Arizona Senator Announces New Anti-Immigrant Legislation

La Opinón

PHOENIX - State Sen. Russell Pearce announced at a Wednesday press conference that he will present legislation next year to target Arizona’s undocumented immigrants, reports La Opinión. The measure, titled "Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act," would bar cities from enacting policies that prevent federal immigration law enforcement, such as establishing sanctuary cities and also allows prosecutors to enforce state employer sanctions penalizing businesses that knowingly hire undocumented workers.

The senator stressed that states have the right to detain any person “found in the United States illegally,” and finally called on Governor Jan Brewer, to convene a special session addressing the issue. "I do not need permission from the federal government, we need 287g," said Pearce.

Pearce said that if his proposal fails in the state legislature, he plans to take the issue to the voters.

Concluye la VII Cumbre del ALBA con la Declaración de Cochabamba

Mario Hubert Garrido

Visiones Alternativas


La VII Cumbre de la Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA) concluyó con la firma de la Declaración Final de Cochabamba, que incluye importantes acuerdos, como la creación del SUCRE.

Según los dignatarios y representantes de las nueve naciones miembros de ese bloque, el Sistema Único de Compensación Regional de pagos (SUCRE) entrará en vigor a partir de 2010.

Ese mecanismo financiero permitirá abandonar la actual dependencia del dólar estadounidense.

Tras la firma del tratado constitutivo del SUCRE, un equipo multidisciplinarlo de los países del ALBA iniciará varias operaciones técnicas para su implementación a partir del 1 de enero próximo.

Entre otros documentos aprobados en ese foro, sobresale una Declaración sobre los principios del Tratado de Comercio de los Pueblos (TCP), una iniciativa del presidente anfitrión, Evo Morales, para enfrentar a los Tratados de Libre Comercio (TLC) que impulsa Estados Unidos en la región.

Asimismo suscribieron una Declaración sobre los Derechos de la Madre Tierra y los embates del cambio climático que presentarán a nombre de este bloque en una Conferencia sobre estos temas en Copenhague (Dinamarca), en diciembre próximo.

También aprobaron una declaración especial de apoyo al pueblo de Honduras que demanda el retorno a sus funciones del presidente constitucional, José Manuel Zelaya.

De igual forma adoptaron una resolución de condena al bloqueo económico, comercial y financiero que impone Estados Unidas a Cuba hace más de 50 años.

Antes de viajar a sus respectivos países, los presidentes, vicepresidentes y primeros ministros que concurren al cónclave se trasladaron al estadio Félix Capriles para participar en una fiesta de cierre junto a los movimientos sociales de Latinoamérica, el Caribe, África, Asia y Estados Unidos.

En ese encuentro, unos 700 delegados participantes en la Primera Cumbre de Movimientos Sociales, en la casa Campestre, entregaron las conclusiones de unas siete mesas de trabajo con énfasis en los embates del cambio climático y sobre la autodeterminación.

En la primera jornada de la VII Cumbre, el secretario de Seguridad de Rusia, Nikolai Patrushev, envió ayer un saludo a la Cumbre a nombre del presidente de esa nación euroasiática, Dmitri Medvedev.

También se definió encomendar al Consejo Político elaborar un proyecto que cree un Consejo de Seguridad de las Fuerzas Armadas que promueva la creación de una escuela para el desarrollo de las Fuerzas Armadas.

Uno de los temas destacados en la consideración de los presidentes se refirió al rol de los medios de comunicación como agentes del desarrollo en el marco de una estrategia comunicacional.

Derechos de la Madre Tierra

La Declaración sobre los Derechos de la Madre Tierra, una propuesta del presidente anfitrión aprobada en la jornada final de esta Cumbre, será presentada en una Conferencia sobre ese tema en Copenhague (Dinamarca) en diciembre de este año.

Para el dignatario de origen aimara, según explicó en las deliberaciones, el sistema capitalista es culpable de convertir los recursos naturales en un negocio privado, de ahí la demanda de que los países desarrollados asuman y paguen la deuda climática.

Morales destacó además el papel del líder de la Revolución cubana, Fidel Castro, como pionero en la comunidad internacional en defensa del planeta Tierra, y su exigencia para que las naciones ricas paguen la llamada deuda ecológica.

También Morales propuso la creación de un tribunal de justicia climática que juzgue y sancione a quienes no cumplan sus compromisos y continúen con la destrucción del planeta.

Asimismo lanzó la iniciativa de elaborar una Declaración de los derechos de la Madre Tierra, los cuales, apuntó, están primero que los derechos humanos.

La primera puede existir sin la vida humana, pero ésta no puede existir sin la Madre Tierra, alertó. Según Morales, los pueblos indígenas son los que tienen autoridad moral para debatir sobre ese tema.

"Hablar del cambio climático es defender a la Madre Tierra que es algo sagrado, la que nos da vida, producción, recursos naturales, el agua", proclamó.

Sostuvo que ese fenómeno que afecta a la humanidad "no es un problema esencialmente ambiental, ni tecnológico ni de financiamiento, sino de formas de vida".

El cambio climático no es una causa, es un efecto, que debía llamarse destrucción del medio ambiente, un producto del sistema capitalista que busca obtener la máxima ganancia posible, acumular capital sin tomar en cuenta la vida de los demás, remarcó.

Morales habló de construir un socialismo comunitario en armonía con la Madre Tierra que recupere las prácticas de vivir bien que vienen de nuestros originarios del todo el mundo, concluyó.

Sobre el tema, el presidente venezolano, Hugo Chávez, denunció que el principal depredador del medio ambiente es Estados Unidos y sus políticas de consumismo, modelo que impone a otras naciones.

* La Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA) es un mecanismo de integración regional integrada por Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Ecuador, Honduras, San Vicente y las Granadinas, Antigua y Barbuda, y Dominica.

Unlearning the CIA

The Education of Bob Baer


By CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM

CounterPunch

When I first met ex-CIA officer Bob Baer in Washington DC, I thought, The guy looks nothing like George Clooney. But Clooney, who won an Academy Award playing Baer in the film Syriana, had in fact captured something about the posture, the pathos, the weariness of a CIA man who spends too many years getting filthy in the field – in the peculiar mire of the Middle East, no less – risking his life and being ignored for it. Clooney in the film cycles among the suits at Langley, the cubicled bureaucracy, looking somewhat like the only sane man in a mental ward.

So it was with Bob Baer in DC – unfamiliar ground, “a city of crazies,” he said. He was heading back home, out west, to the little mountain village of Silverton, and when I met him there a few months later, he took me on the big tour. Silverton is a mining outpost turned tourist stop, but it still resonates with the dissident manners of men who dig silver out of the ground looking for paydirt and don’t like the authorities interfering. The town is accessed by high passes where tractor trailers regularly fall off the cliffs in winter, and it has only one paved road, Main Street, and it has a church with upside-down crosses. Several residents – so Baer assured me – are licensed to own fully-automatic machineguns. “It’s to shoot at the black helicopters,” he laughed but didn’t seem to be joking. The locals tell me the place has a tendency to welcome “people who messed up in some other life and come here to be nobody.” I think Bob Baer came here partly because the CIA claimed he messed up. Maybe he did. Depends on who you talk to in this business, which is as it should be among professional liars.

Because maybe it was the Agency that messed up – this seems to be a CIA habit, the kind of habit that fails to see Al Qaeda on the horizon, that gets the country mired in Iraq, that makes you wonder, as a tax-paying citizen, whether the agency in its current incarnation has a reason for being other than to squander your money. It’s something the citizens in Silverton might grouse about.

Robert Baer dedicated 21 years to the storied Central Intelligence Agency, beginning in 1976, at age 22. He was a believer. He trained to blow things up – the tradition of covert action from which the CIA was born – and, more important, to make sure Americans didn’t get blown up. He trained to listen, watch, take notes. He dove into the cities of the Middle East, learning the spy game, learning to deceive and trick and be someone else, perfecting his Arabic, growing out his black beard, tanning his skin. The Middle East was his crucible and eventually his obsession. He became so good he passed as native, wandering Beirut in the 1980s during the civil war that ravaged Lebanon, wearing a headband that announced, in the calligraphy of the Qu’ran, We Crave Martyrdom. “These fucking Americans are everywhere,” he’d tell his cabbies, looking to flush out martyrs. “We should blow up their embassy!” As early as 1983, he was chronicling the threat of Islamist terrorist networks in memos that he says few of the people who mattered in Langley or the Oval Office bothered to read. His work would win him the CIA’s Career Intelligence Medal; Seymour Hersh, the dean of intelligence reporters in Washington DC and a personal friend, once called him the “best field operative the CIA had in the Middle East.” The accolade from his higher-ups felt like cruel irony when years later the Islamists he warned about smashed into American shores.

When he left the Agency in 1998, he hunkered down and wrote about his time as a spy. His first two books – a memoir, See No Evil, and an expose, Sleeping with the Devil, about the demented US relationship with the Saudis – netted him a deal with Hollywood. But what Syriana as film could not capture – because, after all, it’s a Hollywood operation and dedicated, like the CIA, to a good cover story, one that sells, keeps us watching without really understanding – is that the CIA isn’t very good at doing what it’s supposed to do, which is not to assassinate or to blow things up or to mount ill-conceived coups, but to know. The agency Baer labored for and loved has been credited in its lowest hours with so much foolery, atrocity, waste and deception, so much that is subterranean and unaccountable, and meanwhile it’s supposed to know what the rest of us can’t know, to get a grip on the secrets of the world, to be accountable in the final sense of providing what’s called “intelligence” – not stupidity.

So Baer had come to Silverton to get away from stupidity. He suggested we go hiking into the mountains. The day was warm and the sun high and the creeks full of melt. When I walked to meet him at his old refurbished miner’s shack off Main Street, across from the church with the upside-down crosses, his wife Dayna, an ex-CIA counterterrorism officer, was on the carpet with their newly adopted 13-month-old Pakistani orphan girl, Khyber, who smiled and smiled. “The Taliban judge in the adoption court didn’t trust two Americans wandering around the country looking for an orphan,” said Baer. “But the US embassy was worse.” He held Khyber’s little hand and kissed her foot and gave his impish smile. “I’m not sure whether she’s the daughter of a suicide bomber or a Taliban warrior we killed,” he said. Turned out neither was true. Then we went hiking.

***

The Central Intelligence Agency, established in 1947 under the National Security Act, was conceived by men who had learned the art of secret warfare in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. The OSS was a commando outfit, designed for covert action – assassination of Nazis, bombing of bridges – but the CIA was supposed to be something better, more subtle, more complex. It would engage in covert action when the need arose, but preferably it would hang like fog over the countries it targeted, quiet and amorphous, floating in and out. In the wake of WWII, intelligence gathering was the stated goal, not brute intervention, certainly not murder. This was emphasized in the charter and the legislation that established the CIA, but the language of the law didn’t matter much.

