Pacifying the Philippines, 1900

A shipload of legal marijuana would be worth a few million dollars. A shipload of illegal marijuana is worth in the neighborhood of one hundred million dollars, at master distributor discount. Does less pot pass through Panama now that "kingpin" Noriega is in jail? Has there been a crash in the pot market?

During the post-Contra confrontation with Noriega, the Reagan administration stressed the interception of his bulky, easy to smell marijuana, contributing to an explosion in the popularity of concentrated, profitable to smuggle cocaine, and the popularization of crack and concentrated heroin.

President Bush's replacement for Noriega, Guillermo Endara, was a director and secretary of Banco Interoceánico, targeted by both the FBI and DEA as a major money laundry for both the Cali and Medellín cocaine cartels. How is it possible that President Bush, the former Director of the CIA, didn't know that? It was George Bush who had authorized Noriega's substantial 1976 CIA paychecks, and it was he who insisted on putting Noriega back on the payroll in 1980, after Carter had the good sense to take him off.

From Bush's perspective, this made sense. Noriega and his Mossad advisor Mike Harrari, who worked closely with Bush aide Gregg, proved invaluable in arming the Contras. "Since the beginning of the supply of arms to the Contras, the same infrastructure that was used for arms was used for drugs. The same pilots, the same planes, the same airstrips, the same people," noted José Blandon, Noriega's former chief of political intelligence.

Just before the December 1989 Panama invasion, in which Gen. Barry McCaffrey was in charge of barrio incineration, Endara's business partner, Carlos Eleta, was arrested in Georgia for conspiring to import a half-ton of cocaine per month. The charges were dropped as soon as Bush installed Endara as Panamanian president and Eleta became an "asset." Bush then insisted that "The answer to the problem of drugs lies more in solving the demand side of the equation than it does the supply side, than it does in interdiction or sealing the borders." That'll keep the price up and justify turning the U.S. into a police state.

Endara's attorney general, treasury minister and chief justice of the supreme court were all former directors of First Interamericas Bank, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Colombia's Cali cartel, one of its major money laundries, according to Panama's National Banking Commission. "Take my word for it," intoned a determined George Bush at his inaugural, "this scourge will stop!"

New York Times:1/10/95: "In a daunting new turn in the traffic of Colombian cocaine into the United States, smugglers are buying old passenger jets, taking out the seats and using the planes to fly huge amounts of the drug into Mexico, American and Mexican officials say. Travelling at night with their lights off, the Boeing 727's and French-made Caravelle jets are believed to be carrying as much as six tons or more of cocaine in a single flight. The cocaine is then transported overland into the United States, where the wholesale value of such a load is about $120 million."

That's enough to buy a new plane for each load, as the innovative Amado Carillo, and his partners in Colombian and Mexican military intelligence, well understood. The legal value of such a load would be 10% of the illegal value, or less.

Inevitably, the economics of Prohibition has caused the fascist cancer to metastasize. "Leopards" are no longer just a Latin phenomenon. And the U.S. Leopards are a much more professional and well-financed lot. George Bush's Defense Authorization Act of 1989 ordered the Pentagon to a) integrate the various US command, control, communications and intelligence assets to monitor illegal drugs; b) enhance the National Guard's role in drug interdiction and enforcement operations; c) serve as the lead agency in detecting and monitoring drug smuggling.

This saw the formation of drug intelligence centers in most government enforcement bureaucracies. These included a CIA drug-intelligence clearing house and the El Paso-based Joint Task Force 6, set up in November 1989 at Biggs Army Airfield adjacent to Fort Bliss. JTF-6 coordinates regional narcotics enforcement with the DEA's El Paso Intelligence Center, also located at Biggs. JTF-6 fills thousands of missions yearly in "total integration" with border law enforcement, to quote its commander, Lt. Gen. Stotser.

