HomeMy WebLinkAbout30- Public Comment Jay Lindberg i
Libertarian For the 40th Congressional District
Activism Among the Bureaucrats
Drgwarwhr (Jay Lindberg)
"Nothing needs reforming like other people's habits." Mark
Twain. I first saw this quote in "Steal this Urine Test" by
Abbie Hoffman the Great. Ten years ago he realized exposrri$
the fraud will end the Drug War. They had to kill him because
in a war based on lies, the truth is the greatest enemy of all.
I went to a grant writing class today at Cal State San
Bernardino. It is part of a certificate program I am working on
I was the only non-bureaucrat there. The instructor tried to
practice some censorship of the heretic (me of course) becausr-
I kept exposing the BS they believe in, as the BS that it is.
didn't bite. Part of her plan was to silence opposition to the
status quo and part of her plan was dealing with fear of the-
unknown. The instructor had no idea just how corrupt thp,
system really is and she didn't want to know either. Especially
about the Drug War Economy in all its glory.
The class was full because the Tobacco tax was creating
immediate demand for grant writers. They were discussing the
carving up is the tobacco settlement, $28,000,000 annually to
the county. I reminded them that the "Tobacco settlement%'
was not a settlement, it is a tax. The reason there was no
provisions in the bill to address nicotine addiction was the bill
was designed for the government to profit from nicotine-
instead and punish the addict. They didn't have a clue.
Another student was bragging about the "Weed and Seek
Program" and the new "Juvenile Accountability" programs ore-
of the DOJ. I told them, "if these programs are such a gook
idea they should be field tested to address corruption inside.
government, first. We should start with the DOJ." I used ny
definition of citizenship.
1
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that Law Enforcement could not live by these drug laws either.
The plan behind the Drug testing petition was to test em, Bust
em, Squeeze em, Turn em into rats, and work our way up the
chains of command.
The petition simply addressed that the beneficiaries of this war
must live by the same laws they are profiting from. The
enforcement mechanism was no drug testing for law
enforcement, no drug war funding in the county. I was hunting
the corruption with this plan while the rest of the movement
played bunker baby in their closets. One quote "Activist" told
me the harder you push the harder they will push back. I
stated, "No shit, what part of war don't you understand? We
didn't start the war, they did. We will have to end it and hold
those responsible for this unjust and corrupt war accountable
for their conduct. In the end, we will all have blood on our
hands.
Unenforceable laws:
By: Drgwarwhr@aol.com(IayLindberg)
Date: 5/22199 6:02:42 AM Pacific Daylight Time
Unenforceable laws,the Drug War, and bad data are far greater
acts of irresponsible behavior from our society, that illegal
drug use by individual citizens. I have no doubt we will have
reduced this country to rubble before we learn that lesson.
Drug war addiction is one of the two most irresponsible uses of
resources and government power in the history of man.
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MysteriousMena Entered into Record at ' Page 1 of 7
CouncillCmyDevCms Mtg: I l4 G 0
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AM AMERICA ACTS I V By C. S. Mahoney iav tNerklS'OL' Secy
City of -SMI ti;iMdrdino
Up until the moment when three medellin cartel gunmen blew the life from his body in front of
a dingy Baton Rouge Salvation Army outlet,Adler Berriman,better known as Berry Seal ran
the largest drug smuggling operation in the continental United States. From his headquarters at
the Intermountain Regional Airport in Mena Arkansas,Seal oversaw the importation of tens of
thousands of pounds of cocaine and the export of tremendous amounts of U.S. military
hardware. He was able to accomplish this with the overt and covert complicity of at least four
major U. S. government agencies and despite being investigated at least nine times between
1981 and 1986 by everything from a grand jury to an official congressional inquiry. The case of
Berry Seal stands as a cautionary tale of Intelligence Community 's covert operational
capability run amok.
It's true roots lie not in the Oachita mountains,some 160 miles from Little Rock where he broke
state and federal laws for so long and with such impunity, rather they lie in the dank steaming
jungles of North Vietnam. For to tell the story of Berry Seal is to tell the story of Air America.
