vruz: The Cocaine Coup & The CIA Connection
by Paul DeRienzo

It was a day before the scheduled return of Haiti’s exiled president Jean Betrand Aristide, and it was clear that the October 30, 1993 deadline for a return to democratic rule in the western hemisphere’s poorest nation could not occur. Aristide, a Roman Catholic priest who had been elected nearly three years before with 70 percent of the vote in Haiti’s first free election, was speaking to a packed session of the United Nations General Assembly.

In a dramatic move, Aristide told the diplomats that the military government of Haiti had to yield the power that was to end Haiti’s role in the drug trade, a trade financed by Colombia’s Cali cartel, that had exploded in the months following the coup. Aristide told the UN that each year Haiti is the transit point for nearly 50 tons of cocaine worth more than a billion dollars, providing Haiti’s military rulers with $200 million in profits.

Aristide’s electrifying accusations opened the floodgate of even more sinister revelations. Massachusetts senator John Kerry heads a subcommittee concerned with international terrorism and drug trafficking that turned up collusion between the CIA and drug traffickers during the late 1980s’ Iran Contra hearings.

….

• Forget 2012. As far as many Mexicans are concerned, the ancient Mayas were being generous: the sky’s actually going to fall next year. Why? Because it’s 2010, Mexico’s bicentennial, and Mexican history has an eerie way of repeating itself. Mexico’s 1910 centennial, after all, saw the start of the bloody, decade-long Mexican Revolution, which killed more than a million people. And that cataclysm was precisely a century after the start of Mexico’s bloody, decade-long War of Independence in 1810.
• You get the picture. As a result, there’s been no shortage of talk lately about possible unrest, especially in the form of armed rebel groups, erupting south of the border in 2010. But is there really a basis for concern? None as apparent as the popular grievances that existed in 1809 or 1909. But this is still Mexico; and while Spanish colonizers no longer oppress the country, and dictators like Porfirio Diaz aren’t brutalizing campesinos, the country nonetheless is reeling from the worst criminal violence in its history and one of its hardest economic slumps. “We are very near a social crisis,” José Narro, the director of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in Mexico City, said recently. “The conditions are there.”

• A key terror suspect who allegedly helped to plan last year’s attacks in Mumbai and plotted to strike Europe was an American secret agent who went rogue, Indian officials believe.
• David Headley, 49, who was born in Washington to a Pakistan diplomat father and an American mother, was arrested in Chicago in October. He is accused of reconnoitring targets in India and Europe for Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based terror group behind the Mumbai attacks and of having links to al-Qaeda. He has denied the charges.
• He came to the attention of the US security services in 1997 when he was arrested in New York for heroin smuggling. He earned a reduced sentence by working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) infiltrating Pakistan-linked narcotics gangs.
• Indian investigators, who have been denied access to Mr Headley, suspect that he remained on the payroll of the US security services — possibly working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) — but switched his allegiance to LeT.
• Despite being firmly on the radar of the US intelligence agencies, he was allowed to return to India as recently as March. Indian officials are furious that their American counterparts did not share details of that visit at the time. The Indian media has raised the possibility that Mr Headley was being protected by his American handlers — a theory that experts say is credible.
• “The feeling in India is that the US has not been transparent,” said B. Raman, a former counter-terrorism chief in the Indian foreign intelligence service, the Research and Analysis Wing.
• “That Headley was an agent for the DEA is known. Whether he was being used by the CIA as well is a matter of speculation, but it is almost certain that the CIA was aware of him and his movements across the subcontinent.”

• McGinn believes pot should not only be legal, but also taxed.
• “We recognize that, you know, like alcohol, it’s something that should be regulated, not treated as a criminal activity. And I think that’s where the citizens of Seattle want us to go,” said McGinn on a public radio show on Friday.
• McGinn asked for the public’s help identifying the issues he should tackle as mayor. Topping the list was light rail expansion. The second slot went to legalizing pot.
• Now McGinn, as well as state leaders, are talking about it.
• McGinn says the drug should be legalized and also taxed to offset some of the city’s financial problems.
• “I think if every elected official who ever smoked marijuana voted to legalize it, it’d probably be legalized in an instant,” he said.

thedaytheytriedtokillme:

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said that U.S. pilotless planes have crossed the border recently from Colombia, and he’s ordered his military to shoot down the drones if they appear in Venezuelan airspace again.

