaply, got cracked. Miami was the one place with a long tradition of government and police collusion that could enable those with money and Mafia lawyers to bargain with the authorities when necessary. The investigator referred to a case where one of his fellow teammates got busted. They located a lawyer who for $4000 made the whole thing evaporate at the police level. A scramble for influence inevitably led to the emergence of a handful of powerful men combining forces and enjoying a dominant position in the trade.

Colombian Gold

The final takeover of the Colombian market at the end of 1975 by the Miami group solidified prices at a hundred dollars higher than before, never to come down again (*until the passage of Prop 215 in 1997). It is clear that the critics of decriminalization who worry about marijuana being taken over by RJ Reynolds and Big Tobacco shouldn’t worry – pot is already under the thumb of a very large marijuana monopoly.

The investigator capped his report with the new that Don Aemillo, a [transporter] busted last Summer with 180 tons, was actually being escorted into Miami by the Coast Guard to foil jackers, all of the freighters marijuana hit the market. He then made a warning to those who might be interested in taking up a kingpin on offers to get fronted anywhere in the country: “A lot of folks who get fronted get fattened up until, at the end of the season, a couple of jackers visit them with shotguns and take it all, so the victims will be back working for the Miami Boys next year”. We hope this story reaches the New York Times and we hope the investigators stay healthy.

– The Green Chazzan 

Legal Marijuana is a trap and Medical Marijuana, once a community benefit, is now mired by fraud. There it’s been said, coming from someone that has grown, cultivated, harvested, trimmed and sold marijuana for medical use; one can no longer deny the state of decay that has swept the medical marijuana business. The Green Rush is the 21^st century Gold Rush, and like everything that starts off as a benefit, it is ending as a burden. This writing is no less a confession about the world that we the growing community have lived in, the real world.

The Beginning

Medical Marijuana was a miraculous concept dreamed up by the genius and legendary pot dealer Dennis Peron. Dennis was known for having the first major marijuana collective and the first legal collective in San Francisco. He is most well known for being the author of Proposition 215, the first medical marijuana law for compassionate use in world history. He was associated with the gay rights movement through his friend Harvey Milk and understood that medical marijuana would be instrumental in fighting the global AIDS crisis that had begun in the 1980s. The Dallas Buyers Club is actually a movie about Mr. Peron and his friends, just different characters and different situations, but nonetheless it’s the same story; about a group of afflicted people, sentenced to death indirectly by their own government, resorting to smuggling and other shady tactics just to survive their own diseases and seize their right to life. That is how the medical marijuana movement started, as a fight for the right to live.

Dennis Peron and Jack Herer – Heroes of Marijuana

Dennis’ vision, as a true hippie, was that medical marijuana growers would work together in communes or collectives to create marijuana medicine for the terminally ill to fight the ravages of industrial disease and immunological diseases in our modern world. He believed that marijuana growers should make a profit but not allow greed to become excess and inherently corrupt his vision. Many growers and collectives stood with Mr. Peron’s vision but over time they were corrupted by the greed of fast money, illegitimate opportunity and from the machinations of criminal predators, enhanced by clandestine corruption within the government itself.

Proposition 215 was a collective effort by many famous hippies, smugglers, lawyers and other generally good willed individuals that sought to liberate the misery of many of their friends and in many cases themselves from years of physical and psychological ailments.

Proposition 215 originally had two versions, Dennis’ version and the version we have today:

“By late January, 1996, it was becoming clear that Dennis Peron’s network of volunteers could not come up with enough signatures to place the Compassionate Use Act of 1996 on the ballot. Some 433,000 valid signatures were needed by April 24; Dennis’s followers claimed to have gotten 175,000 of uncertain validity and Panzer says that number was inflated. Enter Ethan Nadelmann (Founder of Drug Police Alliance and Prop 19 advocate), a 40-yearold drug-policy expert who runs a Manhattan think tank called the Lindesmith Center, through which he allocates $4 million annually on behalf of financier George Soros. Nadelmann has a law degree from Harvard, a doctorate from Princeton, and is the author of a book about the drug war, “Cops Across Borders: The Internationalization of U.S. Criminal Law Enforcement.” He knew the effort to get a medical marijuana initiative on the California ballot had a strong chance of success because a statewide poll taken in June 1995 by David Binder Associates showed that 60% of the voters were favorably inclined.

George Soros

Soros agreed to back a professional signature drive after reading a New York Times article that said Dennis already had gathered 200,000 valid signatures. Nadelmann was concerned about Soros et al being perceived as out-of-staters exerting political influence in California (which of course they were). He also wanted proof that the reform effort had support beyond Dennis Peron’s circle of friends. He got reassurance on both counts in February when George “I Guarantee It” Zimmer, president of the Men’s Wearhouse, a resident of Oakland, pledged $105,000 towards a professional signature drive. (It was actually in the form of a loan.) Nadelmann then kicked in $350,000 from Soros; $300,000 from Peter Lewis, the owner of Progressive Insurance in Cleveland; $100,000 from John Sperling, a professor of economic history whose Phoenix-based Apollo Group owns 88 private colleges.(and who was also backing a medical marijuana initiative in his home state of Arizona), and $50,000 from Laurence Rockefeller. “All these individuals, as businessmen, consider drug prohibition wasteful and costly,” says Nadelmann, “and each has personal reasons for feeling strongly about it.”

Peter Lewis

Of Soros he says, “He has a practical concern about the drug issue: it’s in danger of bankrupting the country. We’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on the war on drugs, if you count law enforcement, medical costs, and lost productivity.” In other words, the donors represent an enlightened faction of capital. There were strings attached to the money. Nadelmann wanted control of the campaign placed in the hands of a “professional,” and he selected a Santa Monica consultant named Bill Zimmerman, based, he says, on Zimmerman’s success promoting an insurance-reform measure that passed in 1993. “Dennis Peron is a remarkable character,” says Nadelmann, “and it’s true that the movement was ‘organic,’ in that he got his signatures through volunteers. But if I had one moral to draw from this situation, it’s to go straight to the professionals and avoid the hassles involved in starting with the grass roots.” Zimmerman, upon getting the money from Nadelmann, created a front group called Californians for Medical Rights (CMR) and hired a competent outfit called Progressive Campaigns to get the signatures. The signature gatherers were paid 60¢ per —high for a popular measure_ and the rate was upped to $1 per signature before they had more than enough.”

• The O’Shaughnessy’s Reader (2013)

http://www.beyondthc.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Dennis-Peron-and-215-for-BTHC1.pdf

Dennis Peron w/ The Pioneers of Medical Marijuana – Author of Prop 215

Dennis was left in a position of less authority over Prop 215 following the political takeover by Nadelmann backed by George Soros and the Consortium. The same group would later have police stings initiated against Dennis’ cannabis clubs in San Francisco to put him under financial and psychological pressure, while allowing the Consortium to negotiate a deal to modify Prop 215 with California Attorney General Dan Lundgren, the Fraternal Order of Police and the Correctional Officers Association to ensure that marijuana, despite being made medical, would remain in the California penal code and thus remain an enforceable crime in the State of California.

DA Dan Lungren

Soros won out with the real Prop 215 being shelved in the annals of history at the infamous Castro Castle while the second Prop 215, sponsored by the police and the US prison system, would be implemented into law. Prop 215 would become one of the largest public biological experiments in US history, as Soros intended for free medical research, and at the same time Prop 215 would became one of the largest reverse stings ever concocted by federal and state law enforcement in world history. This is the viciousness of those who have pushed for pot legalization in the forms of Prop 19, SB1262 and now AUMA, because it removes constitutional protections under medical law and brings everything back under the rigid and brutal interpretations of the Controlled Substances Act. However, defense attorneys won’t tell you this because legalization was designed in their favor, to give them more cases, more clients and more work, same with the law enforcement side. Marijuana will always be a crime as long as it remains in the California Penal Code, once it is removed from the CPC it can find its true home in the Public Health Code where it can no longer be cited by law enforcement.

Marijuana is a medicine. It causes the body to regenerate itself. To regenerate from Cancer, AIDS, psoriasis, auto-immune disorders and psychological trauma. Marijuana is a regenerative plant, just twist a branch until you hear a crack, then watch it grow stronger and bulkier; because that is the natural function of marijuana genetics, to reconstruct, rebuild and restore.

The Racket

Marijuana is born into this world as seed, that seed is grown into a plant that becomes a mother, and from that mother comes trimmings known as clones.  Like life and people, some clones are good and bear good nug, while other clones are bad and bear nothing. The clones must then go under 18 or more hours of light every day to vegetate and grow into something with potential. Then the amount of light is reduced at the right time to encourage the now vegetative plants to flower and thus bear fruit. In the United States, in order to create 99 of these fruit bearing plants, an individual must have a sick patient with AIDS, cancer or some other kind of terminal disease, and their doctor’s referral, to sponsor and justify the 99 plant exemption and produce a full crop. To produce a profitable crop, several of these exemptions along with countless referral scripts from other patients with 6 to 12 plant allowances, must be collected, gathered and filed. A dispensary facilitates this process by requiring a copy of the referral paperwork in order to become a member of their collective.

So what the hell does that all really mean? The bottom line, it means that every new patient to a cannabis collective generates approximately two pounds of marijuana or $4000 in production value per crop and that a terminally ill patient, with AIDS or cancer generates approximately 31 pounds or $62,000 in production per crop. A good grower can turn over 5 or more productions in a year, that’s about 155 pounds or $310,000 a year; the grower can sell the 155 pounds in another state, he can be looking at upwards of $900,000 or more.

All in exchange for the right to purchase the pot, the patient effectively loans their allotment to the collective, and buys it back at 375% markup for consumption. What has this done? This has given incentive to a racket to keep patients from growing their own allowances and centralize production with the distributor, ie. The collective and their private networks, minimizing competition and keeping prices high. This has also politically encouraged distributors and operators to work with law enforcement on forming favorable regulatory regimes as we see with MMRSA and AUMA. Further, it has created financial incentives for the exploitation of sick patients and their medical records on a national level on the basis of obtaining their personal growing rights.

The Circus Show

Many stood at the US High Times Cannabis Cup 2016 on 420 week, watching the dead spirits of yesteryear desperately search for that golden bud with little avail. The event was hastily put together after High Times lost their permit in Colorado for permitting illicit narcotics sales to take place on fairgrounds during the event. Like a wounded cur, High Times retreated to their own territory at the NOS Events Center in the Tweaker Capital of California, San Bernardino. The unseemly racetrack is a company owned property where High Times could continue its for-profit charade with impunity. The scam is an easy one, charge ‘potreprenuers’ and underworld figures alike for networking access, while at the same time running a tourist scam using free dabs, free carnival rides, very expensive munchies and very expensive trinkets to fleece suburban stoners while providing a cover for large scale smuggling activities.

Tom Forcade on High Times Magazine

High Times never left the business of narcotics distribution, its founder, ex-CIA agent Thomas Forcade, was one of the largest drug smugglers on the East Coast during the 60’s and early 70’s. Forcade used the magazine as not only a tool of resistance but also for underworld communications, revealing the market rates of underground pot flows and using coded articles to send messages back and forth between smugglers. Forcade would inevitably be assassinated when Richard Nixon consolidated the global narcotics markets in the early 1970’s to pave the way for the cocaine markets of the 1980’s. The US Department of the Treasury, knowing that High Times is a rogue, money laundering CIA operation has not failed to audit High Times annually, desperately searching for their link to Panamanian Bank Accounts.

For more on how the CIA has been smuggling narcotics for the last 40 years, see the Required Reading section: https://thegreenpulpit.wordpress.com/required-reading/

Dan Skye hustling more profit

A feeling of doom and gloom had seemingly taken hold of the ‘potreprenuers’ and marijuana activists at the Cup despite the near advent of legalization. High Times Editor and corporate pocket holder, Dan Skye, pretty much said ‘Fuck The Movement’, in a not so indirect way during the awards ceremony, pretty much cheering on the death of Mr. Nice and declaring his advocacy for the short passing of other marijuana icons so that they could make way for the ascension of the new Marijuana Robber Barons. Skye could barely withhold his sellout support to the dreaded Adult Use of Marijuana Act, also known as AUMA. A bill for marijuana ‘legalization’, financially backed by the same group of Neo-Con’s (Parker, Schultz, Kissinger, Liddy, Soros, Holyoak, Thiel etc..) that heralded the Controlled Substances Act with Nixon in 1971. A bait in switch of the most epic proportions, sponsored by the worst hearts of Silicon Valley and their Republican Party/ex-DEA cohorts in Washington. This has a created a pall of depression as, much like we have seen in the 2016 election, big money politics is seemingly prevailing over common sense, with or without the American people’s permission.

