'Bin Laden's Drugs Plot To Kill Thousands'

[bbchris]

uk.news.yahoo.com/050726/140/fo7c0.html



Osama bin Laden tried to buy a massive amount of cocaine, spike it with poison and sell it in the United States hoping to kill thousands, according to reports.The plot failed when Colombian drug lords decided it would be bad for business if they got involved in the deal.An investigation by the US Drug Enforcement Administration has examined how advanced the plot became when it was hatched a year after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.



The Washington Post has reviewed a document detailing the DEA's findings in the matter, in addition to interviewing sources familiar with the case.



Osama bin Laden personally met leaders of a Colombian drug cartel to in 2002 to negotiate the purchase of tons of cocaine, saying that he was willing to spend tens of millions of dollars to finance the deal.



"They wanted to kill thousands of people - more than the World Trade Centre," said a source.



Although the drug lords would have reaped millions of dollars in profits by selling the cocaine to bin Laden, they knew that if his plan succeeded it might effectively destroy the market for their cocaine in America.



The other was their fear of retaliation from the US government once its citizens started to die from the drugs, according to sources.



In 2002, the then DEA Director Asa Hutchinson said: "The DEA [has] received multi-source information that Osama bin Laden himself has been involved in the financing and facilitation of heroin-trafficking activities.



"It is important we recognise that when money goes from the pocket of an American to buy drugs, it may contribute to the financing of unspeakable crimes of violence around the world."



Earlier this year, Afghan tribal leader Hajji Bashir Noorzai who was one of the most wanted drug dealers in the world and previously had been identified as bin Laden's major heroin supplier, was arrested in New York City on federal criminal charges.

|Blah Blah|Thinking Out Loud|Jane Eliz||Talk Soup | Underground HK |

[ans]

"Colombian drug lords decided it would be bad for business"

[DreamTone7]

What do you expect, ans, from people who care for nothing other than money?



What I would have loved to see is one of these cartels to drop a dime on old Bin Laden while he was in town.

[NRKofOver]

Quote:

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It is important we recognise that when money goes from the pocket of an American to buy drugs, it may contribute to the financing of unspeakable crimes of violence around the world

---

Well, that's why I buy locally produced methamphetamine, no reason to send our drug money to other countries. We should all work diligently to support our trailer park communities.

My music for the disenchanted masses

[ans]

Dreamtone



NRK:

[NRKofOver]

Well, I obviously said that fecetiously but the point I was trying to make is that the correlation between drug buying in the US and supporting terrorism is tenuous at best.



It would be just as easy to say that all the people who continue to support the criminalization of drugs contribute to a black market economy of massive profits that aids in the financing of terrorism.



If drugs were legal, then there wouldn't be profits in the hands of thugs, therefore eliminating any hope of druglords financing terrorists.

My music for the disenchanted masses

[ans]

"If drugs were legal, then there wouldn't be profits in the hands of thugs"

[Galmin]

Quote:

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"Colombian drug lords decided it would be bad for business"

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Well, from a business point of view, I think we can all agree on that killing a lot of your customers will make your revenue go down.

[Rev9Volts]

i wish it would have worked out. i am in favor of getting rid of all coke and crack heads.

[Rev9Volts]

works for me!...





Homeless addicts, crack babies, drive-by-shootings, gangs, burglaries, robberies, muggings, black-on-black youth violence. Where did this scourge come from?



The twin centers of the crack cocaine industry are Los Angeles and Miami. The first time the MIAMI HERALD ever mentioned crack cocaine was April 20, 1986.[1] The first time the LOS ANGELES TIMES ever mentioned crack cocaine was two months later on June 30, 1986.[2] The news service Facts on File first mentioned crack on August 15, 1986, under the headline, "'Crack' Explosion Alarms Nation."[3] That story said crack had been around for "as long as 3 years, but its use was said to have exploded in the last months of 1985 and the first half of 1986." From these sources, we conclude that crack first appeared about 1983 and began spreading quickly; by mid-1986, it was a nationwide problem. What happened between 1983 and 1986?



Cocaine had been around as a sniffable white powder since the mid-1970s, but it cost $200 a gram ($5600 an ounce) providing recreation for the rich, not for working people. But by 1986 that had changed. The MIAMI HERALD wrote April 20, 1986, "Described until recently as a rich man's drug, cocaine has filtered down to blue-collar households and is finding an eager market among high school students who can ante up $10 or so to buy some 'crack,' cocaine in a highly purified form suitable for free-basing [smoking]."[1] The LOS ANGELES TIMES wrote September 21, 1986, "The economics of cocaine have changed so radically that it is no longer restricted to the well-to-do. The processing of crystallized cocaine as 'rock' or 'crack' has so lowered the price--and increased the availability--that junior high school students are pooling their lunch money... to buy cocaine from schoolyard dealers."[4] How did crack spread throughout urban neighborhoods during 1983-1986?



