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Another “modifed limited hangout”
What the Times failed to
report was that Bergt changed the airline’s name, when it began passenger
service, from Alaska International to Mark Air. This relieved the paper of
telling its readers that Mark Air, which flew support flights for Oliver North’s
NHAO, had been fingered for drug trafficking by the Iran Contra Final Report.
Ironically, it was Senator
John Kerry who began an investigation of allegations that elements of the supply
network supporting the Contras were linked to drug traffickers, in early 1986.
When the Commission’s
findings were released, they revealed that Mark Air, was "strongly suspected"
by US Customs of owning an aircraft that had been used in 1984 to smuggle
cocaine into the United States from South America.
Further, according to
Customs, the aircraft was sold that same year by Mark Air to "a large scale
[unnamed] drug trafficking organization recently convicted in federal court."
Although unnamed by the Kerry
Commission, this is almost certainly the smuggling organization of Juan Matta
Ballesteros, suspected of having connections capable of ensuring that US law
enforcement was “looking the other way” when their C130’s roared into town.
Customs also reported also
that it was investigating the financial activities of Mark Air and its officers
because of "large cash movements to and from Mexico and other foreign
countries."
A "major
narcotics smuggling ring"
In a report that is the very
definition of a “Modified Limited Hangout,” the Commission stated that US
Customs reportedly had confirmed that Mark Air had sold the aircraft to a major
narcotics smuggling ring, but "the sale to this group may have been a legitimate
business deal and not drug related;” and that Customs indicated that the
information concerning Mark Air officers carrying large quantities of cash was
"certain," but that "such behavior is common in the air charter business and
thus is not by itself suspicious.”
Nor is this the only
intelligence-related scandal with which Bush’s employer was involved. Despite an
eight-year U.S. embargo on the sale of all military equipment to Libya, the
airline assisted Libyan strongman Col. Moammar Khadafy in obtaining three giant
C-130 ''Hercules'' transport planes.
''The Hercules aircraft in
Libya are doing deadly work. They were in Colonel Khadafy's invasion of Chad,''
said Pierre Salinger on ABC’s 20-20. Libya obtained the three planes --
reportedly the most powerful military aircraft in existence -- through a series
of international agents and intrigue, the broadcast reported.
Libya managed to acquire the
planes through an intermediary in Miami who purchased the plane from Alaska
International Airways, according to Salinger. The 'middleman' used in the deal
may be relevant to 9/11:
notorious
Lebanese weapons merchant Sarkis Soghanalian, also a key figure in BCCI.
Tropical plants & international intrigue
Once again, although young
George W Bush played no part in the C130 sale, he was clearly operating in a
milieu of “international agents and intrigue” which smacks of the CIA.
In an update on our earlier
report about Bush’s year in “tropical plants,” the man Bush was working for
during the year he spent traveling Guatemala and Central America
(see pt I), former Zapata
Offshore President Robert Gow, was at the same time embroiled in a takeover
attempt of the notorious United Fruit Company (on whose Board sat his father,
Ralph Gow, a long-time Director), and that while Bush was there supposedly
“looking over tropical plants,” the company was actively participating in a
counter-insurgency program with the Guatemalan Government as part of the CIA’s
Operation Condor.
Far from confirming the
conventional wisdom that Bush spent the more poorly-documented stretches of time
in his biography with his cowboy boots up on a desk somewhere, pulling the tab
on another ‘tall cold one,’ the new evidence uncovered points instead to the far
more sinister conclusion that during his supposed “lost years” Bush was being
initiated into a national-security oligarchy, a secret and invisible state
within the public state, composed of multiple generations of certain
‘blue-blood’ Eastern families like Bush’s, who appear to have been running
America’s intelligence agencies as if they were a ‘family business.’
The real question is why—
especially in an election year— such important information is only available in
the MadCowMorningNews.
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