Archive for July 6th, 2009
Robert Stack makes it sound like something out of a science fictions story — a small town in Washington state falls victim to a plague of sorts after tiny blobs of gelatinous goo rained from the sky on August 7, 1994. It made dozens of people severely ill.
Black military helicopters were sighted in the Oakville, Washington area before rain storms brought the fall of the unknown substance.
In 1997, residents of in the Everett area of Washington State reported a similar clear gelatinous substance falling from the sky, according to a guest on Art Bell’s syndicated radio program. “Art’s guest says she received hundreds of calls from people all over the country that have also reported the fall of deadly gelatin blobs.”
In 1977, during a congressional hearing, the Pentagon admitted to conducting hundreds of secret germ “attacks” in a number of cities, using microorganisms it claimed were harmless to humans. “Most of the open-air test sites are known only from a list provided by the Army for a 1977 hearing before the Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research, a panel then chaired by Senator Edward M. Kennedy but since disbanded. Details about a few of the actual tests have since become available through law suits and Freedom of Information Act claims. Although documents describing open-air testing have been partially censored by the Military, they indicate that one of the Army’s chief goals was to conduct the experiments without raising suspicions among exposed populations,” Leonard A. Cole wrote for the Washington Monthly in 1985.
The Pentagon has a long track record of using unsuspecting civilians as guinea pigs. For example, in 1965, the Army conducted open air tests using the simulant Bacillus globigii at Washington DC’s National Airport and Greyhound bus terminal. The following year, the Army conducted tests in Manhattan subway line in order to analyze the vulnerability of large metropolitan areas to biological weapons attacks. (See the “History of the US Offensive Biological Warfare Program” timeline.)
“Although such military research was highly classified, by 1975 concern over revelations of myriad intelligence abuses led to a comprehensive investigation by the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee, which published a CIA memorandum listing the deadly chemical agents and toxins then stockpiled at Fort Detrick,” write Ellen Ray and Willam H. Schaap (Bioterror: Manufacturing Wars the American Way). “These included anthrax, encephalitis, tuberculosis, lethal snake venom, shellfish toxin, and half a dozen lethal food poisons, some of which, the committee learned, had been shipped in the early 1960s to Congo and to Cuba in unsuccessful CIA attempts to assassinate Patrice Lumumba and Fidel Castro.”
Following World War II, biological warfare was advanced through funding by the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the Navy with hundreds of biological warfare (BW) projects at corporations and universities throughout the country. The Pentagon claimed to have banned research in 1969, due to public pressure, but in 1975 it was learned that a CIA project still maintained BW stocks at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
“Despite the international agreement which banned development of germ-warfare agents, the Pentagon’s research budget for infectious diseases and toxins has increased tenfold since fiscal 1981. Further, most of the 1986 budget of $42 million went to 24 U.S. university campuses where the world’s most deadly organisms are being cultured in campus labs. Similarly, the U.S. Army has resumed biological agent testing at its Dugway, Utah, test site which had been declared unsafe a decade earlier,” Project Censored reported in 1981.
There are numerous reportings of gelatinous rain associated with chemtrails. There is a patent (United States Patent 6,315,213) describing a method for artificially modifying the weather by seeding rain clouds of a storm with suitable cross-linked aqueous polymer. “The polymer is dispersed into the cloud and the wind of the storm agitates the mixture causing the polymer to absorb the rain,” explains a web page on atmospheric geoengineering and chemtrail patents. “This reaction forms a gelatinous substance which precipitate to the surface below. Thus, diminishing the clouds ability to rain.”
Found on High Times
A state prison guard was arrested Wednesday after deputies say he traveled to Collier County to pick up cocaine and marijuana which he planned to smuggle into Everglades Correctional Institution in exchange for cash.
What Shamel Watson, 30, of Miramar, didn’t know was that the person he arranged to pick up the drugs and cash from was an undercover Collier County Sheriff’s Office deputy.
