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Mara Leveritt Author, Editor The Arkansas Times So tell me your name and why you�re here this weekend. I�m Mara Leveritt. I wrote a book called The Boys on the Tracks, and since the book concerns drugs and elements of a story that appear to be connected to the CIA, I am at this CIA drug symposium here in LA. Okay, so tell me a little bit about what the book is about, and how you came to write it. The book is about the murders of two young men, two seventeen-year-olds in Arkansas. In 1987, they were found run over by a train. The train crew spotted these two boys lying on the tracks just before they ran over them. And of course the crew was horrified, and that began a story that was horrifying in its beginnings, but then it also became stranger and stranger as its investigations proceeded, and I became interested in the investigations. What led you to become interested in these investigations? Usually investigations follow a certain procedure; there are some things that are typically done. And while not all crimes are solved, a lot of them end up being solved if proper procedures are followed. In this case the procedures appeared to be anything but proper at every level. First of all, the county officials who investigated�this was a very unusual crime scene�the paramedics at the start of it said that it appeared that the boys� blood was heavy and purplish in color, not fresh. The paramedics thought that the boys were dead before they were hit by the train. The train crew thought that the boys were lying unnaturally still, side by side, like soldiers laid out, and they didn�t even flinch as the train was coming� bearing down at them with whistles and horns and all of the thunder of an approaching train trying to stop. And so there was a lot of speculation that the boys had already been killed before the train hit them. But despite that, the deputies who investigated went out of their way to declare that it appeared to be an accident, that maybe it was suicide� maybe they had just both laid down there and been run over either because they fell asleep or something else quite harmless. They never even seriously discussed the possibility of murder. Usually that�s the first thing that law enforcement examines in an unusual death. That was followed by an even stranger situation where the bodies were sent to the medical examiner in Arkansas, who performed autopsies and declared that: �yes, indeed, these deaths had been accidental�, because the boys had smoked themselves into what he called a marijuana-induced stupor�. and had fallen asleep together, side by side into such a profound sleep from all this marijuana that they were unable to be awakened by the onrushing train. That raised a lot of eyebrows in Arkansas. The bodies were buried; the parents objected. They did not believe this medical examiner�s ruling. An out-of-state pathologist was brought in. The bodies were exhumed, re-examined and indeed the out-of-state pathologist from Atlanta found evidence of a stab wound to the back of one of the boys and a crushing blow to the skull of the other boy, injuries that he established had been inflicted before the train ever approached them. And so, with that, a grand jury declared that the deaths were in fact homicides. And, from there on�it was a very unusual step that the medical examiner of the state of Arkansas was overturned by a grand jury, but that happened. So, here the case was getting further and further strange. So then it was sent to the state police. The state police were supposed to investigate. Subsequent to an examination of their investigation, their records from it revealed that they did almost nothing to really look into what had happened. They did no follow-up on the leads. There were reports of leads but they were not followed up on. And meanwhile the parents were getting more and more disgusted that for some reason the county officials and now it seemed the state officials were not interested in getting at the truth of what had happened here. Ultimately, the case went to federal officials. You know, not every murder is a federal case. So, it has to have some particular component that makes it a federal case that warrants an investigation by the FBI. The FBI never said why, after three years, they decided that it did, but they did step in then and investigate. They assured the parents that they would get down to the bottom of it and have the case solved by the end of the year. Two years later they did not and they were right back saying, �Well, it may actually not have been a murder after all.� Back to square one, saying that in fact it may have been an accident or a suicide. Let�s skip forward to what actually did happen, and then we�ll go back. The grand jury that overturned the medical examiner concluded that they were murdered in some kind of crime that related to the local drug scene, which was festering at the time. This was in the county that�s literally on the back doorstep of the county where Little Rock (the capital of the state) is situated. And so the connection was made that these deaths were cocaine-related, and that it appeared that the boys had seen something and had been killed for what they had seen� that they had stumbled upon some kind of activity that ended up in their being murdered. What that was has never been clearly established. There was speculation that, at the same time