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Bilderberg 2010: What we have learned

admin — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:16:08 +0000

Bilderberg 2010: What we have learned

A huge agenda of global issues was crammed into four days of ’secret’ meetings by a mysterious group of power brokers. But who elected them and why are we paying for them?

The lines have been drawn. Whose side are you on? Photograph: Alex Amengual

Weary and bramble-scratched, elated by the press coverage, and sick of riot vans and lukewarm Spanish omelette baguettes, we return from Bilderberg 2010 with the following thoughts uppermost in our tired mind:

• ‘Global cooling’ is on the cards

Check out the agenda for Bilderberg 2010: “Financial reform, security, cyber technology, energy, Pakistan, Afghanistan, world food problem, global cooling, social networking, medical science, EU-US relations.” That list is a window into your future. Don’t think for one minute that it isn’t. And don’t ignore it, because it isn’t ignoring you.

I love how “social networking” must fry the Bilderbergian mind. On the one hand, as Zuckerberg of Facebook says, privacy is no longer a social norm so it’s okay to milk the networking sites for information, social trends and dissident thinking; however, you can’t stop the people from arranging a meet-up to discuss internet censorship or the rights and wrongs of “global cooling”. Speaking of which, Bill Gates (Bilderberg 2010) is funding “cloud whitening” technology; trials start soon. Global dimming isn’t just something that happens every time Big Brother starts. On the basis of this agenda, I think we can expect a lot of statements about cutting-edge cloud-technology trials in the next 12 months. If it works in Dubai, it can work in Britain too…

• You can’t keep a good story down

If I had to pick the point when Bilderberg finally broke through into mainstream news, it would be when the BBC News Blog published a round-up of Bilderberg reports. Twelve months ago, this would have been barely conceivable. This year, Kissinger must be spitting chips.

• People love their ‘leaders’

I know this sounds peculiar, or at least it does to me, but this year’s Bilderbloggingshave quite commonly been met with outrage at the idea that we should submit Bilderberg to greater scrutiny. You hear people talk about the delegates at Bilderberg as their “leaders”, and you see the delegates mythologised as the greatest and the best – whose benign Olympian machinations should progress untroubled by the interference of public and press. “Leaders” like the CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, and the chairman of Kissinger Associates Inc.

I’m baffled to the point of punching tree trunks to witness the determination of some folk to throw themselves in front of these heads of corporations and presidents of banks and to wave their arms protectively, yelping: “Leave them alone! Let them strategise for the good of the world in peace! How could they possibly have a frank discussion with our politicians if we were privy to it? Stop this unseemly prying!” I mean, seriously. The day that Marcus Agius, chairman of Barclays, strategises for my good is the day he repays me the hundreds of pounds of bank charges he’s been levying on me since my schooldays. The day that Peter Voser, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, sits around a table with the express concern of making the world a better, more beautiful place for all of us, is the day that my arse grows teeth and eats my hat.

Do this: Look at the list of participants and ask yourself one simple question: what’s their bottom line?

• I’m on a list

One afternoon, towards the end of the conference, my wife and I chanced upon some of the Bilderberg organisers out on a two-limo trip to the seafront. We recognised them from our stay at the hotel before the conference began. We went up and asked them if they could confirm the names of British delegates attending this year’s meeting. In horror, they jackknifed from the promenade, back into their limos, one of them cackling weirdly and holding her handbag to her face. Another snatched a camera from the footwell, and started snapping my face as I snapped hers. You can see me give the thumbs-up in the photo. So, if I wasn’t before, I’m now on Bilderberg’s least wanted list. What a bore.

Bilderberg snaps back: my face is on its way to Leiden HQ. Photograph: Charlie Skelton

Maybe they’ll write me nice letter, asking me to cease and desist. Or maybe … maybe it’s best I state now, for the record: I’m not a communist, a fascist, a racist or a petty thief. I didn’t steal that laptop, I didn’t photograph those children, I don’t mutilate horses. I didn’t sleep with that prostitute. I don’t believe in UFOs. I don’t have sketchbooks filled with drawings of the Houses of Parliament on fire. I don’t hate progress. I am not possessed of vile feelings towards the Dutch, the Spanish, the Jews, the Mormons, the Welsh, or anyone on earth except Peruvian folk musicians. I’m not into S&M. I’ve never paid anyone to hose me with custard, or tread on my testicles in six-inch heels. I don’t spend Friday nights in a gimp suit. I’m not an adult baby. I *did* make a porn film once, but it wasn’t a very good one. Too much plot.

I’m not manically depressed, delusional, bitter towards the world, a brooding failure, a collector of SS regalia, obsessed with one particular local weather reporter, or suicidal. I didn’t raise my voice. The steps of the police station weren’t slippy. I don’t want to kill bankers or string up politicians. I don’t want to overthrow the government. I wouldn’t mind if there were fewer talent shows on TV, but it’s nothing that’s likely to spill over into bloodshed. I’m not wearing a bra. I haven’t had sex with a turkey.

• People aren’t angry enough

There were 130 people up the hill, chugging sangria and strategising. And down at the foot of the hill, on the other side of the riot vans, about 130 people with flags and cameras. My God, that’s depressing. In a world that, by any estimation, is a hard, gruelling, unfair place to billions of humans, in which assets are being grabbed, wealth is being relentlessly centralised (the Bilderbank, Goldman Sachs, has just notched up its best ever quarter, in which George Osborne so kindly lets us choose our own “austerity measures” – in such a distressingly cocked-up world, 130 of us made it all the way to the Spanish seaside to say: “Maybe what you’re strategising up there isn’t working out for the best.”

Perhaps there would have been more, but people have got other things on their mind: they’re behind on their mortgage payments, saving up for a wedding, saving up for a divorce, saving up for a holiday that doesn’t involve being detained by policemen, disenchanted by CamCleggian sameness, hotly engaged in local politics, knackered, sick, drunk, or Spelbound (in the Britain’s Got Talent sense of the word). They’re furious enough that Robert Green let that goal in, never mind anything else. Where’s the headspace to be concerned about Bilderberg?

Bertrand Russell saw it coming. He saw a world in which “any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible”. I’m surprised you’ve even got time in your day to have scrolled this far down.

• One person can make a difference

Last year, I wrote about my visit to Vouliagmeni to see what Bilderberg was all about. It wasn’t a happy trip. But in my final piece I asked people to come along in 2010 and help sprinkle the “slug” of Bilderberg with the “salt” of publicity. About 10 or so people took me up on this. Of these 10, one was “Quierosaber”, the brave fellow who crawled into the hills before sunrise, with leaves wrapped around his head, and took photos of the delegates (see our Spot the Delegate quiz, and our Bilderberg 2010 Power Gallery). In one of his photos appeared Gordon Campbell, the premier of British Columbia. The Canadian press started asking questions, and discovered that he’d paid for his plane ticket to Bilderberg using public money.

Sure, Campbell was on the quietly published list of attendees, but the difference between a list of names and a photo is incalculable. So there we have it: accountability, transparency, and none of it possible without people like Quierosaber packing a knapsack at 4am, wrapping laurel leaves round a borrowed camera and hiding under brambles.

• There’s an awful lot of unelected ‘advising’ in the world

One of the participants snapped by Quierosaber is the glacial senior fellow of the Hudson Institute, Marie-Josée Kravis, (wife of Henry Kravis, head of private equity megafirm KKR). The tax-exempt Hudson Institute is a US “thinktank” which has a clearly stated aim: “We seek to guide global leaders in government and business.” It’s funded by good and wise people like Monsanto, DuPont, Pfizer, McDonald’s, General Atomics, IBM, Proctor & Gamble, and Conrad Black (Bilderberg attendee and currently guest of Florida correctional institution).

The Hudson Institute was set up by the Rand Corporation (which had previously been set up by the Douglas Aircraft Company to advise the US military). In a nutshell, that’s who Marie-Josée Kravis works for, and that’s who George Osborne spent Bilderberg 2006, 2007, 2008 and 2009 listening to. In the words of Aretha Franklin: who’s zoomin’ who? And who the hell asked these foundations for their guidance in the first place? Stop issuing reports! Stop thinktanking! Stop presenting “well-timed recommendations to leaders in government”. Mind your own unelected business for a change. And pay some tax while you’re about it.

• There’s still no answer to the big question

I’d like to quote the prime minister, David Cameron (Bilderberg, 2008): “Greater transparency is at the heart of our shared commitment to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account … It’s your money, your government, you should know what’s going on. So we’re going to rip off that cloak of secrecy and extend transparency as far and as wide as possible.”

In the spirit of secret cloaks being ripped away, it seems reasonable to ask: does the secretive “private meeting” of Bilderberg, which takes “one-third” of its participants “from government and politics”, have any effect at all on our domestic and international policies? Does this fantastically media-shy group that has our brand newlord chancellor, Kenneth Clarke QC MP, on its inner steering committee, does this four-day conference, with its agenda and its lanyards and its side-meeting seminar rooms, does it serve to influence the way our country is run? Or is that a bit like asking: Does Amy Winehouse like a drink?

Explicitly top of Bilderberg’s agenda this year is “financial reform”. Present at this year’s conference: Paul Volcker, chairman of Obama’s economic recovery advisory board. Just after Bilderberg, Obama warns of massive layoffs of teachers, police and firefighters. Also present was Portugal’s finance minster, Fernando Teixeira dos Santos. Portugal has just voted through an emergency package of tax hikes and public spending cuts. Was any of this discussed in the financial reform sessions? If not, what was discussed?

If Bilderberg doesn’t influence public policy, then why is it four days long, and why does it spend €10m protecting the sanctity of its discussions? Why hold it at all? What a waste of busy people’s time! And if it does influence public policy, then by what twisted logic is public money being spent keeping it secret? And why, in this publicly protected secrecy, should Klaus Kleinfeld (disgraced former CEO of Siemens AG) and Dieter Zetsche (the chairman of Mercedes-Benz), and James A Johnson (board member of Goldman Sachs, member of the trilateral commission, member of the Council on Foreign Relations), have the ear of our politicians?

Cameron wants us to have the answers to these questions. As he says: “It’s your money, your government, you should know what’s going on.” So we ask: How much British public money has been used to police Bilderberg? Who’s putting the request in to MI5? Who’s paying for the watermelons? Does the Bilderberg Group have an accounts book? Could we see it? Could someone ask Ken Clarke for a copy? Isn’t it about time the Daily Telegraph got involved? Are taxpayers paying for the riot vans? Or are corporations hiring police forces as private armies to stand guard over a private meeting?

These questions are exactly as stupid and exactly as important as asking whether Sir Peter Viggers bought his own duck house. These are questions about political process that deserve simple and straightforward answers, not the scorn of idiots for asking them.

• It takes longer to get from Sitges to Santander than you might think

I missed the ferry home. And not even by a whisker. I was a good 100km out in my estimate. There was shouting and recrimination on a rain-sodden Basque motorway. I can’t believe I didn’t do what the VP of Fiat did and come by private jet.

• There are only 358 shopping days till Bilderberg 2011

Maybe you think there’s nothing to worry about here. Maybe you think Bilderberg isn’t a public-private travesty of secrecy and lies. Maybe you see nothing odd in Tony Blair (Bilderberg 1993) lying to parliament about going. Maybe you think this is how “important stuff” gets done, how geopolitics should be conducted. Maybe you think it’s okay that a representative of the Hudson Institute, which campaigns against organic food and is funded by Monsanto, should be locked in a conference centre for four days discussing the “world food problem” with Joaquín Almunia, the EU commissioner for competition.

Marching off into the sunset: but they’ll be back again for Bilderberg 2011. Photograph: Alex Amengual

Maybe you look at the world and think it’ll all be okay tomorrow because, for you at least, it’s sort of okay today. Maybe you see “social networking” and “cyber technology” on Bilderberg’s agenda and you aren’t concerned. Maybe you don’t think Peter Mandelson’s rushed-through digital economy bill had anything to do with his attendance at Bilderberg 2009.

Maybe you don’t see an irony in the individual getting screwed and screwed again by the same corporations and bailed-out banks who are so forthcoming with their advice for our politicians. Maybe you don’t feel like you’re getting shafted. Or maybe you’ve just got numb. There are plenty of other things to worry about in the world. Serious things, like health and poverty and terrorism. And anyway, the people up the hill in Bilderberg will sort it out for us. They’re clever people. They’re experts. They just spent four days talking about “medical science” and the “world food problem”. They’re on it. We can relax.

Or maybe you think it would a good thing to keep the Bilderball rolling. The massively increased coverage of this year’s Bilderberg didn’t just “happen”. People made it happen. People emailed photos to press agencies, rang up friends who worked for newspapers, gave interviews to camera crews, and a local lawyer whose wife was giving birth to twins gave pro bono advice over the phone. So here’s an idea: maybe you were given a telephoto lens three Christmases ago and you’ve never had cause to use it. Maybe you’re not sure we should start bombing Iran just yet. Maybe you’re a fan of “greater transparency”, and fancy taking Cameron up on his pledge “to enable the public to hold politicians and public bodies to account”. Maybe you’d like to meet some of the sharp, savvy, committed, interested people I’ve met this last week. Maybe you’d like to be one of them.

Borrow a tent, set up a YouTube channel, start saving now for the flight. Email us onbilderberg2011@yahoo.co.uk. Let’s add a zero to the end of 130. And let’s put an end to the lunatic, inappropriate, expensive and undemocratic secrecy of Bilderberg.

Federal Reserve makes record $52.1bn profit

admin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 22:02:54 +0000

Fed chief Ben Bernanke has made money for the US taxpayer

The Federal Reserve made a profit of $52.1bn (£32.2bn) in 2009, a rise of 47% over the previous year.

The sum allowed the central bank to pay a record $46.1bn to the US Treasury last year.

That was the largest amount ever paid by the central bank since its creation in 1914.

The record figure was largely thanks to its attempts to support the financial system throughout the ongoing financial crisis.

The Fed funds itself from its own operations and returns any profits to the Treasury department.

Taxpayer gains

The figures suggest that US taxpayers have, so far, gained money from the US government’s action in propping up the system.

Some of the profit has come from interest earned on government bonds and mortgage-related securities – including those of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The emergency lending programmes instituted by the central bank during the last year’s financial crisis helped swell the Fed’s balance sheet to more than $2tn.

They were designed to keep down interest rates and get banks lending to each other again, hoping to spark an economic recovery.

The Fed could also lose money on its holdings if it sells them at a time when they have fallen in value.

The Fed also earned money from its emergency loans to banks and other firms, such as the giant carmakers. It charged both interest and fees on these.

The Yemen Hidden Agenda: Behind the Al-Qaeda Scenarios, A Strategic Oil Transit Chokepoint

admin — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 05:16:17 +0000

by F. William Engdahl

Global Research, January 5, 2010

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On December 25 US authorities arrested a Nigerian named Abdulmutallab aboard a Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on charges of having tried to blow up the plane with smuggled explosives. Since then reports have been broadcast from CNN, the New York Times and other sources that he was “suspected” of having been trained in Yemen for his terror mission. What the world has been subjected to since is the emergence of a new target for the US ‘War on Terror,’ namely a desolate state on the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen. A closer look at the background suggests the Pentagon and US intelligence have a hidden agenda inYemen.

For some months the world has seen a steady escalation of US military involvement in Yemen, a dismally poor land adjacent to Saudi Arabia on its north, the Red Sea on its west, the Gulf of Aden on its south, opening to the Arabian Sea, overlooking another desolate land that has been in the headlines of late, Somalia. The evidence suggests that the Pentagon and US intelligence are moving to militarize a strategic chokepoint for the world’s oil flows, Bab el-Mandab, and using the Somalia piracy incident, together with claims of a new Al Qaeda threat arising from Yemen, to militarize one of the world’s most important oil transport routes. In addition, undeveloped petroleum reserves in the territory between Yemen and Saudi Arabia are reportedly among the world’s largest.

The 23-year-old Nigerian man charged with the failed bomb attempt, Abdulmutallab, reportedly has been talking, claiming he was sent on his mission by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), based in Yemen. This has conveniently turned the world’s attention on Yemen as a new center of the alleged Al Qaeda terror organization.

Notably, Bruce Riedel, a 30-year CIA veteran who advised President Obama on the policy leading to the Afghan troop surge, wrote in his blog of the alleged ties of the Detroit bomber to Yemen, “The attempt to destroy Northwest Airlines Flight 253 en route from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day underscores the growing ambition of Al Qaeda’s Yemen franchise, which has grown from a largely Yemeni agenda to become a player in the global Islamic jihad in the last year…The weak Yemeni government of President Ali Abdallah Salih, which has never fully controlled the country and now faces a host of growing problems, will need significant American support to defeat AQAP.”[1].

Some basic Yemen geopolitics

Before we can say much about the latest incident, it is useful to look more closely at the Yemen situation. Here several things stand out as peculiar when stacked against Washington’s claims about a resurgent Al Qaeda organization in the Arabian Peninsula.

In early 2009 the chess pieces on the Yemeni board began to move. Tariq al-Fadhli, a former jihadist leader originally from South Yemen, broke a 15 year alliance with the Yemeni government of President Ali Abdullah Saleh and announced he was joining the broad-based opposition coalition known as the Southern Movement (SM). Al-Fadhli had been a member of the Mujahideen movement in Afghanistan in the late 1980’s. His break with the government was reported in Arab and Yemeni media in April 2009. Al-Fadhli’s break with the Yemen dictatorship gave new power to the Southern Movement (SM). He has since become a leading figure in the alliance.

Yemen itself is a synthetic amalgam created after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990, when the southern Peoples’ Democratic Republic of Yemen (PDRY) lost its main foreign sponsor. Unification of the northern Yemen Arab Republic and the southern PDRY state led to a short-lived optimism that ended in a brief civil war in 1994, as southern army factions organized a revolt against what they saw as the corrupt crony state rule of northern President Ali Abdullah Saleh. President Saleh has held a one-man rule since 1978, first as President of North Yemen (the Yemen Arab Republic) and since 1990 as President of the unified new Yemen. The southern army revolt failed as Saleh enlisted al-Fadhli and other Yemeni Salafists, followers of a conservative interpretation of Islam, and jihadists to fight the formerly Marxist forces of the Yemen Socialist Party in the south.

Before 1990, Washington and the Saudi Kingdom backed and supported Saleh and his policy of Islamization as a bid to contain the communist south.[2] Since then Saleh has relied on a strong Salafist-jihadi movement to retain a one-man dictatorial rule. The break with Saleh by al-Fadhli and his joining the southern opposition group with his former socialist foes marked a major setback for Saleh.

