-Caveat Lector-
Will the Senate give the ''bird" to the American public?
So Senator Leahy "has signaled that" the Judicary Committes "expects little
problem in Hutchinson' appointment." How interesting. Did he do it with
semaphores, secret code or did he just give Asa the thiumbs-up. If so, then
the cover-up continues and the present Senate Judicary Committee will be
giving the "bird" to the American public.
Will the hard questions be asked or will the Senate continue the cover-up?
We shall see . . . and we the people shall know.
Old rules do not apply, . . . the interent has brought us all to the table
and . . . it is very simple.
The emperor has no clothes.
Om
K
Robert A Millegan
=====
Thursday, July 12, 2001
Asa Hutchinson hearing date set
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
WASHINGTON -- The Senate Judiciary Committee will consider the
appointment of Rep. Asa Hutchinson to be the next head of the Drug
Enforcement Administration on Tuesday.
The confirmation hearing date had been in limbo for weeks because
of the failure of Democrats and Republicans to agree on the makeup of
Senate committees after the chamber shifted into Democratic control
last month.
The White House announced Hutchinson's appointment on May 9.
The 50-year-old third-term Arkansas congressman had said he would
not leave his House seat until confirmed by the Senate. Arkansas Gov.
Mike Huckabee is expected to call a special election for the 3rd
Congressional District seat once that happens.
The office of Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, chairman of the
Judiciary Committee, has signaled that it expects little problem with
Hutchinson's appointment.
Copyright © 2001, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Inc. All rights
reserved.
from:
http://www.madcowprod.com/
Asa and the Drug Smugglers
by Daniel Hopsicker
Bush's DEA appointee knows a thing or two about drug smuggling.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
George W. Bush’s nomination of Asa Hutchinson to head the Drug Enforcement
Administration is a crushing blow to those who couldn’t bring themselves to
believe the sordid stories of George Junior consorting with drug smuggler
Barry Seal.
As reported in the new book "Barry & ‘the boys,’" and magazines and
newsletters like "From the Wilderness" and "High Times," George the II had
much more than a nodding acquaintance with the biggest drug smuggler in
American history and his notorious Mena operation.
Instead of downplaying this connection while focusing all eyes on the
tee-ball on the south lawn, Bush has now put it right in our faces. Current
Republican Congressman and former Western Arkansas US Attorney Asa Hutchinson
was directly involved in the Mena drug smuggling operation, providing the
critical legal ‘protection’ necessary for any operation of that size and
magnitude, and acting to squelch whatever legal action which local citizen
outrage prompted.
In addition to the people already on record regarding Hutchinson’s coziness
with the Mena cocaine smuggling—former IRS agent Bill Duncan prominent among
them—numerous witnesses have stepped forward for the first time on Hutchinson
in "Barry & ‘the boys."
According to the Arkansas State Police Commander in charge of Mena, Finis
Duvall, on at least one occasion then-US Attorney Asa Hutchinson ‘took care’
of a Mena legal entanglement for Barry Seal that has never been surfaced in
the press.
According to Duvall, who was there, the Arkansas state police didn't even try
to develop a case against the Mena drug smuggling, because it was well known
that it was being 'protected' by US attorney Hutchinson.
"We always knew we couldn't prosecute Barry Seal, no matter what we got on
him, because of the politics involved in the Western Judicial District," the
crusty Finis Duvall told us.
Then there are Hutchinson’s recent business dealings with drug smugglers.
Recently a Barry Seal drug smuggling associate, Michael Roy Fugler, took a
company called Netivation public. Netivation.com (NASDAQ: NTVN) portrays
itself as an Internet public policy and political Web site, offering a
package of fundraising services to candidates and campaigns. The Virginia
State Democratic Party, for example, raised money for Netivation.com to
produce Web sites for its candidates, and Netivation.com received a
percentage of any campaign contribution made to candidates via the Web pages.
It also publishes the US Congress Factbook, and has a major Internet site for
campaign fundraising.
One question might be: what does a drug smuggler have to do with the US
Congress Factbook? But wait...there’s more. After going public, Netivation
turned around and immediately signed as their initial marketing "poster boy"
none other than Arkansas Congressman Asa Hutchinson. Hutchinson, of course,
before becoming the marketing "poster boy" for a company drug smuggler Barry
Seal's associate Michael Fugler took public, had been the U.S. Attorney for
the Western Judicial District in Arkansas, which encompasses Mena.