The agency was, and remains, divided into two main branches. Foremost is the Directorate of Operations, the DO, which fields officers on the ground, trained in disappearing under cover, gathering information, and, in the extreme case, willing and able to engage in covert action, to fix elections, topple governments, arrange unfortunate deaths. The DO is better known as the clandestine services – it is the CIA imagined in movies, alternately garlanded and smoke-screened but always romanticized. By contrast, the Directorate of Intelligence, the DI, is staffed with intellectuals – the PhDs, the scientists, the psychiatrists, sociologists, the geeks – who analyze the information the DO officers are supposed bring in. From the start there was conflict between the two directorates: one the home of mavericks, operators, the men who got dirty, the other the ivory tower of the thinkers who filtered the raw data to make it palatable for consumption by politicians. In many ways, it’s a false dichotomy: the two directorates have worked hand in hand making bad decisions, but each habitually blames the other.

Bob Baer, from his own account, was an operations guy by nature. He grew up in the Colorado high country dreaming of a life as a competitive downhill skier. He liked to run sheer slopes where a bad decision meant you died wrapped in pines or tossed off cliffs or lost in a crevasse. The ambition stalled with his rotten performance at school – “Straight Fs, with a few worse grades,” as he recalls it, because he spent too much time on the slopes. His mother, heiress to a sizable fortune from Bob’s grandfather, had a reasonable answer. She took him to Europe for a kind of quack Henry James education at age 15, the schooling of a nascent CIA field man. Bob and his mom traversed Europe for several years – his father, who “wasn’t good for anything,” had abandoned the family – and by 1968, they were in Paris when the city was burning and students were rioting. He soon learned French, then German when his mother bought a Land Rover and headed east, aimed improbably for Moscow. The Rover was an old piece of junk, “like riding a John Deere tractor.” When they limped out of Prague, Soviet tanks passed them on the road, dispatched to crush the Prague Spring. They made it Moscow, then Helsinki, then home to the states, where Baer was sent by his mother to a military school. The discipline somehow took, and he was accepted into Georgetown University, graduating with a degree in international relations and, on a lark, he passed the Foreign Service exam. A year later, crashed out on a friend’s couch in Berkeley, with no job prospects and not much ambition for anything but the life of a ski bum, he applied, again on a lark, to the CIA. He imagined a sinecure in the Alps, where he might spy on European governments between runs in the powder.

Instead, Baer was dumped into the bowels of New Delhi to scope out Soviet influence in India. He was now a Cold Warrior. When he arrived to the house provided as cover, he was greeted by seven servants lined up under “a huge banyan tree and a pergola of jasmine that arched over the entire length of the driveway.” No snow, but this wasn’t so bad for a 25-year-old starting his first real job.

***

In 1976, the same year that Baer, bright-eyed and enamored, joined the Agency, a clandestine services veteran named John Stockwell, chief in the CIA’s disastrous Angola venture in the 1970s, prepared a series of investigative memoirs very much along the lines of the books Baer would write a quarter-century later. What Stockwell had seen as an operative in Africa and across the Third World was a CIA that was purely interventionist – not gathering intelligence, but brutally machinating, vicious, a secret weapon of US presidents and White House policymakers to battle the Soviets for world control. CIA paramilitary operations through proxy forces – the funding of mercenaries, terrorists, saboteurs – were, reported Stockwell, “all illegal,” their goal to “disrupt the normal functioning, often the democratic functioning, of other societies” (a blinding flash of the obvious for readers today). For Stockwell, who would quit the CIA in 1976 to whistleblow before Congress, this “rais[ed] serious questions about the moral responsibility of the United States in the international society of nations.” Secrecy in pursuit of the mercurial thing called “national security,” he wrote, had given license to amorality that issued from the highest rungs of government: “The major function of secrecy in Washington is to keep the U.S. people and U.S. Congress from knowing what the nation's leaders are doing,” he wrote. “Secrecy is power. Secrecy covers up mistakes. Secrecy covers up corruption.” And in the CIA, he concluded, “a profound, arrogant, moral corruption set in.” Ex-CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson came to a similar conclusion: “Every president since Truman, once he discovered that he had a totally secret, financially unaccountable private army at his personal disposal found its deployment irresistible.”

By the mid-1970s, however, the veil was torn wide. Congress under the direction of Sen. Frank Church in 1975-76 issued a devastating series of reports on the criminality of the agency. The CIA had sponsored coups and fixed elections in Greece, Italy, Burma, Indonesia and dozens of other nations. It had smuggled Nazi war criminals out of Germany to fight communism in Eastern Europe; it worked arm in arm with narcotics traffickers in Asia, Europe, the Middle East (and always seemed to leave behind a thriving drug nexus wherever it intervened); it supplied security forces worldwide with torture equipment, torture manuals, torture training. In Vietnam, its massive Saigon Station oversaw the kidnapping and killing of tens of thousands of suspected Vietcong, many of them innocents, doing a good job of turning the peasant population against the US. The rot came out almost daily as the Church Committee dug it up. By the late 1970s, the CIA had planned or carried out the assassination of leaders in more than a dozen countries; CIA jokers called this “suicide involuntarily administered,” courtesy of the Agency’s “Health Alteration Committee.” The agency’s work disrupting governments was often in service of corporations with close ties to Congress and the White House and whose business interests were threatened by anything that smelled of socialism. The agency had been busy too on the homefront, in violation of domestic law, overseeing mind control programs in which unwitting Americans were poisoned with drugs, experimented upon, effectively tortured; opening the mail of US citizens; surveilling the political activity of Americans; infiltrating the media with disinformation; lying habitually to elected officials. The CIA appeared in this light as a threat to the republic itself.

Not much of this perturbed young Bob Baer, who was finishing his senior year at Georgetown as the Church revelations splashed across the front pages of the Washington Post and New York Times. “I was left with the impression,” he wrote in his memoir, “that behind the dirt there must be some deep, dark, impenetrable mystery – a forbidden knowledge.” Sojourning with his mother across Europe had given him a “romantic view of the world,” and the CIA, he said, “seemed for a moment like romance itself.”

***

Historians will argue the point, but in the wake of the Church hearings a kind of reform fell over the agency, certainly a scaling back of covert action that heralded the end of what nostalgics might call the heroic age of free-wheeling interventionism – though the reform didn’t last. Baer matured as a field officer under the new dispensation, tasked to do what the CIA claimed it now wanted from the clandestine services: Not to disrupt or destabilize or assassinate – presidential directive 12333, issued in 1981, explicitly prohibited CIA assassinations – but to listen, speak the language, gather sources, stay quiet with an ear to the ground, know your host country, the critical issues, the people and players, learn the streets of the city where you’re posted, disappear into the fabric of the society. Learn to move like fog. Any case officer will tell you this is a lot harder than it sounds. CIA officers who worked with Baer tell me he excelled at it wherever he went, in Beirut in the 1980s, in the disaster of Iraq post-Gulf War I, in Khartoum tracking terrorists, in Tajikistan as station chief, in Sarajevo during the Yugoslav wars, in Paris working cocktail parties.

Tradecraft was the key. You learned to dodge surveillance and to run surveillance. You learned how to tap phones and to make sure you weren’t tapped. You learned about the enemy’s weapons, battle plans, the latest technologies. You devoured books, a CIA man devoting himself as a regional scholar. You learned to use the toys of the trade, weird poisons like “Who, Me?”, which makes the victim smell literally like shit for days, the stench seeping from his pores. You used standard-issue James Bond items like microdots, photographic negatives reduced to the size of a period on a page, and you learned stegonography, the art of caching data inside photographs. You learned disguises. Baer thought highly of the Diamond-Tooth Disguise – a false diamond incisor in your smile-line and “the only thing people remember about you is that diamond.” You learned covers for action and covers for status, the latter being the big picture explanation for why you’re in-country. Most often your cover for status is that you work in some capacity for the US embassy, a day job shuffling paper (Baer, like all CIA case officers, is constrained by lifetime contract with the CIA from revealing his status covers over the years).

The real work is after dark, when the embassy shuts down. Then you hit the streets, the bars, the alleys, the dingy hotel rooms where you debrief your “agents,” the locals you’ve turncoated to work betraying their own government, stealing secrets. Covers for action were the life or death of a mission, the determinant whether you’d head home for the night or get caught on a capital crime for spying. The Laundry Cover came in handy. If you’re running around a city late at night, make sure you know where the nearest 24 hour laundromat is, make sure you have the dirty laundry with you – it has to be really dirty – and “make sure you’re dirty too.” Babies in a stroller are good cover. Dogs late at night are good cover for dead-drops, because you can look to the dog as an excuse for your wandering. “You can also hide messages,” says Baer, “in the dog poop.”

The Mom Cover was one of Baer’s inventions. “I’ve taken my mom as cover to the diciest places,” he tells me. “I took her to the Garm Valley in 1992, in Tajikistan, which had just been overrun by Bin Laden extremists.” Baer’s purpose as chief of station in Tajikistan was to find out how and where the factions were operating. “We had an old Niva sedan with stolen Afghan diplomat plates and got stopped by twelve gunmen, fighting the civil war, who were filthy and cut up and hadn’t washed in weeks. My mother said, ‘Oh hello, how are you? I’m his mother. And where are you from?’ Some of the gunmen spoke English. They finally gave us tea.”

So here was Baer among Jordanian princes, rogue oil traders in Iraq. Here he was in 1993 stealing a kilo of cocaine from the airplane of Morocco’s King Hasan, simply to prove that one of our allies in the Middle East was a drug runner (“I wanted to rub Washington’s nose in it.”). In Sarajevo he posed as an arms dealer, in Iraq he was an assassin, in Paris a pimp. Once he was stalked by wolves on the Silk Road. In Tajikistan, he spent his off-time cultivating his counterparts in the KGB, parachuting with them drunk on vodka or racing around in their tanks for a goof (headquarters reprimanded him for his initiative). In the Tajik capital of Dushanbe, he found himself in the middle of an Islamic uprising, holed up in a hotel room with a cache of Stinger missiles, while people were shot in the town square and a man with a bull-horn screamed, “THERE ARE SPIES AMONG US.”

Then there was Beirut in the 1980s, where Baer would fully understand the stakes intelligence work presented, the answers it could unfold. Beirut was a tragic experience for the United States in the Middle East, eclipsed only by the disaster of the Iraq occupation 20 years later. It began with the car bombing of the American embassy in April 1983, which killed 63 Americans, including six CIA officers. Six months later, 241 US soldiers died in a car-bombing of the Marine barracks. Then, in the spring of 1984, the beloved head of the CIA station in Beirut, William Francis Buckley, was kidnapped by elements of Hezbollah, and by 1985, Buckley in captivity was dead from pneumonia. Never before had the CIA suffered so many losses in such short order.