that these events were taking place in central Arkansas, there was a tremendous amount of cocaine activity going on in the western part of the state in the little town of Mena. There was a lot of drug running going on by an operation that was headed by the smuggler Barry Seal - all of this has subsequently been documented by federal records - and a tremendous volume of cocaine was coming in to the state. At Mena, Barry Seal also had connections with the CIA and exactly what he was up to has never been clearly understood. But it was the conclusion of the prosecuting attorney and other law enforcement people in and around Mena who had tried to find out what was going on with Barry Seal and actually bring him to justice, that it could not be done. They were running into the same kind of obstructions. And the prosecutor in that part of the state concluded that, because of the CIA connections and the federal involvement in that operation (which seemed to be linked to Iran contra - this being in the mid 1980s), that no investigation of Barry Seal or anyone connected with him was ever going to be allowed to go anywhere, because if any part of that operation were brought to light, it might tumble the whole house of cards and bring everything to light. And so his conclusion was that neither Seal nor anyone fully involved with him was going to be able to be fully examined. And that raised a lot of speculation from those of us who had been seeing how bizarre the investigations of these murders had been in central Arkansas. We had to ask the question, were these two situations connected? Was what happened with the drugs that led to the death of these two boys somehow connected with this very clandestine operation? So, tell me, were you in Arkansas at this time? Did you live there? Yes. Do you mean in Little Rock? I lived in Little Rock. So describe the climate of life in Little Rock, in Mena Arkansas in these years. Well in the mid 1980s, Little Rock was kind of a fast moving place because we had a financial situation that allowed the sale of bonds that was not happening elsewhere in the country. And so we had this flurry of development of what were called bond houses. And working in the bond houses were a lot of people, mostly men, who were called bond daddies, because they were making so much money so fast and the atmosphere that surrounded the bond houses and all of this fast money that was being made was also just caked with cocaine. There was a lot of powder cocaine. You saw these people at all of the better restaurants in town and you also knew that there was cocaine dust following a lot of their tracks. So, fast money and a lot of powder cocaine. Was cocaine a kind of payoff? Was everyone celebrating by doing cocaine because they had made lots of money or was the money being made because of the cocaine? I don�t think that they were dealing in cocaine. I think that the cocaine was a perk, a side benefit, just something they could afford to buy. It was happening nationally at the time. It was not entirely confined to Arkansas by a long shot, and so a lot of people who had that kind of wealth were indulging in a pretty new� almost a faddish kind of drug odyssey at that point. Apart from there being a prevalence of cocaine around these bond daddies and all of the people who were making a lot of money, did it come to your attention or to the other people in this community that there were a lot of kids running around dealing coke or coke dealers everywhere�at the rec. center or at the corner�was it that kind of infestation or was it more just in the higher echelons of power, just more quiet? Did it seem like an epidemic? Did anyone react in that kind of way? Well you know it�s part of the hypocrisy of this whole story that a lot of comfortable or well-to-do people have done cocaine in this country and never ended up in trouble with the law as result of it. And we know about the disparities in sentencing between powder cocaine and crack cocaine. So there was cocaine coming into the country in a lot of ways, and it was getting onto the street corners. A lot of it was going into the form of crack. But the part that I was describing relative to the big fast money that was flying around the bond houses at that time in history was all powder cocaine. It was kind of the privileged sets. Where was Clinton in all of this? Was he in some kind of power at the time? Bill Clinton was the Governor, and there were two aspects that relate to Bill Clinton that have intrigued people. One is that the medical examiner who ruled that these boys died accidentally because of their marijuana-induced stupor was widely ridiculed for that ruling and even more so when another doctor came in and said that the bodies clearly indicated that they were murdered and he had not reported that. So he came under a lot of fire. And then there were other rulings that he made that made people think that he was not fit for that office. Nonetheless, Bill Clinton continued to support him - vigorously support him - and helped keep him in office until three weeks before he announced that he was going to run for president. And that�s one question that has always followed Bill Clinton around about this story, because most of the people that Clinton surrounded himself with were very competent in Arkansas in that era. And Dr. Fahmy Malek, the medical examiner, stood out as one who clearly was not - and that raised questions. The