Making the World Safe for Narco-Terrorism
By William Norman Grigg
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Source: The New American, May 8, 2000
American foreign policy decisions on Kosovo and Haiti have aided drug-trafficking narco-states. |
In
a March 23rd report to Congress, “Drug Czar” Barry McCaffrey disclosed
that drug-related deaths in America have reached record levels, while
the street prices of heroin and cocaine have bottomed out.
Nevertheless, McCaffrey insisted, “progress” is being made in the “war
against drugs.”
Scarcely two weeks had passed before it was
revealed that one of the chief field commanders in that “war” had been
compromised. The April 4th Washington Post reported that Colonel James
Hiett, the former U.S. military group commander at the U.S. Embassy in
Bogota, Colombia, who was “in charge of all U.S. military activities in
Colombia, including counterdrug operations,” has been charged with
covering up his wife’s money laundering and drug smuggling operations.
According to U.S. Customs Commissioner Raymond Kelly, Customs officials
had long suspected that Colonel Hiett “had knowledge of his wife’s
actions and may have even had some complicity.”
In a sense,
Colonel Hiett stands accused of privatizing, for his own benefit, the
Clinton administration’s official policy in Colombia, which is to abet
the growth of narco-terrorism in that unfortunate land. As previously
reported in these pages (see “A Narco-Vietnam” in our April 24th
issue), Colombian President Andres Pastrana, with the active support of
the Clinton administration, has turned over a Switzerland-sized chunk
of the nation to the Communist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC), which controls most of Colombia’s narcotics industry.
The
contradictions in the Colombian government’s U.S.-supported “drug war”
policy have demoralized those Colombian officials who seek to restore
the rule of law to their nation. Following a FARC terror attack on the
small town of Vigia del Fuerte that killed 21 police officers and nine
civilians, General Jorge Enrique Mora issued a press release condemning
the Pastrana government’s support for the narco-rebels. “These are the
same people that the most important leaders of the country are seen
embracing on television,” protested General Mora.
Such
rear-echelon betrayals of front-line soldiers in the “war on drugs” are
old news to former Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agent Michael Levine,
the agency’s most decorated undercover operative. “It was an inside
joke at the DEA that we were always ‘turning the corner in the war on
drugs,’” Levine recounted to THE NEW AMERICAN. “We first heard that
pitch from the head of the DEA back in 1973, just after Nixon had
declared ‘war’ on narcotics. I also remember how [William] Bennett, the
Bush administration’s ‘Drug Czar,’ retired in victory back in the early
’90s. But the reality is that we’ve spent over one trillion dollars on
this ‘war,’ and no matter how many corners we’ve turned, we’re no
better off, except for the bureaucrats and politicians who benefit from
the whole charade.”
Levine, who stays in contact with many other
front-line “drug war” veterans, explains that “many of us have felt a
real sense of betrayal as we have learned, time and time again, that
the drug kingpins who we are told are arch-enemies of America are in
fact assets and allies of our elite — the State Department, the CIA —
and who have a license to sell us drugs as long as they are useful to
the powers that be. In the meantime, our government is using the ‘war
on drugs’ as an excuse to violate our constitutional rights at whim. So
while most of the front-line soldiers are fighting what they think is
the good fight, the front office people are pursuing an entirely
different agenda.”
There is more to that agenda than mere
bureaucratic double-speak, as in McCaffrey’s report to Congress, or
opportunistic corruption, as is alleged in the case of Colonel Hiett.
The same ruling Establishment that presides over the “war on drugs” has
taken great care to cultivate and protect the worst elements of the
international narcotics underground. It is no exaggeration to say that
recent U.S. foreign policy has made it a priority to keep the world
safe for narcotics trafficking.
KLA Connection
Shortly
before NATO began its 1999 air war against Yugoslavia, THE NEW AMERICAN
documented the links between the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA)
and the Albanian crime syndicates that control the “Balkan connection”
through which flows an estimated 40 percent of the world’s heroin (see
“Diving into the Kosovo Quagmire,” in our March 15, 1999 issue).
Similar warnings were issued by European academic John Laughland in the
May 6, 1999 Times of London: “The conflict in Kosovo is the latest in a
series of wars in the former communist bloc fought to seize control of
drug trafficking routes.... The ‘ethnic’ uprisings which convulse
formerly communist states invariably occur at strategically important
points on the Eurasian drug route. It runs from the heroin fields of
Afghanistan, through the former Soviet Central Asian states, the
Caucasus, Turkish Kurdistan and into the Balkans. Eighty percent of the
heroin on sale in Europe now passes along this route.” The Kosovo
bloodletting, asserted Laughland, is the “latest, most horrific, of
these turf battles” — and KLA “criminals operate the most powerful
drug-running network in Europe.”
