Heads Up, Mexico: You May be Next

The time has come, insists Representative Michael McCaul (R-Texas), "for the U.S. to show serious commitment to war in our own backyard." 

It's shamefully narrow-minded of Washington to confer the blessings of humanitarian mass murder on distant Bedouins while ignoring our Mestizo neighbors to the South. McCaul, a former federal prosecutor who now chairs the Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, is eager to help rectify that inequity by designating six Mexican drug syndicates -- including Los Zetas, which is led by U.S.-trained military personnel -- as "foreign terrorist organizations."

The War Down South:  U.S.-funded Mexican paramilitary police.

This would permit deportation or prosecution of anyone providing "support" to the narcotics syndicates. Of course, this wouldn't apply to the public officials in the United States responsible for the huge narcotics price support program called the "War on Drugs."

Over the past five years, an estimated 37,000 people have been killed as a result of the U.S.-funded war between the administration of Mexican President Felipe Calderon and various narcotics syndicates. Several months ago, Texas Governor Rick Perry suggested that Washington should invade Mexico for the supposed purpose of ending the violence.  The only trivial impediment to that plan, Perry observed, is that Mexico's government would have to "approve" of the invasion.

As if to answer the question, "What kind of Latin American political figure would `approve' of a U.S. invasion and occupation of his country?" Colombian-born Washington Post columnist Edward Schumacher-Matos offered a very public endorsement of the proposal. 

It's worth pointing out that between positions with the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and his present gig at the Post, Schumacher-Matos taught a course at Harvard's David Rockefeller Center for Latin American studies, which is one of several academic nurseries in which the Establishment cultivates tomorrow's Quislings.

Schumacher-Matos piously chastises Mexico's political class for being "too proud to do what they immediately should: Call in the Marines." Only if Mexican somehow emerge from "their nationalistic stupor" will they see the light of reason and welcome the presence of  their new overlords -- "American military specialists stationed within [their] borders to help the country build powerful electronic intelligence systems and train modern military and police forces to replace its suffocatingly hierarchical, outdated ones."

Although Mexico "is our neighbor and supposed longtime ally, the Mexican army has never -- never -- participated in a joint military exercise with the U.S. military," Schumacher-Matos points out, inviting us to sorrowful contemplation of the shame of it all. To substantiate the point, he cites a recent study by Roderic Ai Camp of the Woodrow Wilson Center, oblivious to the irony of mentioning Wilson's name in connection with proposed U.S. military intervention in Mexico.

"What is getting in the way of deeper cooperation with the U.S. military is that the Mexican military, political and intellectual leaders, abetted by U.S. intellectuals, still have their heads in the Mexican and American wars for the 19th century and the Cold War of the 20th," Schumacher-Matos scolds. "They talk of imperialism and hegemony -- which are irrelevant today."

This isn't "imperialism" that we're discussing, insists this Rockefeller-suckled sock puppet: It's applied humanitarianism of the kind that has turned places like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Kosovo, and Libya into havens of peace and prosperity.

Elements of Schumacher-Matos's prescription are a bit outdated.  The "electronic intelligence systems" he describes are already operating in Mexico; huge amounts of money are being poured into training and equipping Mexican military and police; and U.S.-trained paramilitaries are actively involved in the Drug War -- on both sides of the conflict.

U.S.-trained Mexican Stormtroopers.

 "The U.S. agents generally provide intelligence and training, while Mexicans do the hands-on work," explains a recent AP dispatch from Mexico City. Brad Barker, president of a "private" mercenary firm called HALO Corporation, told the AP: "Yes, we're tracking vehicles, yes, we're tracking people.... There's been a huge spike in agents down here."

For the nonce, however, the huge and growing population of U.S. military and intelligence "advisers" infesting Mexico have to "play down" their role, in order "to avoid rubbing nationalist raw spots."

The division of labor used to maintain the fiction of Mexican independence was displayed in joint operations staged to murder Arturo Beltran-Leyva, the admittedly vicious head of a narcotics operation (an offshoot of the Sinaloa Cartel) he co-founded with his four brothers. On December 11, 2009, a team of U.S.-trained Mexican Special Forces operators, acting on intelligence gathered by their American "advisers," attacked a Christmas party, slaughtering several guests, wounding numerous others, and terrorizing scores more while Beltran-Leyva fled.

Name the "good guy" in this photo. Yes, this is a trick question.

Several days later, U.S. agents tracked the fugitive to an apartment in Cuernavaca. This time 200 special forces troops laid siege to the building, surrounding it with tanks and helicopter gunships.

