American Conspiracies

by Jesse Ventura

  It’s a proven fact that the CIA’s into drugs, we even know why. It’s because they can get money to operate with, and not have to account to Congress for what they’re doing. All this is justified because of the “big picture.” But doesn’t it really beg for a massive investigation and trials and a whole lot of people going to jail? This includes the big banks that allow the dirty money to be laundered through them.

  Let’s take a longer look at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International—or, as our current defense secretary Robert Gates once called BCCI, the Bank of Crooks and Criminals.25 As CIA deputy director twenty years ago, Gates was in position to know. But when US Customs Commissioner William von Raab was getting ready to arrest some folks involved with drug money laundering at a BCCI subsidiary in Florida, “Gates failed to disclose the CIA’s own use of BCCI to channel payments for covert operations, which the customs chief learned about only later—and thanks to documents supplied to him by British customs agents in London.”26

  At one time BCCI had more than 400 branches in 78 countries and assets of over $20 billion. Most everywhere, “BCCI systematically relied on relationships with, and as necessary, payments to, prominent political figures,” as a Senate report put it. The bank had started out in Pakistan in 1972, with much of the start-up funding being provided by the CIA and the Bank of America. By the early 1980s, the National Security Council’s man charged with tracking terrorist financing, Norman Bailey, said “we were aware that BCCI was involved in drug-money transactions,” but the NSC took no action. Probably because CIA Director Casey was relying on BCCI to distribute American assistance to the Afghan mujahideen who were fighting the Russians at the time. Except most of the aid went to the faction controlled by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was probably the leading heroin trafficker in the world. Pakistani president Muhammad Zia in 1983 let local traffickers put their drug profits into BCCI.27 John Kerry’s committee came across the bank’s role in drugs and started to investigate, but received basically zero “information or cooperation provided by other government agencies.”28

  BCCI was the seventh biggest bank on the planet when it collapsed, shortly after the Soviets withdrew their troops from Afghanistan. The mainstream media had started reporting on BCCI’s activities early in 1991—“The World’s Sleaziest Bank” was the headline on Time magazine’s cover story. Soon the Bank of England pulled the plug and regulators started shutting down BCCI’s offices in dozens of countries. It was also the largest Islamic bank, and one fellow said to have lost a lot of invested money when BCCI fell apart was Osama bin Laden.29 After that, to make up for his missing revenue, bin Laden started cooperating with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the Afghan warlord who was taking profits from drugs and putting them into Islamic terrorist movements.30

  This brings us up to the present, and what’s going on today in Afghanistan and Mexico. I’m going to rely first on a recent article by Peter Dale Scott, called “Afghanistan: Heroin-Ravaged State.”31 He says that’s how we should think of Afghanistan, rather than as a “failed state.” One statistic he cites is that in 2007, according to our State Department, Afghanistan was supplying 93 percent of the world’s opium, the illicit production of poppies bringing in $4 billion—more than half the country’s total economy of $7.5 billion.

  But even though 90 percent of the world’s heroin is originating in Afghanistan, their share of the proceeds in dollar terms is only about 10 percent of that. It’s estimated that more than 80 percent of the profits actually get reaped in the countries where the heroin is consumed, like the U.S. According to the U.N., “money made in illicit drug trade has been used to keep banks afloat in the global financial crisis.”

  So who’s making out like bandits? It’s a familiar story. Drug trafficking is tolerated in exchange for intelligence, simple as that. Here’s what Dennis Dayle, a former top DEA agent in the Middle East, said at an anti-drug conference a couple years back: “In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.”

