USA - crack in Los Angeles, did the CIA put it there?

[enquirewithin]

Free the Tweakers!

Counterpunch, June 7, 2007

http://www.counterpunch.org/taylor06072007.html

By ELLEN TAYLOR
"I have nothing good to say about methamphetamines", declares Mike Goldsby, a highly-respected local expert in drug addiction, in our local paper here in Humboldt County, northern California. The estimated 1.4 million users in the US would disagree. Productivity-oriented professionals with demanding careers praise the increased alertness afforded by meth. Timber fallers, mill workers, truck drivers, and others in dangerous occupations extol the stamina it provides. The military has always depended upon meth as a source of courage and quick reaction time. Poor people, trapped in multiple low-paying jobs or the exhausting paperwork demands of public assistance, emphasize its empowering and antidepressant effect. people agree that, like other drugs, meth can be fatal. But its high morbidity and mortality, they would add, rest in the fact that its use is illegal.
Like marijuana, also a medicine, meth is a multi-billion dollar criminal industry. There is naturally violence where such huge profits are to be made. As revealed by Gary Webb in his San Jose Mercury News articles on crack cocaine, successful drug networks involve protection and exploitation by government agencies, including law enforcement. Police departments flourish on grants for drug interdiction. The domestic cost of the War on Drugs was $51 billion in 2006. The penal system, increasingly privatized, prospers as well. The public pays an annual $27,000 for each of 2.5 million prisoners. As a society, we are invested in this industry: some cities are almost exclusively supported by their prisons.
In March I attended a conference, "Methamphetamine, Hepatitis and HIV" in Salt Lake City, where drug policy analysts described "set and setting" as determinants of how a drug or medicine will affect an individual. The law enforcement vendetta against meth, and media use of such slogans as "meth kills", linking it to deviance, disease and violence, provides a hostile setting, and amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Public opinion as reflected in our local Times-Standard op-eds echo the official contempt. One guest opinion praised the policies of Mao Tse-tung for summarily executing drug offenders. Another called it "terrorism," and suggested soliciting homeland security money. Recent killings by the Eureka police were attributed to the victims' use of meth, which is rapidly becoming a license to kill. Even Mike Goldsby, in saluting law enforcement's "vital role in holding addicts accountable" regretted that "there are not enough police or jails to arrest, convict and incarcerate every addict."
A declaration of war is an open invitation to ignore the rights of individuals in the name of a more urgent destiny. The War on Drugs is no exception. Harsher sentences than for murder, illegal searches and seizures, intrusive urine testing, property forfeitures, disenfranchisement, ineligibility for public support, housing, school loans or food stamps, loss of children: fourth, fifth, eighth and fourteenth amendment protections are widely denied meth users.
Demonization of meth cripples democracy. Involvement in illegal and socially-condemned activities has estranged large segments of the population from political life. Paranoia prevents users from exercising their first amendment rights to express their opinions. Thus, in a democracy already handicapped by apathy, a stigmatized class is prevented from defending their own interests.
This has powerful implications. One op-ed reported that 70 per cent of children in some Humboldt County schools come from "meth homes." Urine tests at local clinics confirm wide use. Paul Gahlinger M.D., Commander of the Davis County Jail in Utah, observed that his inmates, 65 per cent meth convicts and one-third female, attribute their incarceration not to meth but to the chaotic problems of poverty. They have no plan to stop using. It is evident that meth is endemic, a street medicine used to treat endemic conditions of life in the American culture of speed, performance, achievement, self-absorption, alienation, waste and neglect.
The War on Drugs amounts to a war on our own people. It is contrary to the precepts of Christianity and all other religions, and destructive to the foundations of democracy. We must treat the human conditions that cause suffering, instead of demonizing the medicine that relieves the symptoms, if we wish to restore family and human values to our communities.

