VHeadline guest commentator Clifton Ross writes: While Mr. George W. Bush promised more money to the Colombian government to fight presumably "bad narcoterrorists" his administration was sending "good narcoterrorists" to help develop its plans for Haiti.

As USAID states at their website: OTI [Office of Transition Initiatives, of USAID] continues to work closely with the US Embassy and IOM to develop options for a reintegration program for former combatants. Training and management specialists of the Kosovo Protection Corps, a civilian response unit consisting primarily of former Kosovo Liberation Army members, have been brought to Haiti to assess how the Kosovo model might be applied there.

• The "Kosovo model" is code that would require an understanding of the KLA to interpret.

After kidnapping President Aristide and bringing into power a narco-government "of transition" by means of drug dealers and murderers should be no surprise that the Bush administration would want to coordinate this newly imposed narco-government with its drug-dealing buddies in the KLA.  See Anthony Fenton’s article.

Up to 80% of the heroin that enters Europe passes through the KLA, the elephant in the living room of narco-terrorism. The heroin the KLA helps smuggle into Europe has its origins in US-controlled Afghanistan ... the nation recently "liberated" from the Taliban, that Islamic grouping that had nearly eliminated opium production.

Now, under the aegis of the US and puppet Hamid Karzai Unocal, opium production is back up to record levels. The Afghan warlords, our "good narcoterrorists" are quite happy, as are, presumably, our "good narcoterrorists" in Kosovo, who skim the cream off the top of the drug money.

It is increasingly clear that what holds up the Bush administration in Washington is not only oil, but drugs ­ and that’s nothing new (see Whiteout:The CIA, Drugs and the Press by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair for an extensive and well-documented history).

During the Contra War, Papa Doc Bush used Colombian cocaine money to pay for arms for the terrorist Contra war in Nicaragua where 30,000 died, and the Vietnam War was financed by heroin from the Golden Triangle. The drugs are brought into the US on CIA planes and distributed in our poor urban communities as a way of keeping the largely African American community and other disenfranchised communities, sedated, neutralized and/or imprisoned.

Now Baby Doc Bush appears to be stemming the flow of cocaine in South America while opening the taps of heroin in the Mideast. That would be a logical conclusion, since the US tends to fund its terrorist wars with drug money and at present the war in Iraq appears to require all the heroin the US can get its hands on for alternative, regional funding sources.

But not everything is as it appears to be. What is being viewed as "stopping the flow" of cocaine is a mere redirection through other channels.

In planning for future assaults on Latin America, we can expect Haiti to once again be a critical transshipment but the US must also get control of "product" and establish relations with the "wholesalers." That is to say, in order for the US to set up "good narcoterrorists" they must first dispense with the "bad narcoterrorists" so the leftist FARC, which taxes cocaine in areas under its control, must first be crushed in order for the "good narcoterrorists" to come into power.

And who might they be?

President Alvaro Uribe, of course.

Uribe’s close ties to the Medellin Cartel will enable the top narcoterrorists of the world (the US government) to finance their wars in Latin America (as they did through the second half of the twentieth century) while also carrying out drug and terror operations in the Middle East.

"Deep throat," the anonymous agent who blew the whistle on Nixon and Watergate, said "follow the money." Perhaps today he might say, "Follow the drug and oil pipelines." Bush’s pledge of aid to oil-rich and drug-plagued Colombia, a nation which is already the largest recipient of US aid in the hemisphere, is another step toward future US intervention in Latin America as it seeks to control the world through oil, drugs and guns.

Clif Ross
clifross1@yahoo.com

Photography: Santiago Padilla