Daniel Hopsicker - Sept 30, 2008

The true owner of the “N” number painted on the business jet used in the sting against Hugo Chavez is a CIA contractor.

The luxury business jet carrying a suitcase filled with $800,000 in bribes whose discovery last August kicked off the Suitcase-Gate Scandal had the same American registration, or” N” number, as that of a plane flying for a CIA contractor in Iraq, the MadCowMorningNews has learned.

The so-called Suitcase-Gate Scandal is playing out in a trial currently underway in a Federal courtroom in Miami.

Newspaper photos taken of the Citation X top-of-the-line business jet right after the ill-fated suitcase flight show ‘N’ number N5113S on the tail.

But a Florida-based CIA air contractor called Air-Scan Inc. is assigned that tail number, according to FAA records, for a Cessna 182 flying in Iraq.

Air-Scan Inc. is an American military contractor which has—even for an American military contractor—a checkered past. Still, there has been no mention during the trial so far of the murky provenance of the plane.

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Peter Dale Scott - September 19, 2008

Introduction

Recently I published two articles pointing to suggestive similarities between the recurring deep events in recent American history – those events which, because of their intelligence aspects, are ignored, misrepresented, or covered up in the American media. The first article pointed to overall similarities in many deep events since World War II. The second pointed to surprising points of comparison in the two deep events which were followed shortly by major U.S. wars: the John F. Kennedy assassination and 9/11. In the background of all these events, I suggested, was recurring evidence of the milieu “combining intelligence officials with elements from the drug-trafficking underworld.”

In this essay I shall first attempt to lay out the complex geography or network of that milieu, which I call the global drug connection, and its connections to what has been called an “alternative” or “shadow” CIA. I shall then show how this network, of banks, financial agents of influence, and the alternative CIA, contributed to the infrastructure of the Kennedy assassination and a series of other, superficially unrelated, major deep events.

In this narrative, the names of individuals, their institutions, and their connections are relatively unimportant. What matters is to see that such a milieu existed; that it was on-going, well-connected, and protected; and that, with increasing independence from governmental restraint, it played a role in major deep events in the last half century.

This of course strengthens the important hypothesis to be investigated, that this on-going milieu may also have contributed to the disaster of 9/11.

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via Real History Blog

Julian C. Holmes, A brilliant and prolific letter writer.

[...] Though the Washington Post does not over-extend itself in the pursuit of hard news, just let drop the faintest rumor of a government “conspiracy”, and a klaxon horn goes off in the news room. Aroused from apathy in the daily routine of reporting assignations and various other political and social sports events, editors and reporters scramble to the phones. The klaxon screams its warning: the greatest single threat to herd-journalism, corporate profits, and government stability — the dreaded “CONSPIRACY THEORY”!!

It is not known whether anyone has actually been hassled or accosted by any of these frightful spectres, but their presence is announced to Post readers with a salvo of warnings to avoid the tricky, sticky webs spun by the wacko “CONSPIRACY THEORISTS”.

Recall how the Post saved us from the truth about Iran-Contra.

Professional conspiracy exorcist Mark Hosenball was hired to ridicule the idea that Oliver North and his CIA-associated gangsters had conspired to do wrong (*1). And when, in their syndicated column, Jack Anderson and Dale Van Atta discussed some of the conspirators, the Post sprang to protect its readers, and the conspirators, by censoring the Anderson column before printing it (*2).

But for some time the lid had been coming off the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In 1986, the Christic Institute, an interfaith center for law and public policy, had filed a lawsuit alleging a U.S. arms-for-drugs trade that helped keep weapons flowing to the CIA-Contra army in Nicaragua, and cocaine flowing to U.S. markets (*3). In 1988 Leslie Cockburn published Out of Control, a seminal work on our bizarre, illegal war against Nicaragua (*4). The Post contributed to this discovery process by disparaging the charges of conspiracy and by publishing false information about the drug-smuggling evidence presented to the House Subcommittee on Narcotics Abuse and Control. When accused by Committee Chairman Charles Rangel (D-NY). of misleading reporting, the Post printed only a partial correction and declined to print a letter of complaint from Rangel (*5).

January 29, 2008 - The Narco News Bulletin

On a fall evening in a cotton field in Nicaragua, a group of armed men placed a series of torches in a line of planters along a makeshift runway.

About half an hour later, around 9 p.m. that evening, Friday, Nov. 26, 2004, a twin-prop Beechcraft King Air 200 touched down on that rural runway and came to a stop. The assembled men began to unload the plane, which was packed with cocaine, while holding the sole witness to the event, a local field hand, captive.

Before departing, the men attempted to set fire to the plane, but miraculously it did not burn. They departed the area in trucks with the plane’s valuable payload, leaving behind the lone witness, alive, and more than a half dozen AK-47 automatic rifles.

Several days later, Nicaraguan law enforcers apprehended a truck headed for Honduras carrying 1,100 kilos of cocaine. The driver was arrested and the cocaine payload seized. The Nicaraguan law enforcers said the source of the seized dope appeared to be the Beech 200 found abandoned in the cotton field. Police had found traces of cocaine onboard the aircraft as well.

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MEXICO CITY (AFP) — A private jet that crash-landed almost one year ago in eastern Mexico carrying 3.3 tons of cocaine had previously been used for CIA “rendition” flights, a newspaper report said here Thursday, citing documents from the United States and the European Parliament.

The plane was carrying Colombian drugs for the fugitive leader of Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel, Joaquin “Chapo” Guzman, when it crash-landed in the Yucatan peninsula on September 24, El Universal reported.

The daily said it had obtained documents from the United States and the European Parliament which “show that that plane flew several times to Guantanamo, Cuba, presumably to transfer terrorism suspects.”

It said the European Parliament was investigating the private Grumman Gulfstream II, registered by the European Organization for the Safety of Air Navigation, for suspected use in CIA “rendition” flights in which prisoners are covertly transferred to a third country or US-run detention centers.

It also said the US Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) logbook registered that the plane had traveled between US territory and the US military base in Guantanamo.

It said the FAA registered its last owner as Clyde O’Connor in Pompano Beach, Florida.

Extraordinary rendition has been harshly criticized since it began in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.

by William Blum - Early Spring 1997

1947 to 1951, FRANCE

According to Alfred W. McCoy in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, CIA arms, money, and disinformation enabled Corsican criminal syndicates in Marseille to wrestle control of labor unions from the Communist Party. The Corsicans gained political influence and control over the docks — ideal conditions for cementing a long-term partnership with mafia drug distributors, which turned Marseille into the postwar heroin capital of the Western world. Marseille’s first heroin laboratories were opened in 1951, only months after the Corsicans took over the waterfront.

EARLY 1950s, SOUTHEAST ASIA

The Nationalist Chinese army, organized by the CIA to wage war against Communist China, became the opium barons of The Golden Triangle (parts of Burma, Thailand and Laos), the world’s largest source of opium and heroin. Air America, the CIA’s principal airline proprietary, flew the drugs all over Southeast Asia. (See Christopher Robbins, Air America, Avon Books, 1985, chapter 9)

1950s to early 1970s, INDOCHINA

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