In Salt Lake City numerous speakers at the March conference came from a criminal justice background, including correctional facilities, and national D.A. and probation offices.They condemned national drug policy, the "War on Drugs", in which, they said, not a single skirmish has been won.
A declaration of war brushes aside everyday rules, such as citizens' rights,in the name of a more urgent objective. Police, who should be the last line of defense, are now the first line of offense. In communities such as ours, the meth stigma is fast becoming a licence to kill.Meanwhile illegal substances continue to be as widely used, and related diseases spread.. In Salt Lake City, law enforcement representatives observed that, regarding the War on Drugs, the U.S. meets the diagnostic criteria for addiction to failed policies. These criteria include: continued use in the face of adverse consequences, the failure to fulfill major obligations to others, and recurrent social and legal consequences.
Over the past 30 years more than a trillion dollars has been spent on this addiction: $20 billion a year. Our prison population of 2.5 million, preponderantly drug offenders, outnumbers many states, at a cost of an annual $27 thousand per prisoner. African American prisoners now equal the number of slaves freed by Lincoln, and live as they did, working as slaves, their families torn asunder.
The war on drugs like all wars targets the poor. Poverty engenders depression, street drugs are powerful anti-depressants. Congress could end the war and free the slaves, banishing the chaos of poverty with the saved billions. That would be truly efficient harm reduction.
Ellen Taylor is a Physician's Assistant in general practice in Humboldt County, California. She can be reached at ellenetaylor@yahoo.com

[~lostgurl~]

A new entry has been added to Drugs Archive

Description:

10 mins
A tribute to the Pulitzer prize-winning reporter who broke the story of the CIA's involvement in the importation of cocaine into the US.
Webb died in December 2004 from self-inflicted gunshots to the head

To check it out, rate it or add comments, visit
Gary Webb: In his own words
The comments you make there will appear in the posts below.

[beentheredonethatagain]

