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What Happens in Congress May Not Be As
Important
As What Happens With CIA, The Military and The Private
Contractors
Leading Us To War in Colombia
When The Children
of the Bull Market
Begin to Die
By
Michael C. Ruppert
[Bill Clinton arrives in Cartagena Colombia on
August 30, 2000 on the heels of three unpublicized massacres by right wing
paramilitaries designed to inflame FARC guerillas. The real shooting and
the American publicity machine churning out war fever will start on the
same day. This was the lead story in the June issue of "From The
Wilderness."]
While attention is being increasingly focused on a
billion dollar military aid package for Colombia that is nearing Bill
Clinton's desk for signature, experience - especially that taken so
painfully from Vietnam - tells us that the real determinants of how deeply
involved we will become in Colombia are not in Washington, but already
down there stirring the pot. As in Vietnam, and unlike the Contra War,
Congress may just be playing "catch-up" with events created by various
interests serving more than one master. And experts are becoming
increasingly persuaded that our current Colombian experience is more like
Vietnam than anything since. The likelihood of direct involvement of U.S.
forces in a dense hostile terrain, controlled by experienced, organized,
well-armed, indigenous forces, toughened by three decades of civil war is
growing daily. And indicators of the imminence of conflict are not to be
found in whether the Senate or the House chops or adds a few dollars or
helicopters which can all be restored without fanfare to the Foreign Aid
Bill in Conference Committee at the last minute. They are to be found in
the movements and actions of money, the U.S. military and some
CIA/DoD connected corporations, possibly using "sheep-dipped" CIA and
military personnel disguised as employees of private companies in roles
that can only expand the conflict.
The money flow in and around Colombia, both as connected
to the drug trade, to vast oil reserves and to the other abundant
resources accessible through the "back door" to the Amazon, only hints at
the financial and economic power accumulated in the country. As FTW
observed a year ago, the wealth accumulated by the FARC guerrillas,
largely through the "taxation" of the drug trade, was sufficient to induce
Richard Grasso, Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, to travel to
Colombia seeking investment funds for Wall Street. That same wealth has
made it possible, according to MS-NBC, for FARC to purchase enormous
quantities of weapons from the Russian Federation and have them delivered
to Colombia in huge Il-76 transport planes. The rebel forces (both FARC
and ELN), now controlling a third of the countryside, are paying for the
weapons with cocaine which is then flown back, under the control of the
Russian Mafia for sale in Europe, the Middle East and the former Soviet
Union. The model is not substantially different from that employed by CIA
protected assets and operations during the Contra War of the 1980s except
that there is no ideological mask. And, as documented heavily by FTW
(10/99), the proceeds of Russian organized crime are increasingly finding
their way into profitable investments in U.S. banks like the Bank of New
York or into Wall Street where history is again affirmed that the real
power always profits from both sides of a war.
To understand the significance of this trade it must be
noted that, in spite of the continuing expansion of violence between the
three dominant factions (government, right wing paramilitaries and
rebels), all of which deal prodigiously in drugs, Colombia has been able
to steadily expand its drug production every year for the past ten years.
Now the largest drug producing nation in the world, according to DEA and
DoJ sources, Colombia produces almost all of the world's cocaine and
almost two thirds of all the heroin entering the United States. If one
imagines three rivals locked in a raging gun battle, one wonders how or
why they could all simultaneously increase drug production at rates that
would make major corporations jealous. Clearly something else is operating
here and that is the hand guiding the huge accumulation of wealth
resulting from decades narco-expansion. That hand, we believe, is the CIA.
That accumulated drug wealth is what is attracting the likes of major
World Trade Organization advocates like former Bush Treasury Secretary
Nicholas Brady and his Darby Investments and multi-national giants like
Philip-Morris, which, at press time, has announced plans to purchase
Nabisco with some of the excess cash it has derived from laundering drug
money [See related stories this issue]. The other key to understanding the
motive for a full regional conflict in and around Colombia comes when one
grasps fully that the accumulated equity of decades of drug trafficking,
possibly several trillion dollars, would be enough, if properly focused in
a unified national economy to threaten United States economic dominance in
the Western Hemisphere and perhaps the world. Better to have the country
divided into warring factions and incapable of focusing a unified
national will or acting as a regional lynchpin to lead other South
American nations in opposition to the re-colonization of the region
.
The Private
Contractors
As noted by highly credible writers such as Peter Dale
Scott, Col. Fletcher Prouty and even the legendary "retired" CIA
executive Ted Shackley in his book The Third Option, the use of private
corporations, whether directly owned by CIA as "proprietaries" or not, is
a common practice for the extension of U.S. military and diplomatic power.
