by
Michael C. Ruppert
Extracted from Nexus Magazine, Volume
8, Number 2
February-March 2001
from
NexusMagazine Website
The Bush
family’s involvement in drug-running is an open secret,
but Dick Cheney’s direct link to a global drug pipeline
through a US construction company is less well known
This article is reprinted
with permission from author Mike Ruppert,
Editor/Publisher of From The Wilderness newsletter.
It first appeared in the
October 2000 issue (vol. III, no. 8).
From The Wilderness describes itself as "a nonpartisan,
non-sectarian map from the here that is, into the
tomorrow of our own making". |
FROM MEDELLIN
TO MOSCOW WITH BROWN & ROOT
Halliburton Corporation’s
Brown & Root is one of the major components of the Bush-Cheney Drug
Empire. The success of Bush Vice-Presidential running mate Richard
Cheney at leading Halliburton, Inc. to a five-year, US$3.8 billion
"pig-out" on federal contracts and taxpayer-insured loans is only a
partial indicator of what may happen, now that the Bush ticket has
won the US presidential election.
A closer look at available research, including an August 2, 2000
report by the Center for Public Integrity (CPI) (www.public-i.org),
suggests that drug money has played a role in the successes achieved
by Halliburton under Cheney’s tenure as CEO from 1995 to 2000. This
is especially true for Halliburton’s most famous subsidiary, heavy
construction and oil giant Brown & Root. A deeper look into history
reveals that Brown & Root’s past - as well as the past of Dick
Cheney himself - connects to the international drug trade on more
than one occasion and in more than one way.
Last June, the lead Washington, DC, attorney for a major Russian oil
company connected in law enforcement reports to heroin smuggling,
and also a beneficiary of US-backed loans to pay for Brown & Root
contracts in Russia, held a $2.2 million fundraiser to fill the
already bulging coffers of presidential candidate George W. Bush.
This is not the first time that Brown & Root has been connected to
illegal drugs, and the fact is that this "poster child" of American
industry may also be a key player in Wall Street’s efforts to
maintain domination of the half-trillion-dollar-a-year global drug
trade and its profits. And Dick Cheney, who has also come closer to
illegal drugs than most suspect and who is also Halliburton’s
largest individual shareholder ($45.5 million), has a vested
interest in seeing to it that Brown & Root’s successes continue.
Of all the American companies dealing directly with the US military
and providing cover for CIA operations, few firms can match the
global presence of this giant construction powerhouse which employs
20,000 people in more than 100 countries. Through its sister
companies or joint ventures, Brown & Root can build offshore oil
rigs, drill wells and construct and operate everything from harbours
and pipelines to highways and nuclear reactors. It can train and arm
security forces and it can now also feed, supply and house armies.
One key beacon of Brown & Root’s overwhelming appeal to agencies
like the CIA is that, as it proudly announces from
its own corporate
web page, it has received the contract to dismantle ageing Russian
nuclear-tipped ICBMs in their silos. Furthermore, the relationships
between key institutions, players and the Bushes themselves suggest
that under a George "W" Administration the Bush family and its
allies, using Brown & Root as the operational interface, may well be
able to control the drug trade all the way from Medellín to
Moscow.
Originally formed as a heavy construction company to build dams,
Brown & Root grew its operations via shrewd political contributions
to Senate candidate Lyndon Johnson in 1948. Expanding into the
building of oil platforms, military bases, ports, nuclear
facilities, harbours and tunnels, Brown & Root virtually underwrote
LBJ’s political career. It prospered as a result, making billions on
US Government contracts during the Vietnam War.
The Austin
Chronicle, in an August 28, 2000 Op-Ed piece entitled "The Candidate
from Brown & Root", labels Republican Cheney as the political
dispenser of Brown & Root’s largesse. According to political
campaign records, during Cheney’s five-year tenure at Halliburton
the company’s political contributions more than doubled to $1.2
million. Not surprisingly, most of that money went to Republican
candidates.
Independent news service
Newsmakingnews also describes how in 1998,
with Cheney as Chairman, Halliburton spent $8.1 billion to purchase
oil industry equipment and drilling supplier Dresser Industries.
