-Caveat Lector-
In a message dated 1/5/00 6:18:55 AM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
Isn't it interesting how stupid people can be?
Among the most notable members of the China Lobby are Madame Anna Chennault,
whose husband, General Claire Chennault, founded Air America; columnist Joe
Alsop; FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, former California Senator William
Knowland, and Ray Cline, currently Chief of Intelligence for the State
Department. They and such compatriots as the late Time magazine publisher
Henry Luce and his widow, Congresswoman Claire Boothe Luce, have been some of
the country's strongest proponents of the Nationalist Chinese cause.
In 1954 Chiang Kai-shek formed the Asian People's Anti-Communist League
(APACL), which was to become one of the vital links between the China Lobby
and the Taiwan government. (It was also *in that year that Nixon urged that
U.S. troops be sent into Indochina following the French defeat in Dien Bien
Phua. proposal which failed because of the lack of public support for such
policy following the Korean War.) As soon as the APACL was formed, Chiang
announced that it had established "close contact" with three American
politicians-the most important of whom was Vice President Richard Nixon.
Over the years the China Lobby has continued to spring to Nixon's support. It
was Madame Chennault, co-chairman in 1968 of Women for Nixon-Agnew Advisory
Committee, who helped raise a quarter of a million dollars for the campaign;
it was she who just before the election entered into an elaborate set of
arrangements to sabotage a White House peace plan. Within 30 hours of the
announced plan, South Vietnam President Thieu rejected the new negotiations
it proposeda rejection Madame Chennault had helped arrange as a last-minute
blow at Hubert Humphrey and the Democrats.
It is not only his debts, associations, and sympathies to the China Lobby
which have linked Nixon with Kuomintang machinations in Indochina and helped
plunge the U.S. deeper into the morass there. One of his most important
foreign policy appointments since taking office has been the reassignment of
Ray Cline as State Department director of intelligence and research. Cline,
the controversial CIA station chief in Taiwan who helped organize KMT forays
into Communist China, in 1962 promoted Nixon's old project of a Bay of Pigs
invasion of China. Within a month of Clines recent appointment, the
resumption of pilotless Intelligence flights over mainland China was approved.
The entire cast of the China Lobby has relied on one magic corporation, the
same corporation established just after World War II by General Claire
Chennault as Civil Air Transport and renamed in the 1950's Air America.
Carrier not only of men and personnel for all of Southeast Asia, but also of
the policies that have turned Indochina into the third bloodiest battlefield
in American history, Air America's chief contract is with the American
Central Intelligence Agency.
Air America brings Brahmin Bostonians and wealthy Wall Streeters who are the
China Lobby together with some of the most powerful men in Nationalist
China's financial history. One of its principal services has been to fly in
support for the "remnant" 93d Division of the KMT, the "opium army" in Burma;
another has been as a major carrier of opium itself. Air America flies
through all of the Laotian and Vietnamese opium pickup points, for aside from
the private "butterfly fleet!' and various military transports, Air America
is the "official" Indochina airline. A twenty-five-year-old black man
recently returned from Indochina told Ramparts of going to Vietnam in late
1968 as an adventurer, hoping to get in on the dope business. But he found
that the business was all controlled by a "group like the Mafia. It was tight
and there wasn't room for me." The only way he could make it in the dope
trade, he says, was to go to work for Air America as a mechanic. He found
there "was plenty of dope in Laoslots of crystals [heroin] all over the
place." Air' America was the only way to get in on it.
What has taken place in Indochina is more than a flurry of corruption among
select dramatis personae in America's great Asian Drama. The fact that Meo
tribesmen have been nearly wiped out, that the Corsican Mafia's Air Opium has
been supplanted by the CIA's Air America, that Nationalist Chinese soldiers
operate as narcotics bandits, that such architects of U.S. democracy for the
East as the Nhus and Vice President Ky have been dope runners-these are only
the bizarre cameo roles in a larger tragedy that involves nothing less than
the uprooting of what bad been the opium trade for decades-through the
traditional lotus land of the Middle East into Western Europeand the
substitution of another network, whose shape is parallel to that of the U.S.
presence in Southeast Asia. The ecology of narcotics has been disrupted and
remade to coincide with the structure of America's Asia strategy-the stealthy
conquest of a