No one knew who was behind the car bombings, least of all the CIA. Solving the mystery became an obsession for Baer, and he set out on a four-year odyssey in the Beirut Station to get the answer. Working Beirut was dangerous. The place was shelled and rocketed daily, infested with snipers, divided into fiefdoms controlled by Druz militiamen, Hezbollah, Fatah terrorists. Baer operated among them all. “Bob knew Beirut better than anyone I met there,” said former CIA officer John Maguire, now retired, who spied with him at the Beirut station for several years in the 1980s. “He worked both sides of the Green Line, east Beirut, and west Beirut, the southern suburbs, and the Biqa valley. He was a recruiter, and he worked alone, did it 24-7, with no fanfare, no back up.” Baer finally concluded, in 1987, that the Islamist regime of Iran, employing local Fatah proxies, was the key player behind the embassy bombing and the Buckley kidnapping. The revelations, said Baer, didn’t register at headquarters. “It was old history by then. They just didn’t care. It was my first realization of the historical amnesia at the agency,” he says now.

Baer claims he would go on to produce no small supply of intelligence in the Middle East and Central Asia. He recruited an asset inside Hezbollah, which had never before been done. He says he prevented a terrorist attack on the USS New Jersey, which was to be rocketed off the coast of Lebanon. In the 1980s, he began plumbing the network of Islamists known as the Muslim Brotherhood, whose members would later link into Al Qaeda. “I told headquarters, ‘Hey guys we gotta do something about the Brotherhood, they're up to no good,’” Baer told me. “I went to Germany, found a Brotherhood source, but no one in DC was interested and they let the guy disappear.” The source, Baer claims, was a member of the same cell that Mohammed Atta would join in Hamburg years later in preparation for the attacks of 9/11.

The point, he told me again and again, is that the higher-ups at the CIA who reported to the White House did not seem to value real intelligence, the slow organic process of gathering information in bits and understanding it. Presidents serve for four years; they want results today, they want intelligence that serves the political agenda that ensures re-election. CIA director George Tenet in the run-up to the Iraq war provided just this kind of intelligence. The Iraqi WMDs were a “slam-dunk,” said Tenet, and his pronouncement fit with the chief justification for a war the Bush Administration had predetermined. But the WMDs were an illusion, and meanwhile there were dissenters on the ground in the CIA who said as much and were ignored.

One day when I asked Baer to list his achievements as a spy, he offered up a litany of serious work. “I also fixed the coffee machine on the 6th floor and fucked George Tenet’s wife,” he joked.

***

Historical amnesia might seem a habit of every American administration since the founding of the national security state in 1947, but it stands out as a world-historic problem in the post-9/11 environment. The attacks from Iran’s proxies in Beirut – the bombings of American military and intelligence sites, the kidnapping of Buckley – arguably presented a classic case of history coming back to haunt the CIA in the form of “blowback.” Ex-CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson has made a career writing about blowback, the CIA’s term of art for when interventionism results in long-term negative consequences for US national security. Johnson in his three books on the topic – his first was subtitled The Costs and Consequences of American Empire – makes a compelling universal argument for blowback as systemic in US foreign policy post-World War II.

In hindsight, Iranian blowback against the US should have been expected, as easy to understand as the law of gravity. In 1953, the CIA helped to topple the democratically-elected president of Iran, a socialist named Mohammed Mossadegh who threatened to nationalize British oil interests. The agency installed the tyrannical Shah, who was friendly to oil corporations while instituting a reign of terror that begat the Islamic Revolution of 1979 – the same Islamists who stormed the US embassy to take 53 American hostages and spark the hostage crisis that would unravel the presidency of Jimmy Carter, the same Islamists who now aggressed against the US in Beirut, where the US also happened to be intervening. During this period, the CIA was providing arms to another group of Islamist revolutionaries in Afghanistan, who were fighting off a Soviet invasion. The past in Afghanistan was prologue: Our Islamist allies there would coalesce into Al Qaeda to provide a particularly nasty example of blowback on September 11, 2001.

***

How Bob Baer came to his unhappy end at the CIA after 21 years of service, reduced overnight to the status of pariah and forced to quit, is a matter of dispute. By 1995 he was head of CIA operations in northern Iraq, based in Kurdish-held Salah-Al-Din, tasked with organizing opposition to the regime of Saddam Hussein. It was his first foray into covert action, and it would be his last. In early 1995, his sources inside the Iraqi army were talking about a coup attempt, the toppling of Saddam and the installing of a military junta friendly to the US. This seemed to accord with Baer’s mission. For months he had been directing Kurdish forces, with CIA support, to attack Saddam’s army outposts in the north. The attacks resulted in the deaths of thousands of Iraqi soldiers. (When I asked Baer if he had ever committed assassinations for the agency, he said, “Nope, sorry to disappoint, but I ordered the deaths of over 2,000 Iraqis in paramilitary operations. Does that make me an assassin or a mass murderer?”)

Washington said he had overstepped his authority in supporting the coup planners. Baer claimed that the Clinton Administration had in fact given the go-ahead, then balked at the last minute. Baer’s feeling was that the administration didn’t know what it wanted, was too “politically correct,” and that he was the scapegoat for its indecision. The coup, when it finally unfolded, was crushed unceremoniously, the rebel generals killed.

What then happened strained Baer’s imagination. He was recalled to headquarters, investigated by the FBI, his passports confiscated, and he was charged – absurdly, it seemed, given the CIA’s history of screw-ups that went unpunished – with attempted murder for conspiring to assassinate a foreign leader. Baer claimed he was only following orders. After a six month inquiry, he was exonerated of the charge. The ironies abound. Baer had excelled in intelligence, not intervention, and his only attempt at covert action would backfire to ruin his career. He was permanently desk-jobbed, hating the air-conditioned bureaucracy of Washington, knowing he’d never get posted again in the field where he thrived. At the very moment when his career in the agency should have taken a turn for the better, he quit.

Now he surveyed the landscape of his life, and it was not pretty. He was broke, priced out of the bubble-economy real estate in DC, and, accustomed to living in hellholes and on the edge, he felt like a stranger in his own country. His family was in shambles after years of neglect. His marriage, he said, was loveless, sexless – he had long been escaping it purposely in assignments overseas. He was a pariah to his three children, an absentee father. “There’s this whole bullshit that they’ll come back to you in the end,” he says today. “But that’s, well, bullshit. My kids basically lie to me about everything. Their grades. Their lives.” He soon got divorced, and re-married to a colleague, a CIA agent named Dayna Williamson, who he met while posted working the war in Sarajevo. Dayna was a social worker in Orange County before she joined the agency, became a “shooter” in the CIA’s Office of Security, trained to kill with a pistol, trained in “target acquisition” in crowds using a quick-draw purse with a false bottom where she kept a Glock. She once worked protecting the queen of Jordan during public appearances. Orphaned from the agency, Bob and Dayna tried freelance intelligence consulting in Beirut, old and familiar territory. One of the first offers Baer got was to commit an assassination. That wasn’t an option.

Instead, he would study Latin and Greek, would become a scholar. He read Aristotle, Herodotus, Polybius, Tacitus in the original tongue. He thought about writing books, something about his saga with the CIA. The idea made sense. It might even earn him money. Baer worked for two years to complete “See No Evil,” and, when the book hit stores in early 2002, pegged to the 9/11 attacks, it was a best-seller. Its argument was commonsensical and certainly held no news: The CIA had forgotten that intelligence depended on human beings in the field, what’s called in the parlance “humint.” Computers crunching data, the satellites snapping photos from miles in the sky – these wouldn’t save us. The failure to trust the perils of humint, argued Baer, helped allow 9/11 to happen. He dedicated the book to his kids: “I hope this goes a little way,” he wrote, “in explaining where I was for all those years.”

Baer liked the discipline of writing; it played to his strengths as a spy. He could accomplish it alone, with no oversight, cultivating sources, listening on his own terms, unconstrained by the bureaucracy. A number of ex-CIA case officers I spoke to said Baer’s memoir rang true: The CIA did not value its people in the dirt. Ex-CIA deep cover agent Ishmael Jones, who last year published a pseudonymous memoir, “The Human Factor,” about his disillusioning years at the CIA, told me: “Baer’s achievements in books show that he is very talented and intelligent. Imagine what he could have done for our national security in a functioning clandestine service.” This is perhaps the greatest irony: Baer needed to leave the agency to fully thrive. Working for the CIA was “a little boy’s adventure,” Baer told me. “But you don’t mature. You don’t grow up.”

***

When Hollywood came calling after the success of “See No Evil” and Syriana went into production in 2004, Baer snagged a cameo role, playing an FBI agent. He had one line, demanding George Clooney give up his “passports” – in the plural – and he kept flubbing it. There are a lot of ex-CIA officers who tell me they’ve laughed at the Syriana version of the CIA, among them Bob Baer.

What Syriana offers, beyond its obvious portrait of the symbiosis of big oil and aggressive foreign policy, is a clean conspiracist choreography of agency men. The CIA dances without fail to the tune of oil corporation executives and DC lobbyists and lawyers who, in undisclosed channels as ethereal as ESP, order the agency to assassinate a Middle Eastern emir the oil corporations don’t like. This preposterous clockwork CIA world is run, like most CIA conspiracies on film, with no snags, no accidents, no bureaucratic in-fighting, no paperwork, no stupidity or incompetence or laziness, and certainly nothing of the tiresome and tragically boring real world interregnums where officers like Baer sweat in those hotel rooms in Beirut debriefing sources, slowly making connections, piecing the puzzle or not piecing it at all. Real intelligence work doesn’t make for good movies.

In this regard, Syriana is a remarkably dated vision that aligns nicely with the agency of the 1950s and 1960s that swooped around the planet toppling governments during the golden age of covert action, back when the CIA was deadly effective and not the clipped-wing thing it is today. One could argue that Syriana is in fact a kind of backhanded propaganda, as deafeningly simplistic as a James Bond film. “The objection I have with Baer’s work is that the entertainment angle unintentionally shows the CIA as an efficient organization,” says Ishmael Jones, who spent 15 years in deep cover with the agency. “Syriana may seem a negative portrayal of the CIA – as an organization of assassins seeking to advance American oil company interests – but it also presents the CIA as all-knowing, determined, tough and hard-working. The CIA, as a living creature, would prefer this portrayal to that of being devoted only to its own feeding and growth, avoiding rigorous work and foreign duty.” When I asked Baer about his fellow officer’s assessment, he shot back in an e-mail: “He’s right.”