Examples of the former in Vietnam include Civil Air Transport or Air
America while examples of the later include large multi-nationals such as
Bechtel, Brown and Root, AT&T or any of the major oil companies. In
regions where overt commitment of U.S. military forces is impolitic these
private corporations, as they have evolved in the last few decades, can
accomplish a multitude of objectives essential to inflaming regional
conflicts to the point where U.S. military forces must be called in to
save the day. The use of these companies, which serve as actual profit
centers for their private investors, their intelligence agency owners, or
both, has evolved to the point where the corporations offer off-the-shelf
war making capabilities from infantry fighters, to aerial
reconnaissance, to general officers capable of setting up or
commanding division sized maneuvers in client countries. The survivability
of these companies is a priori tied to the creation of conflict and
regional destabilization with the blessings of CIA so that there will
always be customers. Peace becomes the enemy.
One such corporation, heavily involved in both Colombia
and in Kosovo is the Virginia based DynCorp. DynCorp, according to Alex
Cockburn and Jeff St. Clair, is the nation's twenty-second largest defense
contractor with 1998 U.S. Government contract revenues of $475 million.
DynCorp, which currently has between 300-600 contracted employees in
Colombia, is performing functions like crop eradication (using defoliants
- like Vietnam), to sophisticated aerial reconnaissance, to combat
advisory roles training military and possibly even paramilitary forces.
When the history of the Colombian War is written in may well be noted that
the first U.S. casualties were actually three DynCorp employees killed
when their reconnaissance aircraft crashed on a mountaintop in the drug
growing regions last summer. DynCorp employees have been described as
being arrogant and more than willing to get "wet" by going out on combat
missions and engaging in firefights. A British source reminded us recently
that DynCorp Chairman, Pug Winokur, begged out of Commerce Secretary Ron
Brown's ill fated last flight in the Balkans. The same Pug Winokur is on
the board of Harvard Endowments which had a behind the scenes hand in
destroying the economic research conducted by former Assistant Secretary
of Housing, Catherine Austin Fitts in 1996. That research was beginning to
illuminate how the drug trade generates profits for Wall Street through
the subsidized HUD housing market where Harvard is a heavy
investor.
The second major contracting firm active in Colombia is
Military Professional Resources, Inc (MPRI). MPRI has pre-positioned
itself well for contract work in Colombia and is very optimistic about its
prospects for contracts when the billion dollar military aid package
passes sometime this summer. It should be. It also helped the Colombian
government devise the three-phase action plan that will be implemented
when the aid package is funded.
MPRI is not shy about the fact that it is a military
company with many contacts. As indicated by stories in the Dallas Morning
News and in more detailed research by the Canadian based International
Network on Disarmament and Globalization, MPRI maintains a database of
11,000 retired officers and enlisted personnel able to work on temporary
assignments in foreign countries. MPRI spokesman, Lt. General Ed Soyster
(U.S. Army, Ret.), is not shy in boasting of his company's presence in
Colombia or it's ability to provide anything from a general officer
to consult on organization or a tank driver or SAM (surface to air)
missile operator to provide training in third world countries. And that is
exactly what MPRI intends to do when the aid package is
approved.
Asked for his opinions about "outsourcing" as the
process of hiring military personnel through private companies is called,
Drug Czar and former head of U.S. Southern Command, Barry McCaffrey said,
"I am unabashedly an admirer of outsourcing� There's very few things in
life you can't outsource." This sounds like a reasonable position
for McCaffrey to take since he will lose his job as Drug Czar next January
and find himself on the open market just as things in Colombia begin to
respond to an increased U.S. military presence. FTW is fairly confident
that he has his resume in with at least two firms already.
The problems with outsourcing are acute and obvious.
First there is the question of accountability. Reports from within
Colombia indicate that the American contractors are behaving with impunity
as if they were, as is widely believed, working for the CIA anyway. What
is to prevent these private employees from committing acts of aggression
that would cause an instant uproar if committed by American troops? This
is the classic case of deniability and, as documented by Peter Dale Scott
in his CIA suppressed 1970 book The War Conspiracy, the history of
Southeast Asia, especially in the period from 1959 to 1963 is fraught with
instances where CIA proprietaries or contractors engaged in actions that
widened and inflamed local conflicts into regional conflicts. What
better position to be in than a position where, virtually immune to
congressional oversight, it would be possible to create as much business
as your company could handle. This of course is advantageous for firms as
large as DynCorp and MPRI which trade on Wall Street and have board
members "interlocked" with other major defense contractors who stand to
benefit from widened conflict. A second problem with outsourcing is
command and control. FTW has always taken the position that the tail wags
the dog on foreign policy - that foreign policy is directed and created to
serve corporate and financial interests. Historically, the military
has served, aside form being the direct administrator of key aid, as a
political entity in its own right and a balance of sorts to corporate
gluttony or, as Scott so eloquently described in The War Conspiracy,
another key player in "a floating crap game" that all sides seek to
protect while none are able to control its eventual size or
direction.