This made Halliburton a corporation that will have a presence in
almost any future oil drilling operation anywhere in the world.
And
it also brought back into the family fold the company which had once
(also in 1948) sent a plane to fetch the new Yale graduate George H.W. Bush to begin his career in the Texas oil business. Bush the
elder’s father, Prescott, served as a managing director for the firm
that once owned Dresser: Brown Brothers Harriman.
BROWN & ROOT’S
SPECIAL OPERATIONS
It is clear that everywhere there is oil there is Brown & Root. But
increasingly, everywhere there is war or insurrection there is Brown
& Root also. From Bosnia and Kosovo to Chechnya, Rwanda, Burma,
Pakistan, Laos, Vietnam, Indonesia, Iran, Libya, Mexico and
Colombia, Brown & Root’s traditional operations have expanded from
heavy construction to include the provision of logistical support
for the US military. Now, instead of US Army quartermasters, the
world is likely to see Brown & Root warehouses storing and managing
everything from uniforms and rations to vehicles.
Dramatic expansion of Brown & Root’s operations in Colombia also
suggests Bush preparations for a war-inspired feeding frenzy as a
part of "Plan Colombia". This is consistent with moves by former
Bush Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady to open a joint
Colombian-American investment partnership called Corfinsura for the
financing of major construction projects with the Colombian Antioquia Syndicate, headquartered in Medellín (see FTW, June 2000).
And expectations of a ground war in Colombia may explain why Brown &
Root, in a 2000 Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) filing,
reported that in addition to owning more than 800,000 square feet of
warehouse space in Colombia, it also leases another 122,000 square
feet. According to the Brown & Root Energy Services Group filing,
the only other places where the company maintains warehouse space
are in Mexico (525,000 square feet) and the United States (38,000
square feet).
According to the website of
Colombia’s Foreign Investment Promotion
Agency, Brown & Root had no presence in the country until 1997. What
does Brown & Root - which according to Associated Press (AP) has
made more than $2 billion supporting and supplying US troops - know
about Colombia that the United States public does not? Why the need
for almost a million square feet of warehouse space which can be
transferred from one Brown & Root operation (energy services) to
another (military support) with the stroke of a pen?
As described by AP, during the "Iran-Contra" era Congressman
Dick
Cheney of the House Intelligence Committee was a rabid supporter of
Marine Lt Col. Oliver North. This was in spite of the fact that
North had lied to Cheney in a private 1986 White House briefing.
Oliver North’s own diaries and subsequent investigations by the CIA
Inspector-General have irrevocably tied him directly to cocaine
smuggling during the 1980s and the opening of bank accounts for one
firm moving four tons of cocaine a month. This, however, did not
stop Cheney from actively supporting North’s (unsuccessful) 1994 run
for the US Senate from Virginia - just a year before he took over
the reins at Brown & Root’s parent company, Dallas-based
Halliburton, Inc., in 1995.
As the Bush Secretary of Defense during Desert Shield/Desert Storm
(1990-91), Cheney also directed special operations involving Kurdish
rebels in northern Iran. The Kurds’ primary source of income for
more than 50 years has been heroin smuggling from Afghanistan and
Pakistan through Iran, Iraq and Turkey.
Having had some personal experience with Brown & Root, I noted
carefully when the Los Angeles Times observed that on March 22, 1991
a group of gunmen burst into the Ankara, Turkey, offices of joint
venture
Vinnell, Brown & Root and assassinated retired Air Force
Chief Master Sergeant John Gandy.
In March 1991, tens of thousands of Kurdish refugees, long-time
assets of the CIA, were being massacred by Saddam Hussein in the
wake of the Gulf War. Saddam, seeking to destroy any hopes of a
successful Kurdish revolt, found it easy to kill thousands of the
unwanted Kurds who had fled to the Turkish border seeking sanctuary.
There, Turkish security forces - trained in part by the Vinnell,
Brown & Root partnership - turned thousands of Kurds back into
certain death.
Today, the
Vinnell Corporation (a TRW company) is one of the three
pre-eminent private mercenary corporations in the world, along with
the firms MPRI and DynCorp (see FTW, June 2000). It is also the
dominant entity for the training of security forces throughout the
Middle East.