When Ted Shackley arrived in Laos,Vang Pao was at war with two rival druglords for control
of the Southeast Asian opium trade. Shockley had just been transferred to Laos from Miami
where he had run JMWAVE, a Spanish language radio station broadcasting nonstop
propaganda into Havana.He had also run Operation 40,which was a program dedicated to
training and equipping assassins for the express purpose of killing the upper echelons of the
Cuban revolutionary government. It was thought that if this could be accomplished that the
communist regime in Cuba would collapse under it's own weight.At some point this operation
evolved into the infamous Operation Mongoose,which was tasked with training and equipping
Cuban exiles for the doomed Bay of Pigs invasion. Even after the Bay of Pigs debacle Shockley
stayed on in Miami to conduct a covert war against Cuba.
In 1965 the covert war on Cuba was folded up and Shackley's team was moved en masse to
Laos. Shockley took three of his Operation 40 assassins to Laos with him,Felix Rodriguez,Jose
Pasada and Chi Chi Quintero.Shackley was in Laos a matter of days before intermediaries set
up a meeting between he and Vang Pao. Vang Pao wanted total control of the opium trade and
Shockley wanted a military intelligence foothold in the Southeast Asian opium trade.The two
struck a bargain. The United States Air Force would bomb the compounds of both of his rivals
out of existence in exchange for certain favors once he was in control of the opium traffic. The
Air Force carried out it's end of the bargain.The young major who coordinated the bombing
attacks on Vang Pao's rivals was Richard Secord.
When Vang Pao did become undisputed lord of the Southeast Asian opium trade,he regularly
began donating a share of his profits to the training and equipping of Laotian tribesman for
incursions against North Vietnamese supply lines and to carry out assassinations against
suspected communist sympathizers. The director of training for the tribesman was Shackley's
second in command, Tom Clines. Major General John Singlaub ran the assassinations arm of
the enterprise. Richard Secord coordinated the flights that ferried arms, personnel, and heroin
to various points throughout Europe and Asia. One of the pilots who made these flights was a
Special Forces lieutenant named Adler Berrimen, later known as Berry Seal. In 1968 Mafia
MysteriousMena Page 2 of 7
Don Santos Trafficante visited Vang Pao in a Saigon hotel. There are at least three different
>, military intelligence reports that mention this meeting so it is highly unlikely that it escaped
Shaekley's notice. More likely, it occurred with his direct complicity. Subsequent to the meeting
Trafficante became the leading importer of China White heroin in the western world. Vang
Pao's profits soared, and as they did so did his contributions to the training and equipping of the
Laotian tribesman. What had been a relatively small scale operation suddenly blossomed into
the Phoenix Project. The Phoenix Project was an epic intelligence debacle that resulted in the
assassinations of nearly 35,000 noncombatants throughout Vietnam,Laos, Cambodia and
Thailand. The Phoenix Project acquired it's own airforce,paid for with profits from Vang
Pao's heroin trade and piloted by U.S. intelligence personnel such as Adler Berrimen.
In 1972,with the coming fall of Saigon, Air America, as the group had come to be known
(complete with the cynical motto "We Fly Right") was officially disbanded. But during their
four years of existence, they had established an important precedent. They had used an existing
criminal infrastructure to finance intelligence community operations that they never would
have received funding for had they gone through standard appropriations channels, thus
subverting the will of Congress and the American people.
Even after Ted Shackley was brought back to the United States to run the western hemisphere
operations of the CIA, his agents were still extorting millions of dollars from Vang Pao and
transferring it to a bank in Australia called the Nugun Hand Bank. They also began to pilfer
tons of military equipment from depots around Asia and transfer it to a secret base in Thailand.
One of the men who flew the military hardware into Thailand and made the odd smuggling run
for Vang Pao was Adler Berrimen a.ka. Berry Seal.
In 1975 George Bush became director of the CIA and Ted Shackley received yet another
promotion, this time to Deputy Director of Intelligence in charge of world wide covert
operations. This was a major step towards the directorship of the CIA,which Shackley would
have received had Ford won the election. But Carter won and Admiral Stansfield Turner
became director of the CIA. Under Carter's direction,Admiral Turner began to dismantle
large parts of the CIA's covert operations apparatus. Since the accounts in the Nugen Hand
bank and the military hardware stashed in Thailand had never officially existed, they were
never touched. However the remnants of Air America feared that this would not be the case for
much longer so they found employment with the Shah of Iran until Turner's purge had run it's
course.
The Shah was a longtime friend of the United Sates, so it was not difficult to get the operation
approved. Elements of the Air America apparatus began training and equipping the Shah's
dreaded secret police SAVAAK for a prolonged assassination program against the Shah's many
political enemies, both in and out of Iran. This must have made the Shah sleep better at night
because he paid the mercenaries off in copious amounts of petrodollers.