The real story that Syriana missed is that the CIA today has more employees, more hangers-on in the bureaucracy, more private contractors, a fatter budget than ever, and it still can’t seem to effectively deploy field agents for the fundamental purpose of human intelligence. In the long wake of 9/11, the agency, flush with money, engaged in vast new hiring, and the CIA now boasts over 20,000 employees, equal to the size of an army division. Most serve in the Directorate of Intelligence, the geek squad; less than 2,000 work in the clandestine services at the Directorate of Operations. But even the operations people are mostly staying home. According to Ishmael Jones, some 90 percent of CIA employees live and work in the comfort of the US, unaccustomed to drinking ditchwater and sleeping on cots; during the Cold War, perhaps 45 percent lived stateside. The physical evidence of the domesticity is all around Washington DC, in the form of huge new building construction for CIA offices.

“Before 9/11, the CIA was bureaucratic and sloppy, but after 9/11 it got viciously more so,” Jones wrote me recently in an e-mail describing how the bloat functions. “Instead of just calling someone and setting a meeting, as you do so often in your work as a journalist,” he told me, “the CIA will form committees to discuss how to contact someone and spend months on it. Then instead of calling the guy on the phone, they’ll do something wildly expensive – create a convention in Rome at a fancy hotel, prepare events and speakers, and then invite the guy to the convention. Or they buy the bank where he does business. Real estate is big, so maybe they’ll buy the house next door to the guy. These programs never seem to work because the conditions never seem to be just right for meeting the person. But meeting the man isn’t the goal,” Jones told me. “Making everyone look busy and making money disappear is.”

The agency is gripped in the privatization frenzy now commonplace in the US intelligence services, where officers are more interested in the revolving doors of the Beltway than, pace the Hollywood delusions of Syriana, whacking emirs halfway across the globe. The intelligence-industrial complex is worth as much as $50 billion a year, with private sector contracts outsourced to ex-CIA officers who offer their services to the agency at thrice what the average CIA staffer makes (and with far less effectiveness, according to sources like Jones, than even the wasteful staffers). This is a change unprecedented in the history of the agency. “You never saw a private contractor inside CIA in my time and no one talked about getting a contract when they left,” Baer tells me. “People retired and disappeared. It was like Cincinnatus. They went back to their farms. Look at George Tenet. He retires, makes millions of dollars on his book, and now he has multiple contracts consulting with the CIA. When he wrote his book, the CIA gave him researchers and an office – a classified office at Langley – so he could have the CIA do his fact-checking for him.” Ishmael Jones tells me that some $3 billion since 9/11 has been “wasted, lost or stolen” by ex-CIA officers working as contractors doing “support work,” running training programs, conducting “research,” writing “analysis.” Private companies fleecing the US government is an American tradition, more starkly in the last decade than ever before, but the difference, notes Jones, “is that CIA contractors have no oversight, no accountability.”

The new hiring, the bigger budgets, the growth in contracting is clearly predicated on the ostensible concerns of national security. All this effort is meant to defeat the noun called “terror” and find Bin Laden, who has taken up the useful spot on the horizon where Communism once loomed as the threat. Bob Baer profited from the Bin Laden threat industry with his first book. “There’s money, careers, whole reputations dependent on the Bin Laden threat. But the threat has come and gone,” says Baer. “We fucked that one up.”

Meanwhile, there is the Baghdad Station, where the investment is supposed to matter. John Maguire, who worked with Baer in Beirut, recently came back from Baghdad, now the largest CIA clandestine operation since Saigon during the Vietnam War. “Few if any case officers know their way around the city, rarely venture out, certainly not alone, and most can get lost. ‘Too dangerous,’ they say. When they do go out,” Maguire tells me, “it’s with personal body guards, drivers, armored cars, automatic weapons, and a profile from a Mad Max movie.” So much for moving like fog. Instead, there is the iron fist, the Abu Ghraibs and the CIA “black sites,” the super-secret gulags, where the agency has resurrected its criminal habit of torturing “sources.” Torture, as Bob Baer will tell you, has never produced a useful piece of intelligence and never will. Torture does, however, produce a lot of pissed-off people who end up hating the United States when they might have been allies. In other words, a good set-up for more blowback.

***

One day last autumn, when I went to visit Baer in Silverton before the big snows hit and the roads would be closed for days, we walked in the mountains and talked about what a really effective CIA might have achieved. It might have found Bin Laden (Baer thinks he’s dead, his videos that pop up the work of an Al Qaeda master in PhotoShop). Might have gotten inside the Muslim Brotherhood that helped produce Bin Laden’s troops. Might have been honest about the mirage of Saddam’s WMDs. “The CIA supplied weapons to the mujahideen in Afghanistan for ten years and beat the Soviet army,” he said. “Yet the agency hadn’t secured one single source inside Afghanistan who could tell us about Al Qaeda.”

We talked about his latest book, “The Devil We Know,” an intelligence analysis of Iran that suggests everything in the popular discourse in the US about Iran is wrong. It’s the sort of intelligence that likely would have been ignored if published inside the agency. The US, offers Baer, should engage with Iran, a great power in the Middle East, the heir of the Persia of antiquity that is invested in a historical memory the American spy apparatus can’t be bothered to understand. The US should come to a détente with Iran’s rulers, recognizing them not as madmen intent on destruction but as players in the world of realpolitik – not so very different in their intent than the United States. Iran, says Baer, has abandoned its penchant for funding terrorism against the US. Altogether this is a big-hearted argument, almost heroic, given the carnage visited on the CIA by the mullahs during Baer’s years in Beirut, the friends killed by Iran, the chaos spread by Iran. The book in that sense is a peace offering in spite of the awful past – a recognition of historical memory and an attempt at an answer to it.

Almost nothing in what he suggests in the Iran book accords with the conventional wisdom in DC. Iran must submit, goes the wisdom, or else suffer our bombs. Iran, after all, is supposed to be the next big threat. Baer’s dissenting voice is small in the scrum of interests in Washington. That’s why he’s in Silverton. He suggests the CIA transfer its headquarters to the mountains, to live in the hard cold winter and get a grip on reality, lose some fat. I get the impression he no longer believes in US power as currently configured. Perhaps he has come full circle from traveling the world with his mom. He tells me he might run for county sheriff and that his first official act is that he will “no longer enforce federal laws.” He tells me, “We're a country of isolationists. We don't do empires. So we come home. Build the perfect electric car, give away solar panels, retool the assholes on Wall Street to build public transportation.” He’s got his new daughter Khyber to take care of, and his wife Dayna. He has a new pair of skis. As we walked into the mountains, snow started falling. The peaks would soon be covered, and the valley. Baer could go skiing.

Christopher Ketcham, a freelance writer in Brooklyn, NY, is writing a book about secessionist groups in the US. You can write him at cketcham99@mindspring.com or see more of his work at christopherketcham.com.

Grietas y Resquicios

Argenpress


En algún lugar de la inflexión, donde la curvatura se desplaza hacia una perspectiva diferente, los efectos de alejan de las causas y las razones se tornan obtusas; cuando la inflexión es superlativa, aparecen grietas y resquicios en la contundencia de la razón…

Cuando una decisión se sustenta en razones inobjetables, suelen ser innecesarias las justificaciones; cuando se decide atendiendo al bien común, la contundencia de los motivos no admite resquicios ni recovecos por los cuales se filtren las sospechas; la toma de decisiones razonadas determina un punto sin retorno, y por eso, las reconsideraciones y las negociaciones son las secuelas de la irreflexión.

En la liquidación de la paraestatal Luz y Fuerza del Centro (LyFC) intervinieron: la lógica matemática y económica como una razón incuestionable; el conflicto del estado con el sindicato como un motivo ineludible; pero la necesidad de consolidar al estado como el titular del monopolio de la violencia es una justificación mezquina. La súbita desaparición de LyFC adquirió dimensiones sociales debido al desarrollo subrepticio del proceso, y fue entonces cuando las razones se debilitaron y se filtraron las suspicacias.

Cuando una decisión es oportuna, prudente y razonada no admite reconsideraciones, ni retrocesos, ni la más tenue recapitulación. La insólita disposición de los secretarios de Economía y Trabajo para dialogar con el sindicato de una empresa extinta y liquidada, denota una debilidad argumentativa, además, las propuestas de los secretarios exhiben la aprehensión del estado ante cualquier indicio de ingobernabilidad.

El calderonismo se legitimó por la lealtad incondicional de las fuerzas armadas y ha pretendido consolidarse en una cruzada contra el crimen organizado, se ha esparcido la sensación de vulnerabilidad a todo el territorio nacional para militarizar las regiones hostiles y adversas al régimen; pero la estrategia calderonista no consideró la emergencia de la tensión social generalizada.

El criterio calderonista enfatiza el miedo generalizado por la inseguridad galopante y la violencia exacerbada para justificar la adopción de medidas autoritarias implementadas por la fuerza pública. Pero este férreo criterio tiene una grieta: no contempló la posibilidad de provocar el descontento de la ciudadanía. Así lo demuestran las iniciativas del ejecutivo en materia fiscal y el procedimiento para la liquidación de LyFC.

Mientras la ciudadanía sólo sea considerada como una fuente de ingresos para el estado, persistirá el riesgo de ingobernabilidad; porque cuando la población percibe los matices despóticos en el estado, se agudizan la tensión y el repudio que se filtraron por las grietas y los resquicios en la contundencia de la sinrazón…

The US as Failed State

The Super Rich are Laughing


By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

CounterPunch

The US has every characteristic of a failed state.

The US government’s current operating budget is dependent on foreign financing and money creation.

Too politically weak to be able to advance its interests through diplomacy, the US relies on terrorism and military aggression.

Costs are out of control, and priorities are skewed in the interest of rich organized interest groups at the expense of the vast majority of citizens. For example, war at all cost, which enriches the armaments industry, the officer corps and the financial firms that handle the war’s financing, takes precedence over the needs of American citizens. There is no money to provide the uninsured with health care, but Pentagon officials have told the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee in the House that every gallon of gasoline delivered to US troops in Afghanistan costs American taxpayers $400.

“It is a number that we were not aware of and it is worrisome,” said Rep. John Murtha, chairman of the subcommittee.

According to reports, the US Marines in Afghanistan use 800,000 gallons of gasoline per day. At $400 per gallon, that comes to a $320,000,000 daily fuel bill for the Marines alone. Only a country totally out of control would squander resources in this way.

While the US government squanders $400 per gallon of gasoline in order to kill women and children in Afghanistan, many millions of Americans have lost their jobs and their homes and are experiencing the kind of misery that is the daily life of poor third world peoples. Americans are living in their cars and in public parks. America’s cities, towns, and states are suffering from the costs of economic dislocations and the reduction in tax revenues from the economy’s decline. Yet, Obama has sent more troops to Afghanistan, a country half way around the world that is not a threat to America.

