http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2000/07/05/hiett/print.html
The corruption of Col. James Hiett
When the commander of U.S. anti-drug efforts in Colombia got involved
in drug running, Congress should have rethought its massive military
aid bill -- but it didn't.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Bruce Shapiro
July 05, 2000 | In two weeks, a retired Army colonel will stand for
sentencing before Judge Edward Korman in the Cadman Plaza federal
courthouse. The colonel's name has never been uttered on the Senate
floor. You can rummage in vain for any mention of him in
congressional committee testimony and reports.
Yet the case of Col. James Hiett, former commander of U.S. Army
anti-drug advisors in Colombia, due to be sentenced in mid-July for
covering up his wife's drug smuggling, has everything to do with the
passage last week of more than $1 billion in military aid to
Colombia. Hiett's case offers dark hints of what the United States is
in for by turning the Colombian drug-war theater into a large-scale
American military enterprise -- and it reveals, too, some of the
costs of the drug war on America's own streets.
The Hiett scandal is already an international embarrassment to the
United States, and its outlines have been widely reported. In the
mid-1990s, while Hiett was still stationed in the United States, his
wife Laurie Ann Hiett was treated in an Army hospital for drug
addiction. Later Hiett was named by the Army to head the 200-strong
battalion of military advisors in Bogota. The couple went -- even
though Laurie had lapsed back into addiction, snorting cocaine in
front of her husband.
Soon she was buying cocaine through her Army-employed Colombian
driver. By 1998 she was under investigation by the Army, not only for
using drugs, but for shipping $700,000 worth of coke, wrapped in
brown paper, to the United States in diplomatic mail. She handed some
of the cash proceeds, collected on trips to New York, to her husband
-- who proceeded to carefully spend the wad on household bills, to
"dissipate," in his own word, the money trail. In May Laurie Hiett
pleaded guilty to smuggling and was sentenced to five years in
federal prison.
That much was reported, in detail, on "60 Minutes" and elsewhere.
Less well known, but revealed in her sentencing hearing last May, is
how the Army worked to protect her husband. First, Army investigators
tipped him off about their investigation, in particular their pursuit
of a $25,000 roll of cash Laurie had handed him. Then, after his wife
was arrested, those same Army investigators quickly cleared Hiett of
any wrongdoing. It was only U.S. Customs Service director Ray Kelly
who insisted on pushing the investigation further after his agents
became convinced of the officer's complicity in his wife's actions.
You might think that an Army coverup of a minor-league scandal like
an officer's drug-smuggling wife would worry a Congress about to
plunge the American military far deeper into corruption-mired
Colombia. But the issue never came up.
Of course, defenders of the Colombia aid package would argue that
Hiett was an aberration. But they're wrong on two counts. First, what
makes the Colombia mess such a quagmire is the utter corruption on
all sides. Every faction -- left-wing guerrillas, right-wing death
squads, corrupt Colombian military elements and, under Hiett at
least, the U.S. Army -- has some involvement in the drug trade.
And Hiett's corruption itself is not necessarily that unusual. As
former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador and Paraguay Robert White told
Salon's Jeff Stein: "There's always been a fear of this by sensible
people in the Pentagon. The legend is that the United States military
is incorruptible, but that has proven not to be the case. There are
quite a few instances of this corruption."
On "60 Minutes" and in a New York Times interview this spring, the
Hietts received the kind of empathetic portrayal too rarely accorded
substance-abusing households: the addict wife and the straight-laced
officer-husband locked in compulsive denial.
One of the ironies of Col. Hiett's sentencing is that just last
Wednesday the Senate rejected an amendment by Sen. Paul Wellstone,
D-Minn., to the Colombia drug-war bill which would have diverted much
of that money into making effective drug-treatment programs widely
available. "If Laurie Hiett had received adequate treatment back in
1995, Col. Hiett would not be in trouble today," points out Eric
Sterling, head of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, a
Washington think tank. "She is the perfect illustration of how the
only real way to fight the drug war is to reduce demand for drugs,
through good treatment."