The operation was overseen by Edwin Wilson and Frank Turpel. The fear and hatred that the
ensuing assassination program brought about was instrumental in Iran falling to the Islamic
militants. This was the first time that the Air America network had been used for purposes
totally outside of the CIA's supervision and so Shackley and Tom Clines had to deal with
something that neither of them expected, resistance from inside the intelligence community.
While many had winked at Shackley's ingenuity in financing the Phoenix Project with Vang
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Pao's heroin profits, the prospect of using that selfsame apparatus for an operation that was at
best only nominally in the national interest and was very profitable to those involved. So
Shackley and Clines bowed to the pressure from their collegues and withdrew the elements of
Air America from Iran.
Mere weeks later Shackley, Richard Secord, and Eric Von Marbod formed a company called
EATSCO, the Egyptian American transport and Service Company. Because Eric Von hlarbod
had been assistant Secretary of Defense, the company received the contracts to ship all of the
arms shipments into Egypt. The routes into Egypt had been opened due to the Camp David
peace accords. These shipments were partially coordinated by Adler Berriman.
The Air America apparatus banked hundreds of millions of dollars over the next several years
until they came under the unwelcome scrutiny of U.S. Attorney Larry Barcella. Barcella
discovered that Edwin Wilson had been selling explosives to Col. Qaddaffi in direct defiance of
the U.S. arms embargo. Barcella indicted Edwin Wilson and Frank Turpel and began an
investigation of Shackley, Clines, Secord and Von Marbod. This investigation lasted less than a
week before it was quashed, but Deputy Director of Intelligence Frank Carlucci did ask that
Shackley and Clines resign from the CIA, they did.
Air America was mothballed for a period of slightly more than two months while Edwin
Wilson, then under multiple federal indictments, traveled to Nicaragua to negotiate a deal with
then dictator, Anastasio Somoza. After obtaining a contract to supply Somoza with U.S.
military hardware and private sector advisors in open contempt of U.S. policy,the apparatus
was reactivated. Even after Somoza was forced to flee to the Bahamas,Air America continued
!iti to supply arms and advisors to the vestiges of his supporters in Nicaragua, now called the
Contras. The man who acted as liaison to the Contras was one of Ted Shackley's old Operation
40 operatives, professional assassin Chi Chi Quintero.
Quintero took orders from the Contras and relayed them to Adler Berrimen who set up the
shipping routes. Shackley's next coup was to negotiate a deal with the Iranians whereby the
hostages were kept on ice until the election was over. This enabled Reagan strategists to portray
the Carter administration as weak and vacillating. Perhaps not an I naccurate depiction. The
American public did not seem to think it coincidental that the hostages were released on the day
of Reagan's inauguration.All of this time and all of these operations were leading the Air
America apparatus incrementally toward Mena.
There has long been an outlaw quality about Mena. During the nineteenth century, it was a
refuge for smugglers and bandits. In the 1920's it was a hotbed of political discontent. During
the depression, it offered shelter to anarchists and like minded extremist elements. The rolling
terrain and densely packed pine and hardwood forests give the surrounding territory a
secretive feel. As though you could wander over the next hill and come upon a parked UFO or a
cocaine shipment in progress.
Berry Seal started bringing planes into Mena in 1979, but the operation never really got into
full swing until late 1980. There never seemed to be any deviation from the cycle that ran until
his death in 1986. Armaments were loaded at Mena. They were then flown to a private airfield
in Costa Rica located on a gigantic ranch belonging to a millionaire named John Hull.
The construction of this airfield had been supervised by Chi Chi Quintero. From there, the
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planes were refueled and sent on or sometimes the cargo was off loaded for overland shipment
to boats waiting in Costa Rican waters. But wherever the planes finally did offload their cargo,
there was an arguably more lethal cargo waiting to be picked up, kilos of it
The planes would then turn back towards the United States to deliver their cargo to various
drop points throughout the South. One video tape left among the voluminous financial records,
journals, bank drafts and classified federal documents, Seal left after his death shows a cargo
plane dropping several sturdy looking duffel bags by parachute, Seal retrieving them and
stuffing them into a helicopter that had come in behind the cargo plane. He then smiles into the
camera and says "That was the first daylight cocaine drop in the history of the state of
Louisiana.