The story begins in Nicaragua. In 1979, the "Sandanistas" --a left-wing revolutionary army --defeated the U.S.-trained army of dictator Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua. Less than two years later, according to the WASHINGTON POST (March 10, 1982), on November 16, 1981, CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] Director William Casey proposed to President Reagan that he approve $19 million for the CIA to organize a counter-revolutionary force to overthrow the leftist Sandanista government.[5] The POST reported that President Reagan accepted Casey's proposal and authorized the CIA to finance and train a paramilitary commando force to provoke a counter-revolution in Nicaragua. According to TIME magazine, throughout 1982 the CIA rallied anti-Sandanista military forces, creating bases of operation in Honduras, on Nicaragua's border.[6] This became known as Ronald Reagan's "secret war," but it wasn't much of a secret. In fact, it was so public that on December 8, 1982, the U.S. House of Representatives unanimously passed the "Boland Amendment" to the 1983 military appropriations bill stating that none of the appropriated defense funds could be used to "train, arm, or support persons not members of the regular army for the purpose of overthrowing the government of Nicaragua."[5] This amendment made it illegal for the CIA to continue funding its anti-Sandanista army, which by then was calling itself the FDN (Nicaraguan Democratic Forces), but was better known as the Contras.



After passage of the Boland amendment, the Contras desperately needed a new source of funds. (This was several years before Oliver North set up his Iran connection to divert money from arms sales to the Contras.) According to a year-long investigation by the SAN JOSE (California) MERCURY NEWS based on court records, recently declassified documents, undercover audio tapes, and files retrieved via the Freedom of Information Act, the FDN solved its problem by opening the first pipeline from the Colombian cocaine cartels to black gangs --the Crips and the Bloods --on the streets of Los Angeles.[7]



The MERCURY NEWS investigation highlights three individuals in particular: Danilo Blandon, Norwin Meneses, and Ricky Ross.



At Ricky Ross's drug trial in San Diego in March, 1996, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's (DEA) star witness was Danilo Blandon, telling his story for the first time. Blandon was the son of a wealthy Nicaraguan family who fled from Nicaragua to Los Angeles on June 19, 1979, at age 29, just as the Somoza dictatorship collapsed. His family's ranches and real estate holdings in Managua, and his wife's substantial wealth, were confiscated by the Sandanista government. The Blandons worked in Los Angeles to build an anti-Sandanista movement, holding rallies and cocktail parties, but Blandon testified that their efforts raised little money. The trial record shows that, in 1981, Blandon was introduced to Norwin Meneses, another Nicaraguan living in California. With Meneses, Blandon flew to Honduras where they were introduced to the military chief of the CIA's Contra army, Enrique Bermudez. According to the MERCURY NEWS, "Bermudez was hired by the Central Intelligence Agency in mid-1980" to create the FDN. The MERCURY NEWS says, "Bermudez was the FDN's military chief and, according to congressional records and newspaper reports, received regular CIA paychecks for a decade, payments that stopped shortly before his still-unsolved slaying in Managua in 1991." (The Contra-Sandanista war ended in 1988.) After meeting with the CIA's Bermudez, Blandon testified in court, he and Meneses started raising money for the Contra revolution by selling drugs in L.A.



Blandon's partner, Norwin Meneses, was known in Nicaragua as "Rey de la Droga" (King of Drugs). In 1979, Meneses was under active investigation by the DEA and by the FBI for selling drugs in the U.S. According to the MERCURY NEWS, "despite a stack of law enforcement reports describing him as a major drug trafficker, Norwin Meneses was welcomed into the U.S. in July 1979 as a political refugee and given a visa and a work permit. He settled in the Bay Area and for the next six years supervised the importation of thousands of kilos of cocaine into California." (A kilo, or kilogram, weighs 2.2 pounds.) Meneses supplied Blandon with tons of cocaine and with assault weapons, which Blandon sold to young blacks in L.A. Blandon's profits went back to Honduras and Nicaragua, to support the CIA's Contra army. There seems little doubt that the CIA cooperated in Blandon's operation. Indeed, NEWSWEEK magazine on two occasions printed interviews and other evidence indicating that the CIA and the DEA both cooperated in the Contras' guns-and-drugs pipeline. (NEWSWEEK 1/26/87, pg. 26, and 5/23/88, pg. 22; and see WASHINGTON POST 1/20/87, pg. A12.) The MERCURY NEWS has now provided additional confirming evidence.



Blandon didn't really know what he was doing until he met Ricky Ross, a small-time African-American drug dealer. Because Blandon could supply limitless amounts of cocaine at rock-bottom prices, Ross began to build an enormous drug empire. When methods for turning cocaine into crack became known in 1983, Ross already had a drug-dealing network in place. Norwin Meneses routinely shipped 200-to-400-kilo quantities of cocaine from Miami to Blandon on the west coast, who sold them to Ross. Ross had 5 "cook houses" turning cocaine into crack. A former crack dealer described for the MERCURY NEWS one of Ross's cook houses where huge steel vats of cocaine were being stirred with canoe paddles atop restaurant-sized gas ranges. At his recent drug trial, Ross testified that it was not unusual to take in between $2 and $3 million a day. "Our biggest problem had got to be counting the money," Ross testified. Blandon told the DEA last year that during 1983 and 1984 he supplied Ross with 100 kilos a week. As this crack flooded into the streets of L.A., the gangs, chiefly the Crips and the Bloods, set up a national distribution network, and crack cascaded across the country into black neighborhoods everywhere, offering a cheap vacation from the miseries of ghetto life. For $20, anyone could get wasted. The gangs themselves

were immensely strengthened by the money, guns, and connections that the crack business brought them. And of course the CIA's army got the millions it needed to keep alive Ronald Reagan's secret war.