Soon after al-Fadhli joined the Southern Movement coalition, on April 28, 2009 protests in the southern Yemeni provinces of Lahj, Dalea and Hadramout intensified. There were demonstrations by tens of thousands of dismissed military personnel and civil servants demanding better pay and benefits, demonstrations that had been taking place in growing numbers since 2006. The April demonstrations included for the first time a public appearance by al-Fadhli. His appearance served to change a long moribund southern socialist movement into a broader nationalist campaign. It also galvanized President Saleh, who then called on Saudi Arabia and other Gulf Cooperation Council states for help, warning that the entire Arabian Peninsula would suffer the consequences.

Complicating the picture in what some call a failed state, in the north Saleh faces an al-Houthi Zaydi Shi’ite rebellion. On September 11, 2009, in an Al-Jazeera TV interview, Saleh accused Iraq’s Shi’ite opposition leader, Muqtada al-Sadr, and also Iran, of backing the north Yemen Shi’ite Houthist rebels in an Al-Jazeera TV interview. Yemen’s Saleh declared, “We cannot accuse the Iranian official side, but the Iranians are contacting us, saying that they are prepared for a mediation. This means that the Iranians have contacts with them [the Houthists], given that they want to mediate between the Yemeni government and them. Also, Muqtada al-Sadr in al-Najaf in Iraq is asking that he be accepted as a mediator. This means they have a link.”[3]

Yemen authorities claim they have seized caches of weapons made in Iran, while the Houthists claim to have captured Yemeni equipment with Saudi Arabian markings, accusing Sana’a (the capital of Yemen and site of the US Embassy) of acting as a Saudi proxy. Iran has rejected claims that Iranian weapons were found in north Yemen, calling claims of support to the rebels as baseless. [4]

What about Al Qaeda?

The picture that emerges is one of a desperate US-backed dictator, Yemen’s President Saleh, increasingly losing control after two decades as despotic ruler of the unified Yemen. Economic conditions in the country took a drastic downward slide in 2008 when world oil prices collapsed. Some 70% of the state revenues derive from Yemen’s oil sales. The central government of Saleh sits in former North Yemen in Sana’a, while the oil is in former South Yemen. Yet Saleh controls the oil revenue flows. Lack of oil revenue has made Saleh’s usual option of buying off opposition groups all but impossible.

Into this chaotic domestic picture comes the January 2009 announcement, prominently featured in select Internet websites, that Al Qaeda, the alleged global terrorist organization created by the late CIA-trained Saudi, Osama bin Laden, has opened a major new branch in Yemen for both Yemen and Saudi operations.

Al Qaeda in Yemen released a statement through online jihadist forums Jan. 20, 2009 from the group’s leader Nasir al-Wahayshi, announcing formation of a single al Qaeda group for the Arabian Peninsula under his command. According to al-Wahayshi, the new group, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, would consist of his former Al Qaeda in Yemen, as well as members of the defunct Saudi Al Qaeda group. The press release claimed, interestingly enough, that a Saudi national, a former Guantanamo detainee (Number 372), Abu-Sayyaf al-Shihri, would serve as al-Wahayshi’s deputy.

Days later an online video from al-Wahayshi appeared under the alarming title, “We Start from Here and We Will Meet at al-Aqsa.” Al-Aqsa refers to the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that Jews know as Temple Mount, the site of the destroyed Temple of Solomon, which Muslims call Al Haram Al Sharif. The video threatens Muslim leaders — including Yemeni’s President Saleh, the Saudi royal family, and Egyptian President Mubarak — and promises to take the jihad from Yemen to Israel to “liberate” Muslim holy sites and Gaza, something that would likely detonate World War III if anyone were mad enough to do it.

Also in that video, in addition to former Guantanamo inmate al-Shihri, is a statement from Abu-al-Harith Muhammad al-Awfi, identified as a field commander in the video, and allegedly former Guantanamo detainee 333. As it is well-established that torture methods are worthless to obtain truthful confessions, some have speculated that the real goal of CIA and Pentagon interrogators at Guantanamo prison since September 2001, has been to use brutal techniques to train or recruit sleeper terrorists who can be activated on command by US intelligence, a charge difficult to prove or disprove. The presence of two such high-ranking Guantanamo graduates in the new Yemen-based Al Qaeda is certainly ground for questioning.

Al Qaeda in Yemen is apparently anathema to al-Fadhli and the enlarged mass-based Southern Movement. In an interview, al-Fadhli declared, “I have strong relations with all of the jihadists in the north and the south and everywhere, but not with al-Qaeda.”[5] That has not hindered Saleh from claiming the Southern Movement and al Qaeda are one and the same, a convenient way to insure backing from Washington.

According to US intelligence reports, there are a grand total of perhaps 200 Al Qaeda members in southern Yemen. [6]

Al-Fadhli gave an interview distancing himself from al Qaeda in May 2009, declaring, “We [in South Yemen] have been invaded 15 years ago and we are under a vicious occupation. So we are busy with our cause and we do not look at any other cause in the world. We want our independence and to put an end to this occupation.”[7] Conveniently, the same day, Al Qaeda made a large profile declaring its support for southern Yemen’s cause.

On May 14, in an audiotape released on the internet, al-Wahayshi, leader of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, expressed sympathy with the people of the southern provinces and their attempt to defend themselves against their “oppression,” declaring, “What is happening in Lahaj, Dhali, Abyan and Hadramaut and the other southern provinces cannot be approved. We have to support and help [the southerners].” He promised retaliation: “The oppression against you will not pass without punishment… the killing of Muslims in the streets is an unjustified major crime.” [8]

The curious emergence of a tiny but well-publicized al Qaeda in southern Yemen amid what observers call a broad-based popular-based Southern Movement front that eschews the radical global agenda of al Qaeda, serves to give the Pentagon a kind of casus belli to escalate US military operations in the strategic region.

Indeed, after declaring that the Yemen internal strife was Yemen’s own affair, President Obama ordered air strikes in Yemen. The Pentagon claimed its attacks on December 17 and 24 killed three key al Qaeda leaders but no evidence has yet proven this. Now the Christmas Day Detroit bomber drama gives new life to Washington’s “War on Terror” campaign in Yemen. Obama has now offered military assistance to the Saleh Yemen government.

Somali Pirates escalate as if on cue

As if on cue, at the same time CNN headlines broadcast new terror threats from Yemen, the long-running Somalia pirate attacks on commercial shipping in the same Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea across from southern Yemen escalated dramatically after having been reduced by multinational ship patrols.

On December 29, Moscow’s RAI Novosti reported that Somali pirates seized a Greek cargo vessel in the Gulf of Aden off Somalia’s coast. Earlier the same day a British-flagged chemical tanker and its 26 crew were also seized in the Gulf of Aden. In a sign of sophisticated skills in using western media, pirate commander Mohamed Shakir told the British newspaper The Times by phone, “We have hijacked a ship with [a] British flag in the Gulf of Aden late yesterday.” The US intelligence brief, Stratfor, reports that The Times, owned by neo-conservative financial backer, Rupert Murdoch, is sometimes used by Israeli intelligence to plant useful stories.

The two latest events brought a record number of attacks and hijackings for 2009. As of December 22, attacks by Somali pirates in the Gulf of Aden and the east coast of Somalia numbered 174, with 35 vessels hijacked and 587 crew taken hostage so far in 2009, almost all successful pirate activity, according to the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Center. The open question is, who is providing the Somali “pirates” with arms and logistics sufficient to elude international patrols from numerous nations?

Notably, on January 3, President Saleh got a phone call from Somali president Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed in which he briefed president Saleh on latest developments in Somalia. Sheikh Sharif, whose own base in Mogadishu is so weak he is sometimes referred to as President of Mogadishu Airport, told Saleh he would share information with Saleh about any terror activities that might be launched from Somali territories targeting stability and security of Yemen and the region.

The Oil chokepoint and other oily affairs

The strategic significance of the region between Yemen and Somalia becomes the point of geopolitical interest. It is the site of Bab el-Mandab, one of what the US Government lists as seven strategic world oil shipping chokepoints. The US Government Energy Information Agency states that “closure of the Bab el-Mandab could keep tankers from the Persian Gulf from reaching the Suez Canal/Sumed pipeline complex, diverting them around the southern tip of Africa. The Strait of Bab el-Mandab is a chokepoint between the horn of Africa and the Middle East, and a strategic link between the Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean.” [9]

Bab el-Mandab, between Yemen, Djibouti, and Eritrea connects the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea. Oil and other exports from the Persian Gulf must pass through Bab el-Mandab before entering the Suez Canal. In 2006, the Energy Department in Washington reported that an estimated 3.3 million barrels a day of oil flowed through this narrow waterway to Europe, the United States, and Asia. Most oil, or some 2.1 million barrels a day, goes north through the Bab el-Mandab to the Suez/Sumed complex into the Mediterranean.

An excuse for a US or NATO militarization of the waters around Bab el-Mandab would give Washington another major link in its pursuit of control of the seven most critical oil chokepoints around the world, a major part of any future US strategy aimed at denying oil flows to China, the EU or any region or country that opposes US policy. Given that significant flows of Saudi oil pass through Bab el-Mandab, a US military control there would serve to deter the Saudi Kingdom from becoming serious about transacting future oil sales with China or others no longer in dollars, as was recently reported by UK Independent journalist Robert Fisk.

It would also be in a position to threaten China’s oil transport from Port Sudan on the Red Sea just north of Bab el-Mandab, a major lifeline in China’s national energy needs.

In addition to its geopolitical position as a major global oil transit chokepoint, Yemen is reported to hold some of the world’s greatest untapped oil reserves. Yemen’s Masila Basin and Shabwa Basin are reported by international oil companies to contain “world class discoveries.”[10] France’s Total and several smaller international oil companies are engaged in developing Yemen’s oil production. Some fifteen years ago I was told in a private meeting with a well-informed Washington insider that Yemen contained “enough undeveloped oil to fill the oil demand of the entire world for the next fifty years.” Perhaps there is more to Washington’s recent Yemen concern than a rag-tag al Qaeda whose very existence as a global terror organization has been doubted by seasoned Islamic experts.

F. William Engdahl is the author of Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order

Notes

1. Bruce Riedel, The Menace of Yemen, December 31, 2009, accessed in http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-12-31/the-menace-of-yemen/?cid=tag:all1.

2. Stratfor, Yemen: Intensifying Problems for the Government, May 7, 2009.
3. Cited in Terrorism Monitor, Yemen President Accuses Iraq’s Sadrists of Backing the Houthi Insurgency, Jamestown Foundation, Volume: 7 Issue: 28, September 17, 2009.

4. NewsYemen, September 8, 2009; Yemen Observer, September 10, 2009.

5. Albaidanew.com, May 14, 2009, cited in Jamestown Foundation, op.cit.

6. Abigail Hauslohner, Despite U.S. Aid, Yemen Faces Growing al-Qaeda Threat, Time, December 22, 2009, accessed inwww.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1949324,00.html#ixzz0be0NL7Cv.

7. Tariq al Fadhli, in Al-Sharq al-Awsat, May 14, 2009, cited in Jamestown Foundation, op. cit.

8. al-Wahayshi interview, al Jazeera, May 14, 2009.

9. US Government, Department of Energy, Energy Information Administration, Bab el-Mandab, accessed inhttp://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/World_Oil_Transit_Chokepoints/Full.html.

10 Adelphi Energy, Yemen Exploration Blocks 7 & 74, accessed in http://www.adelphienergy.com.au/projects/Proj_Yemen.php.

Dope Inc. on the Subcontinent

admin — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 01:12:58 +0000

Obama and Afghanistan: America’s Drug-Corrupted War

by Peter Dale Scott

Global Research, January 1, 2010

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The presidential electoral campaign of Barack Obama in 2008, it was thought, “changed the political debate in a party and a country that desperately needed to take a new direction.”[1] Like most preceding presidential winners dating back at least to John F. Kennedy, what moved voters of all descriptions to back Obama was the hope he offered of significant change. Yet within a year Obama has taken decisive steps, not just to continue America’s engagement in Bush’s Afghan War, but significantly to enlarge it into Pakistan. If this was change of a sort, it was a change that few voters desired.

Those of us convinced that a war machine prevails in Washington were not surprised. The situation was similar to the disappointment experienced with Jimmy Carter: Carter was elected in 1976 with a promise to cut the defense budget. Instead, he initiated both an expansion of the defense budget and also an expansion of U.S. influence into the Indian Ocean.[2]

As I wrote in The Road to 9/11, after Carter’s election

It appeared on the surface that with the blessing of David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, the traditional U.S. search for unilateral domination would be abandoned. But…the 1970s were a period in which a major “intellectual counterrevolution” was mustered, to mobilize conservative opinion with the aid of vast amounts of money…. By the time SALT II was signed in 1979, Carter had consented to significant new weapons programs and arms budget increases (reversing his campaign pledge).[3]

I noted further that the complex strategy for reversing Carter’s promises was revived for a new mobilization in the 1990s during the Clinton presidency, in which a commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld was prominent.[4]

The Vietnam War as a Template for Afghanistan

It is as if Washington had emerged with only one objective from America’s failure in Vietnam: the urge to do it again and get it right. But the principal obstacle to victory in Afghanistan is the same as in Vietnam: the lack of a viable government to defend. The importance of this similarity has been stressed by Thomas H. Johnson, coordinator of anthropological research studies at the Naval Postgraduate School, and his co-author Chris Mason. In their memorable phrase, “the Vietnam War is less a metaphor for the conflict in Afghanistan than it is a template:”

It is an oft-cited maxim that in all the conflicts of the past century, the United States has refought its last war. A number of analysts and journalists have mentioned the war in Vietnam recently in connection with Afghanistan.1 Perhaps fearful of taking this analogy too far, most have backed away from it. They should not—the Vietnam War is less a metaphor for the conflict in Afghanistan than it is a template. For eight years, the United States has engaged in an almost exact political and military reenactment of the Vietnam War, and the lack of self-awareness of the repetition of events 50 years ago is deeply disturbing.[5]

Many of the common features of an unpopular corrupted government have been well summarized by Johnson and Mason. In their words, quoting Jeffrey Record,

“the fundamental political obstacle to an enduring American success in Vietnam [was] a politically illegitimate, militarily feckless, and thoroughly corrupted South Vietnamese client regime.” Substitute the word “Afghanistan” for the words “South Vietnam” in these quotations and the descriptions apply precisely to today’s government in Kabul. Like Afghanistan, South Vietnam at the national level was a massively corrupt collection of self-interested warlords, many of them deeply implicated in the profitable opium trade, with almost nonexistent legitimacy outside the capital city. The purely military gains achieved at such terrible cost in our nation’s blood and treasure in Vietnam never came close to exhausting the enemy’s manpower pool or his will to fight, and simply could not be sustained politically by a venal and incompetent set of dysfunctional state institutions where self-interest was the order of the day.[6]

If Johnson had written a little later, he might have added that a major CIA asset in Afghanistan was Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of President Hamid Karzai; and that Ahmed Wali Karzai was a major drug trafficker who used his private force to help arrange a flagrantly falsified election result.[7] This is a fairly exact description of Ngo dinh Nhu in Vietnam, President Ngo dinh Diem’s brother, an organizer of the Vietnamese drug traffic whose dreaded Can Lao secret police helped, among other things, to organize a falsified election result there.[8]

This pattern of a corrupt near relative, often involved in drugs, is a recurring feature of regimes installed or supported by U.S. influence. There were similar allegations about Chiang Kai-shek’s brother-in-law T.V. Soong, Mexican President Echevarría’s brother-in-law Rubén Zuno Arce, and the Shah of Iran’s sister. In the case of Ngo dinh Nhu, it was the absence of a popular base for his externally installed presidential brother that led to drug involvement, “to provide the necessary funding” for political repression.[9] This analogy to the Karzais is pertinent.

An additional similarity, not noted by Johnson, is that America initially engaged in Vietnam in support of an embattled and unpopular minority, the Roman Catholics who had thrived under the French. America has twice made the same mistake in Afghanistan. Initially, after the Russian invasion of 1980, the bulk of American aid went to Gulbeddin Hekmatyar, a leader both insignificant in and unpopular with the mujahedin resistance; the CIA is said to have supported Hekmatyar, who became a drug trafficker to compensate for his lack of a popular base, because he was the preferred client of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which distributed American and Saudi aid.

When America re-engaged in 2001, it was to support the Northern Alliance, a drug-trafficking Tajik-Uzbek minority coalition hateful to the Pashtun majority south of the Hindu Kush. Just as America’s initial commitment to the Catholic Diem family fatally alienated the Vietnamese countryside, so the American presence inAfghanistan is weakened by its initial dependence on the Tajiks of the minority Northern Alliance. (The Roman Catholic minority in Vietnam at least shared a language with the Buddhists in the countryside. The Tajiks speak Dari, a version of Persian unintelligible to the Pashtun majority.)

According to an important article by Gareth Porter,

Contrary to the official portrayal of the Afghan National Army (ANA) as ethnically balanced, the latest data from U.S. sources reveal that the Tajik minority now accounts for far more of its troops than the Pashtuns, the country’s largest ethnic group.…. Tajik domination of the ANA feeds Pashtun resentment over the control of the country’s security institutions by their ethnic rivals, while Tajiks increasingly regard the Pashtun population as aligned with the Taliban.