If the videotape is any indication, Seal's operations were pulled off with a military precision
that was to be expected of a former Special Forces pilot. The pattern of financing a black op,
that could not be financed through normal intelligence community appropriations channels
with the profits from drug sales to American citizens was being continued by the same group of
men who had done it in Vietnam a decade previously. The Mena operation's only real
divergence from the guns for drugs for guns pattern was some occasional intelligence gathering
duties.
Sometime in 1982, CIA technicians came to Mena and installed cameras in the wings of Seal's
C-123K transport plane. Seal used these cameras to take the famous pictures of the Sandanistas
loading drugs aboard a flight in Nicaragua. These pictures were later used by the Reagan
administration to justify covert aid to the Contras. These same pictures were used by the Bush
administration as one of the links in the evidentiary chain tying Manuel Noriega to a massive
drug smuggling campaign.
The C-123K cargo plane that Seal used, later became an important link in another chain. The
chain connecting the operations at Mena to the original Air America apparatus. Seal's C-123K
cargo plane, which he dubbed "Fat Lady", had been part of the original Air America fleet in
Laos. After the fall of Saigon "Fat Lady" had stayed on at the secret base in Thailand,
occasionally turning up working for CIA friendly companies but mostly doing heroin runs for
Vang Pao's organization.
Seal's plane and two others like her were used in this way until the operation in Iran,when
they were transferred to Iran and countries just outside of Iran, to facilitate the training of the
Shah's secret police. At the conclusion of that operation they turned up in Mena.The smugglers
at Intermountain Regional Airport seem to have enjoyed reasonably cordial relations with the
local community. The one horrific exception to this was the deaths of two local teenagers, found
bludgeoned and stabbed, then laid across tracks to be struck by the morning freight train.
Authorities stepped all over themselves to rule the deaths an "accident", saying, "the boys had
been smoking marijuana and fell asleep on the tracks" Only after the coroners report showed
that the boys had been killed prior to being layed on the tracks were the deaths pronounced
murders. Some of Seal's records indicate that the area in which the boys had been camping was
one of his drop zones and that there had been a flight on the night they were killed.
Since Seal modeled his operations so closely on Airborne resupply procedures, it is only logical
that he would have set out security teams to patrol the perimeter of his drop zone. Don Henry
and Kevin Ives may have run afoul of just such a patrol and been killed because of it. Whatever
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the case, a large number of people who were either investigating or implicated in the death's of
the two teenagers have either been killed or have committed suicide. This has all the hallmarks
of black operations damage control. Seal's relations with the banks were especially good.
Secretaries have testified that there were days that they were given stacks of cash and directed
to secure cashiers checks and money orders,just below the ten-thousand dollar limit that
triggers an automatic IRS cash transaction report.The Union Bank of Mena seems to have been
a particular favorite of Seal's. Not only did he maintain several accounts there, but some of the
bank's officers were also administrators of the Intermountain Regional Airport. One of these
officers,Jackson Stevens, was an early Clinton campaign contributor.
The Union Bank of Mena is currently under investigation by the house banking committee.
Another name that crops up time and again in relation to Seal's financial activities is Don
Lassater. Lassater ran a Little Rock bond house that was investigated for laundering cocaine
profits. He was also involved in a cocaine distribution trial as a codefendant with Roger
Clinton, the President's brother. Lasater was sentenced to a short prison stay in this case.
The President has been accused of varying degrees of collusion in the Mena case. The single
most glaring piece of evidence that he did indeed know about the activities at Intermountain
Regional Airport is the Congressional testimony of a former Arkansas state trooper named
Larry Patterson who said that he and other officers repeatedly discussed in Clinton's presence
large amounts of guns, money and drugs going in and out of Mena".
Another Arkansas State Trooper L.D. Brown has said in a magazine interview that while a
s= -� member of the Governor's security detail, he applied to the CIA with Clinton's verbal and
written endorsements. Shortly after doing so, he was contacted by Berry Seal and found himself
making smuggling runs into Central America. Clinton made his first public statement on Mena
at a press conference in 1991 in which he said " there are apparently linkages to the federal
government", he also said, "there are all kinds of questions as to whether Seal had any links to
the CIA and whether that banked into the Iran-Contra deal".Not much of a statement to make
upon finding out that one of the largest smuggling operations in the history of the United States
was going on in your state.