That’s enough for a grand jury, right there. It provides direct and concrete
evidence that what's been called "the goings-on at Mena" reveal exactly what
the "conspiracy theorists" have been loudly proclaiming for a decade: the
visible efforts of a huge and largely invisible organization.
Paying off a favor isn’t, of course, illegal.
But abetting drug smuggling, unfortunately for Mr. Hutchinson, is.
This is no small matter, especially since Michael Fugler was no mere legal
counsel to Barry Seal; rather, he was an integral part of the smuggling
organization, and already, by the middle Seventies, deeply involved in all of
Barry’s various businesses, including the 'front' sign companies.
We had heard from several of Seal's associates accounts of Fugler's
activities which the State Bar of Louisiana would presumably frown on…Like
the time he had left a briefcase filled with over $100,000 of drug money
sitting on the front car seat of a rental car at Baton Rouge Airport, and
then been too afraid to go back to attempt to retrieve it.
Congressman Hutchinson has the sheer gall to serve as a member of the House
Speaker's Task Force for a Drug-Free America. As what? An industry
representative?
The Task Force has a mandate "to seek out new and more effective approaches
to combating the threat of drug use among the nation's youth."
Numerous witnesses in western Arkansas can be found who can directly testify
that Mr. Hutchinson’s actions, as opposed to his words, have been absolutely
and unequivocally detrimental to achieving this goal.
As an aside, Hutchinson somehow also found the time to present the case to
the Senate for the impeachment of Bill Clinton, where he urged the senators
in his closing argument to "let justice roll down like mighty waters." Were
that to happen, we would urge Asa not to wear his good suit to work that day,
because Clinton wouldn’t be the only one getting wet.
Hutchinson made tough-talking speeches to community groups in Arkansas about
cleaning up what even he had been forced to acknowledge was "a haven for
international drug trafficking" Barry Seal had continued to operate from an
airfield, Mena, just a few short miles from Hutchinson's office.
Maybe the sound of the big C123’s rumbling overhead had scared him. But
obserbers of Hutchinson’s lack of performance grew increasingly skeptical of
their boys’ fire-eatin’ crime-fightin’ credentials.
Hutchinson's actions never once matched his rhetoric.
IRS agent William Duncan had been the first to take his accusations public.
In a deposition for the Arkansas Attorney General, he was asked, "Are you
stating now under oath that you believe that the investigation in and around
the Mena airport of money laundering was covered up by the U.S. Attorney?"
Duncan's reply: "It was covered up."
Now we know why.
By following the money trail left behind by Barry Seal, we have now
discovered that more than a dozen years after Seal's death one of the key
members of his drug smuggling organization brought a company public which had
then signed on Asa Hutchinson to be the poster boy for its marketing efforts
to attract fundraising clients.
Small world?
=====
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0119/ridgeway1.shtml
Posted May 10th, 2001 12:30 PM
villagevoice.com exclusive
Iran-Contra Conspiracy Dogs Pick for DEA
Asa Hutchinson's Arkansas Past
by James Ridgeway
WASHINGTON, D.C., MAY 10—The news leak here Wednesday that President Bush
will soon name Asa Hutchinson, a conservative Arkansas Republican, as head of
the Drug Enforcement Agency has cranked up the Clinton conspiracy buffs.
Hutchinson, of course, is best known as the clean-cut House prosecutor who
helped bring Clinton's impeachment before the Senate. His appointment will be
a victory for the dozens of House members who hung tough and pushed the
hopeless effort to the very end—at which point they were mocked by Bill
Clinton and Al Gore, who stood on the White House porch celebrating the
victory and laughing at the right-wingers.
But Clinton scandalmongers are into Hutchinson for quite another reason. They
say that while he was U.S. attorney for the western part of Arkansas in the
early 1980s, he looked the other way as a huge drug ring allegedly operated
in the little town of Mena. Hutchinson, for his part, said he left office
before the evidence was well-established, according to the Arkansas Times.
Conspiracy buffs suspect the ring was part of the Iran-Contra affair. They
think Hutchinson and his successor ignored the drug trafficking and money
laundering to protect the interests of President Reagan and other GOP
bigwigs. The state police and the IRS are said to have investigated the
situation at Mena, but a grand jury investigation went nowhere. Barry Seal,
the famous drug trafficker, was murdered about a month before he was to
appear before the grand jury in Arkansas.