• The Green Chazzan 

Continued in Part 3….

The Consortium & Hotel California

AUMA Sponsors (The Consortium)

What is AUMA? It’s no less than the Undead Zombie of Prop 19, back from the dead once again to test the faith of the Medical Marijuana community in its final hour of justice. Prop 19, SB1262, and all of these other initiative also-rans have been nothing but attempts by Wall Street, Law Enforcement and Big Pharma to use their government influence to capture, break and redesign the marijuana supply chain as they see fit. Putting control of the industry permanently into the hands of international mafia, hedge fund billionaires, cartel front men, crooked cops and crooked politicians who refuse to let go of their Prohibition & Payola aka Tax & Jail Model.

To understand why AUMA is bad for your health we need to dial back a little bit and talk about what California means to the international marijuana movement. Why do we put such an emphasis and focus on California Marijuana Laws, and especially those of Los Angeles and the City of Long Beach? The answer is that California is where everything started for this movement and ultimately where everything will end. Northern California is literally the heart of international marijuana cash crop production and Southern California today represents a political and socio-economic ‘pivot point’ in the great struggle for marijuana decriminalization because Los Angeles is the largest and most sophisticated High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area in the world and the Port of Long Beach is equally the largest drug trafficking port in the world. Basically the largest narcotics customer base on the plant with the largest transportation/distribution hub right next to it, two key control points for every business and underworld syndicate with an interest in narcotics. California is the mother plant in the world of medical marijuana, every other state is just a clone. Colorado, as we have mentioned before, is still completely dependent on California for seeds, trim and even bud during the harsher seasons.

LA HIDTA Zone

Despite California’s status as the founder and leader of medical marijuana, many within the California movement have failed to understand why the political situation in the Golden State hasn’t stabilized. The biggest reason being that the California Movement has been in a political and legal war against the Police Departments, the Mob and the Cities of California since our journey began in the mid-90s. The California Police Union, consisting of the California County Sheriff’s, City Police Unions, and other law enforcement officials, the DEA, and the League of California Cities consisting of Mayors and City Attorneys have done everything within and beyond their legislative powers to obstruct the patient’s right to alternative medical therapy through the use of medical marijuana. Interestingly enough the tactics used by cities and law enforcement, have driven the medical marijuana industry into the hands of organized crime. Medical marijuana was a business for the patients to get access to well grown, clean and environmentally safe medical marijuana, this has since been corrupted as cartel and organized crime members have taken the marijuana cultivation process and have transformed it into a mass production supply chain.

Feinstein

California’s liberal reputation is often impeded by the wealthy and powerful conservative elements within the state. Law enforcement is heavily embedded in this conservative cabal due to history. As we have mentioned before, a sort of racial law enforcement clique began to form within the California police departments in the early 1920’s. Recruits from the Deep South and the local California KKK in Anaheim and San Diego were preferred for Law Enforcement hires for many years, due to their views on race, narcotics and institutional corruption; this practice persisted well into early 90’s culminating in a public outcry with the Los Angeles Riots of 1992 over the racial brutalization of Rodney King by the LAPD. This clique merged with the DEA under the guidance of Governor George Deukmejian and then Mayor Dianne Feinstein of San Francisco in the 1970’s to stamp out the power of the hippie movement in California, and has continued to remain embedded in municipal and state administrations throughout California ever since the consolidation of power by the Neo-Conservatives during the Reagan Years.

The Neo-Con’s are no different than Neo-Liberals, they are the 1%, the Trilateral Commission, the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminati, whatever you want to call them, they are the rich guys with all the money and power that hate humanity and have a Malthusian dream of self-fulfilling biblical prophecy so that they can have their Elysium planet.  They control the flow of international narcotics, including marijuana after they consolidated control during the 1970’s and they sit on both sides of the aisle so that the American people stay in the dark about how American power really works.  The likes of Americans For Safe Access, The Drug Policy Alliance, Students for Sensible Drug Policy and the Marijuana Policy Project were commissioned by George Soros, George Zimmer, Peter Lewis, JP Holyoak and Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft to disrupt, dismantle and hijack the medical marijuana movement and deliver it to the Anglo-American corporate interests that had paid handsomely for it. The Consortium is led by former President George H.W. Bush and other co-executives and majority shareholders of major pharmaceutical names like Beyer (GW Pharmaceuticals), Merck, Teva, Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Gilead, Altria, RJ Reynold, British American Tobacco and Eli Lilly. The Bush DEA’s number one target for some time has been the Pioneers of Medical Marijuana and the people around them that helped found Prop 215; seeking to dismantle any remnant of the movement that pushed using marijuana as a medicine.

The goal was to discredit marijuana as a medicine and push it as tobacco-like vice product, to protect their business interests from competition and consolidate power under their own mantra ‘Legalization’; the purpose of this is to divide and conquer the medical marijuana movement so that the Consortium can continue to steal the old growers trade secrets and then patent them as their own, to develop Schedule II pharmaceuticals like Sativex and Epidolex.  The Consortium has enabled their AstroTurf activist front groups including Americans For Safe Access, Marijuana Policy Project and the Drug Policy Alliance to wreak havoc on the entire medical marijuana community and its patients alike. To a large extent they have succeeded, in large part, thanks to collusion by the California Police Unions and the League of California Cities.

Palaces of Prohibition

DEA

The base of Neo-Conservative power in California is San Diego County that is the source of much of their financial and institutional power for the entire world. San Diego is home to the richest and one of the largest Mormon communities in the United States; it is also the largest base of Neo-Nazi funding and power in California. It is the home of the Tea Party and residence of many outspoken Neo-Con power brokers like Darrell Issa, Duncan Hunter, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Margaret Cargill (of Cargill, Monsanto’s partner in crime) Bill Gates, and many retired officers of the Neo-Con military command.

San Diego possesses one of the largest military installations in the United States with 6 Naval Bases, 3 Marine Bases and 1 Coast Guard Station. San Diego also possess the largest DEA presence in California; it is effectively their stronghold and major front for the entire country. San Diego has been a military town for over 100 years and because of this, their culture has evolved with both the National Defense culture and the Narco-State culture created by the DEA. Many law enforcement personnel in California retire to San Diego after they have completed their service. This is why Americans for Safe Access, formerly a major Bush DEA front, operates primarily out of San Diego, Sacramento, formerly Long Beach and Bakersfield; because their illegal operations were shielded by Neo-Con friendlies in those municipalities and alternatively by Mexican Cartel and Chinese Triad counterparts in LA and San Francisco.

The next source of Prohibition power in California comes from Orange County, a major source of Republican financial strength attributing much of its rise as an S&L, Cocaine, Money Laundering and Real Estate hub in the 1980s. This county is controlled mostly by major Republican land barons like billionaire Donald Bren of the Irvine Community and William Lyon of Lyon Communities who are financially the lords and masters of most of the cities in LA County, they control the politics through business and the streets through narcotics distribution ran by Italian Mafia front men out of Newport Beach, Santa Ana and Anaheim. The Orange Curtain or ‘The OC’ is the ideal example of a neo-conservatives dream of a corporate fiefdom. Many GOP powerbrokers are born and raised through Orange County’s privileged Republican private school system, which uses a series of Catholic schools to place young adults in conservative colleges throughout the country like USC, ASU, Chapman, Amherst and other well-known conservative institutions for ideological training. Most dispensaries owned in Orange County are front’s for money laundering, cocaine and pill smuggling and controlled by members of local organized crime that use patients as a front to disguise their illicit activities.

OC is a significant battlefront, because not only is Orange County a major source of Republican wealth but it has also become a major distribution hub for the Mexican Mafia in California. Thanks in large part to municipal corruption and a plentiful amount of Carlito’s Way-type Coke Attorneys, the Mexican and Asian Cartels have taken complete control of the cities of Santa Ana, Huntington Beach, Orange, Anaheim, Westminster, Buena Park and Garden Grove. The rule in Orange County is that the wealthy live south of these cities, and that the police provide almost a DMZ-like front line at the city limits for these areas. The Neo-Con and KKK backed city administrations in the poor cities oversee the chaos of gang violence and drug distribution in collusion with the Cartel, collecting profits from both the incarcerations and narcotics sales. The author of SB1262, Lou Correa, is the State representative of the district controlled by the Cartels, and his bill is designed to hand the California medical marijuana industry over to the collection of Consortium-Cartel interests that are fronted by the Marijuana Mafia.

Lou Correa

The third source sits in Oakland and Silicon Valley, these are the Silicon Libertarian Billionaires like Sean Parker, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and other tech Nazi’s that see marijuana as a pathway towards managing digital serfdom. These young guns owe their money and success to their Neo-Con handlers, who are all ex-Nixon and Reagan Era elite, and they are being crafted to be the next Rockefellars and Soro’s of the 21^st century where the population will be managed digitally. AUMA is not the brainchild of Parker, but he is the marketable face of the scheme in an attempt to disassociate Zombie Prop 19 from its odious origins. Marijuana in the bay area is largely managed by a cooperative effort between the mafia-end of the Teamsters Union, led by the utterly corrupt, yet indicted, Dan Rush and ex-DEA hacks in Contra Costa, Alameda and Monterey and the Asian Mob primarily managed by the San Francisco Tong’s with its big shots like Raymond Chow and former State Senator Leland Yee.

Dan Rush w/ Richard Lee pushing Prop 19

Dan Rush Indictment: https://www.fbi.gov/sanfrancisco/press-releases/2015/union-organizer-indicted-for-corruption-attempted-extortion-and-money-laundering

The fourth major source of financial power and probably the most critical is the one sourced in Los Angeles County. The Republicans have long viewed the City of Los Angeles as an ideological warzone and have done everything within their power to hamper the cities progression, citing a need to avoid the creation of “San F**cisco Liberal Fascism”. The sources of Republican power in Los Angeles are Long Beach, Flintridge, Simi Valley, Glendale, Pasadena and the Western Valley; despite LA’s overwhelming population of Democrats, the LA GOP holds an amazingly disproportionate level of power within LA City Hall and especially the LA County Board of Supervisors & Sheriff. Out of the four areas mentioned thus far, this group is by far the cleverest and also the most dangerous; they are big time shot callers in the Republican world because they hold a key responsibility within the power structure of the Consortium. They possess the responsibility of managing and overseeing the largest narco-trafficking corridor in the entire world, the Los Angeles Basin.

Michael Antonovich

The Debacle

Mayor Bob Foster

The Port of Los Angeles and the Port of Long Beach exist side by side as the largest domestic import hub for international cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin trafficking in the United States. Every year ton upon metric ton of Afghan heroin comes in through the Port of LA and Long Beach where it is taken to reprocessing labs in South-Central and Downtown LA to be sold to local syndicates and gangs throughout the county and country. The narco-trafficking in the port is primarily facilitated by the Teamsters, Long Beach Police Department and Long Beach City Attorney’s Office who use payoffs, gangland intimidation tactics and murder to maintain a protection racket over the port unions in exchange for silence. Former Long Beach Mayor Bob Foster, and former City Attorney Bob Shannon, leading members in relation to Long Beach organized crime, initially conceived the idea of allowing medical marijuana dispensaries in Long Beach as a cover for improving cocaine and heroin distribution flows in Los Angeles through a man named John Melvin Walker, currently serving federal RICO time, when heroin imports began to surge out of Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007. They were backed by the Neo-Conservative establishment of Los Angeles led by County Supervisors Don Knabe and Michael Antonivich, the two men pulling the strings at the top of the Los Angeles Narcotics Pyramid, along with major financial support from William Lyon in Orange County. However things did not go as planned as hippies began to show up in Long Beach to apply for business licenses; they were more skilled at growing, actually took care of the patients and were able to undercut the Consortium backed collectives with their exorbitant prices. The Consortium was immediately threatened, they had controlled Long Beach for years through the power of the Bush-Walker Family, and suddenly their billion dollar narco-trafficking operations were being upended by the California hippies once again. In response, Prop 19 and the municipal bans were conceived by the Consortium to divide the marijuana movement and racketeer the marijuana industry through over regulation.

Don Knabe

Since that time, with the help of the Marijuana Astroturf organizations, the Consortium has successfully led an illegal regulatory coup d’etat with the disastrous Long Beach “Ban Regulation” and the passage of Proposition D in LA County, both measures designed to insulate and protect collectives backed by the Consortium interest. This same group has pushed Long Beach Police Chief, Jim McDonnell, a former LAPD narco-crony from the Gates Years, to become the new Los Angeles County Sheriff. McDonnell is a staunch prohibitionist, declaring his opposition to medical marijuana at a Long Beach Planning Commission meeting and stating that he believed marijuana patients exaggerated their illnesses. McDonnell has voiced this opinion to protect the interests of his former political handlers, Long Beach City Attorney’s Bob Shannon and Charlie Parkin, who in return have aided McDonnell’s run for Sheriff by helping him fabricate Long Beach crime statistics. Patient’s in Long Beach currently live in fear of McDonnell, because of his past use of a Neo Nazi affiliated policemen named ‘Officer Strohmann’, to conduct brutal intimidation against citizens investigating the narcotics rackets.