It costs $750,000 per year for each soldier we have in Afghanistan. The soldiers, who are at risk of life and limb, are paid a pittance, but all of the privatized services to the military are rolling in excess profits. One of the great frauds perpetuated on the American people was the privatization of services that the US military traditionally performed for itself. “Our” elected leaders could not resist any opportunity to create at taxpayers’ expense private wealth that could be recycled to politicians in campaign contributions.

Republicans and Democrats on the take from the private insurance companies maintain that the US cannot afford to provide Americans with health care and that cuts must be made even in Social Security and Medicare. So how can the US afford bankrupting wars, much less totally pointless wars that serve no American interest?

The enormous scale of foreign borrowing and money creation necessary to finance Washington’s wars are sending the dollar to historic lows. The dollar has even experienced large declines relative to currencies of third world countries such as Botswana and Brazil. The decline in the dollar’s value reduces the purchasing power of Americans’ already declining incomes.

Despite the lowest level of housing starts in 64 years, the US housing market is flooded with unsold homes, and financial institutions have a huge and rising inventory of foreclosed homes not yet on the market.

Industrial production has collapsed to the level of 1999, wiping out a decade of growth in industrial output.

The enormous bank reserves created by the Federal Reserve are not finding their way into the economy. Instead, the banks are hoarding the reserves as insurance against the fraudulent derivatives that they purchased from the gangster Wall Street investment banks.

The regulatory agencies have been corrupted by private interests. Frontline reports that Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin, and Larry Summers blocked Brooksley Born, the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from regulating derivatives. President Obama rewarded Larry Summers for his idiocy by appointing him Director of the National Economic Council. What this means is that profits for Wall Street will continue to be leeched from the diminishing blood supply of the American economy.

An unmistakable sign of third world despotism is a police force that sees the pubic as the enemy. Thanks to the federal government, our local police forces are now militarized and imbued with hostile attitudes toward the public. SWAT teams have proliferated, and even small towns now have police forces with the firepower of US Special Forces. Summons are increasingly delivered by SWAT teams that tyrannize citizens with broken down doors, a $400 or $500 repair born by the tyrannized resident. Recently a mayor and his family were the recipients of incompetence by the town’s local SWAT team, which mistakenly wrecked the mayor’s home, terrorized his family, and killed the family’s two friendly Labrador dogs.

If a town’s mayor can be treated in this way, what do you think is the fate of the poor white or black? Or the idealistic student who protests his government’s inhumanity?

In any failed state, the greatest threat to the population comes from the government and the police. That is certainly the situation today in the USA. Americans have no greater enemy than their own government. Washington is controlled by interest groups that enrich themselves at the expense of the American people.

The one percent that comprise the superrich are laughing as they say, “let them eat cake.”

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

El Sindicato de Electricistas Llama a la Huelga en todo el País

Gonzalo Sánchez
Tercera Información

"Primero se liquiden y luego ya veremos" fueron las palabras con las que el gobierno de Felipe Calderón abrió el diálogo con el Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas. Para el gobierno mexicano cualquier acuerdo debe darse después de que los trabajadores asuman el ilegal cierre de la empresa de electricidad Luz y Fuerza del Centro, lo que significa para los 42.000 trabajadores de la empresa perder sus empleos.

A cambio el ejecutivo que lidera Felipe Calderón dará a los trabajadores una insuficiente liquidación, becas para hacer cursos de 3 meses de capacitación laboral o la posibilidad de convertirse en empresarios siguiendo los consejos de unos consultores especializados.

Esta propuesta no ha convencido al 95% de los electricistas que exigen al gobierno recuperar sus puestos de trabajo en las condiciones anteriores al violento cierre.

Debido a esto el SME salió del diálogo preparando una asamblea con otros sindicatos mexicanos como la Unión Nacional de Trabajadores, campesinos y el Frente Sindical Mexicano entre otros, con el fin de llamar a una huelga en todo el país que será apoyada por la izquierda social y política mexicana, de acuerdo a las declaraciones del líder de éstas, López Obrador.

El Sindicato Mexicano de Electricistas denunció ante la opinión pública que el gobierno les persigue individualmente, coaccionándolos para que acepten el finiquito, aunque según el Coordinador General del sindicato Martín Esparza "vamos a resistir hasta que nos devuelvan el puesto de trabajo".

Rape Is a Pre-Existing Condition? The Heartlessness of the Health Insurance Industry Exposed

By Danielle Ivory
The Huffington Post Investigative Fund

Christina Turner feared that she might have been sexually assaulted after two men slipped her a knockout drug. She thought she was taking proper precautions when her doctor prescribed a month's worth of anti-AIDS medicine.

Only later did she learn that she had made herself all but uninsurable.

Turner had let the men buy her drinks at a bar in Fort Lauderdale. The next thing she knew, she said, she was lying on a roadside with cuts and bruises that indicated she had been raped. She never developed an HIV infection. But months later, when she lost her health insurance and sought new coverage, she ran into a problem.

Turner, 45, who used to be a health insurance underwriter herself, said the insurance companies examined her health records. Even after she explained the assault, the insurers would not sell her a policy because the HIV medication raised too many health questions. They told her they might reconsider in three or more years if she could prove that she was still AIDS-free.

Stories of how victims of sexual assault can get tangled in the health insurance system have been one result of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund's citizen journalism project, which is calling on readers to provide information and anecdotes about the inner workings of the insurance industry. The project aims to uncover details and data that can inform the larger debate over how to fix the nation's health care system. As the Investigative Fund reported in September, health insurance companies are not required to make public their records on how often claims are denied and for what reasons.

Some women have contacted the Investigative Fund to say they were deemed ineligible for health insurance because they had a pre-existing condition as a result of a rape, such as post traumatic stress disorder or a sexually transmitted disease. Other patients and therapists wrote in with allegations that insurers are routinely denying long-term mental health care to women who have been sexually assaulted.

Susan Pisano, spokeswoman for the health insurance industry's largest trade group, America's Health Insurance Plans, said insurers do not discriminate against victims of sexual assault and ordinarily would not even know if a patient had been raped.

"These issues you are bringing up, they deserve to be brought up," said Pisano. "People who have experienced rape and sexual assault are victims and we want them to be in a system where everyone is covered."

Turner's story about HIV drugs is not unusual, said Cindy Holtzman, an insurance agent and expert in medical billing at Medical Refund Service, Inc. of Marietta, Ga. Insurers generally categorize HIV-positive people as having a pre-existing condition and deny them coverage. Holtzman said that health insurance companies also consistently decline coverage for anyone who has taken anti-HIV drugs, even if they test negative for the virus. "It's basically an automatic no," she said.

Pisano, of the insurance trade group, said: "If you put down on a form that you are or were taking anti-HIV drugs at any time, they [the insurance companies] are going to understand that you are or were in treatment for HIV, period," she said. "That could be a factor in determining whether you get coverage."

Some doctors and nurses said that the industry's policy is not medically sound. "The chance of a rape victim actually contracting AIDS is very low. It doesn't make any sense to use that as a calculus for determining who get health insurance," said Dr. Alex Schafir, faculty instructor at Providence St. Vincent Hospital in Portland, Ore.

Nurses who deal with sexual assault cases say the industry's policy creates a significant problem for those treating women who have been assaulted. "It's difficult enough to make sure that rape victims take the drugs," said Diana Faugno, a forensic nurse in California and board director of End Violence Against Women International. "What are we supposed to tell women now? Well, I guess you have a choice - you can risk your health insurance or you can risk AIDS. Go ahead and choose."

Turner, now a life and casualty insurance agent, said she went without health coverage for three years after the attack. She second-guesses her decision to take the HIV drugs. "I'm going to be penalized my whole life because of this," she said.

Several women told the Investigative Fund that after being sexually assaulted they had been denied care or ruled ineligible for health insurance because of what were deemed pre-existing conditions stemming from their assaults -- particularly post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

A 38-year-old woman in Ithaca, N.Y., said she was raped last year and then penalized by insurers because in giving her medical history she mentioned an assault she suffered in college 17 years earlier. The woman, Kimberly Fallon, told a nurse about the previous attack and months later, her doctor's office sent her a bill for treatment. She said she was informed by a nurse and, later, the hospital's billing department that her health insurance company, Blue Cross Blue Shield, not only had declined payment for the rape exam, but also would not pay for therapy or medication for trauma because she "had been raped before."

Fallon says she now has trouble getting coverage for gynecological exams. To avoid the hassle of fighting with her insurance company, she goes to Planned Parenthood instead and pays out of pocket.

A New Mexico woman told the Investigative Fund she was denied coverage at several health insurance companies because she had suffered from PTSD after being attacked and raped in 2003. She did not want to disclose her name because she feared that she would lose her group health insurance if she went on the record as a rape victim. "I remember just feeling infuriated," she said.

"I think it's important to point out that health plans are not denying coverage based on the fact that someone was raped," said Pisano of the insurance trade group. "But PTSD could be a factor in denied coverage."

"That might not be a discriminatory action, but it certainly would seem to have a discriminatory impact," said Sandra Park, staff attorney at the Women's Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union. "Insurance discrimination against rape victims will only further discourage them from coming forward to law enforcement and seeking medical help."

Even when patients have coverage, there are fundamental disagreements between insurance companies and doctors about what mental health treatment is medically necessary. The Investigative Fund spoke with doctors, psychologists, and licensed clinical social workers around the country who work regularly with victims of sexual assault. They said that their patients have been experiencing an increase in delays and denials, particularly for talk therapy.

"There's a lot of anger about this in the medical community," said Dr. George Shapiro-Weiss, a psychiatrist in Middletown, Conn. "You don't realize what an Alice in Wonderland web this has become."

"A lot of my patients are being told that their treatment isn't medically necessary," said Keri Nola, an Orlando, Fla., psychologist, who said about 75 percent of her patients are victims of sexual violence.

Several therapists cited problems with managed care companies that specialize in mental health. Such firms generally work under contract with health insurers to hold down costs while still authorizing appropriate care.

Some therapists and patients said the managed care companies have cut off necessary treatment for sexual assault victims in the name of cost containment. "The companies are peppering them with questions about their symptoms, and about their histories, and asking, 'Well, are you sure you really need therapy?'" said Jeffrey Axelbank, a New Jersey psychologist. "For someone who has been traumatized, it can feel like another trauma, and it makes the therapy less effective."

Pisano, of the insurance association, said it was not fair to draw a larger pattern from such anecdotal evidence. "These situations are evaluated on a person-by-person basis," she said. "There is nothing routine about this."

Jim Wrich, a Madison, Wis., a consultant who helps employers evaluate the companies that manage their mental health care, said his work has made him wary of the industry. "This is absolutely routine - these denials," Wrich said. "The default position is to reject care."

