---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Wed, 17 Feb 1999 From: "F. Joseph Brown" <•••@••.•••> Subject: RE: cj#900> re: consumerism, advertising, & propaganda To: "INTERNET:•••@••.•••" <•••@••.•••> As a footnote, consider the comments of Michael Levine, ex-DEA agent, reformed, on KPFA Pacifica radio, Feb. 16, '99: He observes that the billion-or-so federal dollars given to Madison Avenue, and Disney in particular, to advertise the Drug War, actually serve to promote drug use, by piqueing youths' interest to TRY drugs, effectively furthering the world-dominating illegal (but covertly promoted) drug business. He also notes that such money could easily buy every coca leaf in South America. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- from cj#901> A group of organizations (and many hundreds of individuals) are forming a loose coalition based on this one issue (STOP THE DRUG WAR) in order to show our Mayor - Jerry Brown - that we are against this war on the people of Oakland (and the world) and all its consequences that ravage our community. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 16 Feb 1999 To: •••@••.••• From: jeffgates <•••@••.•••> Subject: Re: cj#901> Oakland: Allies Needed Against The Drug War At the risk of rocking this smug little boat, I just returned from a stay in West Oakland where I resided with a friend who lives at Ettie and 34th street. Might I suggest you take a ride around the hood before you proncounce too widely on calling off the war.... Living there is a bit like living in a war zone. Quite a challenge when raising a child or just attempting to lead a somewhat secure and sane life. Are you suggesting this as a remedy for something dangerous and real? jeff gates ---------- Dear Jeff & cj, No one disputes the challenges faced by visitors to and residents of "the hood". But... if the US government participates in the drug trade, and if drug problems are only getting worse under the war, then is the war really a solution? Can we even believe that the government's _objective in the war is to reduce drug-related problems? Yes, Jeff, I and others are suggesting that the so-called Drug War is a war aimed not at reducing the drug problem, but rather at developing a police state right here in the Land of the Free. The on-the-ground consequences of the War are arbitrary police powers, not less drugs, eroded civil liberties, not less crime, and skyrocking prison populations, not healed communities. Below is a posting sent in by Mark Douglas Whitaker, "DAMNING ADMISSIONS: The CIA and Drugs". Several previous cj postings have also presented and discussed evidence of CIA involvement in the drug trade, and there are several credible books on the topic, including "The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia" and Gary Webb's recent "Dark Alliance". I published a series of four articles in New Dawn magazine, "The Police State Conspiracy - An Indictment", which is now available on our website (http://cyberjournal.org). This series is presented as a "hearing", in which a "prosecutor" outlines an "indictment" against the perpetrators of a "police-state conspiracy". Just below this response are the bibliography provided with the series, and the Summary of the "indictment". My American Heritage Dictionary defines "smug" as "complacent or self-righteous". Perhaps I'm to some extent guilty, and perhaps the pot is calling the kettle black, as well. Be that as it may, we can all surely benefit by remaining even more open to other people's perspectives, and to being even more willing to re-examine our assumptions in the light of all available evidence. One of the primary suggestions made in the Police State series is that we need a new way of evaluating these things we call "conspiracy theories". Too much attention, to my way of thinking, is placed on attempting to prove that such-and-such a scenario did happen, or is happening. To begin with, the deck is stacked against proving allegations which the media and the government are intent on disproving. If our goal is to make an intelligent judgement about what's going on around us, the most sensible approach may not be to fixate on a single scenario and stick to it like a bulldog, digging our teeth into the volumes of conspiracy-theory literature. More sensible, I suggest, is to enumerate the competing scenarios, and to list the evidence for and against each scenario. In many cases it is very easy to say "Scenario X seems by far the most likely", even when it would be very difficult or impossible to _prove scenario X. Why should the media's "consensus reality" be accepted as true if it is in fact one of the less-likely scenarios on offer (eg, the Oswald lone-assassin theory)? One thing we know for sure is that the government, and the media, have lied to us many times in the past. When it comes to offical pronouncements and news coverage, I see the tactics of public relations at work more than I see any ethics of democratic accountability. Part of life is living with incomplete