NATIONAL SECURITY LAWS:
LEGALIZED DRUG DEALING?
by John Lee
Justice is incidental to law and order. —FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
No book on Prohibition would be complete without discussion of illegal drug Prohibition. Over $100 billion tax dollars have been "invested" in America's so-called War on Drugs (i.e., given to cops). More Americans are arrested every year on drug charges than the total number of bootleggers arrested during the 13 years of America's first Prohibition. These are of course the same police who arrest citizens for alleged DWI offenses, which include the opinionated charge of DWI by unknown and untested drugs.
According to a study conducted by Rotory International by the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, the cost to America for drug abuse and its related tolls was $76 billion in 1991. Among the factors the researchers took into consideration were drug-related crime, hospital costs, lost productivity and diseases transmitted by intravenous injections. "We feel this is a conservative estimate," said a USC graduate student. The study did not include military personnel or transient populations, and utilized figures from the Center for Disease Control. (Note that if these drugs were legalized, regulated and taxed, these semi-official numbers would probably show a surplus, as occurred after America's first alcohol Prohibition was lifted.) In reality, many of America's most productive and wealthy workers, executives, athletes, politicians use drugs to improve their job performance in a competitive workplace.
One U.S. Congressman from the state of Tennessee, Republican Zack Wamp, has a prior conviction for drug dealing. Fourteen other current members of Congress have prior arrests for drug-related charges. Even Vice President Al Gore's son was kicked out of school for smoking hemp just like his daddy, and just like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Governor George W. Bush, disgraced Republican Congressman Newt Gingrich and President Bill Clinton. It is pure propaganda to allege otherwise in the face of glaring reality.
Corruption of the government's drug war has a direct effect on all law enforcement agencies as well as on the government's drink-driving war, since it is the same cops doing the arresting. Many citizens are also accused of driving under the influence of illegal drugs, without any blood or urine test required for conviction, or without any drugs being found. If the national government is corrupt, and has legally empowered itself with the authority to import so-called illegal narcotics for mass consumption by the American public through its "national security" laws, then the entire government's moral authority over its citizens is in question.
Let us take a look at America's history of national security.
President Harry Truman signed the National Security Act in 1947 (Title 50 USC 403). Congressman Clarence Brown, however, warned: "I am very much interested in seeing the United States have as fine a foreign military and naval intelligence as they can possibly have, but I am not interested in setting up here in the United States any particular central police agency under any President, and I do not care what his name may be, and just allow him to have a Gestapo of his own if he wants to have it. . . . Every now and then you get a man that comes up in power and has an imperialist idea."
Victor Marchetti, a former high-ranking CIA official, in 1974 wrote a history of the CIA titled CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. The book was heavily censored by the CIA, although with legal assistance from the American Civil Liberties Union, parts of the deleted portions were allowed by the courts. This whistleblowing book led to the formation of Congressional committees in 1975 to probe criminal activity committed by the CIA, such as coups d'etat and political assassinations. Richard Helms, the former director of CIA, was convicted of purjury in one of these hearings. Mr. Marchetti writes:
"That Truman attempted to create an overt intelligence organization, one which would emphasize the gathering and analysis of information rather than secret operations, was commendable. That he thought he could control the advocates of covert action was, in retrospect, a gross miscalculation. . . . With the passage of the National Security Act of 1947 [Congress] allowed the new agency special exemtions from the normal congressional reviewing process, and these exemptions were expanded two years later by the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949. Of the greatest and most far-reaching consequence was the provision in the 1947 law that permitted the CIA to 'perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence . . . as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.' From those few innocuous words the CIA has been able, over the years, to develop a secret charter based on NSC directives and presidential executive orders, a charter almost completely at variance with the apparent intent of the law that established the agency. This vague phrase has provided the CIA with freedom to engage in covert action, the right to intervene secretly in the internal affairs of other nations. It has done so usually with the express approval of the White House, but almost always without the consent of Congress, and virtually never with the knowledge of the American public."
The president, who headed the National Security Council, was thus given a virtual blank checkbook to conduct international policy behind the backs of Congress and the American people, if he chose to do so.
