American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [72]
But are we surprised? In 1987, the House Narcotics Committee had concluded there should be more investigation into the Contra-drug allegations. What was the Washington Post’s headline?: “Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling.” The paper wouldn’t even run Chairman Charles Rangel’s letter of correction! That same year, a Time correspondent had an article on this subject blocked and a senior editor privately tell him: “Time is institutionally behind the Contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you’d have no trouble getting it in the magazine.”17
The list of government skullduggery goes on, and it’s mind-boggling. Remember when Poppa Bush ordered our military to invade Panama back in 1990? The stated reason was that its leader, Colonel Manuel Noriega, had been violating our laws by permitting drugs to be run through his country. In fact, Noriega had been “one of ours” for a long time. After Noriega was brought to the U.S. and convicted by a federal jury in Miami and sentenced to 40 years, filmmaker Oliver Stone went to see him in prison. There Noriega talked freely about having spied on Castro for the U.S., giving covert aid to the Contras, and visiting with Oliver North.18 Noriega and Bush Sr. went way back, to when Bush headed the CIA in 1976. The brief prepared by Noriega’s defense team was heavily censored, but it did reveal significant contact with Bush over a 15-year period. In fact, Bush had headed up a special anti-drug effort as vice president called the South Florida Task Force, which happened to coincide with when quite a few cargoes of cocaine and marijuana came through Florida as part of the Contra-support network. So why did we finally go after Noriega? Some said it’s because he knew too much and was demanding too big a cut for his role in the Agency’s drug-dealing.19
I can’t exempt Bill Clinton from possible knowledge about some of this. A little airport in Mena, Arkansas, happened to have been a center for international drug smuggling between 1981 and 1985. That’s when Clinton was governor of the state. Barry Seal, who had ties to the CIA and was an undercover informant for the DEA, kept his plane at Mena and “smuggled between $3 billion and $5 billion of drugs into the U.S.”20 Seal was also part of the Reagan administration’s effort to implicate the Sandinistas in the drug traffic, though he was actually smuggling weapons to the Contras. He ended up brutally murdered by his former employers with Colombia’s Medellin cartel, in Baton Rouge, on February 19, 1986. Among the articles found in Seal’s car were then-Vice President Bush’s private phone number.
Clinton said he learned about Mena after that, in April 1988, even though the state police had been investigating the goings-on there for several years. In September 1991, he spoke publicly about “all kinds of questions about whether he [Seal] had any links to the C.I.A ... and if that backed into the Iran-Contra deal.” But Seal’s contraband in Mena generated hundreds of millions that needed to be money-laundered, and his papers show that he dealt with at least one big Little Rock bank. Several inquiries into Mena were stifled, and IRS agent Bill Duncan told Congress in 1992—during the Clinton presidential campaign—that his superiors directed him to “withhold information from Congress and perjure myself.”21 Looks like Clinton may have been tainted by the Iran-Contra madness himself.
Okay, the Reagan-Bush gang is gone, and Clinton is now president. It’s 1996 when the San Jose Mercury News comes out with a remarkable 20,000-word series by reporter