L.D. Brown, a former member of then governor Clinton's Arkansas security
detail, claimed in a 1995 article in The American Spectator that he had
participated in two secret flights originating from Mena in 1984 during which
M-16 rifles were given to the Nicaraguan contras in exchange for cocaine.
Brown also claimed Clinton himself was involved. In the mid 1980s,
Hutchinson, ensconced as head of the state Republican Party, asked for a new
investigation into drug trading and other irregularities at Mena.
The charges of money laundering and drug trafficking at Mena have grown to
legendary proportions. They have been stoutly denied, and proof has always
seemed circumstantial at best.
=====
http://www.arktimes.com/010525coverstoryb.html
Asa and me
I've wondered for years: What does Hutchinson know about Arkansas's biggest
drug smuggler? And when did he know it?
By Mara Leveritt
May 25, 2001
Asa Hutchinson and I share a passion for the subject of drugs. As a
crusading member of Congress, he talks a lot about them. As a reporter
focused on crime, my writing centers on them. Hutchinson wants to intensify
this country's war on drugs. I think three decades of failure have proven the
war a disaster.
Now President George W. Bush has nominated Hutchinson to head the DEA, the
biggest drug-fighting squad in the world. But before Hutchinson assumes that
post, there are some questions about high-level cocaine trafficking in
Arkansas while he was a U.S. attorney here that he should be required to
answer. The questions have hung about for years, but so far he has managed to
dodge them.
They relate to the period from 1982 to 1985, when Hutchinson served as the
federal prosecuting attorney for western Arkansas. He speaks often of that
time.
"During the 1980s, our nation declared a war against drugs," he proclaimed in
a 1997 speech to the House. "I was in that battle as a federal prosecutor. It
was during that time that our families, our communities, and our
law-enforcement officials mobilized in a united effort to fight this war."
In another speech he observed, "I have seen the drug war from all sides - as
a member of Congress, as a federal prosecutor, and as a parent - and I know
the importance of fighting this battle on all fronts."
But some strange things happened in Hutchinson's district while he was
federal prosecutor that he doesn't mention in his speeches. Specifically, a
man identified by federal agents as "a documented, major narcotics
trafficker" was using facilities at an airport in Hutchinson's district for
"storage, maintenance, and modification" of his drug-running aircraft,
throughout most of Hutchinson's tenure.
The man was Adler Berriman "Barry" Seal. For the last four years of his life
- and throughout Hutchinson's term as U.S. attorney - his base of operations
was Mena, Arkansas.
In 1982, the year that Hutchinson took office as U.S. attorney and Seal moved
to Mena, federal officials were already aware that he controlled "an
international smuggling organization" that was "extremely well organized and
extensive." Agents for the DEA, FBI, U.S. Customs, and IRS were watching him.
They brought Hutchinson evidence that Seal was "involved in narcotics
trafficking and the laundering of funds derived from such trafficking."
I knew none of this in the early 1980s. At the time, this was highly secret
information, known only to a handful of state and federal investigators and a
few politicians, including U.S. Attorney Asa Hutchinson.
My interest in the relationship between Seal and Hutchinson was piqued as I
became aware of how heavily drug prosecutions fell on street- and mid-level
dealers, while smugglers like Seal, who imported drugs by the ton, rarely
ended up in prison. So when rumors surfaced about Seal and his organization,
and how they had managed for years to avoid prison, even though the extent of
their activities was well known to drug authorities, I wanted to know more.
But getting the story has not been easy. In the early 1990s, I asked
Hutchinson about Barry Seal and his associates at Mena. Hutchinson provided
no information, and politely dismissed the complaints that had arisen by then
about his failure to prosecute Seal. He said he had already resigned as U.S.
attorney by the time the matter arose.
Even then I knew better than that. Ignoring sidelong glances from some of my
peers, who already equated drug smuggling at Mena with reports of life on
Mars, I began collecting official accounts of what had happened there. My
main thrust was an attempt to acquire, through the federal Freedom of
Information laws, all the documents relating to Seal that were generated by
the FBI.
I wish now that I had gone after the DEA's records on Seal, but I was working
in the dark. I knew that the FBI had been involved in Seal's case, so I began
with what I knew.
