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[From a long interview with Roger Morris. Morris is a former foreign
service officer and has also served on Presidents Lyndon Johnson’s and
Richard Nixon’s National Security Council senior staff. He resigned,
however, over the invasion of Cambodia. Roger Morris is now a fellow at
the Green Institute, a lecturer, and the author of several books]
SUZAN MAZUR, SCOOP, NZ - You suggest in your book, Partners in Power,
based on what you describe as "a numbing accumulation" of evidence
following numerous trips to Arkansas,100 interviews and the review of
thousands of documents – that Bill and Hillary Clinton, as Governor and
First Lady of Arkansas, knew about the ongoing CIA drugs and gun running
by CIA asset Barry Seal, et al., out of Mena's Intermountain Regional
Airport in the Ouachitas in the 1980s. The operation armed the
Nicaraguan Contras and delivered $3 billion to $5 billion worth of
cocaine for distribution throughout the American homeland – as you note,
"the single largest cocaine smuggling operation in US history". . .
Roger Morris: I don't know about Manchurian Candidate, I just think that
the Clintons are the quintessential compromised American politicians.
That's a tragedy as well as an outrage. These are two people who were
young people of promise, and I think for all we know about them, of some
initial idealism and some purpose and goals beyond their own ambition,
although that ambition was outsized in both cases. We don't know, of
course, how much of the detail they were aware of regarding Mena, but
I'm convinced they were both aware of what was essentially going on
there.
Suzan Mazur: How early did they know?
Roger Morris: My guess is they learned of it very soon after it started,
if not at the very inception. . .
This is a seamless web of corruption and compromise in Arkansas. It was
part of the job after all to tend to these large corporate interests –
Walmart and Tyson's Foods and all of the other big hitters in Arkansas.
Hillary was working for a law firm that represented most of those
interests in Arkansas and elsewhere throughout the South. I think they
simply saw this as part of what one had to do in political life and
political office.
Suzan Mazur: But this is something quite serious because it had to do
with the poisoning of millions of Americans with drugs smuggled in
through Arkansas from Latin America.
Roger Morris: Absolutely. It's not a casual corruption. . .
Suzan Mazur: After Mena came under scrutiny following the October 1986
crash of the CIA's Fat Lady plane over Nicaragua "with a load of arms
for the Contras" and CIA asset Eugene Hasenfus' capture – the Colorado
City Municipal Airport run by the FLDS polygamists began receiving . . .
Roger Morris: I once interviewed a DEA agent who was retired and was
quite cynical about all of this and he compared it to – the whole thing
should have been written about by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He said they
had the gulags, the archipelago. We have the drug running archipelago.
That the map of the United States is a map of leopard spots, of
airstrips, of depots, of centers of distribution. And, of course, it
tends to be heavier in the Southern states closer to the supply when the
supply was mainly the South. But the West is heavily populated with it
as well. . .
Mena was one of these marginalized subjects that the American body
politic, certainly the culture of media and certainly respectable
historians, biographers, etc., people who pretend to write about what's
real in American political life – never really wanted to touch.
Suzan Mazur: Sixty Minutes dropped it.
Roger Morris: Oh Sixty Minutes was fascinated initially and wanted to
talk about it and when they got a diffident – I don't know – from
Congressman Jim Leach, who was in the process of investigating Mena at
the time, Sixty Minutes dropped it as well.
Suzan Mazur: It may be time for Sixty Minutes to look at it again.
Roger Morris: You know, it's like so much in foreign policy. We're never
going to come to terms with the crises we face in the Middle East or
anywhere else in the world until we face the history of our involvement
there. We're not going to come to terms with the corruption in American
politics as huge as the tyranny of money is until we understand how it
works.
Suzan Mazur: Mena is a case study.
Roger Morris: Mena wasn't, as you point out, just a plundering
corporation – a health care, an insurance giant, or somebody giving
money to protect a venal interest – this was a criminal empire that
victimized millions of Americans. That used its money for the most
nefarious purposes around the world.
Suzan Mazur: Aside from Mena serving as the air hub for the trafficking
of drugs and guns – you report in the book that Nella, Arkansas, just
outside Mena, was a training grounds for Contra pilots and guerrillas.