One wonders, then, how come they're so damned ineffective. Has the strategic situation been misdefined to begin with? Is their Mexican border effort just cosmetic, given that the entire Pacific coast from Baja to Anchorage is equally porous? Are some of the strategic goals unstated, covert? Are we just playing the red-herring funding game?

In May of 97 four Marines on a JTF-6 border patrol shot 18 year-old Ezekiel Hernandez Jr. to death while he was herding goats 400 yards from his Redford, Texas borderland home. Hernandez was shot in the back by an M-16 at 230 yards, well outside the range of the old .22 he carried for rattlers.

This murder was the inevitable result of the 1992 policy outlined in Soldiers, the official magazine of the U.S. Army: "The U.S. Military Police School at Fort McClellan, Alabama is providing free training in advanced police techniques and military aggression tactics to law enforcement personnel.... Subjects offered in this course include shotgun and submachine gun usage, night drug raids, and land navigation."

"Joint Task Force Six is one of three task forces organized to help fight the drug war....The Active Army operates the National Interagency Counterdrug Institute at a camp at San Luis Obispo, California. It is staffed by soldiers who train civilian anti-drug law enforcement personnel in drug eradication and interdiction. They also teach civilian agencies how to make use of military assets in support of counterdrug operations. The Active Army can get under the Posse Comitatus Act [the 1876 law forbidding the U.S. Army to police Americans] in operating this school by staffing it with California Guardsmen. Camp San Luis Obispo is also owned by the California National Guard."

Do we really want to police Americans with "military aggression tactics"? Wasn't the political danger inherent in that the whole point of the Posse Comitatus Act? Although a federally paid adjunct of the Army, it has been legal, since 1988, for the National Guard to operate as state police. Both the National Guard and the Department of Defense are lobbying for repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act.

On 1/4/95, Rep. Barbara Kennelly (D-CT) proposed the creation of a Rapid Deployment Force of 2500 troops within the FBI to function as on-call Storm Troopers for local jurisdictions. Once deployed the RDF would have the power of state police. 1996 Republican presidential hopeful Lamar Alexander, demonstrating his canny originality, proposed simply creating a new unit of the army with the specific mission of U.S. border drug and immigrant interdiction.

Bill Bennett and his congressional mouthpiece, the incredible Gerald Solomon (R-NY), Chairman of the House Rules Committee no less, went Lamar one better. They proposed that the mission of the U.S. military itself be changed to one of international drug interdiction, with all federal law enforcement agencies put under direct military command. That is, they proposed an overt military police state. Senator Dole, running against Bill Clinton, supported a version of this, including a Defense Authorization amendment, wisely killed by the Pentagon itself, that would have authorized the U.S. military to seal the Mexico-U.S. border, that is, to repeat Nixon's economically disastrous 1969 Operation Intercept.

During Congressional hearings on March 29, 1995, a Dole-Helms ally, Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN), chairman of the House Western Hemisphere Subcommittee, proposed that the United States place an aircraft carrier off the coast of Peru and Bolivia and forcibly spray coca fields with herbicides despite the opposition of those governments. Needless to say, the reaction in Lima and La Paz was apoplectic. If these fools ever try it, they'll have the Peruvian Army joining Sendero Luminoso.

Unless the military knows a way to change the value of money, the rightwing proposals would mean either partial or all-out war with all those countries officially threatened by the State Department with the cut-off of aid, or decertified, due to their non-cooperation in the Drug War. Strategically successful drug-war models, like Holland, simply collapse the smugglers' power with controlled legalization. That is, they finance doctors, not drug gangs. But Gingrich, Solomon, Bennett, Helms, Faircloth, Gramm, Hatch, McCollum, Abraham, Inhofe and the rest of their airhead army actually proposed militarily attacking the drug-dealing infrastructures, that is, the military high command, of Peru, Bolivia, Colombia, Burma, Mexico, Argentina, Laos, Afghanistan, Turkey, Taiwan, Ghana, Nigeria, India, Iran, Lebanon, Paraguay, Pakistan, Bahamas, Belize, Brazil, Cambodia, China, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Guatemala, Haiti, Hong Kong, India, Jamaica, Malaysia, Panama, Taiwan, Thailand, Venezuela, Vietnam, Iran, and Syria.

