Lees het volgende uitstekende artikel van Jon Schwarz, gepubliceerd op The Intercept, over Oliver North die van drugslord, nu waarschijnlijk snel zal
worden gebombardeerd (deden ze dat maar letterlijk) tot president van
terreurorganisatie NRA, ofwel de National Rifle Association......
Leden van de NRA snappen nog steeds
niet dat alcohol één van de dodelijkste harddrugs op de wereld is,
maar hebben wel de pest aan alles wat men verder illegale drugs* noemt
(waar ze uiteraard ook cannabis toe rekenen......). Geen nood voor deze veelal hypocriete christenen, Oliver North wordt ondanks zijn rol als 'drugslord' en terrorist gewoon als held gezien, terwijl hij een oorlogsmisdadiger is die berecht zou moeten worden voor het Internationaal Strafhof in Den Haag (het ICC).....
Als North bijvoorbeeld een Colombiaan was geweest, had men hem al lang opgesloten in de VS vanwege zijn bemoeienis met de invoer van enorme hoeveelheden cocaïne (in de VS).....
Voorts heeft North de Contra's in Nicaragua, een terreurgroep die tegen de socialistische regering vocht, gesteund met wapens, die hij kocht van de winsten gemaakt met drugshandel....
Ach het voorgaande geeft ten overvloede nog eens aan waarvoor de NRA staat: grootschalige terreur op de straten, scholen en andere openbare gelegenheden van de VS.......
May
12 2018, 2:03 p.m.
THE
NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION has always been
clear about drugs: They’re terrifying.
Last
year, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre darkly
warned that
members of drug gangs “are infiltrating law enforcement and even
the military.” In 2013, LaPierre proclaimed that
“Latin American drug gangs have invaded every city of significant
size in the United States,” and are a key part of the “hellish
world” that awaits us in the future. When Charlton Heston was
president of the NRA in the 1990s, he declared that
regular Americans would soon be besieged by 10,000 drug dealers freed
from prison by the Clinton administration.
It
seems odd, then, that the next president of the NRA will
soon be Oliver North,
who spent years in the 1980s working together with large-scale
cocaine traffickers and protecting a notorious narco-terrorist
from the rest of the U.S. government.
This
reality about North has been largely covered up, first by North
himself and then by Fox News and the passage of time. Thirty
years later, it’s been almost totally forgotten. But the facts
remain genuinely appalling.
North
was an active-duty Marine when he joined the Reagan administration’s
National Security Council in 1981. One of Reagan’s top priorities
was organizing and funding the Contras, a guerrilla military force,
to overthrow the revolutionary socialist Sandinista government of
Nicaragua. But the Contras engaged in extensive,
gruesome terrorism against
Nicaraguan civilians. Congress gradually reduced and then eliminated
appropriations supporting them, leading the Reagan administration to
secretly search for money elsewhere.
"Report
of the congressional committees investigating the Iran-Contra
Affair,” U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee to
Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran; U.S. Senate Select
Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan
Opposition, 1987
North
enthusiastically looked for cash wherever he could find it, and
led many of the clandestine schemes that later became known
as the Iran-Contra scandal. The Sultan of Brunei donated $10 million
(which North’s secretary Fawn Hall accidentally wired to the wrong
Swiss bank account), and Saudi Arabia ponied up as well. North also
pushed what he called “a
neat idea”: selling U.S. military equipment to Iran, with the
proceeds passed along to the Contras.
Meanwhile,
the Contras had a neat idea of their own: facilitating cocaine
trafficking through Central America into the U.S., with a cut going
toward supporting their war against the Sandinistas. Some Contras
were themselves cocaine traffickers, and others were simply happy to
make alliances of convenience with drug cartels.
There’s
no evidence North actively wanted cocaine
to be smuggled into the U.S. It was simply that he had other
priorities. But was he aware of the Contras’ drug trafficking? Yes.