Arrest reports gave this account:
The Florida Department of Corrections contacted CCSO in June to assist in the department’s investigation after it received information that Watson had made arrangements with two inmates to bring a large amount of cocaine and marijuana into the Miami-Dade County prison, where he is a correctional officer.
On June 20, an undercover CCSO deputy received a cell phone call from Watson, who said he was a state corrections employee and that he was calling on behalf of an inmate.
At the deputy’s request, Watson called back on June 24 and arranged to meet the deputy to pick up 1 pound of marijuana and 4 ounces of cocaine, which he would deliver to the two inmates. Watson asked to be paid $1,000 for his services.
Around 3:45 p.m. Wednesday, Watson arrived at the 63 mile marker of Interstate 75 in Collier County in a 2002 blue Nissan Maxima to pick up the drugs and cash from the undercover deputy.
The deputy handed Watson cocaine and marijuana. Watson told the deputy he did not need to weigh the drugs. The deputy then gave Watson $1,000 cash.
Watson was then taken into custody.
He was charged with marijuana possession with intent to deliver, cocaine trafficking and receiving a bribe, all felonies.
[Editor's note: The reason why the editor of Foreign Policy magazine Moises Naim's recent column is significant is because for far too long the foreign policy community has been a willing conduit for exporting America's wrongheaded and failed cannabis prohibition around the globe. But, the American dominance of the drug policy debate has started to wane over the last 8-10 years in quarters like the United Nations, and columns like Mr. Naim's underscore the myriad reasons why America's elected policymakers need to adopt a reform mindset--notably under an Obama administration--not status quo retrenchment into an unyielding, prohibition-centric cannabis policy.]
The American prohibition on thinking smart in the drug war
The Washington consensus on drugs rests on two widely shared beliefs. The first is that the war on drugs is a failure. The second is that it cannot be changed.
Americans are a can-do people. They tend to believe that if something does not work, it needs to be fixed. Unless, that is, they are talking about the war on drugs. On this politically fraught issue, Washington’s elites and, indeed, the majority of the population, believe two contradictory things. First, 76 percent of Americans think the war on drugs launched in 1971 by President Richard Nixon has failed. Yet only 19 percent believe the central focus of antidrug efforts should be shifted from interdiction and incarceration to treatment and education. A full 73 percent of Americans are against legalizing any kind of drugs, and 60 percent oppose legalizing marijuana.
This “it doesn’t work, but don’t change it” incongruity is not just a quirk of the U.S. public. It is a manifestation of how the prohibition on drugs has led to a prohibition on rational thought. “Most of my colleagues know that the war on drugs is bankrupt,” a U.S. senator told me, “but for many of us, supporting any form of decriminalization of drugs has long been politically suicidal.”
As a result of this utter failure to think, the United States today is both the world’s largest importer of illicit drugs and the world’s largest exporter of bad drug policy. The U.S. government expects, indeed demands, that its allies adopt its goals and methods and actively collaborate with U.S. drug-fighting agencies. This expectation is one of the few areas of rigorous continuity in U.S. foreign policy over the last three decades.
A second, and more damaging, effect comes from the U.S. emphasis on curtailing the supply abroad rather than lowering the demand at home. The consequence: a transfer of power from governments to criminals in a growing number of countries. In many places, narcotraffickers are the major source of jobs, economic opportunity, and money for elections.
The global economic crisis will only intensify these trends as battered economies shrink and illicit trade becomes the only way for millions of people to make a living. Mexico’s attorney general reckons that U.S. consumers buy $10 billion worth of drugs from his country’s cartels each year, a business that propelled Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel, to Forbes magazine’s latest list of the world’s billionaires. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, all that money allows the two main cartels to train, equip, and pay for a highly motivated army of 100,000 that almost equals Mexico’s armed forces in size and often outguns them. And this ascendancy of the drug cartels is a global problem. The opium trade is equal to 30 percent of Afghanistan’s legal economy, and from Burma to Bolivia, Moldova to Guinea-Bissau, drug kingpins have become influential economic and political actors.