But of course this is covert policy, it can’t be taken literally. Those few real conservatives who do, find themselves at odds with their own power structure. The Republican defense contractors don’t mean to attack our dopers, the ones buying our arms. This attack on “drugs” is defined by the Republican strategic geniuses as arming and financing the fascist military structures that are actually dealing the drugs: House leader Dennis Hastert (R-IL), in the Western Hemisphere Drug Elimination Act, passed as law by Congress 10/19/98: “The drug crisis facing the United States is a top national security threat. The Department of Defense has been called upon to support counter-drug efforts of Federal law enforcement agencies that are carried out in source countries.”

The Pentagon responded by upgrading the priority of “drug eradication and interdiction” in its Global Military Force Policy from the lowest, “4: non-hostile,” to “2:military operations other than [declared] war.” This means a huge “military operation” in Colombia, home of “narco-terrorists,” but none at all in Brazil, Burma, Pakistan, Mexico or Bolivia, home of “strategic assets.”

And thanks to the incremental repeal of the Posse Comitatus Act, the Army is Actively supporting the value of Mexican pot by eradicating American pot. Actually, it's supporting the value of American pot also, vastly increasing the acreage these high-tech Keystone Cops have to worry about - thereby guaranteeing themselves employment and a steady expansion of their mission. Drug War has been pursued with Draconian efficiency in the U.S. for years, with no effect whatever on availability and demand. It has simply escalated the price, further strengthening the most violent of the dealers. This justifies the appropriations that enable military intelligence to run those dealers.

Ex-DEA Agent Michael Levine: "The drug war under President Clinton is bigger and healthier than ever. It seems like every department in the federal government has a part in it - DEA, FBI, CIA, NSA, IRS, DIA, ATF, State Department, Pentagon, Customs, Coast Guard, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines - and each one is fighting for more turf and a bigger chunk of the drug war budget. When I started out in 1965 there were two federal agencies enforcing the drug laws, and the budget was less than $10 million. Today [1993] there are 54 agencies involved and the budget is $13 billion. Orchestrating the whole mess is a Drug Czar who is generally a political appointment with no special qualifications for the job."

That is, McCaffrey is no psychiatrist or psychopharmacologist. But, of course, he is an expert at expanding the police mission of the military. A good short definition of a fascist police state would be "a state in which publicly-funded military-police agencies drive policy."

U.S. policy has been driven by the biggest publicly-funded police-agency propaganda barrage in history. The overt 1997 federal Drug War appropriation was $15.1 billion. The 1998 federal bill was $16 billion, the 1999 bill was $18 billion, with two-thirds of that simply being pumped into domestic law enforcement, that is, into filling the prisons with vulnerable kids. Most of the rest goes into propaganda and "treatment," that is, "re-education," in the Stalinist sense.

These budgetary figures don't include the tens of billions expended by the military, by the federal judicial and penal systems or the state judicial and penal systems. In 1991, the RAND Corp. estimated the total outlay of public funds at $30 billion. The 1999 figure must be twice that.

For fiscal 1998 Clinton and McCaffrey announced a billion-dollar ONDCP/Ad Council ad blitz: "There is every reason to believe that this absolutely will turn around drug abuse by youngsters," intoned Bombastic Barry. I doubt there is a serious expert in the RAND Corp. or anywhere else anywhere who expects this blowhard to have any strategic effect whatever. But Barry McCaffrey knows that. McCaffrey's job is to keep the Drug War going, that's all. The Drug War is designed to be endless. At the same time he engineers artificial hysteria with the biggest propaganda barrage in history, he finances the military structures - Peruvian, Mexican, Burmese, Thai, Pakistani, etc. - that are actually dealing the drugs. He finances, that is, the major customers of America's defense contractors, the biggest drug money launderers in the world.