other thing that perplexed people was that when Bill Clinton announced that he was going to run for president against George Bush, and we had this situation in Mena that had come to light and had been fairly well explored. A lot of people had found out information about Barry Seal and what was going on. Seal was dead by then but people wanted to know what was happening in Mena, in Arkansas, so a good deal of information had come to light that Arkansas had been the home base for this major international drug smuggler who, for the last two years of his life, had been able to operate without being stopped. Now if you were in a campaign, especially in the middle of a war on drugs, it seemed that Bill Clinton could have said to George Bush� Let me back up�George Bush could have said to Bill Clinton, "How was it, Governor Clinton, that in your state, the biggest documented drug smuggler in US history was allowed to operate untouched for the last two years of his life?" to put him on the spot. After all, this is a war on drugs. On the other hand, Bill Clinton has always said that federal officials were watching Barry Seal. They knew what was up, and they had him under control, and Clinton has always said it was a federal matter. So Clinton could have, in turn, said to George Bush, "I would like to know why federal officials, who knew from the minute that Barry Seal stepped foot in Arkansas that he was coming and watched him the whole time he was there, so why didn�t they intervene?" George Bush was in charge of the executive branch of the federal government at that point, so why didn�t the justice department do something to bring Barry Seal down? And so they each had a lot of ammunition. They could have had a really big dog fight about that. Meanwhile everybody�s talking about what a scourge drugs are in this country. People were building prisons as fast as they could to put street level dealers in jail. And here�s, by any definition, the biggest major drug kingpin we�ve ever run into, and nobody seems to know a thing about it, and nobody wants to raise it during the campaign. It was like hands-off on both sides of that question. So all the clues lead the general gossiping Little Rock and Mena public to suspect that Bill Clinton is potentially involved in giving this guy the protection that he needs. He�s running for office, he obviously needs money for that campaign, and this guy could potentially be fueling his campaign. Were these all things that people were thinking? No, in fact, I would say that to this day, most people do not associate what was going on in Mena with the politics of the time. And I would say furthermore, that most people do not hold Clinton primarily responsible. Yes it was in Arkansas, and yes our state police were among those who knew that Barry Seal was there. But when Bill Clinton says that he was told that it was a federal matter and that the feds had Barry Seal under control, I find that believable. I believe he was told that. Other people were probably told that too. And indeed if Seal was involved in the CIA and somebody said, look this is a CIA matter, and just kind of leave it to us, that may be exactly what happened. The question though is, what was going on with George Bush and Ollie North and their connections with this cocaine smuggler? And from my point of view, I wanted to know. When Bill Clinton got into office, I was hoping that he would open up the records. Okay, that happened during the Bush administration; now it�s a new administration so let�s find out what happened in our state - his state, my state, Arkansas - and find out what was the true story now. But I have been fighting for several years to get the Justice Department to release Freedom of Information records on Barry Seal and it has been the same wall of denials that the records existed. And then when it was established that they did, then a very reluctant release of records ensued, followed by an acknowledgement that many thousands of other papers existed. Those have not yet been released. I suppose they will, but even the ones that have been released have been heavily censored, and some of the reasons that they have offered for censoring them are that these pertain to national security and the CIA. And so my appeal at this point is that I would like to know, what are the national security issues that prevent the release of information about the major narcotics smuggler who has been dead now for 14 years? And what was his connection with the CIA that they don�t want to talk about and don�t want to release the records of? I was hoping that this administration, the Clinton administration, would release those records. And now, we�re almost at the end of that and they haven�t come out anymore than they came out during the Bush administration. So has anyone ever directly said to Bill Clinton, okay, it was a federal issue and you didn�t know about it and so you weren�t at fault, but as soon as you became President, you are the federal, and so, has anyone ever called him on that? No. Not that I know of. Okay, because that�s an interesting� that would certainly force him to come up with another excuse. The Clinton White House has declared - Mark Fabiani, counsel for the president, has been on record saying that when questions about Mena have been asked, he said Mena is the darkest backwater of right-wing conspiracy theories. And so that sort of puts it into the fruit and