Magellan Behavioral Health Services, Inc., one of the nation's largest managed-care companies with more than 58 million customers, said that it does not routinely turn down treatment requests from victims of sexual assault or other clients. "We're not denying care. We are exercising our responsibility to make sure that medical necessity is met," said Dr. Lawrence Nardozzi, Magellan's medical director. "I think the process works well."

Asked if cost is a factor in the company's decisions, Magellan spokeswoman Erin Somers said: "If all the safeguards are in place to determine whether treatment is medically necessary and appropriate" then "the cost takes care of itself."

A former care manager for Magellan said in an interview that she felt pressure to deny care for cost reasons. Lois Gorwitz, a psychologist with thirty years of experience who went to work for Magellan in California in 2000, said her superiors would tell her: "We are not denying this person treatment, we are denying them their benefit. If they want the treatment they can still pay out of pocket." But, Gorwitz said, "You know that means that the person is not going to get the treatment because they can't afford to pay out of pocket."

Gorwitz quit after two years. "It's a very uncomfortable feeling of not being able to offer help," she said.

Asked for a response, Magellan's Somers said, "I think you should keep in mind that there have been a lot of changes at Magellan in the last seven years. I think the people who work at Magellan now are not having that experience."

La Unidad y la Refundación Imposibles

Mario Rivera Ortiz
Argenpress


Con motivo de la proximidad del bicentenario de la Guerra de Independencia (1810) y del centenario de la Revolución Mexicana (1910) y, sobre todo, debido al pánico desatado por los resultados electorales obtenidos por la izquierda socialdemócrata en las elecciones federales del 5 de julio de 2009, ha caído sobre la población mexicana un diluvio de llamamientos al debate nacional desde el Congreso, suscritos por el Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD), el Partido del Trabajo (PT) y Convergencia, con el objetivo primordial de estimular la lucha por las Presidencia de la República en 2012 y, dicen, modificar la política económica del gobierno panista y lograr algunas reformas democráticas del Estado. Prototipo de dichos llamamientos es el que lanzó el PRD, el 15 de septiembre próximo pasado, en el que se convoca a la unidad en torno a lo que llama “un nuevo proyecto alternativo de nación”.

En el debate previo a dicha publicación, llegó a proponerse para el nuevo programa de lucha del frente parlamentario de las izquierdas el “cambio de régimen político” que incluía el derecho de revocación de los funcionarios en todo momento, la democracia participativa, el plebiscito, el referendo, una ley general de participación ciudadana y la inevitable lucha contra la pobreza. No obstante, casi todas estas propuestas fueron archivadas por “excesivas” y quedó en el documento suscrito por la Comisión Especial para la Unidad de las Izquierdas la oferta minimalista adecuada para una “república soberana, libre, democrática, digna, justa, equitativa, igualitaria y laica”. Más de la misma sopa eisenachiana.

La fórmula para el debate nacional desde el Congreso, por lo tanto, excluyó cualquier propuesta que pudiera afectar a la propiedad capitalista y/o a su férreo aparato de dominación de clase, y, por consiguiente, fuera digna del apoyo de las clases trabajadoras del siglo XXI, es decir de la multitud. Sus gestores ex priístas, ex socialistas, ex comunistas, ex trotskistas, etc., no consideraron que el “pueblo” mexicano de hoy no sea el mismo de ayer, compuesto mayoritariamente por los campesinos sin tierra que barrieron el porfiriato, no comprenden que ahora su masa mayoritaria es de trabajadores asalariados explotados por el capital, por lo que, la república burguesa, cualquiera que sea su forma, ya no es su necesidad histórica. ¡El desarrollo social y político de México exige la república social! Por ello, ningún agrupamiento político que llame a la unidad de las izquierdas podrá lograrla con un programa minimalista.

La acentuación del proceso de desintegración y las deserciones en masa de la centro-izquierda política parlamentaria así lo sugieren. Aparentemente nada puede detener dicho proceso de descomposición, pese a que algunos núcleos de esta corriente se aferran desesperadamente a los movimientos sociales para mantener sus posiciones y fortalecer sus cabildeos reformistas frente al Poder. Por desgracia entre la socialdemocracia eisenachiana no predomina todavía el convencimiento sobre su incapacidad para conducir el movimiento revolucionario y mucho menos para aliarse, como fuerza subordinada al nuevo proletariado, en su tarea de derribar la vieja sociedad capitalista.

La experiencia histórica mexicana demuestra que todos los pactos de unidad que ha suscrito el movimiento obrero, estudiantil y campesino con la izquierda pequeñoburguesa, desembocaron en la capitulación política; verbigracia cuando la formación del Partido Nacional Revolucionario (1929), Partido Popular (lombardista) (1948), Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (1961), Partido Socialista Unificado de México (1981), Partido Mexicano Socialista (1987), Frente Democrático Nacional (1988) y Partido de la Revolución Democrática (1989).

Más recientemente, en septiembre de 2008, un grupo de de organizaciones de la izquierda tradicional mexicana reeditó al antiguo y fracasado Movimiento de Liberación Nacional. ¿Y qué sucedió con esta resurrección? justo ahora, una año después, ni siquiera respira.

Es tiempo pues, de decir lo que a nuestro juicio explica la parálisis galopante del centro- izquierda. Lo que realmente demostraron los resultados de las elecciones federales pasadas, no fue sólo el rechazo de la politiquería propia de las organizaciones de esta tendencia, sino fundamentalmente el repudio al vacío de propuestas clasistas en sus plataformas electorales

Otra objeción importante a los cantos de las sirenas unionistas es la forma orgánica “partido político”, porque se ha visto como ésta ha funcionado hasta ahora en México. Se trata de una estructura ad hoc para incubar el desclasamiento y la corrupción material e ideológica del proletariado. Tal cosa dice la historia.

Y finalmente, el no menos crucial problema de la auto descalificación de los actuales líderes partidarios y de casi todas las corporaciones sindicales obreras, es decir, de los mismos que suelen suscribir los llamamientos a la unidad: ¿Quiénes son los demócratas, colaboracionistas y unitaristas de la izquierda de hoy? Son la reproducción de los viejos políticos oportunistas devenidos en conservadores y reaccionarios posmodernos. La izquierda parlamentaria de hoy en su conjunto no representa siquiera a los nuevos elementos sociales recientemente proletarizados por el proceso incesante de la concentración del capital, sino al pequeñoburgués tradicional que quiere mantener vigentes las viejas relaciones sociales que, en el pasado, le otorgaron privilegios; no a la población integrada por los campesinos, artesanos y pequeños propietarios que derribaron al porfirismo, sino a la que, por el contrario, quiere salvarse de las consecuencias del desarrollo capitalista junto con su changarro; no a la acción revolucionaria, sino al acomodo oportunista. Lo que pasa es que cuando los parlamentarios clasmedieros se ve defraudados por los grandes burgueses o simplemente siente que su influencia sobre las masas se desgasta, entonces se acerca a los jodidos para ganar su voto y recuperar canonjías, al mismo tiempo que trata de asustar a sus patronos con el petate de los “estallidos sociales”. Por eso los grandes banqueros y empresarios se ríen de esta “oposición”.

Las diversas corrientes sociales de izquierda revolucionaria, más temprano que tarde, se unificarán, no cabe duda, pero en derredor de un programa proletario internacionalista y lejos de cualquier caudillaje clasemediero.

Todo ello ha motivado a los movimientos sociales contemporáneos a inventar nuevas formas orgánicas de lucha no partidarias ni parlamentarias, estructuras ejecutivas y legislativas al mismo tiempo, con activistas removibles en cualquier momento y acciones acordes con la correlación de fuerzas existente. Este sería el embrión orgánico y funcional del contrapoder social.

Ahora bien, para terminar, sólo falta explicar que el esbozar propuestas sobre el programa y las formas de las organización revolucionarias para el presente y el futuro, no quiere decir que la revolución social esté a la vuelta de la esquina aquí en México, ni tampoco que las posibilidades de cierta mejoría del actual sistema se hayan cancelado; únicamente queremos decir que las fuerzas sociales que pueden conducir esos cambios, grandes o pequeños, son el nuevo proletariado revolucionario organizado y/o la gran burguesía (si tuviese voluntad política). No obstante, desde ahora deben ir forjándose las ideas principales que darán cuerpo a la plataforma política del futuro contrapoder social revolucionario. Esta no es una tarea que debe posponerse, como dicen algunos socialdemócratas y ex comunistas, “hasta que haya democracia”, sino incorporarse desde ya a la conciencia de clase de. Las diversas corrientes sociales de izquierda revolucionaria más temprano que tarde se unificarán, no cabe duda, pero en derredor de un programa proletario internacionalista, lejos de cualquier caudillaje clasemediero y representándose a sí misma.

DEA Agents Accused in Court Pleadings of Dealing Heroin As Part of 1990s Pakistan Connection

by Bill Conroy

NarcoNews

Agents — Two Since Retired, One Now Leading High-powered Task Force — Call Claims “Absurd” and “Despicable”



A top gun with the DEA’s Special Operations Division, along with two fellow law enforcers, are not what they seem, if Gaetano (Guy) DiGirolamo Sr., a convicted heroin dealer, is to be believed.

The trio are, in fact, drug dealers themselves, argues Yale law professor Steven B. Duke in court pleadings filed on behalf of his client, DiGirolamo.

Those pleadings are part of a long-running effort by DiGirolamo to get his 1994 conviction overturned by the court. To date, DiGirolamo, who is serving a life sentence in a federal penitentiary in Otisville, N.Y., has failed to convince the judicial system of his point of view.

However, documents recently provided to Narco News by DiGirolamo (uncovered years after his conviction), as well as revelations that have surfaced recently in the case of national security whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, seem to open the door to reasonable doubt in the government’s case against DiGirolamo.

As for the three DEA agents involved in his case, they have long maintained that DiGirolamo’s allegations against them are without merit.

One of those agents, Derek Maltz, now serves as the special agent in charge of the high-powered and secretive Special Operations Division, a multi-agency task force under DEA’s umbrella that targets transnational criminal organizations.

The other two agents who helped send DiGirolamo up the river, David Katz and Michael Yanniello, have both since retired from DEA. Yanniello now serves as chief of university police for SUNY College at Old Westbury in New York. Katz is the CEO and founder of a security consulting firm called Global Security Group, based in New York City.

Yanniello, when contacted via e-mail by Narco News for comment, replied simply that DiGirolamo’s “allegations are absurd.”

Katz, in a telephone interview with Narco News, says DiGirolamo’s claims are “beyond absurd,” describing them as “despicable.”

DiGirolamo tried to “solicit” a contract “to have me murdered,” Katz alleged during a phone interview with Narco News, adding that there is a transcript of the surveillance tape on which that threat is made.

