Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga led a brutal drug gang that ferried tons of cocaine
north. Then he approached the Drug Enforcement Administration for a deal.

TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS — The number of murders the Honduran drug lord admitted to orchestrating over 10 years was stunning.

The dead included people he described as killers, rapists and gang members. Then there were the innocents: a lawyer, two journalists, a Honduran refugee in Canada, an official who was serving as Honduras’s antidrug czar and a politician who became his adviser; there were even two children caught in a shootout.

In all, the drug lord, Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, said that, working in concert with drug traffickers and others, he had “caused” the deaths of 78 people — a number that posed a dilemma for United States officials when Mr. Rivera came to them offering to expose high-level corruption in this Central American nation of some nine million people.

Knowing that he was already in the sights of United States investigators, Mr. Rivera sought to help the Drug Enforcement Administration root out corrupt Honduran politicians and other elites who had made Honduras a gateway for massive amounts of cocaine headed for the United States through Mexico.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/world/americas/after-78-killings-a-honduran-drug-lord-rivera-partners-with-us.html?

The reputations of Willie Falcon and Sal Magluta as legendary cocaine cowboys precede them everywhere.

What’s not well known about the duo who dropped out of high school and became the Colombian cartels’ go-to smugglers is this: In the mid-1990s at the peak of the Miami Vice era, they donated substantial drug-trafficking profits to Cuban exile paramilitary groups aiming to kill Fidel Castro, according to former law enforcement sources and people with knowledge of their donations.

While Magluta is serving a 195-year sentence in prison after being convicted on drug-related charges, Falcon is facing a U.S. deportation order to Cuba after completing a 20-year sentence in June on a money-laundering plea agreement. Ever since, he has been detained in a Louisiana immigration facility.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article176248426.html

Lars Schall: 70 years ago, on September 18, 1947, the National Security Act created the Central Intelligence Agency, CIA. Douglas, you refer to the CIA as “the organized crime branch of the U.S. government.” Why so?

Douglas Valentine: Everything the CIA does is illegal, which is why the government provides it with an impenetrable cloak of secrecy. While mythographers in the information industry portray America as a bastion of peace and democracy, CIA officers manage criminal organizations around the world. For example, the CIA hired one of America’s premier drug trafficker in the 1950s and 1960s, Santo Trafficante, to murder Fidel Castro. In exchange, the CIA allowed Trafficante to import tons of narcotics into America. The CIA sets up proprietary arms, shipping, and banking companies to facilitate the criminal drug trafficking organizations that do its dirty work. Mafia money gets mixed up in offshore banks with CIA money, until the two are indistinguishable.

Drug trafficking is just one example.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/09/22/the-cia-70-years-of-organized-crime/

https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0997287012/counterpunchmaga

Is American Made CIA Propaganda? from Tom Secker on Vimeo.

For all those pundits out there who were concerned that Trump wasn't "Presidential" enough to actually be President, I have some great news for you! This past week Trump wiped out any such fear by doing the most presidential thing that can possibly be imagined: Continuing the never-ending war in Afghanistan!

That's right, the longest war in the history of the United States is not coming to an end any time soon. And just in case you were still operating under the delusion that the current puppet figurehead was any different at all from any of the stuffed shirts who previously occupied the Oval Office, Trump is even copying Obama's failed 2009 "surge" strategy to keep the whole charade going for another 4 (or 8 or 12 or 200) years.

https://steemit.com/news/@corbettreport/trump-continues-the-never-ending-afghan-opium-war

This piece has been adapted and expanded from the introduction to Alfred W. McCoy's new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.

In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of its intelligence infrastructure, particularly of the emerging technologies for digital surveillance, agile drones, and biometric identification. In 2010, almost a decade into this secret war with its voracious appetite for information, the Washington Post reported that the national security state had swelled into a "fourth branch" of the federal government -- with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security organizations, and over 3,000 intelligence units, issuing 50,000 special reports every year.

Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed the visible surface of what had become history's largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus. According to classified documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, the nation's 16 intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined "black budget" of $52.6 billion, the equivalent of 10% percent of the vast defense budget.

By sweeping the skies and probing the worldwide web's undersea cables, the National Security Agency (NSA) could surgically penetrate the confidential communications of just about any leader on the planet, while simultaneously sweeping up billions of ordinary messages. For its classified missions, the CIA had access to the Pentagon's Special Operations Command, with 69,000 elite troops (Rangers, SEALs, Air Commandos) and their agile arsenal. In addition to this formidable paramilitary capacity, the CIA operated 30 Predator and Reaper drones responsible for more than 3,000 deaths in Pakistan and Yemen.