And you note that Seal also flew in to Mena Medellin cartel kingpin
Jorge Ochoa to show him the operation.
You also describe secretaries from a bank close to the airport telling
investigators that couriers from the Mena drugs for arms operation
brought bags of money there, and that in order to avoid scrutiny, they
purchased cashier checks in amounts just under $10,000. Would you expand
on this about the bags of cash?
Roger Morris: We don't know very much about the sheer size of that
traffic. We simply know that it happened from time to time – from locals
from people who worked in the banks, people who were in local law
enforcement and those who worked around the airport. . .
Suzan Mazur: There was a town adjacent to the airport, so it wasn't a
secluded airport in a land that time forgot.
Roger Morris: The airport was always incongruous. State of the art. Long
runway. Very sophisticated maintenance. For all intents and purposes, it
could have been a very advanced Air Force base or government
installation with a small town nearby, but of course it wasn't. It was
essentially a private airport. The traffic that went in and out of Mena
– they weren't resident in the town. These were not people who lived
there. They were always on their way somewhere else. They got picked up
in limousines or helicopters or whatever and taken off to Little Rock or
to other places. . .
Suzan Mazur: You seem to find former Arkansas trooper L.D. Brown's
"firsthand evidence" compelling about Bill Clinton pulling some strings
to get him into the CIA, about Brown meeting and flying with Seal, and
about his being "privy to some of the Clintons' most personal liaisons"
– including the "sustained affair", dating from the mid-80s, between
Hillary Clinton and Rose [Law Firm] partner Vince Foster. Would you
comment on the credibility of LD Brown?
Roger Morris: I thought Brown was a credible witness. I thought most of
the other troopers were credible as well. We've gone through a kind of
ebb and flow of credibility with the troopers. They were first on the
scene with exposes in the American Spectator. We often forget that they
also talked to reporters from the Los Angeles Times who did a very
similar series. For whatever one thinks of the American Spectator, the
LA Times did much the same thing. They were roundly attacked, of course,
personally as well as professionally by the Clinton camp. They sort of
receded. And they've now reappeared – lately. . .
Let me just say that everything [LD Brown] told me about everything else
with the Clintons – details large and small – personal and political –
everything checked out. And everything he told me about his experience
with the drug running and all the rest checked out similarly as much as
I could check it with other sources. You're always up against
credibility issues in this world and you make choices. But there was so
much other evidence that this was going on.
Sixty Minutes was very interested because they wanted one single talking
head, a simple story line to pin on Clinton and those simple story lines
are the easiest to knock down as the Clintons have always understood.
You destroy the credibility of a Gennifer Flowers or an LD Brown or
Paula. . .
Suzan Mazur: Was there a draft of the letter LD Brown sent to the CIA
that Clinton made notes on?
Roger Morris: I don't know about the notes. There was a recommendation
Clinton made. And as the book explains, Clinton's connections with the
Agency go back a long way. Since the book was published, I've had people
come forward and tell me that they knew much more than even the
informants I was talking to, and I was talking to people who were
retired from the Agency, who were quite categorical about Bill Clinton
having been a source for Operation Chaos and for informing on American
students abroad while he was at Oxford and all the rest.
Since then I've had people come to me and say, well don't you know you
missed the story, he was actually recruited at Georgetown. Georgetown
was a veritable recruiting center in those days for the CIA – not just
for Americans but for the large number of foreign students, the sons of
foreign wealthy who were at Georgetown. So Bill's contact with the
Agency went back for years and years. . .
Suzan Mazur: You also suggest in your book that Clinton's Uncle Raymond
Clinton had his mob connections. And I believe you've said that Raymond
may have been Bill's ticket into Georgetown's school of Foreign Service.
Roger Morris: Uncle Raymond was pure and simple mob proconsul for Hot
Springs, Arkansas. . .
But coming back to what I was saying earlier, about Hillary and Bill –
you can't do business in American politics without coming upon this
absolutely shady world that operates in a kind of no-man's land between
crime and legality. And of course much of organized crime – billions and
billions, now trillions of dollars in profits from gambling and
everything else – has been washed clean, as it would, and legalized in
all sorts of things – electronics, land, agribusiness, and all the rest.