The leadership of the army has been primarily Tajik since the ANA was organised in 2002, and Tajiks have been overrepresented in the officer corps from the beginning. But the original troop composition of the ANA was relatively well-balanced ethnically. The latest report of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, issued Oct. 30, shows that Tajiks, which represent 25 percent of the population, now account for 41 percent of all ANA troops who have been trained, and that only 30 percent of the ANA trainees are now Pashtuns. A key reason for the predominance of Tajik troops is that the ANA began to have serious problems recruiting troops in the rural areas of Kandahar and Helmand provinces by mid-2007.[10]

This problem derives from a major strategic error committed by the U.S. first in Vietnam and now repeated: the effort to impose central state authority on a country that had always been socially and culturally diverse.[11] Johnson and Mason illustrate Diem’s lack of legitimacy with a quote from Eric Bergerud:

The Government of Vietnam (GVN) lacked legitimacy with the rural peasantry, the largest segment of the population…The peasantry perceived the GVN to be aloof, corrupt, and inefficient…South Vietnam’s urban elite possessed the outward manifestations of a foreign culture…more importantly, this small group held most of the wealth and power in a poor nation, and the attitude of the ruling elite toward the rural population was, at best, paternalistic and, at worst, predatory.[12]

Thomas Johnson rightly deplores the U.S. effort to impose Kabul’s will on an even more diverse Afghanistan. As he has written elsewhere,

The characterization of Afghanistan by the 19th Century British diplomat Sir Henry Rawlinson as `consist[ing] of a mere collection of tribes, of unequal power and divergent habits, which are held together more or less closely, according to the personal character of the chief who rules them. The feeling of patriotism, as it is known in Europe, cannot exist among Afghans, for there is no common country’ is still true today and suggests critical nuances for any realistic Afghanistan reconstruction and future political agenda.”[13]

According to Thomas Johnson, the first eight years of the U.S. in Afghanistan have also seen the Army repeating the strategy of targeting the enemy that failed inVietnam:

Since 2002, the prosecution of the war in Afghanistan—at all levels—has been based on an implied strategy of attrition via clearing operations virtually identical to those pursued in Vietnam. In Vietnam, they were dubbed “search and destroy missions;” in Afghanistan they are called “clearing operations” and “compound searches,” but the purpose is the same—to find easily replaced weapons or clear a tiny, arbitrarily chosen patch of worthless ground for a short period, and then turn it over to indigenous security forces who can’t hold it, and then go do it again somewhere else…. General McChrystal is the first American commander since the war began to understand that protecting the people, not chasing illiterate teenage boys with guns around the countryside, is the basic principle of counterinsurgency. Yet four months into his command, little seems to have changed, except for an eight-year overdue order to stop answering the enemy’s prayers by blowing up compounds with air strikes to martyr more of the teenage boys[14]

Johnson and Mason’s depiction of the Vietnam template underlying Afghanistan is important. But there is a glaring omission in their description of power in the Afghan countryside:

When it is in equilibrium, rural Afghan society is a triangle of power formed by the tribal elders, the mullahs, and the government…. In times of peace and stability, the longest side of the triangle is that of the tribal elders, constituted through the jirga system. The next longest, but much shorter side is that of the mullahs. Traditionally and historically, the government side is a microscopic short segment. However, after 30 years of blowback from the Islamization of the Pashtun begun by General Zia in Pakistan and accelerated by the Soviet-Afghan War, the religious side of the triangle has become the longest side of jihad has grown stronger and more virulent.

This remains true, but is dated by its omission of drug-trafficking, and the militias supported by drug-trafficking, which since 1980 have become a more and more important element in the power-balance. Sometimes the drug-traffic adds to the power of tribal elders like Jalaluddin Haqqani or Haji Bashir Noorzai, with tribal drug networks often passed from father to son. But today one of the most important power-holders is the drug-trafficker Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a Ghilzai Pashtun from the north without a significant tribal base. Hekmatyar is much like General Dan Van Quang during the Vietnam War, in that his power continues to depend in part on his sophisticated heroin trafficking network in Afghanistan’s Kunar and Nuristan provinces.[15]

The more we recognize that today drugs are a major factor in both the economy and the power structure of Afghanistan, the more we must recognize that an even better template for the Afghan war is not the Vietnam war, where drugs were important but not central, but the CIA’s drug-funded undeclared war in Laos, 1959-75.

Afghanistan and the Laos Template

I have quoted at great length from Johnson’s pessimistic essay in Military Review, partly because I believe it deserves to be read by a non-military audience, but also because I believe that his excellent analogies to Vietnam are even more pertinent if we recall the CIA’s hopeless fiasco in Laos.

Vietnam, for all its problems with Catholic and Montagnard minorities, was essentially a state with a single language and a single, French-imposed system of law.Laos, in contrast, was little more than an arbitrary collection of about 100 tribes with different languages, in which the dominant Tai-speaking Lao Loum tribes compromised, in the 1960s, little more than half of the total population. Faced with an intractable mountainous terrain, the French wisely devoted little energy to establishing a central power in Laos, which then had one capital for the north and another for the south.[16] Like Afghanistan and in contrast to Nepal, Laosremained and remains one of the world’s last countries without a railroad.

To supplement their own minimal presence in Laos, the French relied on two minorities with two completely different non-Tai languages, the Vietnamese and the Méo or Hmong. The protracted French war in Indochina produced two combating armies in Laos, the pro-French Royal Laotian Army, in uneasy alliance with Hmong guerrillas, and the pro-Vietnamese Pathet Lao.

Thus Laos, when it became nominally independent in 1954, was a quasi-state with two armies, a collection of tribes with different languages and customs, and tribe-dividing borders defined arbitrarily to suit western convenience. All this might have remained relatively stable, had not Americans arrived with naïve notions of “nation-building.” Misguided efforts to establish a strong central government rapidly produced two dominating consequences: massive corruption (even worse than Vietnam’s), and civil war.[17]

It would appear that the CIA in Laos, reflecting the opposition of the Dulles brothers to any form of neutralism, intended to divide the country and make it an anti-Communist battlefield, rather than let it slumber quietly under the guidance of its first post-French prime minister, the neutralist Souvanna Phouma (nephew of the king). A CIA officer told Time magazine in 1961 that the CIA’s aim “was to ‘polarize’ the communist and anti-communist factions in Laos.”[18] If this was truly the aim, the CIA succeeded, creating a conflict in which the U.S. dropped more than two million tons of bombs on one part of Laos, more than in both Europe and the Pacific during World War Two.[19]

Despite this absurd and criminal U.S. over-commitment, the end result was to turn Laos, a profoundly Buddhist nation with an anti-Vietnamese bias, into what is nominally one of the last remaining Communist countries in the world. And our principal ally, a Hmong faction allied earlier with the French, suffered devastating, almost genocidal casualties. (The London Guardian charged in 1971 that Hmong villages who “try to find their own way out of the war – even if it is simply by staying neutral and refusing to send their 13-year-olds to fight in the CIA army – are immediately denied American rice and transport, and ultimately bombed by the U.S. Air Force.”)[20]

No one has ever claimed that in Laos, as opposed to Vietnam, “the system worked,”[21] or that the U.S. might have prevailed had it not been for faulty decision-making at the civilian level.[22] From a humanitarian standpoint, America’s campaign in Laos, was from the outset a disaster if not indeed a major war crime. Only one faction profited from that war, international drug traffickers – whether Corsican, Nationalist Chinese, or American.

With the beginning of CIA support for him in 1959, the CIA’s client Phoumi Nosavan, for the first time, directly involved his army in the opium traffic, “as an alternative source of income for his [Laotian] army and government…. This decision ultimately led to the growth of northwest Laos as one of the largest heroin-producing centers in the world” in the late 1960s.[23] (The CIA not only supported General Ouan Rattikone (Phoumi’s successor) and his drug-funded army, it even supplied airplanes to senior Laotian generals which soon “ran opium for them” without interference.)[24] Conversely, when the US withdrew from Laos in the 1970s, opium production plummeted, from an estimated 200 tons in 1975 to 30 tons in 1984.[25]

America’s Addiction to Drug-Assisted War: Afghanistan the 1980s

It is hard to demonstrate the CIA, when unilaterally initiating a military conflict in Laos in 1959, foresaw the resulting huge increase in Laotian opium production. But two decades later this experience did not deter Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, from unilaterally initiating contact with drug-trafficking Afghans in 1978 and 1979.

It is clear that this time the Carter White House foresaw the drug consequences. In 1980 White House drug advisor David Musto told the White House Strategy Council on Drug Abuse that “we were going into Afghanistan to support the opium growers…. Shouldn’t we try to avoid what we had done in Laos?”[26] Denied access by the CIA to data to which he was legally entitled, Musto took his concerns public in May 1980, noting in a New York Times Op Ed that Golden Crescent heroin was already (and for the first time) causing a medical crisis in New York. And he warned, presciently, that “this crisis is bound to worsen.”[27]

The CIA, in conjunction with its creation the Iranian intelligence agency SAVAK, was initially trying to move to the right the regime of Afghan president Mohammed Daoud Khan, whose objectionable policy (like that of Souvanna Phouma before him) was to maintain good relations with both the Soviet Union and the west. In 1978 SAVAK- and CIA-supported Islamist agents soon arrived from Iran “with bulging bankrolls,” trying to mobilize a purge of left-wing officers in the army and a clamp-down on their party the PDPA. The result of this provocative polarization was the same as in Laos: a confrontation in which the left, and not the right, soon prevailed. In a coup that was at least partly defensive, left-wing officers overthrew and killed Daoud; they installed in his place a left-wing regime so extreme and unpopular that by 1980 the USSR (as Brzezinski had predicted) intervened to install a more moderate faction.[29]

By May 1979 the CIA was in touch with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahedin warlord with perhaps the smallest following inside Afghanistan, and also the leadingmujahedin drug-trafficker.[30] Hekmatyar, famous for throwing acid in the faces of women not wearing burkas, was not the choice of the Afghan resistance, but of the Pakistani intelligence service (ISI), perhaps because he was the only Afghan leader willing to accept the British-drawn Durand Line as the Afghan-Pakistan boundary. As an Afghan leader in 1994 told Tim Weiner of the New York Times:

“We didn’t choose these leaders. The United States made Hekmatyar by giving him his weapons. Now we want the United States to shake these leaders and make them stop the killing, to save us from them.”[31]

Robert D. Kaplan reported his personal experience that Hekmatyar was “loathed by all the other party leaders, fundamentalist and moderate alike.”[32]

This decision by ISI and CIA belies the usual American rhetoric that the US was assisting an Afghan liberation movement.[33] In the next decade of anti-Soviet resistance, more than half of America’s aid went to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who soon became “one of Afghanistan’s leading drug lords.” Brzezinski was also soon in contact with Pakistan’s emissary Fazle ul-Haq, a man who by 1982 would be listed by Interpol as an international narcotics trafficker.[34]

The consequences were swiftly felt in America, where heroin from the Golden Crescent, negligible before 1979, amounted in 1980 to 60 percent of the U.S.market.[35] And by 1986, for the first time, the region supplied 70 percent of the high-grade heroin in the world, and supplied a new army of 650,000 addicts inPakistan itself. Witnesses confirmed that the drug was shipped out of the area on the same Pakistan Army trucks which shipped in “covert” US military aid.[36] Yet before 1986 the only high-level heroin bust in Pakistan was made at the insistence of a single Norwegian prosecutor; none were instigated by the seventeen narcotics officers in the U.S. Embassy. Eight tons of Afghan-Pakistani morphine base from a single Pakistani source supplied the Sicilian mafia “Pizza Connection” inNew York, said by the FBI supervisor on the case to have been responsible for 80% of the heroin reaching the United States between 1978 and 1984.[37]

Meanwhile, CIA Director William Casey appears to have promoted a plan suggested to him in 1980 by the former French intelligence chief Alexandre de Marenches, that the CIA supply drugs on the sly to Soviet troops.[38] Although de Marenches subsequently denied that the plan, Operation Mosquito, went forward, there are reports that heroin, hashish, and even cocaine from Latin America soon reached Soviet troops; and that along with the CIA-ISI-linked bank BCCI, “a few American intelligence operatives were deeply enmeshed in the drug trade” before the war was over.[39] Maureen Orth heard from Mathea Falco, head of International Narcotics Control for the State Department under Jimmy Carter, that the CIA and ISI together encouraged the mujahedin to addict the Soviet troops.[40]

America’s Return in 2001, Again With the Support of Drug-Traffickers

The social costs of this drug-assisted war are still with us: there are said, for example, to be now five million heroin addicts in Pakistan alone. And yet America in 2001 decided to do it again: to try, with the assistance of drug traffickers, to impose nation-building on a quasi-state with at least a dozen major ethnic groups speaking unrelated languages. In a close analogy to the use of the Hmong in Laos, America initiated its Afghan campaign in 2001 in concert with a distinct minority, the Tajik-dominated Northern Alliance. In a closer analogy still, the CIA in 2000 (in the last weeks of Clinton’s presidency) chose as its principal ally Ahmad Shah Massoud of the Northern Alliance, despite the objection of other national security advisers that “Massoud was a drug trafficker; if the CIA established a permanent base [with him] in the Panjshir, it risked entanglement with the heroin trade.”[41]

There was no ambiguity about the U.S. intention to use drug traffickers to initiate its ground position in Afghanistan. The CIA mounted its coalition against the Taliban in 2001 by recruiting and even importing drug traffickers, usually old assets from the 1980s. An example was Haji Zaman who had retired to Dijon inFrance, whom “British and American officials…met with and persuaded … to return to Afghanistan.”[42]

In Afghanistan in 2001 as in 1980, and as in Laos in 1959, the U.S. intervention has since been a bonanza for the international drug syndicates. With the increase of chaos in the countryside, and number of aircraft flying in and out of the country, opium production more than doubled, from 3276 metric tonnes in 2000 (and 185 in 2001, the year of a Taliban ban on opium) to 8,200 metric tonnes in 2007.

Why does the U.S. intervene repeatedly on the same side as the most powerful local drug traffickers? Some years ago I summarized the conventional wisdom on this matter:

Partly this has been from realpolitik – in recognition of the local power realities represented by the drug traffic. Partly it has been from the need to escape domestic political restraints: the traffickers have supplied additional financial resources needed because of US budgetary limitations, and they have also provided assets not bound (as the U.S. is) by the rules of war. … These facts…have led to enduring intelligence networks involving both oil and drugs, or more specifically both petrodollars and narcodollars. These networks, particularly in the Middle East, have become so important that they affect, not just the conduct of US foreign policy, but the health and behavior of the US government, US banks and corporations, and indeed the whole of US society.[43]

Persuaded in part by the analysis of authors like Michel Chossudovsky and James Petras, I would now stress more heavily that American banks, as well as oil majors, benefit significantly from drug trafficking. A Senate staff report has estimated “that $500 billion to $1 trillion in criminal proceeds are laundered through banks worldwide each year, with about half of that amount moved through United States banks.”[44] The London Independent reported in 2004 that drug trafficking constitutes “the third biggest global commodity in cash terms after oil and the arms trade.”[45]

Petras concludes that the U.S. economy has become a narco-capitalist one, dependent on the hot or dirty money, much of it from the drug traffic.

As Senator Levin summarizes the record: “Estimates are that $500 billion to $1 trillion of international criminal proceeds are moved internationally and deposited into bank accounts annually. It is estimated half of that money comes to the United States”….

Washington and the mass media have portrayed the U.S. in the forefront of the struggle against narco trafficking, drug laundering and political corruption: the image is of clean white hands fighting dirty money from the Third world (or the ex-Communist countries). The truth is exactly the opposite. U.S. banks have developed a highly elaborate set of policies for transferring illicit funds to the U.S., investing those funds in legitimate businesses or U.S. government bonds and legitimating them. The U.S. Congress has held numerous hearings, provided detailed exposés of the illicit practices of the banks, passed several laws and called for stiffer enforcement by any number of public regulators and private bankers. Yet the biggest banks continue their practices, the sums of dirty money grows exponentially, because both the State and the banks have neither the will nor the interest to put an end to the practices that provide high profits and buttress an otherwise fragile empire.[46]

In the wake of the 2008 economic crisis, this analysis found support from the claim of Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, that “Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis.” According to the London Observer, Costa

said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result…. Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. “In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor,” he said.[47]

Why This Drug-Corrupted War Will Continue

Thus the war machine that co-opted Obama into his incipient escalations of an unwinnable war is not just a bureaucratic cabal inside Washington. It is solidly grounded in and supported by a wide coalition of forces in our society. For this reason the war machine will not be dissuaded by sensible advice from within the establishment, such as the recommendation for Afghan counterterrorism from the RAND Corporation:

Minimize the use of U.S. military force. In most operations against al Qa’ida, local military forces frequently have more legitimacy to operate and a better understanding of the operating environment than U.S. forces have. This means a light U.S. military footprint or none at all.[48]

It will not be dissuaded by the conclusion of a recent study for the Carnegie Endowment that “the presence of foreign troops is the most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban.”[49] To justify its global strategic posture of what it calls “full-spectrum dominance,” the Pentagon badly needs the “war against terror” in Afghanistan, just as a decade ago it needed the counter-productive “war against drugs” in Colombia.

Full-spectrum dominance is of course not just an end in itself, it is also lobbied for by far-flung American corporations overseas, especially oil companies like Exxon Mobil with huge investments in Kazakhstan and elsewhere in Central Asia. As Michael Klare noted in his book Resource Wars, a secondary objective of the U.S.campaign in Afghanistan was “to consolidate U.S. power in the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea area, and to ensure continued flow of oil.”[50]

The global drug traffic itself will continue to benefit from the protracted conflict generated by “full-spectrum dominance” in Afghanistan, and some of the beneficiaries may have been secretly lobbying for it. And I fear that all the client intelligence assets organized about the movement of Afghan heroin throughCentral Asia and beyond will, without a clear change in policy, continue as before to be protected by the CIA. And America’s superbanks like Citibank – the banks allegedly “too big to fail” – are now since the downturn even more dependant than before on the hundreds of billions of illicit profits which they launder each year.[51]

In both Afghanistan and Laos (as opposed to Vietnam) heroin has been by far the principal export, and so important that simply to curtail the production of opium has risked impoverishing those in the areas where opium was grown. This was the reason given for not disrupting heroin flows in the severe winter of 2001-02, the first year of the American invasion of Afghanistan. The economy was so devastated that, without income from opium, large numbers of Afghans might have starved.

