Songs of the Drug Vultures


 

Sightings from The Catbird Seat

~ o ~

October 24, 2000

GEORGE BUSH, DICK CHENEY
AND THEIR DRUG EMPIRE

Halliburton Corporation’s Brown and Root is one of the major components of the Bush-Cheney drug empire

By Michael C. Ruppert, the Wilderness Publications

The success of Bush Vice Presidential running mate Richard Cheney at leading Halliburton, Inc. to a five year $3.8 billion “pig-out” on federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans is only a partial indicator of what may happen if the Bush ticket wins in two weeks.

A closer look at available research, including an August 2, 2000 report by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) at www.public-i.org, suggests that drug money has played a role in the successes achieved by Halliburton under Cheney’s tenure as CEO from 1995 to 2000.

This is especially true for Halliburton’s most famous subsidiary, heavy construction and oil giant, Brown and Root. A deeper look into history reveals that Brown and Root’s past as well as the past of Dick Cheney himself, connect to the international drug trade on more than one occasion and in more than one way.

This June the lead Washington, D.C. attorney for a major Russian oil company connected in law enforcement reports to heroin smuggling and also a beneficiary of US backed loans to pay for Brown and Root contracts in Russia, held a $2.2 million fund raiser to fill the already bulging coffers of presidential candidate George W. Bush.

This is not the first time that Brown and Root has been connected to drugs and the fact is that this “poster child” of American industry may also be a key player in Wall Street’s efforts to maintain domination of the half trillion dollar a year global drug trade and its profits. And Dick Cheney, who has also come closer to drugs than most suspect, and who is also Halliburton’s largest individual shareholder ($45.5 million), has a vested interest in seeing to it that Brown and Root’s successes continue.

Of all American companies dealing directly with the U.S. military and providing cover for CIA operations few firms can match the global presence of this giant construction powerhouse which employs 20,000 people in more than 100 countries. Through its sister companies or joint ventures, Brown and Root can build offshore oil rigs, drill wells, construct and operate everything from harbors to pipelines to highways to nuclear reactors. It can train and arm security forces and it can now also feed, supply and house armies.

One key beacon of Brown and Root’s overwhelming appeal to agencies like the CIA is that, from its own corporate web page, it proudly announces that it has received the contract to dismantle aging Russian nuclear tipped ICBMs in their silos.

Furthermore, the relationships between key institutions, players and the Bushes themselves suggest that under a George “W” administration the Bush family and its allies may well be able, using Brown and Root as the operational interface, to control the drug trade all the way from Medellin to Moscow.

Originally formed as a heavy construction company to build dams, Brown and Root grew its operations via shrewd political contributions to Senate candidate Lyndon Johnson in 1948. Expanding into the building of oil platforms, military bases, ports, nuclear facilities, harbors and tunnels, Brown and Root virtually underwrote LBJ’s political career. It prospered as a result, making billions on U.S. Government contracts during the Vietnam War.

The “Austin Chronicle” in an August 28 Op-ed piece entitled “The Candidate From Brown and Root” labels Republican Cheney as the political dispenser of Brown and Root’s largesse. According to political campaign records, during Cheney’s five year tenure at Halliburton the company’s political contributions more than doubled to $1.2 million. Not surprisingly, most of that money went to Republican candidates.

Independent news service “newsmakingnews.com,” also describes how in 1998, with Cheney as Chairman, Halliburton spent $8.1 billion to purchase oil industry equipment and drilling supplier Dresser Industries. This made Halliburton a corporation that will have a presence in almost any future oil drilling operation anywhere in the world. And it also brought back into the family fold the company that had once sent a plane – also in 1948 – to fetch the new Yale Graduate George H.W. Bush, to begin his career in the Texas oil business. Bush the elder’s father, Prescott, served as a Managing Director for the firm that once owned Dresser, Brown Bothers Harriman.

It is clear that everywhere there is oil there is Brown and Root. But increasingly, everywhere there is war or insurrection there is Brown and Root also. From Bosnia and Kosovo, to Chechnya, to Rwanda, to Burma, to Pakistan, to Laos, to Vietnam, to Indonesia, to Iran to Libya to Mexico to Colombia, Brown and Root’s traditional operations have expanded from heavy construction to include the provision of logistical support for the U.S. military. Now, instead of U.S. Army quartermasters, the world is likely to see Brown and Root warehouses storing and managing everything from uniforms to rations to vehicles.

Dramatic expansion of Brown and Root’s operations in Colombia also suggest Bush preparations for a war inspired feeding frenzy as a part of “Plan Colombia.” This is consistent with moves by former Bush Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady to open a joint Colombian-American investment partnership called Corfinsura for the financing of major construction projects with the Colombian Antioquia Syndicate, headquartered in Medellin. (See FTW June, 00).

And expectations of a ground war in Colombia may explain why, in a 2000 SEC filing, Brown and Root reported that in addition to owning more than 800,000 square feet of warehouse space in Colombia, they also lease another 122,000 square feet. According to the filing of the Brown and Root Energy Services Group, the only other places where the company maintains warehouse space are in Mexico (525,000 sq. feet), and the U.S. (38,000) square feet.

According to the web site of Colombia’s Foreign Investment Promotion Agency, Brown and Root had no presence in the country until 1997. What does Brown and Root, which, according to the AP has made more than $2 billion supporting and supplying U.S. troops, know about Colombia that the U.S. public does not? Why the need for almost a million square feet of warehouse space that can be transferred from one Brown and Root operation (energy) to another (military support) with the stroke of a pen?

DRUGS

As described by the Associated Press, during “Iran-Contra” Congressman Dick Cheney of the House Intelligence Committee was a rabid supporter of Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North. This was in spite of the fact that North had lied to Cheney in a private 1986 White House briefing. Oliver North’s own diaries and subsequent investigations by the CIA Inspector General have irrevocably tied him directly to cocaine smuggling during the 1980s and the opening of bank accounts for one firm moving four tons of cocaine a month. This, however, did not stop Cheney from actively supporting North’s 1994 unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate from Virginia just a year before he took over the reins at Brown and Root’s parent company, Dallas based Halliburton Inc. in 1995.

As the Bush Secretary of Defense during Desert Shield/Desert Storm (1990-91), Cheney also directed special operations involving Kurdish rebels in northern Iran. The Kurds’ primary source of income for more than fifty years has been heroin smuggling from Afghanistan and Pakistan through Iran, Iraq and Turkey.

Having had some personal experience with Brown and Root I noted carefully when the Los Angeles Times observed that on March 22, 1991 that a group of gunmen burst into the Ankara, Turkey offices of the joint venture, Vinnell, Brown and Root and assassinated retired Air Force Chief Master Sergeant John Gandy.

In March of 1991, tens of thousands of Kurdish refugees, long-time assets of the CIA, were being massacred by Sadam Hussein in the wake of the Gulf War. Sadam, seeking to destroy any hopes of a successful Kurdish revolt, found it easy to kill thousands of the unwanted Kurds who had fled to the Turkish border seeking sanctuary. There, Turkish security forces, trained in part by the Vinnell, Brown and Root partnership, turned thousands of Kurds back into certain death.

Today, the Vinnell Corporation (a TRW Company) is, along with the firms MPRI and DynCorp (FTW June, 00) one of the three pre-eminent private mercenary corporations in the world. It is also the dominant entity for the training of security forces throughout the Middle East. Not surprisingly the Turkish border regions in question were the primary transhipment points for heroin, grown in Afghanistan and Pakistan and destined for the markets of Europe.

A confidential source with intelligence experience in the region subsequently told me that the Kurds “got some payback against the folks that used to help them move their drugs.” He openly acknowledged that Brown and Root and Vinnell both routinely provided NOC or non-official cover for CIA officers. But I already knew that.

From 1994 to 1999, during US military intervention in the Balkans where, according to “The Christian Science Monitor” and “Jane’s Intelligence Review,” the Kosovo Liberation Army controls 70 per cent of the heroin entering Western Europe, Cheney’s Brown and Root made billions of dollars supplying U.S. troops from vast facilities in the region. Brown and Root support operations continue in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia to this day.

Dick Cheney’s footprints have come closer to drugs than one might suspect. The August Center for Public Integrity report brought them even closer. It would be factually correct to say that there is a direct linkage of Brown and Root facilities – often in remote and hazardous regions – between every drug producing region and every drug consuming region in the world. These coincidences, in and of themselves, do not prove complicity in the trade. Other facts, however, lead inescapably in that direction.

A DIRECT DRUG LINK

The CPI report entitled “Cheney Led Halliburton To Feast at Federal Trough” written by veteran journalists Knut Royce and Nathaniel Heller describes how, under five years of Cheney’s leadership, Halliburton, largely through subsidiary Brown and Root, enjoyed $3.8 billion in federal contracts and taxpayer insured loans. The loans had been granted by the Export-Import Bank (EXIM) and the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). According to Ralph McGehee’s “CIA Base (c)” both institutions are heavily infiltrated by the CIA and routinely provide NOC to its officers.

One of those loans to Russian financial/banking conglomerate The Alfa Group of Companies contained $292 million to pay for Brown and Root’s contract to refurbish a Siberian oil field owned by the Russian Tyumen Oil Company. The Alfa Group completed its 51% acquisition of Tyumen Oil in what was allegedly a rigged bidding process in 1998. An official Russian government report claimed that the Alfa Group’s top executives, oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and Pyotr Aven “allegedly participated in the transit of drugs from Southeast Asia through Russia and into Europe.”

These same executives, Fridman and Aven, who reportedly smuggled the heroin in connection with Russia’s Solntsevo mob family were the same ones who applied for the EXIM loans that Halliburton’s lobbying later safely secured. As a result Brown and Root’s work in Alfa Tyumen oil fields could continue – and expand.

After describing how organized criminal interests in the Alfa Group had allegedly stolen the oil field by fraud, the CPI story, using official reports from the FSB (the Russian equivalent of the FBI), oil companies such as BP-Amoco, former CIA and KGB officers and press accounts then established a solid link to Alfa Tyumen and the transportation of heroin.

In 1995 sacks of heroin disguised as sugar were stolen from a rail container leased by Alfa Echo and sold in the Siberian town of Khabarovsk. A problem arose when many residents of the town became “intoxicated” or “poisoned.” The CPI story also stated, “The FSB report said that within days of the incident, Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) agents conducted raids of Alfa Eko buildings and found ‘drugs and other compromising documentation.’

“Both reports claim that Alfa Bank has laundered drug funds from Russian and Colombian drug cartels.

“The FSB document claims that at the end of 1993, a top Alfa official met with Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, the now imprisoned financial mastermind of Colombia’s notorious Cali cartel, ‘to conclude an agreement about the transfer of money into the Alfa Bank from offshore zones such as the Bahamas, Gibraltar and others. The plan was to insert it back into the Russian economy through the purchase of stock in Russian companies.

“… He [the former KGB agent] reported that there was evidence ‘regarding [Alfa Bank’s] involvement with the money laundering of… Latin American drug cartels.”

It then becomes harder for Cheney and Halliburton to assert mere coincidence in all of this as CPI reported that Tyumen’s lead Washington attorney James C, Langdon, Jr. at the firm of Aikin Gump “helped coordinate a $2.2 million fund raiser for Bush this June. He then agreed to help recruit 100 lawyers and lobbyists in the capital to raise $25,000 each for W’s campaign.”

The heroin mentioned in the CPI story, originated in Laos where longtime Bush allies and covert warriors Richard Armitage and retired CIA ADDO (Associate Deputy Director of Operations) Ted Shackley have been repeatedly linked to the drug trade. It then made its way across Southeast Asia to Vietnam, probably the port of Haiphong. Then the heroin sailed to Russia’s Pacific port of Valdivostok from whence it subsequently bounced across Siberia by rail and thence by truck or rail to Europe, passing through the hands of Russian Mafia leaders in Chechnya and Azerbaijan. Chechnya and Azerbaijan are hotbeds of both armed conflict and oil exploration and Brown and Root has operations all along this route.