Well, that is where the facts in the DiGirolamo case begin to get a bit slippery, if the court pleadings filed by Duke are put in the picture.

The alleged murder plot surfaced on the word of a jailhouse informant sicced on DiGirolamo while he was in prison, according to court pleadings. In a 1998 letter written to the judge in the case, attorney Duke points out that the U.S. prosecutor claimed to have the “murder plot on tape,” adding that the allegation “was either a lie or a recklessly irresponsible misrepresentation.”

“We have the tape (obtained under FOIA),” Duke wrote “There is nothing remotely related to violence or retribution on it.”

Smacked up

DiGirolamo’s run-in with the system — the DEA specifically — led to his indictment in 1991 and conviction in 1994 on heroin-related conspiracy charges in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

DiGirolamo appealed his conviction, only to lose again in 1995. At that point, Duke, a professor of law at Yale Law School in New Haven, Conn., stepped in, and took on DiGirolamo’s case pro bono. In 1997, Duke filed a post-conviction petition [a habeas corpus appeal] with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York seeking to vacate DiGirolamo’s conviction.

“In December 1999, (the federal judge) dismissed the entire case in one of the most bizarre opinions I have ever seen,” Duke says. “... Essentially, (the judge) said it didn’t matter if the DEA agents were corrupt smugglers.”

DiGirolamo appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Last year, the appeals court ruled against DiGirolamo, not on the merits, but because he “did not file a timely notice of appeal.” As a result, the appeals court concluded, “we lack jurisdiction to consider the denial of his habeas petition.”

But it is the merits of DiGirolamo’s case that continue to keep bubbling to the surface, even after all these years. In particular, new documents provided to Narco News by DiGirolamo seem to raise some puzzling questions with respect to the nature of the sting used by the three DEA agents (Maltz, Katz and Yanniello) to snare their targets.

One of those documents is a DEA Telex communication that details a proposed itinerary for DEA agent Maltz to travel from New York to Pakistan to take delivery of 20 kilos (some 44 pounds) of heroin from DEA’s office in Karachi.

Maltz made that journey in late November 1990 and returned with the heroin on Dec. 4, 1990. During the return trip, according to court pleadings filed by Duke, Maltz flew on commercial airliners (TWA and Air France) and made one stop in Paris before returning to New York with the heroin.

The heroin run was allegedly part of a controlled delivery, which is a standard law enforcement procedure that involves allowing a load of drugs, under close supervision, to be delivered to suspects in order to set them up for arrest.

In this case, because the heroin was passing through at least two foreign countries, DEA would have had to obtained clearances from those countries — Pakistan and France. In addition, law enforcers tell Narco News, in a normal controlled delivery, the “take down” (or arrest) of the suspects is usually accomplished very shortly after the drugs enter the U.S..

“We never let it [the drugs] out of our sight [in a controlled delivery] and took down the bad guys within hours of the stuff arriving,” one law enforcer says.

In the case of Maltz’ heroin run to Pakistan, he was not acting in an undercover capacity, according to Duke’s court pleadings, but rather as a courier seemingly absent close surveillance of his activities. In addition, Duke alleges in the court filings that Maltz never produced proof that his heroin “controlled delivery” mission involving Pakistan had the proper approvals, including the required country approvals.

The DEA Telex document obtained by Narco News (see document here) is interesting in that is seemingly shows that Maltz was approved to travel to Pakistan on Nov. 25, 1990, with a connecting flight in Frankfurt, Germany. The return flight, according to the Telex, also was supposed to go through Frankfurt as well — with the appropriate country clearance slated to be obtained form the German government for the transportation of the heroin through that nation.

However, in a follow-up communication on Nov. 27, 1990, the document shows, the fly-out date for Maltz trip to Pakistan was changed to Nov. 29. In addition, in a separate document, a DEA report of investigation prepared by a Karachi-based DEA agent, a notation appears indicating that the Pakistan Narcotics Control Board on Nov. 26, 1990, approved the “exportation of 20 kilograms of heroin from Karachi, Pakistan, to New York,” but it makes no mention of a similar approval from the government of France, where Maltz allegedly flew next after leaving Karachi with the heroin, according to court pleadings in the DiGirolamo case.

One law enforcer who examined the paperwork for Narco News says “the Telex's are legitimate to me, just incomplete as far as I can see, or just plain sloppy, or missing stuff on purpose.”

Duke appears to believe the latter scenario is the case.

In 1998, he wrote a letter to the judge in DiGirolamo’s case:

Previously suppressed DEA reports, obtained by us ... describe three months of feverish activity in the New York area trying to deliver the heroin to … "distributors." Despite many claimed conversations with … with CIs [confidential informants] and with … alleged distributors, no deliveries are consummated, just a lot of talk.

According to the DEA agents in this case, the 12 kilos of white heroin [out of a total of 20 kilos] brought by agent Maltz from Pakistan in December 1990 were finally delivered to [DiGirolamo’s] co-defendant [Louis] Salerno and became evidence in this case with his arrest on April 9, 1991.

Then, in court pleadings, Duke points out that it took months for the heroin imported by Maltz from Pakistan to be put to use in “taking down” suspects — as opposed to hours as is normally the case, according to law enforcement sources, in a standard controlled delivery:

... Nobody can be found to take delivery of any drugs [brought in from Pakistan by Maltz] until five months after their arrival.

Duke argues, in the 1998 letter to the judge:

The agents were engaging in their own smuggling operation, for the purpose of selling the drugs and using "stings" as a cover for their operation.

... Maltz concocted a "plan" to get a drug supply in Pakistan without paying for the drugs, bring them here for illicit purposes, and cover his tracks with phony paperwork. ...

DiGirolamo was accused of acting in conspiracy with Salerno to take possession of the heroin, all based on the word of an informant, court records show. And the one undercover tape-recording in which DiGirolamo is supposedly caught discussing the conspiracy is mysteriously inaudible, Duke claims in court pleadings.

DiGirolamo, in recent e-mail and phone interviews with Narco News from prison, contends he had nothing to do with that heroin deal.

The other co-conspirator in the case, an individual named Khan, according to DEA agents, was arrested in the United Arab Emirates UAI) and imprisoned, awaiting a death sentence.

However, DiGirolamo's attorney obtained a letter from the UAE embassy indicating they "have no record of Mr. Khan being imprisoned in the country."

The private investigator on DiGirolamo’s case, a former cop who worked pro bono due to his belief in DiGirolamo’s innocence, also dug up evidence that the now-vanished Khan served as an informant for the U.S. government in a prior case and suggests that he is not a co-conspirator, but rather that Kahn continued to work for the government as an informant in DiGirolamo's case — which, if true, would appear to make the case against DiGirolamo a fraud.

Where’s the Dope?

The supposed kingpin of the Pakistani heroin organization being targeted by Maltz, Katz and Yanniello was an individual named Jan, according to the DEA.

However, according to Duke’s court pleadings, Jan claims that he was working for the DEA, supplying heroin for delivery to the U.S. "with the expectation that the buyers would be arrested and he would get a reward.”

Duke also argues in court pleadings that there is no evidence to show that Khan even knew Jan or did business with him. So, Duke asks, how could DiGirolamo be part of the Jan organization if his supposed co-conspirator, Khan, never did business with the supposed source of the heroin, Jan?

The government, by contrast, denies that Jan or Khan ever worked as informants and contends the balance of the allegations raised by Duke on behalf of DiGirolamo are absurd and untrue.

From the government’s pleadings in DiGirolamo’s post-conviction appeal case:

DiGirolamo … argues that his trial counsel was ineffective because he 1) failed to claim that Hizbullah Khan was an informant and 2) failed to claim that there was no Jan organization, and that Special Agent Maltz was using the pretense of investigating the supposed Jan organization to mask the agents’ narcotics trafficking.

As set forth above, neither claim has merit. Accordingly, the failure to raise either claim could not have been error.

However, yet another set of documents provided to Narco News by DiGirolamo appears to raise a whole new series of questions with respect to the veracity of the case that the DEA agents brought against him.

From Duke's pleadings:

... On April 2, 1991, Malik [a DEA informant] met Louis Salerno at a diner on Long Island. Malik told Salerno he had 12 kilograms of ninety percent pure white heroin, and he was willing to turn it over to Salerno for $100,000. Malik's courier charge for transporting it from Pakistan. Salerno asked for a sample so he could test it.

... On April 8, 1991, Malik met Salerno. Salerno said that the sample was "fine" and that he would have the $100,000 courier fee the following day. After a series of telephone calls the following day, Salerno and Malik met again in the parking lot of a Holiday Inn at the Plainview Plaza. Salerno gave Malik a bag containing $100,000. Malik took the money inside the hotel while Salerno remained in the parking lot.

After giving the money to DEA agents, Malik went back to the parking lot and told Salerno that Malik's friend would arrive in five minutes with the heroin. Shortly thereafter, DEA agent Michael Yanniello drove into the parking lot and put the heroin in the trunk of Salerno's car. Malik told Salerno that everything was done and asked Salerno to call him to "discuss the rest." Malik walked away, and DEA agents arrested Salerno.

But years later, DiGirolamo’s lawyer, Duke, discovered that the heroin put in the trunk that day may not have been heroin at all.

From another 1998 letter Duke directed to the judge in DiGirolamo's case:

At petitioner's trial, the DEA agents testified that 20 kilos of heroin were brought by agent Maltz from Pakistan in December 1990, and that 12 kilos of that shipment were ultimately delivered in a sting operation to co-defendant Salerno in April 1991. No drugs were ever produced at trial. Instead, a photograph was offered together with a stipulation. The stipulation had never been approved by either of the defendants, even though it had a place for their signature, which remained blank.

... FOIA [Freedom of Information Act] documents recently obtained show that the packages turned over to the DEA lab by agents Maltz and Yanniello were never even tested for heroin. According to the lab documents, these items were to be weighed and identified only, per agent Yanniello and per agent Maltz. The work sheets suggest that while some rough screening tests may have been done, no actual determinations were made that the powders were heroin, much less that they contained the purities set forth by AUSA [Assistant U.S. Attorney] Burns in the stipulation.

On yet another front, Duke says a witness has come forward who claims to have purchased heroin from individuals fitting the description of the DEA agents in the DiGirolamo case. The witness, Louis Perez, a former cop who is serving a life sentence in a federal prison on drug conspiracy charges, claims the heroin he and his one-time partner, Jesus Vargas Morales, acquired in those deals in Queens, N.Y. (some 40 ounces a week at $6,000 an ounce) were in turn sold on the streets of Philadelphia.

The government discounts the Perez’ claims, arguing he disgraced his badge and is a convict whose word is not credible.

However, Duke contends he has made numerous requests of government prosecutors for various records, including phone numbers, that would help substantiate or disprove the claims being made by Perez, but “all those requests have been ignored.”