The outcome was predictable, and proudly memorialized in trophy photos of Beltran-Leyva's dead, mutilated body that were given wide circulation by the Mexican government.


This assassination was hailed as a significant "victory" in Washington's drug war in Mexico. Indeed, from the perspective of the people who manage that war, it was an ideal victory -- the kind that helps perpetuate the conflict, rather than bringing it to an end. As the AP points out, in the year following the killing of Beltran-Leyva, arrests of drug cartel leaders were up, cocaine seizures expanded, and extraditions of drug suspects to the U.S.  increased -- "and yet, killings jumped to a record high ... and more heroin and marijuana are being produced in Mexico and smuggled into the U.S." 

As with all other "successful" government programs, Washington's narco-war in Mexico is a breeder reactor for larger and even more profitable problems. The escalating violence by Washington and its puppet government in Mexico City is provoking retaliatory violence against American assets.

Washington's proxy war in Mexico has killed tens of thousands of Mexicans, as well as a small but growing number of U.S. citizens. What really prompted the ire of Rep. McCaul, however, was the murder last February of Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata by a hit team employed by Los Zetas. This episode, in which a Federal Agent was assassinated by a cartel led by U.S.-trained Mexican paramilitaries that led McCaul to demand that Mexican drug syndicates be classified as "foreign terrorist organizations."

(Courtesy of Sipsey Street Irregulars.)

 While Mexican President Calderon has “boldly declared war against the cartels," McCaul declares, "the Mexicans are losing the war – and so are we.”

Of course, the most effective way to destroy the criminal syndicates -- as a growing number of war-weary Mexicans understand -- would be to de-criminalize narcotics, which would mean an immediate end to the grotesquely inflated profits that sustain the cartels. 

McCaul and his ilk, however, prefer to take the contrary approach -- continued escalation of the conflict with no imaginable end. "We can't afford a failed state in Mexico, and we must secure our borders," intones McCaul.

Let's briefly examine this familiar piece of thought-stopping boilerplate.

Since the housing bubble burst four years ago, immigration from Mexico is down dramatically. The chief threat to "border security" at present is the violence being churned up in Mexico through Washington's drug war. If the threat of "spillover" narcotics violence is the main problem, ending the drug war is the obvious solution -- yet ideologues like McCaul have a way of resisting the obvious.

For those who understand that the state is always and everywhere the chief enemy of liberty, prosperity, and peace, the term "failed state" is a pleonasm. When employed by spokesmen for the Imperial power elite, however, the term is invoked as a prelude to military intervention in order to impose a government-exercised monopoly on force -- which in practice has meant becoming local franchises of a U.S.-dominated global political system. 

Interventions of this kind are justified as a form of preventive counter-terrorism. Accordingly, whenever U.S. politicians and policy-makers suggest that Mexico is in danger of becoming a "failed state," they are tuning the atmosphere for even more forceful intervention in that country's domestic affairs.

It shouldn't surprise us to learn that a growing number of Mexicans are weary of being on the receiving end of Washington's armed benevolence.

"We are fed up with this war that nobody asked for," exclaimed Ciudad Juarez resident Leticia Ruiz, one of thousands of Mexicans who attended protests on April 6 demanding an end to Washington's drug war in Mexico. 

"We're sick of you politicians," declared Javier Sicilia, a noted Mexican author whose 24-year-old son was murdered by cartel hit-men. "In this badly planned, badly executed and badly led war, you have put the country into a state of emergency."

The horrors being visited on Mexicans in this unnecessary war are of little concern to the ruling elite on either side of the border. As Hillary Clinton admitted in a moment of stunning candor, de-criminalization of narcotics and de-escalation in the drug war simply aren't possible, because there is "too much money" to be made through prohibition. One illustration of this can be seen in the fact that when the global finance system went into cardiac arrest in 2008, laundered narcotics proceeds were the only liquid capital available for inter-bank loans. 

Many law enforcement agencies in the United States have become addicted to drug war subsidies, both in the form of funds stolen and redistributed through taxation and in the form of direct highway robbery by way of "asset forfeiture." The Texas legislature has sought to expand that symbiosis between the criminal underworld and the even more disreputable political "overworld" by expanding the use of highway checkpoints -- for seatbelt enforcement, license and insurance inspections, and drug and weapons searches -- in order to harvest revenue to make up for shortfalls in tax revenue. 