Not surprisingly, the Turkish border regions in question were the
primary transshipment points for heroin produced in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, destined for the markets of Europe.
A confidential source with intelligence experience in the region
subsequently told me that the Kurds "got some payback against the
folks that used to help them move their drugs". He openly
acknowledged that Brown & Root and the Vinnell Corporation both
routinely provided NOC (non-official cover) for CIA officers. But I
already knew that.
From 1994 to 1999, during US military intervention in the Balkans -
where, according to The Christian Science Monitor and Jane’s
Intelligence Review, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) controls 70
per cent of the heroin entering Western Europe - Cheney’s
Brown &
Root made billions of dollars supplying US troops from vast
facilities in the region. Brown & Root support operations continue
in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia to this day.
Dick Cheney’s footprints have come closer to drugs than one might
suspect. The Center for Public Integrity’s August 2000 report
brought them even closer. It would be correct to say that there is a
direct linkage of Brown & Root facilities - often set up in remote,
hazardous regions - with every drug-producing region and every
drug-consuming region in the world. These coincidences, in and of
themselves, do not prove complicity in the trade. Other facts,
however, lead inescapably in that direction.
A DIRECT
DRUG LINK TO DICK CHENEY
The CPI report entitled "Cheney Led Halliburton to Feast at Federal
Trough", written by veteran journalists Knut Royce and
Nathaniel
Heller, describes how, under five years of Cheney’s leadership,
Halliburton, largely through subsidiary Brown & Root, enjoyed $3.8
billion in federal contracts and taxpayer- insured loans. The loans
had been granted by the Export-Import Bank (EXIM) and the Overseas
Private Investment Corporation (OPIC). According to Ralph McGehee’s
CIA Base, both institutions are heavily infiltrated by the CIA and
routinely provide NOC to its officers.
One of those loans, to Russian financial/banking conglomerate The
Alfa Group of Companies, contained $292 million to pay for Brown &
Root’s contract to refurbish a Siberian oil field owned by the
Russian Tyumen Oil Company. The Alfa Group completed its 51 per cent
acquisition of Tyumen Oil in what was allegedly a rigged bidding
process in 1998.
An official Russian Government report claims that
The Alfa Group’s top executives, oligarchs Mikhail Fridman and
Pyotr
Aven, "allegedly participated in the transit of drugs from Southeast
Asia through Russia and into Europe". These same executives, Fridman
and Aven, who reportedly smuggled the heroin in connection with
Russia’s Solntsevo mob family, were the same ones who applied for
the EXIM loans that Halliburton’s lobbying later safely secured. As
a result, Brown & Root’s work in Alfa Tyumen oil fields could
continue - and expand.
After describing how organized criminal interests in The Alfa Group
had allegedly stolen the oil field by fraud, the CPI story - using
official reports from the FSB (the Russian equivalent of the
FBI),
oil companies such as BP-Amoco, former CIA and KGB officers and
press accounts - then established a solid link to Alfa Tyumen and
the transportation of heroin.
In 1995, sacks of heroin disguised as
sugar had been stolen from a rail container leased by Alfa Eko and
sold in the Siberian town of Khabarovsk. A problem arose when many
residents of the town became "intoxicated" or "poisoned".
The CPI story also stated:
"The FSB report said that within days of
the incident, Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD) agents conducted
raids of Alfa Eko buildings and found ’drugs and other compromising
documentation’.
"Both reports claim that Alfa Bank
has laundered drug funds from Russian and Colombian drug
cartels.
"The FSB document claims that at the end of 1993, a top Alfa
official met with Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, the now
imprisoned financial mastermind of Colombia’s notorious Cali
cartel, ’to conclude an agreement about the transfer of money
into the Alfa Bank from offshore zones such as the Bahamas,
Gibraltar and others’. The plan was to insert it back into the
Russian economy through the purchase of stock in Russian
companies.
"...He [the former KGB agent] reported that there was evidence
’regarding [Alfa Bank’s] involvement with the money laundering
of... Latin American drug cartels’."