If you want to understand why we are arming the Colombian military, a major drug dealing power, understand why we armed Burmese military intelligence - after the UN Drug Control Program identified them as the largest heroin traders in the world. An International Monetary Fund study pointed out that Burma's foreign exchange reserves for 1991 through 1993 were only about $300 million, but that the Burma Army purchased arms valued at $1.2 billion during the period.

Likewise, the Colombian narco-terrorists we are financing must hold up their end of the deal, the bills must be paid. McCaffrey and Clinton, in the name of all the smarmy virtues, are orchestrating a genocidal quagmire that will profit no one but the arms manufacturers who trade the Prohibition-inflated price of drugs for their lethal wares. Civil war, endless civil war, is a goldmine of endless contracts that keep assembly lines humming.

In President Ernesto Samper's Colombia, 1994-98, the MAS ("Death to Kidnappers") death squads were originally formed by the Medellín cartel as a tactical answer to the military pressure put on them by M-19 guerrillas. The death squads were staffed by CIA-trained Colombian officers, who already had a significant piece of the Medellín action. "The drug dealers' core military power lies in the paramilitary groups they have organized with the support of the largest landowners and military officers," explained Alberto Galán, brother of assassinated 1994 presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán.

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), protect not only their campesino constituents, but some of the most powerful dealers in Colombia. They are, in part, Fidel's contribution to Colombian politics. Rather than target the hard-to-hit guerrillas, who hit back, and who in any case have fighters capable of protecting, or destroying, jungle labs, the death squads hit journalists, drug legalization advocates, labor leaders, human rights activists and other political threats to a drug-dealing military police state.

After 50 years of guerrilla war, of course, since military power is built on money, the Colombian left has become as deeply dependent on the artificial Prohibition value of drugs as the right. That is, the artificially inflated value of drug crops has created powerful institutional support, on all political sides, for continued, endless Drug War.

FARC is already the only government in at least half of the Colombian countryside. That Colombian campesinos support FARC is revealed not only by its military success, but by the fact that the CIA crop-dusting in guerrilla areas is aimed not only at their drug crops, but at their food crops. The objective, as in Vietnam, is to turn them into docile sharecroppers.

FARC demonstrates a small part of its logistical clout

On February 26, 1999, Colombian Gen. Fernando Tapias Stahelin told the gathered eminences at the Bogotá artillery school that the army would begin using heavy artillery against the rebels. This was necessary because FARC was now fielding units of 200-300 men.

The logistics of that escalation, of course, will make FARC more dependent than ever on the underground drug economy. McCaffrey is not lying when he says the guerrillas are dealing. He is lying when he says that he is not. McCaffrey's Big Lie is the Stalinist lie that policy can dictate economic physics - that the economics of Prohibition can be managed by police state tactics. The Stalinist police state, the essence of which was Prohibition, collapsed - economically.

And if the campesino-guerrillas were the real "narcoterrorists," they would hardly be demanding the controlled legalization of all drugs, since that will collapse their value, making them useless as a source of military funding. As with the Zapatistas of Mexico and the Senderistas of Peru ("the Shining Path," Sendero Luminoso), the original FARC intention had been to empower the campesinos by eliminating the McCaffrey, that is, by eliminating the excuse for Colombian participation in the U.S. military-industrial complex.

But warfare often perverts good intentions. A veteran member of the foreign press corps, who has lived in Colombia for years, warns me not to lionize the left. "The FARC are not freedom fighters or defenders of the peasants. They might have been originally but they have degenerated into just another power block within this complex, brutal and absurd civil war we have now. So far as most intelligent observers can see, they really only have the Stalinist aim of keeping themselves in power, grabbing more territory and imposing their will by force."

"All of this power-grabbing is with the aim of eventually having the clout to get the government to make fundamental reforms in the system here, which is completely corrupt and unjust, but by now, after fifty years in the bush as guerrilla fighters, they have lost sight of political realities, are out of touch with the world as it is nowadays, don't really have the ability to administer a country well, have lost the support of intellectuals and technicians and in short, no longer really know what they want."