The battle to obtain even those documents has now taken longer than the
length of time that Seal was based at Mena. At first the FBI denied that it
had any records on Seal. When I produced photocopies of FBI memos relating to
the Seal investigation, the agency acknowledged that a file existed. But, I
was told, it probably would take years to review it, and besides, thousands
of applicants for other files were already ahead of me.
That's when I wrote to two members of Congress, asking for their help. Even
though Hutchinson is not from my district, I contacted him in hopes that,
having been close to the events, he would want to help clear the record.
Again, he responded politely.
He told me that it was always good to hear from me, that he had contacted the
FBI in my behalf, and that he would be back in touch with me when the agency
responded. He included a copy of a federal guide to using the Freedom of
Information and Privacy Act, in the hope that it would help in my "research
efforts." He thanked me for my patience.
That was the last I heard from Asa Hutchinson until a couple of years later,
when I mentioned the incident in a column. At that point, an aide to
Hutchinson hastened to apologize for the lack of followup. But still, there
was no help on the Mena front coming from the Hutchinson camp.
Fortunately, Rep. Vic Snyder was more responsive. In fact, Snyder and his
staff made repeated attempts to persuade the FBI to release the records I had
requested. Finally, after a personal visit from Snyder, the agency agreed to
start releasing some of its files on Mena. As a result, during the past two
years, I have received several hundred pages of reports relating to Barry
Seal. I have posted many of these pages on my website, maraleveritt.com, and
a new batch will be posted soon. The pages reflect the intensity of activity
surrounding Seal, even if, in true wartime fashion, most of the details have
been blacked out.
Many of the documents have been so heavily censored that they have been
rendered worthless. And hundreds more were withheld altogether. Some of the
redactions were made, according to agency notations, to protect the privacy
of named individuals. Many others, however, are said to have been made under
laws to protect "national security."
In an effort that my children predict I'll still be waging from beyond the
grave, I am appealing the national security exclusions. What, I ask, is the
connection between Seal and national security?
I have seen the rug of "national security" grow larger by the year, and it
concerns me that so many aspects of this war on drugs are piously being swept
under it. Too often "national security" means "don't tell the American
people."
I believe that if this country is going to fight a long and costly war, the
war's leaders have an obligation to report faithfully on its battles. The
incidents that surrounded Seal constituted a major battle. But the faithful
report has been missing. For more than 15 years, U.S. government officials,
including Hutchinson, who were close to the events have maintained a stony
silence.
Yet, despite the former prosecutor's unhelpfulness, chunks of the story have
emerged. And scoffs about Mena aside, it is a remarkable one. The stakes with
Seal were about as high as they can get in a war. The story is replete with
intrigue and layers of betrayal. The losses it reflects were enormous.
Here's a gram of what happened:
Early in 1984, after years of painstaking investigation, law enforcement
agencies, including the DEA, were ready to prosecute Seal. But Seal called
upon political connections, and they let him become an informant rather than
go to prison. The price of Seal's last-minute deal with the U.S. government
was that he was to betray his Colombian allies, toppling the leadership of
the Medellin cartel.
But the government lost on the deal. The plan to use Seal to rout the cartel
ended in murder and failure. Not only was Seal exposed, and then
assassinated, but members of his "extensive" organized crime operation evaded
prosecution.
The fiasco left many law enforcement officers who'd worked on the Seal case
feeling that they'd been betrayed. I've interviewed some of them, and their
disillusionment is heartbreaking.
In 1992, I spoke with Jack Crittendon, a sergeant with the Louisiana State
Police. He told me that 10 years earlier, in early 1982, he and his partner
were building a case against Seal when they were notified that DEA officials
in Miami were on the verge of indicting Seal. Armed with that information,
Crittendon and his partner confronted Seal at a steak house in Baton Rouge.
"We told him we'd like for him to turn around and cooperate with us and with
the DEA and with the U.S. attorney in Baton Rouge," Crittendon recalled. "We
were looking across the table at him. Now, the man had a mind for business.
With his mind, he could have been the head of a Fortune 500 company. It just
so happened that his business was smuggling. We told him we wanted the
cartel. He said he'd have to give it some thought."
Ultimately, Seal rejected the Louisiana proposal. Crittendon recalled, "We
said, 'That's fine with us, but wherever you go, they're going to be after
you.' And, in fact, it was shortly after that, he turned up in Mena,
Arkansas."