nut-cake category� and just wackos or crazy people would be asking these kind of questions and bringing this whole subject up. Mena is nuts and there�s nothing to it. And that�s simply not true. So can you give us a sense of who some of the main characters are in this story? Who are the people who have been spearheading this investigation from a public standpoint? Well, for instance, Linda Ives, the mother of one of the boys who was killed, has persisted since the death of her son. And since she�s gotten so many ridiculous answers, she has persisted in trying to find out what happened�a very natural kind of question to ask. And as the question has sort of gotten larger, and included the possibility that Mena had something to do with it, her name was on a list. Stories about her were included in a packet of information that was given to several reporters when the White House was trying to explain that there were all these right wing media people out to get the White House by spreading disinformation and stories that were not true about the White House. And they prepared quite a lengthy packet of information that they said explained what they were trying to say here. Included in that packet of basically wackos were the stories about Linda Ives raising questions about what was going on. And so, she felt, and I think, reasonably so, that there was an attempt to discredit her because she had the nerve to raise some of these questions. Who were some of the other people who stepped forward and demanded some sort of� In Arkansas, a lot of the information about Mena was first brought to light by a group of Vietnam veterans who were at the university, and they called themselves the Arkansas Committee. They were kind of infuriated by the idea that they�d gone to Vietnam, fought, and then they�d come back and now it looked like we were shipping guns to Central America and were bringing drugs back with impunity, just running amuck on some kind of covert operation. And that was one group that worked very hard. The attorney general for the state of Arkansas for a long time became very active trying to pursue information about what happened at Mena, and unfortunately he stopped raising questions just as soon as Bill Clinton was elected president. That was a disappointment to a lot of people. A few reporters nationally, myself among them, have stuck with this story and keep chipping away at it and getting a little bit more of the story as each year goes by. Apart from the book which is put out by� Saint Martin�s Press. Saint Martin�s Press, which is a relatively mainstream operation I�m sure. Yeah, yeah. Did you try to get any articles in any other publications? Oh, yes. I�ve been an editor at The Arkansas Times for several years, and I�ve written about this for a good long time. I�m one of the few reporters there - there are a couple of other reporters who have done a good job on aspects of this story too - but I think I�ve probably stuck with it longer and more consistently than any of the others. And when my book came out, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the state-wide daily paper, gave it a good review, acknowledged that it certainly didn�t seem to be any kind of an off-the-wall account. It basically coincided with what was known, and filled in a lot of the blanks in some key areas. Nobody�s contesting the story. For a long time I wanted to say, okay debunk me! Okay, I�m putting it out, shoot holes in it if you can. That hasn�t happened. It�s been out for just about a year now, and that has not happened. It has held its ground and it has held it well. In the book or in any articles did you speculate that you felt that there could be a suspicious relationship between the death of the boys and the cocaine operation and potentially Bill Clinton? Were those three things ever linked together? Well certainly the death of the boys and cocaine. That�s pretty well suspected and if not confirmed, because there was no cocaine in their systems. There was a little bit of marijuana, but the grand jury concluded that there was a lot of cocaine activity in the area. The prosecuting attorney, who was the anti-drug crusader and was elected year after year because he was the big anti-drug fighter in the county where this happened, turned out to be deeply involved with drugs himself - shaking down people, taking money not to prosecute� And, as a federal jury ultimately concluded: running a drug racket out of the prosecuting attorney�s office�in the very county where this happened. And he was the one who presented himself as the guy who was going to get to the bottom of these murders. He was supposed to be the hero, and it turns out that he was one of the most corrupt in the whole story. And so we certainly have corruption at the county level. And he was actually a state official, a state prosecuting attorney. And so we have certain corruption in the judicial system at his level. We have major questions about what was going on with the federal investigations into these deaths and the fact that they would deny to me that they have any records of any files of the case when now, they�ve come around and acknowledged 16,000 pages of files on this case. What�s up with that? And so without linking it specifically to any one particular official, yes we have the governor who was Clinton, yes we have George Bush who was president. But it seems that what we had was a lot of covert activity