Benedict Arnold’s

Why would you trust a fucktard in a tree? This is professional!?

Let’s talk about morale and loyalty for a minute. Morale is low among California activists these days, including those among OC NORML and the California Cannabis Coalition, as many die-hard activists and political supporters have found themselves betrayed by trusted leaders in lieu of the demonic AUMA creeping upward in the polls. Growers and operators alike followed the siren call of the Emerald Grower’s Association led by inexperienced political hacks like Hezekiah Allen and Sean Donahoe, who have used their family relations to build industry clout as a pair of pied pipers that have led growers to nothing but political failure and ruin. Earlier this year, comedy grower Micky Martin infamously lampooned the pair of hucksters during the Fuck Mickey Awards 2015, largely targeted at Consortium members within the industry for their deceptive practices. Hezekiah Allen completely failed negotiations with the state regarding individual growing rights, claiming that it was the industry’s obligation to make concessions while taking payouts from regulatory insiders to dig the knife deep in the Emerald Triangle’s back. Allen disingenuously failed to mention that California regulatory, hungry for tax revenue, were prepared to make major concessions on grow rights and the Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act  but being the false prophet that he is, we were failed utterly if not maliciously.

Look at this bullshit website, seriously?!

NORML and the Law Offices of Matthew Pappas also have to take responsibility for some of the disarray in the movement. NORML, already controversial due to Keith Stroup’s epic betrayal in the late 70’s, has pretty much continued the Long Sell Out of the movement by feeding grower after grower to predatory lawyers and political organizations that have no shame in turning over our people to the regulators and law enforcement authorities without proper legal protection. It was NORML that initially backed Prop 19, it was NORML that helped Lou Correa draft SB1262 and it was NORML that backed EGA and told the growers that they could trust Hezekiah Allen to sell them upriver with the formation of MMRSA and now AUMA.

Also we can’t let the leadership of CCHI 2016 off the hook either for wasting everyone’s time and happily taking everyone’s money. Buddy Duzy, the leader of CCHI, is an idiot huckster and an idolater of Jack Herer, yet he seems to annually take a shit on Jack’s dream by sabotaging the collection of signatures for Jack’s initiative while taking political donations to keep buying himself an endless marijuana supply. Also if you ever met Buddy, one would understand that he has no concept of law or what a lawyer is for and should probably be the last person leading a referendum on anything. His well-liked stoner partner, Michael Jolson, is probably the most disappointing of the group, as many relied on his ethical and congenial character to keep an eye on Buddy rather than collaborate with the poorly educated junkie on wasting everyone’s important time. Thanks Buddy and Mike, you couldn’t have helped the bad guys more by distracting us with your false prophecies and financial malfeasance, karma will be a huge bitch, best believe it.

Buddy being a leader

This Coalition of Corruption between the Cartels, the Cops, The City Administrators and The Consortium are now going for the throat with AUMA. The bill and its proponents claim that the AUMA will correct the loopholes left for Law Enforcement by Prop 215. The Bill in reality is a complete and utter nightmare for the medical marijuana movement; AUMA is Prop 19’s real intent in its true corporate form.  AUMA hands the industry over to the corporate oligarchy and California Law Enforcement Complex on a silver platter; the bill violates federal law and completely upends the medicinal spirit of Prop 215 in favor of a small cabal of business interests known as the Marijuana Mafia.

Now that we understand what California has been dealing with let’s talk about AUMA:

10 Reasons Why AUMA is a TRAP

1. It’s going to raise the price of pot worldwide.

• When the price of marijuana per pound in California goes up, prices go up even higher everywhere else. A tax like AUMA’s sets a price floor aka price control in the market, meaning it’s impossible to sell marijuana below a certain price because of the tax burden without taking a loss. Colorado learned their lesson during the past two years when the price of marijuana experienced deflation from a supply glut. Since Colorado implemented price controls before the price drop, they are now stuck selling marijuana above its market price thus expanding their own street market and diminishing their legal market. Since marijuana supply will only increase as state after state legalizes, a premature tax will toxify the mother plant and global marijuana markets in a very unsettling way.

2. Most of the tax revenue goes to jails, police and insider bureaucracy.

• This is not a lottery sin tax, this tax is designed to fill law enforcement and prison system budget gaps to keep business running as usual after marijuana arrests become invalidated.

3. Marijuana will still have felonies and prison sentences under the California Penal Code for all patients and recreational users.

• A crime is only a crime if there is a legal punishment for it. As long as marijuana remains within the California Penal Code, possession and production will remain a crime. AUMA does not decriminalize or fully legalize possession, it legalizes sales and purchases but lets the police keep their pound of flesh by still allowing marijuana arrests.

4. Drugged Driving with worse DUI punishments than drunk driving.

• Marijuana has been proven to not impair motor vehicle driving, but despite these studies, law enforcement has moved forward by sponsoring companies that are working on creating an accurate marijuana breathalyzer to entrap marijuana patients with highly subjective DUI charges that are being slated to have more of an impact than an alcohal DUI. Law Enforcement is basically saying, with legalization, be careful what you wish for because you just might get all of it, including police entrapment.

5. Personal grows can be banned by the state.

• AUMA only requires a simple parliamentary majority to overturn personal growing rights and trust me, this is not an IF but a WHEN if this bill gets passed. None of the AUMA sponsors want small growers competing with them or offering up superior homemade product.

6. Cities and counties can ban outdoor cultivation.

• Cities and counties will continue to racketeer marijuana businesses with impunity, expect all the grows and shops to be owned by the mayor and his family with this one.

7. Cities and counties can pass arbitrary taxes, ordinances and bans.

• In addition to an outrageous price driving state tax, we will also have price hiking city taxes and ordinances, along with city wide bans that have CUP’s issued to only to those with enough money to properly bribe the city councils.

8. Eliminates Prop 215 constitutional protections.

• Goodbye medical marijuana and its constitutional protections. Subordinates California law to the Federal Schedule I Prohibition, turning cannabis from a legal right into a legal privilege. Think DMV license suspension, exactly.

9. Allows for control by outside industries (Alcohal, Tobacco, Pharma, etc.)

• Opens the door wide open for Consortium control. Expect Sean Parker and the Coalition of Corruption to storm in, bribe every city from Yreka to Imperial Beach, lock up every grower that doesn’t kow tow, and buy up all of their assets at the auction for rock bottom prices.

10. Reinstitutes control of the national industry under DC insiders and billionaires.

• Reinstitutes Consortium control over the medical marijuana industry. GOP drug lords like the Bush Family, the DuPonts and Kochs will continue to use marijuana as a front for cocaine and heroin distribution, while loading up the private prison system, that they own, with the patients that they sell their products to.

–The Green Chazzan

Part 1 – https://thegreenpulpit.wordpress.com/2016/04/24/the-truth-part-1-the-miami-boys/

Part 2- https://thegreenpulpit.wordpress.com/2016/04/24/the-truth-part-2-smoke-mirrors/

EDITOR: We would like to thank our readers for bearing with us while the site is being transitioned. Our archives are available at the bottom of the web page with all articles available by date

Dan Rush w/ Richard Lee pushing Prop 19

It should come as no surprise that the largest investors in Medical Marijuana are large international drug cartels, foreign intelligence agencies, state sponsored terrorists and the American billionaire class (primarily Republicans and Liberal Internationalists) who have used their almost unlimited pool of wealth to corrupt the medical marijuana industry in hopes of having complete market control & comparative advantage with the advent of marijuana legalization.

As the Green Pulpit has always claimed, ‘Legalization’ is a political term used to mask the legitimization of organized crime controlled grows, production facilities and collectives to create a legitimate avenue for the multi-billion dollar money laundering schemes that have kept the industry and its supply chain flowing for decades. ‘Legalization’ also maintains the role of law enforcement and continues the Drug War, by creating new legal schemes for possession and intoxication that allow law enforcement and the courts to continue indirectly taxing and jailing both marijuana businesses operators and marijuana patients. The Drug War itself is a for profit, unconstitutional, law enforcement entrapment that brings drugs into the United States, sells it to its citizens and arrests them to fill the for-profit jail system that benefits the bottom line of the 1%.

US Incarceration Rate

Foreign Activity

In rural and impoverished areas in both California and Arizona, many grows are used to support meth labs and vice versa; often with cheap or free labor being brought in by cartel coyotes, trafficking in people from Mexico, Central and South America, but also Southeast Asia and China as well. The Chinese government and Chinese businesses have been laundering money through both Mexico and California via pharmaceutical transactions, Mexican cartel banking, and most interestingly enough through Native American tribes seeking more expansive grows. Since the federal government has allowed for cultivation on Indian Reservations, many tribes have been approached by agents of the Chinese government, looking to invest hard currency into large-scale greenhouse grows on Reservation land. Their goal is to avoid having the illegal RMB’s and counterfeit USD’s from being collected by the US tax system so that they can not only have capital to create more store fronts for their operations but also so that China can protect the RMB from Federal Reserve policy.

Stratfor(c)

How Drug Sales and Money Laundering Can Damage The Economy: https://thegreenpulpit.wordpress.com/2014/07/27/the-devils-work-marijuana-in-the-20s-and-30s-part-2/

What the hell does international currency manipulation have to do with marijuana? Quite a bit. China is using US Nixonian policy in reverse. Checking out our Secret History of the Drug War section we recall that narcotics have often been used as a weapon of war, primarily impacting the public health of the target population but also by introducing currency imbalances through the actual underground sales of the drugs themselves. China was defeated during the Opium Wars by both an influx of opium and currency manipulation by the British; China has now retooled their soft foreign policy to target America through an influx of illicit drugs, counterfeit dollars and manipulation of untaxed reserves created by the drug transactions. Did you know that China now manufactures 95% of all of the world’s ecstasy pills? Did you know that Chinese government subsidiaries are the #1 supplier of pseudoephedrine and ephedra (the base compounds of methamphetamine) to the Sinaloa and Gulf Cartels? Did you know that China White Heroin comes from Burma through traffickers and sources loyal to Chinese intelligence? It’s a cold war people and also a dirty one.

More on the Opium Wars: https://thegreenpulpit.wordpress.com/2014/03/27/the-opium-mob/

Sino-Mexican Connection:

http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2005/06/the_mexican_connection_pseudoe.html

http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1759760/how-mexican-drug-cartels-are-moving-hong-kong

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/chinese-mexican-businessman-found-205m-cash-sold-black-market-meth-chemicals-article-1.386830

http://abcnews.go.com/ABC_Univision/News/chapo-guzman-controls-meth-trafficking-us-asia-study/story?id=18865196

The worst part of all of this is that the international business Consortium and Republican lawmakers are actively collaborating with Chinese agents and business entities to keep medical marijuana illegal. Now why would they do that? Because the US prison system has Chinese and Russian investors, it’s really that simple. And if our best and brightest are being imprisoned and denied work over a plant, even more success for our global rivals in assuming military dominance and thus global dominance in the long term. Marijuana also has been proven to help get users off of the narcotics that the Chinese government now controls, its antithetical toward their goals. China is also heavily focused on unity through thought control, which is why marijuana is punishable by death in mainland China. They do not want any substance that encourages independent thought or subversive thought to be available to anyone, a very similar view shared by the Reagan and Bush administrations of yesteryear.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/carl-takei/anonymous-exposes-uss-big_b_3567035.html

Both China and Russia have analyzed the US’s method of controlling the global narcostate and have seen its benefits in both population management domestically and in soft power with foreign affairs. Russian intelligence and the Russian Mafia have made a big impact in the LA Basin over the last few years, buying up infamous collectives, bribing the LA County Sheriff Lee Baca, to look the other way and taking over a network of grows stretching from Orange County to Downtown LA to Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley.

Want to have a better relationship with the government? Want to clean up this industry? Be patriotic and anonymously report foreign activity to Homeland Security. Show them who the good guys are!

Terrorism

San Bernardino

The most glaring issue with the involvement of foreign actors, the Russian and Mexican Mob, is their willingness to work with Saudi and Iranian investors to traffic terrorists into the United States. This author is aware of several groups of illegal Afghan and Chechen nationals trimming for the Russian Mob at various locations, including dispensaries in the San Fernando Valley, while also working part time as valets to case terror targets within Los Angeles and the surrounding Southland. There are also several Armenian and Iranian subgroups, posing as Eastern European Jews and Israelis, that have also collaborated with the Russian’s and Saudi’s to bring terror cells into the country through the marijuana business. Dispensaries, since they are cash only businesses without employment records, provide an ideal cover for imported terror, especially if the dispensary and associated grows are ran by organized crime.