Did he try to shield one of “his” cocaine traffickers from
consequences from the other branches of the U.S. government?
Yes. Did he work together with a known drug lord? Yes.
This
may seem shocking to the easily shocked. But it’s all been
documented in various government investigations. All you need in
order to learn about it is curiosity and an internet connection. For
instance, here’s a screenshot from the CIA’s
website about
the Nicaraguan Revolutionary Democratic Alliance, or ADREN by
its Spanish acronym, which was later folded into the Contras:
"Allegations
of Connections Between CIA and The Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to
the United States,” CIA, 1998
The
full extent of North’s complicity in cocaine trafficking will never
be known. When the Iran-Contra scandal story broke in November 1986,
he ordered Hall to destroy so many documents that the shredder
malfunctioned,
and she had to ask White House maintenance to come and fix it.
Moreover, when North was removed from his National Security Council (NSC) job, he took with him 2,848 pages of daily notes — which legally
belonged to the federal government. By the time a congressional
investigation was finally able to examine the notes, North and his
lawyers had redacted huge amounts of information.
Nonetheless,
543 of the pages mentioned drugs or drug trafficking, with the
probe finding that
“in many of these cases, material in the Notebooks adjacent to the
narcotics references has been deleted.”
"Drugs,
Law Enforcement And Foreign Policy,” U.S. Senate Committee on
Foreign Relations, 1989
But
despite North’s cover-up, what we do know for sure is
incredibly damning.
Perhaps
most significantly, according to North’s own
notes he
met with Panama’s then-dictator Manuel Noriega in London in
September 1986 to collaborate on a plan for Noriega to support the
Contras in return for American money and arms. They discussed
sabotaging a Nicaraguan airport and oil refinery, as well as creating
a program to train Contra and Afghan mujahedeen commandos in Panama
with Israeli help. (It’s not completely clear, but North appears to
have written that “Rabin” – i.e., Yitzhak Rabin, who was then
Israel’s minister of defense – “approves.”)
North
was clearly enthusiastic about the potential partnership with
Noriega. In an
earlier email selling
the proposal to one of his superiors, he wrote that “we might have
available a very effective, very secure means of doing some of the
things which must be done if the Nicaragua project is going to
succeed. … I believe we could make the appropriate arrangements w/
reasonable OPSEC and deniability.”
Email,
Oliver North to John Poindexter, May 8, 1986 (neem aan dat het niet om een email ging destijds....)
But
of course, Noriega was himself a powerful drug trafficker. Knowing
this didn’t require a top-secret clearance: It was published on
the front page of
the New York Times three months before North met with him.
According to the Times article, “A White House official said the
most significant drug-running in Panama was being directed by General
Noriega.”
The
North-Noriega operation ultimately didn’t come to fruition; the
Iran-Contra affair was exposed just two months after they met.
But the planning that did occur is conclusive evidence that North
eagerly worked with drug dealers operating on the largest scale
imaginable.
“Panama
Strongman Said to Trade In Drugs, Arms and Illicit Money,” New York
Times, June 11, 1986
North
also went to great
lengths to
protect an ally who was a key participant in what the Justice
Department called “the
most significant case of narco-terrorism yet discovered.”
In
1984, José Bueso Rosa, a Honduran general, plotted with several
others to assassinate the president of Honduras. They planned to fund
the hit with the proceeds from selling 760 pounds of cocaine in the
U.S.
The
FBI, however, had the participants under surveillance, intercepted
the shipment when it arrived at a small airfield in Florida, and
arrested everyone involved.
But
Bueso had played a key role in Honduran support for the Contras. So
North went to work to get him off as lightly as possible. (Bueso had
not himself been charged with drug trafficking, but
wiretaps made it obvious he participated in that part
of the project.)