"For example, they talk about nationalizing oil, which is run by foreign companies. But at the same time they are living off pay-offs from these companies and would never in a million years be able to run the oil wells by themselves." ".... It was the guerrillas who killed the three US Indian rights people, two of them Native Americans, who came to Colombia to support a tribe in its fight against a multinational oil company who wants to exploit their natural resources. So what does that say to you!!!!"

"The peasants support them, in part, because the army is a traditional enemy and behaves even worse. But more and more it is because the FARC have the guns and anyone who goes against them is bumped off. A lot of young guys and girls go into the FARC because there is no other economic alternative and because, for some half-literate, resentful 15 year-old kid, who never will have a chance to be anyone important, it's great to have a gun and be part of a group that pushes people about. Besides, this is no longer a country with a peasant majority, as it was before. It is more and more urban, which means that it is a much more complex economy and raises much more complex questions about who is guilty of exploitation. Is a middling guy who owns a shop or a truck a capitalist or not?"

And if he is, will the structural economy benefit by subsidizing his sweat? Is an Indian farmer, hoping to scratch a living from his produce, a sweat-equity capitalist deserving of state support? Jacobo Arbenz, the great Guatemalan reformist of the 1950's, so famously overthrown by the Dulles brothers, would have said so, but the IMF has a different idea. Juan Manuel Ospina, president of the Colombian Farmers' Society, points out that under IMF-US sponsored trade models, Indian grain, corn, rice, potato and onion farmers are undersold by cheap global imports - Archer Daniels Midland's great humanitarian contribution to Colombia. Given the artificial Prohibition-value of the drug crops, starving Indians are forced into the drug-crop economy and into the civil war. Lowland Indians are growing ipadú coca, highlanders grow opium.

The solution, as native Colombian politicians are well aware, is to collapse the value of drug crops with controlled legalization, thereby economically collapsing the militarization of the countryside. The money not spent on warfare could then be used to support sweat-equity production models.

The 1998 Colombian senatorial campaign poster of Benjamín Jacanamijoy, son of a famous ayahuasquero shaman. His campaign slogan was “Preserva tu cultura, revive la tradición.” He was narrowly defeated, and expects to win next time.

As in the U.S., the herb legalization/alkaloid decriminalization movement has created an alliance of the centrist right and the centrist left. The Colombian right is keenly aware that the flow of narcodollars into the Colombian economy artificially inflates the value of the peso, badly hurting the viability of Colombia's legal exports on the world market. That is not an effect of pharmacology, it is an effect of Prohibition. Saloman Kalmanovitz, a director of the Central Bank, and other Colombian equivalents of Paul Volcker, Milton Friedman and George Soros have joined Indian, campesino and urban centrists in calling for an end to the self-inflicted disaster of Prohibition.

But the militaries have become dependent on the economics of Prohibition. The civil war, that is, has degenerated, on all sides, into a duplicitous street fight for the crop, with both sides treating the hood dealers as kingpins, just as in mafioso Johnny Rosselli's Guatemala. My journalist friend writes to me, 10/99, ""A friend of mine, who works for national parks, just came back from the zone which the government handed over to the guerrilla to realize the peace negotiations. I have been reading a lot of newspaper reports about their terrorist rule there. What my friend tells me is that there is a kind of tense calm. What people are really worried about is that if the guerrillas withdraw, the place will be shot up by the paramilitaries, which happens all the time, just these random slaughters of civilians in zones controlled by the guerrilla (and vice versa) on the theory that if you are not with us, you are against us. But the interesting thing is this: just outside this zone is another town, only about fifteen miles away, where the paramilitaries are gathering and waiting to strike. But the paramilitaries rarely have groups of more than 200 armed men, where the guerrillas have thousands in this demilitarized zone. So what the hell is going on? Although the two are supposedly bitter enemies, you rarely hear of a combat between the paras and the guerrillas. This is just to give you some idea of how weird the situation is."