information and conflicting evidence; we operate that way all the time. If we waited for certainty regarding the weather, or traffic conditions, or whether an earthquake might strike, we'd never be able to leave our homes. Sensible people proceed by making "best estimates" of what reality has in store for them, and then get on with their lives. But when it comes to evaluating larger realities -- beyond the boundaries of our daily experience -- we often lose our common sense. Instead of thinking for ourselves, and making our own "best estimate" of reality, we go along with whatever officialdom tells us, and then change our minds when they tell us to. How many remember that Saddam was one of our "good guys" during the decade-long Iran-Iraq war? For my money, the burden of proof is on those who maintain we _aren't rapidly and systematically becoming a police state nation, and on those who believe that any such trend is unintended. regards, rkm ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Recommended Reading (alphabetical order): ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ William Blum, "Killing Hope, US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II", 1995, Common Courage Press, PO Box 702, Monroe, ME 04951, USA. Michel Chossudovsky, "The Globalisation of Poverty", 1997, Third World Network, 228, Macalister Road, 10400 Penang, Malaysia, fax 60 4 226 4505. Richard Douthwaite, "The Growth Illusion", 1992, Lilliput Press, Dublin. William Greider, "Who Will Tell the People -- the Betrayal of American Democracy", 1993, Simon and Schuster. Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order", 1997, Simon and Schuster. V.I. Lenin, "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism", 1939, International Publishers Co. Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith (editors), "The Case Against the Global Economy and for a Turn Toward the Local", 1996, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco. Richard K. Moore, "Globalization and the Revolutionary Imperative", a book-in-progress available online at http://cyberjournal.org/cadre/gri/gri.html Michael Parenti, "Make-Believe Media -- the Politics of Entertainment", 1992, St. Martin's Press, New York. David Wise, "The American Police State", 1973, Vintage Books. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Summary ^^^^^^^ The pattern, then, is clear. The US leads the way in the development of police-state measures and of the means to get them implemented without debate. The measures are then exported to other countries by the tried-and-true method of staging dramatic incidents. Globalization is a very systematic process, as we have seen in the pattern of IMF interventions, and as we can see in the establishment of global governing institutions. It is no surprise that a systematic means have been developed to implement the police-state regimes which are required to fulfill the aims of the neoliberal revolution. The evidence, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, is clear. Our NWO elite leaders are committed to the program of corporate globalization. They are compelled to this strategy by the need to keep their capital pool growing. Reducing Western populations to Third-World status is a necessary part of their plans for the globalization of the economy and the consolidation of all power in their centralized bureaucracies. The installation of police-state regimes is being purposely pursued in order to force this elite program on Western populations. I suggest to you that the only reasonable verdict is "guilty as charged", and that the sentence should be the overthrow of the capitalist elite oligarchy, through non-violent democratic revolution, and the replacement of the capitalist system by one more appropriate to human happiness and well-being. I thank you for your attention and invite you to go forth and do your duty as free men and women to secure the future of the Earth and of your progeny. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1999 16:07:27 -0600 To: •••@••.•••, •••@••.••• From: Mark Douglas Whitaker <•••@••.•••> Subject: war on drugs, or trading war for drugs? SOME WAR ON DRUGS WE HAVE GOING HERE - MORE LIKE WAR FOR DRUGS. I am particularly concerned that there seems to be a waiver issued by the Justice Deparment for carte blanche. ------------------------------------------------ www.counterpunch.org DAMNING ADMISSIONS: The CIA and Drugs Just under two years ago John Deutch, at that time director of the CIA, traveled to a town meeting in South Central Los Angeles to confront a community outraged by charges that the Agency had been complicit in the importing of cocaine into California in the 1980s. Amid heated exchanges Deutch publicly pledged an internal investigation by the CIA's Inspector General that would leave no stone unturned. It is now possible to review, albeit in substantially censored form, the results of that probe. At the start of this year the Inspector General, Fred Hitz, released a volume specifically addressing