This long, expensive and tortured path was hastily established, as described by FTW in previous issues, after President George Bush’s personal envoy Richard Armitage, holding the rank of Ambassador, had traveled to the former Soviet Union to assist it with its “economic development” in 1989. The obstacle then to a more direct, profitable and efficient route from Afghanistan and Pakistan through Turkey into Europe was a cohesive Yugoslavian/Serbian government controlling the Balkans and continuing instability in the Golden Crescent of Pakistan/Afghanistan. Also, there was no other way, using heroin from the Golden Triangle (Burma, Laos and Thailand), to deal with China and India but to go around them.

It is perhaps not by coincidence again that Cheney and Armitage share membership in the prestigious Aspen Institute, an exclusive bi-partisan research think tank, and also in the U.S. Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce. Just last November, in what may be a portent of things to come, Armitage, played the role of Secretary of Defense in an practical exercise at the Council on Foreign Relations where he and Cheney are also both members. Speculation that the scandal plagued Armitage, who resigned under a cloud as Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration, is W’s first choice for Secretary of Defense next year is widespread.

The Clinton Administration took care of all that wasted travel for heroin with the 1998 destruction of Serbia and Kosovo and the installation of the KLA as a regional power. That opened a direct line from Afghanistan to Western Europe and Brown and Root was right in the middle of that too. The Clinton skill at streamlining drug operations was described in detail in the May issue of FTW in a story entitled “The Democratic Party’s Presidential Drug Money Pipeline.” That article has since been reprinted in three countries. The essence of the drug economic lesson was that by growing opium in Colombia and by smuggling both cocaine and heroin from Colombia to New York City through the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico (a virtual straight line), traditional smuggling routes could be shortened or even eliminated. This reduced both risk and cost, increased profits and eliminated competition.

FTW suspects the hand of Medellin co-founder Carlos Lehder in this process and it is interesting to note that Lehder, released from prison under Clinton in 1995, is now active in both the Bahamas and South America. Lehder was known during the eighties as “The genius of transportation.” I can well imagine a Dick Cheney, having witnessed the complete restructuring of the global drug trade in the last eight years, going to George W and saying, “Look, I know how we can make it even better.” One thing is for certain. As quoted in the CPI article, one Halliburton Vice President noted that if the Bush-Cheney ticket was elected, “the company’s government contracts would obviously go through the roof.”

THE DARK PAST

In July of 1977 this writer, then a Los Angeles Police officer struggled to make sense of a world gone haywire. In a last ditch effort to salvage a relationship with my fiancée, Nordica Theodora D’Orsay (Teddy), a CIA contract agent, I had traveled to find her in New Orleans. On a hastily arranged vacation, secured with the blessing of my Commanding Officer, Captain Jesse Brewer of LAPD, I had gone on my own, unofficially, to avoid the scrutiny of LAPD’s Organized Crime Intelligence Division (OCID).

Starting in the late spring of 1976 Teddy had wanted me to join her operations from within the ranks of LAPD. I had refused to get involved with drugs in any way and everything she mentioned seemed to involve either heroin or cocaine along with guns that she was always moving out of the country. The Director of the CIA then was George Herbert Walker Bush.

Although officially on staff at the LAPD Academy at the time, I had been unofficially loaned to OCID since January when Teddy, announcing the start of a new operation planned in the fall of 1976 had suddenly disappeared. She left many people, including me, baffled and twisting in the breeze. The OCID detectives had been pressuring me hard for information about her and what I knew of her activities. It was information I could not give them. Hoping against hope that I would find some way to understand her involvement with CIA, LAPD, the royal family of Iran, the Mafia and drugs I set out alone into eight days of Dantean revelations that have determined the course of my life from that day to this.

Arriving in New Orleans in early July, 1977 I found her living in an apartment across the river in Gretna. Equipped with scrambler phones, night vision devices and working from sealed communiqués delivered by naval and air force personnel from nearby Belle Chasse Naval Air Station.

Teddy was involved in something truly ugly. She was arranging for large quantities of weapons to be loaded onto ships leaving for Iran. At the same time she was working with Mafia associates of New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello to coordinate the movement of service boats that were bringing large quantities of heroin into the city. The boats arrived at Marcello controlled docks, unmolested by even the New Orleans police she introduced me to, along with divers, military men, former Green Berets and CIA personnel.

The service boats were retrieving the heroin from oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, oil rigs in international waters, oil rigs built and serviced by Brown and Root. The guns that Teddy monitored, apparently Vietnam era surplus AK 47s and M16s, were being loaded onto ships also owned or leased by Brown and Root.

And more than once during the eight days I spent in New Orleans I met and ate at restaurants with Brown and Root employees who were boarding those ships and leaving for Iran within days. Once, while leaving a bar and apparently having asked the wrong question, I was shot at in an attempt to scare me off.

Disgusted and heart broken at witnessing my fiancée and my government smuggling drugs, I ended the relationship. Returning home to LA I made a clean breast and reported all the activity I had seen, including the connections to Brown and Root, to LAPD intelligence officers. They promptly told me that I was crazy.

Forced out of LAPD under threat of death at the end of 1978, I made complaints to LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division and to the LA office of the FBI under the command of FBI SAC Ted Gunderson. I and my attorney wrote to the politicians, the Department of Justice, the CIA and contacted the L.A. Times. The FBI and the LAPD said that I was crazy.

According to a 1981 two-part news story in the “Los Angeles Herald Examiner” it was revealed that The FBI had taken Teddy into custody and then released her before classifying their investigation without further action. Former New Orleans Crime Commissioner Aaron Cohen told reporter Randall Sullivan that he found my description of events perfectly plausible after his thirty years of studying Louisiana’s organized crime operations.

To this day a CIA report prepared as a result of my complaint remains classified and exempt from release pursuant to Executive Order of the President in the interests of national security and because it would reveal the identities of CIA agents.

On October 26, 1981, in the basement of the West Wing of the White House, I reported on what I had seen in New Orleans to my friend and UCLA classmate Craig Fuller. Craig Fuller went on to become Chief of Staff to Vice President Bush from 1981 to 1985.

In 1982, then UCLA political science professor Paul Jabber, filled in many of the pieces in my quest to understand what I had seen in New Orleans. He was qualified to do so because he had served as a CIA and State Department consultant to the Carter administration. Paul explained that, after a 1975 treaty between the Shah of Iran and Sadam Hussein the Shah had cut off all overt military support for Kurdish rebels fighting Sadam from the north of Iraq. In exchange the Shah had gained access to the Shat al-Arab waterway so that he could multiply his oil exports and income.

Not wanting to lose a long-term valuable asset in the Kurds, the CIA had then used Brown and Root, which operated in both countries and maintained port facilities in the Persian Gulf and near Shat al-Arab to rearm the Kurds. The whole operation had been financed with heroin. Paul was matter-of-fact about it.

In 1983 Paul Jabber left UCLA to become a Vice President of Banker’s Trust and Chairman of the Middle East Department of the Council on Foreign Relations.

If one is courageous enough to seek an “operating system” that theoretically explains what FTW has just described for you, one need look no further than a fabulous two-part article in “Le Monde Diplomatique” in April of this year. The brilliant stories, focusing heavily on drug capital are titled “Crime, The World’s Biggest Free Enterprise.” The brilliant and penetrating words of authors Christian de Brie and Jean de Maillard do a better job of explaining the actual world economic and political situation than anything that I have ever read.

De Brie writes, “By allowing capital to flow unchecked from one end of the world to the other, globalization and abandon of sovereignty have together fostered the explosive growth of an outlaw financial market…

“It is a coherent system closely linked to the expansion of modern capitalism and based on an association of three partners: governments, transnational corporations and mafias. Business is business: financial crime is first and foremost a market, thriving and structured, ruled by supply and demand.

“Big business complicity and political laisser faire is the only way that large-scale organized crime can launder and recycle the fabulous proceeds of its activities. And the transnationals need the support of governments and the neutrality of regulatory authorities in order to consolidate their positions, increase their profits, withstand and crush the competition, pull off the “deal of the century” and finance their illicit operations. Politicians are directly involved and their ability to intervene depends on the backing and the funding that keep them in power. This collusion of interests is an essential part of the world economy, the oil that keeps the wheels of capitalism turning.”

After confronting CIA Director John Deutch on world television on November 15, 1996 I was interviewed by the staffs of both the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. I prepared written testimony for Senate Intelligence which I submitted although I was never called to testify. In every one of those interviews and in my written testimony and in every lecture since that time I have told the story of Brown and Root.

I will tell it again at the USC School of International Relations on December the 8th, 2000 – regardless of who wins the election.

– Michael C. Ruppert

(c) Copyright 2000, Michael C. Ruppert and “From The Wilderness” Publications, P.O. Box 6061-350, Sherman Oaks, CA 91413, 818-788-8791, www.copvcia.com. All Rights Reserved. – Permission to reprint for non-profit onnly is hereby granted as long as proper sourcing appears.

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Don’t Blink!

All Promises Broken – Volume II Hearings Held Without Notice – Behind Closed Doors

by Michael C. Ruppert

NOTE: At the time this story was written it looked like the House Intelligence Committee was going to get away with closing out the CIA drug investigations. But thanks to the efforts of From The Wilderness that resulted in class action suits being filed against the CIA in Los Angeles and Oakland and other publicity we have generated Volume II has not been closed out. They can’t because too many people are watching. On October 12, 1999, investigators from House Intelligence came to Los Angeles and copied 6,000 pages of our records for review. Going into 2000, Volume II is still very much an open investigation and FTW is proof that something can be done. – MCR

On May 25, just four days after we published our last issue, under the totally misleading heading of “CIA and Drugs in Los Angeles” the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) held a closed door hearing. It took us until June 22 to determine that the Committee heard testimony that day from Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Bromwich, who had not appeared before the Committee since the release of his report last year. And it also heard from current CIA Inspector General Britt Snider, who discussed Volume II of retired CIA IG Fred Hitz’s report on the whole Contra war – not Los Angeles. Los Angeles was Volume I.

That’s right – They have had the hearing on Volume II. They did it in secret. The press did not cover it. And it remains unclear, at this moment, as to whether HPSCI’s final report will even be declassified or made available to the public in any form at all. This is not only a breach of every promise made to us in 1996 by both Houses; it is, in my opinion, a complete breach of trust between the government and the people.

In a June 22 conversation with HPSCI Deputy Staff Director, Tim Sample, I was told that the Committee “would like to wrap this up this summer.” I was also told that the protocol for closing the investigation out had not been finalized. It is “not known” whether there will be another hearing. It is “not known” whether or if the Committee’s final report will be declassified or ever released. It is “not known” if any additional witnesses will be called. I and retired DEA Agent Cele Castillo and presumably the other major figures in the investigation have all received letters asking us to submit whatever other evidence “we are aware of” before the Committee closes its work.

This is a sign of true desperation as the Republican controlled Committee must absolutely close the issue – to protect George W. Bush – before the 2000 Presidential campaign begins in earnest in October. It must also protect the biggest secret of all from the American people: The entire economy, and the entire political system itself, is currently hooked and dependent upon – drug money.

I have been saying for years that you could show a video of George Bush ordering drug runs, CIA agents laundering money and flying airplanes full of drugs and no one in power would do anything about it. They would not be able to. In this issue I will tell you, and the House, about something almost as damning – a partially authenticated letter, written on CIA letterhead and stamped “Top Secret”, ostensibly written and signed by CIA Director William J. Casey in late 1986, that admits to direct participation in the drug trade [SEE STORY THIS ISSUE]. I have been aware of the existence of this letter for approximately five months. I have had it read to me in its entirety. It was not until I was given this last chance by HPSCI to present “all of the information of which you are aware on the allegations” that I was able to obtain an “On the Record” statement about the letter from Attorney Ray Kohlman. The letter will be admitted into evidence in a new trial motion for former Green Beret William Tyree in the near future. When that happens, From The Wilderness will publish the letter, both on the Internet and in the newsletter.

Now that the House has indicated its intent to close the matter for good and all it is time to bring the letter forward – for good and all. I will also see to it that the letter is widely distributed enough so that any of the major news organizations will be able to follow up on it. The information in this issue is enough for the House Intelligence Committee to go to the CIA and compel it to confirm or deny the letter’s authenticity.

Reading The Right Map

If nothing happens with further hearings, or with the letter, I will tell you in advance exactly why.