According to Australian journalist Michael Ware, Time Magazine’s correspondent in Kandahar, opium is still the main support of the Afghan economy, as well the main support for both the Karzai government and the Taliban opposition:

You take away the opium and you suck the oxygen out of this economy and you’ll be treading on the toes of significant players who have built empires around the opium trade, and that includes political and military figures as well as criminal and business figures here in Kandahar.[52]

A consistent bias of U.S. news reporting on opium and heroin in Afghanistan has been to blame the Taliban for their production, and not also the government. For example, the New York Times reported on November 27, 2008 that

“Afghanistan has produced so much opium in recent years that the Taliban are cutting poppy cultivation and stockpiling raw opium in an effort to support prices and preserve a major source of financing for the insurgency, Antonio Maria Costa, the executive director of the United Nations drug office [UNODC], says.”[53]

But as Jeremy Hammond responds,

In commentary attached to the UNODC report, Mr. Costa asks, “Who collects this money? Local strong men. In other words, by year end, war-lords, drug-lords and insurgents will have extracted almost half a billion dollars of tax revenue from drug farming, production and trafficking.” Notably, Mr. Costa does not answer his question with “the Taliban”, but includes a much broader range of participants who profit from the trade that includes, but is in no way limited to, the Taliban.[54]

Citing the statistics in the UNODC’s annual reports, Hammond estimates that the reported Taliban revenues from opium ($75-100 million) are only about 3 percent of the total earned income in Afghanistan ($3.4 billion), which in turn is only about five percent of the UNODC estimate of what that crop is worth in the world market ($64 billion).[55]

It is because of the larger share of drug profits going to supporters of the Kabul government that U.S. strategies to attack the Afghan drug trade are explicitly limited to attacking drug traffickers supporting the Taliban.[56] Such strategies have the indirect effect of increasing the opium market share of the past and present CIA assets in the Karzai regime (headed by Hamid Karzai, a former CIA asset),[57] such as the president’s brother Ahmed Wali Karzai, an active CIA asset, and Abdul Rashid Dostum, a former CIA asset.[58]

As I have observed elsewhere about the U.S. campaign against the FARC and cocaine in Colombia, the aim of all U.S. anti drug campaigns abroad has never been the hopeless ideal of eradication. The aim of all such campaigns has been to alter market share: to target specific enemies and thus ensure that the drug traffic remains under the control of those traffickers who are allies of the state security apparatus and/or the CIA. This was notably true of Laos in the 1960s, when the CIA intervened militarily with air support to assist Ouan Rattikone’s army, in a battle over a contested opium caravan in Laos.[59]

Consequences for America of a Drug-Corrupted War

But this toleration of the traffic has led to another similarity with Vietnam and Laos in the 1960s: the increasing addiction of GIs to heroin, Afghanistan’s principal export. Despite the denial one has come to expect from high places, it is (according to Salon’s Shaun McCanna).

not difficult to find a soldier who has returned from Afghanistan with an addiction. Nearly every veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom I have spoken with was familiar with heroin’s availability on base, and most knew at least one soldier who used while deployed.[60]

And the reported easy availability of heroin outside Afghanistan’s Bagram air base, like that four decades ago outside Vietnam’s American base at Long Binh, points to another alarming similarity. Just as at the height of the Vietnam war, heroin was shipped to the United States in body bags containing cadavers,[61] so now we hear from Heneral Mahmut Gareev, a former Soviet commander in Afghanistan that

Americans themselves admit that drugs are often transported out of Afghanistan on American planes. Drug trafficking in Afghanistan brings them about 50 billion dollars a year – which fully covers the expenses tied to keeping their troops there. Essentially, they are not going to interfere and stop the production of drugs.[62]

Gareev’s charge has been repeated in one form or another by a number of other sources, including Pakistani General Hamid Gul, a former ISI commander:

“Abdul Wali Karzai is the biggest drug baron of Afghanistan,” he stated bluntly. He added that the drug lords are also involved in arms trafficking, which is “a flourishing trade” in Afghanistan. “But what is most disturbing from my point of view is that the military aircraft, American military aircraft are also being used. You said very rightly that the drug routes are northward through the Central Asia republics and through some of the Russian territory, and then intoEurope and beyond. But some of it is going directly. That is by the military aircraft. I have so many times in my interviews said, ‘Please listen to this information, because I am an aware person.’ We have Afghans still in Pakistan, and they sometimes contact and pass on the stories to me. And some of them are very authentic. I can judge that. So they are saying that the American military aircraft are being used for this purpose. So, if that is true, it is very, very disturbing indeed.”[63]

Another slightly different testimony is from General Khodaidad Khodaidad, the current Afghan minister of counter narcotics:

The Afghan minister of counter narcotics says foreign troops are earning money from drug production in Afghanistan. General Khodaidad Khodaidad said the majority of drugs are stockpiled in two provinces controlled by troops from the US, the UK, and Canada, IRNA reported on Saturday. He went on to say that NATO forces are taxing the production of opium in the regions under their control.[64]

I do not accept these charges as proven, despite the number of additional sources for them. None of the sources quoted here can be considered an objective source with no axe to grind, and worse charges still are easy to find in wilds of the Internet.

However the charges are plausible, because of history. Just as in Vietnam and Laos, the United States made its initial alliances in Afghanistan with drug traffickers, both in 1980 and again in 2001; and this is a major factor explaining the endemic corruption of the U.S.-sponsored Karzai regime today. There should be an official Congressional investigation whether the United States did not intend for its Afghan assets, just as earlier in Burma, Laos, and Thailand, to supplement their CIA subsidies with income from drug trafficking.

In short, the impasse the U.S. faces in Afghanistan, in its efforts to support an unpopular and corrupt regime, must be understood in the light of its past relations to the drug traffic there – a situation which resembles the past U.S. involvement in Laos even more than in Vietnam. It is this sustained pattern of intervention in support of drug economies, and with the support of drug traffickers, that so depresses observers who had hoped desperately that, in this respect, Obama would bring a change.

The question remains: how many Americans, Afghans, and Pakistanis will have to die, before we can put an end to this drug-corrupted and drug-corrupting war?

Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, is a poet, writer, and researcher. He was born inMontreal in 1929, the only son of the poet F.R. Scott and the painter Marian Scott. His prose books include The War Conspiracy (1972), The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (in collaboration, 1976), Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (1977), The Iran-Contra Connection (in collaboration, 1987), Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (in collaboration, 1991, 1998), Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993, 1996), Deep Politics Two (1994, 1995, 2006), Drugs Oil and War (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, March 2003), The Road to 9/11 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War (Ipswich, MA: Mary Ferrell Foundation Press, 2008).

Notes

[1] John Nichols, “Obama’s Campaign Merits a Peace Prize,” Nation (blogs), October 10, 2009,http://www.thenation.com/blogs/thebeat/482916/obama_s_campaign_merits_a_peace_prize.

[2] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007), 65-69.

[3] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 66-67.

[4] Scott, Road to 9/11, 67-68, referring to the Rumsfeld Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States.

[5] Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason, “Refighting the Last War: Afghanistan and the Vietnam Template,” Military Review, November-December 2009, 1.

[6] Johnson and Mason, “Refighting the Last War,”, 5, citing Jeffrey Record, “How America’s Own Military Performance in Vietnam Aided and Abetted the “North’s” Victory, in Marc Jason Gilbert, ed. Why the North Won the Vietnam War (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 119.

[7] New York Times, October 28, 2009.

[8] Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin, 1997), 239; A.J. Langguth, Our Vietnam (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 99; Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/ Chicago Review Press, 2003), 203 (drugs).

[9] McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 203.

[10] Gareth Porter, “Tajik Grip on Afghan Army Signals New Ethnic War,” IPS News, November 28, 2009, http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49461.

[11] Spencer Tucker, Vietnam (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 87.

[12] Eric Bergerud, The Dynamics Of Defeat: The Vietnam War In Hau Nghia Province (Boulder, Co: Westview Press, 1991) 3; quoted in Johnson and Mason, “Afghanistanand the Vietnam Template,” 5.

[13] Thomas H. Johnson, “Ismail Khan, Heart, and Iranian Influence,” Strategic Insights, July 2004, http://www.ccc.nps.navy.mil/si/2004/jul/johnsonJul04.asp.

[14] Johnson and Mason, “Refighting the Last War,” 7-8.

[15] Gretchen Peters, Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda (New York: Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press, 2009), 127-29.

[16] The southern provinces were administered directly by a résident supérieur in Vientiane, who also supervised , but indirectly, the quasi-independent northern Kingdom of Louangphrabang.

[17] Corruption within the U.S. Aid program (or boondoggle) in Laos, centered about bribes paid by CIA contractor Willis Bird, produced a Congressional investigation. See Scott, Drugs, Oil and War, 196, Martin E. Goldstein, American Policy Toward Laos, 186-87; U.S. Congress, House U.S. Aid Operations in Laos, House Report no. 546, 86^thCong., 1^st Sess. (Washington: GPO, 1959).

[18] Time, March 17, 1961; discussion in Scott, War Conspiracy, 78.

[19] Keith Quincy, Hmong: history of a people‎ Cheney, WA: Eastern Washington University, 1995), 163. To this day the CIA’s fact sheet on Cambodia lists, as the chief environmental problem in Laos, “unexploded ordnance” (all of it American); see CIA, The World Factbook,

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/la.html.

[20] Guardian (London), October 14, 1971. Cf. McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 320-21.

[21] Cf. Leslie H. Gelb and Richard K. Betts, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 1979).

[22] Mark Moyar, Triumph Forsaken: The Vietnam War, 1954-1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

[23] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 300.

[24] John Prados, Lost Crusader: the Secret Wars of CIA Director William Colby (New York: Oxford UP: 2003), 168.

[25] Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 40.

[26] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 461; citing interview with Dr. David Musto.

[27] David Musto, New York Times, May 22, 1980; quoted in McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 462.

[28] Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East since 1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 223; Diego Cordovez and Selig S. Harrison, Out of Afghanistan: the Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 16-17, 23-28.

[29] Scott, Road to 9/11, 77-79; Little, American Orientalism, 150.

[30] Scott, Drugs, Oil, and War, 46, 49; McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 475-78.

[31] New York Times, 3/13/94.

[32] Robert D. Kaplan, Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan (New York: Random House, 1990), 68-69.

[33] Brzezinski for example writes that “I pushed a decision through the SCC to be more sympathetic to those Afghans who were determined to preserve their country’s independence” (Brzezinski, Power and Principle, 427). On the same page he writes that “I also consulted with the Saudis and the Egyptians regarding the fighting inAfghanistan.” He is silent about the early, decisive, and ill-fated contact with Pakistan.

[34] Scott, Road to 9/11, 73-75, citing Christina Lamb, Waiting for Allah: Pakistan’s Struggle for Democracy (London: H. Hamilton, 1991), 222; cf. McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 479. Fazle ul-Haq was the governor of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province; at the same time he was also an important CIA contact and supporter of the Afghan mujahideen, some of whom — it was no secret — were supporting themselves by major opium and heroin trafficking through the NWFP. However, after lengthy correspondence with Fazle ul-Haq’s son, I am persuaded that there are no known grounds to accuse Fazle ul-Haq of having profited personally from the drug traffic. See “Clarification from Peter Dale Scott re. Fazle Haq,” 911Truth.org, http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20090223165146219.

[35] Scott, Road to 9/11, 73-75; citing McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 475 (leading drug lords), 464 (60 percent).

[36] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 461-64, 474-80; Lawrence Lifshultz, “Inside the Kingdom of Heroin,” Nation, November 14, 1988: Peters, Seeds of Terror, 37-39.

[37] Ralph Blumenthal, Last Days of the Sicilians (New York: Pocket Books, 1988), 119, 314.

[38] Cooley, Unholy Wars, 128-29; Beaty and Gwynne, Outlaw Bank, 305-06.

[39] Beaty and Gwynne, 306; cf. 82; also Allix, La petite cuillère, 35, 95; Peters, Seeds of Terror, 45-46.

[40] Maureen Orth, Vanity Fair, March 2002, 170-71. A Tajik sociologist added that she knew “drugs were massively distributed at that time,” and that she often heard how Russian soldiers were “invited to taste.”

[41] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 536.

[42] Philip Smucker, Al Qaeda’s Great Escape: The Military and the Media on Terror’s Trail (Washington: Brassey’s, 2004), 9. On December 4, 2001, Asia Times reported that a convicted Pakistani drug baron and former parliamentarian, Ayub Afridi, was also released from prison to participate in the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan (http://www.atimes.com/ind-pak/CL04Df01.html); Scott, Road to 9/11, 125.

[43] Peter Dale Scott, “Afghanistan, Colombia, Vietnam: The Deep Politics of Drugs and Oil,”
http://www.peterdalescott.net/qov.html.

[44] U.S. Congress, Senate, Minority staff report for Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Hearing on Private Banking and Money Laundering: a Case Study of Opportunities and Vulnerabilities (November 9, 1999), http://hsgac.senate.gov/110999_report.htm. These figures are both much used and much disputed, along with their relevance. But even if the real figures are only half those estimated by the Senate report, dirty money would appear to be a structural part of the U.S. economy. Those who deny this remind me of the economists who, as late as the 1950s, argued that U.S. foreign trade (then listed at about 2 percent of GNP) was too small to be a significant element in the U.S. GNP. No one would make that argument today.

[45] Independent (London), February 29, 2004. Cf. Michel Chossudovsky, “The Spoils of War: Afghanistan’s Multibillion Dollar Heroin Trade,” GlobalResearch, May 5, 2005,http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CHO20050614&articleId=91.

[46] James Petras, “`Dirty Money’ Foundation of U.S. Growth and Empire,” from La Jornada, May 19, 2001, Narco News 2001, http://www.narconews.com/petras1.html.

[47] Rajeev Syal, “Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor,” Observer, December 13, 2009, http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money-banks-saved-un-cfief-claims.

[48] RAND Corporation, “How Terrorist Groups End: Implications for Countering al Qa’ida,” Research Brief, RB-9351-RC (2008),http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9351/index1.html.

[49] Gilles Dorronsoro, “Focus and Exit: an Alternative Strategy for the Afghan War,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, January 2009,http://carnegieendowment.org/files/afghan_war-strategy.pdf.

[50] Michael T. Klare. Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict (Henry Holt, New York 2001; quoted in David Michael Smith, “The U.S. War in Afghanistan,”The Canadian, April 19, 2006, http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2006/04/19/01181.html, emphasis added. Cf. Scott, Road to 9/11, 169-70.

[51] U.S. Congress, Senate, Minority staff report for Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Hearing on Private Banking and Money Laundering: a Case Study of Opportunities and Vulnerabilities (November 9, 1999), http://hsgac.senate.gov/110999_report.htm.

[52] “Afghanistan - America’s Blind Eye,” ABC/TV (Australia), April 10, 2002, Reporter: Mark Corcoran,http://www.mickware.info/2002/files/2b3c5632e1c8fa1ad68b6f83ae91a8c3-93.php.

[53] Kirk Kraeutler, “U.N. Reports That Taliban Is Stockpiling Opium,” New York Times, November 27, 2008.

[54] Jeremy R. Hammond, “New York Times Misleads on Taliban Role in Opium Trade,” Foreign Policy Journal, November 29, 2008,http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2008/11/29/new-york-times-misleads-on-taliban-role-in-opium-trade/.

[55] Personal communication of December 29, 2009, citing UNODC Reports of 2008 and 2009.

[56] James Risen, U.S. to Hunt Down Afghan Lords Tied to Taliban, New York Times, August 10, 2009: ”United States military commanders have told Congress that…only those [drug traffickers] providing support to the insurgency would be made targets.”

[57] Nick Mills, Karzai: the failing American intervention and the struggle for Afghanistan (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2007), 79.

[58] New York Times, October 27, 2009.

[59] Valentine, Strength of the Pack, 333.

[60] Shaun McCanna, “It’s Easy for Soldiers to Score Heroin in Afghanistan,”Salon, August 1, 2007, http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2007/08/07/afghan_heroin/. Cf. Megan Carpentier, “Is The Military Ignoring The Heroin Problem In The Ranks?”, AirAmerica.com, October 20, 2009, http://airamerica.com/politics/10-20-2009/military-ignoring-its-heroin-problem/?p=all; Gerald Posner, “The Taliban’s Heroin Ploy,” The Daily Beast, October 19, 2009, http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-19/the-heroin-bomb/full/.

[61] Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Pack: The People, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA (Springfield, OR: TrineDay, 2009), 171; cf. 103.

[62] Gen. Mahmut Gareev, ““Afghan drug trafficking brings US $50 billion a year,” RussiaToday. August 20, 2009, http://russiatoday.com/Top_News/2009-08-20/afghanistan-us-drug-trafficking.html.

[63] Jeremy R. Hammond, “Pakistan: General Hamid Gul on Destabilizing Pakistan,” Foreign Policy Journal, August 27, 2009,http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_56790.shtml.

[64] “Occupiers involved in drug trade: Afghan minister,” IranPressTV, November 1, 2009,

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=110130§ionid=351020403.

Peter Dale Scott is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Peter Dale Scott

Tarpley on the Pearl Harbor Conspiracy

admin — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 02:05:50 +0000

WHO ‘Swine Flu Pope’ under investigation for gross conflict of interest

admin — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 23:54:02 +0000

by F. William Engdahl*

The man with the nickname “Dr Flu”, Professor Albert Osterhaus, of the Erasmus University in Rotterdam Holland has been named by Dutch media researchers as the person at the center of the worldwide Swine Flu H1N1 Influenza A 2009 pandemic hysteria. Not only is Osterhaus the connecting person in an international network that has been described as the Pharma Mafia, he is THE key advisor to WHO on influenza and is intimately positioned to personally profit from the billions of euros in vaccines allegedly aimed at H1N1.


Professor Albert Osterhaus

Earlier this year the Second Chamber of the Netherlands Parliament undertook an investigation into alleged conflicts of interest and financial improprieties of the well-known Dr. Osterhaus. Outside of Holland and the Dutch media, the only note of the sensational investigation into Osterhaus’ business affairs came in a tiny note in the respected British magazine, Science.

Osterhaus’s credentials and expertise in his field were not in question. What is in question, according to a short report published by the journal Science, are his links to corporate interests that stand to potentially profit from the swine flu pandemic. Sciencecarried the following brief note in its October 16, 2009 issue about Osterhaus:

“For the past 6 months, one could barely switch on the television in the Netherlands without seeing the face of famed virus hunter Albert Osterhaus talking about the swine flu pandemic. Or so it has seemed. Osterhaus, who runs an internationally renowned virus lab at Erasmus Medical Center, has been Mr. Flu. But last week, his reputation took a nosedive after it was alleged that he has been stoking pandemic fears to promote his own business interests in vaccine development. As Science went to press, the Dutch House of Representatives had even slated an emergency debate about the matter.” [1]

On November 3, 2009 it appeared that Osterhaus emerged with at least the damage somewhat under control. An updated Scienceblog noted, “The House of Representatives of the Netherlands today rejected a motion asking the government to sever all ties with virologist Albert Osterhaus of Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, who had been accused of conflicts of interest in his role as a government adviser. But Dutch health minister Ab Klink, meanwhile, announced a “Sunshine Act” compelling scientists to disclose their financial ties to companies.” [2]

The Minister, Ab Klink, reportedly a personal friend of Osterhaus, [3] subsequently issued a statement on the ministry’s website, claiming that Osterhaus was but one of many scientific advisers to the ministry on vaccines for H1N1, and that the Ministry “knew” about the financial interests of Osterhaus. [4] Nothing out of the ordinary, merely pursuit of science and public health, so it seemed.