This article was recently released by JudicialWatch.org, discussing the growing cases of terror smuggling in the United States:

“ Mexican drug traffickers help Islamic terrorists stationed in Mexico cross into the United States to explore targets for future attacks, according to information forwarded to Judicial Watch by a high-ranking Homeland Security official in a border state. Among the jihadists that travel back and forth through the porous southern border is a Kuwaiti named Shaykh Mahmood Omar Khabir, an ISIS operative who lives in the Mexican state of Chihuahua not far from El Paso, Texas. Khabir trained hundreds of Al Qaeda fighters in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen and has lived in Mexico for more than a year, according to information provided by JW’s government source.

Now Khabir trains thousands of men—mostly Syrians and Yemenis—to fight in an ISIS base situated in the Mexico-U.S. border region near Ciudad Juárez, the intelligence gathered by JW’s source reveals. Staking out U.S. targets is not difficult and Khabir actually brags in an Italian newspaper article published last week that the border region is so open that he “could get in with a handful of men, and kill thousands of people in Texas or in Arizona in the space of a few hours.” Foreign Affairs Secretary Claudia Ruiz, Mexico’s top diplomat, says in the article that she doesn’t understand why the Obama administration and the U.S. media are “culpably neglecting this phenomenon,” adding that “this new wave of fundamentalism could have nasty surprises in store for the United States.”

This disturbing development appears on the Open Source Enterprise, the government database that collects and analyzes valuable material from worldwide print, broadcast and online media sources for the U.S. intelligence community. Only registered federal, state and local government employees can view information and analysis in the vast database and unauthorized access can lead to criminal charges. Updated data gathered on Khabir reveals he’s 52 years old and was ordered to leave Kuwait about a decade ago over his extremist positions. Khabir is currently on ISIS’s (also known as ISIL) payroll and operates a cell in an area of Mexico known as Anapra, according to the recently obtained information.

A year ago Judicial Watch reported on an ISIS camp in this exact area, just a few miles from El Paso. JW’s April 14, 2015 report identified Anapra as the location of the ISIS base, details that were provided to JW by sources that include a Mexican Army field grade officer and a Mexican Federal Police Inspector. Anapra is situated just west of Ciudad Juárez in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. At the time JW reported that another ISIS cell was established to the west of Ciudad Juárez, in Puerto Palomas to target the New Mexico towns of Columbus and Deming. Sources told JW that, during the course of a joint operation, Mexican Army and federal law enforcement officials discovered documents in Arabic and Urdu, as well as “plans” of Fort Bliss – the sprawling military installation that houses the US Army’s 1st Armored Division. Muslim prayer rugs were recovered with the documents during the operation.

A few months later JW reported that Mexican drug cartels are smuggling Middle Eastern terrorists into a small Texas rural town near El Paso and that they’re using remote farm roads—rather than interstates—to elude the Border Patrol and other law enforcement barriers. The foreigners are classified by the U.S. government as Special Interest Aliens (SIA) and they are transported to stash areas in Acala, a rural crossroads located around 54 miles from El Paso on a state road – Highway 20. Once in the U.S., the SIAs wait for pick-up in the area’s sand hills just across Highway 20. At the time JW’s government sources revealed that terrorists have long entered the U.S. through Mexico and in fact, an internal Texas Department of Public Safety report leaked by the media documents that several members of known Islamist terrorist organizations have been apprehended crossing the southern border in recent years.

Earlier this year, as part of an ongoing investigation into national security risks in the porous southern border, JW obtained evidence that proves the U.S. government has known for more than a decade about the partnership between terrorists and Mexican drug cartels. State Department documents made public by JW in January say that for at least ten years “Arab extremists” have entered the country through Mexico with the assistance of smuggling network “cells.” Among them was a top Al Qaeda operative wanted by the FBI. Some Mexican smuggling networks actually specialize in providing logistical support for Arab individuals attempting to enter the United States, the government documents say. The top Al Qaeda leader in Mexico was identified in the September 2004 cable from the American consulate in Ciudad Juárez as Adnan G. El Shurkrjumah. The cable was released to Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).”

• Judicial Watch (2016)

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/04/cartels-help-terrorists-in-mexico-get-to-u-s-to-explore-targets-isis-militant-shaykh-mahmood-omar-khabir-among-them/

Terrorist-In-Chief and Consortium Top Dog King Salman

Most of the terrorists work for the Consortium anyway, because it’s in major part an international relationship between Republican leadership and the House of Saud. Osama Bin Laden was a top agent of Saudi Intelligence, as were several other prominent terrorists from Al-Qaeda. Even today we see ISIS and the al-Nusra army, sponsored by Saudi intelligence, slaughtering thousands of innocents in Iraq and Syria. Hell, even Obama knows the Saudi’s did 9/11, it’s all in the secret 28 pages.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/obama-administration-set-to-release-secret-28-pages-from-911-report-a6999696.html

Remember, there is no excuse to protect terrorists or spies in this business! Most of the pot growing farmers we know are red blooded die-hard freedom loving Americans who would never sell out their people or country, especially to a bunch of filthy terrorists looking to hurt innocent people. We agree, see something, say something. Save lives. Locking up a terrorist isn’t snitching.

Sex Trafficking

What women are forced to do for a job in marijuana

It’s no secret that every dispensary from San Diego to Oakland is staffed by former prostitutes, escorts, broke hippie girls and wannabe Hollywood starlets that are often recruited straight out of the sex trade or are subjected to interviews with dispensary owners that resemble nothing less than trying out for a porno. Girls are required to maintain stripper or ‘thin and slutty’ looks to keep their job, much like an airline attendant from the 1960’s; any deviation into professionalism is met by job termination.

The Asian Mob for one has brought in former massage parlor girls from Vietnam, Thailand, Philippines, Japan, China and other locations to staff their dispensaries and make sure the management is well taken care of. The Russian Mob has a habit of picking up retired porn starlets and fake models from the San Fernando Valley, usually targeting women that have addictions to cocaine or methamphetamine, so that they can be kept happy, loyal and controlled.

Girls trimming pot on the floor, no buckets or tables

Another danger to women comes during the harvest season, where many female ‘trimmigrants’ have gone up to the fields of the Emerald Triangle to harvest, only to find themselves being forced into sex slavery on the farm. The most notorious was the revelation of the Clearlake ‘Rape Box’, where women were kept in dog cages and dog crates, to be molested by the farmers and farmhands whenever they saw fit.

“LAKEPORT, Calif. — When authorities raided the marijuana growing operation, they found greenhouses filled with plants over 6 feet tall, neatly lined with individual irrigation systems. But the rest of the property, one federal agent recalled, looked like a horror scene. They found dilapidated trailers where farmers appeared to live, caches of weapons and a bloody towel.

“To me, it smacked of a scene from ‘Deliverance,'” said David Prince, assistant special agent in charge of Homeland Security Investigations in Northern California. “If I was a plant, that’s where I’d want to live. If I was a human, that’s not where I’d want to live.”

It was here, in a remote area east of Clear Lake in Northern California, that authorities allege a kidnapped teenage girl from Los Angeles County was sexually abused and occasionally held captive in a metal box. The box — about 4-by-2-by-2 feet — sat outside one of the trailers, with holes drilled through the lid and a blanket inside. The box “had been altered to imprison a human,” a federal criminal complaint read.

In charges unsealed in San Francisco, federal officials allege that two men had abused the [15-year old] girl and forced her to help with their marijuana production. The girl eventually called authorities from a West Sacramento hotel, where she was rescued, officials said.

The suspects — Ryan Alan Balletto, 30, and Patrick Steven Pearmain, 25 — face numerous felony charges. The Los Angeles Police Department arrested a third man, Eric Edgar, on suspicion of sexual assault. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had been investigating the 680-acre property owned by Balletto since December 2011, court documents showed.

Then, authorities raided the marijuana farm. “It was kind of like opening Pandora’s box,” said Lake County sheriff’s Sgt. Dennis Ostini. They found 1,200 marijuana plants, guns and other items. But the most horrifying discovery was the metal box the girl said she was kept in. She told police the men made her stay in it on two occasions for a total of three days, court records show.

Spray-painted on the outside was the first letter of the girl’s name. Inside was a decal that “depicted an animal skull surrounding the shadow image of a human skull with the logo ‘Bone Collector,'” according to the court documents.

The men put a hose through one of the holes to clean the girl and wash out the human waste inside, prosecutors alleged. Inside the box investigators found human hair and a poem the girl had written about being held inside the box. A “rack” allegedly used for bondage and sex toys were also found on the property. Authorities alleged in court papers that Balletto called the girl a “trooper” because she didn’t scream when she was in the box.

Authorities said the investigation is ongoing. U.S. Atty. Northern District spokesman Joshua Eaton said there could be more victims….”

Complete Article: http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jul/26/local/la-me-girl-captive-pot-20130727

Money Laundering

The quasi legal status of marijuana dispensaries in California and Colorado have created ample opportunities for organized crime and foreign intelligence to use dispensaries as an immaculate system to wash their illicit gains from cocaine, heroin, pills & ecstasy, people trafficking, stolen goods and other underworld activities. Since medical marijuana is a cash only system, it’s simply a matter of adding the illicit cash to the stockpile of legitimate yet unaccounted dispensary monies and claim a higher amount of marijuana sales to mask the transactions. There is not a BSA analysis or IRS audit or any other program outside of FINRA/FinCen licensure that can account for this, and even then it’s a legal quagmire, this is a major roadblock in federal decriminalization and true legalization.

How it works

What marijuana industry members must understand is that the US Department of Justice does not have an incentive to legitimize organized crime and foreign controlled businesses and marijuana activists must realize it is their obligation to work with the government to help discern and discriminate between individuals and organizations accurately. Who are the good guys? And who are the bad guys? Legitimate growers need to answer these questions so that the government can make an accurate prescription in performing accurate regulation and targeted enforcement against the racketeers.

Environmental Impact

500,000 gallons of stolen river water

The government is preparing to act on ‘Legal Marijuana’ in a big way because the legitimization of marijuana businesses means a gross expansions of both tax and due diligence revenue. What does that mean? Well at the Cannabis Cup, we met with a consultant from a company called Emerald Environments who were offering environmental solutions to what they regarded as the ‘coming regulatory apocalypse’ in California. They were representing a larger Fortune 500 entity that had become interested in the passage of the Medical Marijuana Regulation and Safety Act of 2015. The company had been analyzing the marijuana compliance issues, and their representative informed us that most of the marijuana industry was in gross violation of both federal and state EPA statutes within the State of California.

C’MON GUYS! We are better than this!

The consultant told us to check out the California State Water Resources Control Board’s website.

SWRCB Cannabis Cultivation Site: http://www.swrcb.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/enforcement/cannabis_enforcement.shtml

He informed us that this program will become statewide, with similar programs for indoor grows that have to meet the government’s industrial standards for air quality, soil impacts, water use and land use. Interestingly enough the SWRCB has been evaluating the industry over a period of four years and this PowerPoint pretty much details their conclusions:

http://www.swrcb.ca.gov/water_issues/programs/enforcement/docs/cannabis_enfrcmnt/cannabis_cultv_powerpoint.pdf

Not good people. These agencies look like they are getting ready to ticket the crap out of the growing community for all of this reckless behavior with the environment. Our friend also informed us that if the tickets mount or if the environmental impact is bad enough, the consequences could lead to asset forfeiture actions similar to the DEA.

Rackets

The Green Rush is the new Gold Rush it seems, in every way and shape. Dispensaries are very much historically akin to the old Western Trading Posts that dominated California during the Gold Rush, like the historical Sutter’s Fort. Many of the people that got rich off of the gold rush were those that sold supplies (hydro-stores) to the miners and those that bought gold (dispensaries) in exchange for cash, supplies and food. The trading posts made the gold available to interested parties like jewelers and banks (vendors) who would try to take the gold back to the East Coast, either by ship or by horse and cart.

“The benefit to the forty-niners [growers] was that the gold was simply “free for the taking” at first. In the goldfields at the beginning, there was no private property, no licensing fees, and no taxes. The miners informally adapted Mexican mining law that had existed in California. For example, the rules attempted to balance the rights of early arrivers at a site with later arrivers; a “claim” could be “staked” by a prospector, but that claim was valid only as long as it was being actively worked.”