However much sympathy Laurie Hiett's addiction deserves, the Hietts
also neatly demonstrate the profound social inequity and inverted
justice of the whole drug war. Judge Korman contrived to sentence
Laurie Hiett to two years less prison time than called for in federal
sentencing guidelines, and Col. Hiett himself was indicted for the
smallest offense prosecutors could find on the books. Yet Laurie
Hiett's "mule," Hernan Aquila, a Colombian-born resident of Queens
whom she recruited to transport her coke after its arrival in New
York, last month received a longer prison term than her employer for
initiating the scheme.
Perhaps most importantly, despite their successful play for public
and judicial sympathy, the Hietts are actually part of a much larger
picture of how the drug war persistently ensnares and corrupts
drug-law enforcers, their families and their close associates.
In that sense, the case is a novelty only because Col. Hiett was
wearing U.S. Army green instead of street-cop blue. His story, for
instance, has deep resonance in the neighborhoods of New Haven,
Conn., where I live, and where every few years a high-ranking cop
ends up ensnared, one way or another, in the trade.
One veteran officer's son becomes a heroin addict and gets killed in
a gang vendetta. The city's top uniformed cop moves in with a
coke-addled petty thief and ends up dealing out of the police
department's evidence locker. A narcotics detective is accused of
conspiring with a dealer in covering up the murder of a former
alderman-turned-addict.
My friend John R. Williams, a New Haven criminal defense lawyer who
has handled drug cases (and the occasional corrupted cop) since the
1970s, recognized the Hiett pattern immediately. Col. Hiett, says
Williams, "was part of an operation in which drugs and drug profits
are everywhere -- the moral norm." The policies that officers like
Hiett are supposed to enforce, Williams says, bear no relationship to
the reality they see every day: informants paid in drugs, family
members who use drugs and drug agents who sell drugs. The constant
denial, the distance between reality and policy and the huge profits
that result "makes cynicism endemic, makes it only a small leap from
selective enforcement to selective participation."
The city's former Police Chief Nicholas Pastore agrees: Hiett was
caught not just by his wife's addiction but by the impossible
contradictions of policy. "You see this gradual slide into a morality
in which the rules have a constantly shifting meaning."
This, then, is what Congress is buying with its $1 billion entry into
Colombia's drug-drenched civil war: the Hiett enterprise on a massive
scale, with the Pentagon as major stockholder. Diplomatic pouches and
military planes as drug pipelines; pilots, drivers and returning
officers as couriers; and an American partnership with a Colombian
military already profoundly mired in drug trafficking, paramilitary
violence and human-rights abuses.
Like the drug war as a whole, the Colombian operation is an
inescapable briar patch. Every act of interdiction raises the price
of coca even higher, making it ever more profitable for farmers and
smugglers. "Our own repressive apparatus," says Sterling, "is what
will make the market attractive and draw people like Mrs. Hiett
further into the trade."
It is not only U.S. drug policy reformers who make this point. In
May, Alejandro Gertz Merero, the police chief of Mexico City, called
for policies that end "the economic interest in drug trafficking,"
instead of increasing the street value of drugs with enforced
scarcity.
The $1.6 billion plan originally proposed by President Clinton (the
final version is now being negotiated by the House and Senate) called
for spending $512 million on two Colombian military battalions,
purchasing 63 helicopters and spending more than $200 million on drug
interdiction in Colombia.
All this to a sustain Colombian military operations about which Human
Rights Watch recently revealed "detailed, abundant, and compelling
evidence of continuing close ties" to "paramilitary groups
responsible for gross human rights violations." Human Rights Watch
estimates that half of all Colombian battalions are involved with the
notorious paramilitaries -- a partnership, despite the real crimes of
the country's guerilla movement, responsible for most of country's
37,000 civilian killings since 1985. It is, as Sterling puts it, a
"massive intensification" of the American military's involvement in
the corruption-generating drug war.
Which brings us back to Col. Hiett and his sentencing in Brooklyn.
The Hiett case leaves many questions in its wake. Why did the Army
move so fast to cover up his complicity? How widespread is
drug-related corruption already among U.S. military personnel and
their households in Colombia? What are the relationships between
tainted U.S. military officials like Hiett and their Colombian
counterparts?
These are questions that the soft-landing plea bargains accorded Col.
Hiett and his wife were designed to forestall, and which Congress
should have asked before giving a final rubber stamp to the Colombia
quagmire.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Bruce Shapiro is national correspondent for Salon News.
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