“Unlike normal trade, the drug
trade requires paramilitary control to be exercised over territory,”
continues Laughland. In the aftermath of NATO’s war on Yugoslavia, the
KLA, with the help of an occupying force of 49,000 “peacekeepers,” has
established military control over the province, which has become a
UN-protected narco-state. In a March 14th dispatch from Belgrade,
Maggie O’Kane of Australia’s Sydney Morning Herald reports that Kosovo
“has become a ‘smuggler’s paradise’” under the rule of the KLA, which
conducts its narcotics operations without interference from NATO.
Marko
Nicovic of the International Narcotics Enforcement Officers Association
in Albany, New York, estimates that drug traffickers based in Kosovo
are moving as much as five tons of heroin each month. “It’s coming
through easier and cheaper, and there’s much more of it,” observes
Nicovic. “The price is going down and if this goes on we are predicting
a heroin boom in western Europe such as there was in the early ’80s.”
Albanian drug barons are specifically targeting markets in the United
States and Europe. O’Kane quotes a “24-year-old heroin middleman” as
telling her that “since the war Kosovo heroin dealers, most of them
from four main families, were concentrating on the western Europe and
United States markets.”
East/West Narco-Axis
Balkans
correspondent Peter Klebnikov, in the January/February issue of the
left-wing Mother Jones, reports that “Kosovar drug dealers associated
with the KLA have begun to form partnerships with Colombian traffickers
— the world’s most notorious drug lords.” According to Jurgen Storbeck,
director of Europol (the European Union’s cooperative police force),
“Colombians like to use Kosovar groups for distribution of cocaine. The
Albanians are getting stronger and stronger, and there is a certain job
sharing now. They are used by Turks for smuggling [heroin] into the
European Union and by Colombians for distribution of cocaine.”
But
with the European heroin market reaching saturation point, the KLA is
turning its attention to the U.S. market — a particularly attractive
option since, as “Drug Czar” Barry McCaffrey acknowledges, heroin use
is on the rise among American youth. McCaffrey’s report illustrates
that America is in the midst of its own “heroin boom,” and, according
to geopolitical analyst Benjamin Works of the Strategic Issues Research
Institute, this is largely the work of the KLA’s Albanian Mafia allies
within this country. Works notes that “heroin addiction has exploded in
the United States and Canada during the 1990s.... The same has happened
in Britain and on the Continent, thanks to the rapid expansion of the
Albanian Mafias in London, Brussels, Milan, Spain, and Germany.” So
prominent is the role of Kosovo Albanian gangsters in the European
heroin trade that European users refer to illegal narcotics as
“Albanka,” or Albanian lady. Works points out that “Albanka” peddlers
have secured a foothold in such major U.S. cities as New York, Boston,
Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, and Dallas-Fort Worth.
“Mr.
Clinton, while presiding over this tragic explosion of heroin
trafficking by his favorite ‘victim’ minority, has been flooding the
airwaves with gun control initiatives that are highly rhetorical and
designed by those who want to eventually disarm us,” writes Works.
“Heroin represents a greater danger to our society than do cocaine,
handguns, tobacco or alcohol.... We have to prepare for an even greater
flood of lethally-pure heroin on our streets — city and suburb — in
coming months. NATO’s KFOR [Kosovo Force] troops and the UN’s police
force in Kosovo have left the floodgates open and show no signs of
re-establishing order in their ‘liberated’ corner of the Balkans.”
Nor
can it be said that these developments took the Clinton administration
and its NATO counterparts by surprise. Shortly after the bombing of
Yugoslavia got under way, Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) sent a letter
to Mr. Clinton urging that the administration conduct an assessment of
the KLA’s role in drug trafficking. In his reply, Mr. Clinton claimed
that he had ordered an assessment from both the CIA and the Drug
Enforcement Administration. “Neither agency has any intelligence that
indicates the KLA has either been engaged in other criminal activity or
has direct links to any organized crime groups,” asserted the
President, who promised to “monitor” the KLA for any future signs of
narcotics trafficking.
A congressional source close to Grassley
told Mother Jones that the letter was “a nonanswer” and that there has
been no subsequent White House action regarding the KLA’s escalating
narco-campaign. Bob Agresti of McCaffrey’s Drug Control Policy Office
told Mother Jones that “We do care” about KLA drug trafficking but that
“we’ve got our hands full trying to bring peace there” — a piece of
spin-control that contradicts the President’s insistence that the KLA
has not been engaged in criminal activity. Michel Koutouzis, the
Balkans expert at the Paris-based Global Drugs Monitor (OGD), maintains
that the DEA’s website once contained a section offering a detailed
description of Kosovo Albanian drug trafficking, but that it was
removed a week before the NATO air strikes began. “The DEA doesn’t want
to talk publicly [about the KLA],” OGD director Alain Labrousse told
Mother Jones. “It’s embarrassing to them.”
For that matter, the
Clinton administration, which eagerly touts the assault upon Yugoslavia
as a “moral victory” in the cause of “peace,” is desperate to keep the
region free of media scrutiny. Reported the March 12th New York Times,
“administration officials acknowledge that an over-riding priority is
to avoid American casualties [among KFOR troops] and keep Kosovo out of
the news during an election year. One administration official, who
served in Bosnia, said that the driving force behind the policy now is
to keep it ‘off the front page.’”
