CharlesDarwinTrump Wants $200 Billion More For Iran War. Here's What Else That Could Fund.
manxuForget what that could fund. $200 billion with 400 million Americans means that every single American chose to throw $500 to this war. It’s like you found $500 on the street, you picked them up, and you sent them to Washington for the money to transform into rockets that rain down on school children.
Every. Single. American. Chose to take $500 they could have spent on food or credit debt or education or rent or whatever your priority. And instead they chose to turn it into big kabooms half a world away. Big kabooms that make everything at home more expensive. From grandma in a wheelchair to barely born, including legal and illegal immigrants. People living in tents didn’t get their $500, people facing medical bankruptcy didn’t get their $500.
It’s disgusting what kind of garbage this government is willing to spend money on while it calls affordability, a hoax.
The last time Congress refused to fund a war, the Republicans just sold weapons to our bitterest enemy (Iran, ironically), so they could use the profits to fund their illegal war in Nicaragua.
Maybe Trump can ask all his billionaire friends to chip in, a billion a piece. A few of them can pay more, a lot more.
The CIA in funding the contras in nicaragua was buying cocaine and selling it to LA street gangs, and taking guns down to south america to sell. They also sold the street gangs some military grade weapons.
It’s not a one off, just one they got caught on. We are all familiar with Air America flying heroin they made in the golden triangle to dope up vietnam soldiers that were unruly.
The CIA in funding the contras in nicaragua was buying cocaine and selling it to LA street gangs, and taking guns down to south america to sell. They also sold the street gangs some military grade weapons.
This is a VERY interesting aspect of the Iran-Contra Scandal that every administration has wanted to avoid. I’ve been studying it ever since it happened. I watched the entire Iran-Contra Scandal hearings play out on TV, and I’ve been tracking it ever since.
Your version is one possibility, but it’s a bit simplified, and I think it was more convoluted than that.
Once they had the money from the illegal Iranian arms sales. Don’t forget, Iran was our bitterest enemy, having taken American Embassy personnel hostage for well over a year, just a few years before (that was where our adventures with modern Iran began, and why Trump is claiming that they started it 47 years ago). And yet THATS who the Reagan Administration chose to do business with.
Once they had the money, they needed to buy guns, and once they bought the guns, they had to send them to Central America to arm their “freedom fighters.” Since the war was officially, Congressionally prohibited, they couldn’t use normal military transport, so they hired people with lots of experience surreptitiously flying contraband in and out of hidden American airfields and Central American jungles. Who is uniquely experienced in such flying? - drug smugglers, of course.
So they hired a bunch drug smugglers, loaded their planes with guns, and they flew them down to Central America, protected by the CIA, where the guns were unloaded, and they were paid in cash. So what does a drug smuggler do when he finds himself in Central America, with an empty plane, a bag full of cash, and CIA protection? Take a wild guess.
So they started transporting cocaine on their return trips, which were many. They were flying small Cessnas, which don’t hold a lot of heavy cargo like guns, so many trips were required, both ways.
Before Iran-Contra, powdered cocaine was the drug of the wealthy. So much poured in during Iran-Contra, that the law of supply & demand crashed the price, and it became so cheap that it took over the inner cities of our entire nation. The Crack Cocaine Epidemic was a direct result of the Iran-Contra Scandal, and our nation has NEVER truly investigated it.
Now here’s where I separate from your simplified version: Did the CIA know about the cocaine smuggling, AND did they operate it, and create an enormous public health danger, just to get profits for their guns?
It’s the CIA, literally anything is possible. They had to have known that their smugglers were smuggling cocaine back. Simple logic and Critical Thinking Skills, something that CIA agents should be good at, should lead them that that conclusion is not only possible, but almost certain.
But were they actively operating a cocaine smuggling operation to find their illegal, unConstitutional war? I doubt that one. They were making crazy money in far fewer transactions by selling weapons to Iran. The money from cocaine smuggling might look like a fortune to a small-time smuggler who got a lucky job, but it’s small time to a government trying to fund a war. They ended up with $18 million (1980s dollars) in profits to fund their war, and they couldn’t have made that much money that fast with individual cocaine trips. I think the cocaine smuggling was an independent operation by the pilots.
BTW, none of this is speculation or a conspiracy theory (even though it was a bona-fide conspiracy), it was all confirmed when pilot Eugene Hassenfuss was arrested, and the first thing he did was hand over the business card of his CIA handler. ALL of it came out after that - except the admission that the entire crack cocaine epidemic was started by Ollie North, the CIA, and the Republican Reagan Administration. After all, it mostly hurt poor blacks, so who cares, right?
I appreciate your response and yes my comment was the very short version of the story.
I however posit that the CIA knew exactly what they were doing, and that is just the tip of the iceberg, and they never stopped being involved in the drug trade to fund black operations, off the books, and to enrich themselves I’m sure.
Afghanistan Heroin for instance. 100% I would bet the CIA was involved selling it.
That when they go after traffickers, they are going after the rival ones not in bed with them. As they are doing now.
I can’t prove that obviously, I am working mostly off that guy’s expose in the what was it, san jose mercury times, that the government leaded on to retract the article, and the seattle times published it, and provides it to this day, (on their now paywalled paper.) The author famously committed one of the worst cases of suicide ohio cops have ever seen, shooting himself twice in the back of the head.
There is another thing of note to mention in passing, one of the first big cocaine smugglers that got busted when the colombians started taking it into florida, forget his name, later got bailed out by the CIA, of prison, and started working for them, idk in the 90s I think.
Yeah, the guy they caught was Eugene Hassenfuss, whom I mentioned. He has his own Wikipedia entry.
You absolutely make a valid point, and our government definitely criminalized drugs in an attempt to control certain populations by incarcerating them in massive numbers. Why wouldn’t they also work the strategy on the other end, and get them hooked now, to make it easier to arrest them later?
Several drug waves were proceeded by a war. Heroin became big in the 60s because it was being smuggled over on military transports. Then it shifted to Cocaine in the 80s because of Iran-Contra, and then back to heroin because of Afghanistan. I say Several, because at least one drug wave, the Opiate Epidemic, was engineered by the Sackler family, to addict as many people as possible for profits. No war involved there.
Weed was always popular, and never attached to a war. It’s just too big and bulky to smuggle quietly.
LSD was primarily supplied by Owsley Stanley, an audio engineer for the Grateful Dead, and also the first private individual to create LSD. He supposedly made over 500 grams, amounting to about 5 million doses, and probably the vast majority of all the LSD going around in the 60s and 70s.
I want to believe our government would never do anything that nefarious, but from what we’ve learned, they’ve been doing shit that is beyond our wildest imaginations. Literally anything is possible with those psychopaths.