Seal was being watched so closely that state and federal officials in
Arkansas, including Asa Hutchinson, knew of his move to Arkansas, almost from
the moment his first aircraft arrived. They also knew that Seal had formed a
business relationship with Rich Mountain Aviation, an aircraft modification
company headquartered at the Mena airport.
Soon after Seal's move to Mena, U.S. Attorney Hutchinson called a meeting at
his Fort Smith office to coordinate local surveillance. Among those attending
were an Arkansas DEA agent, a U.S. Customs official, and U.S. Treasury agent
William C. Duncan.
Duncan's job was to investigate money laundering by the Seal organization. By
the end of 1982, he had gathered what he believed to be substantial evidence
of the crime.
Duncan and an Arkansas State Police investigator, who was also monitoring
Seal's enterprise, took their evidence to Hutchinson. They asked that the
U.S. attorney subpoena 20 witnesses they'd identified to testify before a
federal grand jury. To Duncan's surprise, however, Hutchinson seemed
reluctant. Ultimately, Hutchinson called only three of the 20 witnesses the
investigators had requested.
The three appeared before the grand jury, but afterwards, two of them also
expressed surprise at how their questioning was handled. One, a secretary at
Rich Mountain Aviation, had given Duncan sworn statements about money
laundering at the company, transcripts of which Duncan had provided to
Hutchinson. But when the woman left the jury room, she complained that
Hutchinson had asked her nothing about the crime or the sworn statements
she'd given to Duncan. As Duncan later testified, "She basically said that
she was allowed to give her name, address, position, and not much else."
The other angry witness was a banker who had, in Duncan's words, "provided a
significant amount of evidence relating to the money-laundering operation."
According to Duncan, he, too, emerged from the jury room complaining "that he
was not allowed to provide the evidence that he wanted to provide to the
grand jury."
Hutchinson left the U.S. attorney's office in October 1985, to make what
turned out to be an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate. His successor, J.
Michael Fitzhugh, appeared no more zealous than Hutchinson to pursue
information regarding Seal. As a result, neither Seal nor his associates in
Arkansas were indicted.
(As late as 1989, according to records I've received, FBI agents in Little
Rock were still expecting that some of Seal's associates would be indicted.
Only after Sen. Dale Bumpers inquired into the status of the case, and calls
were made to Fitzhugh's office, did the agents learn that the grand jury had
disbanded the previous summer without issuing the expected indictments.)
In 1991, Treasury agent Duncan was questioned under oath about the Seal
investigation. Asked what conclusions he and his superiors at the IRS had
drawn, Duncan answered matter-of-factly, "There was a cover-up."
"I had found Asa Hutchinson to be a very aggressive U.S. attorney in
connection with my cases," Duncan said. "Then, all of a sudden, with respect
to Mena, it was just like the information was going in, but nothing was
happening, over a long period of time. But, just like with the 20 witnesses
and the complaints, I didn't know what to make of that. Alarms were going
off...
"We were astonished that we couldn't get subpoenas. We were astonished that
Barry Seal was never brought to the grand jury, because he was on the
subpoena list for a long time. And there were just a lot of investigative
developments that made no sense to us."
Asked to elaborate, Duncan explained, "One of the most revealing things was
that we had discussed specifically with Asa Hutchinson the rumors about
National Security [Administration] involvement in the Mena operation. And Mr.
Hutchinson told me personally that he had checked with a variety of law
enforcement agencies and people in Miami, and that Barry Seal would be
prosecuted for any crimes in Arkansas. So we were comfortable that there was
not going to be National Security interference."
Duncan also said he found it "very strange" that he saw so few signs of the
DEA at Mena while Seal was headquartered there. "We were dealing with
allegations of narcotics smuggling [and] massive amounts of money
laundering," Duncan said in his deposition. "And it was my perception that
the Drug Enforcement Administration would have been very actively involved at
that stage, along with the Arkansas State Police. But DEA was conspicuously
absent during most of that time."
Duncan did not know while he was investigating Seal that, about a year and a
half after Seal's move to Arkansas - and about midway through Hutchinson's
term as U.S. attorney - the smuggler had changed his mind about becoming a
federal informant. In March 1984, with charges filed against him in Florida
and others pending in Louisiana, Seal was desperate to make a deal. But the
U.S. attorney in Fort Lauderdale was more inclined to prosecute than to let
Seal roll and become an informant. The talks had reached an impasse.