Hillary has an extraordinary number of donors and contributors,
supporters, etc., who have dubious records of legality, both here in the
US and in the world at large. It's commonly thought that Giuliani has a
set of seedy contacts but Hillary can match 'em seedy-for-seedy. . .
Suzan Mazur: Is there anything else you'd like to say about the
Clintons?
Roger Morris: It may sound corny but I think it's genuinely an American
tragedy. I think this is a woman who is acting out a personal tragedy in
the most dramatic and historic political terms. She's going to be
obviously the first serious woman contender for the presidency of the
United States and it's going to be such a freighted choice, such a
fraught campaign, simply because of the character of her background and
her own compromise over the years. It may have been inevitable. Being
wooed and won by this winning young Southerner, this Sisyphus who kept
pushing the rock of his seedy background up the hill only to find it
falling back down again. This wanton libido that overtook him.
I really do feel a sense of sorrow and compassion about her tragedy,
because I think she loved him. I think this was a devastating blow to
her life as well as a great humiliation because she always thought she
was smarter, better, more disciplined, etc., more able to lead than he.
And it didn't work that way of course. It hasn't worked out. She's
trying to salvage it even as we speak.
Suzan Mazur: How powerful do you think organized crime is at this point?
Roger Morris: I think we're in a wholly new era with Iraq and with post
9/11 and the Bush administration. The privatization of armed forces and
of national security and of intelligence is absolutely unprecedented.
And so too is this open looting of a war. We've always had plunderers
and profiteers in war time, but what's gone on in Iraq with cash and
suitcases full of it and with the overcharging and the looting by the
Halliburtons and others is absolutely unprecedented.
Suzan Mazur: It's dizzying.
Roger Morris: It's absolutely dizzying. And we'll never catch up with
it. That looses into the body politics untold amounts of cash and
influence so that this stands to be by far the most corrupt political
campaign in the history of the republic. And we've had some very corrupt
ones. But all of this money you see headlined, $30 million raised here,
$27 million raised there. All of this is a fraction of what's really
changing hands. . .
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0707/S00058.htm
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
[From a long interview with Roger Morris. Morris is a former foreign
service officer and has also served on Presidents Lyndon Johnson’s and
Richard Nixon’s National Security Council senior staff. He resigned,
however, over the invasion of Cambodia. Roger Morris is now a fellow at
the Green Institute, a lecturer, and the author of several books]
SUZAN MAZUR, SCOOP, NZ - You suggest in your book, Partners in Power,
based on what you describe as "a numbing accumulation" of evidence
following numerous trips to Arkansas,100 interviews and the review of
thousands of documents – that Bill and Hillary Clinton, as Governor and
First Lady of Arkansas, knew about the ongoing CIA drugs and gun running
by CIA asset Barry Seal, et al., out of Mena's Intermountain Regional
Airport in the Ouachitas in the 1980s. The operation armed the
Nicaraguan Contras and delivered $3 billion to $5 billion worth of
cocaine for distribution throughout the American homeland – as you note,
"the single largest cocaine smuggling operation in US history". . .
Roger Morris: I don't know about Manchurian Candidate, I just think that
the Clintons are the quintessential compromised American politicians.
That's a tragedy as well as an outrage. These are two people who were
young people of promise, and I think for all we know about them, of some
initial idealism and some purpose and goals beyond their own ambition,
although that ambition was outsized in both cases. We don't know, of
course, how much of the detail they were aware of regarding Mena, but
I'm convinced they were both aware of what was essentially going on
there.
Suzan Mazur: How early did they know?
Roger Morris: My guess is they learned of it very soon after it started,
if not at the very inception. . .
This is a seamless web of corruption and compromise in Arkansas. It was
part of the job after all to tend to these large corporate interests –
Walmart and Tyson's Foods and all of the other big hitters in Arkansas.
Hillary was working for a law firm that represented most of those
interests in Arkansas and elsewhere throughout the South. I think they
simply saw this as part of what one had to do in political life and
political office.
Suzan Mazur: But this is something quite serious because it had to do
with the poisoning of millions of Americans with drugs smuggled in
through Arkansas from Latin America.