Contributing Editor Catherine Austin Fitts, who was a Managing Director at Dillon Read before becoming Assistant Secretary of Housing under George Bush and who holds an MBA from Wharton makes things very simple. She points out that the four largest states for the importation of drugs are New York, Florida, Texas and California.

She then points out that the top four money laundering states in the U.S. (good for between 100 and 260 billion per year) are New York, Florida, Texas and California. No surprise there. Then she rips the breath from your lungs by pointing out that 80 per cent of all Presidential campaign funds come from New York, Florida, Texas and California.

Civics test: Who are the current governors of Texas and Florida?

From The Wilderness has been working on a story for an upcoming issue that will show conclusively, using testimony of law enforcement officers and U.S. Government records, that Dominican drug gangs, who dominate the trade in the northeast United States – especially New York and Pennsylvania – have been making regular campaign donations to the Clinton-Gore-Democratic camp since the early 90s. California drug sales are currently split between Democratically allied crime factions and entrenched hard core Republican strongholds from the Reagan era.

People who shudder at the thought of the Chinese buying into presidential politics would choke if they knew how much drug money was involved.

Why? Again, the answer is simpler than you might think. While the Department of Justice estimates that $100 billion in drug funds are laundered in the U.S. each year, other research, including research material from the Andean Commission of Jurists cited by author Dan Russell in his soon to be published book Drug War place the figure at around $250 billion per year. Catherine Austin Fitts places the figure at $250 to $300 billion.

Given the fact that the UN estimated that in the early 1990s world retail volume in the illegal drugs was $440 billion, $250 billion seems about right. Fitts, using her Wall Street experience as an investment banker is then quick to point out that the multiplier effect (x6) of $250 billion laundered would result in $1.5 trillion dollars per year in U.S. cash transactions resulting from the drug trade…

During the Contra years, when the CIA and Bill Clinton were swimming in cocaine, and Arkansas became the only state in the Union to ever issue bearer bonds (laundry certificates), employment in Arkansas rose to an all time high because there was so much money floating around.

So what if they don’t count all the dead bodies like two young boys Kevin Ives and Don Henry, shot, bludgeoned and dismembered on a railroad track after witnessing CIA drug drops. “It’s the economy – Stupid!”

The Pop

Corporations trading on Wall Street, including many implicated in money laundering schemes where products are sold with questionable bookkeeping throughout drug producing regions, all have stock values that are based upon annual net profits. Known as “price to earnings” or “The Pop” the multiplier effect in stock values is sometimes as much as a factor of thirty.

Thus, for a firm like GE or Piper Aircraft to have an additional $10 million in net profits based upon the drug trade, the net increase in these companies’ stock value could be as much as $300,000,000. Did GE make a $10 million net profit on consumer products in Latin America last year? Easily.

And since GE owns NBC is there a chance that accurate reporting on the drug trade and CIA’s involvement therein might hurt their stock?

Disney owns ABC and has a huge retail, resort and entertainment empire that benefits from the “drug multiplier.” Would ABC consider hurting its parent’s stock value? Ronald Reagan’s CIA Director, William Casey had been Chief Counsel to Cap Cities Broadcasting until 1981. His old law firm represented Cap Cities when it bought the ABC network in 1985.

ABC’s Peter Jennings, by the way, had been doing a series of investigative reports on the CIA drug bank (and successor to the Nugan Hand bank) Bishop, Baldwin, Rewald, Dillingham and Wong when the buyout was initiated. Cap Cities (not surprisingly) secured SEC approval in record time and effectively and immediately silenced Peter Jennings who had previously refused to back down from Casey’s threats. Thereafter ABC was referred to as “The CIA network.”

I have no doubt that the ABC “object lesson” was front and center for CNN founder Ted Turner and Time-Warner when Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell and (CIA vet) John Singlaub put the pressure on in the wake of April Oliver’s 1998 “dead bang accurate” Sarin gas stories connecting CIA to the killing of American defectors.

Every major media corporation in the country trades on Wall Street. There are no “independents” left and the American people are left with the increasing cognitive dissonance of recognizing that they are being fed useless bullshit. I wonder how they would respond to real a news corporation if they saw or heard one.

It’s Legal to be Bad

It is also perfectly legal for a Wall Street brokerage or investment bank to go “offshore” and borrow once laundered drug money to finance a corporate merger or leveraged buyout (LBO).

Why do this? If you were a major multi-national corporation in a cutthroat competition to buy a company with a hundred million in sales (which might boost your stock value $3 billion) you would be willing to pay a seemingly outrageous price. [How much would you be willing to spend to make $3 billion? – 2.9?].

All an LBO is is an acquisition financed on borrowed money. If you are Goldman-Sachs, arranging the deal, and you can borrow laundered drug money at five per cent or a bank’s money at ten per cent where are you going to go? Remember that since the cost of capital is lower using laundered drug money you are now able to outbid all the other competitors because your total payback stays the same…

And a major drug dealer, like a Carlos Lehder, a Pablo Escobar, an Amado Fuentes, a Matta Ballesteros or a Hank Rohn, sitting around with ten billion dollars of useless illegal money, is more than happy to loan it at five percent because his money is now legal and liquid. And, if one goes to prison or dies, there is always another dealer to fill the void so that the supply is not interrupted.

The drug trade now has power because it is underwriting the investments of the largest corporations in the world. It underwrites politicians. It has hooked the gringos on Wall Street whose own children sometimes die from its drugs.

Wall Street cannot afford to let the drug barons fall.

Congress cannot afford to let the drug barons fall.

Presidents and their campaign finances cannot afford to let the drug barons fall.

Why?

Because our top down economy, controlled by one per cent, cannot take the risk of letting competition (business or political) have the edge of using drug money. The third world has its revenge for European colonialism but Wall Street still calls the shots. And for every million dollars of increased sales or increased revenues from a buyout, the stock equity of the one per cent who control Wall Street, increases twenty to thirty times.

Remember – The National Security Act of 1947, which created the CIA, was written by Wall Street lawyer and banker Clark Clifford. Clark Clifford is the man who brought the CIA backed drug bank BCCI into the United States.

Allen Dulles who virtually designed the CIA and served as its Director, and his brother John Foster who was Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, were Wall Street lawyers from the firm Sullivan and Cromwell. Dwight Eisenhower’s personal liaison with the CIA was none other than Nelson Rockefeller. William Casey was Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission under Richard Nixon. Former CIA Directors from William Raborn to William Webster to Robert Gates to James Woolsey to John Deutch all sit or have sat on the Boards of the largest, richest and most powerful companies in America.

As we near the millenium one thing is clear to anyone who sees the economic system clearly. The system is on the verge of implosion.

Privately owned and operated prison companies trade on Wall Street. One of those, Wackenhut, is a virtual CIA proprietary. We have entered, at the end of the industrial age, a phase of growth where we must incarcerate an ever expanding number of people to sustain the growth of all the companies profiting from law enforcement, crime, imprisonment and war.

And the overheated stock market must grow or collapse. The reason this nation spends five dollars on prisons for every one dollar on higher education – even after seven straight years of falling crime rates – is because there is more profit in it in the current economic model. Hell, we have turned police departments into profit making entities through asset forfeiture. This is insane!

This economic model is patently no more sustainable than a snake eating its own tail can be considered nourishment. Organized crime has become the government and it seeks to make all citizens become subliminally guilty participants, fearing for their own livelihoods, believing that the system will collapse if someone really tackles the issues facing us – as surely as the iceberg faced the Titanic.

The system will collapse anyway – unless the economic model is turned upside down – unless a way is found or offered which will make it more profitable than all other ways – to do the right thing. The only thing that will sustain the current economic system, and its dependence on drug capital, is a police state. New enforcement programs involving HUD and the Department of Justice such as Project “Safe Streets” and “Weed and Seed” – along with their corresponding butchery of the Constitution – show an emerging police state already. The conduct of Congress and the White House in the CIA drug investigations further demonstrate the arrogance, the fear and the ever-increasing sloppiness of a system out of control.

The veneer, the illusion that we live under the rule of law cracks before our eyes, grows thinner and ever more difficult to sell with each passing minute. All at once the fears of the right of a New World Order and the fears of the left, of new concentration camps and genocide suddenly become one and the same thing. Dogma matters little to the oppressed. Pain tastes the same whether you call it Fascism or Communism.

Carlos Enrique Lehder Rivas, co-founder of the Medellin Cartel, who was given a life sentence in 1990, now enjoys the sunshine at his home in the Bahamas. He frolics regularly with gaming magnate and owner of the Atlantis Hotel Sol Kerzner. His guests at parties include Kevin Costner who played (I am sorry to say) both Elliot Ness and Jim Garrison.

Manuel Noriega will probably be out of prison before Bill Clinton leaves office. The Kosovo Liberation Army has been funded with drug money and has trained with Islamic terrorist Osama bin Laden. The son of a documented drug trafficker, who very few people in this country even know anything about, is “scheduled” to become our next President, simply because he has the most money and he and his backers control most of “The Pop.”

How much time can this government have? How much time does it deserve? Bill Clinton’s Farewell Address should probably be, “Apres moi, le deluge.”

Mike Ruppert

www.drugwar.com/cv10.shtm


 

From Drugging America , by Rodney Stich:

FBI AGENT EXPOSES
CIA-MAFIA-DRUG TIES

A veteran FBI agent and highly-decorated Vietnam veteran provided still further corroboration to the fact that the CIA has been smuggling drugs for the past 40 years, that the CIA has been engaging in drug trafficking with Mafia segments, and that the FBI and other Justice Department divisions have covered up for these interrelated crimes.

Richard M. Taus had been a Special Agent for the FBI from 1978 to 1988, during which time he was assigned to organized crime and foreign counter-intelligence operations….

While he was a helicopter unit commander in Vietnam, Taus discovered and reported to his supervisors widespread drug trafficking by the Central Intelligence Agency. Taus described how the CIA transported drugs that were sold to American GI’s in Vietnam and Laos, causing over a third of the armed forces in Vietnam to become drug addicts.

These GI’s were often too drugged out to either fight or defend themselves. In addition, in that condition, they often killed their own officers, a practice known as “fragging.”…

I first made contact with Taus in 1997, and he was hesitant about revealing government corruption that he discovered while an FBI agent. I explained to Taus that there was a U.S. Supreme Court decision rendered about 15 years earlier stating that a federal employee had a greater duty to report criminal activities by his superiors than a duty to cover up for such crimes because of any employee secrecy agreement….

Taus said he did all he could to report these criminal activities, but the coverup was too pervasive. The coverup included senior FBI officials such as Oliver “Buck” Revell, who had earlier stalled and stopped legitimate FBI investigations concerning both the Irangate and Iraqgate scandals, similar to his boss, J. Edgar Hoover, protecting organized crime for many years….

He stated in general terms about discovering evidence of major criminal activities involving the CIA, the White House, and other government operations. Over a period of several years, Taus provided me with sufficient data to write a book sole on his disclosures as a military pilot and then an FBI agent….

While Taus was piloting a helicopter in Vietnam he heard over the aircraft radio a distress call from the pilot of an Air America C-46 aircraft about to make a crash landing. Taus proceeded to the crash site and landed, offering to fly the unharmed pilots to their base of operations. But the crew refused to leave the aircraft, saying they would wait for Air America people to arrive.

The reason for refusing to leave the aircraft was suggested by the nature of the cargo: it consisted of heroin, estimated at about 4000 pounds.

(Air America and its predecessor airline, Civil Air Transport, among others, was one of many CIA airlines. While I was flying captain for Japan Airlines out of Tokyo, where many of these CIA-associated pilots went for recreation, I learned from them that the CIA was hauling drugs.)

Upon returning to base, Taus made a written report to his military unit commander describing the heroin on the Air America aircraft. He also sent a letter to his New York congressman, reporting the CIA’s drug smuggling operation. A congressional “investigation” followed, which covered up for the CIA’s drug smuggling – a congressional coverup that has gone on for the past 40 years. . . .

Tius returned to the United States from Vietnam and became part of the New York National Guard, assigned to instructor duties for the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College courses. While on military duty with the National Guard, he was sent to Central and South America several times on special missions, during which he learned more about the global drug trafficking business and the involvement of it of the CIA, State Department, and U.S. military. . . .

