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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the June 15, 2000
issue of Workers World newspaper
-------------------------More Pentagon drug peddling
It has a worldwide apparatus. It is armed to the teeth. It has a long history of drug trafficking.
No, it is not the mafia. Nor is it any of the drug cartels--although these often do its bidding.
It is the United States Pentagon.
The latest revelations of Pentagon drug smuggling come from Seoul, south Korea. On May 30, a U.S. Air Force captain was arrested on charges of smuggling 2.5 kilograms of cocaine from Panama to Korea. The captain was held on a U.S. military base, his identity kept secret.
Anti-social crimes committed by members of the 37,000 U.S. occupying troops are routine in south Korea. The same week, another unnamed U.S. officer was arrested with his son on charges of raping a Korean bartender in the southeastern city of Taegu.
Nor is drug trafficking new to the Pentagon. Heroin and cocaine trafficking by U.S. military forces and the Central Intelligence Agency during the Vietnam War and the covert war against Nicaragua has been documented. In both cases profits were used to support anti-communist thugs and death squads.
More recently, the head of the U.S. "war on drugs" in Bogotá, Colombia--Col. James Hiett--plead guilty to laundering profits from his wife's heroin shipments. That trafficking operation was based at the U.S. embassy in Bogotá.
None of these crimes should shock anyone familiar with the history of the Pentagon. Imperialist occupying armies routinely commit the most outrageous crimes against the people in the countries that they occupy. The residents of Vieques, Puerto Rico, are living testimony to that abuse.
The only surprise might be the sheer arrogance of a government to wage a brutal war against the people of Latin America and the people of the United States under the cover of a "war on drugs."
A real war on drug trafficking would begin with the Pentagon and the biggest banks in the United States that profit from the billions of dollars in the drug trade.
—A.M.
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