that spanned several levels of government and corruption that was multi-level corruption. So in your opinion, as a journalist who�s been going after this story for several years, and who has had the opportunity to talk to the parents, to know the town intimately, to have a sense of the climate there, what is your estimation of what happened? I think� You can say I speculate� Yes, and this is only speculation because, unfortunately, we have not seen any good investigation to date. But the most reasonable conclusion is that the boys were out at night and they may have heard that there were drugs being dropped in this particular area - just grapevine kind of information. They may have been curious about that. They may have even thought they were going to outsmart the punks who were there to pick up the drugs and make off with a little bit to make some bucks. Or they may have been just simply innocently walking along and came upon the people who were collecting the drugs and ended up being killed to eliminate them from ever talking about it. Something like that, I think, almost certainly happened. Now who was involved with that? Who actually did it? It seems to me that it must have been people who had some serious connections with law enforcement and the judicial system, that they had been able, for all of these years, to make everybody back off. And beyond that, I don�t think we can know. We just don�t know. But there has to be some good reason for the behavior of every investigating agency that has gotten near this� that they would be so quickly repulsed from pursuing it. So what has this pursuit of this information done to your attitudes and understandings about the government that we enable to maintain power? What has this done to your perception of the way things are? I�ve been paying attention to this story very carefully because I�ve written a book about it. But I also have been reporting on criminal justice issues in Arkansas for about 25 years. And what I am convinced of is that we have a lot of very good people in law enforcement and we have a lot of people who have been corrupted by the huge amount of money�certainly huge relative to what they are being paid�that great amount of money that is involved in drugs. And so this corruption does not start or end with the cop on the street. It involves prosecutors; it involves judges; it involves the state police and the criminal intelligence divisions of our state police; it involves people in the federal government, both investigators and in the justice department, and it involves perhaps almost certainly members of the US military. And it is not just in Arkansas, nor is it just in the United States. Every state has this situation occurring in it, and it goes well beyond the borders of the United States. So, do we live in a culture of corruption? Yes, we live in a culture of corruption. We do. And� I would say that what we live in is a culture that has been corrupted by laws that we have created� probably well-intentioned in a lot of ways. Certainly a lot of the support for these laws has been in the belief that these are good laws because they were going to protect our kids from drugs and no one wants to see lives ruined by addictions and so forth and so on. But now I think we are seeing a lot of disillusionment. The United States has become the biggest jailer on the face of the earth. We have five percent of the population of the world and more than 20 percent of the world�s prisoners. We are building prisons. We are paying a fortune to support this war on drugs, and people are beginning to see - it�s not doing it. It�s not only not effective at what it�s supposed to be doing, but it has had those terrible side effects of corrupting some of the most important and valuable institutions that we have. A man from Argentina told me one time that a judge there said that we in the United States don�t appreciate how valuable our confidence, the confidence that we have in our system of justice is. Because once that confidence is gone, then people have lost respect for our laws, for our courts and everything� and the knees kind of get knocked out from something that�s very important. Well, that confidence is being weakened now too. So when you see that, in fact, in LA and New York, there are police forces all over the place that have been corrupted, and that there�s a conference being devoted to the corruption of the CIA and its complicity in cocaine dealing, does that clarify anything in your mind? Because you might have generated your own suspicions about what may or may not be going on in your own little bubble, but now that you come out and see that it�s not only in Arkansas and that there are all these people who are whistle blowers and DEA agents and FBI agents and Michael Ruppert and so on� Well what a lot of people are trying to do now� I think what is happening is, thanks to the internet, people are being able to connect a lot of the dots with a lot of information that could not have been brought together before. Had something like this happened 50 years ago, we might have been pretty isolated with our story in Arkansas, and maybe no one would ever know about it. But at this point, what we have is�as someone said today at the symposium�we all have pieces of the pie. We may not be able to put them all together to get the whole pie, but we are able for the first time to put a lot of pieces together. And that