Roger Morris: Absolutely. It's not a casual corruption. . .
Suzan Mazur: After Mena came under scrutiny following the October 1986
crash of the CIA's Fat Lady plane over Nicaragua "with a load of arms
for the Contras" and CIA asset Eugene Hasenfus' capture – the Colorado
City Municipal Airport run by the FLDS polygamists began receiving . . .
Roger Morris: I once interviewed a DEA agent who was retired and was
quite cynical about all of this and he compared it to – the whole thing
should have been written about by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. He said they
had the gulags, the archipelago. We have the drug running archipelago.
That the map of the United States is a map of leopard spots, of
airstrips, of depots, of centers of distribution. And, of course, it
tends to be heavier in the Southern states closer to the supply when the
supply was mainly the South. But the West is heavily populated with it
as well. . .
Mena was one of these marginalized subjects that the American body
politic, certainly the culture of media and certainly respectable
historians, biographers, etc., people who pretend to write about what's
real in American political life – never really wanted to touch.
Suzan Mazur: Sixty Minutes dropped it.
Roger Morris: Oh Sixty Minutes was fascinated initially and wanted to
talk about it and when they got a diffident – I don't know – from
Congressman Jim Leach, who was in the process of investigating Mena at
the time, Sixty Minutes dropped it as well.
Suzan Mazur: It may be time for Sixty Minutes to look at it again.
Roger Morris: You know, it's like so much in foreign policy. We're never
going to come to terms with the crises we face in the Middle East or
anywhere else in the world until we face the history of our involvement
there. We're not going to come to terms with the corruption in American
politics as huge as the tyranny of money is until we understand how it
works.
Suzan Mazur: Mena is a case study.
Roger Morris: Mena wasn't, as you point out, just a plundering
corporation – a health care, an insurance giant, or somebody giving
money to protect a venal interest – this was a criminal empire that
victimized millions of Americans. That used its money for the most
nefarious purposes around the world.
Suzan Mazur: Aside from Mena serving as the air hub for the trafficking
of drugs and guns – you report in the book that Nella, Arkansas, just
outside Mena, was a training grounds for Contra pilots and guerrillas.
And you note that Seal also flew in to Mena Medellin cartel kingpin
Jorge Ochoa to show him the operation.
You also describe secretaries from a bank close to the airport telling
investigators that couriers from the Mena drugs for arms operation
brought bags of money there, and that in order to avoid scrutiny, they
purchased cashier checks in amounts just under $10,000. Would you expand
on this about the bags of cash?
Roger Morris: We don't know very much about the sheer size of that
traffic. We simply know that it happened from time to time – from locals
from people who worked in the banks, people who were in local law
enforcement and those who worked around the airport. . .
Suzan Mazur: There was a town adjacent to the airport, so it wasn't a
secluded airport in a land that time forgot.
Roger Morris: The airport was always incongruous. State of the art. Long
runway. Very sophisticated maintenance. For all intents and purposes, it
could have been a very advanced Air Force base or government
installation with a small town nearby, but of course it wasn't. It was
essentially a private airport. The traffic that went in and out of Mena
– they weren't resident in the town. These were not people who lived
there. They were always on their way somewhere else. They got picked up
in limousines or helicopters or whatever and taken off to Little Rock or
to other places. . .
Suzan Mazur: You seem to find former Arkansas trooper L.D. Brown's
"firsthand evidence" compelling about Bill Clinton pulling some strings
to get him into the CIA, about Brown meeting and flying with Seal, and
about his being "privy to some of the Clintons' most personal liaisons"
– including the "sustained affair", dating from the mid-80s, between
Hillary Clinton and Rose [Law Firm] partner Vince Foster. Would you
comment on the credibility of LD Brown?
Roger Morris: I thought Brown was a credible witness. I thought most of
the other troopers were credible as well. We've gone through a kind of
ebb and flow of credibility with the troopers. They were first on the
scene with exposes in the American Spectator. We often forget that they
also talked to reporters from the Los Angeles Times who did a very
similar series. For whatever one thinks of the American Spectator, the
LA Times did much the same thing. They were roundly attacked, of course,
personally as well as professionally by the Clinton camp. They sort of
receded. And they've now reappeared – lately. . .