“Miners [growers] worked at a claim [grow] only long enough to determine its potential. If a claim [grow spot] was deemed as low-value—as most were—miners would abandon the site in search for a better one. In the case where a claim was abandoned or not worked upon, other miners would “claim-jump” [jack] the land. “Claim-jumping” [jacking] meant that a miner began work on a previously claimed site [steal plants]. Disputes were often handled personally and violently, and were sometimes addressed by groups of prospectors [activists] acting as arbitrators. This often led to heightened ethnic tensions. In some areas the influx of many prospectors could lead to a reduction of the existing claim size by simple pressure.”

Sound familiar?

These days what we are seeing in the industry is coercion and collusion by organized crime and city councils to lock down the authorized distributors of cannabis in order to control and fix the price of marijuana. This started in the City of Long Beach, spread throughout California and now it’s like a disease going from marijuana state-to-state. This model seems most successful in Arizona where growers are terrorized by the Paradise Valley elite, and their attack dog Sheriff Joe, who retain almost exclusive control over all available dispensaries and large scale grows in the state of Arizona. The state, despite being the neighbor of the Mother Plant, has not shared the same benefits as Oregon; in fact just the opposite. Arizona has a disproportionately high price for marijuana due to the difficulty and severe penalties for cultivation and transporting without a license in the state; the Arizona-California border is heavily maintained and most vendors have to stay super low key in the Phoenix-Tempe area due to Sheriff Joe’s Orwellian surveillance state. This pressure by law enforcement is to ensure that prices remain high for the patient or end user within the state. Local AZ growers are screwed out of the benefit of high prices because dispensaries, due to their complete control over distribution, dictate the prices they are willing to pay. Which happens to be at almost 50% below California market rate. While these groups rob the growers of their hard worked gains, they then turn around and screw the patients with 50-65$ eighths of mid-grade. We are talking a cost of $900-$1200 and a gross profit of $6000 or more, per pound. This is the wet dream of the Tax & Jail cabal known as The Consortium. They have complete domination over the Arizona market, led by local hedge fund sociopath JP Holyoak and with the aid of Marijuana Policy Project, have tried to deprive citizens of their individual grow rights in the state of Arizona so that they can continue to fix the marijuana markets as they always have. (See Part 1: Miami Boys). Holyoak and friends have even actively tried to suppress the opposing AZFMR initiative, which allows for individual grows, by bugging and hacking activists phones, monitoring Facebook chats and breaking into emails.

Sheriff Joe

The goal of this financial Consortium in every state, is to control the distribution of marijuana, subjugate and eliminate the small and medium sized farmer, commercialize greenhouses on a mass scale, sacrifice medicinal quality in exchange for high profit ‘commercial grade’, which will simply be outrageously expensive mids and kill off the competitive craft market. All medicinal quality marijuana will be controlled by Big Pharma companies like Gilead, Teva, GW, Merck and Pfizer, all owned or shares held by The Consortium members behind AUMA. The ultimate goal is to return the legal marijuana market back to the same limited number of hands that controlled it from the mid-70’s to the mid-90’s, when the cycle was broken with Dennis Peron’s liberation of the movement with Prop 215.

AUMA Sponsors (The Consortium)

They do this by bribing city councils and local police in every county of every marijuana state. These guys are billionaires so their pockets go long and deep. Most American cities still have deep budget gaps or debt dismay from the 2008 financial crisis, so their politicians are chomping at the bit for more revenue, especially if it benefits themselves. Most city councils, like those in Santa Ana, Long Beach, Santa Cruz, San Diego and many others throughout marijuanadom will not issue an operating permit unless the Mayor and Council members are offered stakes or monthly kickbacks from the dispensaries. This is not implementing a tax to benefit the public welfare, but rather political corruption designed to profiteer off a cash only business, that’s probably money laundering, with no taxes and no regulations.

We have discussed city corruption with marijuana at length in past articles and series like Narc vs. Narc, and the Coalition of Corruption. We encourage you to check out the site further.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-30/state-sanctioned-theft-failed-war-drugs-and-cops-abuse-civil-forfeiture

https://thegreenpulpit.wordpress.com/2014/05/30/long-beach-corruption-unveiled-local-news-connects-police-and-city-council-to-marijuana-rackets/

https://thegreenpulpit.wordpress.com/2016/01/01/police-corruption-marijuana/

https://thegreenpulpit.wordpress.com/2014/03/19/the-marijuana-mafia/

https://thegreenpulpit.wordpress.com/2014/10/

More to Come…

–The Green Chazzan

Alright guys HAPPY INDEPENDENCE DAY! We have our backs against the wall so it’s time for a hardcore political download to get everyone set up for the COUNTER-ATTACK. This is not a drill, this is full scale political warfare and it’s time for boot camp.

The Truth About AUMA:

The Truth – Part 1: The Miami Boys

The Truth – Part 2: Smoke & Mirrors

The Truth – Part 3: The Consortium & The Legalization Trap

The Truth – Part 4: The Dark Side of the Moon

WAR PLAN

STEP 1

HOW TO FORM A SUPER PAC IN CALIFORNIA

http://www.fec.gov/ans/answers_pac.shtml

From the Federal Election Commission website:

“A Super PAC (Independent Expenditure-Only Political Committee) or Hybrid PAC (committee that maintains a non-contribution account) must register by filing FEC Form 1 [PDF] (Instructions [PDF]), Statement of Organization within 10 days after raising or spending in excess of $1,000 in connection with federal elections. Under “Type of Committee,” the PAC would check box 5(f). Additionally, the committee must submit a letter to identify itself as a Super PAC or Hybrid PAC. The Commission has approved a template for Super PACs to use, and has provided specific instructions for Hybrid PACs. For additional information, consult the Super PAC and Hybrid PAC sections of our Recent Developments in the Law page, as well as our Coordinated Communications and Independent Expenditures brochure.”

Remember:

“You are not allowed to use all that money you’ve raised from corporations and unions to make “direct contributions” to candidates or their political action committees. You also can’t take out TV ads or billboards in coordination with any of those candidates or their PACs.”

WHY IS THIS IMPORTANT?

The only way you will be effectively able to raise money against AUMA is by forming several Super PAC’s, each with a specific purpose to attack the Sean Parker machine. One PAC will be for television ads, one for newspapers, one for social media, one for digging dirt on Parker and his Consortium cronies, one for pamphlets and hand media, and several for making political contributions on the quiet to key political figures. This is also the easiest and fastest way to raise money in the US political system, its completely legal and its playing by the big boys rules so we can kick the big boys right where it hurts, the pocketbook. The key of the SuperPAC is to make the election too expensive to make it worthwhile for big business, while they have already spent $100 million, our goal is to make them spend over a billion. If they want our industry its going to cost a pound of flesh, we need to make it happen. Especially on social media.

STEP 2

HOW TO USE TWITTER and INSTAGRAM FOR PROPOGANDA

1. Open several twitter accounts with cool 420 related names.
2. Get a multi-tweet platform for your browser: http://mashable.com/2009/05/18/twitter-apps-manage-multiple-accounts/#BfZpmfsdpOq3
   1. This allows you to manage all accounts at the same time.
3. Use Twitter to get the truth out.
4. Hashtag as many words as you can, this links your tweet to more tweets allowing people from around the world to see your truth in seconds.
5. You can call people out just by finding their name
   1. Typing @donduncanasa is a #RICO #MMJ #Thief #AUMA #BADforBusiness @barackobama indict this #asshole will go WORLDWIDE and the President WILL see it because he is on twitter all the time. Welcome to the 21^{st Century.} 
6. Don’t overplay your hand on twitter. Don’t try to respond to people directly, use the format above to make creative messages, they play to the audience better and get you seen more effectively.
7. Don’t make yourself look crazy on twitter, EVERYONE can see you on Twitter, it is 100% exposure so choose your words very very carefully. Do not make threats, just say facts.
8. There must be a team on Twitter 24/7. Twitter has brought down countries and politicians, you can outnumber their money with this tool.
9. Do the same with INSTRAGRAM. It is also hashtag and referenced based but is primarily used for IMAGES and PICTURES. There are tons of people on IG every minute of the day, use this to educate and post messages. CREATE SEVERAL INSTAGRAM ACCOUNTS.

STEP 3

HOW TO USE YOUTUBE FOR PROPOGANDA

1. Start a YouTube Channel, the more the better.
2. Videotape yourself in a creative way to gain the audience’s attention, show them some herb, do something hippie cool, use digital media equipment, MAKE IT INTRIGUING TO A GENERAL AUDIENCE.
3. Tell the truth, and get guest stars who will.
4. The more you reveal about the good side and the bad side of marijuana the more the public will trust your judgement. The PROOF IS IN THE PUDDING AND SHOWING IS ALWAYS BETTER THAN TELLING.
5. Do Not Portray Yourself in A Hostile or Threatening Manner, DO NOT MAKE THREATS. YOU ARE NOT CLIVEN BUNDY. You are a marijuana grower trying to get the truth out, make it about THE TRUTH.
6. The more the better, social media is very lightweight with the Soros Gang because to them the truth hurts, they do not want the public informed. IT IS YOUR JOB TO INFORM THE PUBLIC.
7. MILLIONS OF PEOPLE ARE ON YOUTUBE HOURLY, PLAY A STRAIGHT GAME AND MAKE YOUR VIDEO FOR ALL AUDIENCES. DO NOT RANT BE CLEAR AND CONCISE.

STEP 4.

Congressman Adam Schiff (D) Cool guy

HOW TO CALL YOUR CONGRESSMAN

1. Google your congressman.
2. Find out where your congressman is having his next public meeting.
3. Go there in a big group.
4. Talk to him politely and respectfully, but make your concerns known.
5. Get his number.
6. Follow-up next week and thereafter into the election.
7. If he is pro-marijuana and anti-auma, help him out.
8. If he is anti-marijuana or anti-auma, then fuck him over via TruthOut to his/her constituents. DO NOT THREATEN OR DO ANYTHING ILLEGAL, just play politics.

STEP 5

MAKE ALLIANCES

Remember “The Enemy of My Enemy Is My Friend”, here are Sean Parker and George Soro’s enemies, hit them up.

http://www.march-against-monsanto.com/

https://www.organicconsumers.org/campaigns/millions-against-monsanto

https://gmo-awareness.com/resources/anti-gmo-groups-america/

http://www.citizensforethics.org/

https://www.eff.org/

http://www.sierraclub.org/

Contact the Green Party and educate them.

http://www.gp.org/

Contact Bernie Sanders and educate him

https://go.berniesanders.com/page/content/splash

Anti-Globalization Groups

Anti-Free Trade Groups

Educate the enemies of our enemies about what they do in the shadows. Hurt their pocketbook.

STEP 6 – CONNECT THE MONEY

1. Figure out which SuperPAC’s are contributing to AUMA.
2. Identify which individuals and corporations are contributing to that PAC.
3. Connect their money to the big money ie. Hedge funds and billionaires.
4. Publish this information and start digging on their dirty secrets, especially if its marijuana related.
5. Connect the dots for the public, make them understand that this is not in their best interest.
6. EXAMPLE: Sean Parker is investing in a marijuana breathalyzer? MAKE THIS KNOWN.
7. Identify the foreign cartel money connections, this is just like Iran-Contra. We have to connect the ISIS weapons to the drug money and laundering to the drug sales we know the big boys are doing. If we all put our heads together I am sure we can figure this out.

STEP 7

RECRUIT RECRUIT RECRUIT

There are a lot of pot friendly young people out there looking for a job. Give them a damn job and earn their loyalty, teach them how to fight and get the ball rolling. The more operators we have the better. People power works in large numbers but there must be several branches that go operational. Use this chart to organize your effort.

STEP 8

GATHER EVIDENCE AND USE IT TO FUNDRAISE

Once the truth is out there will be several entities that want to donate to the SuperPAC’s, but that can only happen if you open your mouth and talk about what is going on in a clear and concise manner and show evidence. It’s time to get grimy and that may equate to providing information on pro-AUMA operators to federal law enforcement ie. FBI, DOJ, not the DEA or locals, they are corrupt. They made their bed and now they get to lie in it. Karma is a bitch and sometimes there needs to be a little no mercy Justice For All going on to stop evil people from taking things that aren’t theirs.

Leave no stone unturned, all is fair in love, war & politics, all information is fair game; let the world know how medical marijuana really works.  Welcome to Operation Green Rush.

• The Green Chazzan 

Given that war has broken out in the fight for our marijuana freedoms as we face a multi-state threat from the so-called ‘recreational marijuana’ and their neo-conservative corporate consortium partners, we have decided to introduce a new series called ‘Law and Order’ where we openly contend that the Drug War itself is unconstitutional. We will present to you cases from the past few decades that slowly but surely eroded the rights and freedoms that We The People of America have guaranteed in our Bill of Rights and Constitution of the United States, in the name of an unholy cause called the War on Drugs.