It then becomes harder for Cheney and
Halliburton to assert mere coincidence in all of this, as CPI
reported that Tyumen’s lead Washington attorney, James C. Langdon, Jr, at the firm of
Aikin Gump,
"...helped coordinate a $2.2 million
fundraiser for Bush this June. He then agreed to help recruit 100
lawyers and lobbyists in the capital to raise $25,000 each for W’s
campaign."
The heroin mentioned in the CPI story originated in Laos, where
longtime Bush allies and covert warriors Richard Armitage and
retired CIA ADDO (Associate Deputy Director of Operations) Ted Shackley have been repeatedly linked to the drug trade. It then made
its way across Southeast Asia to Vietnam, probably the port of
Haiphong.
Then the heroin was shipped to Russia’s Pacific port of
Vladivostok, from where it was subsequently bounced across Siberia
by rail and then by truck or rail to Europe, passing through the
hands of Russian Mafia leaders in Chechnya and Azerbaijan. Chechnya
and Azerbaijan are hotbeds of both armed conflict and oil
exploration, and Brown & Root has operations all along this route.
As described in previous issues of FTW, this long, expensive and
tortuous path was hastily established after President George Bush’s
personal envoy Richard Armitage, holding the rank of Ambassador, had
travelled to the former Soviet Union to assist it with its "economic
development" in 1989.
The obstacles, then, to a more direct,
profitable and efficient route from Afghanistan and Pakistan through
Turkey into Europe were a cohesive Yugoslavian/Serbian Government
controlling the Balkans and continuing instability in the Golden
Crescent of Pakistan/ Afghanistan. Also, there was no other way,
using heroin from the Golden Triangle (Burma, Laos and Thailand), to
deal with China and India but to go around them.
It is perhaps not by coincidence again that Cheney and Armitage
share membership in the prestigious Aspen Institute, an exclusive
bi-partisan research think-tank, and also in the US-Azerbaijan
Chamber of Commerce. In November 1999, in what may be a portent of
things to come, Armitage played the role of Secretary of Defense in
a practical exercise at the Council on Foreign Relations, of which
he and Cheney are both members.
Many of the longest-serving and best Bush apparatchiks like Richard Armitage and
CIA veteran Ted Shackley have heavy political baggage.
Since governmental power is so evenly split after the long election
as to appear contrived, it is unlikely that controversial nominees
for cabinet positions like Armitage or Shackley will be placed
before a 50-50 Senate which is unlikely to confirm them.
Armitage is
more likely to appear as a quasi-official adviser in troubled
European regions. This is similar to the roles he performed for
George Bush in 1989 in Russia and in 1992 in Albania. Armitage’s
travels presaged both the Chechen and Kosovar conflicts and the
rampant expansion of the drug trade through those regions.
DRUG
PIPELINE STREAMLINED
The Clinton Administration took care of all that wasted travel for
heroin with the 1999 destruction of Serbia and Kosovo and the
installation of the KLA as a regional power. That opened a direct
line from Afghanistan to Western Europe - and Brown & Root was right
in the middle of that, too.
The Clinton skill at streamlining drug operations was described in
detail in the April 2000 issue of FTW (From
The Wilderness Publications) in a story entitled "The
Democratic Party’s Presidential Drug Money Pipeline". That article
has since been reprinted in three countries.
The essence of the drug
economic lesson was that by growing opium in Colombia and by
smuggling both cocaine and heroin from Colombia to New York City
through the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico (a virtual straight
line), traditional smuggling routes could be shortened or even
eliminated. This reduced both risk and cost, increased profits and
eliminated competition.
FTW suspects the hand of Medellín cartel co-founder Carlos Lehder in
this process, and it is interesting to note that Lehder, released
from prison under Clinton in 1995, is now active in both the Bahamas
and South America. Lehder was known during the 1980s as "the genius
of transportation". I can well imagine Dick Cheney, having witnessed
the complete restructuring of the global drug trade in the last
eight years, going to George W. and saying, "Look, I know how we can
make it even better".
One thing is for certain. As quoted in the CPI article, one
Halliburton vice-president noted that if the Bush-Cheney ticket were
elected, "the company’s government contracts would obviously go
through the roof".