The Military
Last October President Clinton
issued pardons to a number of convicted Puerto Rican FALN terrorists and
sent them home. This was unusual because the terrorists were bombers who
had killed several people during the 1970s and were serving time in New
York prisons. While criticism of the pardons focused on Hillary Clinton's
run for the U.S. Senate in New York, FTW reported to you accurately
(10/99) that the move was really a bargain being struck between Clinton
and Puerto Rican nationalists to provide for the safety of U.S. military
forces as they prepared for direct U.S. involvement in Colombia. After the
1999 loss of permanent bases in Panama the closest (and only) remaining
U.S. facilities capable of supporting a Colombian intervention are in
Puerto Rico. In unpublicized testimony before the Senate Caucus on
International Narcotics Control on September 21, 1999, Southern Command
Chief, Marine General Charles Wilhelm stated that, "�U.S. Southern Command
must compensate for the loss of U.S. bases in Panama by creating an
alternative theater architecture that will support efficient, effective
and flexible CD [Counter Drug] operations into the 21st century. Puerto
Rico has replaced Panama as the focal point of our theater architecture.
U.S. Army South recently completed its relocation from Fort Clayton in
Panama to Fort Buchanan; Special operations command has displaced from its
garrison locations in Panama to its new home at Naval Station, Roosevelt
Roads. � Other forward deployed elements of SOUTHAF [U.S. Air Force,
Southern Command] have migrated from Howard Air Force Base to new
locations in Puerto Rico and Key West."
The Puerto Rican activists who are
fighting to keep U.S. Naval operations off of the tiny island of Vieques
understand fully that they are slowing preparations for war.
And signs abound that, like Vietnam,
the coming war in Colombia will not be confined to one country. In his
testimony Gen. Wilhelm commented at length on the effects of the Colombian
narco-insurgency on surrounding nations. He took special pains to lament
the power vacuum in Panama which, since the U.S. invasion in 1989 has had
no standing army. This is a great irony now for the country with the most
accessible land border with Colombia and which is reportedly providing
"unpoliced" safe havens for FARC and ELN guerillas to train, rest and
equip without fear of Colombian cross-border pursuit. This is EXACTLY the
situation the developed under CIA control in Cambodia and Laos from 1959
to 1975.
Just as the Vietnam War involved
North and South Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Burma and China (not to
mention the USSR) the coming conflict in Colombia will involve Colombia,
Panama, Venezuela, Equador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Costa Rica and perhaps
every nation in the hemisphere. In his 1999 remarks Wilhelm took great
pains to note the deployment or military forces around Colombia by
neighbors including Venezuela which has, in a gesture of independence,
refused to allow U.S. military aircraft overflight privileges. That is not
the case in Ecuador on Colombia's western border where the Ecuadorian
government is rushing to help the USAF expand an air force base and
debating whether or not to make the U.S. dollar the country's official
currency. Throughout all of this the U.S. Military will assert its
presence and it will take advantage of a multitude of political and combat
environments to perfect its operational skills and effectively re-colonize
and de-populate parts of the region. On May 23, 2000, as far north as
Guatemala, which borders Mexico, General Wilhelm ordered 40 combat Marines
into that country, equipped with Blackhawk and Chinook helicopter
gunships. Their purpose: to fight drugs.
And lastly, tried and true
CIA-friendly politicians, are beginning to lay the groundwork for direct
intervention in Panama to guarantee a Vietnam-like feeding frenzy. On June
9, while covering Congressional hearings on the drug trade, Reuters
reported that, "'The war in neighboring Colombia against well-armed
narco-terrorist forces, financed through laundered drug profits through
Panama's banks is escalating and threatens to spread through the region',
said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican. ' Panama does not
have an army, navy or air force. The Panamanian government and its
national police force have reputations for corruption and
inefficiency.'"
Thanks to our long standing
friendship with author and investigator Jonn Christian, co-author of The
Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy and author of a forthcoming sequel to
his original (1978) work Fatal Connections: Linking the Kennedy and King
Assassinations, we know something more about Rohrabacher. And it fits all
too well into the Vietnam mold. FTW is in possession of LAPD reports and
Sand Diego police intelligence files indicating that the diminutive
Rohrabacher, then just 20, was intimately connected with armed radical
right-wing CIA funded elements that had been planning assassinations of
both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. In fact, Rohrabacher, then a
young conservative Republican, was at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968
the night that RFK was assassinated and was interviewed by LAPD. That
murder led to the eventual election of Richard Nixon and the prolongation
of the Vietnam War for another seven painful, profitable years.
The parallels between Colombia and Vietnam are
inescapable and unavoidable. After twenty-five years, the passing of an
entire generation, the forces that govern us behind the scenes are poised
to unleash another "floating crap game" of profits, corporate
expansion, re-colonization and even genocide. The one glaring and
hope-giving difference is that this time the war will be justified on the
basis of fighting not Communists, but drug traffickers - and only one gang
of drug traffickers at that. We will see the American people's willingness
to accept this ploy when the children of the bull market begin to
die. |
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