"Taliban Planned to Supplant
Cali Cartel"
by Daniel Hopsicker
December 15--Venice, Florida.
In an exclusive interview
with the MadCow Morning News, a Special Forces Commander just returned
from Afghanistan has offered a reluctant-but-candid assessment of the reasons
for the increase in hostility last summer between the U.S. and the "Evil
Ones" that led to the heinous September 11 attack...
"The Taliban were launching
an effort to take over the worldwide heroin trade, and then use that as
a basis to move into cocaine distribution as well," stated this grizzled
veteran of recent rescue missions behind enemy lines.
"They were planning on supplanting
the Cali Cartel."
Who, one wonders, might have
gotten a little bent out of shape about that?
Three related stories, whose
outcomes may provide the answer, have surfaced in the news this week...
In the first, it was announced
that the Senate Intelligence Committee has been quietly gearing up for
major hearings in February about the "massive intelligence failure" that
resulted in tragedy on September 11.
"It is going to be a bombshell
of an investigation of historic proportions -- a lot of embarrassing red
faces resulting from it," stated columnist Bob Novak on CNN.
In the second story, President
Bush called on Americans to join the Sept. 11 war effort... by giving up
illegal drugs. Citing narcotics trafficking as a source of funding for
terrorism, Bush said, "It's so important for Americans to know that the
traffic in drugs finances the work of terror...that terrorists use drug
profits to fund their cells to commit acts of murder.''
"The Taliban were a drug
trafficking government,'' said a spokesman at the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration, while stating that the Northern Alliance was also heavily
involved in the drug trade.
In fairness it must be noted
that the American DEA is currently led by Asa Hutchinson, who while US
Attorney in Bill Clinton’s Arkansas provided protection for what one
former National Security Council official called "the biggest drug smuggling
operation in history" in Mena Arkansas, just a few short miles from
Hutchinson’s office.
No word from the DEA on whether
this makes the Bush Administration a "drug trafficking government" too...
The Bush administration plans
to lean on Kabul's new government to promote crops like winter wheat, says
Hutchinson, to any reporter capable of sitting through a DEA briefing with
a straight face.
"It's a rare opportunity
that we have, to influence 70 percent of the world's supply of heroin,''
Asa Hutchinson told Reuters.
You can almost hear the cash
registers ringing in his head.
But DEA chief Asa Hutchinson’s
unfortunate past is not why some people are growing increasingly-nervous
in tiny Venice, Florida.
The third related story coming
out this week concerns this ‘wave of nerves’ and what it may portend
for the success of the upcoming Senate hearings into September 11.
In Venice, home to blue-haired
widows, early-bird specials, and two flight schools at the airport that
trained Bin Laden’s terrorist Air Force, the local paper revealed last
week that Venice City Manager George Hunt has been keeping a loaded gun
in a desk in his office.
Hunt decided that top city
officials, including the airport manager, should procure concealed weapons
permits. Presumably with a straight face, he told the local paper his decision
(later rescinded in the face of public outcry) was based on "massive amounts"
of evidence from the American Waterworks Association(!) about threats to
the water supply.
If that were not puzzling
enough, Hunt also pushed through a measure which the Gondolier heralded
in a front page headline:
"Airport to Get Its Own Cops."
Venice Airport Manager Larry
Heath said the issue was how best to protect the airport. But citizens
in other parts of the country, notably New York and Washington DC, might
be excused for feeling that slightly more to the point than protecting
the Venice Airport would be protecting Americans from the Venice Airport.
Or at least from the covert operations run there.
With tensions running so
high, some view Bush’s linkage of drugs and terrorism as coming at a
particularly inopportune and potentially embarrassing moment, especially
given the pending Senate Intelligence Committee Sept 11 investigation.
Were the real truth to ever
become known about the commodities being traded so casually in Florida's
over-active black market, heads would roll in such numbers that there might
be calls to bring back the guillotine, just for efficiency.
But with Ashleigh Banfield
and Geraldo constituting what passes for American journalism, there thankfully
appears little chance of that.
"Trading with the Enemy"
President Bush's comments
about drugs and terrorism recognize, however obliquely, that Bin Laden's
organization derived much of its funding through the heroin and opium trade
in Afghanistan.
But no one has yet alleged
that Bin Laden’s "Islamic fundamentalists" distributed these drugs. They
merely sold them to some other organization, that then in turn distributed
to retail on the American street... leaving some to question whether Osama
might have had a deal with the American Mob.
The MadCow Morning News was
the first to report on Mob connections to Magic Dutch Boy Rudi Dekkers
and the covert operations conducted at the Venice Airport. Flight School
Owner Has Shady Ties.
"Frankly, we can't differentiate
between terrorism and organized crime and drug dealing," Assistant Attorney
General Michael Chertoff told the Senate Banking Committee which briefly
"looked into" the terrorists’ money trail in the aftermath of the Sept
11 disaster.
"These groups don't hold
themselves independently: They work with one another. Terrorists get engaged
in drug activity. They have relationships with organized crime," Chertoff
said.
In a related story illustrating
this premise, reported heavily in Mike Ruppert’s From the Wilderness,
US federal agents arrested Kevin Ingram on 12 June as he prepared to board
a privately-chartered Lear jet carrying more than $ 500,000 in cash raised
from the sale of sophisticated weaponry, including missiles machine guns
and grenade launchers.
The weapons were destined
for the Middle East to be used in possible terrorist attacks.
If the deal he got caught
doing was typical, insiders state, it was oil and heroin up front for guns
and training.
Perhaps envisioning a new
career as a Magic Dutch Boy, Ingram was heading for Amsterdam on his Lear
when he was arrested.
Will the Senate Intelligence
Committee find any of this worthy of their interest?
So little is still known
about the true nature of the Sept. 11th attack that any kernel of fact
is an island adrift in a sea of 'journalists' in designer eyewear.
For example, on the question
of whether Mohamed Atta was involved in previous terrorist acts, reports
that Mohamed Atta blew up a bus in Israel in 1986 have been ridiculed as
an "urban legend one sees so much of on the internet."
It is a minor curiosity,
perhaps, but we have discovered that, true or no, the Internet is not where
this report first surfaced.
The following is taken verbatim
from NBC News Sept 13 transcript:
"This investigation also
takes us to Florida where the FBI task force saw a name on the passenger
manifest that was familiar to them. NBC News has learned that flight training
for Mohamed Atta, one of the alleged hijackers, apparently took place at
a flight school in Florida. As NBC's Kerry Sanders reports, the FBI can
also link Atta to a suspected car bombing in Israel in 1986..."
Curiously, the transcript
then omits whatever it was that correspondent Sanders had to say about
his discovery.
This couldn't be wartime
censorship...could it?
Finally, in the matter of
wartime censorship, there is still no word from the International Officer's
School at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Ala. concerning our polite
but persistent queries about Mohamed Atta's reported attendance there.
First reported by Newsweek,
the Washington Post, and the Miami Herald--no slouches themselves as purveyors
of urban legend--the story still awaits plausible denial.
Perhaps plausibility has
been replaced, priority-wise, by interesting-looking frames.
Or perhaps, as with so many
other matters in American life these days, government officials just believe
that we are better off not knowing.
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