Not everyone charged with drug crimes can bargain effectively with the U.S.
government. But Seal had some advantages. For one, he had financial
resources. According to his own account, by 1984 he had already earned
between $60 and $100 million smuggling cocaine into the U.S. He could hire
his own lawyers.
Perhaps more important, it appears, he had cultivated some important
connections. Stymied in his negotiations in Florida, Seal flew his personal
Lear jet to Washington, D.C., where he met with members of a White House task
force on crime headed by the elder George Bush. At the time, the current
president's father was vice president under President Ronald Reagan.
There is no indication that then Vice President George Bush was present at
the meeting with Seal. But the meeting was important, nonetheless. Where Seal
had failed in Florida, he now succeeded in Washington, as members of the task
force backed his offer to become a federal informant.
Days later, in the presence of Justice Department officials, Seal signed an
agreement to cooperate with the DEA. The problem for Duncan and other
investigators working in Louisiana and Arkansas was that the deal was kept a
secret. Contrary to law enforcement protocols, they were not informed of the
change in Seal's status.
Seal lived for 23 months after he cut that deal. They are months shrouded in
mystery. Questions that have festered for years remain to this day unanswered.
Why were Duncan and other investigators assigned to follow Seal not notified
that he was now a confidential government informant? And what was the DEA's
role with regard to Seal? How close was the supervision of this high-level
criminal turned critically-important informant? After Seal became an
informant, did he continue to smuggle drugs - and keep the money he made from
them - as he later testified in court that he did?
By Seal's own account, his gross income in the year and a half after he
became an informant - while he was based at Mena and while Asa Hutchinson was
the federal prosecutor in Fort Smith, 82 miles away - was three-quarters of a
million dollars. Seal reported that $575,000 of that income had been derived
from a single cocaine shipment, which the DEA had allowed him to keep.
Pressed further, he testified that, since going to work for the DEA, he had
imported 1,500 pounds of cocaine into the U.S.
Of course, Duncan and other investigators knew nothing of all this. They had
no idea in 1984, as they monitored Seal's occasional appearances at Mena,
that the smuggler was also flying between meetings with high-level U.S.
officials and the cocaine lords of Central America. Between March 1984 and
February 1986, records indicate that Seal flew repeatedly to Colombia,
Guatemala, and Panama, where he met with Jorge Ochoa, Fabio Ochoa, Pablo
Escobar, and Carlos Lehder - leaders of the cartel that at the time
controlled an estimated 80 percent of the cocaine entering the United States.
Compounding the mystery around Seal are questions that arose during this
period about his relationship with the CIA. Were the connections extensive,
permeating his career? Or were they limited to one event, as the CIA
maintains? I know that some of the records in Seal's FBI file - ones I've
been denied on grounds of national security - originated with the CIA. So the
questions remain.
What we do know is that, in June 1984, CIA technicians installed hidden
cameras in Seal's C-123K at Florida's Homestead Air Force Base. The next day,
Seal flew to Nicaragua, where the CIA-installed cameras captured images of
cocaine being loaded onboard the plane. Two months later, at the height of
the Reagan administration's effort to get congressional funding for the
Nicaraguan Contras, those photos were leaked to the media. Administration
sources identified the blurry figures as leaders of the Sandinista
government, who were opposed by the Contra rebels.
The leak exploded Seal's cover, revealing to his associates in the Medellin
cartel that he was now cooperating with the U.S. government. It ruined Seal
as an informant just three months after he'd made the deal. And it set him up
for retaliation.
How much of this Hutchinson knew at the time, he has never said. What is
known is that at the end of 1984, Seal was indicted in Louisiana, and in
January 1985, he pled guilty to drug charges there. His usefulness now
limited to courtrooms, for most of 1985, Seal made appearances at federal
drug trials, where he testified as a government witness against others in his
trade. He helped in several prosecutions, though none in Arkansas.
Seal's most important court appearance was to come in 1986, when he was
scheduled to testify at the trial of Jorge Ochoa Vasques. But in February of
that year, shortly before the trial was to begin, Seal was ambushed in Baton
Rouge and killed in a hail of bullets. Upon hearing of Seal's murder, one
stunned DEA agent lamented, "There was a contract out on him, and everyone
knew it. He was to have been a crucial witness in the biggest case in DEA
history."