by Daniel Brandt


The frenzy over the story about the CIA and crack in Los Angeles has turned into a media war. Two things are going on: the story itself, and the reaction to the San Jose Mercury News by the mainstream media. The second is beginning to drown out the first. This is unfortunate, since many in high places would like to see the first story disappear altogether. If this happens, the larger story behind the first story will recede as well. This larger story is the one that needs to be investigated.
First of all, let's introduce Economics 101 into the equation -- something which reporters on both sides have failed to do because they don't own library cards. After 1980, prices of cocaine dropped dramatically. In Medellin, a kilogram of pure cocaine was selling for $20,000 in 1982; by early 1984 the FOB price had dropped to $4,000. This was due to the fact that Bolivia began refining cocaine locally after 1980, and Peru and Paraguay expanded production and refinement. (This is from R.T. Naylor, an economics professor at McGill University in Montreal who specializes in the black market. His book, "Hot Money and the Politics of Debt," is available in five languages. This particular information is in a 1994 Black Rose paperback edition, pages 175-6.)
When it comes to assessing the changes in price and availability of crack in Los Angeles during the 1980s, the role of the CIA in the cocaine coup in Bolivia in 1980 is at least as significant as the actions of dealer Oscar Danilo Blandon. The CIA's support for this coup, and their protection of major South American dealers, is covered by former DEA agent Michael Levine in "The Big White Lie: The CIA and the Cocaine/Crack Epidemic -- An Undercover Odyssey" (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1993).
Celerino Castillo III, another former DEA agent who worked out of Guatemala and was in charge of El Salvador, has written about cocaine and the contras in El Salvador with coauthor Dave Harmon in "Powderburns: Cocaine, Contras and the Drug War" (Oakville, Ontario: Mosaic Press, Sundial, 1994).
Both former DEA agents accuse the CIA of complicity in the drug trade. It's a story of CIA profiteering and double-dealing, or at a bare minimum, a story of CIA toleration of such behavior among their assets, and then protecting these assets against the DEA's attempts to bring them to justice. This is the story that needs to be investigated by Congress. Until this story is sketched in more detail, it seems silly to concentrate on the activities of one dealer in Los Angeles.
The San Jose Mercury News deserves credit for reviving this issue. Until now the issue was killed and buried by the mainstream media, and apparently forgotten in the public imagination. But the way in which the Mercury News revived it created more of a straw man than a Frankenstein -- a bit too easy to knock down. It's primarily a question of emphasis: Were the activities of Oscar Danilo Blandon a manifestation of prior CIA misdeeds in this area, as well as of general economic factors that affected the price of cocaine, or was Blandon the cutting edge of a problem that would not have existed without him?
In packaging the story for the Mercury News, reporter Gary Webb "went Web." In earlier decades, we might have said he "went Hollywood," but it amounts to the same thing. He turned a complex series of interrelated global events into a clean, compelling regional story. Then he implied that the cart belonged in front of the horse. We end up with an imputed scandal and something resembling modern journalism, with book and movie rights close behind. But we still don't have responsible historical analysis.
Then something happened that could only happen in American journalism. Our mainstream press, with all the resources at their command, loudly accused Gary Webb of shoddy journalism, and used equally shoddy journalism to make their point. Walter Pincus at the Washington Post has CIA connections that go back 37 years, and the Post's own CIA connections go back further, so everyone expected mere propaganda from them. We weren't disappointed.
But then Doyle McManus, a Washington correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, was the point man in a four-week effort that involved 25 Times reporters. Their three-part series appeared on October 20, 21, and 22. Nowhere is Michael Levine or Celerino Castillo mentioned, and while the declining price of cocaine is referred to at one point, the reasons behind this decline are not. Yet McManus accuses the Mercury News of "profoundly bad journalism" (Charlie Rose, PBS, October 22) and keeps complaining about Gary Webb's book and movie contracts. (McManus says that he hates to sound like an apologist for the CIA, because he's spent a lot of his career investigating the CIA. In almost the same breath he admits that the contra-cocaine story is ten years old, but has never been properly investigated. So what has McManus been doing for ten years? Charlie didn't ask.)
It would be more interesting to hear from McManus about the sort of pressures that were brought to bear on the Los Angeles Times to come up with this series. Who issued the marching orders? Who dictated the spin? How high did it go? But as mere consumers of spin, not producers, we are not allowed to know such things.
Another interesting tactic was tried by the New York Times on October 21. A front page effort by Tim Golden made the case that the gullibility evidenced by the widespread interest in the Mercury News story is a problem specific to blacks. The reaction was immediate from some readers, who pointed out that it's not a black problem at all, but a problem that all people legitimately have with unresponsive government in general, and unrestrained CIA operations in particular.
Then Charlie Rose trotted out Jack White of Time magazine to say much the same thing that Tim Golden said. White is apparently a light-skinned African-American, judging from his television appearance. The big boys learn fast: you don't use someone with a "Tim Golden" byline to argue that the problem lies with black perceptions. Or maybe you do, because however you dress it up, it still effectively plays the race card, which conveniently functions to sidestep the real issue.
Another angle by the mainstream press betrays something that can only be described as jealousy. The Mercury News has the most sophisticated Web site of any newspaper , while the mainstream press muddles along with a so-so presence on the Web. With a daily circulation of 300,000 newspapers, the Mercury News hit rate on its Web site was running from 600,000 to 700,000 per day before the story, and as many as 860,000 per day once interest in the story picked up. (Their CIA-crack story alone, which was investigated for a year, includes pictures, documents, and sound clips; downloading only the text files results in a 225-page printout.) More importantly, the story was picked up everywhere around the country, and Congress and the CIA director were forced to announce investigations.
Charlie Rose seemed agitated that the Mercury News could do so well with this story, without first clearing it with the sort of elite East-coast media savants and political fixers that he usually fondles on his show. He invited the Washington correspondent for Wired magazine, John Heilemann, to apologize for the sins of Silicon Valley. Compared to Jack White and Doyle McManus, Heilemann was refreshingly lucid. He patiently explained that the technology of the Web was more or less neutral, and not responsible for the manner in which the Mercury News chose to use it.
While the sort of clout demonstrated by the Mercury News cannot be ascribed to the Web site directly, as opposed to the compelling nature of the story itself, it has the big boys worried. Freedom of the press for those who can afford to own the presses is precisely what they've always supported. But this story suddenly raises suspicions that the Internet has changed the equation in support of democracy.
Unless regional newspapers agree to mild-mannered, regional-interest Web sites, all the resources that the elites have invested in monopolizing the Daily Spin could end up spinning down the drain. The CIA and their mainstream friends cannot let this happen. That's the second aspect of this continuing episode -- one which makes it potentially a bigger story than even the Mercury News bargained for.

