Peter Dale Scott - American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan

Also by Peter Dale Scott

The Politics of Escalation in Vietnam (1966, with Franz Schurmann and Reginald Zelnik)

The War Conspiracy (1972, 2008)

The Assassinations: Dallas and Beyond (1976, with Paul Hoch and Russell Stetler)

Crime and Cover-Up: The CIA, the Mafia, and the Dallas-Watergate Connection (1977)

The Iran-Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (1987, with Jonathan Marshall and Jane Hunter)

Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror (1988, 1989, poetry)

Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (1991, 1992, 1998, with Jonathan Marshall)

Listening to the Candle: A Poem on Impulse (1992, poetry)

Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993, 1996)

Crossing Borders (1994, poetry)

Deep Politics II: The New Revelations in Government Files, 19941995 (1994, 2007)

Drugs, Contras and the CIA: Government Policies and the Cocaine Economy (2000)

Minding the Darkness: A Poem for the Year 2000 (2000, poetry)

Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (2003)

The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (2007)

The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11 and the Deep Politics of War (2008)

Mosaic Orpheus (2009, poetry)

American War Machine

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American War Machine

Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection, and the Road to Afghanistan

Peter Dale Scott

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Copyright 2010 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Scott, Peter Dale.

American war machine : deep politics, the CIA global drug connection, and the road to Afghanistan / Peter Dale Scott.

p. cm. (War and peace library)

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-7425-5594-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4422-0589-5 (electronic)

1. Drug trafficGovernment policyUnited States. 2. Drug controlPolitical aspectsUnited States. 3. Intelligence serviceUnited States. 4. United States. Central Intelligence Agency. 5. Afghan War, 2001 Causes. I. Title.

HV5825.S3915 2010

958.104'7dc22

2010013895

` The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

To the countless victims of the global drug connection, and especially to those who have died exposing it.

M y first acknowledgments and thanks must go to my chief editor, Mark Selden.

No other book that I have ever written has owed so much to the patient and painstaking editorial guidance it has received. This is in fact the fourth book with my prose that was edited by Mark; the first, Remaking Asia: Essays on the American Uses of Power , was in 1974. But Mark has read and reread the present work with such care that I respectfully recognize him as, in the best sense, a collaborator. What was remarkable was the number of times he understood what I was struggling to say more clearly than I did myself.

I owe a similar debt to Susan McEachern and Janice Braunstein, my editors at Rowman & Littlefield, and to the skills of my agent, Victoria Shoemaker, and my indexer, Allan Giles. Their collective efforts, combined with Marks, have made my work as an author easier than it would have been otherwise. I am also grateful to those who edited and published earlier versions of this books chapters, namely Eric Wilson, Michel Chossudovsky, Janice Matthews, and Jeremy Hammond. And I would like to thank Alan Kaufman for his legal opinions, which served to improve the book as well as protect it.

There are also many people from whom I have learned and with whom I have discussed this subject. The first to be mentioned must be Alfred McCoy, assuredly the authority most often cited in this book. Al McCoy was also a cowitness to the strange episode in Palo Alto with which the book opens. McCoys Politics of Heroin , first published in 1972 and now in its third edition, remains an indispensible source for all those interested in the topic of the CIA and drug trafficking.

My ideas have also been deeply influenced by my best friend Daniel Ellsberg and by his important book Secrets . The works of many others, including Bertil Lintner, John Dinges, Gareth Porter, and my former coauthor, Jonathan Marshall, have also been important to me. With the rise of the Internet, I have learned to rely on the researches of a number of younger scholars. Some of these, such as Russ Baker, have become personal friends. Because of geography, others, such as Jeremy Hammond, remain e-mail correspondents only.

As some of the claims made in this book are unusual and are likely to draw adverse comment, I should make it clear that I alone am responsible for them as well as for whatever errors and shortcomings in the book that may be discovered.

I do want to thank some others in particular who have helped refine my ideas of deep politics, including R. T. Naylor, the late Penny Lernoux, Rex Bradford, Eric Wilson, Roger Morris, Richard Falk, Ole Tunander, David Ray Griffin, and Sally Denton.

At eighty-one, I do not expect to write another political book as long and as complex as this one. But I feel a great sense of gratitude for the number of younger people doing similar research in these areas. This allows me to feel confident that, no matter what happens to Americas government, the search for truth is currently flourishingand will, I believe, continue to gain in strength.

This is now the sixth book that I have dedicated with a grateful heart to my wife, Ronna Kabatznick. Our love, for more than twenty years now, keeps growing and has helped to keep me young. In the same spirit and for the same reason, I wish to thank wholeheartedly my wonderful children, their wonderful spouses, and their wonderful children.

Chapter 2 was originally published as Drugs, Parapolitics, and Mexico: The DFS, the Drug Traffic, and the United States, in Government of the Shadows: Parapolitics and Criminal Sovereignty , ed. Eric Wilson and Tim Lindsey (London: Pluto, 2009).