Today Ricky Ross is facing life in federal prison without the possibility of parole. Danilo Blandon is free, working as an informant for the DEA. Norwin Meneses has never spent a day in a U.S. prison. Although he figured in 45 separate federal investigations, he openly supplied Ricky Ross's crack empire from his home in the Bay area, and was never touched by the law. He has since moved back to Nicaragua.



According to the MERCURY NEWS, agents of four law enforcement agencies --DEA, U.S. Customs, the L.A. County Sheriff's Office, and the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement --say their investigations into Ross's empire were thwarted by the CIA or by unnamed "national security" interests.



The rise of the crack industry has had lasting effects on communities across America. In 1980, one out of every 453 Americans was incarcerated. By 1993, one out of every 189 Americans was incarcerated. Between 1980 and 1993, the U.S. prison population tripled (from 329,821 to 1,053,73 .[8]



But not just anyone went to jail. Crack is a poor person's drug; powder cocaine remains a recreation of the rich. Congress and 14 states passed laws making penalties for crack up to 100 times as great as penalties for powder cocaine. As a result, blacks were much more likely to go to jail, and for longer periods, than whites. In 1993 blacks were seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites; an estimated 1471 blacks per 100,000 black residents vs. 207 whites per 100,000 white residents were imprisoned at the end of 1993.[8]



Prisons are now the fastest-growing item in almost all state budgets. California spends more on prisons than it does on colleges and universities. (NY TIMES 6/2/96, p. 16E) Former defense contractors are now getting into the lucrative incarceration business. (NY TIMES August 23, 1996, pg. B1.) Almost three quarters of new admissions to prisons are now African-American or Hispanic. If present trends continue for another 14 years, an absolute majority of African American males between the ages of 18 and 40 will be in prison or in detention camps. (NY TIMES 8/10/95, pg. A14.) A secret war indeed.

[Galmin]

Quote:

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i wish it would have worked out. i am in favor of getting rid of all coke and crack heads.

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I am surprised to hear this from you, Rev. Didn't your president use to be a whitenose himself?

[Galmin]

There it is:

Edited by: Galmin  at: 8/20/05 19:24

[NRKofOver]

I find it interesting that Reagan started an illegal war and then when it was pointed out that it was illegal and we shouldn't be doing that, he inadvertantly created the crack epidemic. Nice. And while the CIA and presumably higher-ranking officials knew that crack money was being used to economically support the Contras, they just turned their heads to the plight of drug addiction and drug dealing because it met their own ends.



And wasn't it Mrs. Reagan, right around this time, who began the 'Just Say No' campaign, while her husband implicitly supported illegal drug use and sales just for a private, illegal war. I wonder how many Americans died from drug overdoses and gangland wars because we had to overthrow some dork in a second rate Central American nation of little concern?



The more I think about it, this is one for Michael Moore. The Vice-President at the time was former CIA director, George Bush, who had to have great knowledge about the CIA's activities at the time. And his son, current president Bush is a known cocaine user. Maybe with their campaign contributions to the Republican party, the drug traffickers dropped in a few party favors for the big wigs kids while they were in college or avoiding military service.



God Bless America!

My music for the disenchanted masses

[ans]

"I wonder how many Americans died from drug overdoses and gangland wars because we had to overthrow some dork . . . ?"



Yikes!



Who is this "we" who held those poor innocent Americans down and jammed the spikes into their veins? Not Michael Moore, I presume.



More likely it's the same "we" who decided that American citizens shouldn't need to bear responsibility for their own actions because they're too stupid for all that responsibility-bearin'.



Needle goes in - blame your dealer - needle goes in - blame your neighborhood - needle goes in - blame the government - needle goes in - blame the needle manufacturer - needle goes in - blame society in general - needle goes in - blame the Booger Man - OOPSIE, Overdose! - REAL healthy attitude





WAY too many second graders get their heads blown off in gangland crossfires, and that's a sad & tragic fact - someone at some point needs to blame the @#%$ that pull the trigger instead of Smith & Wesson & Reagan

[Galmin]

Ah yes, those were the days when you could trade a couple of hundred missiles for a hostage. Didn't Reagan call it "arms-for-hostages" in his presidential finding (you know, the finding he wrote one year before he denied to the Tower comission that he knew anything whatsoever about the Iran-Contras dealings)?



A Major General could procure missiles, realize that the deal would require Congressional notification as its overall value exceeded $14 million but get order (and follow it) about getting on with it anyway without having to blow any whistles, today such a former Major General would have to present various bogus material for more than an hour regarding Iraqi WMD in front of the entire UN and keeping a straight face.