After leaving the military, Taus joined the FBI as a Special Agent, and continued his ties to the military as a senior officer in the Army Reserve. During his FBI investigations, Taus discovered covert CIA operations in the United States, including looting the savings and loans, and other criminal activities. . . .

Taus explained how the CIA had infiltrated the FBI and discovered the names of FBI agents and informants, and investigations that could expose covert and criminal CIA operations. The CIA knowingly gave false information to FBI agents, seriously jeopardizing FBI missions and misleading top Justice Department and White House personnel. . . .

Taus was very concerned about the CIA drug smuggling that he observed over a 20-year period of time while an Army officer and then while an FBI Special Agent. This concern was increased by his discovery that the CIA was actively involved in drug trafficking with organized crime figures in the New York area. And if this wasn’t enough, his concern was further heightened by FBI supervisors ordering him to shut down his investigation.

Taus and other FBI agents discovered CIA drug trafficking as a result of their investigations into other organized crime activities, and aided by the Pennsylvania Crime Commission Report on drug trafficking among pizza outlets and cheese dealers. The Pennsylvania report described extensive interstate and international drug-trafficking involving Mafia figures throughout the United States and Canada. . . .

Taus, while heading an FBI investigative team, discovered CIA involvement with the American Mafia in drug trafficking during the time when Assistant U.S. Attorney Louis Freeh was prosecuting the Italian Mafia’s drug trafficking activities in the Pizza Connection drug cases. Freeh’s prosecution of these cases propelled him to prominence in the FBI and he eventually became the director of the bureau.

It was Taus’ belief there was a conflict between the Sicilian Mafia drug activities and those of the American Mafia, and that the CIA’s connections were with the American Mafia. He felt the selective crackdown on the Sicilian Mafia was to eliminate competition to the CIA-backed American Mafia. . . .

Also, the Pizza Connection drug charges focused on low level Mafia figures while protecting high-level drug kingpins and their accomplices in government. Taus explained the obstacles blocking prosecution by well-placed political figures, judges, and others. He explained how AUSA Freeh blocked the issuance of subpoenas for such companies as Cremosa and Drexel-Castle, which had CIA connections. . . .

Mafia, Drugs, Savings and Loans, and The CIA

Taus listed some of the Mafia figures involved in drug trafficking who he investigated. These included Carmine Persico, a member of the Colombo crime family; Salvatore Piga, a Luchese crime family member; Mario Renda, a Mafia untouchable heavily involved in looting of savings and loans during the 1980s; Angelo Ruggiero, a member of the Gambino crime family, and Giuseppe Lamberti and Salvatore Mazzurco, partners in the Mafia-controlled Pronto Demolition Company.

Piga went to First United Company in Garden City, Long Island, a brokerage house dealing in credit exchanges that was owned by Mario Renda. Renda had numerous foreign operations, some of which were shell companies to confuse investigators and for diverting funds. Taus explained that some of these were associated with Oliver North’s Enterprise operation in Central America….

Daughter of Mafia-CIA Insider

Another source whose information dovetailed with Taus’ information was the daughter of a Mafia-CIA figure. She provided me additional information about some of the crime figures Taus described.

Dee Ferdinand, the daughter of Albert Carone, described the bizarre and complex relationship between her father, the Mafia, and the CIA. Al Carone was a member of the Gambino family and had connections to other crime groups in the eastern part of the United States. He was also a detective on the New York City vice squad, a member of the military, and a CIA operative.

Dee said that her father was in the OSS during World War II (the predecessor to the CIA), working in military intelligence (CIC). After the war, he returned to New York, continuing his relationship with the Mafia families, and also became a member of the New York Air National Guard, 27th brigade and the 42nd Infantry division. His earlier army rank was Sergeant, which eventually was raised to the rank of Colonel when he died in 1991. . . .

Drugs and the New York Police Department

Dee said her father was a detective and “bag man” in the New York City police department, collecting money that was distributed to captains and inspectors as payoffs for “looking the other way” where drugs were involved. Dee explained that her father, while a plain clothes detective in New York City police vice squad, paid money to the captains and inspectors of different precincts, and paid off mob figures. . . .

Drug Deals Between the Mafia, CIA, and Mossad

Dee said that her father started in drug trafficking in the Vietnam days, for the CIA and the Mafia. Explaining other aspects of the Mafia’s drug dealings, Dee said, Sam Giancana did a lot of drug deals with the Agency.”

She added that organized crime and the CIA had regular drug dealings with Noriega and the Mossad, and that former Mossad operative Michael Harari was routinely involved. “A lot of this money was split with the Mossad and the Agency. They had to use the mob; there isn’t too much difference between the CIA and the mob. They worked together.” . . .

Operation Amadeus: Joint CIA-Mafia Drug Smuggling Operation

Referring to the CIA-Mafia drug trafficking, she said she knew from what her father said that the drugs coming from South America went to the Colombo, Genovese, and Gambino families, and that it was a joint CIA-Mafia drug operation under the code name Operation Amadeus.

She said that during World War II, Operation Amadeus was involved in transporting Nazi officers from Germany into South American countries. According to her father’s notes, Operation Amadeus split into several other operations, including Operation Sunrise and Operation Watchtower.

CIA-Mafia Drug Money Trail

Repeating what she learned from her father, Dee said part of the money trail went through a bank in England, to the Bahamas, Bank of Zurich in Switzerland, among others.

She said her father carried cash between Mafia figures and the CIA.

Targeting the Blacks in Harlem

I told Dee what Rothstein had told me about CIA drug sales to the blacks in Harlem, and Dee gave me another side of that operation. She confirmed that the CIA and the Mafia did target the blacks in Harlem for drug consumption. . . .

Dee told me about calling Congresswoman Maxine Waters’ office and explaining who she was and about the drug trafficking, including the targeting of the blacks, and the lack of interest shown by Waters’ staff. That reflects similar lack of interest shown by Water’s office when some of my drug trafficking sources also volunteered information about their CIA-DEA drug trafficking knowledge. . . .

Oliver North’s Involvement with CIA-Mafia Activities

Dee described how her father made frequent reference to a John Cathey and his contacts with Cathey involving drug trafficking activities in the Contra operation.

Cathey was the alias frequently used by Oliver North. . . .

x x x

Funding Secret Bank Accounts
for U.S. Officials

In March 1996, Ronald Rewald gave me several boxes containing hundreds of CIA documents generated from the CIA’s secret operation in Hawaii. Within these boxes I found highly sensitive material, including notes that Rewald had made while the titular head of Bishop Baldwin Rewald Dillingham & Wong.

Certain notes and information provided to me by Rewald divulged CIA drug related activities, including drug money laundering. As I gathered from looking over the material and by talking with Rewald, he was unaware of many of the CIA activities originating out of BBRDW.

Deeply imbedded in these documents was an envelope labeled “Attorney-Client information.” The information was dynamite, divulging secret bank accounts set up for well-known politicians and covert agency operatives.

The notes in the envelope listed high-level people with secret CIA-funded accounts. The names on the left side of the notes were the aliases Rewald used to identify the people on the right for which there were secret bank accounts opened and funded by the CIA through BBRDW.

Irwin M. Peach – George Bush
Mr. Bramble – George Bush

Commander Quinstar – General Hunter Harris
Mr. Apan – Robert W. Jinks
Mr. Grey – Robert Allen
Farrah Fawn – Jackie Vos

General Shake – Arnold Braswell
Mr. Branch – Richard Armitage
Mr. Denile – William Casey
Slimey Affirm – Stanley Sporkin

Captain Perjury – Ned Avary
Attorney Doright – Robert Smith

Arnold Braswell was commander-in-chief of the U.S. Pacific Air Force (CINCPAC).

Rewald’s notes also indicated that fictitious names were used to hide money for B.K. Kim, Philippines President Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, among others.

Richard Armitage was U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense and reportedly heavily involved with drug trafficking while in Vietnam.

William Casey was Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Stanley Sporkin was legal counsel for the CIA, and then a federal judge in Washington, D.C. In this capacity, he unlawfully dismissed one of my federal actions seeking to expose the government corruption in which he was involved.

These notes, written by Rewald over ten years earlier when he was head of BBRDW, provided additional evidence of U.S. officials hiding their money in secret bank accounts overseas. The accounts were in financial institutions in Hong Kong, Switzerland, and the Caymans.

Information on another sheet that I found in Rewald’s papers revealed activities engaged in by CIA agents embedded into BBRDW and its various subsidiaries. These are the activities in which Rewald refused to get involved, including CIA drug trafficking. . . .

Peck here for more on: Ronald Rewald, the CIA, FBI and the Mossad


 

From Reader’s Digest, April 1998:

HIGH ON A LIE

Funded by Billionaires, the “Medical Marijuana” Movement is Blowing Smoke in our Eyes

By Daniel Levine

One Saturday last September, 50,000 people, most of them teen-agers, crowded into the Boston Common for the eight annual Freedom Rally. Its organizers billed it as the largest marijuana-legalization event on the East Coast. Strolling through the crowd, holding a joint, was a 17-year-old high-school senior who said his name was Bill. “If they allow sick people to use it,” he said, “it can’t be that damaging.”

Sharing a marijuana pipe with two friends, a 15-year-old named Nicole agreed. “Pot is harmless,” she said. “It should be legalized because there are so many medical benefits. It helps you with a lot of things. It’s the best.”

An increasing number of young Americans agree. They have gotten this idea from a well-funded movement to legalize the “compassionate” use of marijuana. While every legitimate drug requires rigorous testing by the FDA before being approved, marijuana advocates are opting for medicine by popular vote. This year signatures are being gathered for medical-marijuana initiatives in a half-dozen states and the District of Columbia.

Marijuana’s main active ingredient, THC, is effective in relieving nausea and inducing weight gain in cancer and AIDS patients. That is why the FDA has approved Marinol, a synthetic pill form of THC. But marijuana in its smoked form has never been shown in controlled scientific studies to be safe or effective. In fact, marijuana smoke contains over 2000 chemicals, many of which produce psychoactive reactions, cause lung damage and – in cancer and AIDS patients – increase the risk of pneumonia and weaken the immune system. Inhaling the smoke also disrupts short-term memory and leads to changes in the brain similar to those caused by heroin, cocaine and other highly addictive drugs.

“There is no conclusive scientific evidence that marijuana is superior to currently available medicines,” says Dr. Eric Voth, chairman of the International Drug Strategy Institute in Omaha. “Medical marijuana is a scam that takes advantage of sick and dying patients.”

Says Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey ( Ret. ), director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, “Medical marijuana is a stalking-horse for legalization. This is not about compassion. This is about legalizing dangerous drugs.”

“Daddy Warbucks” of Drugs

The legalization of marijuana and other drugs has been debated for more than 30 years, with a vast majority of Americans standing in opposition. Legalization supporters have used the argument that drugs are necessary for medical reasons. But now, for the first time, they have significant financial backing.

In the last six years a handful of America’s wealthiest people have contributed $20 million to groups that promote medical marijuana or other radical drug-policy reforms. Billionaire financier George Soros is the biggest giver, donating more than $16 million. Others include Peter Lewis, CEO of Cleveland-based Progressive Corp., the nation’s sixth-largest auto insurer, and John Sperling, president of the Apollo Group, a holding company that controls for-profit universities and job-training centers.

In an interview with Reader’s Digest, the 76-year-old Sperling said he believes doctors should be allowed to prescribe all drugs, including heroin and LSD. Lewis declined to be interviewed.

A spokesman for Soros said he does not support drug legalization. Nonetheless, Soros has donated millions since 1992 to groups led by people advocating it. Former Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph A. Califano, Jr., calls him the “Daddy Warbucks of drug legalization.”

Soros created a drug-policy institute called The Lindesmith Center and has funded it with $4 million. Its director, Ethan Nadelmann, Soros’s point man on drug policy, has said he wants to “legalize the personal possession of drugs by adult Americans.”

Soros has also given $6.4 million to the Drug Policy Foundation ( DPF ), a leading advocate for medical marijuana. Its stated mission is “publicizing alternatives to current drug strategies.” Its founder, attorney and college professor Arnold Trebach, calls himself a “flat-out legalizer” who advocates the repeal of current drug laws.

Richard J. Dennis, a 49-year-old Chicago commodities trader and member of DPF’s board of directors, supports both medical marijuana and legalization in general. In fact, says Dennis, “I’d like to see legalization for adults for all drugs, including heroin.”

On DPF’s advisory board is Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Lester Grinspoon, a leading advocate of medical marijuana for over 25 years. He compares marijuana’s potential benefit to that of penicillin, predicting, “It will be the wonder drug of the new millennium.”

Soros, Lewis and Sperling gained their biggest victory in November, 1996 when California voters passed Proposition 215, also knows as the Compassionate Use Act. It allows pot to be grown and smoked for “any illness for which marijuana provides relief.” There are no age restrictions. “Illness” is loosely defined and can include headaches, chronic pain and arthritis. A doctor’s oral recommendation is all that is required.

The principal author of the California initiative was 52-year-old Dennis Peron, a San Francisco “medical pot club” owner who’s been arrested 15 times on marijuana charges. Peron says he worded the initiative vaguely because he believes “all marijuana use is medical.”

Peron’s Cannabis Cultivators’ Club is the state’s largest pot club, taking in over $20,000 a day. One day last fall, Peron wandered the club greeting patrons and handed one a bulging quarter-pound bag of marijuana.

Standing in line at Peron’s smoke-filled club to buy an eighth of an ounce of high-grade Mexican marijuana was a 39-year-old named Anthony. Under California’s law, Anthony is consider a “seriously ill patient” who can purchase and smoke pot. He tokes up four or five times a day.

When asked about his ailment, Anthony answered: “Officially, hernia discomfort from overstrenuous intercourse. Actually, I can’t feel it.” He said the club admitted him without any medical referral. A self-described “potaholic,” Anthony has smoked dope since he was 16. My problems, he conceded, “are related to a general life-style kind of thing.”

Peron’s club has operated for years, despite violating state and federal drug laws. In August 1996, state drug agents raided it, seizing 86 pounds of pot and $62,000. “The club was running a sophisticated illegal drug-distribution network,” said a spokesman of California Attorney General Dan Lungren. A grand jury indicated Peron, and he awaits trial on felony drug charges. Meanwhile, Peron is running for governor of California.

Peron’s initiative never would have made it to the ballot without the help of Soros, Lewis and Sperling. California requires 433,269 valid petition signatures before a “citizen’s initiative” can be placed on the ballot. As the deadline neared, Peron and his unorganized group of volunteers had collected only 40,000.

That is when Ethan Nadelmann of Soros’s Lindesmith Center stepped in. He helped create Californians for Medical Rights, a sophisticated campaign organization that pushed the medical-marijuana initiative. Soros and Lewis pored $400,000 into the group, which paid professional signature gatherers who, in 90days, obtained more than 700,000 signatures.

Once the measure was on the ballot, Soros, Lewis and Sperling contributed $450,000 for advertising. Commercials featured emotional appeals for relief through the use of marijuana. The ads never mentioned that Proposition 215 would allow marijuana to be smoked for any condition, without age restriction and without a prescription.

One of the numerous medical-marijuana clubs that opened as a result of Peron’s measure was the Dharma Producers Group in San Francisco, which bragged that it offered “medical marijuana with a Tibetan touch.” The club’s “medical director,” a pony-tailed 52-year-old named Lorenzo Pace, laughed when he explained his medical-marijuana credentials: “I did preliminary research all through the ’60s.”

California for Medical Rights has since changed its name to Americans for Medical Rights. Today it is leading a campaign to place medical-marijuana initiatives on state ballots across the country.

Rx: LSD. – While Californians were voting on medical marijuana, their neighbors in Arizona were considering an even more radical initiative. The Drug Medicalization, Prevention and Control Act of 1996 proposed to legalize not only marijuana but also more tan 100 other drugs – including heroin, LSD and PCP ( angel dust ) – for medical use.

Arizona’s initiative was sold to voters as a way to get tough on violent criminals. How? Open up jail space by paroling all first- and second-time drug offenders. This ignored the fact that virtually all of the 1200 inmates affected had plea-bargained down from more serious charges or had prior felony records.

In Arizona, Sperling spearheaded the campaign. He, Soros and Lewis contributed a total of $1.2 million; the DPF gave $303,000. This accounted for 99 percent of the initiative’s total funding. As in California, much of this money paid for a massive media campaign. Opponents of the initiative, caught unprepared, did not run a single advertisement.

The measure passed, but a post-election survey revealed that Arizona voters had been badly misled. Seventy-four percent did not believe doctors should be able to prescribe drugs such as heroin, PCP and LSD, as he proposition allowed; 70 percent agreed that the initiative would give children the impression that drugs were also acceptable for recreational use. The state legislature subsequently passed a statute that effectively overrode the initiative.

Fighting Back. – The organizers of Arizona’s initiative moved to place a similar measure on the ballot in Washington State. Sperling, Lewis and Soros contributed a total of more than $1.5 million.

Despite being outspent more than ten to one, opponents of the Washington initiative were not about to be caught unprepared. They took every opportunity to stress that the measure was not about compassion, but about legalizing dangerous drugs. Last November voters rejected the measure.

The defeat in Washington has not sidetracked plans for similar medical-marijuana initiatives in other states. Battlegrounds include Hawaii, Florida, Kansas, Maine and Alaska.

An Oregon initiative would not only legalize use of many drugs but also permit the sale of marijuana in state liquor stores. In Washington, D.C., Initiative 59 would allow up to four caregivers, including “best friends,” to cultivate pot for a “seriously ill” person. Organizers are hoping that passage of these initiatives will spur Congress to legalize medical marijuana under federal law.

Says Dr. Robert DuPont, a former director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse:

“Never in the history of modern medicine has burning leaves been considered medicine. Those in the medical-marijuana movement are putting on white coats and expressing concerns about the sick. But people need to see this for what it is: a fraud and a hoax.”

Copyright 1998 Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.


 

The Bushes, The Clintons and The CIA

From COMPROMISED – Clinton, Bush and The CIA, by Terry Reed and John Cummings:

A conversation between Barry Seal and Terry Reed

Barry: “There ain’t nothin’ in this world more powerful that good ol’ fu*kin’ blackmail, Terry. And don’t let anybody ever tell ya different. Jeeeesus Christ, I got some good shit on some big people.”. . .

Terry: “Calm down Barry. Tell me what’s going on.” . . .

Barry: “Terry, what’s most important right now is for ya to play ball with these guys and get your ass down to Mexico ASAP. You impressed the shit out of Leroy . . . Robert Johnson, too. I won’t be able to come to Mexico right now. I’ve got a little matter to take care of. But ya get on down there . . . and I’ll be joining ya soon.” . . .

Terry: “What’s this blackmail you’re talking about?” . . .

Barry: “Ever hear the old expression, it’s not what ya know, it’s who ya know? Well, whoever said that just hadn’t caught the vice president’s kids in the dope business, ’cause I can tell ya for sure what you know can definitely be more important than who you know.”…

Terry: “What’s this about the vice president’s kids and dope?” . . .

Barry: “I don’t wannna tell ya too much, ’cause truthfully ya don’t have a need to know. But Terry, I been workin’ with several federal agencies for the past couple of years, as ya probably suspicioned. In the course of that business, a person can’t help but run across some real sensitive information. It seems that some major players in the Medellin Cartel, whom I personally know, ran across some knowledge that’s very valuable to both the Republicans and the Democrats. Real national security stuff. It seems some of George Bush’s kids just can’t say no to drugs, ha ha ha ha. . . . Well, ya can imagine how valuable information like this would be, can’t ya? That could get ya out of almost any kind of jam.” Seal paused for a moment then asked, “Ya ever play Monopoly? The information I got is so good it’s just like a get-out-of-jail-free card . . . ha, ha, ha, ha YEE-HAWWWWW.” . . .

Terry: “Barry, are you telling me George Bush’s kids are in the drug business?” . . .

Barry: Yup, that’s what I’m tellin’ ya. A guy in Florida who flipped for the DEA has got the goods on the Bush boys. Now I heard this earlier from a reliable source in Colombia, but I just sat on it then, waitin’ to use it as a trump card, if I ever needed it. Well, I need to use it now. I got names, dates, places . . . even got some tape recordin’s. Fu*k, I even got surveillance videos catchin’ the Bush boys red-handed. I consider this stuff to me invincible. Now this is real sensitive shit inside of U.S. Customs and DEA, and those guys are pretty much under control. It’s damage control as usual. But where it gets real interestin’ is what the Republicans will do to the Democrats in order to dirty up the people who might use this information against Bush.” . . .

Terry: “So you’ve got direct knowledge of the Republicans trying to neutralize some Democrats before they can nuke Bush with this?”…

Barry: “Hell, yeah. I’ve been part of it. Remember that meetin’ we had at SOB’s when I told ya, ya should play ball with these guys . . . Remember in that meetin’ I told ya I had a plan to blow the lid off the whole damn Mena deal and shut it down due to adverse publicity?

Well, what I didn’t tell ya was that project was already in effect, and the Republicans were already trying to neutralize some important people in Arkansas … namely, the Clinton family.

Yeah, that day ya explained to me the connection between the Ward family, the Rose Law Firm and the governor’s mansion, well I about shit! Ya see what ya didn’t know was I was on a secret mission by none other than the Agency to sort of uh, dirty up some people real close to the governor. Now, I had been workin’ on this through Dan Lasater.

Now Dan’s a good ol’ boy and all that, but he’s gotta drug problem, and he’s got the balls to be stealin’ from the Agency, too. From what I hear, Dan’s been doin’ a lot of questionable out-a-state investin’. In fact, he’s stashin’ a lot of cash in a resort in New Mexico.

I was told to exploit that, which I was workin’ on. But you come along with this new connection.

I saw an immediate way to get some white stuff up some noses around Bill Clinton real fast.

Terry: “Barry, this is heavy shit! Are you saying you were the source of the cocaine ending up around a lot of important people in Arkansas? . . . There’s a major scandal brewing there. . . . Did you have anything to do with Roger (Clinton) and some of those guys in Lasater’s firm getting investigated?” . . .

Barry: “Terry, I told ya when I met ya, I’m in transportation and I transport what the government wants transported. In this case, the Republicansand the Bush family…wanted some stuff transported through Mena and into Arkansas that would end up in the noses of some very prominent Democrats.

“And yes, I must ‘fess up, I’ve had a hand in that. YEEE-HAWWWWWW! It’s not who ya know, it’s what ya know. . . .

~ ~ ~

Wednesday, Feb. 19, 1986, turned out to be the last day of Barry Seal’s life.

His blood, along with pieces of flesh and bone, were splattered all over the interior of his car. The Baton Rouge police report, in cold official language, described what happened to him that day: “Autopsy determined the cause of Seal’s death to be multiple gunshot wounds fired by an automatic weapon,” the crime report said.

“Three rounds entered Seal’s upper torso, and four entered the left head. Some fifteen rounds were recovered at the murder scene.”

~ ~ ~


 

George SorosFrom The Spotlight, by Martin Mann, May 11, 1998:

Elite Gobble Your Tax Dollars !

The House and the Clinton administration are eye-ball to eye-ball on billions for the IMF. The key question is, who benefits? . . .

The Clinton administration is pressing Congress to vote a hefty new handout — some $18 billion — to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) this year…

These stories have been well covered in the mainstream media. But what has been missing from the White House press releases — and mainstream media reports — is where the money really goes. . . .

To make up for such lack of candor, this populist newspaper has launched its own inquiry to find out just who gets the dough rolled out for this conspiratorial one-world financial bureaucracy The answers turned out to be revealing. . . .

First rakeoff rights off the top go to Goldman Sachs, the giant Wall Street investment bank where Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin made his first billion in the anything goes 1980’s…

Goldman Sachs has been retained as a lavishly-paid financial adviser, underwriter and syndicator both by the governments of South Korea and Indonesia, as well as some of the largest banks and corporations in these sorely squeezed countries. . . .

BILLIONS INVOLVED . . .

Under current arrangements, stage-managed by Rubin and his faithful sidekick, Undersecretary of the Treasury Laurence Summers, Indonesia and South Korea are slated to share an eye-popping $100 billion in IMF bailout funds during the next 16 months or so. . . .

“You’d think most of the loot would go to help ease some of the crushing dollar-denominated debt of these hard-hammered Asian economies — at least, that’s what Rubin and Larry Summers claim,” commented Fred Ackerman, a veteran Wall Street trader in international debentures…

Nothing like it, warned this veteran money manager. “In reality, the IMF’s bailout is being used mainly as loan insurance to enable Indonesia’s and Korea’s tapped-out state agencies and corporations to borrow even more in the global markets.” . . .

Goldman Sachs, chosen as the lead underwriter and syndicator of new bond issues for some of the largest Southeast Asian borrowers, is already collecting millions — and is expected to collect tens of millions — of dollars in fees and royalties for helping to pile more debt on the stumbling Indonesian and Korean economies. . . .

“It’s like one of Mike Milken’s daisy chains, isn’t it?” asked Ackerman sarcastically, referring to the fraudulent syndicates set up in the ’80’s by convicted swindler Michael “Junk King” Milken to rig the bond markets. . . .

In much the same fashion, there is just a thinly veiled linkup between the official acts of Treasury Chief Rubinknown to insiders as the most powerful man in Washington as well as the main back-channel promoter of the IMF — and the huge profits skimmed by his once-and-future firm, Goldman Sachs, from such international bailouts, Wall Street sources say…

The second kickback from the IMF bailout goes to what even the Wall Street Journal calls “vulture capitalists” — that is, international financiers who pounce on distressed corporations, buy them out at knockdown prices, and then use “special connections” to make a killing on the deal. This is what happened in Mexico in 1994-95, and it’s happening now in Southeast Asia, Wall Street sources say. . . .

For an example, they cite the case of Daewoo, a major Korean car manufacturer, crushed by a back-breaking $3 billion debt it could no longer service after international speculators, led by George Soros, raided Korea’s currency and devalued it by more that a third last year. . .

An international syndicate headed by General Motors and advised by Goldman Sachs is now negotiating to buy a controlling interest in Daewoo at a time when they can acquire the huge bankrupt manufacturing complex at a steep discount, something like “15 cents on the dollar,” these sources averred. . .

“That’s a real sweet deal for the vulture investors grabbing Daewoo, but will they also get stuck with its $3 billion in outstanding debt,” asked Dr. Gottfried Sieberth, the dean of European financial writers based in the U.S. . . .

Not if the IMF cash is divided up the way it was in Mexico, where it was used to buy up the defaulted loans of the biggest banks and corporations, explained this knowledgeable observer.

$ $ $

From The Spotlight, by Martin Mann, May 11, 1998:

“Daddy Warbucks” of Drugs and Death –
CFR member George Soros

In April 1998 Reader’s Digest printed an article by Senior Editor Daniel Levine, titled “HIGH ON A LIE.” The article is about the “medical marijuana” movement and explains how the movement is a hoax and a fraud. Levine fails to point out the Council on Foreign Relations links to sponsorship of the movement.

In November of 1996 the California voters passed Proposition 215 – the Compassionate Use Act. It allows the marijuana to be grown and used for “any illness for which marijuana provides relief.” The Campaign for the “Compassionate Use Act” to legalize medical marijuana would not have been successful without the funding of billionaires George Soros, Peter Lewis and John Sperling. . . .

Council on Foreign Relations member George Soros is one of the world’s richest men (estimated worth: $10 billion) and probably the biggest international investor of all time. This guy lost $600 million in one day speculating on which way the yen would jump and never flinched.

Soros doesn’t flinch because he and his fellow Council on Foreign Relations members can always steal more money. In 1995, Senator Alfonse D’Amato, as head of the Senate Banking Committee, issued a report about the Clinton Administration’s $20 billion loan to Mexico. The reason given for the loan was to prop up a staggering Mexico because any default on loans would end foreign investment in all developing countries.

The real reason was to rescue American and Mexican investors who had thrown their money into the craps game of high-interest Mexican Government bonds. For a year before the loan was ordered, on January 31, 1995, top Treasury officials and President Clinton were telling us how great things were going economically in Mexico. It was a cover-up to prevent Congressional defeat of the North American Free Trade Agreement, to bolster the Mexican and US administrations in upcoming elections in both countries, and to protect the major speculators.

An article from Newsday, “Peso Hits Record Low As Bailout Is Debated” ( Karen Rothmyer – 1/31/,95) identifies some of the Council on Foreign Relations members involved in the cover-up. They were “Former Presidents George Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford [who] signed a declaration of support for the [bailout] plan. Also endorsing the plan was George Soros, probably the world’s most influential international investor.”

George Soros is also a member of the Carlyle Group. The Carlyle Group is an investor team led by Ronald Reagan’s Defense Secretary Frank C. Carlucci III and funded in part by the Mellon family. . . .

Soros uses some of the money he steals to fund a group of international foundations.

Foundations are used by The Council on Foreign Relations to funnel corporate and personal wealth into the policy-making process. Foundations are tax-free. Contributions to foundations are deductible from federal corporate and individual income taxes.

The Foundations themselves are not subject to federal income taxation. Foundations control hundreds of billions of dollars of money that would normally go to pay federal and individual income taxes.

In 1970 there were 7000 foundations that controlled $20 Billion in assets. Nearly 40% of these foundation assets were controlled by the top 12 foundations [Ford Foundation, Lilly Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Duke Endowment, Kresge Foundation, Kellogg Foundation, Mott Foundation, Pew Mutual Trust, Hartford Foundation, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Carnegie Foundation]. The top twelve foundations were controlled by the Council on Foreign Relations. . . .

Foundations can he created by corporations or individuals. These corporations or individuals can name themselves and their friends as directors or trustees of the foundations they create. Large blocks of corporate stock or large amounts of personal wealth can be donated as tax-exempt contributions to the foundations. The foundations can receive interest, dividends, profit shares, and capital gains from these assets without paying any taxes on them.

The directors or trustees, of course, are not allowed to use foundation income or assets for their personal expenses, as they would their own taxable income, but otherwise they have great latitude in directing the use of foundation monies-to underwrite research, investigate social problems, create or assist universities, write research, investigate social problems, establish “think tanks,” endow museums, etc. . . .

One of the Foundations, the Open Society Institute, is issuing grants to promote abortion. Among the programs those that use abortion as a method for family planning.

Is the Soros foundation a way for the Council on Foreign Relations to use tax payer money to promote abortion and population control?

Are the Soros foundations part of the Council on Foreign Relations “Secret Team” ?

Do Soros Foundation employees double as covert operators who carry out well planned psycho-political operations in the Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union?

Are any Soros’ Foundation employees also CIA agents? . . .

The Council on Foreign Relations controls the US Banking industry, and has controlled the Federal Reserve since it’s inception.

Council on Foreign Relations member Robert Edward Rubin was sworn in as the 70th Secretary of the Treasury on January 10, 1995. On May 18, 1998 Reuter’s reported “Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin and Attorney General Janet Reno, at a joint news conference, said a three-year undercover operation had resulted in the indictment of officials from 12 of Mexico’s 19 largest banks. They said it was the first time that Mexican banks were “directly linked to laundering the Cali and Juarez cartels’ U.S drug profits.”

Are any drug profits laundered by Council on Foreign Relations controlled US banks?

CFR member Congressman Richard Gephardt (D-MO), recently informed the TV audience America will soon have to relinquish control to a “International Regime.” Are we approaching the day when students and workers marching in the United States will be crushed by UN Peacekeeping Forces under the control of this International Regime? Who will control the Regime? The Council on Foreign Relations?

Should a major political party consider someone willing to turn our country over to a “International Regime” a possible presidential candidate? . . .

For more, GO TO > > > Birds that Drink from Cesspools ; The Secret Nests


 

John SperlingMulti-millionaire founder of the University of Phoenix, Chairman and CEO Apollo Group … and chief funder of ‘CC’ – the first cloned cat.

Apollo Group CEO John Sperling Looks to Broaden Boundaries of Higher Education

Excerpts from an Interview on CNN’s Pinnacle, Aired July 16, 2000:

BEVERLY SCHUCH, HOST (voice-over): John Sperling is about living, reborn several times after close brushes with death. In fact, he’s a lot like the mythical bird the phoenix, having risen from the ashes of his own adversity. He was born the son of an impoverished sharecropper who beat him regularly. As a youth, he worked the farms in the Ozark Mountains shucking barley. He didn’t learn to read until he was 16. He faced bankruptcy twice and cancer once.

But John Sperling is a fighter and has overcome these hardships to soar to the highest level of entrepreneurial success.

JOHN SPERLING: Fortunately, there were no orders governing institutions of higher education so all I did was start a corporation and name it the University of Phoenix.

SCHUCH: (Voice-over) All John Sperling did was create what has become the lawmaking unit’s largest for profit university and certainly the most unusual. Its 74,000 students must hold full-time jobs. Its 52 campuses in 35 states are actually housed in office buildings and there are no dorms, no student unions and certainly no football teams. But the unusual university that John Sperling created in 1978 has become the talk of higher education, not all of it flattering.

While his peers criticize Sperling’s concept, they can’t argue with his credentials, including Ph.D. from Cambridge University.

(on camera): You were originally criticized as being a diploma mill.

JOHN SPERLING: A diploma mill.

SCHUCH: A diploma mill.

JOHN SPERLING: Right.

SCHUCH: Just giving them out without accreditation, without any foundation.

JOHN SPERLING: Yes. Yes. That’s true.

SCHUCH: And what did that make you think?

JOHN SPERLING: Well, the thing that helped a lot is that because I was a legitimate academic, it was difficult. They couldn’t say that I wasn’t an academic. They just said that I was a rogue academic.

SCHUCH (voice-over): But Sperling defied the educational establishment that tried to run him out of town.

JOHN SPERLING: I had students but no college so I set up the University of Phoenix.

SCHUCH (on camera): Who wouldn’t have thought that there wasn’t a University of Phoenix? I mean you came in and invented it.

JOHN SPERLING: Yes.

SCHUCH: People could not have been happy about that.

JOHN SPERLING: Well, they weren’t happy. They were incensed that this California carpetbagger had come down here and stolen the name of their fair city.

SCHUCH (voice-over): It took a while, but Sperling is gaining the grudging respect of his peers and the not so grudging respect of Wall Street, after the University of Phoenix reported revenues of a half a billion dollars last year. The parent company, Apollo Group, is doing even better.

JOHN SPERLING: We took the company public and the IPO, the stock increased by 20 times and I was holding, my son and I were holding a third of the company or nearly 40 percent of the company. We don’t own that much anymore, but we own about 30 percent. But 30 percent of $2 billion is a lot of money.

SCHUCH: Sperling has used his newfound wealth to pursue a grab bag of causes, from prolonging human life to legalizing marijuana to feeding the world.

UNIDENTIFIED COLLEAGUE: Dr. Sperling, you’re making one hell of a contribution.

SCHUCH (on camera): You have a lot of money now.

JOHN SPERLING: Yes.

SCHUCH: You have a son…

JOHN SPERLING: … who also has a lot of money.

SCHUCH: Who also has a lot of money. What are you going to do with all this money?

JOHN SPERLING: I’m starting, as you know, drug order reform is very expensive. It costs millions of dollars a year.

SCHUCH: So this is your indulgence?

JOHN SPERLING: Yeah, that’s one of them. And then two other indulgences, Seafire International, which is a saltwater agricultural company that is one day going to save the world, I might add…

SCHUCH: Modestly.

JOHN SPERLING: … by stopping the global warming problem. And then I have Chronos, which I’m trying to use as an instrument to reform medical practice in the United States.

SCHUCH (voice-over): John Sperling has overcome poverty, conquered a learning disability and risen to the status of multi-millionaire. Yet why does Sperling call his own father’s death a miracle?

JOHN SPERLING: It’s still the happiest day of my life.

SCHUCH (on camera): And you have no remorse about this?

JOHN SPERLING: None whatsoever. . . .

SCHUCH (on camera): How would you characterize your childhood?

JOHN SPERLING: It was a disheveled childhood.

SCHUCH: Disheveled?

JOHN SPERLING: Yes, psychologically disheveled.

SCHUCH (voice-over): In his autobiography, “Rebel With A Cause,” to be released this fall, John Sperling describes an upbringing marked by sickness and poverty. His mother, he writes, was the most influential person in his life. His father, the most despised.

(on camera): Was he ever a good father to you?

JOHN SPERLING: No.

SCHUCH: When did you first hate him?

JOHN SPERLING: Probably the first time he became a conscious part of my life. There was something about him that I just didn’t like from a very early age.

SCHUCH: At some point it was dislike that turned to, you know, loathing.

JOHN SPERLING: Well, in looking back on it I perceived him as weak, cowardly and cruel. There was nothing about him I liked. So a person that has no redeeming qualities is easy to begin to dislike and then if they’re abusive, the dislike turns into hatred. So it seems pretty normal to me.

SCHUCH: And he hit you?

JOHN SPERLING: Oh, yeah, lots of times.

SCHUCH: But you turned the tables on your father.

JOHN SPERLING: Well, I threatened to kill him.

SCHUCH: How old were you?

JOHN SPERLING: Nine or 10, I think I was 10.

SCHUCH: What did you say?

JOHN SPERLING: I said I’ll kill you in your sleep if you ever hit me again.

SCHUCH: And that was it?

JOHN SPERLING: See, he was cowardly enough he believed me.

SCHUCH: You’d have had more respect for him if he’d have hit you again?

JOHN SPERLING: No, I’d have killed him.

SCHUCH: That’s a lot of anger for a little boy.

JOHN SPERLING: Um-hmm.

SCHUCH: You say in your book that, you refer to his death when you were 15 as the miracle.

JOHN SPERLING: Yeah.

SCHUCH: The miracle.

JOHN SPERLING: It’s still the happiest day of my life.

SCHUCH: And you have no remorse about this?

JOHN SPERLING: None whatsoever. . . .

SCHUCH: From fighting university administrations as a teacher’s union activist to battling anti-drug orders to creating a DNA bank for the cloning of animals, the radical pursuits of a rebel with a cause, the next chapter in the story of John Sperling when PINNACLE returns. . . .

JOHN SPERLING: It was about two weeks after I became wealthy that I started my drug order reform.

SCHUCH (on camera): But you never were interested in the accouterments of wealth such as that, were you?

JOHN SPERLING: Well, no, never having had it.

SCHUCH (voice-over): Sperling’s interest in drug reform was at least partly inspired by his use of marijuana during treatment for prostate cancer. As with the other passions in his life, Sperling has attacked the marijuana issue with a vengeance, teaming up with Cleveland businessman Peter Lewis and hedge fund billionaire George Soros.

JOHN SPERLING: It’s unbelievable how much we’ve achieved in just three election cycles from having the whole issue absolutely off the table. No one would discuss it. It was the ultimate third rail of politics. It was you touch that and you’re dead. A federal commission says that there are real medicinal properties of marijuana that should be accepted. Starting in 1996, we won the first two in California and Arizona. Then in ’98 we won in Colorado and Nevada. And…

SCHUCH (on camera): You won what?

JOHN SPERLING: Initiatives to either medicalize marijuana or to reduce the civil penalties or the criminal penalties. . . .

SCHUCH (voice-over): And that’s not all. At age 79 and still going strong, John Sperling has a great many other causes to fight for, including finding the fountain of youth. . . .

SCHUCH (on camera): What’s the worst thing one can feel?

JOHN SPERLING: Boredom. And that in its most extreme form would be depression.

SCHUCH: Do you understand happiness?

JOHN SPERLING: No. I never thought of being happy. I’ve never sought happiness. It’s not something that concerns me.

SCHUCH (voice-over): What does concern John Sperling these days, he says quite humbly, is saving the world. He’s teamed up with scientist Cora Hodges to form Seafire International, a company designed to harvest a crop called salacornea grown in salt water. Sperling sees this project as a lifeline for poor economies.

JOHN SPERLING: The sea water farms are going to be an essential element in, you might call, the economic recovery of both Eritrea and Ethiopia.

SCHUCH: And if you want to save the world, then you’d better plan to be around for a while. . . .

SCHUCH: That’s why John Sperling also created Chronos, named for the Greek god of time, a wellness center that combines vitamin therapy with extensive body and blood analysis to help forestall the aging process. And beyond improving the condition of mankind, Sperling’s latest challenge, the cloning of animals.

JOHN SPERLING: That’s another company I’ve started, Genetic Savings and Clone.

SCHUCH (on camera): You’re kidding, right?

JOHN SPERLING: No. We already have a cryo bank for DNA for all sorts of animals. We intend to start a cloning service to clone pets and farm animals.

SCHUCH: And why?

JOHN SPERLING: Because it’s possible. There are all sorts of reasons to do it. In addition to one of a kind animals, there are, you can help to recover species that are endangered with extinction. You can do transgenic work with farm animals and create all sorts of medicines for human beings.

SCHUCH: And you would want to make money out of this?

JOHN SPERLING: Oh, we will make money. We’ll make a lot of money at it….

~ ~ ~

For more on ‘CC’ the cat and cloning for cash, GO TO > > > Send in the Clones


 

Marc RacicotFormer Attorney General and Governor of Montana.

From Drugging America (copyright 1999), by Rodney Stich:

MONTANA DRUG GATEWAY

The mainstream media has given virtually no publicity to the drugs coming from Canada into the Montana area. This silence exists despite many reports of these activities and the duplicity of local and state law-enforcement and political figures – and especially the usual coverups by U..S. agencies, especially Department of Justice personnel.

Montana had been the home of several well-known crime figures. For instance, Alfred J. Luciano, Sr., a nephew to crime-figure “Lucky” Luciano, had a home in Montana, as did Joseph Bonano. It would be unusual if they did not use the unique opportunities provided by the remoteness of Montana for shipping drugs into the United States….

Montana’s Version of Arkansas

In the 1980s, hundreds of reports were made by local residents about drug trafficking at Mena Airport in Arkansas, followed by state and federal “law enforcement” coverups. The same conditions exist in Montana. Many non-government investigative reports have been made about the drug trafficking from Canada into Montana, the criminal involvement of local and state law enforcement personnel and politicians, and the coverups by state and federal officials….

The greatest number of reports of Montana drug trafficking came from an area known as the Hi-Line where the Burlington Northern Railroad runs parallel to the Montana-Canadian border. People reported planes landing at small airstrips, drugs being off-loaded, and the involvement of government personnel in the criminal activities.

People who made reports of drug trafficking activities to county, state, or federal law enforcement offices found their reports were either ignored, or, they became the subjects of government retaliation. As in Arkansas, many people who sought to expose the political involvement in drugs ended up dead – their deaths often falsely reported by county personnel as suicides….

A Few Courageous People Spoke Out

Several courageous people attempted to expose the involvement of Montana personnel in the drug trafficking. One was James Douglas Alexander, a respected Montana attorney….

Alexander started discovering drug trafficking connected to local and state personnel in 1989 while defending another attorney from Sidney, Thomas Halvorson. Halvorson had been accused of wiretapping the county attorney’s office – during which time he recorded telephonee conversations showing drug trafficking activities involving county and police personnel. After the wiretaps were discovered, the Commission on Legal Practices sought to revoke Halvorson’s license to practice law in Montana.

While defending Halvorson, Alexander discovered additional evidence that the deputy county attorney in Sidney and a police detective were involved in drug trafficking. In the August 1996 edition of Strategic Investment Jack Wheeler, it’s co-editor, wrote:

“Mena in Montana? The Republicans may have their own drug smuggling scandal, similar to Bill Clinton’s in Mena, Arkansas. Due to all the bad publicity, the drug cartels moving coke from Mexico through Mena may have relocated a substantial part of their operation to Montana, bringing the stuff in from Canada. Corruption among state officials is reported to be widespread, reaching right into the governor’s office. DEA sources have hinted that Governor Marc Racicot or some of his top aides might be indicted. Trouble for the Republicans is that Racicot is one of them.”

Co-editor with Wheeler was former CIA Director William Colby, who drowned under mysterious circumstances in the spring of 1996….

Journalist Describing His Findings of Montana Drug Trafficking

Adding to Alexander’s knowledge of drug trafficking and political involvement was journalist Mike Perry of Chinook who started telling Alexander in 1992 of the political involvement in drug trafficking that he had uncovered. Perry told Alexander of drug aircraft landing at Montana airstrips near Havre, Chinook, and Glasgow, which Alexander explained:

“I began communicating with a journalist in Chinook named Mike Perry. Perry gave a whole litany of similar, parallel events that were occurring: airplanes coming in, people unloading cocaine from airplanes, people tetting beat up or killed. It always led back to members of law enforcement. In Chinook, four police officers had lost their jobs because they had tracked airplanes coming into the airport, or other drug-related corruption involving the county attorney and other individuals in Chinook….

Mike Roe, a high-profile investigator, started working with us. He is a private investigator from Phoenix with a good reputation…. We hoped through his contacts with the FBI in Salt Lake City and with other federal agencies in Phoenix, we could get something done. By the time he came in, in 1992, we began to realize that the drugs were a very large-scale operation. Roe began to get in contact with residents in Chinook and Sidney, and there was a whole flood of people coming forward, asking for something to be done, begging us to look into the drugs and murders that appeared to trail back, again, to law enforcement personnel.”

Pressure and threats from local police and sheriff department personnel, and political pressures, forced Perry to leave Montana in December 1998.

A written report dated February 2, 1994, was prepared by private investigator Michael W. Roe of Roe Investigations in Phoenix, Arizona … Roe’s 12-page report identified people and places involved in Montana drug trafficking, the many murders of people threatening to expose the relationship between drug crimes and city and county personnel, including law-enforcement people, and the names of the many witnesses providing key information.

Under “general allegations” the Roe report stated:

Bill Larson, president of the Chinook Branch of the Bank of Montana, was allegedly involved in laundering of drug money through that branch of the Bank of Montana; that he was involved in the transportation of narcotics; that he was involved in a conspiracy relating to the murder of two people in Chinook (Richard Cowen and Bernadette Doiron, on or about January 21, 1987) for which two people were convicted: Lloyd James Wilson and Robert Henry Bone.

Don Ranstrom, Blaine County Attorney, was reportedly involved in the importation, use and sale of narcotics, in the murders of Cowen and Doiron, and there is a belief that he ordered the murders.

– The firing of Chinook police chief Bernie Brost by the mayor after Brost started investigating alleged drug activities by Bank of Montana banker Bill Larson, Blaine County Attorney Dan Ranstrom, Chinook police officer Alan Delk, and others.

– Former county attorney and now city attorney Phillip Carter was involved in drug trafficking, threats against people who would not cooperate to hauling drugs, including trucking firm owner Clint Mullen. After Mullen refused Carter’s reported request to haul drugs, Mullen started receiving retaliation from law enforcement personnel, and the local bank -whose attorney was Carter-suddenly dissrupted Mullen’s financial activities, and he was physically beaten by friends of the city attorney.

The Roe report of February 1994 supplemented Roe’s earlier report which was allegedly “lost” by Great Falls FBI agents.

Destroying Anyone Who Exposes Their Corruption

The Roe report referred to former Circle city attorney Arnie Hove who sought to expose the political involvement in drug trafficking and then was subjected to political harassment and physical violence….

Hove was at the time attorney for the city of Circle, Montana, served as appeals court judge at the Fort Peck Reservation, and was prosecutor for McCone County. He was rising player in Republican politics in Eastern Montana. But when he started exposing political involvement in drug trafficking, state and local retaliation followed.

Alexander described what Hove went through in retaliation for exposing the FBI involvement in Montana drug matters:

“Have come under heavy attack during this period of time – from the fall of 1996 to early 1999. Law enforcement was everywhere investigating Hove for all kinds of criminal activity. It was horrible how they did him, but it was also similar to what they did to me…. Only Hinz has videotapes of witnesses who were offered money to testify falsely against Hove!”

Convenient Death of Key Witnesses

The Roe report, and information obtained from Alexander, described the “convenient” deaths of key people. These included banker Bob Kropp of Farmer’s State Bank in Conrad, who was killed (March 31, 1983) shortly before he was to testify about bribery at drug money laundering. The vice president of Whitefish Mountain Bank at Whitefish, John Ochenrider, died March 31, 1983, two weeks before he was to testify in a money laundering trial with co-defendant Alfred Luciano.

Ochenrider’s death was reportedly due to a fall suffered while mountain climbing – an activity that the banker had never done before. Montana Highway Patrolman Michael Remz was killed as he started investigating aircraft landing on small airstrips near the towns of Libby and Eureka. A journalist who was investigating Luciano’s drug smuggling activities died in a fire in Eureka in late 1997. Many others were killed who had given information about the drug trafficking. Mike Wolf and Bruce Madsen were killed outside Sidney (December 1993) after Wolf wrote his mother that he was about to be murdered. Jerry Herdt died under mysterious circumstances near Glendive after he told acquaintances he was providing information to the FBI about a Sidney prosecutor that Herdt believed was dealing in drugs….

Report Government Corruption – Suffer the Consequences

In a series of interviews by Wesley Phelan of Washington Weekly in 1998, numerous witnesses confirmed that nearly everyone who came forward with information on drug trafficking experienced harassment from police or other government agencies. Alexander said prosecutor Phillip Carter began intimidating and threatening some of the witnesses. The threats against witnesses were federal crimes for which the FBI has responsibility to prosecute….

Obstruction of Justice by Montana Crime Agency and Governor

In 1991, Sidney City Councilman Richard Hobbs said that he and a group of other concerned people provided the Montana Crime Investigation Bureau (MCIB) with several dozen witness statements showing local official involvement in drug trafficking. These statements included witnesses seeing planes landing and drugs being unloaded. Other witnesses also reported drug planes landing at small airstrips at the Glasgow Air Force Base and on the Fort Peck and Fort Belknap Indian reservations.

Despite this evidence, the state agency – under control of then attorney general and future governor Marc Racicot, said they could find no evidence of criminal conduct….

Justice Department Tactics to Silence Alexander

Alexander explained how Justice Department prosecutors sought to silence him, using his humanitarian efforts relating to adoption of war orphans to retaliate and halt his exposure of government-involved drug trafficking….

Alexander explained how he learned about Montana drug trafficking and heavy involvement of local, state, and federal personnel. In a March 13, 1999, letter Alexander wrote:

“We began to gather reports involving drug smuggling into Sidney-Chinook-Havre in the early ’90s. We had more than 70 statements involving witnesses to local law enforcement and prosecutors being involved in drug dealings. There are dozens and dozens of affidavits! When I came out publicly against the drugs, the attacks on me began in earnest. I was driven out of the practice of law and Montana. After I left the state, I was contacted by Orlin Grabbe, then others who I’ve since been advised were linked to NSA and others….”

Reported Canadian Indictment of FBI Agent

“FBI Agent Terry Nelson was indicted in Regina, Saskatchewan Provincial Court Blain County Sheriff Pete Paulsen; journalist Paul Richardson, then of Indian County Today, and myself, confirmed this from the RCMP in Regina…. The investigator also identified Mike Huxtable, a Canadian National, as one of the persons indicted.”…

Drug Money from Drug Lord to Montana Governor?

“It was only later – after I was forced out of Montana – that I found [Montana Governor] Marc Racicot was involved in the drug scheme. There are wire-fund-transfers from Banque Suisse to the Norwest Bank of Helena branch accounts directly to Marc Racicot, his family, and assistants. Those funds came from the Fabio Ochoa operation! Darby Hinz had confirmed from an independent source flights into Montana for the Fabio Ochoa organization….”

Large Numbers of State and Federal Officials Implicated

Montana will surely be more in the news as this drug-smuggling frontier is addressed by more of the media that is willing to report these matters. The heavy involvement of state and federal personnel in obstructing justice in drug-related matters in Montana is one more example of these criminal and subversive activities.

Of some interest, George Bush was in the loop with drug smuggling during the Iran-Contra affair, and Bush’s son George Bush, Jr., is politically aligned with Marc Racicot….

< < < UPDATES < < <

January 9, 2002

Northeast States Oppose
Relaxed Air Standards

Six attorneys general threaten to sue if emissions are eased

By Shannon McCaffrey, Associated Press

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration is considering relaxing clean-air standards for power plants, which environmentalists and Northeastern states strongly oppose and the energy industry favors.

Attorneys general from six Northeastern states traveled to Washington yesterday to warn that they will sue if the Clean Air Act is weakened.

“We will absolutely go to court to forestall these new rules and regulations,” said New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

Northeastern states say they are victims of Midwest power plant emissions that drift east on prevailing winds, polluting the air and water and exacerbating health problems such as asthma. . . .

The Energy Department released a report recently that found Clean Air Act requirements for carbon dioxide emissions from power plants would cost companies billions of dollars and add to energy costs.

In the spring, the Bush administration began re-evaluating requirements that power companies upgrade their plants when they put in place more stringent pollution controls.

The attorneys general said one of the most alarming revisions being considered by the administration involves changing the definition of routine maintenance so that it would allow massive overhauls but not require more pollution controls.

The attorneys general also complained they have been left out of discussions on the issue while energy lobbyists some with close ties with the administration – have been allowed in.

Among those lobbyists is former Montana Governor Marc Racicot, recently tapped by President Bush to take over the Republican National Committee.

Additionally, Bush’s point man on energy policy is Vice President Dick Cheney, the former chief executive of Halliburton Co., a Dallas-based oil company.

In addition to Spitzer, attorneys general from Connecticut, Maryland, New Hampshire, Vermont and Rhode Island were in Washington.

Attorneys general from Massachusetts, Maine and New Jersey submitted statements of support.

Northeastern states already have sued 11 power plants in the Midwest, alleging they are not complying with Clean Air Act requirements….

* * *

November 19, 1999

While people are dying, government agencies pass buck

By ANDREW SCHNEIDER
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER SENIOR NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT

© 1999 Seattle Post-Intelligencer. All rights reserved.

LIBBY, Mont. — They all say somebody should do something.

City, county, state and federal officials agree that someone should follow up. Inquire. Ask questions about the hundreds of people from Libby who have either died or been diagnosed with fatal diseases after being exposed to tremolite asbestos from a vermiculite mine.

Somebody, they say, should investigate disturbing indications that Libby may still be at risk.

But every official and every agency has a reason why, so far, they have not been that somebody.

Medical records, death certificates, doctors in five states and the miners or their survivors say at least 192 have died and at least 375 more have asbestosis or cancers from the lethal, microscopic fibers.

Most of them contracted the terminal diseases years ago, when the mine spewed more than two tons of asbestos a day into the air, six days a week, in a fine white dust that settled over the mountainside and often carried into the town of Libby.

But Libby’s nightmare did not end when the W.R. Grace Co. closed the mine in 1990.

For one thing, asbestos-related diseases take a long time to develop, so cases from earlier exposure will continue to crop up for decades.

But now, as more and more cases are being diagnosed in this little northwest Montana mountain town, some townspeople are finding questions none of the government agencies has dared to seek answers for:

Are the tons of asbestos debris from the mine still killing people?

Are people being exposed today, breathing in death sentences that will be carried out halfway into the next century, after decades of agonizing illness?

Are there dangerous levels of asbestos in the air, in the ground, in the waters of the Kootenai River?

Are the children and grandchildren of the sick and dying, who never saw the mine in operation, going to die from its legacy?...

‘He doesn’t want to know’

Shane Whitmarsh says he just doesn’t like sitting in doctors’ offices.

“That’s not it,” said his wife, Gina. “He just doesn’t want to know if something’s wrong.”

Her strapping, 34-year-old husband, a logger, has had pneumonia three times in a year. “That’s a bad sign that something is wrong with his lungs,” Gina said.

“He’s never worked at the mine, so he thinks he’s safe. There are several other people here in their 30s who think they have chest problems, but don’t want to talk about it.”

Shane shrugs off talk of his own health, saying, “Once you’ve got asbestosis, there’s nothing you can do about it.”

He pauses, then slams his fist on a coffee shop table. “It’s our kids that I’m worried about.”

Carson is 5. Darby, 10.

“That old vermiculite is all over this town. Has anyone checked to see what happened to the asbestos that’s part of it? Are our kids safe?”

‘The state would tell us’

Tony Berget, the mayor of Libby since 1996, agrees there is vermiculite all over the town.

“You can see it sparkle,” the mayor said. “It was used as fill. It covered the old ball parks, most of the town put it in their gardens. It’s used as insulation in most of the houses.

“We know what happened in the old days, the miners coming home covered with white dust. But I don’t think there’s anything to worry about now.

“If there was a problem, I’m sure the county or the state people would have told us. They haven’t given us any information so I’m sure there’s not a problem.”

Tony Berget desperately wants that to be true.

He adds: “I’m sure the county has tested for it, but they haven’t found anything.”

But Kendra Lund, who does environmental testing for Lincoln County, said she hasn’t done any testing for asbestos “for years.”

“We don’t have the facilities to test for asbestos fibers. These are not county issues, but state responsibilities.”

Dr. Brad Black, the part-time county health officer, said, “We’re a very small health department with a very frugal budget. If there was anything wrong the state would tell us.”

“The governor (Marc Racicot) is from Libby,” Berget said.

“If there were a problem, he’d tell us.”

But the state has not done anything, and some state workers are concerned and frustrated. Patrick Plantenberg, acting mining supervisor at Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality, said: “We keep hearing about all these people from Libby who are sick or have died, but no one that I know of from the state has any real information. Whenever I hear something, I call these people who are supposed to deal with it, but nothing has ever been followed up on.”

Fred Ramsey, an epidemiologist for the Montana Health Department, added: “Apparently, the state has not designated anybody. It sounds like the asbestos problem in Libby may have fallen between the crack of ‘whose territory is it?’ ”

Tom Ellerhoff, an administrator for DEQ, said, “We have lots of entities who could get involved and help determine what’s happening in Libby,” and he ticks off an alphabet soup of state and federal agencies.

“The question becomes, who has the authority to do something? The problem is that there hasn’t been a murmur, let alone a public outcry, over what’s happening up there. It’s unfortunate but someone has to raise the issue, make it a hot topic, draw attention to it,” said Ellerhoff. “That’s the way to get the state Legislature and the Congress to demand action and raise money for the studies that should be done up there.”

The federal government seems equally unsure of who has the duty to help Libby.

John Wardell, the coordinator of EPA’s operation in Montana, initially responded to the P-I’s questions about Libby by saying: “A lot of folks are saying EPA should do this or that, but not one of them, the town, the county or the state, has written us a letter or called and asked for our help. We cannot go out there unless we’re invited.”

Berget, the mayor, admitted he’d never called the EPA, but added, “This is not a big secret. They should know about it.

Where is the EPA? It is their job to determine whether there is a hazard in this town. They are on our backs all the time, making people dig up old fuel tanks, after companies that drain stuff into the river. Why aren’t they out here? We’d welcome someone looking at the issue.”

After repeated queries, EPA’s Wardell reconsidered his answer. He said this week that “based on concerns raised” by the P-I, the EPA would investigate the situation in Libby….

For more, GO TO > > > Heavens and Earth; The Secret Nests


 

Peter B. LewisBillionaire Chairman and CEO of Progressive Insurance Company.

“MEDICAL” MARIJUANA BENEFACTOR
BUSTED FOR DRUGS

Billionaire Peter B. Lewis was arrested for possession of more than 3 ½ ounces of hashish and marijuana as he was trying to enter the Auckland airport in New Zealand, January 7, 2000.

Lewis, the chairman and chief executive officer of Progressive Corporation in Mayfield Village, Ohio is the same man who has helped bankroll successful “medical” marijuana initiatives in several states in the past two years. His money, combined with that of George Soros and John Sperling, help pay for petition signature gatherers and heavy advertising campaigns to garner voter support to have the states declare marijuana a “medicine”.

Polls state that children often cite the fact that marijuana is “medicine” as one reason they use it.

Although the charges facing Lewis carry a maximum sentence of 14 years in jail, he was released without recording a conviction. He was encouraged, however, to donate an undisclosed sum of money to a New Zealand drug rehabilitation program.


 

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For more deep cover conspiracies, GO TO…

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Last update January 9, 2003 by The Catbird.

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