THE DARK
PAST
In July 1977, this writer, then a Los Angeles Police officer,
struggled to make sense of a world gone haywire. In a last-ditch
effort to salvage a relationship with my fiancée, Nordica Theodora
D’Orsay (Teddy), a CIA contract agent, I had travelled to New
Orleans to find her. On a hastily arranged vacation, secured with
the blessing of my commanding officer, Captain Jesse Brewer of LAPD,
I had gone on my own, unofficially, to avoid the scrutiny of LAPD’s
Organized Crime Intelligence Division (OCID).
Teddy had wanted me to join her operations from within the ranks of LAPD, starting in the late spring of 1976. I had refused to get
involved with drugs in any way, and everything she mentioned seemed
to involve either heroin or cocaine, along with the guns which she
was always moving out of the country. The Director of the CIA then
was George Herbert Walker Bush.
Although officially on staff at the LAPD Academy at the time, I had
been unofficially lent to OCID since January when Teddy, announcing
the start of a new operation planned in the fall of 1976, suddenly
disappeared. She left many people, including me, baffled and
twisting in the breeze.
The OCID detectives had been pressuring me
hard for information about her and what I knew of her activities. It
was information I could not give them. Hoping against hope that I
would find some way to understand her involvement with CIA,
LAPD,
the royal family of Iran, the Mafia and drugs, I set out alone into
eight days of Dantean revelations which have determined the course
of my life from that day to this.
Arriving in New Orleans in early July 1977, I found Teddy living in
an apartment across the river in Gretna. Equipped with scrambler
phones and night vision devices, and working from sealed communiqués
delivered by navy and air force personnel from nearby Belle Chasse
Naval Air Station, she was involved in something truly ugly.
Teddy
was arranging for large quantities of weapons to be loaded onto
ships leaving for Iran. At the same time, she was working with Mafia
associates of New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello to coordinate
the movement of service boats which were bringing large quantities
of heroin into the city.
The boats arrived at Marcello-controlled
docks, unmolested by even the New Orleans police she introduced me
to, along with divers, military men, former Green Berets and
CIA
personnel. The service boats were retrieving the heroin from oil
rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, in international waters - oil rigs built
and serviced by Brown & Root.
The guns which Teddy monitored, apparently Vietnam-era surplus AK47s
and M16s, were being loaded onto ships also owned or leased by Brown
& Root. And more than once during the eight days I spent in New
Orleans, I met and ate at restaurants with Brown & Root employees
who were boarding those ships and leaving for Iran within days.
Once, while leaving a bar and apparently having asked the wrong
question, I was shot at in an attempt to scare me off.
Disgusted and heartbroken at witnessing my fiancée and my government
smuggling drugs, I ended the relationship. Returning home to LA, I
made a clean breast and reported all the activity I had seen,
including the connections to Brown & Root, to LAPD intelligence
officers. They promptly told me that I was crazy.
Forced out of LAPD under threat of death at the end of 1978, I made
complaints to LAPD’s Internal Affairs Division and to the LA office
of the FBI under the command of FBI SAC Ted Gunderson. I and my
attorney wrote to the politicians, the Department of Justice and the
CIA, and contacted the Los Angeles Times. The FBI and the LAPD said
that I was crazy.
A 1981 two-part news story in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner
revealed that the FBI had taken Teddy into custody and then released
her before classifying their investigation without further action.
Former New Orleans Crime Commissioner Aaron Cohen told reporter
Randall Sullivan that he found my description of events perfectly
plausible after his 30 years of studying Louisiana’s organized crime
operations.
To this day, a CIA report prepared as a result of my complaint
remains classified and exempt from release, pursuant to executive
order of the President, in the interests of national security and
because it would reveal the identities of CIA agents.
On October 26, 1981, in the basement of the West Wing of the White
House, I reported on what I had seen in New Orleans to my friend and
UCLA classmate, Craig Fuller. Fuller went on to become Chief of
Staff to Vice-President Bush from 1981 to 1985.
