Newshawk : Steve Young Sept. 1997 Source: Prevailing Winds Magazine (#5), pp.2026 Contact: P.O. Box 23511, Santa Barbara, CA 93121 Protecting Traffickers, Not the Nation: Washington and the Politics of Drugs, Part 2 or 2 by Peter Dale Scott, Ph.D. In Columbia, according to authors Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, "U.S. officials ... knew that millions of dollars of U.S. aid money, earmarked for the war on drugs, was being used instead to fight leftist guerrillas and their supporters. When [drug] cartelfinanced paramilitary forces entered the town of Segovia in November, 1988, the military stood by and watched. As Colombian professor Alejandro Reyes remembered, 'They killed fortythree people, just at the center of town. Anybody who was close to that place was shot. They were defenseless people, common people of the town ... [I]t was a kind of sanction against the whole town for their political voice...' Fortythree people had been killed for voting the wrong way ... In 1989 ... the U.S. shipped $65 million of military equipment to Colombia. The Colombian chief of police politely pointed out that the items received were totally unsuitable for a war against the traffickers. They were, however, suitable for counterinsurgency. U.S. military equipment turned up in ... Pueto Boyaca. [This was a region irrelevant to the drug traffic,but where the drug cartels' death squads were being trained] ... U.S. helicopters were used in antiguerrilla bombing campaigns, where, unfortunately, many of the victims were civilians. The State Department knew that too." [31] This hypocrisy of "antidrug campaigns" dates back to 1974, the year when Congress cut back U.S. aid programs to repressive Latin American police forces, and then beefed up socalled antinarcotics aid to the same forces by about the same amount. [32] To keep the aid coming, corrupt Latin American politicians helped invent the spectre of the drugfinanced "narcoguerrilla," a myth discounted by careful and dispassionate researchers like Rensselaer Lee. [33] U.S. military officers were equally cynical. Col. James D. Waghelstein, writing in Military Review, argued that the way to counter "those church and academic groups that have slavishly supported insurgency in Latin America" was to put them "on the wrong side of the moral issue," by creating "a melding in the American public's mind and in Congress" of the alleged narcoguerrilla connection. [34] The actual result of such propagandizing is to sanction the role of drug traffickers and their allies in U.S. counterinsurgency efforts, and thus further to strengthen the status of the drug cartels in the countries they terrorize. Two recent indictments by the U.S. Department of Justice reinforce the general paradigm of CIAcreated intelligence net works that reinforce their local power and influence by major involvement in drug trafficking. In March 1997 MichelJoseph Francois, the CIAbacked police chief in Haiti, was indicted in Miami for having helped to smuggle 33 tons of Colombian cocaine and heroin into the United States. The Haitian National Intelligence Service (SIN), which the CIA helped to create, was also a target of the Justice Department in vestigation which led to the indictment. [ 35] A few months earlier, General Ramon Guillen Davila, chief of a CIAcreated anti drug unit in Venezuela, was indicted in Miami for smuggling a ton of cocaine into the United States. According to the New York Times, "The CIA, over the objections of the Drug Enforcement Administration, approved the shipment of at least one ton of pure cocaine to Miami International Airport as a way of gathering information about the Colombian drug cartels." One official said that the total amount might have been much more than one ton. [36] The information about the drug activities of Guillen Davila and Francois had been published in the U.S. press years before the indictments. It is possible that, had it not been for the controversy aroused by the Contracocaine stories in the August 1996 San Jose Mercury, these two men and their networks might have been as untouchable as Miguel Nassar Haro and the DFS in Mexico, or Montesinos and the Peruvian SIN in Peru. The U.S. and Drug Traffickers in Asia: Washington, Afghanistan, and BCCI The same U.S.rightwingdrug symbiosis has prevailed for decades in Asia. Former top DEA investigator in the Middle East, Dennis Dayle, told an antidrug conference that "in my 30year history in the Drug Enforcement Admini stration and related agencies, the major targets of my investiga tions almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA." [37] The biggest recent CIAdrug story in Asia has centered on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, or BCCI. The President, until 1993, of America's traditional ally Pakistan, Ghulam Ishaq Khan, was the man who as finance minister granted special tax status for the CIA and druglinked BCCI, the bank of his close friend Agha Hasan Abedi. Ghulam Ishaq Khan also served as Chairman of Abedi's BCCI Foundation, an ostensible charity that in fact fronted for BCCI's concerted efforts to make Pakistan a nuclear power. [38] BCCI's involvement in drug moneylaundering, drugtraf ficking, and related