Significantly, Rep. McCaul points out that his proposal to designate drug cartels as "terrorist" organizations would "intensify southbound inspections to seize weapons and cash." In practice this would mean an escalation in Washington's unremitting war against privacy and private property.

Rep. McCaul himself illustrates another reason why there is no official interest in ending the drug war. As the Houston Chronicle points out, McCaul "unveiled [his] legislation as he raises his profile in Washington for a possible bid for statewide office" -- specifically, the Senate seat being vacated next year by Kay Bailey Hutchison.  Being a dutiful drug war drone is a prescription for job security -- and in many cases, the key to a lucrative political career. Despite growing public disenchantment with this murderous charade, there is no political profit in working to bring it to an end.

No hyperbole is involved in describing Mexico as another front in the Regime's war with -- well, practically everybody. This is illustrated by the fact that several months ago, beginning with a September 2010 installment of Oliver North's "War Stories" agitprop series, the Fox News Channel has been referring to the proxy conflict in Mexico as America's "Third War" (which would mean, of course, that the ongoing campaign in Libya would be the Regime's fourth war).

Like other spokesmen for the War Party, Rep. McCaul has promoted a unified field theory of global conflict in which Mexico is emerging as a haven for Islamic terrorists bent on destroying the U.S. Although there's no evidence of an Islamist/Narco-terrorist alliance, undisguised U.S. military intervention in Mexico could conceivably provoke a nationalist backlash that would serve the War Party's propaganda needs nearly as well.

The Empire's Clone Army: Mexican narcotics troops.

For decades, some elements of the Right (occasionally abetted by people who should have known better) have peddled the notion that Mexico has created a vast and well-organized "fifth column" within the United States dedicated to La Reconquista -- the re-conquest of territories seized by the U.S. during the Mexican-American War.

In this scenario, non-assimilated Mexicans by the millions join in a campaign of violence orchestrated by the Mexican government with the help of foundation-funded anti-American groups on this side of the border.

Whatever revanchist sentiments may exist in Mexico are the residue of Washington's seizure of roughly half the country through a war of aggression. Washington's proxy narco-war has done nothing to palliate those feelings. About the only thing that could vindicate the alarmist fantasy of a nationalistic uprising on the part of Mexicans living on the U.S. side of the border would be direct U.S. military intervention in Mexico. I'm just cynical enough to believe that this would be considered a selling point to the people who profit on the misery inflicted by Washington's drug wars, both here and abroad.

A quick note ....

My apologies, once again, for postponing the  promised Maryanne Godboldo report. The delay reflects the unusual difficulties I'm having in contacting some of the key figures in this story. I appreciate your patience. 

Thank you so much for helping to keep Pro Libertate on-line! God bless.

Dum spiro, pugno!

Clemency for Wall Street Criminals, Prison for the Powerless

A little help from a passive victim: Why did he hold still?

"Who the hell are these people?"

"I don't know. I used to say they were the same ones we've always had to deal with. Same ones my granddaddy had to deal with. Back then they was russlin' cattle. Now they're running dope. I ain't sure we've seen these people before. Their kind. I don't know what to do about 'em even. If you killed 'em all they'd have to build an annex on to hell."

Sheriff Bell, from Cormac McCarthy's novel No Country for Old Men

  

Johnny Gaskins of Raleigh, North Carolina faces a 30-year prison term -- an effective life sentence --  for the supposed crime of depositing $450,000 in his own bank account. The corporate leaders of Wachovia Bank, a criminal syndicate once headquartered in the same state, won't face prosecution despite admissions that the laundered hundreds of billions of dollars on behalf of Mexican narcotics cartels. 

Wachovia was deemed "too big to fail," and thus too important to prosecute. In our system, mercy is reserved exclusively for the powerful and corrupt, and Johnny Gaskins -- a criminal defense attorney -- was neither. 

Gaskins had earned his money legitimately. As a dutiful tax victim, he reported his income to the criminal predators running the IRS. His purported offense was to make numerous deposits in amounts just under the $10,000 threshold at which banks are required to report to the IRS under the Bank Secrecy Act of 1970.

Punishment without a crime: Gaskins.

Displaying the proprietary blend of depraved creativity and utter dishonesty that typify their caste, federal prosecutors insisted that these innocuous acts constituted the alleged crime of "money structuring." 

Dr. William Anderson, an economics professor at Maryland's Frostburg State University, notes that "money structuring" was defined as "an `ancillary crime' to give prosecutors leverage in cases where people had amassed huge amounts of cash via drug sales or other illegal activities and were trying to avoid detection as well as avoid paying taxes on their money."

