0 9 Pg ' Page 4 OPINION Wednesday, February 15, 1989 The Michigan Daily 0 Edited and managed by students at The University of Michigan The CIA's secret supply network: i -4 .. i +1 420 Maynard St. Vol. IC, No.97 Ann Arbor, MI 48109 Unsigned editorials represent a majority of the Daily's Editorial Board. All other cartoons, signed articles, and letters do not necessarily represent the opinion of the Daily. Bringin Philip Agee was a CIA operative for twelve years until he quit the agency and published Inside the Company, which ex- posed the crimes of the CIA in Latin America. He was the first CIA operative to resign from the agency and publish an account. Agee recently returned from exile g drugs home ' e Let ,17HE PRESIDENT Aierican countries Salvador this wee prospects for pea ;Iresident Reagan's aggression against tift most part failed, prqrmal relations wit :cimal. }t is unlikely tha awrds Nicaragua w dally under the Bu tons are that it w ,hypocrisy. The nev ,o Elliot Abrams' p >n affairs is Berna and at promoting Under him there w from armed confron ,cf the contras - to ther undermine Nica rid politically. The ever, will not cease. Nica: rS of five Central are meeting in El ek to assess the ce in the region. policy of armed Nicaragua has for but the chance for h Nicaragua is still at U.S. policy to- ill change dramati- sh regime; indica- vill be strong on w appointee vying ost in Latin Amen- rd Aronson, an old the contra cause. ill likely be a shift tation - by means an attempt to fur- ragua economically aggression, how- ragua live but it neglects to mention that this is directly attributable to the U.S.-fi- nanced contra war, the U.S. embargo, and the U.S. pressure on European countries to cut off economic aid to Nicaragua. The Nicaraguans are now blamed for their misery. The Bush regime is not likely to give up on these "blame the victim" accusations so prevalent during the Reagan era. Tens of thousands of Nicaraguans have been killed or maimed, hundreds of thousands have been uprooted or forced to emigrate, and the economy has been pounded into shambles. Washington deems this a success. Nicaragua's enormous strides in improving the lot of the majority of the population can not be disputed. Nicaragua does not butcher its citizens, unlike the U.S. allies in the region, such as El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras - all democracies by Washington's distorted standards. The Sandinista's perseverance in the face of U.S. aggression is further proof of their popular support. It is time to reverse the bloody poli- cies of the Reagan era. Minimum de- cency would demand reparations for the plundering of the U.S.-paid merce- naries. Halt the undeclared war by disbanding the contras, dismantling U.S. bases in Honduras, and stopping U.S. maneuvers in the region. It is time to improve relations, end the em- bargo, and accept the rule of interna- tional law. m coverup North, Casey and others - was afraid it was going to blow up sky high because it was financed with drug money from Colombia. This thing started in 1983 when it was clear that the Congress was going to cut off the military funding for the contras, which they did. Casey and North turned to the Israelis to find a solution to this problem. The Is- raelis organized this new resupply opera- tion to replace the one which had previ- ously been funded by the Congress, and it was financed with drug money. The key figure here is Ramon Milan Rodriguez, a Cuban-American whose history goes way back to the Bay of Pigs with the CIA. He was trained by the CIA in money launder- ing (that means passing it through differ- ent accounts to conceal the original these flights, and the money to finance these activities also came through Panama from the Cocaine Cartel. Felix Rodriguez even came to Washington, according to the notes of Bush's appointment secretary, to brief the vice-president on the arms re- supply operation. In 1975, the Justice Department con- ducted an investigation of the Drug En- forcement Agency for corruption. The re- sults of that investigation came out of a report in June of 1975 known as the De- faille Report, after the attorney in the Jus- tice Department who coordinated thein- vestigation. The report showed that Nor- iega in Panama was up to his neck in drug dealing. The report was sent to the CIA, but at that time Noriega became a very important liaison contact with the CIA 0 I 'his slight shift in policy is already i Vjdent on the front pages of The New ;'prk Times. The Times recently re- ported on Nicaraguan refugees pouring into Miami. What was not deemed "fit to print" is the fact that CIA controlled 'xdio stations beaming into Nicaragua ave been telling Nicaraguans to leave "e country," according to ex-contra Mader Edgar Chamorro. To decry now l~e arrival of these refugees is most pypocritical. Finally, The Times reports on Picaragua's economic deterioration, Courtroo: HE LEGAL shenanigans surrounding he trial of Oliver North are a constant V,. reminder of how profoundly un- emocratic the United States is. President Bush, through the Justice d7epartment, is threatening to block the 1 se from going to trial because it Might reveal national security secrets. agreement with Independent Coun- I Lawrence Walsh has apparently iten reached to let the case go forward, Nit it has yet to be approved by the Ydge hearing the case. Why is the Bush administration, like 4 le Reagan administration, so eager to Sonceal the facts of the case? Because, s North's lawyers are threatening to ~eveal, the Iran-contra scam was not pe man running wild, it was a con- pious policy of the entire executive ranch. And it involved issues larger an arms for money, which was then nt to the Nicaraguan contras, such as e Central Intelligence Agency's par- pipation in arms-for-drugs smuggling with the contras, and the Reagan ad- imnistration's deal with Iran to delay he release of American hostages until :fter the 1980 presidential elections. The Congressional hearings on the ,andal served to provide official dam- *ge control. North was painted as a k. e, t, Former CIA operative Philip Agee. and has since been on the university lec- ture circuit. At a recent conference on anti- Communism and the United States at Harvard University, Agee spoke about the U.S. government's involvement with drug smuggling. Daily reporter Paulo DeRooij transcribed some of his comments, which appear below. I have always asked myself: For the United States - with all its technology, all of its military and police power - is it really impossible to impede the inflow of drugs into the United States? Is there some political benefit in the fact that thousands upon thousands if not millions of ghetto youths - who are potential political ac- tivists, who have everything to gain from radical change in this country - are taken out of the political scene when they go on crack, cocaine or heroin? You see, the CIA has been in this drug scene from the very beginning [and] these things that we see today go back to the very beginning. When Mao defeated the Chinese Nationalists, a whole division [of] ten thousand people found refuge in the hills of Burma. And they were sup- plied for years by the CIA, and they were kept operating as a unit. They were going to be a liberation army, something like the contras are today. They kept going, but it turns out that early on they got much better at raising poppies and making opium than they were at fighting the communist forces in China. And that was the beginning of the "Golden Triangle," which continued on into the years of U.S. intervention in South-East Asia. [It] seems that few people know that the diversion of profits to the contras from the arms sales to Iran had a very specific pur- pose in replacing an on-going contra re- supply operation, known as the "Arms Supermarket." Everyone concerned - In military air bases, the aircraft that brought cocaine into the United States were loaded up, and they were loaded up with arms in U.S. Air Force bases to go back to Central America.' source), and he placed these talents at the service of the Cocaine Cartel. He laundered hundreds of millions of dollars, probably even billions of dollars, through Panama- nian banks, including branches of Citibank and Bank of America. In late 1983 he delivered ten million dollars in cash for the commencement of this "Arms Supermarket" operation to another Cuban- American, Felix Rodriguez (whose his- tory also goes back to the beginning, and who is now operating out of the Illopango air base in El Salvador). When Eugene Hasenfus was shot down over Nicaragua in 1986, Felix Rodriguez, who dispatched him from Illopango on that flight, made the first cry of alarm to the Vice-President's office. The telephone records show it. Those records also show that there was constant contact between Felix Rodriguez and Bush's office, princi- pally [through] Donald Gregg - his na- tional security advisor - and Samuel Watson, a Colonel that was also his na- tional security advisor. The aircraft that brought cocaine into the United States were loaded up in mili- tary air bases, and they were loaded up with arms in U.S. Air Force bases to go back to Central America. Noriega gave transit privileges through Panama for because of his position as the chief of the Panamanian Defense Forces Intelligence Service. The CIA had large bases there at the time, and -they had important opera- tions going on in Panama. It was very important for them to keep good relation with Noriega so there would be no inter- ference in these operations. Well, Bush came in as CIA director in January 1976, after the CIA obtained the Defaille Report, and in the course of that year, as CIA director, he met Noriega on at least one occasion. When a CIA director meets a foreign intelligence chief of im- portance like Noriega he is briefed totally on the background of that person. If the CIA didn't know before the Defaille Re- port that Noriega was drug dealing, and they had to because they knew what was happening in Panama, they certainly did from the Defaille Report. And so this certainly would have been part of the briefing. The briefing would have included a history of the agency's relationship with this person, how much money the agency was paying him (I read $200,000 to $250,000 a year to Noriega at that time), what their problems had been, and what the joint operations between the two services were. All these details were known to Bush before meeting Noriega. 