In 1982, then UCLA political science professor Paul Jabber filled in
many of the pieces in my quest to understand what I had seen in New
Orleans. He was qualified to do so because he had served as a CIA
and State Department consultant to the Carter Administration.
Paul explained that, after a 1975 treaty between the Shah of Iran
and Saddam Hussein of Iraq, the Shah had cut off all overt military
support for Kurdish rebels fighting Saddam from the north of Iraq.
In exchange, the Shah had gained access to the Shatt al’Arab
waterway so that he could multiply his oil exports and income.
Not
wanting to lose a valuable long-term asset in the Kurds, the CIA had
then used Brown & Root - which operated in both countries and
maintained port facilities in the Persian Gulf and near Shatt
al’Arab - to rearm the Kurds. The whole operation had been financed
with heroin. Paul was matter-of-fact about it.
In 1983, Paul Jabber left UCLA to become a Vice-President of
Banker’s Trust and Chairman of the Middle East Department of the
Council on Foreign Relations.
THE
WORLD’S BIGGEST FREE ENTERPRISE
If one is courageous enough to seek an "operating system" which
theoretically explains what FTW has just described for you, one need
look no further than a fabulous two-part article published in Le
Monde Diplomatique in April 2000. The stories, focusing heavily on
drug capital, are titled "Crime, The World’s Biggest Free
Enterprise".
The brilliant and penetrating words of authors
Christian de Brie and Jean de Maillard do a better job of explaining
the actual world economic and political situation than anything I
have ever read.
De Brie writes:
"By allowing capital to flow unchecked from one end
of the world to the other, globalization and abandonment of
sovereignty have together fostered the explosive growth of an outlaw
financial market...
"It is a coherent system closely
linked to the expansion of modern capitalism and based on an
association of three partners: governments, transnational
corporations and mafias. Business is business: financial crime
is first and foremost a market, thriving and structured, ruled
by supply and demand.
"Big business complicity and political laissez faire is the only
way that large-scale organized crime can launder and recycle the
fabulous proceeds of its activities. And the transnationals need
the support of governments and the neutrality of regulatory
authorities in order to consolidate their positions, increase
their profits, withstand and crush the competition, pull off the
’deal of the century’ and finance their illicit operations.
Politicians are directly involved and their ability to intervene
depends on the backing and the funding that keep them in power.
This collusion of interests is an essential part of the world
economy, the oil that keeps the wheels of capitalism turning."
After confronting CIA Director John Deutch on world television on November 15, 1996, I was interviewed
by the staff of both the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. I
prepared written testimony for Senate Intelligence which I
submitted, although I was never called to testify. In every one of
those interviews and in my written testimony and every lecture since
that time, I have told the story of Brown & Root.
IN GOD (GOLD,
OIL, DRUGS) WE TRUST
Make no mistake about it. The United States is preparing for war.
Events immediately following the 2000 US election debacle are
ominous predictors for the Bush-Cheney Administration. While not all
of the cabinet posts are yet filled, the key posts of Treasury,
Defense, Justice and National Security Advisor point to the most
militarized oil-and-big-business-friendly administration in 35
years.
So thorough is the plan for control of the government that the son
of Secretary of State (Designate) Colin Powell, in an appointment
which has yet to receive much notice, has been appointed the new
Commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission. This is the
body which monitors and polices all commercial broadcasting in the
United States.
With Colin Powell as Secretary of State, Donald Rumsfeld as
Secretary of Defense and Dick Cheney as Vice-President, the highest
levels of the US Government now house two former Secretaries of
Defense and the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The
new National Security Advisor, Condoleeza Rice, while
African-American, has a long track record of service to Republican
administrations and also sits on the board of directors of Chevron
Oil, which has recently named an oil tanker after her. Her
lackluster operational credentials indicate that she will probably
serve as the designated messenger between Bush, Powell, Rumsfeld and
Cheney and as the African-American poster girl for coming military
adventurism.
Of special interest as this story goes to press is the strongest
rumour among my sources that current CIA Director George Tenet,
appointed to the post by President Clinton in 1997, will remain in
the new Bush Administration. Based upon this writer’s study of CIA
operations and history, this strongly suggests two things.
