Via NarcoNews. Colombia-San Francisco Bay Area drug pipeline helped finance CIA-backed Contras Published: Aug. 18, 1996 BY GARY WEBB Mercury News Staff WriterFOR THE BETTER PART of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found. This drug network opened the first...

Via NarcoNews Role of CIA-linked agents a well-protected secret until now Published: Aug. 19, 1996 BY GARY WEBB Mercury News Staff WriterIF THEY'D BEEN IN a more respectable line of work, Norwin Meneses, Danilo Blandon and ''Freeway Rick'' Ross would have been hailed as geniuses of marketing. This odd trio -- a smuggler, a bureaucrat and a driven ghetto teen-ager -- made fortunes creating the first mass market in America for a product so hellishly desirable that consumers will literally kill...

Via NarcoNews Contra case illustrates the discrepancy: Nicaraguan goes free; L.A. dealer faces life Published: Aug. 20, 1996 BY GARY WEBB Mercury News Staff WriterFOR THE LAST YEAR and a half, the U.S. Department of Justice has been trying to explain why nearly everyone convicted in California's federal courts of ''crack'' cocaine trafficking is black.Critics, who include some federal court judges, say it looks like the Justice Department is targeting crack dealers by race, which would be a...

by Alfonso Chardy, Herald Washington Bureau WASHINGTON -- Some of President Reagan's top advisers have operated a virtual parallel government outside the traditional Cabinet departments and agencies almost from the day Reagan took office, congressional investigators and administration officials have concluded. Investigators believe that the advisers' activities extended well beyond the secret arms sales to Iran and aid to the contras now under investigation. Lt. Col. Oliver North, for example,...

[Having recently received a 404 error at the IASPS site's version of this piece, I figured it better be saved from the Google cache before it's gone forever. -Scott] Companion piece "Coping With Crumbling States" here. Following is a report prepared by The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies' "Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000." The main substantive ideas in this paper emerge from a discussion in which prominent opinion makers, including Richard Perle, James...

[Having recently received a 404 error at the IASPS site's version of this piece, I figured it better be saved from the Google cache before it's gone forever. -Scott] Companion piece "A Clean Break" is here. For related reading: "Ultimate 'peace process' prize," by Robert J. Loewenberg, The Washington Times, October 13, 1996 "Just as Saddam's Power is Under Assault," by David Wurmser, The Wall Street Journal - Europe, September 11, 1996 "Balance of Power," by Richard Perle, The Wall Street...

by Richard Cummings, Playboy.com January 16th, 2007 In November of 2002, Stephen J. Hadley, deputy national security advisor, asked Bruce Jackson to meet with him in the White House. They met in Hadley's office on the ground floor of the West Wing, not far from the offices of Vice President Dick Cheney and then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. Hadley had an exterior office with windows, an overt indicator of his importance within the West Wing hierarchy. This was months before...

 If we look beneath the surface of our public affairs, we can discern one fundamental fact, namely: a great redistribution of power between society and the State. This is the fact that interests the student of civilization. He has only a secondary or derived interest in matters like price-fixing, wage-fixing, inflation, political banking, 'agricultural adjustment,' and similar items of State policy that fill the pages of newspapers and the mouths of publicists and politicians. All these can...

CHAPTER ONE War Is A Racket War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the...

To most Americans of the classes which consider themselves significant the war [World War I] brought a sense of the sanctity of the State which, if they had had time to think about it, would have seemed a sudden and surprising alteration in their habits of thought. In times of peace, we usually ignore the State in favour of partisan political controversies, or personal struggles for office, or the pursuit of party policies. It is the Government rather than the State with which the politically...

Part One THE ANCIENT DESIGN I We have crossed the boundary that lies between Republic and Empire. If you ask when, the answer is that you cannot make a single stroke between day and night; the precise moment does not matter. There was no painted sign to say: 'You are now entering Imperium.' Yet it was a very old road and the voice of history was saying: 'Whether you know it or not, the act of crossing may be irreversible.' And now, not far ahead, is a sign that reads: 'No U-turns.' If you say...

There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom. There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, "Something is going to happen to the American form of government if we don't watch out." These were the innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle....

Chapter 1. The Tonkin Gulf: August 1964 Daniel Ellsberg. Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers. Penguin, 2003. On Tuesday morning, August 4, 1964, my first full day on my new job in the Pentagon, a courier came into the outer office with an urgent cable for my boss. He'd been running. The secretaries told him Assistant Secretary John McNaughton was out of the office; he was down the hall with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. They pointed him to me, his new special...

Friends and fellow citizens, Called upon to undertake the duties of the first executive office of our country, I avail myself of the presence of that portion of my fellow-citizens which is here assembled to express my grateful thanks for the favor with which they have been pleased to look toward me, to declare a sincere consciousness that the task is above my talents, and that I approach it with those anxious and awful presentiments which the greatness of the charge and the weakness of my...

Of all the enemies of true liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds,...