In 1954, a presidential commission concluded: "It is now clear, that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable norms of human conduct do not apply. If the U.S. is to survive, long-standing American concepts of 'fair play' must be reconsidered . . . We must learn to subvert, sabatage and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated and more effective methods than those used against us . . . another important requirement is an aggressive covert psychological, political and paramilitary organization more effective, more unique and, if necessary, more ruthless than that employed by the military. No one should be permitted to stand in the way of the prompt, efficient and secure accomplishment of this mission."
Thus American presidents, through the CIA, were empowered with the legal power to employ terrorist ("paramilitary") tactics against any nation, friend or foe alike, in total secrecy and without congressional oversight. America was going to legally become the most "ruthless" nation on earth, willing to stop at nothing in order to win economic world domination.
Due to various "incidents" of CIA incompetence and trickery (some prosecutors would call it treason), President John Kennedy attempted to rein-in the agency in the beginning in 1961. National Security Action Memorandum 55, titled, "Relations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the President in Cold War Operations," transferring authority from the CIA to the Pentagon, was his first step to "shatter the CIA into a thousand pieces," as reported in the New York Times. His National Security Action Memorandum 263, signed in the latter part of 1963, ordered the CIA and the U.S. military to immediately begin withdrawal from the expensive and unwinnable Vietnam War, and to be completely out of the war by 1965. One month later he was murdered in front of a police station, with dozens of cops watching. "The New York Times" had just predicted that if the president were to be assassinated, the CIA would have led the operation. No other president has attempted to control the CIA and its unmonitored international activities.
One month after the president's killing, President Harry Truman wrote: "For some time I have been disturbed by the way CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational arm and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. . . . I never had any thought when I set up the CIA that it would be injected into peacetime cloak-and-dagger operations."
Victor Marchetti writes: "Probably the worst thing for society is to have a head of state who is also a former covert operator. During those times the secret services get out of control." In 1981, with a former CIA director (and lifelong CIA agent) installed as vice president, the White House issued an executive order that allowed the CIA and its equivalents to start spying on American citizens and to conduct covert operations inside American borders. The new order no longer required the CIA to collect information by the "least intrusive means possible," thus enabling searches without warrents, surreptitious entries, and infiltration of political organizations, as reported by Time magazine. Congressman Don Edwards, chairman of the House Civil and Constitutional Rights Subcommittee, said the order would "put the CIA back in the business of domestic spying." During the next eight years, the White House issued 300 National Security Decision Directives, none of which are rquired to be revealed to Congress or to the citizens. Only 15% have been declassified. Anna Nelson, an historian at Tulane University, said the White House was "extraordinary in its abuse of the process. . . . The arrogance of this arrangement is incredible."
Senator William Fullbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, declared: "But this secrecy . . . has become a god in this country, and those people who have secrets travel in a kind of fraternity . . . and they will not speak to anyone else."
Senator Stuart Symington, a member of the joint Senate Committee for CIA Oversight, noted that: "It is shameful for the American people to be so misled. There is no federal agency of our government whose activities receive less scrutiny and control than the CIA."
Joel Bainerman, in Crimes of a President, writes: "NSDD Number 77 is a good example of how [the 1980 to 1992 White House] employed NSDDs to serve secret agenda goals. It allowed the National Security Council to coordinate interagency efforts for what was called the 'Management of Public Diplomacy Relative to National Security.' This directive served as the basis for 'public diplomacy activities' (i.e., propaganda) by enabling 'organizational support for foreign governments and private groups to encourage the growth of democratic political institutions and practices.' In reality, the directive created propaganda ministries within the National Security Council, the State Department and the White House. The [Congressional] General Accounting Office believed these activities violated the law banning 'covert propaganda' within the U.S."
The following are three "proofs" for you to ponder. You are welcome to make up your own mind. Government law enforcement officers have already made up theirs.
The intention of this information is for you understand what games our government plays with its citizens, so that you can make an intelligent and informed decision. Law enforcement officers already know all this (just ask one who has been around awhile), and you need to know it, too, in order to swim with the sharks without getting bitten.
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