raises bigger questions. Was what happened in Arkansas related directly to the events that took place in relatively the same time period, with cocaine, involving the CIA in Central America, out in California? Did these people know each other? Did they not? And one of the conclusions that I think a lot of us are coming to is that this was a multi-million dollar, billion-dollar business. When you get to that level, most of the people in any kind of field know each other. Who else is playing at that kind of level? Who are the leaders? And who are the big players? So I figure that there probably was at least an awareness of what was going on. And there�s more that we don�t know, that�s yet to be developed. When the average person tells someone, "Did you know that Mena, Arkansas, and essentially Little Rock, its neighbor, were the major drug centers? And that Bill Clinton could have been involved in that, and that this might or might not have helped fuel his rise to power." Most people would say that�s absurd. Bill Clinton is a pervert, for sure, because the media told us that and we confirmed it time and time again. But drugs? The average person would say that that�s a conspiracy theory. So what would you say to that person, having been on the frontline of this quest for information? I would say that we have no information that Bill Clinton was involved in running drugs. That is just not anything I�ve ever heard, or that there�s anything to establish that. The CIA on the other hand - yes, we do know that. And now we�re in the efforts of trying to figure out to what extent. As I said, I wish that Bill Clinton were being helpful about releasing what information is known about it, but I think most people, to this point still, are very leery of anything that smacks of conspiracy theories. I think that�s what the White House spokesman Mark Fabiani was trying to tap into when he said that Mena represents the darkest backwater of right wing conspiracy theories - that this is way off limits� that this is way far over-the-edge kind of stuff. And so what a lot of us here are trying to do is say: no it�s not. We have records that there is a lot of very sound information. What I�ve done and put on my website is posting FBI records on Barry Seal who was running out of Mena, where they say: major international narcotics smuggler. Yes and we�re watching him. No, he�s not in prison. Well why not? These kinds of questions. And I think that consciousness is slowly beginning to rise. The level of government involvement... And frankly I think it predates - it goes way back from before Clinton ever was involved with the federal government. I mean he�s only been President for eight years now and this was going on long before he had anything to do with it or before he was governor of Arkansas. But awareness of that and the scale of it, is beginning to spread. Do you think the CIA is worried that people like us are convening� that there are websites out there that are devoted to this stuff and that there are people like us, who are documenting this stuff� I think the CIA should be worried. And do you think that there is any conscientious attempt to suppress this information, or our ability to network in any way? Do you think that there�s any action being taken behind closed doors to further ensconce this in mystery or to mislead people? The CIA operates in secrecy, first of all. We can�t even find out what their budget is, let alone who gets paid how much. So the very cloak of secrecy that surrounds it makes speculation easy. But its own history of dealing in disinformation and trying to thwart anything that seems ready to get in its way - I think would lead anybody who�s got any familiarity with the CIA to think that it�s not above dirty tricks. And at any time have you yourself been afraid of treading these waters and publishing a book that is controversial by some standards? For my part, I�ve published what I�ve learned so continuously over the years, and I�ve been kind of identified with this story in a lot of ways that I�ve thought that it would be pretty stupid to do anything to me because that would just kind of inflame suspicion. But it has been very interesting to me that, everywhere I have ever spoken about this� everywhere that I have had a book signing� any time I have been talking about this subject, invariably, I am asked, was I afraid? Have I been afraid? Have I received threats? And what that tells me is that people in this country and in our state in particular are aware that, yes, we�re in the land of the free and the home of the brave, but there is risk involved in looking too closely at certain things. There may be evidence to support it all over the place, but there is an intimidation factor at work here that is very severe. And in fact while the grand jury was looking into the deaths of these two boys, six other people were murdered in that immediate area, who had been called to testify before the grand jury or who had already testified. The level of fear in that one county about getting involved, saying what you knew, coming forward with information, was so intense that people in that area in particular became literally frightened for their lives if they knew something. And I think that while that undoubtedly is a very extreme example, something - some version of that, is afoot in the whole country. People are afraid. At the very least, they are afraid that the IRS is