In government-held areas the drug economy is run by the large, paramilitary-connected landowners. On these large drug-crop plantations the campesinos tend to be treated as powerless sharecroppers. Since these plantations aren't in rebel territory, they are never targeted by the CIA crop-dusters. That's why all that "anti-drug effort" has had no strategic effect on the flow of drugs. It is these growers who financed Samper's 1994 election campaign, and who continue to finance Colombia's generals.

The early summer 1996 aerial spraying of Ultra Glyphosate (Monsanto's "Round-Up") on 45,000 acres of Guaviare coca caused convulsive vomiting and hair loss among the children. The enraged mothers organized the August 1996 march of more than 150,000 campesinos in Guaviare, Putumayo and Caqueta provinces. The Colombian federales diffused the protest with false compromises, then stealthily assassinated the march leaders. Many of the surviving campesinos turned, for the first time, to the guerrillas. The U.S. then insisted that Colombia allow it to switch to the far more poisonous tebuthiuron (Dow's "Spike"). Now, if the US State Department has its way, the ongoing chemical spraying will be followed by the massive, nearly indetectable high altitiude dropping of Agent Green (the mycoherbicide fusarium oxysporum formae specialis [f.sp.] erythroxyli). Agent Green is an extension of the US-engineered 1997 UN Drug Control Program's SCOPE program (Strategy for Coca and Opium Poppy Elimination).

But the "anti-drug" fungal spraying is proposed only for rebel-held areas. During the investigation of former Colombian President Samper's financing it was revealed that, while coordinating drug shipments, Cali traffickers, Samper's financiers, racked up a $200,000 phone bill on a number assigned to Brig. Gen. Ismael Trujillo, then head of the Federal Judicial Police, the guy in charge of the U.S. Drug War in Colombia. The Cali money was funneled through Fernando Botero, Samper's 1994 campaign manager and Defense Minister. That is, the Cali cartel was an organic part of the establishment in charge of the Colombian military. Their vast monocrop drug fincas were never sprayed by glyphosate and tebuthiuron, because they weren't in rebel-held areas.

The most powerful paramilitary leader, Carlos Castaño, leader of the militia alliance known as the United Self Defense Forces of Colombia, is a longtime CIA asset who can call on regular army support any time. The Washington Post reports, 12/30/98, that the DEA insists that Castaño is also a major Cali kingpin. Reuters, September 6, 2000: "The head of Colombia's outlawed right-wing paramilitary forces, who has conceded most of his financing comes from the drug trade, said Wednesday that he also gets support from the local and international business community. Carlos Castano, leader of the ruthless United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), spoke of his ties to legitimate businessmen in an open letter to Congress, a day after Defense Minister Luis Fernando Ramirez urged lawmakers to launch a probe into private sources of funding for the paramilitary militias that target leftists and suspected rebel sympathizers across Colombia…. Local and international human rights groups say the AUC, which is responsible for most of the peasant massacres and other rights abuses committed in Colombia, operates with the support of state security forces in an increasingly dirty war with Marxist rebels that has taken more than 35,000 lives since 1990. In a rare television interview in March, Castano said drug trafficking and drug traffickers probably financed 70 percent of his organization's operations."

A Colombian paramilitary

The Washington Post, 8/11/98: "Colombian Army's Third in Command Allegedly Led Two Lives; General Reportedly Served as Key CIA Informant While Maintaining Ties to Death Squads Financed By Drug Traffickers: For years Colombian Gen. Ivan Ramirez Quintero was a key intelligence source for the United States. After training in Washington he was the first head of a military intelligence organization designed by U.S. experts to fight Marxist guerrillas and drug traffickers, and served as a liaison and paid informant for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to U.S. and Colombian intelligence sources." That is, as the first head of the special counterinsurgency unit, it was Ramirez' job to coordinate military operations and weapons financing with Cali kingpin Carlos Castaño.