The War on Drugs is an institution that was designed for one purpose: profit. To profit off of wars both legal and illegal, the jailing of citizens, the seizure of property, the suffering of the people, the destruction of families, the oppression of neighborhoods and the expansion of empire. No other institution has so effectively concentrated wealth at the top in the history of man, than the Leviathan that has emerged comprising of Cartels, Corporations and Government.

Best Nixon

The origin of the War on Drugs is based in the oligarchical reaction to the American counter-culture that had emerged against the War in Vietnam and the destabilizing effect the war in Vietnam had on the US economy. While narco-warfare had been previously used in World War II and the topic of drug control had existed in the political realm for over 100 years, it wasn’t made intrinsic again until the Vietnam War and the creation of the War on Drugs. When Richard Nixon came to office in 1968, several correlated events took place within the White House:

• The Consortium formed by John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles after World War 2 had been brought back into power post-JFK. The same group had attempted to drive the Cuban Missile Crisis years before and had employed CIA operation J/M-Wave to assassinate President Kennedy.
• CIA shipments of heroin during the Vietnam War by former members of Operation Jedburgh to the United States, proved profitable in funding unauthorized wars in Cambodia and Laos that Nixon could not obtain through a Democratic Congress.
• The United States after 1969 began to lose its financial capacity to maintain the war in Vietnam. Nixon, in order to drive up the price of marijuana and heroin to increase war profits instigated Operation Intercept. The heroin epidemic started in Hells Kitchen raised enough money off the books to continue the war well into 1972.
• Heroin sales were compounded by Nixon taking the dollar off the gold standard in 1971 allowing the drug money to be laundered into the economy. Nixon would later convince China to agree to the outsourcing of American jobs in return for cheaper goods undermining American labor to allow for a retaking of the US economy by the Consortium.
• Nixon, the CIA and DEA utilized the same drugs for weapons tactics to reassert US hegemony in South America, overthrowing socialist governments and replacing them with narco-dictatorships backed by the military. This effectively established the modern cocaine trade through empowering Cartel families in Mexico, Panama, Peru and Colombia. Originally the most powerful operator was the Guadalajara Cartel, managed by the CIA, Rafael Quintero and Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo.
• The cocaine trade rapidly expanded into the 1980’s with civil wars in Central America being funded by a drugs-for-arms scheme that cemented the relationship between the US government, the cartels and American corporations. Cocaine shipments would leave Colombia through Panama, be facilitated by Contras through Central America, to Mexico and be flown by plane into private military airports guaranteed by then Governor Bill Clinton in Arkansas.
• The large glut of cocaine, encouraged the creation of the Crack Cocaine epidemic which started in 1984 and was fueled in large part by the trafficking of cocaine by Nicaraguan Contras and Manuel Noriega with the support of the CIA and DEA.
• DEA agent Enrique Camarena would be murdered by the Guadalajara Cartel, Mexican Police and several DEA and CIA agents for disrupting drug flows, setting off an investigation that would eventually lead to the Iran-Contra Affair and the exposure of the international narcotics system.
• The epidemic continued until George HW Bush invaded Panama in 1989 to shut down Noriega’s operation which had been supported by the US since the 1970’s.
• The fall of Noriega followed suit with the takedown of Pablo Escobar who had become the richest man in the world at the time through cocaine sales ($66 billion in 1991). The fall of Pablo was effectively the end of the Colombian reign as power would shift to Mexican Cartels with DEA support.
• The fall of the Arellano-Felix cartel, the successor to the Guadalajara Cartel, in the late 90s and early 2000’s, created a fractured power vacuum in Mexico that was heavily manipulated by Consortium and federal agency interests that has led to Mexico and Canada being the drug trafficking gatekeepers to the US that we have today. The power vacuum has since been filled by El Chapo and the Sinaloa Cartel, Los Zetas, the Gulf Cartel and several other small organizations.

—

The Murder of Enrique Camarena in 1984

DEA Agent Enrique Camarena

This first article talks about the significance of a court case related to the death of DEA agent Enrique Camarena-Salazar in 1984. Camarena had been responsible for the destruction of a 2,500 acre marijuana farm, with a production value of $8 billion. The marijuana farm was controlled by the CIA backed Guadalajara Cartel and its overlord Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo. Camarena was tortured at Gallardo’s ranch by Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain, CIA Agent Rafael Caro Quintero, and two crooked DEA agents who had dimed out Camarena for the bust. Quintero was the co-founder of the Guadalajara Cartel with Gallardo and been an integral part in providing funding from drug sales to the Nicaraguan Contras for Col. Oliver North and the CIA.

Rafael Caro Quintero

Quintero’s wiki:

“The Guadalajara Cartel prospered largely because it enjoyed the protection of the intelligence agency then known as Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS-Federal Security Directorate) under its chief Miguel Nassar Haro, a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent.

His cartel was also benefited by the CIA for having connections with the Honduran drug lord Juan Matta-Ballesteros, who, according to a 1983 U.S. Customs Investigative Report, was the head of the SETCO airline, a corporation that was used for smuggling narcotics into the United States. According to the Kerry Committee report, the SETCO airline was “the principal company used by the Contras in Honduras to transport supplies and personnel for the [FDN (one of the earliest Contra groups)], carrying at least a million rounds of ammunition, food, uniforms, and other military supplies [for the Contras] . . . from 1983 through 1985.”For its services SETCO received funds from the accounts established by Oliver North.

His partner and cartel co-founder, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo, provided a significant amount of funding, weapons, and other aid to the Contras in Nicaragua. Gallardo’s pilot, Werner Lotz stated that Gallardo once had him deliver $150,000 in cash to a Contra group, and Gallardo often boasted about smuggling arms to them. His activities were known to several U.S. federal agencies, including the CIA and DEA, but he was granted immunity due to his “charitable contributions to the Contras.

Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo

Caro Quintero has also been accused of involvement in the murder of US Drug Enforcement Administration agent Enrique Camarena Salazar. In November 1984, the Mexican authorities raided a 220-acre ranch known as El Búfalo in the state of Chihuahua, owned by Caro Quintero. The authorities reportedly burned more than 10,000 tons of marijuana – totaling a loss of around $160 million.

Camarena Salazar, who had been working undercover in Mexico, was said to be responsible for leading the authorities to the ranch. This allegedly prompted Caro Quintero and other high-ranking members of the Guadalajara Cartel to seek revenge against the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Camarena. In retribution, Camarena and his pilot Alfredo Zavala Avelar were allegedly kidnapped in Guadalajara on 7 February 1985 and brutally tortured and murdered. Caro Quintero allegedly buried the two bodies in a clandestine grave in the state of Michoacán. He then left Mexico on 9 March 1985 with his associates and his girlfriend Sara Cristina Cosío Gaona. Former Mexican Judicial Police chief Armando Pavón Reyes reportedly allowed Caro Quintero to flee from the airport in Guadalajara to seek refuge in Costa Rica in a private jet after paying a $300,000 bribe. The police chief was fired shortly afterwards and was charged with bribery and complicity in the Camarena murder.”

Camarena had been brutally interrogated and tortured, kept alive during the torture by Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain’s application of methamphetamine and other drugs to maintain Camarena’s consciousness. His body was found in Michoacan and triggered the largest DEA homicide investigation in US history, known as Operation Leyenda. Rafael Quintero and his partner, Ernesto Carrillo were arrested for the murder with great controversy, with Felix Gallardo being protected from prosecution by the Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid.

Dr. Humberto Alvarez Machain

The DEA, in vengeance, hired bounty hunters to abduct Dr. Humberto Machain and four other defendants to bring to trial in the early 1990’s despite vigorous protests of the Mexican government in regards to violation of the Extradition Treaty in 1978. The case became significant when Dr. Machain sued the US government for abducting a Mexican citizen in good standing in violation of the extradition treaty. In a high controversial 5-4 decision, the Republican Supreme Court ruled that Alvarez was NOT entitled to relief and that the President ultimately had the right to violate congressional treaties in the interest of national security.

The other four abductee’s were convicted as well, many of them had ties to the current and former Mexican Presidents and had been implicated in using Mexican police to help cover up the murder and destroy evidence. In October 2013, two former federal agents and an ex-CIA agent admitted that the CIA had been directly involved in Camarena’s murder because the Guadalajara Cartel’s marijuana and cocaine operations were integral to funding the overthrow of government’s in Central America.

“New revelations suggest that Caro Quintero may have not been the only one responsible for the gruesome murder. Another figure has surfaced in the case, Félix Ismael “El Gato” Rodríguez, a Cuban exile who participated in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. El Gato has also been linked to the 1967 ambush of Ernesto “Che” Guevara in Bolivia.

CIA Agent Felix Rodriguez

These CIA-connection claims are now being brought to light by Phil Jordan, the former director of DEA’s powerful El Paso Intelligence Center in Texas; former DEA agent Héctor Berrellez; and Tosh Plumlee, who maintained he was hired to fly covert missions on behalf of US intelligence. The three men spoke to Fox News in exclusive interviews broadcast last Thursday.

They claimed that Mexican police and agents working for the CIA participated in Camarena’s torture and murder.

“I know and from what I have been told by a former head of the Mexican federal police, Comandante [Guillermo Gónzales] Calderoni, the CIA was involved in the movement of drugs from South America to Mexico and to the US,” said Jordan, according to a transcript of the broadcast.

“In [Camarena’s] interrogation room, I was told by Mexican authorities, that CIA operatives were in there – actually conducting the interrogation; actually taping Kiki,” Jordan claims. Berrellez explained that Camarena was kidnapped and murdered “because he came up with the idea that we needed to chase the money not the drugs.

We were seizing a huge amount of drugs. However, we were not really disrupting the cartels. So he came up with the idea that we should set up a task force and target their monies,” said the former DEA agent. Plumlee added that the CIA was also involved in helping run weapons and drugs from Caro Quintero’s ranch to Central America at the time that the Reagan administration was helping to arm the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

After Camarena’s body had been found about a month later in a rural area, DEA agents surrounded Quintero Caro at the Guadalajara airport but, according to Berrellez, Mexican drug officers pointed their guns and told them to hand over the cartel leader. Plumlee claims that Caro Quintero was later flown to Costa Rica with the help of El Gato.”

http://elpais.com/elpais/2013/10/15/inenglish/1381856701_704435.html

—

Judge David Carter, a highly reputable Narcotics Law professor with the University of California explains why the Camarena case was so important, in his following dissertation to the government of Brazil:

Excerpt from Conferencia Na Escola Da Magistratura, Tema: Narcotrafico

By Judge David O. Carter, Superior Court of Orange County, California

“…I have traveled to Brazil to share my thoughts about the role of the judiciary in narcotics trafficking cases. It is a very complex and sometimes dangerous area for public officials. Sometimes I give too much background on narcotics trafficking and I apologize in advance; but as we discuss the role of judges, it will be needed for you to understand our success, but more importantly – our failures. I believe you will be wiser than we were, and hopefully, avoid some of our glaring mistakes.

The issues our judges face today in the arena of international narcotics trafficking may be your issues of the future. I believe judges wield tremendous personal and political power. We may be powerful but those strengths can be turned against us.

Drug Enforcement Agency agent, Enrique Camarena, was forcibly abducted across the street from the United States Consulate in Guadalajara, Mexico on February 7, 1985. The United States and Colombia had entered into an agreement to extradite cartel members to the United States for trial and incarceration for conspiracy to transport narcotics into the United States. This was an attempt to incarcerate cartel members outside their area of influence and curtail international narcotics trafficking.

Whether it was America, Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, Peru, Colombia etc. The western hemisphere governments and the worldwide community of nations recognized the destabilizing effect of the cartel. When the initial 165 Colombian cartel members were to be extradited, the Cartel announced to the Colombian News agencies that for every cartel member extradited there would be seven Colombian judges or public officials killed. This transcript that I will read portions of IS the transcript of the tape that was played to then Vice President Bush and the National Security Council of the Torture, Interrogation, and Murder of Enrique Camarena and a Mexican pilot working with Camarena, Alfredo Zavala-Avelar at a cartel location in Guadalajara, Mexico. You will hear Enrique Camarena, the agent, who is being tortured. The interrogation was taped to send a message to the United States and the Colombian and Mexican governments to cease the indictment and extradition of cartel members. Electric cattle prods were used and he was beaten to unconsciousness, revived and beaten again. The tape was turned off during the torture and turned back on for the interrogation. Camarena will be heard complaining about these injuries. Only a few minutes will be read today if time allows.

This case will set the tone for many of my remarks about the complex world of international narcotics trafficking and the application of international laws, treaties and government policies that attempt to control this global threat.