In
email, North explained his
plans to “cabal quietly” with other Reagan administration
officials “to look at options: pardon, clemency, deportation,
reduced sentence.” Eventually, North planned to have the case’s
judge informed “in camera” — that is, secretly — about “our
equities in this matter,” in order to push for leniency. Then,
North wrote, it would be necessary to quietly brief Bueso, so that he
wouldn’t “start singing songs nobody wants to hear.”
North
didn’t get everything he wanted, but did succeed in having Bueso
transferred to a “Club Fed” minimum security prison. Bueso was
released on parole after 40 months.
THERE
ARE ALSO numerous documented examples of North
being informed that members of the Contras were involved in drug
trafficking, with no signs that North took any action.
For
instance, after meeting with a key assistant, North wrote in
his notebooks about a plane being used by the brother of a top Contra
leader to ferry supplies from the U.S. to Central America. “Honduran
DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans,” North jotted
down, “is probably being used for drug runs into U.S.”
North
testified in front of Congress that he’d passed this information
along to the Drug Enforcement Administration. When later questioned
by the Washington Post, the DEA, the State Department, and the U.S.
Customs Service all stated that
there was no evidence North ever said anything about the matter to
them.
Oliver
North, notes, August 9, 1985
The
same aide who told North about the plane also informed
him about
the “potential involvement with drug running” of one Contra
official and that another was “now involved in drug running out of
Panama.” And after a call from another subordinate,
North noted that
the Contras were planning to buy weapons from a Honduran warehouse —
and “14 M to finance came from drugs.”
North
was getting similar reports from outside the government as well.
Dennis Ainsworth, a Republican real estate investor who’d
volunteered to help the Contra cause, informed a U.S. attorney that
the top Contra commander “was involved in drug trafficking,” but
that the Nicaraguan community was frightened to come forward
because “they could be blown away by Colombia hit squads.”
Ainsworth said he’d tried to inform the White House about this but
“we were put off by Ollie North,” and “I was even physically
threatened by one of Ollie North’s associates.” (The U.S.
attorney later wrote a memo with
Ainsworth’s statements and transmitted it to the FBI.)
“Regarding
Dennis Madden Ainsworth, Information Concerning,” FBI, January 6,
1987
North
and the NRA did not immediately respond to requests for comment on
this history. When North ran for Senate in 1994, his
campaign spokesperson said his involvement with the Bueso case
was “old news and garbage and nobody cares about it.” In a 2004
appearance on Fox News, North called a congressional investigation
that focused on the Contra-cocaine connection “a witch hunt” with
witnesses “who clearly had a political agenda.”
But
the extraordinarily sordid nature of North’s past will be clear to
anyone who appraises it honestly. In announcing North’s
appointment, Wayne LaPierre said there’s “no one better
suited to serve as our President,” and he’s correct. Oscar
Arias wrote
Thursday that
the NRA “finds in Oliver North a leader worthy of its mission.”
Peter Kornbluh, who was co-director of the Iran-Contra documentation
project at the National Security Archive, is even more
straightforward: North, he says, is “the perfect pick to further
the NRA’s reputation for favoring bloodshed and criminality over
responsible gun control and ownership.”
Top
photo: Former U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North gives the Invocation
at the National Rifle Association-Institute for Legislative Action
Leadership Forum in Dallas on May 4, 2018.
I’m
in
==============================
* Let wel: in het Engels zijn drugs ook de medicijnen tegen ziekte enz. Het gebruik van opiaten als pijnbestrijder is één van de redenen waarom er nu zoveel ophef is in de VS over verslaafden aan die opiaten, ofwel synthetische opium zoals Oxycontin. Bij velen wordt de werking van deze opiaten in de loop van de jaren steeds zwakker, waarna ze hun toevlucht nemen tot echte, niet synthetische opiaten als heroïne.....
PS: in de kop staat dat North ex-CIA werknemer is, in feite was dit zo gezien zijn handelen met de CIA, echter officieel heeft hij nooit op de CIA loonlijst gestaan.