Reputation Comments on this post:

good post

[paowierg]

Here's an interesting article I found about a private jet with ties to the CIA that went in Mexico with four tons of cocaine on board:

http://www.narconews.com/Issue47/article2885.html

 

[top]Mysterious Jet Crash Is Rare Portal Into the “Dark Alliances” of the Drug War

[top]Paper Trail for Cocaine-Filled Plane that Crashed in Yucatán Suggests Link to U.S. Law Enforcement Corruption in Colombia

By Bill Conroy
Special to The Narco News Bulletin

November 17, 2007
The Gulfstream II aircraft that crashed on the Yucatan Peninsula outside of Cancun in late September while laden with some four tons of cocaine has been the subject of considerable media and blogger attention in recent weeks.
Some reports have alleged the errant plane was previously used between 2003 and 2005 by the CIA for several flights to the infamous U.S. “terrorist” prison camp in Guantamano Bay. The fact that the ownership of the aircraft apparently switched hands twice within weeks of the crash, helping to obscure its ownership, has only further fueled media and Internet speculation that the jet’s illegal payload was being transported as part of some larger U.S. government black operation.
All that might be true — or not.
But Narco News has uncovered at least one fact that is certain to deepen the mystery surrounding the crash of the jet whose tail number, N987SA, is now affixed in the lexicon of CIA folklore. That fact revolves around the name Greg Smith, who was identified in a McClatchy Washington Bureau report on the Gulfstream II’s crash as follows:

A bill of sale obtained by McClatchy Newspapers indicates that Florida pilot Clyde O’Connor bought the plane on Sept. 16 — eight days before it went down in the Yucatan jungle. Another Florida pilot, identified by his license number and signature as Greg Smith, also signed the document, but his relationship to O’Connor isn’t detailed.

But before we introduce you to the mysterious Mr. Smith, it is important in all of this to remember that a proposition is not automatically a corollary of a seemingly related fact.
Too many conspiracy theories rest on a proof built on the six-degrees-of-separation premise — that any person on the Earth can be connected to anyone else through a chain of no more than five people. That might be true, and can make for an interesting trail to follow, but it doesn’t prove the first person in the chain even knew the last person — let alone that all six individuals acted in a conspiracy.
As the late, great authentic journalism heavyweight Gary Webb, who did meticulously investigate and link CIA activities to illicit drug running, once said:
“I don’t believe in conspiracy theories. I believe in conspiracies.”
With that understanding in mind, it is important to review the timeline of the Gulfstream II’s demise in the Yucatan peninsula— as reported by other media.
The plane took off from Ft. Lauderdale Executive Airport headed for Toluca, outside Mexico City, on Sept. 18. It crashed near Cancun, Mexico, on Sept. 24 after departing from Rio Negro, Colombia.
Mexican publication Por Esto!, whose work on the story has been exhaustive, with some 30 stories to date, and based on solid journalism, reported that the jet was headed to an airport in Cancun, but arrived shortly after a work-shift change at the airport. The security people on the new work shift did not authorize the Gulfstream II to land, so it flew to an airport in the Yucatán capital of Merida, which also would not authorize a landing.
The jet remained stranded in the air until it ran out of fuel and was forced to make an emergency landing in the hills by the nearby town of Tixkokob, Por Esto! reported.
Mexican authorities apprehended one of the pilots onboard the Gulfstream II a couple days later, about three miles from the crash site. Four days later, they apprehended a man alleged to be the copilot, though Por Esto! has questioned why none of the helicopters or other high-tech search equipment available were mobilized to find the two more quickly. Por Esto! also claimed that the amount of cocaine at the crash site appeared to be much more than the 3.7 metric tons authorities reported.
Also of importance to this story is the ownership trail of the jet itself. McClatchy reported that a Florida-based company called Donna Blue Aircraft, which is supposedly owned by two Brazilian men, acquired the Gulfstream II from a company connected to New York real estate developer William Achenbaum.
That deal was allegedly cut on August 30. Donna Blue then flipped the jet to a new owner, for a supposed payment of about $2 million, on September16.
That’s where the enigmatic Greg Smith comes into the picture, as one of the supposed co-signers on the bill of sale drafted by Donna Blue for the Gulfstream II. Media reports to date have followed the trail of his supposed partner in the deal, Clyde O’Connor, and even delved into the background of Achenbaum, but the trail on Smith seems to be cold.
Where could he be — and who is he anyway? Smith is not exactly a unique name, even in the insular world of the private-jet industry.
Well, it turns out that Narco News has run across the trail of at least one Greg Smith who has plenty of experience flying between southern Florida and Latin America — for the U.S. government.