Fortunately, there are some signs that the blind support for prohibition is beginning to wane among key Washington elites. One surprising new convert? The Pentagon. Senior U.S. military officers know both that the war on drugs is bankrupt and that it is undermining their ability to succeed in other important missions, such as winning the war in Afghanistan. When Gen. James L. Jones, a former Marine Corps commandant and supreme allied commander in Europe, was asked last November why the United States was losing in Afghanistan, he answered: “The top of my list is the drugs and narcotics, which are, without question, the economic engine that fuels the resurgent Taliban, and the crime and corruption in the country. . . . We couldn’t even talk about that in 2006 when I was there. That was not a topic that anybody wanted to talk about, including the U.S.” Jones is now U.S. President Barack Obama’s national security advisor.
But such views have set off fierce clashes between military commanders newly focused on creating peaceful economic opportunities for Afghan families and the U.S. drug warriors set on eradicating Afghanistan’s major cash crop at any cost. What’s more, inertia alone almost guarantees strong support for drug eradication from the massive bureaucracy that lives off the tens of billions of taxpayer dollars that have funded the war on drugs for decades. The opinions of these drug warriors are immune to data: After decades of eradication efforts around the world, neither the acreage of land used to grow drugs nor the tonnage produced has shrunk.
But prohibition at any cost is becoming increasingly hard to defend. As the drug-fueled escalation of violence in Mexico spills across the border into the United States, the American public’s willingness to ignore or tolerate policies that don’t work is bound to decline. And the consequences of failure are already on mounting display: According to the U.S. National Drug Intelligence Center, Mexican drug cartels have established operations in 195 American cities. It is much harder to ignore the collateral damage of the war on drugs when it happens in your neighborhood.
That is the case in many other countries where the nefarious side effects of U.S. drug policies have long been felt. Three of Latin America’s most respected former presidents, Brazil’s Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Colombia’s César Gaviria, and Mexico’s Ernesto Zedillo, recently chaired a commission that came out in favor of drastic changes in the war on drugs—including decriminalization of marijuana for personal use. The commission, on which I sat, spent more than a year reviewing the best available evidence from experts in public health, medicine, law enforcement, the military, and the economics of drug trafficking. One of the commission’s main conclusions is that governments urgently need options beyond eradication, interdiction, criminalization, and incarceration to limit the social consequences of drugs. But though smart thinkers increasingly propose confronting the drug curse as a public health crisis—more options are in the commission’s report at www.drugsanddemocracy.org — real alternatives have found no space in a policy debate stalemated between absolute prohibition and wholesale legalization.
The addiction to a failed policy has long been fueled by the self-interest of a relatively small prohibitionist community—and enabled by the distraction of the American public. But as the costs of the drug war spread from remote countries and U.S. inner cities to the rest of society, spending more to cure and prevent than to eradicate and incarcerate will become a much more obvious idea. Smarter thinking on drugs? That should be the real no-brainer.
Moisés Naím is editor in chief of Foreign Policy. [Editor's note: emphasis in column added]
You’ve probably heard that the CIA is looking to hire laid-off bankers.
This is nothing new.
The long-time former executive director of the CIA – Buzzy Krongard – is a former investment banker.
As Krongard told the Washington Post in March 2001:
If you go back to the CIA’s origins during World War II in the Office of Strategic Services, he explained, “the whole OSS was really nothing but Wall Street bankers and lawyers.”
The CIA sometimes funds certain groups or political parties. For example, former CIA director William Colby (a lawyer, not a banker) helped to arrange the secret subsidization of political parties in Rome in the 1950’s to prevent communist electoral victoriess.
And the CIA has certainly funded various projects (like this one).
And people have made allegations about the CIA funding of the Contras with cocaine sales, involvement in BCCI, and other unsavory deals.
Personally, I don’t know much about much about it. But I do know that the CIA has had a continuous connection with bankers from day one.
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