  After 9/11, when the U.S. sent troops to Afghanistan that fall of 2001, “the Pentagon had a list of twenty-five or more drug labs and warehouses in Afghanistan but refused to bomb them because some belonged to the CIA’s new NA [Northern Alliance] allies.”32 The CIA mounted its anti-Taliban coalition by recruiting and sometimes even importing drug dealers, many of them being old assets from the 1980s. Friends, family, and allies of Afghan president Hamid Karzai are heavily involved. It recently came out that Karzai’s brother is not only involved with the drug trade, but has been receiving regular payments from the CIA for the last eight years!33

  Another of the traffickers, Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, who was the country’s defense secretary and may be its next vice president. He was a general when the U.S. swept into Afghanistan after 9/11, worked closely with the CIA, and got rewarded with millions in cash. Except by 2002, the CIA was well aware that Marshal Fahim was into the heroin trade—long before the invasion, and after becoming defense minister. “He now had a Soviet-made cargo plane at his disposal that was making flights north to transport heroin through Russia, returning laden with cash.” So what was the Bush Administration’s response? “American military trainers would be directed to deal only with subordinates to Marshal Fahim.”34 Gee, I’ll bet they were clean! As clean as Karzai’s brother anyway.

  Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, which we’ll be talking about again in terms of financing the 9/11 terrorists, is another big player. One expert says there is an ISI-backed Islamist drug route of al Qaeda allies that stretches across all of North Central Asia.35 Richard Holbrooke, who is now Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, wrote in an op-ed in 2008 that “breaking the narco-state in Afghanistan is essential, or all else will fail.” Holbrooke also said that it’s a complete waste of money to aerial-spray the poppy fields, which costs about a billion dollars a year, as this only serves to strengthen the Taliban and al Qaeda with the local people.

  Of course, Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon under Bush-II “fiercely resisted efforts to draw the United States military into supporting counternarcotics efforts” because they feared this “would only antagonize corrupt regional warlords whose support they needed.” Now, under Obama, supposedly “fifty suspected Afghan drug traffickers believed to have ties to the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon target list to be captured or killed.”36 But at the same time, the CIA and the DIA now say that the Taliban are getting much less money from the drug trade than was previously thought, and “that American officials did not believe that Afghan drug money was fueling Al Qaeda.” The question this raises in my mind is: then who’s making off with the profits? Karzai’s brother, Marshal Fahim, the Pakistani government, and some people in the CIA maybe?

  The heroin trade took a dive at the beginning of this century because the Taliban put them out of business. When that poppy supply was put on hold for awhile, isn’t it ironic that some of the big banks tumbled? Is it because that dirty money wasn’t getting laundered through their establishments? But apparently, we think it’s better to be in bed with the heroin producers than work with the Taliban.

  Now let’s turn our attention closer to home, and our neighbor Mexico. “Even in the last decade, when it has become more fashionable to write about Mexico as a ‘narco-democracy,’ few, if any, authors address the American share of responsibility for the staggering corruption that has afflicted Mexican politics.”37 Drug trafficking in Mexico actually dates back to the Harrison Anti-Narcotics Act of 1914 that made it illegal here at home, coupled with Mexico’s revolution making its northern section pretty much ungovernable.

  The same year the CIA was formed in 1947, the U.S. helped create Mexico’s intelligence service called the DFS. Colonel Carlos Serrano, the brains behind that, was already connected to the drug traffic. Mexico soon became the main way station for smuggling heroin into the U.S. and Canada. Over time,
the collusion only increased. Just as in Afghanistan, the CIA “was consciously drawing on Mexican drug-traffickers and their protectors as off-the-books assets.” When Miguel Nazar Haro got busted in San Diego in 1981, the FBI and CIA both intervened because he was “an essential repeat essential contact for CIA station in Mexico City.”38 When DEA agent Enrique Camarena was murdered, the CIA got busy protecting the top traffickers behind it. During the eighties, CIA Director Casey helped keep drug lord Miguel Felix Gallardo safe, because he was passing funds along to the Contras. Gallardo’s Honduran supplier was estimated to supply “perhaps one-third of all the cocaine consumed in the United States.”39