[top]The Vega Connection

Baruch Vega is a colorful Colombian who has worked as an asset for the FBI, DEA and CIA, among other agencies, over the years.
Vega was very involved with a series of U.S. law enforcement operations carried out by the DEA and FBI between 1997 and 2000. Those operations, Vega claims, involved brokering deals with Colombian narco-traffickers by offering them the bait of U.S.-government sanctioned plea deals in return for their surrender or cooperation.
The following is from a lawsuit filed recently in federal court by Vega, in which he alleges the government failed to pay him for his high-risk services, to the tune of some $28.5 million:

Once Mr. Vega introduced … American lawyers to the Colombian targets [the narco-traffickers], the lawyers would then get retained and then take over as legal representatives for the Colombian targets and further deal with a group of United States law enforcement agents and prosecutors, hand-picked to work out deals for the Colombian targets. A particular United States Attorney for the Southern District of Florida became the coordinator of this “recruiting effort.”

So Vega is in a position to know the lay of the land in the Colombian narco-trafficking scene — which is the source of the four tons of cocaine found on the crashed Gulfstream II jet. After all, coca plants don’t grow well in Mexico.
According to Vega, between late 1997 and 2000, he traveled between South Florida and South America via a private jet for a total of some 25 to 30 “recruiting” trips— some with FBI agents on board, some with DEA agents on board, and some transporting Colombian narco-traffickers who were being brought back to the United States to negotiate deals.
Vega claims that the main pilot for all of those flights was none other than an individual named Greg Smith.
Here’s how Vega described the situation to Narco News in a recent interview.

Well originally… I met Greg Smith… we needed a pilot, a very trustful pilot, someone we could trust to bring in the [Colombian] drug traffickers to surrender. Then the members of the FBI recommended to get in contact with this guy [Smith] because he was very close to them. Ever since we flew only with him. Everything was with him. … I never asked anything [about Smith’s background]. But he [Smith] brought a couple of pilots because we always have two pilots in the plane. He occasionally brought pilots from the US Customs.
I tell you one thing. We flew with Greg Smith easily 25 to 30 times. All [the] operations [were] between the end of 1997 to 2000.

When Vega was asked if federal agents were on board the jet during those trips, he responded:
“Oh yes, many times. If you read the flying manifest, there were… DEA agents in the plane and of course drug traffickers who were coming to surrender with attorneys.”
Vega adds that the FBI and DEA were each running their own separate operations at the time, so the FBI also was involved in some of the confidential source recruiting trips to South America as well, and he says the Bureau “even paid for the [leased] plane a few times.”
A judge’s ruling in another legal case that is related to Vega’s pending lawsuit, in fact, backs up his claims. It describes the CIA’s involvement in one flight in 1999 that departed from Panama for Florida that involved Vega, federal agents and an indicted, fugitive Colombian narco-trafficker:

Indeed, the appellant [a DEA supervisor] used the CIA to bring Mr. Cristancho to the chartered aircraft surreptitiously, without going through Panamanian airport security or customs. The appellant simply made no attempt to conceal the use of the chartered aircraft. And, an Assistant U.S. Attorney and various DEA agents from Group 9 were at the Fort Lauderdale airport to greet the plane.