More careful investigation into the Osterhaus Affair suggests that the world-renowned Dutch Virologist may be at the very center of a multi-billion Euro pandemic fraud which has used human beings in effect as human guinea pigs with untested vaccines and in cases now emerging, resulting in deaths or severe bodily paralysis or injury.

The ‘Bird Shit Hoax’

Albert Osterhaus is no small fish. He stands at the global nexus of every major virus panic of the past decade from the mysterious SARS deaths in HongKong, where current WHO Director Margaret Chan got her start in her career as a local health official. According to his official bio at the European Commission, Osterhaus was engaged in April 2003, at the height of the panic over SARS (Severe Acquired Respiratory Syndrome) in investigation of the Hong Kong outbreak of respiratory illnesses. The EU report states, “he again showed his skill at moving fast to tackle a serious problem. Within three weeks he had proved that the disease was caused by a newly discovered coronavirus that resides in civet cats, other carnivorous animals or bats.” [5]

Then Osterhaus moved on as SARS cases vanished from view, this time publicizing dangers of what he claimed was H5N1 Avian Flu. In 1997 he had already began sounding the alarm following the death in Hong Kong of a three-year-old who Osterhaus learned had had direct contact with birds. Osterhaus went into high gear lobbying across Holland and Europe claiming that a deadly new mutation of avian flu had jumped to humans and that drastic measures were required. He claimed to be the first scientist in the world to show that H5N1 could be transferred into humans. [6]

In a BBC interview in October 2005 on the danger of Avian Flu, Osterhaus declared, “…if the virus manages indeed to, to mutate itself in such a way that it can transmit from human to human, then we have a completely different situation, we might be at the start of the pandemic.” He added, “there is a real chance that this virus could be trafficked by the birds all the way to Europe. There is a real risk, but nobody can estimate the risk at this moment, because we haven’t done the experiments.” [7] It never did manage to mutate, but he was ready to “do the experiments,” presumably for a hefty fee.

To bolster his frightening pandemic scenario, Osterhaus and his lab assistants in Rotterdam began assiduously assembling and freezing samples of, well, bird shit, in an attempt to build a more scientific argument. He claimed that at certain times of the year up to 30% of all European birds acted as carriers of the deadly avian virus, H5N1. He also claimed that farmers working with hens and chickens were then exposed. Osterhaus briefed journalists who dutifully noted his alarm. Politicians were alerted. He wrote papers proposing that the far away deaths in Asia from what he termed H5N1 were coming to Europe, presumably on the wings or in the innards of deadly sick infected birds. He claimed that migratory birds were carrying the deadly new disease as far west as Rügen and Ukraine. [8] He conveniently ignored the fact that birds do not migrate east to west but rather north to south.

Osterhaus’ Avian Flu alarm campaign really took off in 2003 when a Dutch veterinary doctor became ill and died. Osterhaus claimed the death was from H5N1. He convinced the Dutch government to order slaughter of millions of chickens. Yet no other infected persons died from the alleged H5N1. Osterhaus claimed that that was simply proof of the effectiveness of the preemptive slaughter campaign. [9]

Osterhaus claimed that bird feces were the source, via air bombardment or droppings, onto populations and birds below. That was the vehicle for the spread of the deadly new Asian strain of H5N1 he insisted.

There was only one problem with the now voluminous frozen samples of diverse bird excrement he and his associates had collected and frozen at his institute. There was not one single confirmed example of H5N1 virus found in any of his samples. At a May 2006 Congress of the World Organization for Animal Health (OIE), Osterhaus and his Erasmus colleagues were forced to admit that in testing 100,000 samples of their assiduously saved bird feces, they had discovered not one single case of H5N1 virus. [10]

At a WHO conference in Verona in 2008 titled “Avian influenza at the Human-Animal Interface,” in a presentation to scientific colleagues undoubtedly less impressed by appeals to pandemic emotion than the non-scientific public, Osterhaus admitted that “A proper risk assessment of H5N1 as the cause of a new pandemic cannot be made with the currently available information.” [11] By then, however, his sights were already firmly on other possible pandemic triggers to focus his vaccination activities.

Swine Flu and WHO corruption

When no mass wave of human deaths from Avian Flu materialized and after Roche, maker of Tamiflu, and GlaxoSmithKline had banked billions of dollars in profits from worldwide government stockpiling of their dangerous and reportedly ineffective antiviral drugs – Tamiflu by Roche and Relenza by GlaxoSmithKline – Osterhaus and other WHO advisers turned to other greener pastures.

By April 2009 their search seemed rewarded as La Gloria, a small Mexican village in Veracruz, reported a case of a small child ill with what had been diagnosed as “Swine Flu” or H1N1. With indecent haste the propaganda apparatus of the World Health Organization in Geneva went into gear with statements from the director-general Dr Margaret Chan, about a possible danger of a global pandemic.

Chan made such irresponsible statements as declaring “a public health emergency of international concern.” [12] The further cases of outbreak at La Gloria Mexico were reported on one medical website as, “a ‘strange’ outbreak of acute respiratory infection, which led to bronchial pneumonia in some pediatric cases. According to a local resident, symptoms included fever, severe cough, and large amounts of phlegm.” [13]

Notably those were symptoms which would make sense in terms of the proximity of one of the world’s largest pig industrial feeding concentrations at La Gloria owned by Smithfield Farms of the USA. Residents had picketed the Smithfield Farms site in Mexico for months complaining of severe respiratory problems from the fecal waste lagoons. That possible cause of the diseases in La Gloria apparently did not interest Osterhaus and his colleagues advising the WHO. The long-awaited “pandemic” that Osterhaus had predicted ever since his involvement with SARS in the Guandgong Province of China in 2003, was now finally at hand.

On June 11, 2009 Margaret Chan of WHO made the declaration of a Phase 6 “Pandemic Emergency” regarding the spread of H1N1 Influenza. Curiously in announcing it, she noted, “On present evidence, the overwhelming majority of patients experience mild symptoms and make a rapid and full recovery, often in the absence of any form of medical treatment.” She then added, ”Worldwide, the number of deaths is small…we do not expect to see a sudden and dramatic jump in the number of severe or fatal infections.”

It later was learned that Chan acted, following heated debates inside WHO, on the advice of the scientific advisory group of WHO, or SAGE, the Strategic Advisory Group of Experts. One of the members of SAGE at the time and today was Dr. Albert “Mr Flu” Osterhaus.

Not only was Osterhaus in a key position to advocate the panic-inducing WHO “Pandemic emergency” declaration. He was also chairman of the leading private European Scientific Working group on Influenza (ESWI), which describes itself as a “multidisciplinary group of key opinion leaders in influenza [that] aims to combat the impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza.” Osterhaus’ ESWI is the vital link as they themselves describe it, “between the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin and the University of Connecticut, USA.”

What is more significant about the ESWI is that its work is entirely financed by the same pharma mafia companies that make billions on the pandemic emergency as governments around the world are compelled to buy and stockpile vaccines on declaration of a WHO Pandemic. The funders of ESWI include H1N1 vaccine maker Novartis, Tamiflu distributor, Hofmann-La Roche, Baxter Vaccines, MedImmune, GlaxoSmithKline, Sanofi Pasteur and others.

Not to lose the point, the world-leading virologist, official adviser on H1N1 to the governments of the UK and Holland, Dr Albert Osterhaus, head of the Department of Virology at the Erasmus Medical College of Rotterdam, also sat on the WHO’s elite SAGE and served as chairman at the same time of the pharma industry-sponsored ESWI, which in turn urged dramatic steps to vaccinate the world against the grave danger of a new Pandemic they insisted could rival the feared 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic.

The Wall Street bank, JP Morgan, estimated that in large part as a result of the WHO pandemic decision, the giant pharma firms that also finance Osterhaus’ ESWI work, stand to reap some €7.5 to €10 billion in profits. [14]

A fellow member of WHO’s SAGE is Dr Frederick Hayden, of Britain’s Wellcome Trust and reportedly a close friend of Osterhaus. Hayden also receives money for “advisory” services from Roche and GlaxoSmithKline among other pharma giants involved in producing products related to the H1N1 panic.

Chairman of WHO’s SAGE is another British scientist, Prof. David Salisbury of the UK Department of Health. He also heads the WHO H1N1 Advisory Group. Salisbury is a robust defender of the pharma industry. He has been accused by UK citizen health group One Click of covering up the proven links between vaccines and an explosive rise in infant autism as well as links between the vaccine Gardasil and palsy and even death. [15]

Then on September 28, 2009 the same Salisbury stated, “There is a very clear view in the scientific community that there is no risk from the inclusion of Thiomersal.” The vaccine being used for H1N1 in Britain is primarily produced by GlaxoSmithKlilne. It contains the mercury preservative Thiomersol. Because of growing evidence that Thiomersol in vaccines might be related to autism in children in the United States, in 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics and the US Public Health Service called for it to be removed from vaccines. [16]

Yet another SAGE member at WHO with intimate financial ties to the vaccine makers that benefit from SAGE’s recommendations to WHO is Dr. Arnold Monto, a paid consultant to vaccine maker MedImmune, Glaxo and ViroPharma.

Even more, the meetings of the “independent” scientists of SAGE are attended by “observers” who include, yes, the very vaccine producers GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Baxter and company. One might ask if the SAGE are supposed to be the world’s leading experts on flu and vaccines, why they would ask the vaccine makers to sit in.

In the past decade the WHO, in order to boost funds at its disposal entered into what it calls “public private partnerships.” Instead of receiving its funds solely from member United Nations governments as its original purpose had been, WHO today receives almost double its normal UN budget in the form of grants and financial support from private industry. The industry? The very drug and vaccine makers who benefit from decisions like the June 2009 H1N1 Pandemic emergency declaration. As the main financiers of the WHO bureaucracy, naturally the Pharma Mafia and their friends receive what has been called “open door red carpet treatment” in Geneva. [17]

In an interview with Der Spiegel magazine in Germany, epidemiologist Dr. Tom Jefferson of the Cochrane Collaboration, an organization of independent scientists evaluating all flu related studies, noted the implications of the privatization of WHO and the commercialization of health:

“…one of the extraordinary features of this influenza — and the whole influenza saga — is that there are some people who make predictions year after year, and they get worse and worse. None of them so far have come about, and these people are still there making these predictions. For example, what happened with the bird flu, which was supposed to kill us all? Nothing. But that doesn’t stop these people from always making their predictions. Sometimes you get the feeling that there is a whole industry almost waiting for a pandemic to occur.
SPIEGEL: Who do you mean? The World Health Organization (WHO)? Jefferson: The WHO and public health officials, virologists and the pharmaceutical companies. They’ve built this machine around the impending pandemic. And there’s a lot of money involved, and influence, and careers, and entire institutions! And all it took was one of these influenza viruses to mutate to start the machine grinding… [18]

When asked if the WHO had deliberately declared the Pandemic Emergency in order to create a huge market for H1N1 vaccines and drugs, Jefferson replied,

“Don’t you think there’s something noteworthy about the fact that the WHO has changed its definition of pandemic? The old definition was a new virus, which went around quickly, for which you didn’t have immunity, and which created a high morbidity and mortality rate. Now the last two have been dropped, and that’s how swine flu has been categorized as a pandemic.” [19]

Conveniently enough, the WHO published the new Pandemic definition in April 2009 just in time to allow WHO, on advice of SAGE and others like Albert “Dr Flu” Osterhaus and David Salisbury, to declare the mild cases of flu dubbed H1N1 Influenza A to be declared Pandemic Emergency. [20]

In a relevant footnote, the Washington Post on December 8 in an article on the severity, or lack of same, of the world H1N1 „pandemic“ reported that, “with the second wave of H1N1 infections having crested in the United States, leading epidemiologists are predicting that the pandemic could end up ranking as the mildest since modern medicine began documenting influenza outbreaks.” [21]

Russian Parliamentarian and chairman of the Duma Health Committee, Igor Barinow has called on the Russian Representative to WHO in Geneva to order an official investigation into the growing evidence of massive corruption of the WHO by the pharmaceutical industry. “There are grave accusations of corruption within the WHO,” said Barinow. “An international commission of inquiry is urgently required.” [22]

F. William Engdahl
Author of Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation.. He also authored A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press). His latest book is Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order (Third Millennium Press).
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[1] Martin Enserink, In “Holland, the Public Face of Flu Takes a Hit”,Science, 16 October 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5951, pp. 350 – 351; DOI: 10.1126/science.326_350b.

[2] Science, November 3, 2009, “Roundup 11/3 The Brink Edition“.

[3] Article from Dutch, “De Farma maffia Deel 1 Osterhaus BV“, 28 november 2009.

[4] Ministerie van Volksgezondheid, Welzijn en Sport, “Financiële belangen Osterhaus waren bekend Nieuwsbericht“, 30 september 2009.

[5] European Commission, „Research“, Dr Albert Osterhaus.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Jane Corbin, Interview with Dr Albert Osterhaus, BBC Panorama, 4 October, 2005.

[8] Karin Steinberger, “Vogelgrippe: Der Mann mit der Vogelperspektive“, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 20 October, 2005.

[9] Ibid.

[10] “Schweinegrippe—Geldgieriger Psychopath Auslöser der Pandemie?“, Polskaweb News,

[11] Ab Osterhaus, “External factors influencing H5N1 mutation/reassortment events with pandemic potential”, OIE, 7-9 October 2008, Verona, Italy. Download

[12] Health Advisory, Swine Flu Overview, April 2009.

[13] Biosurveillance, Swine Flu in Mexico- Timeline of Events, April 24, 2009.

[14] Cited in Louise Voller, Kristian Villesen, “Stærk lobbyisme bag WHO-beslutning om massevaccination” , Information, Copenhagen, 15 November 2009.

[15] Jane Bryant, et al, “The One Click Group Response: Prof. David Salisbury Threatens Legal Action”, 4 March, 2009, Download.

[16] Prof. David Salisbury cited in, “Swine flu vaccine to contain axed additive“, London Evening Standard and Gulf News, 28 September 2009, accessed in .

[17] Bert Ehgartner, “Schwindel mit der Schweinegrippe Ist die Aufregung ein Coup der Pharmaindustrie?”

[18] Tom Jefferson, Interview with Epidemiologist Tom Jefferson: ’A Whole Industry Is Waiting For A Pandemic’, Der Spiegel, 21 July 2009.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Louise Voller, Kristian Villesen, “Mystisk ændring af WHO’s definition af en pandemi“, Copenhagen Information, 15 November 2009.

[21] Rob Stein, “Flu Pandemic Could Be Mild“, Washington Post, December 8, 2009.

[22] Polskanet, “Russland fordert internationale Untersuchung“, 5 December 2009.

An Untold History: Carroll Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope

admin — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 21:05:53 +0000

Dr. Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope reveals a Call by Cecil Rhodes for an “American Union”

J.R. / Jones Report | May 30, 2008

Dr. Carroll Quigley, a highly respected professor of history at the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University for 28-years, revealed in his 1348 page magnum opus, Tragedy and Hope (1966), the nefarious goal of Cecil Rhodes’ secret society calling for an American Union, coming to fruition today as the “North American Union.” From 1884 to about 1915, according Dr. Quigley, the members of The Rhodes Secret Society exhaustively worked at extending the British Empire and forming a federal system. The Rhodes Secret Society was “constantly harping on the lessons to be learned from the failure of the American Revolution and the success of the Canadian federation of 1867, and hoped to federate the various parts of the empire as seemed feasible, then confederate the whole of it, with the United Kingdom, into a single organization…(hoping) to bring the United States into this organization to whatever degree was possible…(making) Washington the capital of the whole organization or allow parts of the empire to become states of the American Union (emphasis added. Below see scan copy of page 133 of Tragedy and Hope).”

It is interesting to note that, despite an aversion by The Rhodes Secret Society towards the success of our American Revolution accentuating a victory for sovereignty and freedom predicated upon a Constitutional Republic, the Rhodes Secret Society was willing to adhere to diplomacy by deception in order to confederate independent nations into a single federation or union disregarding the sovereignty of nations. Diplomacy by deception continues to be adhered to by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) under the patronage and guidance of the Rockefellers. It is of utmost importance to understand the deeply rooted genesis in the world of foreign affairs as the Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA) headquartered at Chatham House, St. James Square, London, is the “mother” of the American Council of Foreign Relations (CFR).

Dr. Quigley attributes the success of The Rhodes Secret Society to their effectiveness in concealing its existence. Its members’ preference was to maintain a stealthy appearance with a series of overlapping circles or rings partly concealed by being hidden behind formally organized groups of no obvious political significance and avoiding an appearance of being an integrated group. Dr. Quigley provides a lengthy roster and structure of A Tentative Roster of the Milner Group in the “Appendix” of his book, The Anglo-American Establishment. The “front organization” for The Rhodes Secret Society was The Round Table Group in Great Britain which was working in concert with J. P. Morgan in the United States to establish its “front organization” in the United States. Dr. Quigley described the genesis of the Council on Foreign Relations as follows:

At the end of the war of 1914, it became clear that the organization of this system had to be greatly extended. . . . Lionel Curtis . . . established, in England and each dominion, a front organization to the existing local Round Table Group…This front organization, called the Royal Institute of International Affairs, had as its nucleus in each area the existing submerged Round Table Group…in New York it was known as the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a front for J. P. Morgan and Company in association with the very small American Round Table Group. The American organizers were dominated by the large number of Morgan ‘experts’… The Round Table for years (until 1961) was edited from the back door of Chatham House grounds in Ormond Yard, and its telephone came through the Chatham House switchboard (Tragedy and Hope: 951-952).

“Stealth” is the preferred “modus operandi” practiced by The Rhodes Secret Society, Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA), and the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) in establishing the European Union (EU), the North American Community (AKA: North American Union – NAU), and last week’s Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). “Stealth” has enabled them to manipulate the American people by keeping us ignorant, uninformed, and confused from the days of Cecil Rhodes to today. Dr. Quigley described the manipulation of such tactics over our American political process visa-via the false left vs. right paradigm:

The chief problem of American political life for along time has been how to make the two Congressional parties more national and international…(therefore) argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers…Instead the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can ‘throw the rascals out’ at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy (Tragedy and Hope: 1247-1248).