While Americans practiced a collective form of duck and cover as the Department of Homeland Security's colored alerts pulsed nervously from yellow to red, few paused to ask the hard question: Was all this security really directed solely at enemies beyond our borders? After half a century of domestic security abuses -- from the "red scare" of the 1920s through the FBI's illegal harassment of antiwar protesters in the 1960s and 1970s -- could we really be confident that there wasn't a hidden cost to all these secret measures right here at home? Maybe, just maybe, all this security wasn't really so benign when it came to us.

From my own personal experience over the past half-century, and my family's history over three generations, I've found out in the most personal way possible that there's a real cost to entrusting our civil liberties to the discretion of secret agencies. Let me share just a few of my own "war" stories to explain how I've been forced to keep learning and relearning this uncomfortable lesson the hard way.

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/41724-exploring-the-shadows-of-the-us-security-state-how-i-learned-not-to-love-big-brother

There were 189,000 heroin users in the US in 2001, before the US-NATO invasion of Afghanistan. By 2016 that number went up to 4,500,000 (2.5 million heroin addicts and 2 million casual users).Heroin deaths shot up from 1,779 in 2001 to 10,574 in 2014 as Afghan opium poppy fields metastasized from 7,600 hectares in 2001 (when the US-NATO War in Afghanistan began) to 224,000 hectares in 2016. (One hectare equals approximately 2.5 acres). Ironically, the so-called US eradication operation in Afghanistan has cost an estimated $8.5 billion in American taxpayer funds since the US-NATO-Afghan war started in October 2001.

Interestingly, while the mainstream and pseudo-alternative media outlets keep playing up drugs from Mexico, we hardly hear a peep on the massive amount of Afghan-sourced heroin. To put it in perspective: In 2014, according to the DEA drug threat assessment, Mexico produced an estimated 42 metric tons of heroin. Afghanistan produced 6,400 metric tons of opium that same year. The largest share of US heroin is Afghanistan-sourced. It is coming from US-occupied Afghanistan. There is no other mathematical possibility:

https://www.newsbud.com/2017/08/21/newsbud-exclusive-nato-cia-pentagon-junction-of-the-real-druglords-warlords_/

For over a decade, agents with a New Orleans-based DEA task force sold drugs, intimidated informants and stole cash on the job with total impunity.

According to the Advocate, Chad Scott, the former leader of the task force has been fired in the midst of the investigation. It was reported that Scott and some of the officers working under him had a massive operation selling painkillers and that they would sometimes sell other drugs that they managed to steal from dealers during raids.

“There were a series of complaints that went back years. This is a guy who probably shouldn’t have been allowed to run his own task force,” an anonymous law enforcement official said.

The good news, in this case, is that a large and growing number of federal criminal drug cases are being reversed and nonviolent offenders are being set free due to the fact that this corruption has been exposed.

The FBI is now involved in the investigation and is reviewing the allegations against the officers. Many of the crimes that were committed by these officers happened so long ago that they can’t even be charged with them anymore, but their crime spree continued long into recent times so there is still a large amount of evidence against them.

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/dea-ignored-agents-selling-drugs-for-over-a-decade/

There's a great moment in the new History channel miniseries, America's War on Drugs, when a former DEA agent named Celerino Castillo explains why America's crusade to purge drugs from the world is doomed to fail: "America is more addicted to drug money than they are addicted to drugs."

After risking his life going undercover in the 1980s, Castillo had been disillusioned – quite a few different times – to discover that the CIA couldn't care less about stemming the flow of cocaine from Latin America. In fact, the agency ignored the Contras' drug smuggling. The cocaine moved by the guerrillas made its way to America's inner cities as crack, fueling an epidemic of addiction and mass incarceration that has helped make America the number one jailer in the world. When San Jose Mercury reporter Gary Webb broke that story, he was maligned as a conspiracy theorist and fired. Webb eventually killed himself.

Unearthing these kinds of dizzying links in the global drug trade is the driving force behind the eight-hour, four-night event, which premieres this Sunday, June 18th. Using historic footage, dramatic re-enactments and interviews with a cast of fascinating characters – including former CIA and DEA agents, drug traffickers and gang members – the series makes the case that the drug trade has always been entwined in America's military adventures: all the way from the CIA's secret experiments with LSD in the early Cold War, to opium production in Afghanistan during the War on Terror. "We really wanted to do an epic look at the secret history of the war on drugs in America and tell this much bigger story," says Anthony Lappé, who produced the four-part series along with Julian Hobbs and Elli Hakami . "It's almost like the secret history of the last 50 years."

http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/features/americas-war-on-drugs-inside-engrossing-new-series-w487917

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) investigations into CIA-linked illegal activities are often stymied - a process well documented in files discussing the GAO’s attempt to investigate General Noriega’s ties to drug trafficking, and what the Intelligence Community knew, and when. Documents previously leaked to the Washington Post have now been declassified, confirming the Post’s reporting and providing new details about how CIA blocked all of GAO’s audits touching on any subject which required oversight.