Haiti’s Role
The
Clinton administration and the UN are just as anxious to avoid
prolonged scrutiny of another peacekeeping “triumph” — the UN
occupation of Haiti, which has also been a blessing for the
international narcotics underground. “Five years ago, when 20,000 U.S.
troops were dispatched to this poor nation to oust a military
dictatorship, President Clinton justified the move in part by saying
Haiti’s generals trafficked in drugs,” reported the Houston Chronicle’s
Douglas Farah in a May 9, 1999 dispatch from Margiot, Haiti. “But
despite the restoration of an elected government and the creation of a
new police force, more cocaine than ever before is coursing through
Haiti from Colombia en route to the United States, according to U.S.
and Haitian officials who identify the country’s southern shore as one
of the hemisphere’s busiest conduits for illegal drugs.”
Federal
officials estimate that 59.4 tons of cocaine — roughly one-fifth of the
total imported to the United States — flowed through Haiti in 1998,
making it the busiest transit point for U.S.-bound cocaine. “Drug Czar”
McCaffrey explains that drug cartels “are always searching for the
fissures, and they found one in Haiti.” But that “fissure” didn’t occur
naturally; it was pried open by the UN-authorized 1994 invasion, which
installed the drug-addicted Marxist psychopath Jean-Betrand Aristide
and his Lavalas movement, which essentially decimated that nation’s law
enforcement and judicial institutions.
As in Kosovo, “law
enforcement” in Haiti is carried out by a spectacularly corrupt,
UN-created “police” force. In Kosovo, the gangsters-cum-police are
called the Kosovo Protection Force; the Haitian equivalent is the
UN-trained and U.S.-funded National Police Force. According to the
November 15, 1999 Los Angeles Times, “crimes allegedly committed by the
nascent National Police Force are disturbingly frequent, with scores of
U.S.-trained and -recruited officers implicated in dozens of slayings,
beatings and illegal drug transactions, while 20 other officers have
been killed this year alone.”
In January 1999, Haitian President
Rene Preval dissolved Parliament and began to rule by decree, leading
to what Colin Granderson, a member of a UN mission to monitor the
Haitian police, called “an increase in general lawlessness.” A UN human
rights report issued last fall described “an unprecedented spate of
disappearances, summary executions and other types of killings
attributed to police agents,” which resulted in the recorded deaths of
at least 50 civilians.
One resident of Margiot told the Houston
Chronicle that policemen “only show up with their hands out, to take
[bribes]. They do not beat us like in the old days, but all they want
to do is make money, now that cocaine has come.” Among the officers
indicted for bribery were the second in command of the U.S.-trained
anti-drug unit and the head of Haiti’s elite Special Investigations
Unit. Last year, as drug-abetted corruption spread through Haiti’s law
enforcement organs, the Clinton administration refused to certify Haiti
as a “reliable partner in the drug war.” However, observes the Houston
Chronicle, “Haiti was granted a presidential waiver that spares it from
the economic sanctions that normally accompany decertification.”
During
last November’s congressional debate over a measure intended to end the
ongoing U.S. occupation in Haiti, “House Democrats insisted that Haiti
remains a success story,” observed the Chronicle. Desperate to preserve
its “success,” the Clinton administration unilaterally closed its bases
in Port-au-Prince and re-deployed troops to the countryside. “The point
is, we’re not leaving Haiti,” declared Colonel Roy Duncan, the on-site
commander for the U.S. deployment in Haiti.
Regrettable Results
In
both Kosovo and Haiti, U.S. military personnel have been used to open
“fissures” on behalf of the international narcotics cartels. Our troops
deployed to those pitiable lands now find themselves mired in
open-ended missions in support of UN-created narco-states, while
American law enforcement officers deal with the resulting deluge of
illegal drugs. While “victory” in the “war on drugs” is nowhere to be
seen, the phony anti-drug crusade has given birth to asset forfeiture,
federal scrutiny of private financial transactions, widespread drug
testing and other invasions of personal privacy, and even White House
involvement in inserting anti-drug messages into prime-time television
programs.
In his introduction to the second edition of Red
Cocaine, Dr. Joseph Douglass’ definitive study of the long-term
Communist drug offensive against the West, London-based geostrategic
analyst Christopher Story recalls that in 1936, KGB head Lavrenti Beria
urged students at Lenin University to study “psychopolitics … a
division of geopolitics [designed] to produce a maximum of chaos in the
culture of the enemy.” The long-term Soviet/Red Chinese drug offensive
documented by Douglass is one of the most potent psychopolitical
initiatives ever undertaken by the Communist world. As the Clinton
administration’s “victories” in Kosovo and Haiti illustrate, our own
political Establishment — working in collaboration with the UN — is
actively involved in waging Soviet-style psychopolitical warfare
against the West.
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