And those same legal pleadings mention the name of the company from which Vega chartered the aircraft: Aero Group Jets.

On or about November 17, 1999, the appellant [a DEA supervisor] received an invoice from Aero Group Jets in the amount of $23,200 for the rental of the aircraft used to transport Mr. Cristancho.

Vega also confirmed that Smith’s company was called Aero Group Jets.
A check of the public records available through Florida’s Department of State lists the registered agent/officer of that now inactive company as Gregory D. Smith.
So it would seem that the real question now is whether the Greg Smith who allegedly signed the paperwork in the purchase of the crashed Gulfstream II jet, as reported by McClatchy, is the same Greg Smith who was recommended by the FBI, according to Vega, to pilot more than two dozen flights to Latin America between 1997 and 2000 as part of U.S.-sanctioned law enforcement operations.
One reporter known for his spook-related journalism claims to have already interviewed the right Mr. Smith, but, by his own admission, it was through a third party — which leaves open the possibility of all sorts of shenanigans, particularly if we are dealing with real CIA spooks.
Another reporter with a Florida weekly also claims to have interviewed the real Mr. Smith. However, as it turns out, when Narco News contacted that individual, he stressed that the reporter had gotten the wrong man.
“I was falsely written up … and they named my company,” says Greg Smith, who is with a company called Global Jet Solutions of Pembroke Pines, Fla. “There’s probably three or four Greg Smiths in aviation in South Florida. But it’s not my name on the bill of sale [for the Gulfstream II jet that crashed in Mexico on September 24].”
This Smith, who says his middle initial is “J,” adds that he has hired an attorney to explore legal action against the publication that he alleges wrongly identified him and his company.
Narco News did obtain a copy of a 2007 document that contains the signature belonging to the Greg Smith of Global Jet Solutions. That signature does appear to be different than the signature of the Greg Smith contained on an annual report filed with the state of Florida in 1998 by Aero Group Jets — the firm Vega claims he leased a jet from during his many trips to South America between 1997 and 2000.
So it appears, at least for now, a cloud of mystery still conceals the whereabouts of the right Greg Smith — whom McClatchy reporters contend was a co-signer on the bill of sale for the ill-fated Gulfstream II Jet.

[top]Many possibilities

Now, before anyone jumps to conclusions, it is important to point out that every crashed plane has its own unique story — as does every drug deal gone bad. And most don’t all involve grand CIA conspiracies directly linked to the White House — though as Gary Webbs’ investigative reporting on the CIA/Contra/Crack connection showed, those “Dark Alliances” do surface from time to time.
But for the sake of argument, let’s explore some more mundane theories.
For example, the Gulfstream II jet’s crash landing in the Yucatan might simply be a drug-smuggling run gone bad, with no mystery beyond that reality.
Or it is possible that the jet that crashed outside of Cancun was under surveillance as part of a government operation known as a controlled delivery — in which government agents allow a load of drugs to make its way to the destination (under close scrutiny) with the goal of arresting those who take delivery of the narcotics in the United States. If that’s the case, the fact that the jet crashed after getting waived off of two airports tells us only that something went wrong, that the operation was not “greased” properly, in law enforcement lingo.
As for Vega, and several former federal law enforcement sources interviewed by Narco News, both the notion that the Gulfstream II was part of a U.S. government-sanctioned controlled delivery operation, or that it was part of some kind of CIA black op, are both viewed as being on the low side of probability.
However, at least one law enforcement source with experience working in Latin America did say: “I wouldn’t put anything past those guys [the CIA]. … They aren’t even supposed to be there [in Latin America] officially, so if anything did show up [related to their operations] they would deny it.”
Vega weighed in on the questions as follows:

… I believe more it could be a run [by narco-traffickers] because a controlled delivery is very easy. A controlled delivery would make the plane land … remember how close the Keys are to the Yucatan Peninsula or any airport in Miami. And if it’s a controlled delivery by your government, that plane could land anywhere basically. Or at least land in one place until they call the agents and come and clear the whole thing. That’s why I could say more it looks like a run for one of the traffickers. … Again, that’s what I say [in terms of the allegation that it was a CIA black operation], that’s what doesn’t make sense because let’s assume the Agency is running that thing, they could land in Guantanamo, they could land anywhere in the Keys or in Florida and wait an hour or two until someone calls from somewhere, and then don’t worry. That’s it.

But there also are other possible explanations as to the Gulfstream’s possible connections to U.S. intelligence or law enforcement that fall more squarely into the chaos of human vice —such as greed and official corruption.
With that in mind, it might be worth reviewing some past cases where human virtue seems to have gotten twisted up a bit in pursuit of the drug war.

[top]Money for nothing

At the top of the list is the case of the Bogota Connection, which was exposed by a Justice Department memo drafted in 2004.
Vega was very involved with some of the U.S. law enforcement operations referenced in the memo. Those particular operations played out between 1997 and 2000 and sought to snare narco-traffickers with Colombia’s infamous North Valley Cartel. Remember, Vega claims an individual named Greg Smith, during that same time period, was retained as a pilot to fly numerous missions — for both the DEA and FBI — that were, in essence, confidential-source recruiting trips.
In the course of that work, Vega alleges, corrupt U.S. agents in Colombia seriously compromised his role as a government asset and that a number of his informants within Colombia’s narco-trafficking underworld were assassinated as a result.
Justice Department attorney Thomas M. Kent wrote the memo in late 2004 in an effort to draw attention to alleged serious corruption within the U.S. Embassy in Colombia. In the memo, Kent alleges that DEA agents in Bogotá are on drug traffickers’ payrolls, complicit in the murders of informants who knew too much, and, most startlingly, directly involved in helping Colombia’s infamous rightwing paramilitary death squads to launder drug money.
The first of the major allegations in Kent’s memo centers on a DEA undercover operation launched in Colombia in 1997 called Cali-Man, which made use of Vega as an asset. The operation was overseen by David Tinsley, a DEA group supervisor in Miami.
As part of Cali-Man, Tinsley and the agents working under him uncovered evidence that DEA agents in Bogotá appeared to be assisting narco-traffickers in Colombia. In one case, Tinsley’s group, as part of a sting, obtained a classified document from the U.S. Embassy in Bogota via a narco-trafficker turned informant.
After Narco News exposed the Kent memo in a story published on Jan. 9, 2006, DEA reacted by describing the corruption allegations in that memo as “extremely serious.”
However, some nine days later, after Semana, a popular weekly magazine in Colombia, published a story about the Kent memo, DEA issued another public statement describing the corruption allegations as “unfounded.”
The U.S. mainstream media has been silent about the Kent memo, and the Bogotá Connection, since that time.
It is not to be ignored, in the case of the Gulfstream II jet crash in Mexico, that the flight allegedly left from Rio Negro, Colombia, just outside Medellín, where it managed to avoid that nation’s customs and law enforcement scrutiny while loaded up with at least 132 bags of cocaine that tipped the scales at four tons.
In any event, Vega says his work in Colombia for the DEA and FBI did produce results — despite the alleged treachery on the part of U.S. agents in Bogotá and elsewhere
“All in all, Mr. Vega convinced and successfully recruited about 114 Colombian targets to enter this plan/program, about 25 of which were fugitives at the time of negotiating the deals,” his lawsuit alleges. But, in the end, the U.S. government, he contends, failed to compensate him for his work and risks as promised.
(For more on Vega’s lawsuit, go to this link.)
But the allegations of U.S. law enforcement corruption that have surfaced in the Bogota Connection are not new in the history of the drug war, for those who care to follow that trail.
For example, in the early 1990s, according to court pleadings in a criminal case filed in New York, DEA agents transported a large quantity of heroin from Pakistan to New York City, via commercial airlines, allegedly for the purpose of setting up undercover stings.
However, the defendant in the litigation, Gaetano DiGirolamo, who is now serving a life prison sentence, claims he is not guilty of the charges brought against him in 1991; in fact, he claims that DEA agents framed him, seeking to use his case as a cover for their own illegal drug-smuggling activities.
Among the claims raised in a post-conviction petition filed by DiGirolamo was that he was convicted “based upon perjury of three DEA agents.”
“(The DEA agents) testified that they were involved in importing drugs for use in ‘stings’ against me and others when in truth and in fact they were doing so for their own personal, criminal enrichment,” DiGirolamo states the post-conviction petition.
The petition goes on to raise major doubts about the veracity of the DEA agents’ purported sting against DiGirolamo — such as the fact that the alleged heroin brought in from Pakistan was never tested to assure it was the same heroin used in the sting, nor was the heroin ever produced at trial.
In addition, despite claims by the DEA agents involved in transporting the heroin that their operation had been sanctioned by DEA headquarters in Washington, D.C., as well as the French and Pakistani governments, DiGirolamo’s attorney, law professor Steven B. Duke, says those approvals were never produced.
“Where are they?” Duke asks in a court filing. “Where are the applications for such approvals? Where is the evidence that any of these approvals were sought, much less obtained?”
The DEA agents, of course, contend Duke’s allegations are baseless.
Still, it is clear that federal agents did transport 20 kilos of heroin from Pakistan to New York via commercial airlines — a fact to keep in mind the next time you are flying the friendly skies.
The U.S. Customs Service sent Duke a letter on May 2, 2000, in reply to his queries about the incident. The response was prepared by Bonnie Tischler, then assistant commissioner for Customs’ Office of Investigations. (Customs is now part of the Department of Homeland Security.)
From Tischler’s letter to Duke:

Dear Mr. Duke, Thank you for your March 3, 2000, letter regarding the importation of narcotics into the United States by law enforcement officers.
… The specific incident you cite involved the international controlled delivery of 20 kilograms of heroin at the John F. Kennedy (JFK) Airport on Dec. 4, 1990. Our records indicate that while our agency provided assistance in facilitating that delivery through JFK, the entire operation was initiated and coordinated solely by the DEA. Therefore, I would refer any further questions you my have regarding this matter to DEA Headquarters, 600 Army Navy Drive, Arlington, Virginia 22202.
I appreciate your interest in the Customs Service. If we may be of any further assistance, please contact me …

In yet another case in the late 1990s involving the U.S. Customs Service, federal agents in South Texas were accused of letting an informant — a drug-running pilot — bring tons of cocaine into the country unchecked as part of an effort to snare an alleged drug kingpin.
“Well, it was like a 007 license. I didn’t know the government did that. It was hard to resist,” the smuggler, Rodney Matthews, told ABC News – Primetime in a 1998 interview.
Customs officials denied that Matthews was allowed to smuggle drugs into the country. However, Mark Conrad, who at the time headed U.S. Customs Internal Affairs in Houston, told Primetime a different story:

We got in bed with Rodney Matthews and the importation of a humongous amount of narcotics coming into the United States. … The reason is there’s a great deal of pressure on agents in the field to make cases, to make the big one. And the bigger, the better. … We hide things. We cover them up. We don’t — we’re not honest at times within our own organization, and we’re clearly not honest at times with the media. … It would never be officially condoned. You’ll never find any policy that approves of it, but it happens routinely in virtually every situation where you’re dealing with informants.

Welcome to the drug war. Will the real Mr. Smith please stand up?
Stay tuned…