A drone was spotted by troops near the Fuerte Mara military base, in the northwestern Zulia state, Chavez said. He said that Colombia and the U.S. are preparing for “aggressions” against Venezuela, after an agreement signed in October allows U.S. troops access to seven Colombian military bases for counternarcotics operations.

• MALTRATA, MEXICO — Drug traffickers employing high-tech drills, miles of rubber hose and a fleet of stolen tanker trucks have siphoned more than $1 billion worth of oil from Mexico’s pipelines over the past two years, in a vast and audacious conspiracy that is bleeding the national treasury, according to U.S. and Mexican law enforcement officials and the state-run oil company.
• Using sophisticated smuggling networks, the traffickers have transported a portion of the pilfered petroleum across the border to sell to U.S. companies, some of which knew that it was stolen, according to court documents and interviews with American officials involved in an expanding investigation of oil services firms in Texas.
• The widespread theft of Mexico’s most vital national resource by criminal organizations represents a costly new front in President Felipe Calderón’s war against the drug cartels, and it shows how the traffickers are rapidly evolving from traditional narcotics smuggling to activities as diverse as oil theft, transport and sales.

(Thus gangs are setting themselves up as the go-to lifelines when nation-states begin to fail and become hollow.)

• Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations’ drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.
• Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, 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.
• This will raise questions about crime’s influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, 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.
• Some of the evidence put before his office indicated that gang money was used to save some banks from collapse when lending seized up, he said.
• “Inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities… There were signs that some banks were rescued that way.” Costa declined to identify countries or banks that may have received any drugs money, saying that would be inappropriate because his office is supposed to address the problem, not apportion blame. But he said the money is now a part of the official system and had been effectively laundered.

• New federally financed drug research reveals a stark disparity: children covered by Medicaid are given powerful antipsychotic medicines at a rate four times higher than children whose parents have private insurance. And the Medicaid children are more likely to receive the drugs for less severe conditions than their middle-class counterparts, the data shows.
• Those findings, by a team from Rutgers and Columbia, are almost certain to add fuel to a long-running debate. Do too many children from poor families receive powerful psychiatric drugs not because they actually need them — but because it is deemed the most efficient and cost-effective way to control problems that may be handled much differently for middle-class children?

(The answer is yes.)

• Prague - The Czech government today approved the list of hallucinogenic plants and mushrooms, including hemp, coca, mescaline cactus and magic mushrooms, and decided that people would be allowed to grow up to five pieces of such plants and keep 40 magic mushrooms at home, a CTK source said.

Cluck of a find: Chicken filled with cocaine

• STERLING, Va. - A close inspection by Customs and Border Protection officers at Dulles International Airport turned up something unexpected. Inside a fully-cooked chicken they found cocaine with an estimated street value of $4,300.
• The 60.4 grams (2.3 ounces) of coke was found inside two small, clear plastic bags inside the chicken’s cavity.

CIA Officer Robert Steele Says what is Wrong with the US Military/Intelligence Community, Banksters and the Illegal Drug Trade.

• i agree with him on the several points, but hear some red flags in his speech and wonder if his inclusion on a site that has honest ties to the US military (this is hosted on the First Earth Battalion page) makes him credible in all his “change the system” glory. For example on one point, i think the whole “banksters problem” is legit, but simplistic, and in no way encapsulates ALL the control systems vying for top dog status that in turn makes the world go ‘round in very violent ways. This omission can be telling of his true agenda. Steele might be a disinfo agent in the same sense that makes Earth Battalion ideals seem embraceable by left communities… stir in some nice new age beliefs but the rub is to still let Uncle Sam’s Army run the show…that’s not change I can believe in. -Ledger.

Big hat tip to Uncertain Times.

poortaste:

sunsmudge:

The U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee could vote as soon as this Thursday, November 5 on an amendment that will legally prevent some of the government’s top advisers from even discussing the idea of legalizing or decriminalizing drugs as a solution to the failed “war on drugs.”

Yes, you read that right. The Senate just might censor its own policy advisers from giving science-based advice.

Please take a second to click through and read this, and then take action against it. Whether you support cannabis legalization or not, it is important to stop our lawmakers from censoring common sense (scientific evidence) from entering the discussion.