Such stealthy underhanded tactics have always been the means to an end, including but not limited to the eradication of the sovereignty of independent nations in order to achieve their ultimate goal of establishing a one world government, transcending from the inception of The Rhodes Secret Society to The Round Table Group in Great Britain to Royal Institute for International Affairs (RIIA), and the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR). Tragedy and Hope took Dr. Quigley over twenty years of researching the coveted archives of Cecil Rhodes secret society. Dr. Quigley dedicated his career “to training undergraduates in techniques of historical analysis which will help them to free their understanding of history from the accepted categories and cognitive classifications of the society in which we live, since these, however necessary they…nevertheless do often serve as barriers which shield us from recognition of the underlying realities themselves (Tragedy and Hope: ix).”

Dr. Quigley had a profound influence on numerous future diplomats and government officials. Amongst these individuals included former President Bill Clinton who commended Quigley during his Democratic Presidential Nomination Acceptance Address stating “as a teenager, I heard John Kennedy’s summons to citizenship…then, as a student at Georgetown I head that call clarified by a professor name Carol Quigley, who said to us that America was the greatest nation in history because our people had always believed in two things: that tomorrow can be better than today and that every one of us has a personal moral responsibility to make it so (http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/wjclinton1992dnc.htm).” Clinton specifically referenced Dr. Quigley in his autobiography, Bill Clinton- My Life, when he wrote, “Quigley’s insights had a particularly lasting impact… (so) from the 1992 campaign through my two terms in office, I quoted Professor Quigley’s line often (Clinton: 77-78).”

According to Dr. Quigley, “ by the middle 1890’s Rhodes had a personal income of at least a million pounds sterling a year (then about five million dollars) which was spent so freely for his mysterious purposes…his desire to federate the English-speaking peoples and to bring all the habitable portions of the world under their control…leaving part of his great fortune to fund the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford in order to spread the English ruling class tradition throughout the English-speaking world as (his mentor Professor at Oxford) Ruskin had wanted (Tragedy and Hope: 130-131).” It is interesting to note that former President Bill Clinton was a recipient of Rhodes Scholarship in 1968 along with extremely powerful and prominent individuals from predominantly the two political party paradigm including but not limited to Dean Rusk in 1931, U.S. Secretary of State, 1961-1969, in 1951 Richard N. Gardner U.S. Ambassador and CFR Director, in 1968 Strobe Talbott, American diplomat U.S. Deputy Secretary of State (1994-2001) and Time Magazine Editor-at-Large, Foreign Affairs journalist and President of the Brookings Institution, and in 1973 Richard N. Haass President of the Council on Foreign Relations and Director of the Policy Planning Staff at the U.S. Department of State, 2001-2003 (http://www.americanrhodes.org/). All of these individuals are members of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Dr. Quigley exposed their matrix of complete control over individuals and society:

It is increasingly clear that, in the twentieth century, the expert will replace … the democratic voter in control of the political system. Hopefully, the elements of choice and freedom may survive for the ordinary individual in that he may be free to make a choice between two opposing political groups (even if these groups have little policy choice within the parameters of policy established by the experts) and he may have the choice to switch his economic support from one large unit to another. But, in general, his freedom and choice will be controlled within very narrow alternatives by the fact that he will be numbered from birth and followed, as a number,through his educational training, his required military or other public service, his tax contributions, his health and medical requirements, and his final retirement and death benefits (Tragedy and Hope: 866).

Perhaps, this is the reason why a third party candidate has never won a presidential election in the history of the United States. Just as importantly, Dr. Quigley attested to the forces that have controlled and continue to control England and the United States:

The Liberal Party was not so closely controlled as was the Conservative Party, but its chief leaders were on intimate relations of friendship and cooperation with the Cecil Rhodes crowd… which was especially true of Lord Rosebery, who was prime minister in 1894-1895, and H. H. Asquith, who was prime minister in 1905-1915. Asquith married Margot Tennant . . . in 1894, and had Balfour as his chief witness at the ceremony. . . . In later years Balfour was the closest friend of the Asquiths even when they were leaders of two opposing parties (Tragedy and Hope: 475).…(likewise) There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates, to some extent, in the way the … Right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network,which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so…I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims…but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known (Tragedy and Hope: 950).

Dr. Quigley taught at Harvard where he received his undergraduate degrees and his doctorate. He also taught at Princeton and at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in 1951. Moreover, he also taught in Africa at the Brookings Institution in 1961, and lectured at many other places, including the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory, the Foreign Service Institute of the State Department, and the Naval College at Norfolk, Virginia. In 1958, Dr. Quigley was both a consultant to the Congressional Select Committee that established the national space agency. Also, he was a collaborator in history to the Smithsonian Institution after 1957 assisting in the establishment of the Museum of History and Technology and in the summer of 1964 he served at the Navy Post-Graduate School in Monterey, California, as consultant to “Project Seabed,” a visualization and future design program of what American weapons systems would like in the 1970’s. In short, Dr. Quigley’s Circum Vitae is unequivocally scholarly, impressive, and indicative of the confidence by the Eastern Establishment and the security clearance from both the United States government during the Cold War.

Dr. Quigley’s Tragedy and Hope is loaded with far more revelations than this article can possibly cover here. However, Dr. Quigley’s provocative revelations may account for his “fall from grace” amongst the circles of the intellectual elite, the British Establishment, and the American Eastern Establishment all of which had trusted him to the extent of allowing him to access to their most coveted archives and inner workings. In fact, a few thousand copies of Tragedy and Hope were sold prior to the “accidental destruction” of the plates in an attempt to suppress subsequent editions from being printed according to a taped interview discovered in Quigley’s archives at Georgetown University by Dr. Stanley Montieth (http://www.radioliberty.com/newbkvd.htm).

Exposing the truth about their nefarious “Great Plan, the Great Work, the Lost Word” is the most effective weapon each and every American patriot must utilize in restoring our Constitutional Republic.

Organized Crime in Charge of EU Carbon Trading

admin — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 01:08:25 +0000

First, there was ClimateGate – the scandal with hacked emails suggesting scientists have abused data for research on global warming. Now, another international climate scandal is emerging that may have an impact on the talks in Copenhagen.

Europes top police body Europol, the closest thing that European Union has to the American Fbi, has exposed a massive fraud with the unions official market in carbon credits, the Emission Trading System.

The fraud is costing tax payers in a handful of European countries more than five billion euro – 7 billion dollars – and raises doubts about the effectiveness of carbon trading as a measure to curb emissions.

Europol director Rob Wainwright issued the following statement:

These criminal activities endanger the credibility of the European Union Emission Trading System and lead to the loss of significant tax revenue for governments.
Police authorities in Belgium, Denmark, France, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom have worked together in what Europol calls a process to identify and disrupt the organised criminal structures behind these fraud schemes.

Lets see if we can explain the scheme, using this graphic provided by Europol.

The fraud is based on a what is tax experts and investigators call as a Carroussel fraud with missing traders. This carroussel generates money by stealing value added tax from governments.

The first step of the criminals is to open a trading account with a national carbon registry, in the name of a newly registered company.
From there, this company buys EU emission allowances in another country on one of the six official carbon exchanges in Europe.
After that, these emission allowances are moved to another country, and subsequently sold to an unregulated broker in yet another country.
This broker then charges VAT on these transactions but does not pay the collected VAT to the tax authorities.

Just before the tax authorities realize that this company owes them huge amounts of VAT, basically a period of a few months, the company and its owners disappear.
A new company is set up, using other front men, to repeat the carroussel. Crime rings that run such schemes can have several dozen or hundreds of companies whose real owners are difficult to trace.

Basically, this type of fraud is possible because European countries continue to disagree on single market tax legislation. Carroussel fraud is a constant feature in the European cross-border market and until recently only happened with shipments of valuable goods such as iPods or flat-panel tvs, not with carbon credits.
Europes tax commissioner, in an interview with EUX.TV, has estimated the damage from these carroussel frauds at more than 60 billion euro per year as Euroean finance minister continue to disagree on effective measures to fight this fraud.

The Emission Trading System system was set up in 2005 as part of Europes efforts to curb emissions of greenhouse gases. That topic now is at the top of the agenda at the UN Climate summit in Copenhagen this week and next. This unprecedented and massive fraud is likely to prove a major embarrasment for EU negotiators.

How the Money Works

admin — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 02:32:56 +0000

Narco-Dollars for Beginners

“How the Money Works” in the Illicit Drug Trade

by Catherine Austin Fitts

Special to the Narco News Bulletin

2001

Contents

Narco News Publisher’s Note: Catherine Austin Fitts is a former managing director and member of the board of directors of Dillon Read & Co, Inc, a former Assistant Secretary of Housing-Federal Housing Commissioner in the first Bush Administration, and the former President of The Hamilton Securities Group, Inc. She is the President of Solari, Inc, an investment advisory firm. Solari provides risk management services to investors through Sanders Research Associates in London.

“The Latin American drug cartels have stretched their tentacles much deeper into our lives than most people believe. It’s possible they are calling the shots at all levels of government.”

–William Colby, former CIA Director, 1995

Part I: Narco Dollars for Dummies TOP

A Simple Framework:
The Solari Index and the Dow Jones Index

The Solari Index is my way of estimating how well a place is doing. It is based upon the percentage of people in a place who believe that a child can leave their home and go to the nearest place to buy a popsicle and come home alone safely.

When I was a child growing up in the 1950’s at 48th and Larchwood in West Philadelphia, the Solari Index was 100 percent. It was unthinkable that a child was not safe running up to the stores on Spruce Street for a popsicle and some pin ball. The Dow Jones was about 500, the Solari Index was 100 percent and our debt per person was very low. Of course I did not think about it that way at the time. All I knew was that life on the street with my buddies was sweet.

Today, the Dow Jones is over 9,000, debt per person is over $100,000 and my favorite hairdresser in Philadelphia, Al at the Hair Hut in West Philadelphia, and I just had a debate yesterday afternoon while Al was cutting my hair about whether the Solari Index in my old neighborhood was 0 percent (my position) or 10 percent (Al’s position). Men always think it is higher than women.

Despite the boy-girl spread between us, it is fair to say that Al and I agree that the Solari Index is in the tank — both in the streets of Philadelphia and throughout America.

Life on the street ain’t sweet any more. I watched the slide of the Solari Index as a child. A lot of it had to do with narcotics trafficking and the people that narco dollars put in power on our streets — and in city hall, in the banks, in Congress and the corporations and investors down town and that ring the city.

My mission is to see the Solari Index return to 100 percent and to do so in a manner that moves the Dow up and our debt per person down and makes me and my partners a whole pile of money.

A few years back when my efforts to improve the Solari Index were threatening to reduce narcotics profits in a few places, I discovered that I could not look to the enforcement or the judicial establishment funded with my tax dollars to protect me. Narco dollars had the upper hand throughout government and the legal establishment.

That’s when I decided that I would have to learn how the money works on the drug trade.

Here is what I have learned that has been useful to me — and may help you have a better map of how narco dollars impact you, your business, your family and the Solari Index in your neighborhood.

The Economics of Production:
Sam and Dave Do Boat Loads of White Agricultural Substances

Okay, let’s start at ground zero. It is 1947, and World War II is over. America is ready to go back to work to build the corporate economy. We are in New Orleans on the docks.

Two boats pull into the docks. The first boat is full of a white agricultural product grown in Latin America called sugar. The owner of the cargo, lets call him Sam, sells his boat load of white agricultural substance to the sugar wholesaler on the docks for how much money?

Ok, so let’s say that Sam sells his entire boatload of sugar to the sugar wholesaler on the docks for X dollars.

Now, after Sam pays his workers and all his costs of growing and transporting the sugar, and after he and his wife spend the weekend in New Orleans and he pays himself a bonus and buys some new harvest equipment and pays his taxes, how much cash does he have left to deposit into his bank account? Or, another way of saying this is: What is Sam’s net cash margin on his sugar business?

Well, it depends on how lucky and hard working and smart Sam is, but let’s say that Sam has worked his proverbial you know what off and he makes around 5-10 percent. Sam the sugar man has a 5-10 percent cash profit margin. Let’s call Sam’s margin S for slim or SLIM PERCENTAGE.

Back on the docks, the second boat — an exact replica of the boat carrying Sam’s sugar — is a boat carrying Dave’s white agricultural product called drugs. In those days this was more likely to be heroin, these days more likely to be cocaine. Whatever the precise species, the planting, harvesting and production of this white agricultural substance, Dave’s drugs, are remarkably like Sam’s sugar.

Ok, so if Sam the sugar man sold his sugar to the sugar wholesaler for X dollars, how much will Dave the drug man sell his drugs to the drug wholesaler for? Well, where Sam is getting pennies, Dave is getting bills. If Sam had sales of X dollars, let say that Dave had sales of 50-100 times X. Dave may carry the same amount of white stuff in a boat but from a financial point of view, Dave the drug man has a lot more “sales per boat” than Sam the sugar man.

Now, after Dave pays his workers and all his costs of growing and transporting the drugs, and after he and his wife spend the weekend in New Orleans and he pays himself a bonus and buys some new harvest and radar equipment and spends what he needs on bribes and bonuses to a few enforcement and intelligence operatives and retainers to his several law firms, how much cash does he have left to deposit into his bank account? Or, another way of saying this is what is Dave’s net cash margin on his drug business?

It’s also going to be a multiple of Sam’s margin, right? Maybe it will be 20 percent or 30 percent or more? Let’s call it B for Big, or BIG PERCENTAGE. Dave the drug man has a much bigger “cash profit per boat” than Sam the sugar man. Part of that is, of course, once Dave has set up his money laundering schemes, even after a 4-10 percent take for the money laundering fees, it’s fair to say his tax rate of 0 percent is lower than Sam’s tax rate. While it is expensive to set up all the many schemes Dave might use to launder his money, once you do it you can save a lot avoiding some or all of the IRS’s take.

Look at your estimate of Sam and Dave’s sales and profits. Now answer for yourself the following questions.

Who is going to get laid more, Sam or Dave?

Who is going to be more popular with the local bankers, Sam or Dave?

Who is going to have a bigger stock market portfolio with a large investment house, Sam or Dave?

Who is going to donate more money to political campaigns, Sam or Dave?

Whose wife is going to be bigger in the local charities, Sam or Dave’s?

Whose companies will have more prestigous law firms on retainer, Sam or Dave’s?

Who is going to buy the other’s company first, Sam or Dave? Is Dave the drug man going to buy Sam the sugar man’s company, or is Sam the sugar man going to buy Dave the drug man’s company?

When they want to buy the other’s company, will the bankers, lawyers and investment houses and politicians back Sam the sugar man or Dave the drug man?

Whose son or grandson has a better chance of getting into Harvard or getting a job offer at Goldman Sachs, Sam or Dave’s?

Don’t listen to me. And don’t listen to Peter Jennings, Dan Rather or Tom Brokaw. Who do you think pays their salaries? Who owns the companies they work for? Sam or Dave?

Don’t listen to anyone else. Think about the numbers and listen to your heart. What do you believe?

There is very little about how the money works on the drug trade that you cannot know for yourself by coming to grips with the economics over a fifty year period of Sam and Dave and their boat loads of white agricultural substance. It is the magic of compound interest.

As one of my former partners used to say, “Cash flow is more important than your mother.”

Many Boatloads Later

It’s more than fifty years now since the boats transporting Sam and Dave’s white agricultural products docked in New Orleans. I don’t know what the Narco National Product (Solari’s term for that portion of the GNP coming from narco dollars) was in 1947, but lets say it was a billion dollars or less. Today, the Narco National Product that number is estimated to be about $400 billion globally and about $150 billion plus in the United States.

It helps to look at the business globally as the United States is the world leader in global money laundering. According to the Department of Justice, the US launders between $500 billion — $1 trillion annually. I have little idea what percentage of that is narco dollars, but it is probably safe to assume that at least $100-200 billion relates to US drug import-exports and retail trade.

Ok, so let’s think about how much Sam and Dave have in accumulated profits in their bank and brokerage accounts.

Let’s assume that the US narco national product in 1947 was $1 billion and it has grown to about $150 billion today. Assume a straight line of growth from $1 billion – $150 billion, so the business grows about $3 billion a year and then tops out at $150 billion as the Solari Index has bottomed out at or near 0 percent. America is about as stoned on illegal drugs as it can get, and growth in controlled “Schedule II” substances has moved to Ritalin and other cocaine-like drugs for kids that government programs and health insurance will now finance.

Let’s take the BIG PERCENT margin that we estimated for Dave the drug man’s net cash margin. Let’s say that every year from 1947 through 2001, that the cash flow sales available for reinvestment from drug profits grew by $3 billion a year, throwing off that number times BIG PERCENT. Okay, assume that the reinvested profit grew at the compound growth rate of the Standard & Poor’s 500 as it got reinvested along the way.

That amount is an estimate for the equity owned and controlled by those who have profited in the drug trade. Total narco dollars. How much money is that? I made an Excel spread-sheet once to estimate total narco capital in the economy.

My numbers showed that Dave the drug man had bought up not only Sam’s companies, but — if you throw in other organized crime cash flows — a controlling position in about most everything on the New York Stock Exchange.

When you think about it, this analysis make sense. The folks with the BIG PERCENT — big cash margin — would end up rich and in power and the guys working their you-know-what off for SLIM PERCENT — a low cash margin — would end up working for them.

NYSE Chairman Richard Grasso Embracing a FARC Commmander

A Real World Example:
NYSE’s Richard Grasso and the Ultimate New Business “Cold Call”

Lest you think my comment about the New York Stock Exchange is too strong, let’s look at one event that occurred before our “war on drugs” went into high gear throughPlan Colombia, banging heads over narco dollar market share in Latin America.

In late June 1999, numerous news services, including Associated Press, reported that Richard Grasso, Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange flew to Colombia to meet with a spokesperson for Raul Reyes of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), the supposed “narco terrorists” with whom we are now at war.

The purpose of the trip was “to bring a message of cooperation from U.S. financial services” and to discuss foreign investment and the future role of U.S. businesses in Colombia.