going to come in and look at their taxes. They�ll get audited. Who needs to invite that kind of trouble? Who needs to invite it by poking into the CIA�s business? Or by asking the FBI why they won�t release records that they�re required by law to release? Ask the FBI why they�ve been lying about records they already have. Who wants to go spit in the wind and tug on Superman�s cape like that? And yet more and more people are willing to do it� And so as the suspicion among regular people in this country rises and rises, more suspicious things happen, and more books like yours get published, and more people around suspicious obstructions of justice get mysteriously killed, what fate does this country face? What�s going to happen? How is this going to� Play out? Yeah, in your opinion. Well I think that we�re going to reach a fork in the road. We are going to either get to a point where we confront what happened and become educated or aware�I see a lot of that happening. And then we stand up and say, "This is a democracy. We�re in charge here, not you guys!" and demand the records that are ours (because we paid for them) and bring about a turn around in the laws and a greater level of justice. Or we will kind of meekly go along and allow ourselves to be treated this way, with more and more people being put in prisons, and more and more corruption. And if that happens, I�ll be heartbroken. Everybody here today will be heartbroken. And it will be a terrible tragedy. But I continue to hope. I think that the amount of activity, the amount of interest in these stories on the internet, the awareness that�s coming is very heartening. A lot of people are getting informed. Do these people have any morals any scruples, the people who are behind this, you know, this whole war on drugs, which many people at the conference have said is really a war for drugs, a war to justify to the American people why they�re spending so many tax dollars, to let people say oh okay keep spending it. Is the war on drugs a sham? Yeah, I think that the war on drugs is a sham. As I�ve said, I think that there were probably some people who supported it who thought this was a really good way to protect people. And I also believe there were a lot of people who have gotten into it because there is a lot of money. There are billions of dollars in illegal drugs that would evaporate immediately if these drugs were legalized. And so, to perpetuate a black market and all of the wealth that goes with it, I think there�s a very cynical and dastardly aspect to it. And so, is there anything that we can do? Yeah. Everybody has got to get up to speed on what�s happening. Everybody has got to start going to the library and going to the websites that have information about this. Search �CIA and drugs� in your computers. Look around and become familiar with as much of this story�there�s a story in your neighborhood! Wherever you are in this country, there are drug-related stories that all lead in the same direction, which is that things are not working out the way that the drug warriors told us they were going to. For one thing, they told us that this war would end, and instead we have evermore escalation of it. People have to wake up, get alert, pay attention and find out about it. And I think that as soon as that happens, you know what the next step is. Just like everybody who�s come here. We didn�t know when we began asking questions that eventually we�d be in LA and we�d be talking about this all day. We didn�t even know each other. One step leads to another�. In effect the next stage I think, maybe, for my generation, is to evolve into a culture of muckrakers, you know? Talk about that a bit if you can� A culture of muckrakers sounds great to me. In fact one of my big disappointments is that my own profession�I�m a journalist�and I think that journalists have dropped the ball tragically on this. A lot of them are just indifferent. It�s a hard story to get and so a lot of journalists just haven�t worked very hard at it. And I think it�s an important big nasty story and there are so many others that are a little more glamorous. But yeah, I think that sort of freelance muckrakers, individual people� Basically it all comes down to us. We can read the paper, but even when we�re reading the paper we have got to have our own senses going. Say: do I believe this or not? Ask other questions. We all have to be reporters to ourselves, in a way. We have to be paying attention, asking the next question, reading and being informed, and when things don�t make sense, we have got to challenge them. We have got to do the follow-up. So I think that a generation of muckrakers� I really believe that just asking the next question and pushing for an explanation that makes sense, and not accepting bullshit for an answer� Once you begin to do that, all the rest becomes obvious, you know, what the next thing to do is, whatever it might be. And it�s going to be different for everybody. Everybody�s got a different role to play in this. But it becomes obvious once you become awake. And so is there any particular event that might create this awakened state? Do we need an event? Do we need a war, do we need a conspiracy theory to break, do we need something for this to happen? Certainly, there could be some kind of major event. People don�t know what to do. They don�t know how they can be involved. I�m not a journalist. Me telling this story