  Not surprisingly, narco-corruption in Mexico quickly spread to other agencies of law enforcement. By the time Carlos Salinas became president in the nineties, his attorney general’s office was “as much as 95 percent ... under narco-control.” DFS agents were regularly escorting narcotics shipments through Mexico, and selling drugs they seized to organizations they favored. The DFS was carrying out high-level busts with the assistance of even higher-level traffickers. Operation Condor, carried out with the CIA’s help, did the Guadalajara cartel “a great service by winnowing out the competition.”40

  A new class of oligarchs—known as the “twelve billionaires”—sprang up under Salinas’s policy of “directed” deregulation. Some of the privatized businesses got “snapped up by traffickers in order to launder and invest the profits from their drug operations.” Citibank helped the president’s brother, Raul Salinas, hide his fortune in safe places, and Citibank’s role would later be described as “willfully blind” drug money laundering. Now-defunct Lehman Brothers was right in there too, helping Mexico’s regional governor Mario Villanueva Madrid go into hiding after he got targeted in a drug-and-racketeering investigation. 41

  Beginning in the nineties, drug dealers in Mexico were taking charge of half of Colombia’s drug trade into the U.S. While Mexico used to be just the trans shipping point from South America, now it was a major producer and distributor. Numerous new cartels came into existence—Sinaloa, Los Zetas, La Familia Michoacana, and more—with its gangs even taking control of cocaine networks in many American cities and clandestinely growing marijuana on our public lands. Today, authorities figure that between $19 billion and $39 billion in proceeds from drugs heads back south every year from the U.S.42

  Of course, the death toll figures on what’s happening in Mexico’s drug war are astounding. Between December 2006 and the spring of 2009, more than 10,780 people were killed.43 And most of the guns fueling the violence are coming from the U.S. About 87 percent of the firearms that Mexican authorities have seized over the last five years can be traced to here, many of them from gun shops and gun shows in the Southwestern border states.44 And these are no longer simply handguns, but now military-grade weaponry and very serious ordnance. How come the manufacturers are not being held accountable for selling these weapons over the border? My wife and I have driven across the border three times and nobody’s even stopped us—I could have had a Hummer-full of automatic weapons.

  Since Bush-II and Mexican president Felipe Calderon announced their $6 billion Plan Mexico in 2007—with the bulk of the money going to military training and hardware—the production of Colombian cocaine seems to have actually increased.45 To his credit, Obama stepped things up on the drugs-and-guns front, threatening to prosecute any Americans doing business with three of the most violent cartels and looking to seize billions of dollars in the cartels’ assets.46

  I give Obama praise for renouncing the “war on drugs” phrase, on grounds that it promotes incarceration and not treatment. Before the election, Obama said: “I think it’s time we take a hard look at the wisdom of locking up some first time nonviolent drug users for decades.... Let’s reform this system.”47 I’m waiting for him to follow through on that promise. To his credit, the Justice Department has released new guidelines that reverse a Bush Administration policy. Now federal officers are instructed not to go after marijuana users or suppliers who are in compliance with states’ laws on medical usage.

  But isn’t it high time for complete reform of our drug policy? We’ve got a shadow economy happening, friends. One hundred million Americans have sampled marijuana, and that includes almost half of all the seniors in high school. More than 35 million Americans have tried cocaine at some point, and almost as many have taken LSD or other hallucinogenic drugs.48 Meantime, we’ve got “grows” or “gardens” of pot springing up all across our western states on public lands—and that includes almost 40 percent of national forests. About 3.1 million marijuana plants were confiscated in national forests over a one-year period, September ’07 to September ’08, carrying a street value calculated at $12.4 billion.49

  I mean, how stupid are we? Go back to Chicago and Prohibition, when Al Capone became more powerful than the government because we’d outlawed the selling of liquor. Legalize marijuana, and you put the cartels out of business! Instead, we’re going to further militarize our border and go shoot it out with them? And if a few thousand poor Mexicans get killed in the crossfire, too bad. I don’t get that mentality. I don’t understand how this is the proper way, the adult answer, when they could do it another way. Eventually, after thousands more people get killed, they’ll probably arrive at the same answer: legalization. Because there’s nothing else that will work.