In Gaskins's case, there was no predicate offense. The money was honestly earned and duly reported. Yet according to Pecksniffian federal prosecutor Randall Galyon, "The point of the law is to make sure we don't have people trying to fool the bank. The fact that he was trying is against the law." 

Gaskins was trying to "fool" the bank about conduct that was not innately criminal.  His violations of technical statutes constituted an offense of a severity comparable to ripping the tag from a mattress.

Yet the sacred majesty of the law requires that Gaskins suffer exemplary, conspicuous punishment. 

As Dr. Anderson observes, there was an unambiguous element of payback behind this vindictive prosecution: "Gaskins had success representing people accused of crimes, and the police and prosecutors paid him back with what can only be a trumped-up charge. Remember, Gaskins was convicted of depositing money in a bank. He did not evade taxes, he did not gain his cash through illegal means, he just put the money in the bank."

For reasons unstated yet deafening in their obviousness, the same corps of federal prosecutors who went after Gaskins hammer and tongs last year displayed little of the same zeal in pursuing Wachovia Bank on charges that involve both deliberate fraud and financial collaboration with Mexican narco-criminal syndicates. 

Wachovia's corporate headquarters are in Charlotte, North Carolina -- just a three-hour drive from Raleigh. Perhaps the heroes who brought Johnny Gaskins to book were simply too exhausted from that herculean task to grapple with Wachovia, which was absorbed by Wells Fargo in a federally engineered takeover. The details are predictably opaque, but Wells Fargo -- which initially resisted string-laden TARP subsidies -- was given $25 billion by the Feds after it bought out Wachovia, which was collapsing under the accumulated weight of its rotten debts. 

Although it proudly called itself "the nation's fourth-largest bank," Wachovia was actually a federally chartered criminal enterprise. 

Granted, this can accurately be said of the entire fractional-reserve banking system. Wachovia distinguished itself by becoming a full-service institution to swindlers and criminals of many kinds. 



In February 2008 it was revealed that Wachovia's corporate leadership "solicited business from companies it knew had been accused of telemarketing crimes," reported the New York Times. "Internal Wachovia e-mail messages, for example, show that high-ranking employees ... frequently warned colleagues about telemarketing frauds routed through its accounts." 


Wachovia had been given specific warnings from investigators and from other banks regarding the scams, yet "it continued to provide banking services to multiple companies that helped steal as much as $400 million from unsuspecting victims." 

A federal lawsuit against Wachovia accused the bank of accepting "fraudulent, unsigned checks that withdrew funds from the accounts of victims, often elderly," continues the Times. "Wachovia forwarded those checks to other banks that were unaware of the frauds, which in turn sent money to the swindlers." 


One Wachovia executive warned in 2005 that one account being used by swindlers had received 4,500 complaints in the space of two months. "There is more," she wrote, "but nothing more that I want to put in a note." 


Despite that warning and others, Wachovia continued to process the fraudulent transactions "partly because the bank charged fraud artists a large fee every time a victim spotted a bogus transaction and demanded their money back," the Times points out. "One company alone paid Wachovia about $1.5 million over 11 months...." 


"We are making a ton of money from them," admitted Wachovia executive Linda Pera in 2005, referring to a company later accused of stealing $142 million through fraud. 


Rather than doing what it could to stop the swindle, Wachovia profited from it as long as it could. The bank's role in that scam -- as well as mortgage fraud, embezzlement, and other crimes -- was known by federal regulators and prosecutors no later than February 2008. Nobody at Wachovia faced criminal prosecution. Instead, the bank was permitted to buy its way out of trouble through a $144 million settlement -- and taxpayers were forced to make good on that amount, and much more, a few months later in the federally subsidized merger with Wells Fargo. 

Last March, federal prosecutors offered an even more generous deal to the Wachovia cabal in the form of a"deferred prosecution agreement" regarding charges of laundering an estimated $300 billion for Mexican narcotics syndicates. In lieu of prosecution, Wachovia agreed to the criminal forfeiture of $110 million and a $50,000,000 fine; it also promised to "demonstrate its future good conduct and compliance in all material aspects with the Bank Secrecy Act...."


The Bank Secrecy Act, recall, is the same law Johnny Gaskins "violated" by making small bank deposits of his own honestly-earned, fully reported money. Gaskins wasn't offered a deal in which he would "forfeit" an amount equivalent to pennies on the dollar and be spared additional punishment in exchange for the promise of future "good conduct."


According to the stipulations in the federal "Factual Statement" Wachovia endorsed last March, a Miami branch maintained "correspondent bank accounts" for Mexican currency exchange houses (casas de cambio, or CDCs).


"On numerous occasions, monies were deposited into a CDC by a drug trafficking organization," recounts the "Factual Statement." "Using false identities, the CDC then wired that money through its Wachovia correspondent bank accounts for the purchase of airplanes for drug trafficking organizations." 


Among the offenses to which Wachovia stipulated are "Structured Wire Transactions" intended to launder drug proceeds. Once again, Gaskins was convicted of "money structuring" despite the fact that there was no underlying criminal act. Wachovia, on the other hand, was deliberately washing drug proceeds and facilitating the purchase of aircraft that were used to smuggle at least 22 tons of cocaine.

In 2006, Martin Woods, a Wachovia compliance officer in London, became suspicious when his branch started to receive a large quantity of traveler's checks issued by Mexican CDCs. The checks -- written for large denominations -- were sequentially numbered and improperly endorsed.

Recognizing this as evidence of money laundering, Woods reported his findings to Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency. A year later, Mexican investigators traced those checks to a CDC used by the Sinaloa Cartel. 

Martin's reward for breaking the case, observed the March 9, 2009 issue of Barron's, was to be bullied and demoted by his superiors at Wachovia, who also threw out his reports of similar suspicious activities in eastern Europe. As was the case with the telemarketing fraud, the dirty dealings Martin had uncovered were much too profitable to stop -- and in this case, they were being overseen by people who make Anton Chigurh look like Mr. Rogers.

In September 2007, a U.S. registered Gulfstream II jet carrying 3.3 tons of cocaine crashed in the Yucatan Peninsula. The plane was one of several purchased through a Mexican CDC with "correspondent accounts" held by Wachovia. This particular private jet -- tail number N987SA -- was also an important link between the CIA-abetted international narcotics trade and the CIA's global torture network.

Multi- use asset: A CIA "torture taxi" takes flight...

Until a few weeks before the crash, the plane's registered owner was a Florida-based pilot (and alleged CIA asset) named Greg Smith, who was reportedly involved in a series of federal operations targeting Columbian drug networks from1997-2000. 

Only those so ingenuous as to make Candide look worldly would be surprised to learn that the same individual, and the same aircraft, were involved in smuggling drugs into the United States, or that the CIA found even more repellent uses for the same vehicle.


Mr. "Smith" was the Gulfstream's owner of record between 2003 and 2005, when the plane was used by the CIA for at least three trips between the east coast of the U.S. and the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay.

The same plane was part of the CIA's fleet of "torture taxis" used to ferry detainees to foreign dungeons, reported The Independent of London last January. 

"In 2004, another torture taxi crashed in a field in Nicaragua with a ton of cocaine aboard," the Independent recalls. "It had been identified by Britain and the European Parliament's temporary committee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners as a frequent visitor in 2004 and 2005 to British, Cypriot, Czech, German, Greek, Hungarian, Spanish and other European cities with its cargo of captives for secret imprisonment and torture in Iraq, Jordan and Azerbaijan."

.... wreckage of the same plane, and its cargo of cocaine.

The gentle treatment given to Wachovia testifies of its value as a pass-through to fund criminal syndicates used by the CIA to conduct the business of perpetual war -- whether it's designated the "war on drugs" or the "war on terror."

To cite Bastiat's invaluable formula yet again, both of those "wars" are exercises in creating the poison and the antidote in the same laboratory. 

The "war on drugs" -- which is an exercise in corrupt, murderous foolishness greater, by several orders of magnitude, than Prohibition -- will not end as long as it is profitable to the criminal elite in Washington, their allies in the banking industry, and their largely interchangeable and thoroughly disposable minions in the underworld. 
 
As Hugh O'Shaughnessy of The Independent puts it, decriminalization of drug use would impoverish "the traffickers, large and small, and those who have been making good money building and running the new prisons that help to bankrupt governments -- in the US in particular, where drug offenders -- principally small retailers and seldom the rich and important wholesalers -- have helped to push the prison population to 1,600,000." 

That population will soon include Johnnie Gaskins, a principled but powerless man who committed no crime. The majesty of the law requires nothing less. None of the criminals in Wachovia's corporate leadership will be joining him behind bars, of course, since clemency is a gift the Regime bestows exclusively on its valued accomplices in official crime.

(Note: This essay was originally published under a different title.)

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