0 rogue out of control; Reagan, Bush and the rest of the executive branch were protected. Evidence of contra/CIA drug smug- gling has surfaced occasionally, only to be ignored by Congress because it im- plicates Reagan, Bush and other high officials. In April, 1987, Mike Tolliver, a free- lance pilot and drug smuggler, testified that a year earlier (when aid to the con- tras was banned) he flew 28,000 pounds of military supplies to Agua- cate, a U.S. base in Honduras used for contra supply efforts. He returned to the U.S., landing at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida, with twelve and a half tons of marijuana. Congress conveniently neglected to investigate how it is possible to fly into an Air Force Base, avoiding customs, and unload 25,000 pounds of marijuana. The evidence suggests that both Ronald Reagan and George Bush were fully aware of these activities. North's trial is full of irony, reveal- ing the U.S. government's utter lack of accountability. The same executive branch that was running drugs to sup- port terrorism against the Nicaragua is now using its position to hide those activities. /f; r I MR. ME-StMMeT, 'I KVNOW YOUiLL t KN4OW You'LL REMEMK9 . lthN I'M QET ' ...A I I A SsbnTkSTkLw4ART, A WAIt116ToN At4D TOlt of 1t 'olN.PR WE4ORT NoflR4(G A3ouT " " tRAN-GoNtA M4 i .. s Support mandatory class, By Michael Wilson On college campuses, the Civil Rights and Black liberation struggles of the 60s took the form of demanding that colleges and universities open their doors to Black people. As a direct result, in the early 70s many institutions had the highest percent- age of Black student enrollment in their history (7.7 percent at this University). As universities retreat from objectives ar- ticulated in the late 60s and early 70s, we must fight for true access to universities - access for poor and working class peo- ple of color - but also, in the words of professor and 60s activist Vincent Hard- ing, "Not only fight for the right to a seat on the bus, but also ask the question 'Where is this bus going anyway?"' The University is an elitist white insti- tution, and must become something which has not yet been created, reflecting the ex- periences and addressing the concerns of people of color, particularly women of color, and the poor and working class sec- tors of our communities. Accordingly, in the spring of 1987, amidst an upsurge of racist violence, stu- dents of color and anti-racist whites formulated a series of demands which would, if met, begin to make this univer- sity less racist in its structure and atmo- sphere. One of the demands was for a re- quirement that all incoming students take a course dealing with the issue of race and racism. The proposal for this requirement was developed and revised for over a year by members of Concerned Faculty, UCAR and Faculty Against Institutional Racism, and is currently being considered by the college of LSA. It calls for the establish- ment of a requirement that must be ful- filled by students in the school of LSA during their first two years here. Students can do this by choosing a single four credit class from a series of classes on racism. This is one way in which we can make institutions of higher education, especially public institutions like the University, be accountable to people who have histori- cally been marginalized. It's also an op- portunity to provide a much needed service to the general student body. The majority of college students graduate with little or no understanding of the complexity and' centrality of the isseonf racism in inr society. And many students who perpetrate horrendous acts of racism cite ignorance as a rationale for their offences. While this lack of sensitivity and familiarity with the issues does not make the acts themselves any less racist, a mandatory class on racism would help to explore and hope- fully deter some of the myths and stereo- types which encourage and perpetuate racism. Forum Tonight The United Coalition Against racism, the Black Student Union, The University of Michigan Asian Student Coalition, and Concerned faculty are hosting an open fo- rum tonight at 7 pm, in the Anderson room of the Michigan Union, to engage in dialogue with the general campus community regarding the merits of this proposal. The faculty of the college of LSA will be considering the proposal for the first time on Monday, March 6, and we must organize to generate as much support as possible to insure that this much needed change in the university takes place. Institutions make progressive change only when people demand and guide that change. Come to the forum and continue the struggle for education that is arr c-iul on- n: l,1..a Michael Wilson is a member of UCAR. 0