Firstly,
it implies that the CIA, as a non-partisan servant of Wall Street,
feels that its interests have been - and will continue to be - well
served by Tenet, who is well liked at Langley. Most importantly,
however, it suggests that there are operations, both covert and
otherwise, in motion under CIA control which are moving at a speed
and with a force that will not accept a break in rhythm for a change
in directors. Most critical among these would be the start of the
planned conflict in Colombia.
Since the advent of the atomic bomb, the United States has always
needed two kinds of enemies. On one level, it has needed a tactical
enemy that it can go out and fight in the field in a shooting war.
Since 1945, these enemies have been created and appeared as North
Korea, North Vietnam, Grenada, El Salvador, Panama, Iraq and now
Colombia. On another level, however, the US needs a strategic enemy
that will justify outrageous expenditures of capital for strategic
weapon systems like ICBMs, Trident submarines and "Star Wars"
missile defense systems.
With the new Bush Administration already contemplating a policy
change that would make Colombian rebels (as opposed to drug
traffickers) the targets of US military aid, as has been reported by
AP, there is no doubt where the next shooting war is going to be.
And with the militarized Bush cabinet making a missile
defense
shield a priority, it looks as though either China or Russia will
become the next big enemy of choice.
In the end, profitability will
decide. For the moment, the less-than-credible paper threat is from
unspecified "rogue nations". We can be certain, however, that the
shifting economic pressure plates around the world will reveal our
next demon soon enough. Halliburton is uniquely placed to profit
from either eventuality.
As it was in Vietnam, Central America and Kosovo, drugs continue to
be a huge part of the financial plan for prolonged ground wars. As
one cynic put it, "GOD" stands for "Gold, Oil and Drugs". We can be
assured that an empire (as opposed to a republic) is emerging in the
United States more quickly than many have expected.
And the Bush
Administration is already acting in a "godlike" manner. It is an
empire that may have little need of even the pretence of democracy
as American corporate fascism removes its mask in the wake of our
election circus, the prostitution of our Supreme Court and the
virtual destruction of American government as a servant of anything
other than money, greed and power.
Sources:
-
Aspen Institute,
www.aspeninst.org.
-
Associated Press, "Study: US
Could Save Cost in Balkans", October 10, 2000.
-
Associated Press, "Cheney, North
Relationship Probed", August 11, 2000.
-
Austin Chronicle, August 28,
2000.
-
"CIA Base" © 1992, Ralph McGehee.
-
CIA Inspector-General, "Report
of Investigation: Allegations of Connections Between CIA and
the Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the United States.
Volume II: The Contra Story", Report 96-0143-IG.
-
Christian Science Monitor,
October 20, 1994.
-
Council on Foreign Relations,
www.cfr.org.
-
De Brie, Christian and Jean de
Maillard, "Crime, The World’s Biggest Free Enterprise", Le
Monde Diplomatique, April 2000. Halliburton/Brown & Root,
www.Halliburton.com/brs
-
Jane’s Intelligence Review,
February 1, 1995.
-
Los Angeles Herald Examiner,
October 11 & 18, 1981.
-
Los Angeles Times, March 23,
1991.
-
Newsmakingnews, "The Dick Cheney
Data Dump", August 27, 2000,
www.newsmakingnews.com.
-
New York Press, January 8, 2000.
-
New York Times Index,
www.nytimes.com.
-
Royce, Knut and Nathaniel
Heller, "Cheney Led Halliburton to Feast at Federal Trough",
Center for Public Integrity, August 2, 2000,
www.public-i.org/story_01_080200.htm.
-
Ruppert, Michael C., written
testimony for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,
dated October 1, 1997; see
www.copvcia.com/ssci.htm,
and From The Wilderness 4/99, 4/00, 6/00.
-
Securities and Exchange
Commission, "Edgar" Database,
www.sec.gov.
-
Tarpley, Webster Griffin and
Anton Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography,
Executive Intelligence Review, Washington, DC, 1992.
-
US-Azerbaijan Chamber of
Commerce,
www.usacc.com.
-
Vinnell Corporation,
www.Vinnell.com
|