Read Camarena Transcript

                Most nations of the world view narcotic trafficking as a threat to their sovereignty. I am not here to restate the evils of narcotics, but I do share these common concerns of the world community. An organized and powerful narcotics cartel necessities their own military which they must maintain to stop rival drug cartels from stealing their markets and their narcotics. But this same force can be turned on legitimate democratic governments, destabilize large governments and overthrow small governments. A powerful narcotics cartel allows criminals to subvert the democratic process by giving them a larger influence in government through their use of either force or monies.

A powerful narcotics cartel displaces economies and legitimate industries and businesses. Illegal monies obtained from narcotics and funneled into industry and business allow them to operate at lower profit margins or at a loss. This forces legitimate businesses and industries into bankruptcy and out of business. Narcotics tempts law-abiding and moral citizens to enter the world of narcotics trafficking for profit. This easy money is most tempting to the young people of our countries who dream of wealth.

Our nation has experienced this process. Our poor have become the true victims because much needed monies for food, clothing and shelter have been spent instead of narcotics – usually to the detriment of their families, including young children. Our government has then had to increase our welfare services to provide homes for the homeless and to prevent starvation and this had resulted in an increased tax burden on the middle classes….

What is the Cartel?

                I will only define and deal with core drug trafficking organizations. By definition: Core drug trafficking organizations dominate multiple phases of drug trafficking from production to distribution. They operate internationally and frequently direct subordinate organizations. The United States FBI, DEA, and CIA recognize twelve Colombian, one Peruvian, one Ecuadorian, and one Venezuelan core organization. My overview will cover of these fifteen core drug trafficking organizations.

The Medellin Cartel is comprised of Colombian drug trafficking organizations headquartered in and around Medellin, Colombia and was once considered to be the largest organized criminal enterprise in the world. However, beginning in 1989, with the assassination of presidential candidate Carlos Galan, the Medellin Cartel’s position as the most dominant organization in drug trafficking began to change. Medellin Cartel figure, Jose Rodriguez Gacha, was killed by Colombian authorities. Government pressure resulted in the surrender of key figures , most significantly, Pablo Escobar, who once again became a fugitive and was recently killed by Colombian government forces…

Pablo Escobar

Despite the situation described above, the Medellin Cartel is far from defunct. Drug trafficking to the United States continues and the drug cartels are expanding their markets in Europe. Europe provides an opportunity for a larger profit margin with the average price per kilo of cocaine going for two to three times the price in the United States.

The Cali Cartel is a complex framework of compartmentalized sub-groups or ‘cells’. Cells range from fewer than 10 to more than 30 members. However, accurate cell membership is difficult to determine due to the cartel’s practice of transferring members between cells and back and forth from Colombia to the US. Cali Cartel exhibits characteristics similar to major corporations; using detailed business ledgers to track cocaine profits, assigning specific duties to members, and even insuring drug shipments against possible loss…

The Cartel frequently transports cocaine destined for the US through Mexico and Guatemala. Aircraft often stop in Colombia, Panama, El Salvador and/or Nicaragua for refueling. Cocaine is stored in Guatemala and Mexico to be transported into the United States, most often through Texas, Southern California and Southern Florida. Los Angeles and Miami are used as collection and storage locations for further distribution.

Demonstrated violence is needed to produce fear and curtail governments and private citizens from aggressively enforcing the law against narcotics trafficking.

The Urdinola Grajales Organization is a core organization located in the Northern Valle de Cauca. The organization is led by brothers Ivan and Julio Fabio Urdinola Grajales. The Urdinola Brothers head the Northern Valley Cartel…utilizing legitimate business interests in the areas of fruits, flowers, horticulture and numerous farms to facilitate the production and in-country transportation of cocaine and heroin. The Urdinolas also utilized numerous legitimate export and shipping connections that facilitate the transportation of the drugs to the US and Europe.

Some cartels now specialize in transporting [cocaine]. Their profits are either a portion of the narcotics that they receive for their services for resale or agreed upon monies when the load has been sold. The North Coast Cartel consists of numerous independent drug trafficking organizations, the majority based in the cities of Barranquila, Cartagena, Riohacha, Santa Marta, and the Guijara Peninsula, along the north coast of Colombia. Smuggling has long been a part of the North Coast culture, beginning with emeralds and eventually marijuana & cocaine when it became more profitable. These organizations now specialize in transporting cocaine for the two larger cartels located in Cali and Medellin.

As the market for cocaine in Europe has grown, the ability of North Coast traffickers to shift cocaine shipments from the United States to that expanding market has grown proportionally. North Coast traffickers have established ties to the Sicilian Mafia and are now shipping cocaine to Italy. The cocaine is shipped from Colombia, through the Strait of Gibraltar and finally to Sicily.

I mentioned that trafficking organizations and drug cartels must have an organized and well-armed military to stop rivals from taking their narcotics. This small army is often used to hold ground areas and nowhere is this more important than in coca growing areas. This armed force is also needed to guard the raw material through the narcotics network to the distributor. Growers must grow and harvest coca and that requires dominance over the growing areas….

The primary importer to Brazil is the Jairo Echeverria Organization which is a core transportation and distribution organization based in Caracas, Venezuela. This organization is responsible for transporting and distributing cocaine for the Cali Cartel between Venezuela, the US, Europe and Brazil. The organization uses cargo containers, couriers, private aircraft and commercial aircraft, shipments range between 50 and 500kg. Several associates of the Jairo Echeverria were arrested by Italian law enforcement for delivering cocaine to the Sicilian Mafia, This organization utilizes numerous banks in the Hialeah-Miami area to facilitate their money laundering.

                My impression is that narcotics trafficking cases puts tremendous amount of pressure on judges. In Colombia, numerous judges have been killed. In my country [US], drug related cases constitute easily one half of the criminal case load in our federal and state courts. On a fact-finding level, it has caused our courts to deal with complex banking and money laundering issues. In most criminal prosecutions, we are listening to evidence about whether there has been direct evidence such as an eyewitness identification of the defendant. Often we listen to evidence that may be circumstantial in nature, that is, where there is not direct evidence but evidence from which an inference may be drawn that the defendant committed a crime…

                Narcotics trafficking cases are much more complex. Our judges and juries must listen to and understand the complex facts involved in money laundering. Offshore bank accounts may be in the name of non-existent corporations or actual corporations. Banking ledgers may be needed from numbered and confidential accounts to show both deposits and withdrawals. These transactions involve [trillions] of dollars and may be moved on a daily basis from one bank to another. This requires the cooperation of both the United States and the country where suspected illegal drug monies are deposited. Indictments are obtained in Florida on a cartel member who is arrested in the United States or in a country that allows extradition through treaties.

List of Consortium Members identified in Panama Papers

The prosecution then must obtain the evidence necessary to convict that cartel member. The charges may be conspiracy to launder illegal narcotics monies through either real or fictitious businesses. This requires the courts to obtain the funds, or at least the banking records of the businesses through the subpoena process, and that is solely dependent upon the cooperation of the other country where the funds are located. The banking industry worldwide promises confidentiality to its customers. Whether these banks are in the Cayman Islands, Panama, Switzerland, Venezuela, or the United States, the universal problem is obtaining these banking records.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers

If the bank is an American bank within the United States, then usually it is quite easy for our courts to get compliance with our orders for banking records. When the bank is outside our territorial boundaries, then we are totally dependent on cooperation between the two countries. An example is Panama, under President Noriega it was virtually impossible to obtain banking records, but since his seizure the country under new leadership is more willing to exchange information….

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-24/swiss-banks-land-in-middle-of-money-laundering-probe-again

Domestically, “RICO Laws’ were passed to stop the laundering of money through domestic American businesses. Narcotics traffickers pass narcotics monies through businesses and utilize these case flows as business profits. The narcotics traffickers even pay taxes on these monies disguised as business profits. The trafficker is then free to spend money openly in our society. Often suspicions on the part of law enforcement and the IRS are aroused with purchases of luxery items such as boats, planes, cars and other items with no identifiable source of income. The IRS has prosecuted narcotics traffickers for non-declaration of income…and for tax evasion.

The most controversial issue often involves how a nation obtains international drug traffickers to stand trial. A person may be shipping massive amounts of cocaine into Brazil and your government may decide to prosecute. Although the person is not within your territorial jurisdiction, this Cartel trafficker may be causing many criminal acts ranging from murder, attempted bribery of officials, and the importation of massive amounts of cocaine.

The first is that the foreign Cartel dealer visits your country and is seized….

The second is when a criminal proceeding begins in Brazil and names the foreign Cartel agent as a co-conspirator…allowing for extradition.

The third way the person is obtained is by conflict between nations that give rise to the use of military force. The conflict in Panama involved US military forces and President Noriega was seized. In Grenada, where US citizens were threatened, the US military occupied Grenada and was also able to shut off some the narcotic trafficking routes and airfields….

Invasion of Panama 1989

The fourth method is abduction. The case of United States vs. Humberto Alvarez-Machain raised problems for our judiciary and world governments. The DEA believed that Dr. Alvarez-Machain participated in the murder of Enrique Camarena by prolonging his life so that others [including members of CIA, DEA, and Mexican government] could further torture and interrogate him. On April 2, 1990 Dr. Alvarez-Machain was forcibly kidnapped from his medical office in Guadalajara, Mexico and flown by private plane to El Paso, Texas where he was arrested by drug enforcement agents. The US district court concluded that DEA agents were responsible for Dr. Alvarez-Machain’s abduction, although they were not personally involved in it.

Mexico responded quickly and unequivocally. On April 18, 1990 Mexico requested an official report on the role of the United States in the abduction, and on May 16, 1990 and July 19, 1990, it sent diplomatic notes of protest from the Embassy of Mexico to the US State Department. Mexico said that it believed the abduction was ‘carried out with the knowledge of persons working for the US government, in violation of the procedure established in the extradition treaty in force between the two countries’. The July 19^th note requested the provisional arrest and extradition of the law enforcement agents involved in the abduction. Mexico had already tried a number of members involved in the conspiracy that resulted in the murder of Enrique Camarena in 1984. Rafael Caro-Quintero, a co-conspirator, had already been imprisoned in Mexico on a 40 year sentence but other co-conspirators, Rene Verdugo-Urquidez and Raul Lopez-Alvarez had been prosecuted in the United States and received much harsher sentences of 240 years plus life in federal prison.

The case presented fundamental questions to our court system and its relation with the Executive Branch of our government. It also raised issues of treaties and jurisdiction that is unique to narcotics trafficking cases even when they do not involve murder. Against the backdrop of the varying decisions and conflicts amongst our own judiciary is the Executive Branch’s view of abduction. Certainly, the Executive’s view changed in the 1980’s. The President and National Security Councils’ reaction to the Cartel is indicative of a nation threatened by the Cartel and feeling at war. President Reagan and President Bush both consciously chose to refer to narcotics trafficking as the War on Drugs. In 1980, under President Carter, the office of legal counsel advised the administration that such seizures or abductions were contrary to international law because they compromised the territorial integrity of the other nation and were only to be undertaken with the consent of that nation. (4B OP. OFF. Legal Counsel 549, 556 (1980).

In 1989 there was a dramatic shift in the Executive Branch of our government. In the hearing before the Sub-committee on Civil and Constitutional Rights of the House Committee on the Judiciary, the Assistant Attorney General William Barr, Office of Legal Counsel of the DOJ, concluded that the President did have the authority to override customary international law. This became known as The Barr Letter and reflected executive opinion. It was a dramatic shift in policy and escalation of the war on drugs, in part, a reaction to Enrique Camarena’s death. The result was the abduction of Dr. Machain by the DEA believing that their authority was properly exercised through the Executive.

The United States District Court held it lacked jurisdiction to try Dr. Machain because his abduction violated the extradition treaty with Mexico. The Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of the indictment and repatriation of Dr. Machain, stating that the forcible abduction of a Mexico national with the authorization and participation of the United States violated the extradition treaty. The Court of Appeals said ‘although the treaty does not explicitly prohibit such abductions, the purpose of the treaty was violated by forced abduction”. It upheld the District Court’s findings….The Supreme Court in a 5-4 split decision overturned the lower court’s decision. The Supreme Court noted it had never addressed the precise issue raised in US vs. Alvarez-Machain.

Our courts had dealt with abductions by private citizens without government authorization or participation and had ruled on abductions from countries without extradition treaties…these rulings were favorable, but now government sanctioned abduction was the difficult issue in a highly charged media case with public outcry for the apprehension of the murder suspects. Television and movies were made of this murder. The court agreed that Dr. Machain’s abduction was shocking and it may be in violation of general international law principles, but whether the doctor should be returned to Mexico, as a matter outside of the treaty is a matter of the Executive Branch. The Supreme Court pointedly stated the ‘advantage of the diplomatic approach to the resolution of the difficulties between two sovereign nations, as opposed to unilateral actions by the courts of one nation is obvious’. The Supreme Court had basically kept Dr. Machain and said to the President “You ordered it, now you deal with it and decide if the diplomatic difficulties with Mexico are worth this abduction”.