Some reading in between the lines said to me that Grasso’s mission related to the continued circulation of cocaine capital through the US financial system. FARC, the Colombian rebels, were circulating their profits back into local development without the assistance of the American banking and investment system. Worse yet for the outlook for the US stock market’s strength from $500 billion — $1 trillion in annual money laundering — FARC was calling for the decriminalization of cocaine.

To understand the threat of decriminalization of the drug trade, just go back to your Sam and Dave estimate and recalculate the numbers given what decriminalization does to drive BIG PERCENT back to SLIM PERCENT and what that means to Wall Street and Washington’s cash flows. No narco dollars, no reinvestment into the stock markets, no campaign contributions.

It was only a few days after Grasso’s trip that BBC News reported a General Accounting Office (GAO) report to Congress as saying: “Colombia’s cocaine and heroin production is set to rise by as much as 50 percent as the U.S. backed drug war flounders, due largely to the growing strength of Marxist rebels”

I deduced from this incident that the liquidity of the NY Stock Exchange was sufficiently dependent on high margin cocaine profits (BIG PERCENT) that the Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange was willing for Associated Press to acknowledge he is making “cold calls” in rebel controlled peace zones in Colombian villages. “Cold calls” is what we used to call new business visits we would pay to people we had not yet done business with when I was on Wall Street.

I presume Grasso’s trip was not successful in turning the cash flow tide. Hence, Plan Colombia is proceeding apace to try to move narco deposits out of FARC’s control and back to the control of our traditional allies and, even if that does not work, to move Citibank’s market share and that of the other large US banks and financial institutions steadily up in Latin America.

Buy Banamex anyone?

Part II: Narco Dollars On Your Map TOP

It helps to look at the drug markets by looking at a map of the United States.

What are the four states with the largest market share in illegal narcotics trafficking? Draw a map if you want and shade them in on your map.

Yup. You got it.

New York, California, Texas and Florida.

It makes sense. Those are the biggest states. They have big coastal areas and borders and big ports. It would make sense that the population would grow in the big states where the trade and business flow grows. If you check back to Part I of “Narco Dollars for Dummies”, we described two businesses. One was Sam’s sugar business that had a SLIM PERCENTAGE profit. The other was Dave’s drug business that had a BIG PERCENTAGE profit. It would make sense that these four states would be real big in both Sam’s sugar business and Dave’s drug businesses.

OK. Now. What are the four states with the biggest business in money laundering of narco profits and other profits of organized crime?

Not surprising? Same four states. They are all known as banking power places.

New York, California, Texas and Florida.

What’s next? What are the four states with the biggest business in taking the laundered narco profits and using them to deposit money in a bank, or to buy another company, or to start a new company, or just buy stock in the stock market? That’s what I call the reinvestment business.

Same four, right? New York, California, Texas and Florida.

Who were the governors of these four states in 1996?

Well, let’s see. Jeb Bush was the governor of Florida. Governor Jeb was the son of George H. W. Bush, the former head of an oil company in Texas and Mexico and the former head of the CIA and the former head of the various drug enforcement efforts as Vice President and President. Then George W. Bush, also the son of George H. W. Bush, was the governor of Texas. So the governors of two of the largest narco dollar market share states just happen to be the sons of the former chief of the secret police.

Do you think it is possible to become the governor of a state with the support of the SLIM PERCENTAGE profit businesses and the opposition of the BIG PERCENTAGE profit businesses, particularly after the BIG PRECENTAGE profits have bought up all the SLIM PERCENTAGE profit businesses?

What about president?

Of course, George W. is President today fueled by the single most successful campaign fundraising in the history of Western civilization. Now do you know why Hillary Clinton wanted to be a Senator from New York? Now do you know why Andrew Cuomo wants to be New York governor and is reported to be doing polls to see if people associate him with the Mafia and organized crime?

When you think about it, the President would need to win the majority of the people who donate from the SLIM PERCENTAGE profit businesses but control the reinvestment of the BIG PERCENTAGE profit industry cash flow to win. The competition for the support of the people who control the reinvestment from the BIG PERCENTAGE profit business cash flow in the biggest states would be fierce.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics analysis of the 2000 elections, donors in California, New York, the District of Colombia Metro Area (which is full of lawyers and lobbyists who represent all the other states), Texas and Florida contributed $666.8 million, or approximately 47 percent of a total of $1.427 billion in donations.

I can just paraphrase Tina Turner singing in the background. Care to hum along with us? . . . .”What’s drugs got to do . . . got to do . . . with it?”

Getting Out of Narco Dollars HQ

In 1996, my company and I were targeted by a private informant and a group of investigators working for the Department of Justice and the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). If you have ever seen the movie Enemy of the State with Will Smith and Gene Hackman, then you understand how the drill works.

Will Smith plays a successful Washington lawyer who is targeted in a phony frame and smear by a US intelligence agency. The spooky types have high-speed access to every last piece of data on the information highway — from Will’s bank account to his telephone conversations — and the wherewithal to engineer a smear campaign through the papers and the Council on Foreign Relations types.

The organizer of an investment conference once introduced me by saying, “Who here has seen the movie Enemy of the State? The woman I am about to introduce to you played Will Smith in real life.”

One day I was a wealthy entrepreneur with a beautiful home, a successful business and money in the bank. I had been a partner and member of the board of directors of a Wall Street firm and then Assistant Secretary of Housing-Federal Housing Commissioner during the Bush Administration. I had been invited to serve as a governor of the Federal Reserve Board and instead started my own company in Washington, The Hamilton Securities Group. Thanks to our leadership in digital technology, financial software and analytics, Hamilton was doing well and poised for significant financial growth.

One of my software tool innovations, Community Wizard, helped communities access data about how all the money works in their place. Accessible through the World Wide Web, Community Wizard was illuminating an unusual pattern of defaults on HUD mortgages and other government and homeowner losses in areas in which the CIA had admitted to facilitating cocaine trafficking by Iran Contra supporters.

According to the CIA, we were paying our government to help the narco dollars make money in a way that — if you read Community Wizard’s comic book-like money maps — was losing taxpayers and homeowners billions of dollars.

The next day I was hunted, living through 18 audits and investigations and a smear campaign directed not just at me but also at members of my family, colleagues and friends who helped me. I believe that the smear campaign originated at the highest levels. For more than two years I lived through serious physical harassment and surveillance. This included burglary, stalking, having houseguests followed and dead animals left on the doormat. The hardest part was the necessity of keeping quiet about the physical danger lest it cost me more support or harm my credibility. Most people simply do not believe that such things are possible in America.

In 1999, I sold everything to pay what to date is approximately $6 million of legal and administrative costs. My estimate of equity destroyed, damages and opportunity costs is $250 million. I moved to a system of living in several places on an unpredictable schedule in the hope that this would push up the cost of surveillance and harassment and so dissuade my tormentors from following.

The places were chosen to move me as far away as possible from the corridors of power in Washington and on Wall Street filled with people benefiting from narco dollars and their reinvestment. That strategy-combined with excellent legal and administrative work by a first rate team of very courageous people — has been successful in besting the targeting. It made it possible for me to understand how our economic addiction to narco dollars worked and how to it was draining our neighborhoods. I teamed up with the members of my family and friends and their neighbors who were getting drained.

Four days after Insight Magazine published its cover story on me this summer, the head investigator targeting us resigned unexpectedly. Three weeks later the last of 18 audits and investigations was suddenly closed down. A follow-up article by Insight’s Paul Rodriguez described the closed investigation as something that “many inside both HUD and the Department of Justice regarded as a political vendetta against Fitts.”

The miracle had happened. We have overcome a serious targeting. Like in the movie where Will Smith comes out fine, my story has a happy ending. It’s a wonderful feeling. As Winston Churchill’s once said, “Nothing is more exhilarating than being shot at without result.”

I believe that one of the reasons for my happy ending was that our actions to deal with the investigation reflected the understanding of narco dollars that I acquired from living and traveling throughout America and talking with people from all walks of life about how narco dollars were impacting our lives and neighborhoods in many different places.

Understanding narco dollars is something I need to know to help entrepreneurs around the country build the profitable deals and businesses that will get the Solari Index and Dow Jones in our neighborhoods rising together.

Where I live, folks do not want to know about what is wrong on the Titanic. They do not want to know that a flood of narco dollars is rolling over us. They know these things. What they want to know is how to build arks.

Georgie, West Philadelphia and the Stock Market

One of my new homes is in the city in Philadelphia, near where I grew up in West Philadelphia. Another is in a very beautiful and close knit farming community in Hickory Valley, Tennessee where my father’s family has lived since the 1850’s.

Once a month I drive to Philadelphia from my home in Hickory Valley to attend a board meeting. I stay in a lovely little apartment in the first floor of a row house owned by my friend Georgie.

Georgie is one of my favorite people in the world. She lives in the apartment on the second floor. Just about my favorite thing in the world is hanging out with Georgie. We watch Oprah, we talk, we go to movies, and we giggle over ice cream with long names and cookies. Georgie is an awesome cook and my little apartment fills up daily with the smells of something delicious that Georgie is making.

One day, Forest, my dog, and I were up in Georgie’s apartment to enjoy a fresh plate of scrapple that Georgie had fried up that morning. The conversation turned to narco dollars. Georgie said that looking at the big picture was simply too overwhelming. Couldn’t I explain this without using the words millions or billions — just dollars and cents in terms of our neighborhood in West Philadelphia?

I always have this problem explaining international money flows to moms and grandmoms. Most really great women want to know about the real world. The world of real people — her world full of her kids and grandkids and other kids she loves.

So we got out a blank piece of paper and started to estimate.

Every day there are two or three teenagers on the corner dealing drugs across from our home in Philadelphia. We figured that if they had a 50% deal with a supplier, did $300 a day of sales each, and worked 250 days a year that their supplier could run his net profits of approximately $100,000 through a local fast food restaurant that was owned by a publicly traded company.

Assuming that company has a stock market value that is a multiple of 20-30 times its profits, a handful of illiterate teenagers could generate approximately $2-3 million in stock market value for a major corporation, not to mention a nice flow of deposits and business for the Philadelphia banks and insurance companies.

The Narco Dollar Double Bind:
Dow Jones Index Up, Solari Index Down

As described in Part I, the Solari Index is my way of estimating how well a place is doing. It is based upon the percentage of people in a place who believe that a child can leave their home and go to the nearest place to buy a Popsicle and come home alone safely. The Solari Index is about how safe you feel you and your neighbor’s kids are.

When I was a child growing up in the 1950’s at 48th and Larchwood in West Philadelphia, the Solari Index was 100 percent. It was unthinkable that a child was not safe running up to the stores on Spruce Street for a Popsicle and some pinball. The Dow Jones was about 500, the Solari Index was 100 percent and our debt per person was very low. Of course I did not think about it that way at the time. All I knew was that life on the street with my buddies was sweet.

Today, the Dow Jones is over 9,000, debt per person is over $100,000, and I think the Solari Index in my old neighborhood is 0 percent.

Life on the street ain’t sweet anymore.

To understand how this works, we need to understand “pop.”

It’s Not Just About Profit, It’s About the Pop

Here is the part that is particularly hard for women. It took several times at our sheet of paper before Georgie understood what I was saying.

The power of narco dollars comes when you combine drug trafficking with the stock market.

The “pop” is a word I learned on Wall Street to describe the multiple of income at which a stock trades. So if a stock like PepsiCo trades at 20 times it’s income, that means for every $100,000 of income it makes, it’s stock goes up $2 million. The company may make $100,000, but its “pop” is $2 million. Folks make money in the stock market from the stock going up. On Wall Street, it’s all about “pop.”

The people who own a corporation make money on the stock going up. So a company has investors, with the most powerful investors typically being large institutions who are typically represented on the board of the company. The board is the group of people who decides what goes. The senior management officials who run the company day to day are also on the board. Most of the money they make comes from stock options that they get to encourage them to get the stock to go up for the investors. That means that what everyone who runs the company wants is for the stock to go up. The way to do that is to increase net income or to increase the multiple at which the stock trades.

So in the case of PepsiCo described above, if the management increases soda pop sales in a way that net income goes up by $100,000, the stock goes up $2 million. Now let’s say, the board and management do a whole series of things to attract new investors and improve the company’s image and, as a result, the stock starts trading at 22 times profits. Then, the stock value goes up even more. Whether increasing net income or increasing the multiple at which the stock market values the company profits, the board and the management are focused on making the stock go up. That is how their money works.

The winner in the global corporate game is the guy who has the most income running through the highest multiple stocks. He is the winning pop player. Like the guy who wins at monopoly because he buys up all the properties on the board, he can buy up all the other companies.

So if I have a company that has a $100,000 of income and a stock trading at 20 times earnings, if I can find a way to run $100,000 of narcotics sales by a few teenagers in West Philadelphia through my financial statements, I can get my stock market value to go up from $2 million – $4 million. I can double my “pop.” That is a quick $2 million profit from putting a few teenagers to work driving the Solari Index down in their neighborhood. Bottom line, I can make a lot of quick money on the stock going up and the Solari Index going down

OK, now what does this all mean for the Solari Index in Philadelphia? If I am a group of mothers in my neighborhood who want the Solari Index to go back up to a 100%, what’s stopping me?

Well, if the Department of Justice is correct about $500 billion-to-1 trillion of annual money laundering in the US, then about $20-40 billion should move annually through the Philadelphia Federal Reserve District.

Assuming a 20% margin for the BIG PERCENTAGE profits and a 20 times multiple on the stock of the companies that Dave and his investors and banking partners were using to launder the money, let’s look at how much of the stock market value would be “addicted” to the drug and money laundering profits flowing through the Philadelphia area.

The total stock market value generated in the Philadelphia area with $20-40 billion in narco retail sales would be about $80-160 billion. If you add all the things you could do with debt or and other ways to increase the multiples, and you could get that even higher, say $100-250 billion.

Assuming that there are 3 million people in the greater Philadelphia area, the total stock market value generated would average anywhere from $27,000-to-$85,000 per person. Imagine what would happen to the economy in Philadelphia if this stock market value suddenly disappeared because all the teenagers in Philadelphia stopped dealing or buying drugs?

Imagine what happens to your stock multiple if you are a Philadelphia corporate chieftain and you don’t run narco dollars or large purchases fueled by narco dollars through your financial statements and you don’t attract narco dollars to reinvest in your stock? What happens to your corporate income and your stock profit if the ones who invest narco dollars — accumulated over the last fifty years compounding at their magical compound interest — don’t like you? How is everyone in Philadelphia who loses money on your stock going down going to feel about you?

The Department of Justice says that we launder $500 billion – $1 trillion. Multiply those times a BIG PERCENTAGE cash flow profit margin. Now figure how much of that “income” gets run through the income statement of publicly traded banks and companies and multiply that number by the multiple of income at which their stocks trade.

Voila. I don’t know what your number is. All I know is that, as Ed Sullivan used to say, it is “really, really BIG.”

Understanding Money Laundering in America
Part III: Drugs as Currency

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“Who can compete with the government?”

–John Gotti, Jr.

The Hickory Valley-Philadelphia Fast Food Franchise Pop

Two things helped me understand money laundering in America. First, as I drove from Hickory Valley to Philadelphia once a month and drove around the country with my dog Forest all sorts of people started to teach me about how the money worked truckers and the ladies who run the brand-name motels and the folks who work the late shifts at the gas station food marts. Second, I read Black Money, a mystery novel by Michael Thomas, a former partner of the Wall Street firm, Lehman Brothers.

In Black Money a government investigator investigating S&L fraud starts to look into the revenues and expenses of a fast food chain, which is experiencing far more deposits from sales than it is selling pizzas. As Thomas walks you through a handful of the near infinite number of possible money laundering schemes known to mankind, you start to get a sense for some of the economics of fast food franchises that have nothing to do with feeding people.

After I finished Black Money I started to pay attention to “how the money works” at the fast food and motel franchises at every interstate exit between Tennessee and Philadelphia. What I noticed about them was that no matter when I drove by — day or night, weekday or weekend — some of them were suprisingly empty. Indeed, one or two name brands were defined by their perpetual emptiness. Conversations every time I stopped filled in a lot here and there about how much cash was coming in and going out on the food and retail business.

Some quick estimation on what was being spent per interstate exit to start up and operate all the retail establishments versus what was coming in the door in terms of legitimate business said that some businesses had to be an excuse, an excuse to generate stock market capital gains by combining laundered money or phony profits with retail franchises — or both.

The problems this presents to people trying to run an honest business are numerous. The problems it creates for our work ethic and culture are numerous too. It increasingly puts the low performance people in charge, and everyone starts to behave like and follow them.

For example, I drove ten miles to Bolivar, our county seat, one night to go through the car wash at the local big chain publicly traded gas station. I tried to pay for a three-dollar car wash with quarters. I was told they would not take coins. It was a policy. Counting coins was too much work, the person at the register and then the manager said as they sat and gossiped with their friends, no other customers in sight. So I got back in my car and drove ten miles home and washed the car with a hose and some paper towels, the symbolic economy being too busy to care about steady customers or to do the real work in the concrete world.

If you are feeling energetic, go drive around to a few areas with a heavy concentration of retail fast food and motel franchises. Try estimating out the numbers. See how they work for you in your place. Are your local businesses in the retail business or the money laundromat business or both?

Another quick and dirty estimation technique for your neighborhood is to take the Department of Justice’s figure of $500 billion – $1 trillion and divide by 281 million Americans for a “per American” estimate of money laundering market share. Now multiply that times the number of people in your area. Now divide by the number of local banks. What do the numbers say to you?

The next time you are out on the streets, see if you can guess where the money is. It’s bound to be there someplace.

Enforcement: At the Heart of the Double Bind

I tend not to get bogged down in discussions about how the various police, enforcement and prosecution industries relate to narco dollars.

Here is my bottom line on how the money works on enforcement and the war on drugs.

Every year since I was a child the Solari Index goes down and the budgets that I pay for as a taxpayer to fund more enforcement, prosecution and incarceration go up. If you look at what taxpayers are paying, you would think we were picking up all the narco dollar industry’s expenses.

The more we pay for enforcement, the more the Solari Index goes down and drug profits go up. The more we pay for national security, the more thousands of boat loads of white agricultural products seem to have no problem moving back and forth across the borders.

After fifty years, the correlation is documented and clear.

What is also clear is that the person who has inside help from the national security, intelligence, enforcement and prosecution bureaucracies will have the biggest BIG PERCENTAGE cash margin (see Parts I & II for background on BIG vs. SLIM PERCENTAGE).

