Capítulo 39: George HW Bush and CIA Drug Trafficking:-PART5
"What about Guatemala? What about those murders?" a heckler yelled, referring to CIA sponsored military regimes in Guatemala murdering thousands of civilians.
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"Most importantly, when this investigation is complete, I intend to make the results public, so that any person can judge the adequacy of the investigation. Anyone in the public who has a wish to look at the report will be able to do so. I want to stress that I am not the only person in the CLA who
wants any American to believe that the CIA was responsible for this kind of disgusting charge. Finally, I want to say to you that as of today, we have no evidence of conspiracy by the CIA to engage in encouraging drug traffickers in Nicaragua or elsewhere in Latin America during this or any other period."
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A question came from a graduate student of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama: "I'd like to know how this incident differs from what happened at my school, where, for forty years, the government denied inflicting syphilis on African-American men?"
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Dutch conceded that what had happened at Tuskegee was terrible. "Let me say something else. There was no one who came forward forty years ago and said they were going to investigate."
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"• • •where I live there are no jobs for the children and our kids are just seen as commodities," a woman said. "They are being cycled through the prisons. They come back to the street and are marked and scarred for the rest of their life. You, the President and everybody else should be highly upset. You should be saying, how did this cancer get here?"
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A man stood up. "And now we are supposed to trust the CIA to investigate itself?"
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Dutch tried to quell the malcontents by overemphasising the Inspector General's independence, which incensed the crowd.
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"Why don't you turn it over to an independent counsel? Someone who has the power to issue subpoenas. It would have more credibility.
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Dutch responded that no independent counsel was possible because no criminal complaint had been filed.
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It was Mike Ruppert's turn to speak. For years, he'd been waiting for such an opportunity. The rowdy audience hushed as Mike said, "I will tell you, director Deutch, as a former Los Angeles Police narcotics detective, that your agency has dealt drugs throughout this country for a long time."
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There was a standing ovation. The audience went wild. It took a few minutes to calm everybody down.
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"Director Deutch, I will refer you to three specific agency operations known as Amadeus, Pegasus and Watchtower. I have Watchtower documents heavily redacted by the Agency [CIA]. I was personally exposed to CIA operations and recruited by CIA personnel who attempted to recruit me in the late 7Os to become involved in protecting Agency drug operations in this country. I have been trying to get this out for eighteen years, and I have the evidence. My question for you is very specific,
sir. If in the course of the IG's [CIA Inspector General's] investigations. yOu come across evidence of severely criminal activity, and it's classified, will you use that classification to hide the criminal activity or will you tell the American people the truth?"
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There was more applause and cheering as Deutch wrung his hands and clasped them together as if praying.
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"If you have information," Deutch said, "about CIA illegal activity in drugs, you should immediately bring that information to wherever you want, but let me suggest three places: the Los Angeles Police Department-"
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"No! No!" the crowd yelled.
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"It is your choice: the Los Angeles Police Department, the Inspector General or the office of one of your congresspersons. . ."
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The audience started chanting, "He told you!"
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"If this information turns up wrongdoing," Deutch said, growing exasperated. "We will bring the people to justice and make them accountable.'
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"For the record.." Mike said, "I did bring this information out eighteen years ago and I got shot at and forced out of LAPD because of it." Mike finished to massive applause.
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"My question to you is, " a spectator said to Deutch, "if you know all this stuff that the Agency has done historically, then why should we believe you today, when you say certainly this could never happen in Los Angeles, when the CIA's done this stuff all over the world?"
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"I didn't come here thinking everyone was going to believe me," Deutch said. "I came here for a much simpler task. I came here to stand up on my legs
and tell you I was going to investigate these horrible allegations. All you can do is listen to what I have to say and wait to see the results."
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"But how can we know how many documents have been shredded and how can we be certain that more documents won't be shredded?"
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"I don't know that anybody has found any lost documents in the operational files," Deutch said. "I know of nobody who has found any gaps in sequences, any missing files, any missing papers
for any period of that time. That may come up."
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"Hey, do you know Walter Pincus?" a man asked, referring to a journalist who spied on American students abroad for the CIA.
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"Yes," Deutch said. "Why?"
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"Is he an asset of the CIA?"
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As if he'd had enough, Deutch clasped his head and shook it.
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The crowd vented on the lady who'd invited Deutch to the meeting. "I don't know why this lady is saluting Deutch's courage for coming here today, when everybody knows this building has got hundreds of pigs in it. There's pigs behind those curtains. There's pigs on the roof. We're not going to get no ghetto justice today." The crowd murmured its approval.
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A man stood and pointed at Deutch. "TO see you coming in this community today ir. this way is nothing more than a public-relations move for the white people of this country. So you are going to come into this community today and insult us, and tell us you're going to investigate yourself. You've got to be crazy."
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Refusing to take any more questions, Dutch concluded with, "You know, I've learned how important it is for our government and our agency to get on top of this problem and stop it. I came today to try and describe the approach and have left with a better appreciation of what is on your mind."
