INTRODUCTION:
Here’s one that has characteristics of a “Drug War Story” but is just a little too broad to fit comfortably there. While Air America is the name chosen by the CIA to “hide” its first forays into drug smuggling, things have now evolved into a situation that presents a true ray of hope.
When I illuminate, both personally and more broadly, aspects of the ongoing self destructive event that we so blithely label as "The War on Drugs" my objective is to attempt to create a perspective that few seem to have found. Certainly I know that many don't need to be convinced of the folly of this political decision. And even more so am I aware that some millions of our fellow citizens are constitutionally incapable of grasping the sheer magniture of our blunder. What I do hope to find ways to convey, though, are the dimensions of the truth that we are not hurting only ourselves, and harming only our country, but that we have impacted, and continue to, pretty much the whole planet. And hopefully some may find value in being reminded of this through the tool of a wide variety of "snapshots".
I’ve always understood the point of using small planes and dirt strips to get weapons into the hands of the Montagnards, Kuomintang, etc. Sort of a “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” thing and they were all more than happy to use our weapons to kill communists in Asia. What I’ve never heard a good explanation for, though, is how the return flights came to carry illegal drugs for The Agency to market. Maybe it’s as simple as the schemes of the spooks were more grandiose than they could, or wanted to, go to Congress to seek funding for.
While this sordid episode is not really mentioned much any more, at least we are long since past the point in time when anyone has seriously denied that it happened. Probably that ended at least by the time that the Iran/Contra hearings were finished. In that incarnation, Air America was converted into a private outfit in Oregon named Evergreen, but the same people and tactics were used by Ollie North to keep the Contras fighting the Sandinistas. He switched from Southeast Asian heroin to South American cocaine but our huge appetite for drugs was once again used to fund government actions that needed to stay out of the spotlight. So much for the right wing saying that it is critical for us to stop people from making our own decisions at party time.
Anyway, while it’s sobering to think that our government has, at times, operated a string of preferred drug dealers, there do appear to be differences between now and then. Sure, the message of the illegitimacy of the whole drug prohibition thing still resounds as strongly as ever. Now, however, Bush tries to do things as innocuous as running a string of illegal prisons and promptly gets busted. I mean at one time our own people were falling like flies from overdoses sold at “government outlets”, and the folks involved were tight from top to bottom. Even when they were caught in the act, no one rolled. These days there’s so little appetite in the intelligence community for screwing the people and flaunting the law that the true professionals seem to be pretty strongly focused on actually going only after the terrorists. What a concept.
The frosting, I guess, is that the Kuomintang types have now made enough money from capitalism that they own as mush of mainland China as they would if their side had won originally, and are even so rich that they just hire bureaucrats to run Taiwan for them. Meaning that politics and economics in that part of the world don’t really look that different now than they look here.