President Clinton, CIA and drug smuggling

[warrior1]

Why do people believe this? I had been talking to a fella recently and he was going on about this (No he wasn't a freeper or a repuke) He actually voted for Nader. Anyway, I did a google search and poof there are stories or I should say articles. I don't believe any of it, yet there are articles by Wayne Madsen, Realchange, Newsmax and What really happened, to name a few. I don't have time to weed through all of this. But it's disturbing, but it also reeks of republican smear job. It's sad that people who I would try and convince the opposite are too far gone.

[rfranklin]

1. It was fact during the Reagan-Bush disaster...

Which is why they had to attribute it to Clinton.

[RagingInMiami]

2. If you google George W. Bush, CIA and drug smuggling

You will find the same type of stories.

[htuttle]

16. Except that those are mostly true

Bush Sr. was up to his eyeballs in Iran/Contra cocaine. There is far, far more evidence of that than anything involving Clinton and 'Mena'.

I'm pretty sure that even a Congressional investigation (long after Bush Sr was out of office) determined that the CIA had been running drugs during Iran/Contra.

[underpants]

3. Just finishing "The Hunting of the President"

The whole thing is so ridiculous that it is done away with rather quickly. Even before reading that book (I had missed how whacked the whole investigation was) I knew that this was how Arkansas politics was done...think up the craziest s**t you can imagine (a weekend of hard drinking way out in the woods seems to help) and just start telling it to people. Oh and there is bound to be someone in the Ark. press who will print some part of it (the source's name seems to be all that is really required) and off you go.

[warrior1]

4. This wasn't the only

kooky thing this person believed. Stuff about mandatory vaccination and the possibility some people would die because of it, etc. I told him that the government doesn't care to protect anyone (see Katrina) that I would believe they would poison the vaccine supply to get rid of us.

[papau]

5. Reagan/CIA needed off the books money for Contras - there is no CIA

motive to run its drug operation through AK - and if they did, why would they tell the Governor of the state - like they needed state permission or wanted more folks to know?

[leveymg]

7. Are you serious?

Do you really think anyone could run the quantities of cocaine that went out of Mena Airport without an agreement by the State and local authorities to look the other way?

Of course, the coke was at the bottom of the crates marked "U.S. Government Property" filled with money and M-16s. But, knowledge of the drug imports was widespread within law enforcement and State Government at the time. Nobody wanted to mess with it, and a lot of people benefited personally.

Please, don't be naive.

[papau]

13. look the other way - I'm cia - is obvious - but what the hell is going on

is not -

and indeed trooper speculation is just that - speculation.

Real info leaks would be plugged.

Indeed unlike LA where the drugs on the street could be traced back to CIA, no one has traced a damn thing back to AK- all we have are some "eyewitness" reports.

Possible - of course - in Iraq we threw billions off the backs of trucks.

Were weapons going to the Contras - yes - via Honduras. But via flights from AK - why AK?

Why send coke to the Contra's? "bottom of crates" - if secret flights why hide the coke?

Sorry - the story does not hang together.

Reagan/LA/CIA/coke is clear - this is a foggy as hell.

[leveymg]

17. You have the flow backwards - money to Tegucigalpa - coke back

Guns got diverted and resold domestically and abroad. Mena was a transshipment point. Read "The Dark Alliance" series.

[papau]

25. M-16 flow out of military to private constant problem - but not much money

Guns are diverted all the time - indeed it is the reason the CIA will not let the military do proper inventories or to be audited by outside auditors or to even co-ordinate with Treasury on tracking spending flow.

Transhipment points are chosen foe efficiency.

Just what advantage did Mena bring over other airports.

There are no inspections of CIA shipments at Florida Airports to this day - why would they go to AK for these?

This is bullship info - IMHO - misinformation that is not even well done.

Because it is not well done I suspect it is not put out by the CIA - it seems much more a GOP in house with military friends con job.

[leveymg]

6. Google: "Compromised"

It's a book written by one of Clinton's Arkansas State Trooper bodyguards. It has its flaws, but theres a great deal of truth here. It goes into the Mena Airport CIA Iran-Contra drug and guns smuggling network that owned the State House during the 1980s. Of course, it was Bush 41 at the top of this rotten pyramid, but Bill and Hill, according to someone who was there, were definitely well aware of what was going on out at Mena Airport.

The title says it all. Why do you think Bill and Hill came out of nowhere and were pushed for the job by Pam Harriman? While you're at it, GOOGLE Harriman, who is the mother of the DLC.

[hippiechick]

8. Harriman ...

.... who's late husband Averill Harriman was an Ambassador, as well.

[leveymg]

11. Who do you think was Prescott Bush's boss?

The Brown Bros-Harriman investment house was at the center of US-German-Soviet trade during the 1920s and 1930s. Prescott Bush was just a junior partner. John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen were the chief lawyers for this triad, that also included the big multinationals, Standard Oil DuPont-IG Farben, and FoMoCo and GM, who were the chief trade revenue sources for the Hitler and Stalin regimes.