  And legalization would go a long way toward giving us a more legitimate government, too—a government that doesn’t have to shield drug dealers who happen to be doing its dirty work. There are clearly people in government making money off drugs. Far more people, statistically, die from prescription drugs than illegal drugs. But the powers that be don’t want you to be able to use a drug that you don’t have to pay for, such as marijuana. Thirteen states now have voted to allow use of medical marijuana. Thank goodness Barack Obama just came out with a new policy stating that the feds are not going to interfere as long as people are following state law. That’s a great step toward legalization.

  You can’t legislate stupidity, is an old saying I used in governing. Just because you make something illegal doesn’t mean it’s going away, it just means it’ll now be run by criminals. But is using an illegal drug a criminal offense, or a medical one? I tend to believe medical, because that’s customarily how addictions are treated, we don’t throw you in jail for them. In a free society, that’s an oxymoron—going to jail for committing a crime against yourself.

  The government is telling people what’s good for them and what’s not, but that should be a choice made by us, not those in power. Look at the consequences when it’s the other way around.

  WHAT SHOULD WE DO NOW?

  The hypocrisy of our federal drug policy has to be seen for what it is. When millions of dollars from illegal drug sales are being used to fund government agencies like the CIA and being laundered through our leading banks, isn’t it time to rethink this situation? The fact is, the “war on drugs” is killing and imprisoning our citizens, way out of proportion to how it’s helping anyone. Revamping a criminal justice system that incarcerates thousands of people for using “illicit substances” is a necessity. Legalizing marijuana, and putting a tax on its purchase like we do with cigarettes and alcohol, would be a start toward truly dealing with our “drug problem.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE STOLEN ELECTIONS OF 2000, 2004 (AND ALMOST 2008)

  THE INCIDENT: In 2000 and again in 2004, George W. Bush won closely contested presidential elections against Democratic contenders Al Gore and John Kerry.

  THE OFFICIAL WORD: The Supreme Court stopped a recount in Florida in 2000, giving Bush an Electoral College victory on December 12. In 2004, Bush took the deciding state of Ohio by a 100,000-vote margin and gained a second term.

  MY TAKE: Both elections were stolen by Republican operatives, above all through manipulation of the electronic voting machines in deciding states, where votes were shifted from one candidate to the other. A guy who might have blow
n the whistle was killed in a plane crash right after the 2008 election.

  “If this were a dictatorship, it’d be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator.”

  —George W. Bush, CNN, December 18, 2000

  We all know what happened back in 2000, when the Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the presidency by ordering the vote recount stopped in Florida. Al Gore had won the popular vote nationwide by about a half million votes, but couldn’t get a majority in the Electoral College without Florida. A lot of us also suspect that John Kerry actually won the presidency in 2004, except for Ohio’s Republican secretary of state manipulating the vote totals there in Bush’s favor.

  Would it surprise you to learn that massive conspiracies were involved in both those elections—and that the Republicans were on the verge of trying to steal it again in 2008? The main reason they didn’t was because their key vote-stealer got forced into a court deposition the day before the election—only to die in the crash of his private plane a little more than a month later. His name was Michael Connell. He was Karl Rove’s IT (Information Technology) guy, whose computer handiwork helped swing Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 for Bush. We’ll get to Connell’s story later in the chapter, including some new information that’s never been published before.

  But let’s start with a look back at what happened in 2000. It was around 2:15 AM Eastern time when Fox News led the networks’ charge in projecting Bush the winner. The fellow who started this was John Ellis. He headed up Fox’s decision team and just happened to be the cousin of W and Jeb, who just happened to be the governor of Florida. “Jebbie says we got it! Jebbie says we got it!” Ellis was heard shouting as he got off the phone with his Florida cousin, and it didn’t take more than a couple of minutes before Fox called it that way.1 And within the four minutes after that, like bleating sheep, NBC, CBS, ABC, and CNN followed suit. That was when Gore made his phone call to Bush conceding the election, although he reconsidered as the Florida results suddenly tightened up.