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2017/may/31/noriega-CIA-GAO/

The notorious cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar worked closely with the CIA, according to his son. In this episode of The Geopolitical Report, we look at the long history of CIA involvement in the international narcotics trade, beginning with its collaboration with the French Mafia to using drug money to illegally fund the Contras and overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. We also look at how drug profits are used to float Wall Street and the role big banks play in laundering huge amounts of illicit drug profits.

http://www.newsbud.com/2017/03/06/drug-boss-escobar-worked-for-the-cia/

Did Pablo Escobar work for the CIA? The question is nothing new for conspiracy theorists who have long argued that the United States government’s War on Drugs was actually a cover-up of its efforts to get in on the action, and a new memoir from an individual with a front row seat lends even more fodder to those suspicions.

In his new memoir, Pablo Escobar In Fraganti: What My Father Never Told Me, the iconic drug trafficker’s son shares these interactions to shed light on the man behind the legend, with one particular detail pushed to the headlines: Marroquín alleges that the CIA was closely associated with his father’s business, according to an exclusive interview with Infobae.

http://www.inquisitr.com/3995210/did-pablo-escobar-work-for-the-cia-u-s-media-quiet-as-sons-memoir-says-yes/

Juan Pablo Escobar Henao, son of notorious Medellín cartel drug kingpin, Pablo Escobar, now says his father “worked for the CIA.”

In a new book, “Pablo Escobar In Fraganti,” Escobar, who lives under the pseudonym, Juan Sebastián Marroquín, explains his “father worked for the CIA selling cocaine to finance the fight against Communism in Central America.”
“The drug business is very different than what we dreamed,” he continues. “What the CIA was doing was buying the controls to get the drug into their country and getting a wonderful deal.”

“He did not make the money alone,” Marroquín elaborated in an interview, “but with US agencies that allowed him access to this money. He had direct relations with the CIA.”

Notably, Marroquín added, “the person who sold the most drugs to the CIA was Pablo Escobar.”

Where his first book primarily covered Escobar, the man as a father, Marroquín’s second — which has just been released in Argentina — delves into the kingpin’s “international ties of corruption in which my father had an active participation, among them with the American CIA,” he said in a recent interview.
Those government associates “were practically his partners,” which allowed Escobar to defy the law, and gave him nearly the same power as a government.

Predictably, this information is conveniently absent from media headlines in America.

Read more at http://thefreethoughtproject.com/escobar-son-cia-cocaine/#FRsBbzQ9yuYEvbyE.99

The Department of Justice on Monday announced the indictment of six current and former TSA Officers in Puerto Rico, along with another half dozen other individuals, on charges related to a scheme to smuggle more than 20 tons of cocaine through airports over nearly 20-years.

According to a DOJ press release, the defendants were part of a scheme that helped transport more than 20 tons of cocaine though the Luis Muñoz Marín International Airport from 1998 through 2016. The defendants are accused of allowing “drug mules” to check suitcases containing between 8 – 15 kilograms of cocaine through security gates in order to transport the cocaine.

The current and former TSA defendants (“TSA defendants”) are accused of smuggling multi-kilogram quantities of cocaine while acting as TSA Officers employed at the San Juan airport. Their duties called from them to conduct security and baggage screenings on outbound flights leaving the airport. They are accused of pushing the luggage through the security screenings and onto outbound flights without detection, despite knowing they contained multiple kilograms of cocaine.

http://lawnewz.com/high-profile/tsa-officers-charged-in-scheme-to-smuggle-20-tons-of-cocaine-through-airport/

Billions of dollars from the illegal drug business was the only thing that kept the global financial system from collapsing at the height of the banking crisis just over a year ago, according to the head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

"In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital," Antonio Maria Costa said. "In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor."

Read full article »»

Noriega had a unique status in the American penitentiary system, where he was the first foreign head of state to be convicted and the only official prisoner of war.

He fought to avoid extradition to France, seeking instead a return to Panama even though he faces a 54-year jail sentence there for his role in the murder of political opponents during his time in power between 1981 and 1989.

But in January, the US Supreme Court refused to hear his appeal against extradition, paving the way for a trial in France.

Despite his brutality and despotic tactics, Noriega was protected by the US for much of his military and political career as a Cold War ally.

Read full article »»