I think this is a great article --- I have always thought that the dope cartels are behind the 'war on drugs'

sangraal

The Conspiracy Conspiracy

By Jon Carroll

From The San Francisco Chronicle

5-23-1

I say the word "conspiracy," and what springs to mind?

Nutballs. Fruit bats. People with tinfoil hats. A conversation

you had once with an apparently reasonable person who

casually introduced alien abductions and anal probes into his

conversation about TWA Flight 800.

You might say that conspiracies have been marginalized.

"Conspiracy theorists" are crazy people, dwellers on the

fringe, oddballs, misfits. And certainly there are an adequate

number of people eager to fill that role. Real fruit bats with

pie charts: Come on down!

And yet there have been real conspiracies, and the

conspirators did not wear tinfoil hats. The Bay of Pigs was a

really dopey conspiracy, as was Watergate. Iran-Contra

wasn't much better. A conspiracy to discredit Bill Clinton

with suborned testimony and wild rumors was launched and

financed; one of the members of that conspiracy is about to

become our solicitor general.

Bill Clinton engaged in a conspiracy to hide his sexual

behavior. (Vernon Jordan! Come on down!) Tobacco

companies certainly conspired to keep health information

from the public; energy companies may have conspired to

jack up prices illegally.

And these are the ones we know about. These are the ones

run by the stupid people. The smart conspiracies are still

hidden.

So, suppose you were in a conspiracy to cripple the

government of the United States. Not destroy it, because it

has its uses; just make it weak. Let's not say whom you

work for; let's just say that's your goal. What would you do

first?

How about destroy the FBI? It's in charge of gathering

intelligence of the sort that might uncover a conspiracy. It's

already suspect; its most famous director was a loony-tune

who saw threats to the republic in free-speech advocates and

civil rights workers. It wouldn't take much to convince

people that the FBI is not your friend, is part of a

government that seeks to harm you.

(You might throw in a bunch of corruption elsewhere in

government too, blatant payoffs and telegenic idiots. Result:

More and more smart people eschew public service. Bad for

the government.)

What happens next? A series of blunders designed to

reinforce the contention that the FBI is an agent of

repression. Burn up some children in a religious compound.

Kill the wrong people in an Idaho survivalist camp. Make

sure that the FBI has such a bad computer system that it

can't find its own records of its highest-profile case.

And throw in a Russian spy who sells secrets undetected for

15 years. I mean, these are the folks in charge of internal

security. They're the ones protecting us from real

conspiracies.

And now, dig this: The spy goes to the same conservative

church as the director of the FBI! They see each other every

week! Both the director and the spy call themselves patriots,

and yet while they were there, the FBI became a

laughingstock.

Now, a suspicious man might see intention behind all this. A

suspicious man might ask: Who benefits from a weak and

foolish FBI? Well, here's one idea: people who have illicit

business they need to do in private. Lots of business.

A cartel of interests, you might say. People who share a

common goal.

Another thing this cartel might want is a weak military. Real

low salaries, despite many promises to the contrary.

Discredited weapon systems that are funded anyway.

Enormous cost overruns that eat up budgets. Lots of fuzzy

nostalgia about the men who fought World War II; studied

indifference to the professionalism of the men and women

who might fight the next war.

Weak FBI, weak military. Who's in charge? That's not clear;

the policies in these areas have stayed the same since 1980.

What's going on? More tomorrow.

We're playing "let's pretend" here. We are asking ourselves

questions and seeing where the answers lead. We are trying

to puzzle out certain inconsistencies.

So we now have an FBI whose incompetence is well known

and well publicized. Who benefits? Those who distrust

government in the first place. The neo-Nazi survivalist white

supremacist nutballs. In the past decade, the FBI has

managed to make us all think: You know, there may be

something to what those guys are saying. Not the ideology

part, the other stuff. The conspiracy stuff.

The FBI managed to make David Koresh look like a victim.

It turned Richard Jewell into a hero. Suppose you were an

honest citizen and the FBI came knocking on your door --

wouldn't you be afraid? Would you even cooperate?

Suppose that had been the idea all along: to make citizens

distrust their national police force.

Consider the military. Overpraised and underpaid, politicized

to within an inch of its life. The Gulf War was supposed to

be a great victory, until you checked out the details. The

weapons didn't work that well. Saddam Hussein is still in

power. We killed a whole bunch of civilians, and nothing

changed.

Meanwhile, we have congressmen insisting on weapons

systems that don't work.

No one wants to say a word against the American soldier --

but no one wants to be one, either. It's an Army of One --

maybe literally.

Suppose that had been the idea all along: to burnish the

image of the Army while making the reality tawdry and

dumb. Suppose the idea were to force the good men out

while amping up the patriotic rhetoric.

Suddenly, things don't compute. Suddenly, Gore Vidal and

Timothy McVeigh find they have a lot to talk about.

In 1999, according to a U.N. report, 10 percent of the

economy of the world was devoted to illegal drugs.

Americans spent an estimated $78 billion on illegal drugs.

The illegal drug industry produced $400 billion in gross

revenues.

That's enough money to fund a rather large conspiracy. Let's

do some irresponsible speculating:

The war in Colombia, the war we are pretending that we are

not engaged in, is a battle for control over the drug trade. We

are using yesterday's code words, "guerrillas" versus

"democratic governments," but it's really thugs versus thugs.

Both "indigenous movements" and "reform politicians" either

are or will be corrupted by drug money, or they will be

killed.

I think there are two superpowers in the world: the illegal

drug cartels and the U.S. government. I think everything else

is window dressing.

The drug cartels are opposed to the legalization of

recreational drugs. Legalization would destroy their

stranglehold on the market and lower their profit margins.

Also opposed are multinational pharmaceutical companies

(expensive pain pills would take a dive if marijuana were

legalized); the prison industry, which has a financial stake in

an ever-increasing inmate population; and a legion of sincere

people who look at the very real ravages of addiction and

think tougher laws are the answer.

Perfect for demagogues: They can rail against drugs, which

is exactly what the drug cartels want. They can thunder

against the FBI, while refusing to fund a modern database

system for the agency. They can authorize billions for a

missile defense system, a glossy solution to an imaginary

problem.

I wonder how many American politicians are owned by drug

cartels. They're owned by energy companies and tobacco

companies; why not some well-laundered money from

people in the herbal relaxation business?

But, as I said, this is all just speculation. Let's go see a movie

about World War II.