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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| I didn't concede it was torture then, and I don't concede it's torture now. | |
| That's John Rizzo, former acting general counsel for the CIA, who's making the rounds promoting his book about his 33 years at the bureaucracy, accurately entitled Company Man. | |
| Rizzo is definitely a company man. | |
| After watching the CIA's criminal activities exposed in the Church Committee hearings, Rizzo wasn't disgusted like most Americans. | |
| His response was... That was the reason I decided to join CIA, reading the revelations in the media of the findings of what was called the Church Committee, led by a senator named Frank Church. | |
| It exposed for the first time a number of eyebrow-raising CIA activities from the 50s and 60s, including assassination plots against foreign leaders, drug experiments on unsuspecting U.S. | |
| citizens, mail openings during the Vietnam War. | |
| It was a rather breathtaking array of misdeeds, is the only way to put it. | |
| And I was reading it as a young lawyer and thinking to myself, I have no idea whether the CIA has lawyers, but if they don't, they're probably going to need some now. | |
| And he's been defending the CIA ever since, saying that he sees himself as belonging to an exclusive, selective, secretive club. | |
| Working as a lawyer for the CIA for decades didn't help his moral compass either. | |
| His book recounts how he was at the epicenter of the ethical and legal debate on the CIA torturing suspects by waterboarding, providing legal cover for the barbaric abuses of the American government. | |
| The book is little more than sycophantic propaganda for the CIA, but it is interesting when he talks about Hollywood and how the CIA uses them to propagandize and manipulate the American public more effectively. | |
| In talking about Hollywood, he said, these are people who made a lot of money basically creating make-believe stuff. | |
| And that explains why actors are such perfect covers for intelligence operations. | |
| And he says, movie industry vets are receptive to helping the CIA in any way they can. | |
| He was even approached by one actor who refused to take any money, but told him that instead all he wanted was to score the best $50,000 stash of cocaine they could find. | |
| Where would anyone get the idea that the CIA would be involved in the drug trade? | |
| I will tell you, Director Deutsch, as a former Los Angeles police narcotics detective, that the agency has dealt drugs throughout this country for a long time. | |
| The L.A. | |
| detective knows the CIA is dealing drugs. | |
| The community knows that the CIA is a drug gang. | |
| And the actor knew where the main source of drugs was coming from. | |
| But the company man, Rizzo, pretends he has no idea. | |
| Gary Webb went into more detail about how the CIA created the crack craze through freeway Ricky Ross and used it to fund their covert wars. | |
| This was an outgrowth of a story that I had done about the State of California's Asset Forfeiture Program, which is a program where if the police believed you were a drug dealer, they could come in and take your house and your car and your money without even charging you with a crime. | |
| And when I got into investigating her boyfriend's case, I came across Blandon and I came across his involvement with the Contras and his involvement ultimately with a major crack wholesaler in Los Angeles | |
| named Freeway Ricky Ross. | |
| And so I did a series that said that the crack market in South Central Los Angeles | |
| had been created in the early 1980s with the help of this contra drug ring | |
| and showed how once crack got hold in South Central and once the gangs got a hold of it, | |
| it was spread from South Central to other cities in the United States. | |
| We tracked the cocaine dealers who were running this operation all the way up the ladder to a couple of CIA agents who were actually running the FDN. | |
| Enrique Bermudez and Adolfo Calero. | |
| Most of this information, or much of the information, came out at a trial in San Diego in March. | |
| One of the cocaine brokers, a guy named Danilo Blandon, who was the head of the Southern California operation, has been working for the U.S. | |
| government for the last couple of years. | |
| He was the star witness in a cocaine trafficking trial for the DEA. | |
| Unfortunately, they couldn't really get into a lot of it, because before the trial, the United States filed a motion asking that nobody be allowed to ask Mr. Blandon about his relationship with the CIA. | |
| And it was one of the most curious documents I've ever seen. | |
| It said, if true, this matter would be classified, and if false, it shouldn't be allowed at the trial. | |
| He was suicided by being shot twice in the head. | |
| And the CIA and the federal government being involved in the drug trade is not ancient history. | |
| The U.S. | |
| military and the CIA have aided and assisted the production of poppy-based opiates like heroin in Afghanistan, which supplied only 7% of the world's opiates before U.S. | |
| occupation, but is now generating over 90%. | |
| Whether it's a moral equivalent of something like the War of Drugs or the War of Terror, the government has been running both sides to terrorize the public so they can build an infrastructure of tyranny and prey on the public. |
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