Of Clinton's reticence to discuss the Mena case, Bill Plante and Micheal Singer of CBS news
have written "That a Republican administration was apparently sponsoring a contra aid
program in his state and protecting a smuggling ring that flew tons of cocaine through
Arkansas was indisputable". One thing is certain,that is that Bill Clinton, on most occasions,
has an unusually keen faculty for sniffing out political advantage. It stretches the boundaries of
plausibility that he would have missed the possible political bonuses inherent in the Mena
situation,that is unless he unless he had a good reason for missing them.
Official sanction of the activities at Mena by no means begins and ends with Bill Clinton.As
early as 1986 the Attorney General of Louisiana wrote to then Attorney General Edwin Meese
that Seal had "smuggled between three and five billion dollars worth of cocaine into the United
States. In 1991 Arkansas State Attorney General Bryant wrote to independent council in the
Iran-Contra investigation as to "why no one was prosecuted in Arkansas despite a mountain of
evidence that Seal used Mena as his principle staging area during the years between 1982 and
-� 1985".
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,A Both Internal Revenue Service Agent Bill Duncan and Arkansas State Police Investigator
Russel Welch have accused U.S. Attorney J. Micheal Fitzhugh of not pressing evidence that
they presented him with. Welch was later poisoned with military grade anthrax, something that
is very difficult to come by unless you can lay hands on biological warfare stores.
The final nail in the coffin of the Mena operation came, not with the murder of Barry Seal in
Feb. of 1986, rather it came with crash of the "Fat Lady" which was shot down over Nicaragua
loaded with supplies for the Contras. Arkansas pilot Buzz Sawyer was killed in the crash and
mercenary pilot Eugene Hasenfus was taken prisoner.The Sandanistas were smart enough to
make sure that the footage of Hasenfus being led from the wreckage was splashed all over CNN.
After that, according to one arms dealer who had come to town to get paid, "You couldn't find
anybody in Mena".
The newest incarnation of Air America has turned up in the Wackenhut corporation.
Specializing in security related products, the Wackenhut corporation's board of directors and
senior administration ranks read like a who's who of retired spooks and spymasters. The
Wackenhut corporation was also active in developing chemical and biological weapons for the
contras at a secret facility on an Indian reservation in Southern California. Shortly after the
operation at Mena was closed down, the Wackenhut corporation came out with a new business
venture,Wackenhut Correctional. The idea of privatized prisons is a relatively new one in the
United States and was still facing some legislative hurdles.Wackenhut hired lobbying firm
Grey and Company to aid in getting over these hurdles.It wasn't long before all the
impediments to Wackenhut running prisons in the United States had been removed.With the
contracts to run some American prisons in hand, some of the Wackenhut sales staff left for
South America. It is worth noting that all of the locations where Wackenhut Correctional
obtained large contracts to run South and Central American prisons,were areas that Berry
Seal had formerly run drugs or guns to. The leap from smuggling drugs to running prisons
makes perfect sense in the face of the intelligence community mindset.
Appearances to the contrary, the bulk of all intelligence community activity involves the
analysis and collation of data. Their job is to take absolutely gigantic amounts of information,
shape it, and analyze it, and try to garner a coherent picture of the future from it. Since all of
the people in the senior ranks of the Air America apparatus were high level intelligence officers,
they probably had a good idea of what the net effect of pumping billions of dollars worth of
drugs on to the streets of this country was. They also knew that the war on drugs as started by
the Reagan administration was unwinnable. Not that this country was incapable of interrupting
a large percentage of the flow of drugs through our borders and of drying up another large
percentage at the source, but that the United States does not want to win the war on drugs. H
we were to do so, nearly a dozen South and Central American countries would default on their
loans to Chase Manhattan and the World Bank,plus a huge amount of money currently
circulating on the streets of the U.S. would be taken off.
Being analysts themselves, the command structure of Air America knew that the only real
industrial growth to come from the war on drugs would be in law enforcement and prisons.
Using this knowledge,they filtered their financial base into the Wackenhut corporation and
began to prepare to profit from a national tragedy that they helped create, both here and in
South and Central America. Just as they have profited from tragedies in Laos,Iran and
everywhere else they have appeared. Today,over 62% of those people imprisoned in the United
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States are imprisoned due to drug offenses. As my broker said while we were discussing this
article,"they've created their own futures market.