The Emperor Wears No Clothes

by Jack Herer

The Ultimate Hypocrisy

While waging its self-styled “War on Drugs” against Third World peasants and American civilians, the Reagan/Bush/Quayle/Clinton/Gore administrations (1981-1999) have encouraged and covered up drug smuggling and distribution by high ranking officials of the U.S. government.

On one hand, Bush violated international law by invading Panama to bring reputed drug smuggler and long-time Bush/CIA employee Manuel Noriega to the U.S. to stand trial. On the other hand, he refused to extradite Oliver North, John Hull, Admiral Poindexter, General Secord, Lewis Tambs, and other Americans to Costa Rica, where they are under indictment by that government for operating a drug smuggling operation there.

(The Guardian, British newspaper, “Cocaine shipped by contra network”, July 22, 1989.) Federal hearings conducted by U.S. Senator John Kerry’s (MA) Subcommittee on Terrorism and Narcotics in 1988 and 1989 documented widespread acts by the CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) to block investigations by the Customs Department and FBI into cocaine smuggling by “intelligence operatives” under the guise of national security. No indictments were ever handed down, and witnesses testified under grants of immunity with little media attention.

Special Iran-Contra investigators failed to act on this information or evidence developed by the Christic Institute implicating government complicity in narco-terrorism. And when General Secord was convicted in January 1990 for crimes related to the Iran Contra drugs-for-arms scandal, he was given a fine of $50 and a brief probation when a federal judge decided that the poor fellow had already “suffered enough”.

This from an administration that promotes the death penalty even beheading For marijuana dealers.*

* On the Larry King Show in late 1989, then drug czar William Bennett, a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2000, said he had no moral problems with beheading drug dealers -only legal ones.