I Volunteer to Kidnap Ollie North - by Mike Levine

I Volunteer to Kidnap Oliver North
by
Michael Levine Undercover DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena was tortured to death slowly by professionals.   Every known maximum-pain technique, from electric shocks to his testicles to white hot rods inserted in his rectum, was applied.   A doctor stood by to keep him alive.   The heart of the thirty-seven year old father of two boys refused to quit for more than twenty-four hours.  His cries, along with the soft-spoken, calm voices of the men who were slowly and meticulously savaging his body, were tape-recorded. Kiki, one of only three hundred of us in the world (DEA agents on foreign assignment),   had been kidnapped in broad daylight from in front of the U.S. Consular office in Guadalajara, Mexico by Mexican cops working for drug traffickers and, apparently, high level Mexican government people whose identities we would never know.  They would be protected by people in our own government to whom Kiki's life meant less than nothing.
When teams of DEA agents were sent to Mexico, first, to find the missing Kiki, then to hunt for his murderers,  they were met by a the stone wall of a corrupt Mexican government that refused to cooperate.  To the horror and disgust of many of us, our government backed down from the Mexicans; other interests, like NAFTA, banking agreements and the covert support of Ollie North's Contras,  were more important than the life of an American undercover agent. DEA agents were ordered by the  Justice Department, to keep our mouths shut about Mexico; an order that was backed up by threats from the office of Attorney General Edwin Meese himself.   Instead of tightening restrictions on the Mexican debt, our Treasury Department moved to loosen them as if to reward them for their filthy deed.   As an added insult Mexico was granted cooperating nation in the drug war status, giving them access to additional millions in American drug war funds and loans.
Somehow a CIA—unaware that their own chief of Soviet counter intelligence, Aldrich Ames, was selling all America's biggest secrets to the KGB for fourteen years with all the finesse of a Jersey City garage sale—was able to obtain the tape-recordings of Kiki's torture death.  No one in media or government had the courage to publicly ask them explain how they were able to obtain the tapes, yet know nothing of the murder as it was happening; no one had the courage to ask them to explain the testimony of a reliable government informant, (during a California trial related to Camarena's murder), that Kiki's murderers believed they were protected by the CIA.  Nor did our elected leaders have the courage to investigate numerous other reports linking the CIA directly to the murderers.
Our government's sellout of Kiki Camarena, of all DEA agents, of the war on drugs, was such that United States Congressman, Larry Smith,  stated, on the floor of Congress:
"I personally am convinced that the Justice Department is against the best interests of the United States in terms of stopping drugs...  What has a DEA agent who puts his life on the line got to look forward to?  The U.S. Government is not going to back him up.  I find that intolerable."
 What does Oliver North have to do with this?
 A lot of us, Kiki's fellow agents, believe that the Mexican government never would have dared take the action they did, had they not believed the US government to be as hypocritical and  corrupt as they were and still are.  And if there was ever a figure in our history that was the paradigm of that corruption it is the man President Reagan called "an American hero"; the same man Nancy Reagan later called a liar:  Oliver North.
 No one person in our government's history more embodied what Senator John Kerry referred to when he called the US protection of the drug smuggling Contras a "betrayal of the American people."
 Few Americans, thanks to what one time CIA chief William Colby referred to as the news media's "misplaced sense of patriotism," are aware that the Nobel prize winning President of Costa Rica,  Oscar Arias—as a result of an in-depth investigation by the Costa Rican Congressional Commission on Narcotics that found "virtually all [Ollie North supported] Contra factions were involved in drug trafficking"—banned Oliver North, U.S. Ambassador Lewis Tambs, National Security Advisor Admiral John Poindexter, Presidential Advisor Richard Secord and C.I.A. station chief José Fernandez, by Executive order, from ever entering Costa Rica— for their roles in utilizing Costa Rican territory for cocaine trafficking.
In fact, when Costa Rica began its investigation into the drug trafficking allegations against North and naively thought that the U.S. would gladly lend a hand in efforts to fight drugs, they received a rude awakening about the realities of America's war on drugs as opposed to its "this-scourge-will-end" rhetoric.
read full article here I Volunteer to Kidnap Ollie North - by Mike Levine