John Gotti, Jr, not a reliable source, when asked by a reporter whether or not the New York Gotti family was dealing in narcotics said, “No, who can compete with the government?”

The CIA, also not a reliable source, backs up Mr. Gotti’s postion. According to the CIA’s own Inspector General, the government has been facilitating drug trafficking. Indeed, according to the CIA and DOJ (Dept. of Justice), the CIA and DOJ created a memorandum of understanding that permitted the CIA to help its allies and assets to traffic in drugs and not have to report it.

Where I come from powerful people pay for performance. I can only presume that the narco dollars are getting the performance they want from the expenditure of our tax dollars for more and more enforcement. After all, enforcement keeps profit margins up and the franchise controlled.

The best example I know is my own case. My estimate is that the federal enforcement establishment may have spent more to target me over the last six years than they spent to get Bin Laden before September 11. They clearly were not hampered in my case by having to respect the spirit or the letter of the law. I deduce from that only that the Solari model is not as good for the narco dollar and money laundering businesses as Bin Laden was — at least until recently.

Drugs as Currency

One of challenges of doing the numbers on the narcotics business is that narcotics are not always a commodity — sometimes narcotics are a currency used to pay for other things.

The arms industry sometimes markets to third world countries, or groups such as terrorists, who cannot pay with cash, but can pay with drugs. So, for example, it is not unusual to see arms-drugs transshipment operations, in which payment for arms is taken with drugs and then the drugs retailed in the US to facilitate the arms trading and profits.

A case in point is the Iran-Contra operation at Mena, Arkansas. It has been alleged that Oliver North and the White House (National Security Council) were dealing drugs through Mena not to make money, but to facilitate arms shipments. Mena has received attention as a result of its alleged financial contribution to Bill and Hillary Clinton’s rise to national prominence.

You also see the arms-drugs relationship as you estimate how the money works on the private profits from various taxpayer funded wars. Vietnam, Kosovo, Plan Colombia,Afghanistan, what do they all have in common? Drugs, oil and gas, arms. Add gold, currency and bank market share and you have the top of my checklist for understanding how the money works on any war or “low intensity conflict” around the globe.

Many of the members of our global leadership were trained in wartime narcotics trafficking in Asia during WWII. George H. W. Bush and his generation watched our ally Chang Kai Shek finance his army and covert operations with opium. I am told that the Flying Tigers were the model that taught Air America how to fly dope.

If you trace back the history of the family and family networks of America’s leaders and numerous other leaders around the world, what you will find is that narcotics and arms trafficking are a multigenerational theme that has criss-crossed through Asia, North America, Europe, Latin America and Eurasia and back through the City of London and Wall Street to the great pools of financial capital. Many a great American and British fortune got going in the Chinese opium trade.

One of the benefits of learning how narco dollars work is that it will help you sort through the money laundering and insider trading news on the War on Terrorism. Terrorism and narcotics trafficking often get linked through narcotics as currency. Terrorists need guns. Narco dollars need private protection and covert operations.

In Defense of the American Drug Lords

It’s 1947. You want to make sure that America wins in the great game of globalization. The winner will be the country that accumulates the largest pool of capital to finance its corporations and investment in new technology. That is a problem because Americans vote for leaders who help them spend, not save. No matter how hard Sam the sugar man works and no matter how much he saves, how much capital can be pooled at SLIM PERCENTAGE? It is fair to say it is not enough to beat the investment network that can pool capital at BIG PRECENTAGE growth rates. (See Part I for the story of Sam and Dave).

Indeed, what a history of narcotics trafficking and piracy and various other forms of organized crime over the last five hundred years show is that our leaders have been in a double bind for centuries. The only thing more dangerous than getting caught doing organized crime, is not being in control of the reinvested cash flows from it. This is why monarchs played footsie with pirates in Elizabethan times and no doubt have been doing so ever since.

After taxation, organized crime is a society’s way of forming lots of pools of low cost cash capital. Organized crime is a banking and venture capital business.

So the reality is that if you want to control the cash flow and capital that controls the overworld, you’ve got to control the cash flows getting generated by the underworld. Indeed, you’ve got to have an underworld. If it does not exist, you need to outlaw some things to get one going.

Here is the bottom line on how the money works on narco dollars. Unless Sam switches to dope, Dave will win his wife, his mistress, his banker, buy his company, buy his Congressman and be the star at the local charities. Everyone will admire and pay attention to Dave.

It’s the power of compound interest.

It’s 1947. If you don’t do it, you will be the loser. What would you do?

The Pogo Problem: We Have Met the Enemy and It is Us

The Sam and Dave dilemma of “to deal or not to deal” is made worse by the power of popular opinion.

Last summer, I made a presentation called “How the Money Works on Organized Crime” to a wonderful group of about 100 people at an annual conference for a spiritually focused foundation in Philadelphia. This is a group of people who are committed to contributing to the spiritual evolution of our culture.

After walking through the various Sam and Dave dilemmas with Sam’s SLIM PERCENTAGE profits sugar business and Dave’s BIG PERCENTAGE profits drug business, as well as the intersection between the stock market and campaign fundraising and narco dollars for about an hour, I asked the group what would happen to the stock market if we decriminalized or legalized drugs?

The stock market would crash, they said.

What would happen to financing the government deficit if we enforced all money-laundering laws? Since most of the bank wire transfers are batched and run through the New York Federal Reserve Bank, this should not really be that hard, right?

Their taxes might go up. Worse, yet, their government checks might stop, they said.

I then asked them to imagine a big red button at the front of the lectern. By the power of our imaginations, if they pushed that button they could decriminalize narcotics trafficking and stop all money laundering in the United States.

Who would push the button?

It turns out that in an audience of approximately 100 people committed to spiritually evolve our society that only one person would push the button. Upon reflection, 99 would not. I asked why.

They said that if they pushed the button, their mutual funds would go down and their government checks might stop.

I commented that what they were proposing is that an entire infrastructure of people continue to market narcotics to their children and grandchildren to ensure that their mutual and pension funds stay high in value.

They said, yes, that’s right.

Which is why I say that America is not addicted to narcotics as much as it is addicted to narco dollars.

The National Security Council’s Double Bind in 1996

Here is the acid test.

It’s August 1996. Gary Webb has just broken the story in the San Jose Mercury News about the CIA helping to deal drugs into South Central LA. He has put the legal documents up on their website. The proof is hard. The government is dealing drugs.

Catherine Austin Fitts’s company is publishing a tool on the web called Community Wizard that shows maps with Geographic Information Systems software that include patterns of defaults on HUD mortgages in the areas of LA with the heaviest concentration of CIA supported Iran Contra drug trafficking.

The patterns between HUD defaulted mortgages and narco dollars are much too close for comfort.

What would you do if you were Bob Rubin (Secretary of Treasury, now Co-Chairman of Citicorp), Larry Summers (Deputy Secretary of Treasury, now President ofHarvard), John Hawke (Undersecretary of the Treasury; now Comptroller of the Currency), Al Gore (Vice President, now teaching) and John Deutch (Director of the CIA, now teaching) sitting on the national security council or the related narco dollars task force?

Would you target Webb and get him fired and the story discredited or would you let the story grow and flourish?

Would you target Fitts and have her business and her software tools and databases destroyed or would you let her business flourish, allowing every community to see and track the narco dollars that were helping to drive their Solari Index to 0% while driving the Dow Jones Index higher?

Which will it be in an election year? Will you do everything you can do to attract the reinvestment of the narco dollars into your campaign and into the stock market or will you let Fitts and Webb continue to illuminate “how the money works” on narco dollars in a way that might crash the stock market and make it harder and more expensive for the government to finance the deficit?

Before you answer, let me tell you one more story.

In 1999, I was at a revival for Christian women. One of the presidential candidates made a guest appearance. A friend of mine, an Afro-American minister, who used to work for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), leapt to her feet to applaud him with tremendous enthusiasm. I was surprised at her response given that she understood his success in attracting narco dollars not to mention his and his colleague’s silence on Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance reports and the subsequent CIA admission of drug dealing by the government.

She looked at me and said, “He is going to be the winner.” So I said, “You mean, I am a loser because I tried to stop the corruption and he is a winner because he profited from it and helped it grow. So you will clap for him and not for me.” She replied, “That’s right. You are a loser. He is a winner”

Not such an easy decision to vote for the “rule of law” is it?

Indeed, Webb got fired and Fitts’ was targeted and, after spending $6 million on legal and related expenses, my fortune sank down to the same 0% as the Solari Index.

But whatever I do, I can’t blame it just on the top guys. Whatever they did, whoever it was, they were doing what it took to please and win the crowd.

Americans love a winner.

Solari Index Up, Dow Up, Debt Down

The good news on all of this is that there are solutions. New technology blesses us with the potential tools we can use to radically increase productivity in a way that can “jump the curve” on our narco dollar addiction.

Will it happen? I don’t know.

My pastor says, “If we can face it, God can fix it.” The question is can we face our addiction to narco dollars? Can we do it in a way that entrepreneurs like me can build successful businesses and transactions that profit from getting the Solari Index and the Dow Jones Index to go up together?

Sound impossible? Far from it. It’s quite possible. Add up all the current income generated by small businesses in America. It is currently valued at a multiple of 1-5 times because it is private-not publicly traded in a liquid stock market. Investors have no way to invest in a liquid publicly traded stock.

The creation of a solari, a local knowledge manager/databank that publishes neighborhood financial statements and information and tracks the Solari Index in your place, can make it possible for your neighborhood to create a mutual fund that could channel capital to the profitable small businesses in your neighborhood so that participating small business income could start to trade at a multiple of 10 times — even 20 times or 30 times eventually. The potential capital gains are in the trillions of dollars.

That is a lot of low cost capital that local entrepreneurs can use to create jobs and to build their businesses — even start new ones.

Better yet, while your doing that how about reengineering billions of federal, state and local government investment that has a negative return on investment to both taxpayers and communities to a positive return on investment. More big capital gains that can be securitized and traded in a liquid stock market — again the potential profits are in the trillions.

Finally, add up the value of all the homes and real estate in your community. OK, what would happen to the value of that equity if the Solari Index went back up to 100 percent? Real estate financed through a local trust or REIT or mutual fund that could be traded in the stock market would create a way for investors to start to “trade places.” That means they would profit from the Solari Index going up along with local real estate owners, homeowners and small business folks. Add some more trillions to the potential capital gains.

Helping the Solari Index rise back to 100% is the biggest capital gains opportunity in America, particularly when combined with reengineering government investment and pooling small business equity in a manner that provides competitive access to the stock market. Generations of accumulated narco dollars could do very well investing successfully in such a capital gains opportunity.

A trillion here, a trillion there — pretty soon you are talking about a lot of “pop.”

It can only happen if we can look into the face of our addiction and start having a conversation about how we move out of our current financial incentives that keep the Solari Index down to a more positive, sustainable and wealthy future for our children and grandchildren. For example, think about what would happen if every government worker in America had their annual salary fluctuate based on the performance of the Solari Index in their jurisdiction? I bet it would take about three years to get the Solari Index back to 100%.

That is why all the yah-yah in Washington about new stricter money laundering laws to deal with terrorism won’t work. If government officials and bankers can keep making money when the Solari Index is at 0%, it will not rise no matter how many people — innocent or guilty — we put in jail. The day we decide that government officials only make money for performance and all the companies that get money from government — whether contractors or banks that use taxpayers credit — only get money if we are better off and the Solari Index is rising, is when we will start to face and solve the real problems in a money making way.

It’s time to face our addiction to narco dollars and to grapple with how to reverse our incentive systems. It is time to figure out how publicly traded companies and our banks and insurance companies can make more money from our kids succeeding then from them failing. Indeed, it can be done.

So here is my last message on how the money works on narco dollars. Now that we have run the Solari Index down to near 0% while fueling the rise of the Dow Jones about 20X since I was a kid, the new opportunity is going to be the fortunes to be made on businesses and investment vehicles that fuel the Solari Index rising.

Wouldn’t you pay for streets to be sweet for your child once again? Especially if it made you a whole bunch of money on an IPO of your neighborhood mutual or venture fund in the stock market?

I want to make money on kids succeeding. I want to teach Dave a way to make more money by getting out of narco dollars and backing Sam starting a solari and “trading places.”

My money is on Solari rising.

For more on starting a solari for your neighborhood, see www.solari.com, or contact Catherine at catherine@solari.com

Bibliography TOP

After three years of plowing through hundreds of books, videos and articles, here are the sources that I found most useful to helping me understand “how the money works” in the drug trade.

Assuming that you are a busy person who knows nothing about narco dollars and does not want to become an expert — you just want to have a good map of “how the money works” in your world — I have put an (*) next to my top four book and one video recommendations. These are the ones that will be the most useful to help you understand the drug trade and what it means to you, your family, your business and the Solari Index in your neighborhood.

Books:

Black Money, Michael Thomas, Crown (HC) / St Martins (paper), 1994/95 (*)

Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War, Christopher Simpson, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988

The Boys on the Tracks, Mara Leveritt. St. Martin’s Press, 1999 http://www.maraleveritt.com/botthome.htm

Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, Peter Dale Scott & Jonathan Marshall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

The Collected Works of Col. L. Fletcher Prouty, including, The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World, Col. L. Fletcher Prouty (Ret.) and Understanding Special Operations And Their Impact on The Vietnam War Era – 1989 Interview with L. Fletcher Prouty Colonel USAF (Retired), by David Ratcliffe, rat haus reality press, 1999.http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/USO/
CD-Rom, available from http://www.prouty.org/cdrom.html at The Col. L. Fletcher Prouty Reference Site

CRA$HMAKER: A Federal Affaire, a novel of love, death and the Federal Reserve, Victor Sperandeo & Alvaro Almeida, http://www.crashmaker.com/

Dark Alliance, Gary Webb. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.(*)

Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Peter Dale Scott. Berkley: University of California Press, 1996. See Deep Politics: Some Further Thoughts(http://roswell.fortunecity.com/angelic/96/pdscot~1.htm)

Dope, Inc.: Britain’s Opium War Against the United States, Konstandinos Kalimtgis, 1978

Double Cross: The Explosive Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled America, Sam & Chuck Giancana. New York: Warner Books, 1998

False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire, Peter Truell & Larry Gurwin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1992.

Hot Money and the Politics of Debt, R. T. Naylor. Montreal: Black Rose Books, 1994.(*)

The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, Sally Denton and Roger Morris http://www.randomhouse.com/knopf/authors/dentonmorris/

The Mafia, CIA and George Bush, Pete Brewton. New York: S.P.I., 1992. Introduction: http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a389b6a173e33.htm

Opium, Empire and the Global Political Economy, Carl A Trocki. Routledge: Taylor & Francis Group, 1999.(*)

The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Alfred W. McCoy Lawrence Hill Books, 1991.

Powderburns: Cocaine, Contras and the Drug War, Celerino Castillo, Dave Harmon, Mosaic Press, 1994

Red Mafiya : How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America, Robert I. Friedman, Little Brown & Company, 2000

Rulers of Evil: Useful Knowledge about Governing Bodies, F. Tupper Saussy HarperCollins, 2001

WhiteOut: The CIA, Drugs, and the Press, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. Verso, London:1998.

Articles:

“Albert Vincent Carone: The Missing Link Between Iran-Contra Cocaine Operations and Organized Crime”, Mike Ruppert. From the Wilderness Publications, 1994.
www.copvcia.com.

A Collection of Articles and Essays, Catherine Austin Fitts,
http://www.solari.com/gideon/articles/index.html

A Collection of Articles re: the Targeting of Catherine Austin Fitts:
http://www.solari.com/media/articles%20on%20gideon.htm

William Chambliss, Various articles on piracy and smuggling,
http://www.criminology.fsu.edu/crimtheory/chambliss.htm
http://www.gwu.edu/~soc/w_chambliss.html

Disinfo.com on Drugs, all articles by Preston Peet,
http://www.disinfo.com/pages/list/Drugs/by_author/

Has Dirty Money Polluted Bank of New York? Kelly O’Meara,

Mena, Arkansas: Various articles:

The Crimes of Mena, by Sally Denton & Roger Morris, 7/95
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/crimesOfMena.html

The Boys on the Track, various articles by Mara Leveritt,
http://www.maraleveritt.com/

Gray Money, by Mark Swaney,
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MENA/gray_money.html

Murder, Mayhem and Mystery in Mena, Preston Peet,
http://www.disinfo.com/pages/dossier/id329/pg1/

The Mystery of the “Lost” Mena Report; Gray Money: the Continued Cover-Up, by Mark Swaney
http://www.sierratimes.com/archive/files/jul/26/arms072601.htm

What Really Happened, Mena Archives:
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MENA/mena.html

The Crimes of Mena, by Roger Morris and Sally Denton,
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/RANCHO/POLITICS/MENA/crimes_of_mena.html

Sam Smith’s Progressive Review, The Clinton Scandals (see Mena sections):
http://prorev.com/wwindex.htm

Narco News, www.narconews.com, Al Giordano, Publisher

The Spooky-Minded Professor: CIA Cover Up Meister Gets Princeton Job, by Uri Dowbenko,
http://www.steamshovelpress.com/offlineillumination4.html

Up Against the Beast: High Level Drug Running, by Uri Dowbenko,
http://www.nexusmagazine.com/beast2.html

Catherine Austin Fitts:

Articles About:
http://www.solari.com/media/articles%20on%20gideon.htm

Articles By:
http://www.solari.com/gideon/articles/

Videos:

Air America, Mel Gibson

Bullworth, Warren Beatty

From http://www.fromthewilderness.com/store/videos.html:

CIA Director John Deutch in Watts Video: Special Town Hall Meeting with John Deutch & Juanita McDonald, October 15, 1996 (*)

Mike Ruppert on CIA & Drugs: The Confession & The Impeachment, From The Wilderness. Video, 1999.

The Salon At Fraser Court, Mike Ruppert, From the Wilderness Video, 1999.

Enemy of the State, Will Smith & Gene Hackman

Telefon, Charles Bronson and Lee Remick

Wag the Dog, Dustin Hoffman

For More Narco News go to www.narconews.com

ACORN Has Pull to “Whitewash” Investigations

admin — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 03:11:26 +0000

http://biggovernment.com/2009/11/10/exclusive-audio-from-acorn-claims-jerry-brown-will-whitewash-investigation/

Note: If ACORN can buy an investigation then you should have no problem thinking that Hamilton and Keane couldn’t get the same phone call as Brown.