The Latin America Working Group, 7/23/98, reports that of 247 Colombian military personnel linked to serious human rights violations, 124 were graduates of the U.S. Army's School of the Americas in Fort Benning, GA.

The Village Voice: 8/5/99: "The wife of the Army commander leading the U.S. government's anti-drug efforts in Colombia has been charged in connection with a cocaine smuggling ring that shipped that drug from an American military base in Bogotá to New York City, the Voice has learned."

"Laurie Hiett, the wife of Colonel James Hiett, was named in a criminal complaint filed in late June in Brooklyn federal court, according to records. She has been charged with conspiracy to distribute cocaine."

Others named in the complaint reveal a vast, decentralized distribution system involving the entire structure around Col. Hiett, including many "embassy employees," direct military subordinates, their wives, chauffeurs and stateside contacts. The "embassy employees" were using the Army Postal Service (APO), which in Bogotá is a de facto part of the embassy's customs-free diplomatic pouch. And whose coke was the anti-drug Colonel exporting? Carlos Castaño's Cali coke.

Today, the bogeyman, in the absence of "the scourge of communism," is "the scourge of drugs," supporting precisely the same fascist dynamics. I can't say it better than former Green Beret General Barry McCaffrey, an original defender of the CIA's Vietnam-era Hmong Laotian opium connection, with which it financed Saigon. McCaffrey took over in March of 96 as Clinton's Drug Czar: "The new problems are obvious - they're counter-terrorism, they're counter-drugs, they're illegal movements of peoples, they're arms smuggling, they're transnational Marxist movements that have now become international criminal conspiracies, narco-guerrilla forces." That is, in this masterpiece of fascist double-speak, the new problems are the old problems.

And to combat these horrible leftists, McCaffrey, at the behest of Clinton and with the GOP's Congressional blessing, is going to ship all the arms he can to the Colombian, Bolivian, Argentinean, Mexican, Honduran, Guatemalan, Peruvian, Salvadoran, Pakistani, Philippine, Taiwanese and Burmese military. With McCaffrey in charge, the fascists have nothing to worry about.

Ray Cline, CIA station chief in Taiwan from 1958-1962, later Deputy Director, founded the World Anticommunist League along with Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek's son. Ching-kuo headed the Kuomintang's (KMT's) secret police under Chiang and rose to become President of Taiwan. He was overall military commander of the KMT's Shan states opium armies. The WACL's finishing school was the Political Warfare Cadres Academy in Peitou, Taiwan. El Salvador's Roberto D'Aubuisson, "Major Blowtorch," graduated from both this school and the International Police Academy in Washington, D.C., as did many of South America's finest, including much of the current Colombian high command. When appropriate, courses at Peitou, Taiwan, were taught in Spanish.

"Political warfare" is a combination of sheer terror and unrelenting propaganda aimed at the merciless domination of the bulk of the population by the ruling industrial elite - what the KMT calls "total war." The cadres are schooled in the arts of interrogation, propaganda, militarily-based social organization and terror. D'Aubuisson's party, ARENA, the Nationalist Republican Alliance, is structured exactly like the Kuomintang. It "has a politico-military organization which embraces not only a civilian party structure but also a military arm obedient to the party," to quote President Carter's ambassador to El Salvador, Robert White.

White is a good example of the deep divisions that exist, within the structural U.S. government, between many of the democratically-minded professionals of the State Department and the pro-fascist elements of military intelligence. By 1961, the American military was providing 75% of Taiwan's budget. Kuomintang heroin, from the American-armed Burmese fascists, as well as cocaine from the American-armed Bolivian and Colombian fascists, still finds its way into the U.S. through the American-armed, Kuomintang-trained fascists of ARENA, who are still in control of "democratic" El Salvador. That's why you won't see any reduction in the flow of heroin any time soon.