charges made in 1996 in the San Jose Mercury News. Earlier this month Hitz finally made available for public scrutiny a second report addressing broader allegations about drug running by Nicaraguan Contras. That first volume released ten months ago was replete with damaging admissions. Two examples: The report describes a cable from the CIA's Directorate of Operations dated October 22, 1982, describing a prospective meeting between Contra leaders in Costa Rica for "an exchange in [US] of narcotics for arms." But the CIA's Director of Operations instructed the Agency's field office not to look into this imminent arms-for-drugs transaction" in light of the apparent involvement of US persons throughout." In other words, the CIA knew that Contra leaders were scheduling a drugs-for-arms exchange and the Agency was prepared to let the deal proceed. In 1984, the Inspector General discloses, the CIA intervened with the US Justice Department to seek the return from police custody of $36,800 in cash which had been confiscated from a Nicaraguan drug smuggling gang in the Bay Area whose leader, Norwin Meneses, was a prominent Contra fund-raiser. The money had been taken during what was at the time the largest seizure of cocaine in the history of California. The CIA's Inspector General said the Agency took action to have the money returned in order "to protect an operational equity, i.e., a Contra support group in which it [CIA] had an operational interest." Hitz also unearthed a CIA memo from that time revealing that the Agency understood the need to keep this whole affair under wraps because, according to the memo (written by the CIA's assistant general counsel), "there are sufficient factual details which would cause certain damage to our image and program in Central America." The 146-page first volume is full of admissions of this nature but these two disclosures alone -- allowing a Contra drug deal to go forward, and taking extraordinary action to recoup the proceeds of a drug deal gone awry -- should have been greeted as smoking guns, confirming charges made since 1985 about the Agency's role. The report issued by Hitz a few weeks ago is even richer in devastating disclosures. The Inspector General sets forth a sequence of CIA cable traffic showing that as early as the summer of 1981, the Agency knew that the Contra leadership "had decided to engage in drug trafficking to the United States to raise funds for its activities." The leader of the group whose plans a CIA officer was thus describing was Enrique Bermudez, a man hand-picked by the Agency to run the military operations of the main Contra organization. It was Bermudez who told Contra fund-raisers and drug traffickers Norwin Meneses and Danilo Blandon (as the latter subsequently testified for the government to a federal grand jury,) that the end justified the means and they should raise revenue in this manner. The CIA was uneasily aware that its failure to advise the Contras to stop drug trafficking might land it in difficulties, Hitz documents that the Agency knew that at that time it should report Contra plans to run drugs to the Justice Department and other agencies such as FBI, DEA and US Customs. Nonetheless the CIA kept quiet, and in 1982 got a waiver from the Justice Department giving a legal basis for its inaction. Hitz enumerates the Contra leaders ("several dozen") the CIA knew to be involved in drug trafficking, along with another two dozen involved in Contra supply missions and fund-raising. He confirms that the CIA knew that Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador was an arms-for drugs Contra transshipment point, and discloses a memo in which a CIA officer orders the DEA "not to make any inquiries to anyone re Hanger [sic] No. 4 at Ilopango." Thus, the CIA's own Inspector General shows that from the very start of the US war on Nicaragua the CIA knew the Contra were planning to traffic in cocaine into the US. It did nothing to stop the traffic and, when other government agencies began to probe, the CIA impeded their investigations. When Contra money raisers were arrested the Agency came to their aid and retrieved their drug money from the police. So, was the Agency complicit in drug trafficking into Los Angeles and other cities? It is impossible to read Hitz's report and not conclude that this was the case. CP ------------------------------------------------------ CounterPunch 3220 N Street, NW, Suite 346 Washington, DC 20007 1-800-840-3683 email: •••@••.••• CounterPunch is a project of the Institute for the Advancement of Journalistic Clarity ------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ a political discussion forum - •••@••.••• To subscribe, send any message to •••@••.••• A public service of Citizens for a Democratic Renaissance (mailto:•••@••.••• http://cyberjournal.org) Non-commercial reposting is hereby approved, but please include the sig up through this paragraph and retain any internal credits and copyright notices. 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