Tuesday, December 30, 2008

The CIA and drug flights?

In August 2007, a plane crashed in Mexico. It was full of cocaine from Columbia. No casualties were reported, and I don’t know what happened to the pilot or who he was.

In September 2008, an article was printed that said that the plane that crashed above was used in CIA ‘rendition’ flights. It flew several times to Guantanamo. The owner of the plane was listed as Clyde O’Conner who is from Florida.

This connection does not prove that the CIA was involved in drug trafficking, but it sure does raise suspicion. But it does smack of what the CIA was doing back in the 1980’s. Gary Webb reported on this in 1996:

Webb’s death in 2004 had its roots in his fateful decision eight years earlier to write a three-part series for the San Jose Mercury News that challenged a potent conventional wisdom shared by the elite U.S. news organizations – that one of the most shocking scandals of the 1980s just couldn’t possibly be true.

Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series, published in August 1996, revived the decade-old allegations that the Reagan administration in the 1980s had tolerated and protected cocaine smuggling by its client army of Nicaraguan rebels known as the contras.

Though substantial evidence of the contra crimes had surfaced in the mid-1980s …..the major news outlets had refused to take the disclosures seriously.

For instance, reflecting the dominant attitude toward Kerry and his work on the contra-cocaine scandal, Newsweek dubbed the Massachusetts senator a “randy conspiracy buff.”

Thus, the truth of the contra-cocaine scandal was left in that netherworld of uncertainty, largely proven with documents and testimony but never accepted by Official Washington, including its premier news organizations, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post.

But Webb’s series thrust the scandal back into prominence by connecting the contra-cocaine trafficking to the spread of crack that ravaged Los Angeles and other American urban centers in the 1980s.

This reporting put what the CIA was doing into the spotlight, but the corporate press decided it would be better to bury Webb (and Senator Kerry’s reports) than to face the truth. And not only did the transport and sale of cocaine do a lot of damage in Nicaragua, it also did a lot of damage in the USA also. And they don’t care! And for telling the truth, Gary Webb had his professional life ruined.

The real question is – are they doing the same things today? Is the CIA running a drug running business to get money for other evil uses? I do know that the area of Mexico near the US border is having a huge number of murders related to the drug trade. I do know that Afghanistan has exploded in the amount of opium that they are growing since the US military showed up in 2003. I do know that the ‘war on drugs’ in Columbia is resulting in more and more cocaine being exported.

This is an excellent article on Gary Webb and his reporting on the CIA contras drug trafficking – and how he and his reporting was vilified by the corporate press. And, even today, the corporate press fails to uncover what is really going on in our world and in our government. Instead they focus on stupid things like celebrity crimes and family tragedies – and assist in destroying our country and our democracy by their failures. And they never say they are sorry or that they were wrong.

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