Barry McCaffrey was the lead U.S. counterinsurgency officer in Ambassador White's El Salvador. In May, 1980, at the Sumpul River crossing, more than 600 unarmed men, women and children were machine gunned to death by cooperating Salvadoran and Honduran troops on either bank as they tried to flee Salvadoran territory into Honduras. Little children, caught in the middle of the river, were cut to ribbons.

In December of 1981, at the villages surrounding El Mozote in El Salvador, more than 800 defenseless people were massacred, according to the Salvadoran Catholic Church. In 1992, Tutela Legal, the legal arm of the Salvadoran Church, hired the distinguished international experts of the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team to conduct excavations at El Mozote. In the ruins of a single-room building attached to the village church, the team found 143 human skeletons, 131 of which were children under the age of 12. They had all been machine-gunned to death by standard U.S. Army issue M-16 ammunition manufactured at the Lake City Plant in Independence, Missouri. That was the ammo issued to the Atlacatl Batallion, which had been formed by experts from the U.S. Army School of Special Forces in March of 1981, Barry McCaffrey's outfit.

Aside from massacre by rifle fire, the Atlacatl Batallion and its clones practiced rape, decapitation and disembowelment on a massive scale. By 1982, 600,000 Salvadorans were left homeless - and terrified enough to stop demanding any political rights at all.

It was Ambassador Robert White's reaction to these crimes against humanity that got him fired by the Reagan administration. White is now president of the Center for International Policy. He points out, in the Washington Post, 2/8/2000, that we can expect a repeat scenario in Colombia:

"Our intervention in El Salvador's struggle did not truly constitute intervention, President Reagan argued, because the revolutionaries were not fighting in their own cause but as hirelings of Moscow and Havana. The rationale for involving the United States in Colombia's civil war rests on the equally specious ground that the FARC--the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia--are not an authentic insurgency but an armed drug cartel that fights to protect illicit profits--"narco-guerrillas" to quote from the charged vocabulary of the White House drug policy adviser, Gen. Barry McCaffrey."

".... But is it too much to hope that experienced diplomats will grasp the elementary proposition that an insurgency that has acquired the strength and cohesion necessary to dominate 40 percent of the national territory represents something authentic in the history of Colombia, something not adequately explained by references to illicit commerce?"

"Has it truly escaped senior administration aides that the Colombian civil war is more about massacres of civilians and selective assassinations than armed confrontation? Does it really not matter that to declare war on the FARC puts us in league with a Colombian military that has longstanding ties to the drug-dealing, barbaric paramilitaries that commit more than 75 percent of the human rights violations afflicting that violence-torn country?"

"It is curious that a government as sophisticated as ours should cling to the naive belief that spraying with herbicides can do anything but drive the campesino cultivators deeper into the jungle. The campesinos grow coca not just because it commands bonanza prices but because the traffickers' planes land nearby and pay cash on the barrel head."

"Alternative production--rubber and palm oil, for example--could compete because their prices, while lower, are more stable. But the isolated farmers cannot get their crops to the city. The $1.3 billion in the Colombia aid package for war could be more constructively used to build farm-to-market highways that would peacefully carry the government's authority into this remote zone."

"Nowhere in the official statements on Colombia will Congress find any discussion of risks vs. rewards or any measurement of objectives in relation to resources. Recall that in El Salvador, our bloody, divisive 12-year pursuit of military victory proved fruitless. We finally settled for a U.N.-brokered accord that granted the guerrillas many of their demands."

"The FARC-controlled territory that this program casually commits us to re-conquer is 20 times as large as El Salvador--roughly the size of California. The Colombian military has no experience in carrying the war to the insurgents. What will happen when FARC troops, at home in jungle and savanna, repel the army and shoot down our helicopters? Will we then swallow the bitter pill of political-military defeat? Not if Vietnam and Central America are any guide. Far more likely we will plunge deeper into the quagmire."

That quagmire, precisely because it is a quagmire, will be worth hundreds of billions in direct and indirect defense contract appropriations. That was Barry McCaffrey's job.