to my buddy on the golf course, that�s not going to do anything except make someone think I�m a quack. How do people benefit from the truth at the outset? Well, I can tell you that ten years ago, I started going around to little lunch-time JC meetings and rotary clubs and talking� and I had that entr�e because I was a reporter and had a certain expertise in some areas. But I�d start talking about the war on drugs and I�d say, you know, it�s not working, it�s not going to work. All this jail building that we�re doing - it�s going to collapse eventually. We cannot afford to sustain the path we�re on. And those were such outrageous words to say to these conservative groups of men, you know, suits at lunch. I really thought at times that I was going to get mashed potatoes thrown in my face. But it�s not that way anymore. Now what I hear is men turning to each other at lunch at these kinds of settings saying, "Yeah you know she�s got a point there," and "There was that situation down the road," and they�re comparing notes. Well now that doesn�t sound like much, you know - just one guy turning to the next guy at the table and saying, "You know, I kind of agree, it may not be working." But how else does a population change its mind? It�s one by one by one. One person you say, on the golf course, turning to someone they�re playing golf with. I think at the beginning, everyone who had these thoughts thought, "well I�m the only one who�s thinking this" and so they felt very afraid to come out and say it or they�d get ridiculed. I�ve had people who I know respect me say, "you�re a really fine reporter, I just wish you wouldn�t go into these conspiracy theories so much." Well, I think it�s because I�m a fine reporter that I end up looking at these things in the way that I do. But nobody wants to be ridiculed. If you can just say to somebody else, well hey, I think this, and kind of take that little bit of a risk, you have no idea what a big thing that is. Now all of a sudden maybe they�ll surprise you and say, I couldn�t agree more. And a movement is begun. So when you started publishing articles in the Arkansas Gazette around this topic, did you ever get any pressure from editors to lay off or tone it down? No. I only got mild comments. And I really think it was because I have always been very careful about facts. You know, people think this is wild stuff, but no one has come along and undercut my information. Nobody has been able to say that it didn�t ever happen. And so I�ve got credentials. Somebody can kind of roll their eyes at me but they publish it. I have not had any trouble being published. It seems like that�s the common tendency. People all over this conference have said that they don�t have any people who contest them. They say what they say. It�s way out there, it�s wacky to some, it�s right on to others, and the people to whom it�s wacky and the people to whom it incriminates, those people don�t come forward� Who�s standing up? That�s right. That�s right. And maybe, you know, maybe they�d make some kind of case that it�s so much in the nation�s interest that they wouldn�t do that. These are very serious allegations that are being leveled and they go to the heart of our nation. And if all of the people who have spoken today, telling their own piece of what they have been able to assemble have been wrong, somebody needs to shut us up. Somebody needs to challenge us. And as I said: debunk me! If I am really wrong in these things that I�ve been writing and these other people are wrong. Well, indeed, it�s important. Whoever knows the truth, come out and say it! But that�s our whole point. We do have a Freedom of Information Act and there is a time limit on how quickly the government is supposed to act� and they�re years past the deadline. They�re denying that they have records and then they do have records. So we are justifiably suspicious, I think. Is there anything that you want to say to people, as an expert on this and as someone who has put a lot of time and care and thought and energy into trying to find out the truth? After I wrote the book and it came out, the reaction that I received in Arkansas has been that people are so glad that somebody has written this, because there has been an awareness of the story. A lot of people know their own bits and pieces of the story. And it has kind of been a violation of their own intelligence, of the way that they know things are, that they�ve been asked to swallow something that made no sense. And so it�s been kind of gratifying for them to hear the truth, or to read the truth laid out as it has been in this book, and it empowers people. And I think what we find is that every little bit of truth we get our hands on and share with someone else is a very powerful thing. And that�s really what we�ve got. We can be brave, and we have to be brave. The woman I write about in the book, Linda Ives, the mother of one of the boys who was killed has just been persistent in demanding answers. And I think that she�s a model for the situation that our country is in and that all of us individually are in right now. We�ve just got to do the same thing - just demand answers, and not take nonsense for the truth. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send your FREE holiday greetings online! http://greetings.yahoo.com <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. 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