Why was Seal not protected? There are no good explanations. Seal's status as
an informant was destroyed by the decision to leak his photos. And he was
gunned down, ending his ability to testify, when he showed up for an
appointment that a federal judge had ordered him to keep.
After Seal's murder, the attorney general of Louisiana wrote to U.S. Attorney
Edwin Meese, requesting answers to some of the bigger questions about the
government's relationship with Barry Seal. William J. Guste Jr. asked Meese
why "such an important witness" had not been given protection. Guste also
wanted to know how Seal had been "supervised, regulated and controlled" after
agreeing to work with the DEA.
The Louisiana attorney general asked, "Was Seal allowed to work in an
undercover capacity in Arkansas and Louisiana without notification to
Louisiana and Arkansas officials?" And, "How were the contraband drugs he
brought into the United States while cooperating with the DEA regulated and
controlled?
"Was Seal's drug smuggling organization allowed to remain intact during and
after the time of his cooperation with the government? If so, why?
"Was he permitted to keep hundreds of thousands of dollars which he made
while working for the DEA by actually smuggling drugs into he United States?
How was such money accounted for?"
Guste wrote, "All of these questions and others that will undoubtedly develop
cry for investigation. And law enforcement agencies and the public have a
right to know the answers." In 1994, Guste told me that Meese never responded
to the letter. If Asa Hutchinson, who worked under Meese, made any similar
inquiries, they have never come to light.
Fifteen years have now passed since Barry Seal's murder, and the still
unanswered questions remain as haunting as ever. Bill Clinton, who was
governor of Arkansas during Seal's tenure here, dismissed the questions
during his campaign for the presidency as entirely a federal matter. Once he
gained the White House, a spokesman ridiculed questions about Seal and Mena,
calling them "the darkest backwater of conspiracy theories."
But these questions do not deserve such a brush-off. They deserve answers.
Yet, even at this late date, instead of providing them, President Bush plans
to install Hutchinson, the tight-lipped and loyal drug warrior, as head of
the DEA.
While Hutchinson (and others) have remained mum about the deals and
questions, politics and bungles that surrounded Barry Seal, the peculiarities
that marked Seal's case have not escaped mention entirely. In 1988, the
Senate Committee on Foreign Relations issued a report prepared by its
Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations that
exposed the seriousness of the Seal disaster. That report read in part: "Law
enforcement officials were furious that their undercover operation was
revealed and agents' lives jeopardized because one individual in the U.S.
government - Lt. Col. Oliver North-decided to play politics with the issue."
The report continued: "Associates of Seal, who operated aircraft service
businesses at the Mena, Arkansas airport, were also targets of grand jury
probes into narcotics trafficking. Despite the availability of evidence
sufficient for an indictment on money laundering charges and over the strong
protests of state and federal law enforcement officials, the cases were
dropped. The apparent reason was that the prosecution might have revealed
national security information, even though all of the crimes which were the
focus of the investigation occurred before Seal became a federal informant."
When I wrote to Hutchinson in 1995, he might have referred me that report.
But he didn't. Now that Hutchinson is in line to head the DEA, I think he
should be required to address the long waiting questions about Seal. And a
few more questions to boot. Among them:
What are the limits on secrecy when it comes to fighting this war?
What should be the DEA's relationship with the CIA?
How heavily should narcotics investigators be allowed to rely on
drug-criminals-turned-snitches - people like Barry Seal - for activities that
are kept from public review and for testimony resulting from deals?
What explanation is owed to law enforcement officers, many of whom risk their
lives, only to see their efforts wasted - not purposefully undermined - as
they were in the case of Seal?
What about all the inmates who are serving time in prisons for drug law
violations that were insignificant compared to Seal's? What does Hutchinson
say to them? And to the American people?
Like most drug warriors, Hutchinson speaks often about "messages." He resists
changing even marijuana laws, saying that to do so would send the "wrong
message." He opposes calling the war on drugs anything but a war, arguing
that to change the terminology sends "the wrong message."
I share his respect for messages. So I'd like to hear how he interprets this
one:
In 1994, when I asked the head of the DEA's office in Little Rock what had
actually transpired with Seal, the agent answered obliquely that "no
conclusion was determined." When I asked what in the world that meant, he
explained, "Sometimes that is the conclusion: that there can be no
conclusion."
I'd like to know: Would that answer satisfy Hutchinson? It does not satisfy
me.
Copyright ©2000 Arkansas Times Inc.
-----
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