arms deals is now common knowledge; but the U.S. Government has yet to admit and explain why BCCI's owner Abedi met repeatedly, as reported by Time and NBC, with CIA officials William Casey and Robert Gates. [39] BCCI became close to the CIA through its deep involvement in the CIAPakistan operation in Afghanistan. [40] This in itself was a drug story: by their aid in the 1980s Pakistan and the CIA built up their pre viously insignificant client, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, to a position where he could become, "with the full support of ISI [Paki stani intelligence] and the tacit tolerance of the CIA ... Afghanistan's leading drug lord." [41] BCCI was in a position to launder much of the drug proceeds. [42] Inside Pakistan in the 1980s, the CIA's man for the Afghan armsanddrugs sup port operation, banked and even staffed through BCCI, was the NorthWest Fron tier Provincial Governor, General Fazle el Haq (or Huq), who continued to run the local drug trade with ISI. [43] Haq and BCCI President Abedi met regularly with the then President of Paki stan, General Zia; Zia and Abedi in turn would meet regularly to discuss Afghani stan with CIA Chief William Casey. [44] BCCI corruption was not confined to Asia. It extended also to the notorious CIANoriega alliance in Panama, and in the 1990s to the drugcorrupted military leaders in Guatemala that the U.S. turned to lead the war on drugs in that country. [45] BCCI, along with the United States Government's Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC), even played a role in the supply of arms and trainers to the Colombian drug cartels' death squads in Puerto Boyaca, mentioned above. [46] It would be wrong to blame this pervasive drug corruption on BCCI alone, or to expect that the exposure in 1991 of BCCI, which was only achieved after great opposition and obstruction in Washington, will make the problem go away. BCCI was just one major player in a complex multinational intelligence game of drugtrafficking, arms sales, banking, and corruption. Other CIAlinked and druglinked banks, to which BCCI can be connected, such as the Castle Bank in the Bahamas, the World Finance Corporation in Miami, and the Nugan Hand Bank in Australia, have risen and fallen before BCCI's spec tacular demise, and we should expect more such scandals in the future. [47] It is the same with the drug traffic itself. As long as we do not address the root problem of governmental drug connections that make and break the kingpins, traditional law enforcement will continue to be ineffective. The kingpin is dead; long live the kingpin. Protection for Drug Traffickers in the United States These gray alliances between law enforcement and crimi nal elements lead to protection for drugtraffickers, not just abroad, but at home. Drugtraffickers who are used as covert assets abroad also are likely to be recruited as informants or other assets in this country. Thus for example, a syndicate headed by Bay of Pigs veteran Guillermo Tabraue was able to earn $80 million from marijuana and cocaine trafficking from 1976 to 1987, while Tabraue simultaneously earned up to $1,400 a week as a DEA informant. Vastly underreported in the U.S. press are the number of cases where indicted drugtraffickers, because of their intelli gence connections, are allowed to escape trial in U.S. courts, or else have their charges or sentences reduced. Usually the public learns of these cases only by accident. In one case, a U.S. Attorney in San Diego protested publicly when he was ordered by the CIA to drop charges against a drugtrafficking CIA client in Mexico (the head of the corrupt DFS mentioned earlier), who had been indicted for his role in what was described as Amer ica's largest stolencar ring. Despite public support for his honesty, the U.S. Attorney was fired. [48] After a DEA undercover agent retired and went public, he revealed that in 1980 a top Bolivian trafficker arrested by him was almost immediately released by the Miami U.S. Attorney 's office, without the case being presented to the grand jury. This was two weeks before the infamous Cocaine Coup in Bolivia, financed by the trafficker's family and organization, which briefly installed the drugtraffickers themselves in charge of law enforcement in that country. [49] These anecdotal stories, which are numerous, are tiny when compared to the U.S. governmental protection and coverup of BCCI's involvement in drugtrafficking and moneylaundering [50] To its credit, the CIA knew of BCCI's illegal activities as early as 1979, and started distributing information to the Justice Department and other agencies in 1983. After an unrelated investigation in Florida, two of BCCI's units pleaded guilty to drug moneylaundering in 1990, and five of its executives went to jail. But a senior Justice Department official took the unusual step of requesting the Florida Banking Commissioner to allow BCCI to stay open. [51] For over three years between 1988 and 1991, the Justice Department "repeatedly requested delays or halts to action by the Senate concerning BCCI, refused to provide assistance to the [Kerry] Subcommittee concerning BCCI, and, on occasion, made misleading statements to the Subcommittee