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Immediately, the media tried to spin the meeting in a way favourable to the CIA. Via satellite, Ted Koppel of Nightline interviewed members of the
audience, trying to extract a positive testimony, only to find himself rebuffed by questions such as, "You come down here and talk about solutions. We have kids that are dying. We have hospitals for babies born drug addicted. When are you guys going to come down and bring cameras to our neighbourhood?"
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"I'm not sure that anybody even thought that was why Director Deutch came there today," Koppel said. "He's come here because a lot of you are in anguish. A lot of you are angry. A lot of you are frustrated by what you believe to be the CIA's involvement in bringing drugs to South Central LA. Now, I want to hear from someone who thought it did some good"
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"Well, I am glad Mr Deutch was here today," said Marcine Shaw, the mayor pro tem of Compton.
"I'm glad Congresswoman Macdonald had him here because that's what it took to get your cameras here, Mr Koppel."
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Koppel shook his head. "Yes, but that's not the question." Koppel finished his broadcast with, "If any suspicions were put to rest or minds changed, there was no evidence of it in South Central this evening."
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Originally, Pablo was in bed with the CIA through the Medellin Cartel's contributions to the Nicaraguan rebels. Traffickers who made such payments to the CIA were allowed to operate. Testifying as a US government witness at the Noriega trial, Carlos Lehder admitted contributing millions to the Nicaraguan rebels. Narcos tied the Medellín Cartel to the Nicaraguan government, which gave a false impression that the Communists were financing their activity with cocaine.
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It hadn't gone unnoticed by Pablo that the CIA had helped to overthrow the government of Bolivia in 1980, and put cocaine traffickers in charge -
detailed in my book, We Are Being Lied To: The War on Drugs. In the name of fighting Communism, the CIA had put Klaus Barbi- a Nazi war criminal responsible for the deaths of up to 14,000 people - in charge of the coup in Bolivia. His Argentine death squad had massacred numerous civilians. In light of what had transpired in Bolivia, Pablo probably thought that his goal of becoming the president of Colombia was realistic.
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After the coup, the CLA-backed Bolivian government exported raw coca. One of its customers was the Medellin Cartel. As the anti-Communist cause was being advanced, the CIA protected this activity by obstructing investigations by other law-enforcement agencies. In doing so, it created a secure route for coca paste to go from Bolivia to Colombia. In Medellin, the Bolivian paste was processed and distributed to the US.
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The Argentine intelligence services made a fortune from selling Bolivian paste. Some of the money was laundered in Miami and recycled into other anti -Communist causes, which included buying massive amounts of weapons from US manufacturers, which Bush represented, along with banking interests. That's how Bush used drug money to finance the Nicaraguan rebels.
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Prompted by the journalism of Gary Webb, the CIA and Justice Department investigations confirmed that the Nicaraguan rebels had been involved in the cocaine trade throughout the 1980s. The CIA had been aware of it, and they'd steered other
agencies, such as DEA investigators, away from the truth.
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Despite Narcos holding Pablo accountable for nearly all of the cocaine entering America, CIA protected cocaine wasn't only coming from Colombia. Pablo was used as a smokescreen for cocaine coming from various routes originating in
South America. In El Salvador, the military were involved. Honduras was a major transiting point. Anti-Castro Cubans active in Costa Rica sent boatloads of cocaine to Miami. As usual, the CIA stopped all of the investigations into these areas. The main-stream media avoided it. Long after Pablo's demise, the tangled roots of this infrastructure keep the cocaine flowing to this day.
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Although Pablo started out working with the CIA, the protection provided by the CLA for those contributing to its anti-Communist causes only lasted for so long. General Manuel Noriega of Panama learned this the hard way. While contributing to the Nicaraguan rebels, Noriega turned Panama into a haven for drug money. When George HW Bush was running the CIA in 1976, the US was paying Noriega $200,000 a year. By December 1989, Noriega was no longer useful. Bush turned on Noriega, who allegedly had filmed high-ranking CIA and US officials at sex parties with underage boys and girls at his home in Panama. Lambasting Noriega for drug crimes, the Americans invaded Panama, while omitting his CIA history. Operation Just Cause involved 27,684 troops and 300 aircraft attacking Panama. In January 1990, Noriega surrendered. In the US, he was sentenced to thirty years for trafficking, racketeering and money laundering.
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Somehow Pablo fell out of favour with the CIA. Researchers have speculated over the possible causes. Some believe it was a similar situation to Noriega: Pablo had become more valuable as an enemy to Bush.
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Falling out of favour with someone like Bush must have been daunting. Pablo was a midget in the murder leagues compared to Bush, who authorised the bombing of some of the poorest places in the world. Bush's invasion of Panama caused approximately 4,000 civilian deaths- about the same number of deaths credited to Pablo. According to the Pentagon, Bush's invasion of Iraq caused the deaths of 100,000 soldiers and 7,000 civilians. Backed up by presidential pomp and circumstance, video-casts of precision bombing and an ability to write off the mass murder of civilians as collateral damage, Bush committed murder with panache. With God and the media on his side, he never suffered any consequences.
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With Bush and the US military stepping up actions against Pablo, he needed a new strategy to emerge unscathed. It didn't take long for him to come up with one.
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