They all ended up running the show after World War Two. Both parties, particularly the GOP.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

21. Herbert Walker was Prescott Bush's boss at Union Bank.

[leveymg]

22. Harriman held most of the stock for Thyssen

Walker and Bush each held just one or two shares. But, they managed the business, quietly and efficiently. For which they were rewarded by John Foster Dulles, who was RNC Chairman, and his brother, Allen, who headed the Bern OSS station (the money and espionage door back and forth during World War Two) and then the CIA during the Eisenhower Admin until the Bay of Pigs.

They're all extremely dirty in many ways.

[warrior1]

9. I think it's a bunch

of right wing bullshit.

[leveymg]

12. Read, a lot, and then decide what's BS.

Start with anything by John Loftus.

[MadHound]

10. Well, I think part of it is guilt by proximity

There is now pretty solid confirmation that the CIA/Reagan/Bush administration were smuggling drugs into the US as the "money leg" of the Iran-Contra scheme, amongst others. There is also pretty solid evidence that a large amount of these drugs used Mena Arkansas as their initial entry point. Given that Clinton was govenor of Ark. at the time, and given that there is a large amount of irrational hatred of the man out there, it is only natural that Clinton's name get dragged into this mess. However there isn't a lot of solid evidence, mostly mutterings by Scaiffe and his ilk, backed with mostly bullshit.

However if Clinton did help facilitate this drug running scheme, it would explain a lot of things, namely his meteoric rise to the presidency and his ongoing friendly relationship with Bush 41.

I think that some brave soul would do us a world of good if they would do some investigative report on this. However given the life expectancy of such people when they go poking around into such issues, I doubt that it is going to happen.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

14. There has been investigative work done and yet none of it gets into

the mainstream. Some good sources are mentioned within this thread.

[MadHound]

15. Yes I realize that there has been some good work done on this issue

But as you point out, the vast majority of it has been outside of the mainstream. I was thinking of somebody with the stature of the late Gary Webb, who wrote the series "Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion," which detailed the CIA's flooding LA with crack back in the eighties. Sad to say, while this fine set of articles initially made it into print, somebody got to Webb's editor and forced him to issue a retraction and fire Webb. Years later, Webb's work was found to be spot on true, but sadly by that time Webb was dead of a supposed suicide, and the whole matter was quietly dropped.

What I'm pointing out is that we need somebody of that caliber and stature to persue this, but given the many examples of folks who wind up dead and suicided when they get too close to this, I doubt that this will happen.

[leveymg]

19. Notice that this is one subject that Sy Hersh hasn't touched.

But, read "The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia" and Corn's "Blonde Ghost"

[karynnj]

18. While the CIA and probably G.H.W. Bush were complicit in looking the

other way, while the Contras raised money by bringing drugs into the US, these stories take off from there and quickly become bizzare. The CIA did in the 1990s acknowledge that the Kerry report on Contra drug running was correct. Later in the Noriega trial, some of the Colunbia connections that Kerry's witnesses attested to were confirmed. The reporters who first reported the drug charges got almost no one to believe them. Kerry, who was very careful to state ONLY what could be proved, was called a "randy conspiracy nut".

The conspiracy nuts seem to go way beyond the truth - But, before reading that the government in answer to Maxine Walters' demand for investiagtion pointed to Kerry's report, said it was true, and that it meant there was no need to investigate further, I wouldn't have believed that the Reagan administration could close its eyes to drugs entering this country, while Nancy said we should say no to drugs. The truth is probably more damning than Kerry's report - it would have been irresponsible for Kerry to go beyond what he could absolutely prove.

What seems weird to me is that he voted for Nader, given his concern on this issue. Kerry risked both political suicide and the loss of his reputation to pursue this because it was the right thing to do. Doing this when Reagan was the nation's hero shows who he is. (Using this issue after Reagan was deified after dying last year would not have been a winner - you would think though that those who knew of it would see that Kerry wasn't your typical politician.

[Media_Lies_Daily]

20. The airport in Mena, Arkansas, was used during the Iran-Contra....

...activities during the Reagan-Bush41 presidencies. Clinton was the Governor of Arkansas during some part of that period of time. Guns, ammo, and other supplies were flown into Central America, and drugs came back with the return flights.

[papau]

26. We have flight logs for this? - If so it makes it possible- but where does

Clinton or the local sheriff being in office make them accessories?

[Toots]

23. I believe it is a case of the usual transference the GOP is so good at.

They do it on virtually every subject and presumed power.

[On the Road]

24. I Would Suggest Looking at Some of the Other Claims

made by Wayne Madsen, Newsmax, and WhatReallyHappened.com. To put it kindly, none of them are reliable sources. More bluntly, they have a habit of simply making things up to get attention.

When making a claim like this, you normally lead with your best evidence. The argument that Clinton was a drug-runner because drugs were moving through Mena airport is an enormous stretch. And that's apparently the best they have. Unless there's a lot more, it's not even worth paying attention to.

[papau]

27. I agree :-)

:-)

[Catherine Vincent]

28. Plenty of DUers believe that tripe.