The same decision brought a strong dissent, our Supreme Court was very divided. The dissent stated that this case raises a question of first impressions. The case is unique for several reasons. It does not involve an ordinary abduction by a private citizen or bounty hunter as in Ker vs. Illinois (119 US. 436 (1886)), not does it involve the apprehension of an American fugitive who committed a crime in one state and sought asylum in another…Rather it involves this country’s abduction of another country’s citizen; it also involves a violation of the territorial integrity of that country with which this country has signed an extradition treaty.

The dissent noted that it was ironic that the United States had attempted to justify its unilateral action based on the kidnapping, torture and murder of a federal agent by authorizing the kidnapping of a doctor. Extradition treaties promote harmonious relations by providing for the orderly surrender of a person by one state to another, and without such treaties, resort to force often follows…

Doctor Machain was remanded to the trial court where his case was eventually dismissed for lack of evidence. The lessons for me are numerous. Our state judges often do not recognize the rulings of another state judge and this same conflict can arise between federal judges and state courts…a judge’s power is confined by geography or jurisdiction. The [Cartel] is not! Each time the Cartel crosses a state boundary or national border it calls upon us to cooperate or we will fail in apprehending the traffickers. I believe the Cartel relies on the sovereignty we cherish as a buffer to successful prosecution. Each border represents added burdens to us and a need for increased understanding by states within a country and with other nations.

Case: https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/504/655/case.html

Programs and Policies

The United States has attempted many programs and policies to curtail the Cartel. The first is obviously the prosecution of narcotics transporters and sellers in our state and federal courts….the second program was legislatively enacted and is called the ‘Forfeiture Program’. The numerous laws in this area have essentially one goal: to confiscate monies and properties obtained from the capital that was acquired through narcotics sales. Until recently our focus was solely on incarcerating narcotics traffickers. Often money, real property, land, cars etc. were in other persons names, such as friends and family…in the 1980’s a policy of taking the profit away was initiated. Even here the due process rights of our Constitution apply. The person who possessed monies or property is entitled to be served with notice of the court hearing date. If the person cannot be found, publication in a newspaper of general circulation must be made to notify the party who might have claim to the property or money. The hearing usually consists of the investigating officer testifying as to how the property was confiscated. The judge is required to make findings of adequate service or attempts to serve notice of the court forfeiture proceeding on the person who had the items in possession…the judge at the hearing must find adequate probably cause that the money or property was obtained through illicit narcotics activities. These assets are then forfeited to the state or federal government depending on which agency laid claim to the asset.

There have been interesting problems for the judiciary. We have seen a competition between our federal and state police agencies to lay claim to narcotics assets. The reason is that these assets are usually large sums that help support local or federal law enforcement activities. These inter-family squabbles have hurt cooperative efforts as the agencies compete for the assets. The forfeiture program has also tempted corruption in law enforcement agencies over assets, especially drug monies that can be quietly pocketed. The Zero Tolerance Policy of the United States was the outgrowth of the asset forfeiture program. Instead of rightfully targeting narcotics assets, it stated that if an individual had narcotics on their person then asset they had was to be confiscated. The glaring example of the misuse of this program was the seizure of a 60-foot yacht in Florida by the Coast Guard where a crew member was found to have just one marijuana cigarette.

https://www.aclu.org/issues/criminal-law-reform/reforming-police-practices/asset-forfeiture-abuse

A third and highly controversial program is known as the ‘Reverse Sting’….it became clear in the 1980’s that the Cartel had massive amounts of money to put in foreign banks and controlled legitimate businesses. But often the Cartel was prepared to buy already transported narcotics and resell the product at an increased price. These transactions were multi-million dollar, multi-kilo transactions. The police would have undercover agents pose as dealers to sell their load to the Cartel and when the millions arrived, the arrest would have taken place. The Reverse Sting posed multiple problems for the judiciary. In Miami, Florida and Orange County, California, the police had simply gone to the evidence lockers and taken 20-100 kilos of cocaine seized from other arrests and attempted to resell these narcotics to the Cartel. Only the police were accountable to themselves and if product was lost or stolen, there was no independent scrutiny of these activities. The uncontrolled program incentivized corruption and led to a number of murders.

To the judge willing to scrutinize these sales it presents a dangerous dilemma. The American public believes we are taking narcotics off the street, yet the idea of selling narcotics to the Cartel seems to go against the policy of ridding our society of drugs…the judge involved is personally subject to criticism and even removal from office if the cocaine is purchased by the Cartel and they get away before the arrest is made. The thought of judicial cooperation in removing confiscated cocaine from police storage and then losing it to the Cartel is difficult for the public to understand….the price has already been high, I have been that designated judge where one of the agents I signed ‘Reverse Stings’ for was killed in a crossfire of six Colombians who tried to rip him off for several kilos. The question for a judge is “how deeply do we want to get involved and what is the danger of losing our impartiality and fairness?”.

Why is this case, United States vs. Humberto Alvarez-Machain relevant to our cause? Because it shows that by Supreme Court decision the President of the United States has the authority “to override customary international law” in regards to narcotics and the War on Drugs. So lawyer friends help us out, does this mean that President Barack Obama has the ability to override the UN Convention on Narcotics and RESCHEDULE MEDICAL MARIJUANA UNILATERALLY? In the name of defunding ISIS and the Drug Cartels can Marijuana as both hemp and sinsemilla be taken off of Schedule I and put on another schedule so it can be produced domestically to the benefit of our nation rather than our detriment?

Even now the DEA, DOJ and the White House are in discussion about RESCHEDULING marijuana to a Schedule II, for medical use only to return the medical marijuana program back to whom it was designed for, the patients. But Schedule II may be too restrictive if we want to unleash the productive power of hemp and maintain the genetic diversity of sinsemilla, the government must take this into consideration before just recklessly throwing the keys at Big Pharma.

Nonetheless, Enrique Camarena was killed for, doing his job, busting a CIA pot farm in Mexico ran by the Guadalajara Cartel that was being used to trade drugs for arms in a Central American war against global communism that was flooding the streets of America with foreign pot & crack cocaine, while creating a Frankenstein monster of international proportions in both Mexico, Panama and Colombia. Why was Dr. Machain abducted? DEA vendetta? Or to find out who the dirty agents and moles were?

The most damning part of this case is that it shows that American Prohibition not only led to the creation of the Cartels, but it led to the ascent of the Cartels as having more money , power and resources than the US government itself. America’s soul was sold in the name of national security and all of those in power who participated are trapped in a cage of their own corruption.

Bitfury贡献部分 GPU 算力用于新冠肺炎相关模拟实验 – 矿业挖矿 – ChainNode 链节点
链闻消息，比特币矿业巨头 Bitfury 表示已将其部分 GPU 算力捐赠给美国华盛顿大学用于新冠肺炎病毒相关研究项目 Folding at Home 。该项目此前一直在寻求更多计算机处理能力以运行冠状病毒蛋白结构的模拟实验，并帮助开发新冠肺炎的疫苗。 Bitfury 首席执行官 Valery Vavilov 表示，「自 3 月 20 日以来，Bitfury 的 GPU 算力已为 Folding at Home 进行 1300 多次计算，并计划随着时间的推移扩大其贡献」。

Layer2热门项目Miniswap测试教程，体验即有200MIN空投 – 区块链社区 – ChainNode 链节点

随着DEFI热潮的兴起，很多人想尝试UNISWAP等DEFI项目，但是苦于矿工费太贵了，只好望而却步。如果在以太坊上转账不要钱会怎么样？

有人说那实在是太漂亮了，其实现在很多研发机构也在探索这种可能，最有名的就是通过Layer2来实现，最近已经涌现出一些这类的成果。

这里有一个项目：

Miniswap

非常棒，就是Layer2的一个代表作。

同时他们现在也有空投活动。

那么它是如何实现零手续费的呢？

因为他现在是在Ropsten测试网上。

（是不是感觉很熟悉？之前的ZKS也是）

如果是读者的话。可以尝试着去体验这个交易(撸空投）。

如果是作者的话，可以去报名体验官。

教程准备：

首先我们需要一个PC环境。

其次我们需要安装小狐狸Metamask钱包。建议使用谷歌浏览器来安装。

MetaMask下载地址：https://metamask.io/download.html

一：获取测试代币

首先我们去获取测试代币：

水龙头地址：https://faucet.dimensions.network/ （现在排队领测试币的人太多，经常会提示你排队太长领取失败，如果你也遇到了，可以联系项目方客服V singaporeucd2015，给你打一点。）

如果出现了这种情况。

那就等一下再尝试。

或者你尝试着在本文留言，我会发送少量的代币给你测试(不过可能会有些慢）。

二：访问网站并连接钱包。

首先，钱包得切换成Ropsten网络。

第2步访问网站。

https://l2.minidex.com/#/

3连接成功后会显示如图地址。

三：L2的充提转账。

充值：

我们选择划转，来充值到L2。（充值的代币是测试的ETH）

按照下图所示方向操作。

1输入数字。

2点击确认。

3签名确认。

十几秒后就成交了。

同理。

我们也可以充值其他测试代币。

（下面有其他测试代币的获取方法）

点击以太坊，选择令牌。

选择对应的资产充值即可。

我就以测试币USDT为例。

老三步，看图走。

交易成功是这个样子。

L2传输：

我们可以点击中间L2传输。

按照如图所示步骤操作 。

正确的做法是，把小狐狸的多个账号授权绑定Layer2，相互转账是免费的，如果你没有多个账号，为了完成这步测试，也可以给我的钱包地址转账测试币：0x8966bbAF4d10aB859B6efd2B8dEb579568a0B846

然后我们会发现，互转就免费了。

可以在下图中看到0Gas费用。

L1提现：

提现指的是从L2提到L1(也就是Ropsten网络)。

按照下图5步走。

一般像这种就提现成功。

像这样的就是在等待中。

四：获取体验测试代币

我们点击划转，然后选择测试硬币。

我们输入钱包地址。

点击申请测试令牌。

然后我们去添加测试硬币。

选择自定义代币。

我们粘贴刚才复制的合约地址。

DAI

0x7eda505653731ea8161bc4e0360fd121b299b65f

我们这里可以看到余额。

点击添加代币即可。

其他的合约地址。

BAT

10

0x41e513d12dfdc0b4fecd4f7119e06f3277063cf1

MINI

10

0xe01b7ad70ae37d90eef750de7e55d3ddb7081d91

USDT

10

0xfaaf18034a7e4ebc1cc78d0e66894e47a1c62242

USDC

10

0xabe21da2aafbab0cfe6c05fe82608e0414c87a2b

五，0手续费兑换

在传统的swap兑换里面，以太坊主网上的手续费太贵了。

少则几十元，动辄上百元。

这不是一般的散户能承受得起的。

在miniswap的layer2功能可以实现0手续费 。

步骤如下：

签名也是0手续费。

虽然这笔交易没有消耗gas费，但是速度确实异常的快。

这里要提醒一句，在兑换之前，会要求你点击绑定，如下图，点击绑定，然后点击签名确认即可绑定，就第一次要绑定，绑定成功后，以后兑换就无需再绑定了。

六：添加流动性。

点击右上角”资金池“，选择”添加流动性“ ；

选择相对应的令牌。

然后添加流动性。

添加流动性和兑换一样。

都是零手续费的。

添加完成后，你可以查看流动性。

七：删除流动性。

还是在上面查看的流动性，我们点击删除。

滑动按钮确认删除百分比。

如果要全部取回，直接滑到最后就可以了。

我们取回也是要需要签名。

同样这个过程也没有手续费。

删除完成后，我们可以看到删除后的流动性。

最后总结：

当划转到L2后，所有的操作都没有手续费。

使用起SWAP非常方便快捷。

和ZKS相比：首先网站访问更流畅。使用也更加方便。（奖励也更多）

如果你觉得在测试网玩还不过瘾，可以抓紧空投活动期间，活动期间，通过Miniswap在MINI-ETH交易对买入MINI代币，买入多少送多少!单个地址最多可获得价值2ETH的MINI代币奖励(按照奖励发放时MINI现价折算)，如果你还没有ETH，可以到各大数字交易所去购买，我是在Deepcoin（http://www.idcnpc.com/z/deep/ ）上买的，直接用支付宝和银行卡就能买到，很方便，也很简单，就不再赘述了。

祝大家撸羊毛开心，撸到更多好空投！

最后还是要郑重提醒大家，币圈有风险，投资需谨慎，以上文章仅供参考，不构成任何投资建议，据此入市一切风险您自负。