Let me just say that everything [LD Brown] told me about everything else
with the Clintons – details large and small – personal and political –
everything checked out. And everything he told me about his experience
with the drug running and all the rest checked out similarly as much as
I could check it with other sources. You're always up against
credibility issues in this world and you make choices. But there was so
much other evidence that this was going on.
Sixty Minutes was very interested because they wanted one single talking
head, a simple story line to pin on Clinton and those simple story lines
are the easiest to knock down as the Clintons have always understood.
You destroy the credibility of a Gennifer Flowers or an LD Brown or
Paula. . .
Suzan Mazur: Was there a draft of the letter LD Brown sent to the CIA
that Clinton made notes on?
Roger Morris: I don't know about the notes. There was a recommendation
Clinton made. And as the book explains, Clinton's connections with the
Agency go back a long way. Since the book was published, I've had people
come forward and tell me that they knew much more than even the
informants I was talking to, and I was talking to people who were
retired from the Agency, who were quite categorical about Bill Clinton
having been a source for Operation Chaos and for informing on American
students abroad while he was at Oxford and all the rest.
Since then I've had people come to me and say, well don't you know you
missed the story, he was actually recruited at Georgetown. Georgetown
was a veritable recruiting center in those days for the CIA – not just
for Americans but for the large number of foreign students, the sons of
foreign wealthy who were at Georgetown. So Bill's contact with the
Agency went back for years and years. . .
Suzan Mazur: You also suggest in your book that Clinton's Uncle Raymond
Clinton had his mob connections. And I believe you've said that Raymond
may have been Bill's ticket into Georgetown's school of Foreign Service.
Roger Morris: Uncle Raymond was pure and simple mob proconsul for Hot
Springs, Arkansas. . .
But coming back to what I was saying earlier, about Hillary and Bill –
you can't do business in American politics without coming upon this
absolutely shady world that operates in a kind of no-man's land between
crime and legality. And of course much of organized crime – billions and
billions, now trillions of dollars in profits from gambling and
everything else – has been washed clean, as it would, and legalized in
all sorts of things – electronics, land, agribusiness, and all the rest.
Hillary has an extraordinary number of donors and contributors,
supporters, etc., who have dubious records of legality, both here in the
US and in the world at large. It's commonly thought that Giuliani has a
set of seedy contacts but Hillary can match 'em seedy-for-seedy. . .
Suzan Mazur: Is there anything else you'd like to say about the
Clintons?
Roger Morris: It may sound corny but I think it's genuinely an American
tragedy. I think this is a woman who is acting out a personal tragedy in
the most dramatic and historic political terms. She's going to be
obviously the first serious woman contender for the presidency of the
United States and it's going to be such a freighted choice, such a
fraught campaign, simply because of the character of her background and
her own compromise over the years. It may have been inevitable. Being
wooed and won by this winning young Southerner, this Sisyphus who kept
pushing the rock of his seedy background up the hill only to find it
falling back down again. This wanton libido that overtook him.
I really do feel a sense of sorrow and compassion about her tragedy,
because I think she loved him. I think this was a devastating blow to
her life as well as a great humiliation because she always thought she
was smarter, better, more disciplined, etc., more able to lead than he.
And it didn't work that way of course. It hasn't worked out. She's
trying to salvage it even as we speak.
Suzan Mazur: How powerful do you think organized crime is at this point?
Roger Morris: I think we're in a wholly new era with Iraq and with post
9/11 and the Bush administration. The privatization of armed forces and
of national security and of intelligence is absolutely unprecedented.
And so too is this open looting of a war. We've always had plunderers
and profiteers in war time, but what's gone on in Iraq with cash and
suitcases full of it and with the overcharging and the looting by the
Halliburtons and others is absolutely unprecedented.
Suzan Mazur: It's dizzying.
Roger Morris: It's absolutely dizzying. And we'll never catch up with
it. That looses into the body politics untold amounts of cash and
influence so that this stands to be by far the most corrupt political
campaign in the history of the republic. And we've had some very corrupt
ones. But all of this money you see headlined, $30 million raised here,
$27 million raised there. All of this is a fraction of what's really
changing hands. . .
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0707/S00058.htm
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