Former DEA agent Katz says he finds incredulous the claims that DiGirolamo is an innocent man who was somehow framed.

He spelled out his position in a phone interview with Narco News:

The reason he [DiGirolamo] keeps losing on appeal is he did it [the crime].

… I would be happy to testify under oath to any element of the case. I remember monitoring the undercover calls. He did it.

There was nothing inappropriate done in the case. It was basic undercover case and he was completely complicit in the whole crime.

… [DEA agents] Maltz and Yanniello are two of the best agents I ever worked with. They are honest guys, and any suggestion that they were involved in heroin trafficking is beyond absurd. These guys were as opposite that as you can imagine. For people to suggest otherwise is despicable.

DiGirolamo, now 77, concedes he has done wrong in the past and has paid the price. He spent much of the 1980s (1984-1990) in federal prison after being convicted of distributing some 164 grams of cocaine over a two-year period. He was out of prison about a year when he was indicted on the heroin-related charges.

DiGirolamo says he “deserved to go away” on the cocaine charges, but insists he is innocent of the heroin-related charges and is now sitting in prison “for the crimes of others.”

In an e-mail to Narco News, DiGirolamo describes his dilemma:

Because of my background is associations with assumed O.C. [organized crime] friends, the government is using that card to distort the truth. I expected this to happen and I know that many nights I lay awake in my cell looking at the ceiling wishing that I would have went down a different road.

I do not want to play the pity card, because that is not me. I am above all else a man of honor, and I do not mean the honor the government would have you believe.

When injustice is the only means by which the government uses to convict a person, then we as a nation have failed.

Pakistan Connection

DiGirolamo’s claim that he has been framed may seem, to some, like a predictable act of desperation on the part of a man who is now confronting the prospect of his death in prison.

That may or may not be so.

But one thing is clear: the strangeness of the truth DiGirolamo wants us to believe does not automatically make it fiction.

Likewise, the dark reality of the heroin trade itself is no less true simply because those accused of dabbling in it are not deemed the usual suspects — as evidenced by the allegations of former-FBI-translator-turned-whistleblower Sibel Edmonds.

Edmonds was born in Iran but spent much of her early life in Turkey before moving to the United States for college. After graduating, she wound up working in the criminal justice field and was eventually hired by the FBI in 2001 as a contract translator.

Edmonds’ walk down the path of the American dream came to an abrupt end in March 2002, though, when she was fired by the FBI — after blowing the whistle on alleged espionage being carried out by a fellow FBI employee. She was prevented from pursuing a whistleblower retaliation lawsuit filed in 2002 (based on alleged violations of her First Amendment rights) because of the state-secrets privilege claim invoked by the government. That claim essentially shut down her ability to present evidence in the case under the smokescreen that it would threaten national security.

The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately rejected her appeal in that case. Several related lawsuits filed by Edmonds also were subsequently derailed with the hammer of national security.

But Edmonds was not about to be silenced, and recently came forward — both through court testimony and via the media — with revelations concerning matters the U.S. government has for years now sought to secret away in the closet of dirty tricks.

According to Edmonds, roughly within the same time period of DiGirolamo’s indictment and ultimate conviction (the 1990s), U.S. officials based in Central Asia, specifically Turkey, were involved in a pattern of alleged corruption that included links to heroin trafficking.

It is not clear whether that alleged activity represented only corruption for personal gain or was part of a larger covert operation to advance U.S. interests in the region — including Pakistan, where DEA agent Maltz allegedly obtained the 20 kilos of heroin brought to New York.

It may, in fact, have been a bit of both.

As described in Edmonds allegations, the corrupt activity brought together drug traffickers, assassins and individuals associated with the governments of the U.S., Israel, Pakistan and Turkey toward various ends — including blackmailing or otherwise influencing members of the U.S. Congress; obtaining and reselling U.S. military secrets; and engaging in arms-for-drugs shipments, specifically heroin, to help fund covert activities in Central Asia.

From an interview Edmonds provided to the American Conservative magazine:

EDMONDS: … A lot of the drugs were going to Belgium with NATO planes. After that, they went to the UK, and a lot came to the U.S. via military planes to distribution centers in Chicago and Paterson, New Jersey. …

In under-oath testimony Edmonds provided recently in a case before the Ohio Elections Commission, she lays out the central role that Turkey played in the drug-smuggling operations:

… These Turkish people, and some of them are directly connected to Turkish intelligence and Turkish military in the United Sates, they played a very significant role in bringing in heroin from … Afghanistan to Turkey, [and] from Turkey into both United States, [and] also directly to Belgium, large quantity, very, very large quantity of heroin.

In a recent interview with Narco News, Edmonds pointed to an incident that occurred in New York City in 1995, one year after DiGirolamo’s conviction on heroin charges. The incident involved the arrest of Yasar Oz — a known Turkish heroin trafficker who is suspected of working as an asset for both Turkish and U.S. intelligence agencies.

A DEA agent (name unknown) arrested Oz, Edmonds says, in New York City on Dec. 6, 1995, with some 12 kilos of heroin — and while he was supposedly carrying Turkish diplomatic papers. Edmonds' recounting of the incident is backed up in a 1997 story in CovertAction Quarterly, a respected publication on such matters:

The special perks and privileges given Catli, a drug dealer and suspected killer, were not unique. Haluk Kirci, his accomplice in a series of murders during the Gray Wolves days, and Yasar Oz, another international drug smuggler, also carried similar [Turkish Green Passport] documents signed by Agar.

… The links between one of Turkey's most prominent security officials and organized criminals and fascist assassins were now incontrovertible.

… [Turkey’s Republican People's Party Deputy Fikri] Saglar charges that US interest in Turkish affairs is not confined to official NATO relations and trade ties. He points to the notorious message by the CIA's then-Turkey Station Chief Paul Henze in Ankara to his colleagues in Washington the day after the 1980 coup — "Our boys have done it!" Henze crowed. Saglar concludes that foreign intelligence organizations, including the CIA, have co-opted collaborators from among the extreme-right and exploited them for their particular interests.

Saglar's charge is lent credence by the fact that Yasar Oz — one of the drug traffickers carrying the Green Passports signed by [Turkey’s Interior Minister] Mehmet Agar — was arrested by the Drug Enforcement Administration in New York and immediately released.

Oz supposedly "escaped" DEA custody 6 hours after his arrest in 1995 and flew out of JFK International Airport on a Turkish airline, Edmonds claims. He's still alive and kicking in Turkey – the owner of a casino who is now doing jail time and beginning to reveal secrets, news reports indicate.

Edmonds also points to the research of University of Wisconsin Professor Alfred McCoy, referencing an entry on her bog, 123 Real Change, that touches on his research into the heroin trade in Pakistan.

From Edmonds blog:

In his well-researched book, The Politics of Heroin, Professor Alfred McCoy documents the parallel increase in Heroin production in Afghanistan and Pakistan during the 1980s when the U.S. Government collaborated and supported the Mujahidin directly and indirectly. While in 1979 Pakistan had a small and local opium trade and produced no heroin, by 1981, according to U.S. Attorney General William French Smith, Pakistan emerged as the world's leading supplier of heroin, became the supplier of nearly 60% of U.S. heroin supply, and took over major sections of the market in Europe.

[McCoy writes:] “Who were the manufacturers? They were all either military factions connected with Pakistan intelligence, CIA allies, or Afghan resistance groups connected with the CIA and Pakistan intelligence. In May of 1990, ten years after this began, the Washington Post finally ran a front page story saying high U.S. officials admit that Gulbuddin Hekmatyar [leader of the Hezbi-i Islami guerilla group], and other leaders of the Afghan resistance are leading heroin manufacturers. This had been known for years, reported in the Pakistan press, indeed in 1980 reported in McClean's magazine. In fact in 1980 a White House narcotics advisor, Dr. David Musto of Yale University, went on the record demanding that we not ally with Afghan guerilla groups that were involved in narcotics.”

McCoy also documents interesting phenomena involving the DEA operations and actions (or inaction) in Afghanistan during the 80s:

[McCoy writes:] “During the 1980's from the time that heroin trade started, there were 17 DEA agents based in Pakistan. They neither made nor participated in any major seizures or arrests. At a time when other police forces, particularly Scandinavian forces, made some major seizures and brought down a very major syndicate connected with former president Zia ul-Haq of Pakistan.”

Narco News was not able to confirm any connection between Katz, Maltz or Yanneilo and the catch-and-releases arrest of Oz.

However, Maltz, as special agent in charge of DEA’s Special Operations Division (SOD), clearly has a foot in the intelligence world. One DEA agent who spoke with Narco News says part of what the SOD does is overt, but part of it also is classified — to the point where the agent could not even discuss the nature of that classified work.

Narco News attempted to contact Maltz for this story through DEA’s public affairs office. However, neither the DEA nor Maltz provided a comment for this story prior to deadline.

Former DEA agent Katz also has an interesting resume, serving prior to his retirement from the agency as its liaison to the Israeli Secret Service. Katz even provided training in 2000 to instructors with the Israeli General Security Agency (Shin Bet, now called the Israel Security Agency) — considered to be part of the Israeli intelligence apparatus.

According to information on his company’s Web site, Global Security Group currently employs former “U.S. and Israeli agents” and has “trained the EXP staffs of some of the world's most high-profile executives and high-net worth individuals.”

Katz even wrote a book with a former Israeli secret service officer, called the “Executive's Guide to Personal Security,” and has made appearances on numerous TV news shows, including Fox, CNN and CNBC.

Katz' Global Security Group also recently opened an office in Thailand that is headed by a “former senior supervisory special agent” with DEA "who spend 20 years working in Thailand with senior officials within the Thai law enforcement community," according to the company’s Web site.

However, Katz dismisses any implication that his work on DiGirolamo’s case in the early 1990s had anything to do with the intelligence world.

“The DEA liaison role [with Israel’s Secret Service] was to provide basic law enforcement support and mutual training [with respect to tactics]. I was in that role long after the DiGirolamo case, like late 1990s or 2000,” Katz told Narco News.

With respect to any possible intelligence connection to DiGirolamo’s case, Katz added: “Your talking way above my pay grade. I was just a regular field agent and tactical weapons instructor.”

As for DiGirolamo, he is not backing down from his contention that he was set up to take the fall for actors more powerful that himself.

But DiGirolamo also realizes he is facing the ultimate deadline for making known what he deems to be the truth of is life:

My life is coming to a close. I turned 77 and I know that the clock is running out on me. My only wish is that I want to expose the corruption that permeated this case and has cost me 19 years of my life. To them, it is just the cost of doing business.

I do not expect miracles. I know what I am up against, but time is not on my side; it is on the side of the government. They would like nothing better than for me to pass on and not have to worry about me uncovering them.

Stay tuned ….