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Clinton_Drugs_2.txt
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1996-07-08
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From the Radio Free Michigan archives
ftp://141.209.3.26/pub/patriot
If you have any other files you'd like to contribute, e-mail them to
bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu.
------------------------------------------------
Board: NEWS BB
Topic: WHITEWATER
Subject: LOND. TELEGRAPH 10/9
Here's the second story from Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in
the 10/9 London Sunday Telegraph.......
"SMUGGLERS LINKED TO CONTRA ARMS DEALS"
It is engraved on the consciousness of the world by
now that Arkansas is a corrupt one-party state. What is
less well known is that it is also a major point for
trans-shipment of drugs coming from Latin America and the
Carribean. In the mid-1980s it was perilously close to
becoming a "narco-republic" - a sort of mini-Colombia
within the borders of the United States.
Organized crime has long had a foothold in Arkansas,
especially in the gambling town of Hot Springs where Bill
Clinton spent most of his childhood. and the geography is
good for smuggling. Located in the hinterland, the state
is safely removed from the microscopic surveillance of the
U.S. Coast Guard.
Business exploded in the early 1980s, according to
sources in state and federal law enforcement. Drugs were
flown into airstrips all over Arkansas, and from there
transported overland to cities such as St. Louis and
Chicago.
Basil Abbott, a convicted drug pilot, says that he flew
a Cessna 210 full of cocaine in to Marianna, in eastern
Arkansas, in the spring of 1982. The aircraft was welcomed
by an Arkansas State Trooper in a marked police car.
"Arkansas was a very good place to load and unload," he
said.
But the nerve center of the smuggling operation was at
Mena, a small town in the Ouachita mountains of western
Arkansas. Aircraft with modified cargo doors would drop
their loads over pre-arranged sites, then fly empty into
the Mena airport. The legendary smuggler Barry Seal had
his base of operations there, storing aircraft at a
refitting shop called Rich Mountain Aviation.
Seal was probably the biggest importer of cocaine in
American history. Between 1980 and his assassination in
1986, his team of pilots smuggled in 36 metric tons of
cocaine, 104 tons of marijuana and three tons of heroin,
according to a close associate of Seal.
The sums of money involved were staggering. At his
death, Seal left a number of operational bank accounts.
One of them, at the Cayman Islands branch of the Fuji Bank,
currently has an interest-bearing balance of
$1,645,433,000.
There were various attempts to investigate the Mena
smuggling ring. All of them were obstructed. The first
was a joint investigation by the Arkansas State Police and
the U.S. Treasury's Internal Revenue Service. It lasted
from 1985 to 1986. The IRS investigator, Bill Duncan, says
that there was a cover-up in which crucial evidence was
withheld from the federal grand jury. He resigned in
disgust from the Treasury.
Russell Welch, the investigator for the State Police,
suffered a sever illness during the probe. He was
hospitalized and diagnosed with anthrax poisoning. The
Sunday Telegraph has a copy of his hand-written private
notes for the full three years of the investigation, along
with supporting documents from FBI and Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) sources.
cont.
It is clear that Welch has stumbled on a complex
operation in which narcotics trafficking and government
covert operations had somehow got mixed up. On June 4,
1985, his diary says that an agent from the DEA "informed
me in strictest confidence that it was believed, within
his department, that Barry Seal is flying weapons to
Central and South America. In return he is allowed to
smuggle what he wanted back into the United States".
In August 1987 he received a secret teletype from the
FBI offices in Chicago advising him that "a CIA or DEA
operation is taking place at the Mena airport". The
Sunday Telegraph has a copy of the telex.
By late 1987 he was deeply disturbed. "I feel like I
live in Russia, waiting for the secret police to pounce
down. A government has gotten out of control. Men find
themselves in positions of power and suddenly crimes
become legal. National Security?!"
In 1988 the Democratic whip in the U.S. Congress, Bill
Alexander, started an investigation through the General
Accounting Office. It went nowhere. Alexander then tried
again with a joint investigation by the U.S. Congress and
the Arkansas Attorney General's Office, but ran into
endless obstruction.
Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and the CIA, a
best-selling book published this year, has helped to open
up the mystery of what happened at Mena. the author Terry
Reed has recounted his role in the drama, and since then
other sources have come forward.
It appears that the CIA chose Barry Seal and his
smuggling operation to be the sub-contractor for its covert
scheme to supply arms to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels
between 1984 and 1986. The CIA could not use government
aircraft or pilots because of a congressional prohibition
on aid to the Contras. It was in a desperate hurry to get
things started, and Seal was there with an infrastructure
already in place - in Arkansas.
A big blunder? Undoubtedly. But it is probably going
too far to accuse the CIA of complicity in narcotics
trafficking. Seal had ostensibly turned over a new leaf
by then. Facing indictment for smuggling, he had convinced
Vice-President Bush's drug task force that he could crack
open the Medellin cartel as an undercover agent for the
DEA, which he did in fact accomplish in a spectacular
sting operation.
Big snag. He never stopped hauling cocaine for
himself. In fact he used the high-tech equipment given to
him by the CIA and the DEA to perfect his smuggling skills.
"The CIA didn't realize that Seal had synergised their
covert operation with the Dixie Mafia. They didn't figure
it out until they were in the quicksand, and by then it
was too late," said Seal's associate. "In the end, you
had a situation where the Dixie Mafia was blackmailing the
CIA."
The result was a free-for-all in Arkansas. The
regional drug cartel thought that it had acquired a sort of
federal immunity for drug trafficking, and behaved
accordingly. By 1986 there was an epidemic of cocaine,
contaminating the political establishment from top to
bottom.
The nightlife of the Clinton coterie was worthy of
cont.
Caligula. Dan Lasater, a self-made restaurant tycoon and
money-man for Governor Clinton, gave parties at which
cocaine would be served like hors d'oeuvres and sex was
rampant. Some of this is documented graphically in police
records. Bill Clinton was in frequent attendance.
Lasater was eventually convicted on federal charges
of distributing cocaine to friends. In 1986 he was
sentenced to 36 months in jail.
In addition, there is a document from the Regional
Organized Crime Center in Nashville, dated May 15, 1986,
which shows a request for information on Lasater "in
reference to narcotics trafficking via aircraft with
possible organized crime ties". This was never followed
up.
The DEA kept a file on Lasater. A memo from March
1984 names Patsy Thomasson, Lasater & Co. executive vice
president as a designated passenger on private flights
with Lasater to Latin America. Thomasson is now Director
of Administration at the White House and a crucial figure
in the inner circle of Bill and Hillary Clinton (it was
she who removed Whitewater files from the White House
office of the late Vincent Foster on the night of his
death). On February 8, 1984, she flew to Belize with
Lasater to negotiate the purchase of a farm.
Lasater is now under investigation by the Whitewater
prosecutor. The FBI is trying to determine whether
Lasater's brokerage firm used client accounts to launder
drug profits. In particular, they are looking at
transactions worth $107 million that were put through the
account of an unsuspecting court clerk in Kentucky.
Also under the microscope is the participation of
Lasater & Co. in several hundred million dollars-worth of
bond issues by the Arkansas Development Finance Authority
(ADFA), an agency created by Bill Clinton in 1985. There
have been many allegations that ADFA served as a
"laundromat" for dirty money. In December 1988 it wired
$50 million to the Fuji Bank in the Cayman Islands.
Investigators will be looking for proof that the money -
all of it - returned to Arkansas for its intended purpose
of building family houses.
The more we learn about the circle of people who
surrounded Bill Clinton in Arkansas, and the way they
conducted business, the more alarming this picture becomes.
------------------------------------------------
(This file was found elsewhere on the Internet and uploaded to the
Radio Free Michigan archives by the archive maintainer.
All files are ZIP archives for fast download.
E-mail bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu)