Nexus - 0224 - New Times Magazine-pages

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For Kissinger and the ADL-led NED, dealing with cocaine traf- Oliver North. The judge, Albert V. Bryan, Jr, had been a business fickers was no problem. But LaRouche's public exposé of leading _ partner of the CIA's biggest secret arms dealer, Sam Cummings. drug traffickers on the government payroll was a problem. In that federal trial and at subsequent state trials in Virginia, lead- A May 1986 memo from White House Iran-Contra operator _ ing officials of the ADL operated as de facto members of the gov- Gen. Richard Secord to National Security Council staffer Oliver ernment's prosecution team. In one telling incident, the ADL was North confirms that the Contra support apparatus—what Sen. caught attempting to bribe a Commonwealth of Virginia trial David Boren (D-Oklahoma) labelled the "secret, parallel govern- judge with a promise of a state Supreme Court post in return for ment"—was gathering "information against LaRouche". throwing the book at the LaRouche defendants. By the spring of 1986, following dramatic electoral victories in On 27 January 1989, just days after George Bush was nN the statewide Illinois Democratic Party primary by two LaRouche- _ed as President, LaRouche was deprived of bail, pending appeal, backed candidates for lieutenant governor and secretary of state, and thrown in federal prison, along with six colleagues. the ‘Get LaRouche' forces inside the government had built up | LaRouche was sentenced to 15 years in prison—a life sentence for momentum, especially inside the deeply corrupted Department of a man already in his mid-60s. Bush added his imprimatur to the Justice and the FBI. jailing by refusing to release thousands of pages of exculpatory Two of the most zealous of the Justice Department 'Get evidence under the control of the White House. Of all his political LaRouche' activists. were William Weld and Arnold Burns. Weld _ adversaries and critics, Lyndon LaRouche was the one man whom was the US attorney in Boston who led the federal government's | George Bush desperately wanted out of the way. - pioneering strike-force against LaRouche. He became head of the But the jailing of LaRouche and some of his closest colleagues Department of Justice Criminal Division in September 1986, the was not enough to satisfy the Dope, Inc. crowd. Two LaRouche- number-two position at the DoJ. Now Governor of _ linked publications, New Solidarity, a twice-weekly newspaper Massachusetts, Weld is the scion of a promi- with over 100,000 subscribers, and Fusion, a nent blue-blood family that made its fortune science magazine with over 114,000 sub- in the China opium trade. scribers, were seized by the government on Arnold Burns, the Deputy Attorney 21 April 1987 and shut down in an action General, was a director of the ADL's Sterling that federal courts after the fact declared to National Bank, an outfit founded by mob have been illegal. Federal Bankruptcy Court cronies of Meyer Lansky and implicated in Judge Martin V. B. Bostetter wrote in his 25 hot-money dealings in the United States, October 1989 decision, which was upheld on Italy and Israel. Burns himself was nearly appeal, that the government action had been indicted in a money-laundering scheme run in "bad faith” and that the government had by Israel's secret service, the Mossad. It committed a “constructive fraud upon the would later emerge that Burns’ partners in court". that scheme were part of the Jonathan Jay Pollard Israeli-Soviet espionage ring. In October 1986, an army of over 400 fed- eral and state police, accompanied by heli- copters, fixed-wing planes and an armoured personnel carrier, conducted a raid against the offices of several LaRouche-associated publications in Leesburg, Virginia. This was hen Lyndon LaRouche first warned senior Reagan admin- istration officials about the drug cartel links of the Nicaraguan Contras, it was not yet publicly known that the US government was selling dope to American children to fund the secret the largest domestic paramilitary action by Contra war in Nicaragua (even at the same the federal government since the urban and time that some well-meaning government student riots of the late 1960s and early officials thought they were genuinely fight- 1970s. The purpose was simply to execute ing drugs). two search warrants and make four arrests of people who had no Within days of the Leesburg raid, the first details of the Iran- criminal records! Contra scandal surfaced following the crash of an American sup- Over the next several years, LaRouche and dozens of associates ply plane over Nicaraguan territory and the arrest of Eugene were arrested and put on trial. A prosecution of LaRouche anda Hasenfus, a member of the crew. In the months following the dozen co-defendants in a Boston federal court ended in a mistrial © Hasenfus capture, more and more pieces of the secret government on 4 May 1988. The Boston jury had heard 92 days of testimony —_ corruption came out. from government witnesses. The defence never got to present its The case of Lt. Col. Oliver North is one good example of this case. However, the jurors, according to press accounts, were so _— corruption, especially because so much media attention has been angry at the government's behaviour that when they polled them- directed toward building up the image of the Marine-turned-White selves after they had been dismissed by the judge, they voted | House superspy as a model of American patriotism. LaRouche and the others "not guilty" on all 125 counts. One juror Evidence made public during the congressional Iran-Contra told the Boston Herald on 5 May 1988 that he and his colleagues hearings, through federal and state court cases and international were convinced the government had committed crimes against criminal prosecutions, reveals that Oliver North was in the middle LaRouche. LaRouche told the press that he had been defrauded of of a major international arms-for-drugs trafficking operation a verdict of "innocent". which was run out of his National Security Council office at the Six months later, the Justice Department re-indicted LaRouche Old Executive Office building next door to the White House. in an Alexandria, Virginia federal district court on nearly identical Colonel North was the day-to-day operations officer for the charges. The judge and the jury were rigged. The jury foreman,a Contra resupply program. But it was Vice-President George Department of Agriculture official named Buster Horton, had been —_ Bush, the former CIA Director, who was formally in charge of the a member of a secret government task force that also included _ entire Reagan administration Central America covert operations NEXUS ¢ 33 FEBRUARY - MARCH 1995