concerning the status of investigative efforts concerning BCCI." [52] New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau in this pe riod was also openly critical of the pointed lack of cooperation from the Justice Department. [53] BCCI's drugrelated crimes cannot be separated from its other illegal activities, notably armstrafficking and the corrup tion of public officials. For years the CIA has used corruption of foreign officials to further its aims; and this has fostered a climate of corruption by other entities, such as BCCI. The size of the BCCI scandal and coverup raises questions as to whether (with or without CIA connivance) BCCI, having corrupted senior public figures in such countries as Argentina, Brazil, the Congo, Guatemala, Nigeria, Pakistan, Panama, and Peru (to name only a few), may not have also managed to corrupt major figures in this country as well. As noted by many observers, BCCI and its American allies have prospered through strong financial and other connections to Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton. Many of these were orchestrated for BCCI by the Arkansas investment banker Jackson Stephens, a backer in turn of Presidents Carter, Bush and Clinton. [54] The CIA's worldwide penchant for political influence may help explain why it "seems to have protected BCCI and its backers for well over a decade." [55] Since the demise of BCCI, such influential connections to Clinton have been continued by Stephens and his close invest ment allies Mochtar and James Riady. In addition the Riadys' Lippo Bank in Hong Kong was at one point scheduled to buy out the bankrupt BCCI branch in Hong Kong, where the Burma drug lord Khun Sa was rumored to have deposited hundreds of millions of dollars. The deal went sour, and the BCCI brand was bought instead by the Australian Alan Bond. After Bond in turn went bankrupt, the Lippo Bank bought from him the old Hong Kong BCCI bank building, which it now occupies. [56] The root problem however is the U.S. decision to play Realpolitik in regions where the reality of rightwing power is its grounding in the resources of the drug traffic. Alternatives to this easy route of drug traffic symbiosis and codependency are not easy, but they must be turned to. The government strategy of global Realpolitik has helped to expand the global drug traffic to the point where the strategy itself, strengthening the flow of drugs from one CIAprotected network to another around the world, has become a more genuine threat to the real security of the domestic United States, than the enemies it allegedly opposes. The United States certainly does not control these dangerous allies it has strengthened and in some cases invented. The problem of disengagement from such worldwide alliances is complex, and disengagement by itself will not bring an end to the traffic which U.S. policies have fostered. But it is clearly time, with a new Administration and a new postCold War global environment, for a decisive repudiation to drug alliances and a move towards new global strategies. What Can Be Done? What can be done to stop this governmental protection of drugtraffickers? In the short run we need an ex plicit repudiation of former druglinked strategies and an admission that they have been counterproductive. This, might take the form of an explicit directive from the new Clinton Administration, that old strategies to shore up corrupt right wing governments abroad, like Peru's, must be clearly subordi nated to the new domestic priority of reducing this nation's drug problems. More specifically, the misnamed "War on Drugs," a perni cious and misleading military metaphor, should be replaced by a medically and scientifically oriented campaign towards healing this country's drug sickness. The billions that have been wasted in military antidrug campaigns, efforts which have ranged from the futile to the counterproductive, should be rechanneled into a public health paradigm, emphasizing prevention, maintenance, and rehabilitation programs. The experiments in controlled decriminalization which have been initiated in Europe should be closely studied and emulated here. [57] The root cause of the governmental drug problem in this country is the National Security Act of 1947, and subsequent orders based on it. These in effect have exempted intelligence agencies and their personnel from the rule of law, an exemption which in the course of time has been extended from the agencies themselves to their drugtrafficking clients. This must cease. Either the President or Congress must proclaim that national security cannot be invoked to protect theses drugtraffickers. This must be accomplished by clarifying orders or legislation, discouraging the conscious collaboration with, or protection of, criminal drugtraffickers, by making clear that such acts will themselves normally constitute grounds for prosecution. Clearly, a campaign to restore sanity to our prevailing drug policies will remain utopian, if it does not contemplate a struggle to realign the power priorities of our political system. Such a struggle will be difficult and painful. For those who believe in an open and decent America, the results will also be rewarding.