Mickey Z
Cool Observer
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
Last night, I dreamt Jim Morrison was on the Hollywood Squares...
A Californian friend of mine has a cousin who flew the DC-10s from Vietnam to the US with corpses of troops and said the ones with a red stamp on them were gutted and stuffed with heroin. Alfred McCoy’s Politics of Heroin is quite good (interview with him here: http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/heroin/mccoy1.htm ), as is Michael C Ruppert’s work on the drug trade.
Posted by Owen on from Barcelona 09/21 at 06:09 AMI like the Jim Morrison poem...I’m a bog Doors fan.
I posted some of my own poems on Monday:
http://wdthu.blogspot.com/2005/09/poetry-monday.html
Posted by JOS on from Puerto Rico 09/21 at 09:00 AMCool poems, JOS. I liked the one about the homeless man in Central Park.
Owen: In my WWII book, I talk about the U.S. government soliciting the help of the Mafia to secure NYC docks and to offer logistical help for an invasion of Sicily. Most instrumental was Lucky Luciano. Here’s an excerpt related to heroin:
Upon the war’s end, Luciano was granted executive clemency by New York governor Thomas Dewey and was released (albeit for deportation) on January 4, 1946. What the mob boss did with his newfound freedom is yet another of the war’s vile repercussions.
“From abroad,” says Jonathan Vankin, “Luciano…founded what might as well be called Heroin, Inc., an illegal multinational corporation.” The price to be paid would be incalculable. After WWII, there were roughly 20,000 heroin addicts in the U.S. down from 200,000 twenty years earlier. By 1952, the number of addicts had tripled to 60,000. In 1965, it was 150,000. By 1990, estimates ranged from 533,000 to 1.1. million.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 09/21 at 09:36 AMBig surprise here as the Pentagon blocks 5 officers from testifying about the fact the they knew Atta was a terrorist two years before 9/11:
All part of the continuing story put together nicely by Sander Hicks. Some of this can be found here:
Posted by JOS on from Puerto Rico 09/21 at 09:38 AMThanks, Mickey. I posted that somewhere else once and some people got angry about it. They said it was really sad and they worried about the little girls. I don’t think they really got what it was all about.
Posted by JOS on from Puerto Rico 09/21 at 09:41 AMPakistan went from having no heroin addicts to 1.5 million just between 1979 and 1985 and in a country which supplied 60% of the American market there wasn´t a single DEA arrest there during the period despite Swedish police discovered a drug ring involvng an expresident.
This is one of my favourite passages from Thomas Pynchon´s Vineland, his first book in 17 years and disappointed a lot of folk after Gravity´s Rainbow but it´s an astounding look at how America became a “scabland garrison state” as he puts it, spanning the whole 20th century including the Wobblies, Hollywood unions, COINTELPRO, REX-84 and Nixon´s “urban evacuation centres” among many others. The quote was delivered by a CIA agent putting his hand on a bible he keeps on his desk for the bornagains in the agency:
“Notice how cheap coke has been since ’81?…Harken unto me, read thou my lips, for verily I say that wheresoever the CIA putteth in its meathooks upon the world, there also are to be found those substances which God may have created but the U.S. Code hath decided to control. Get me? Now old Bush used to be head of CIA, so you figure it out.”
James, I liked your poems. Might I suggest losing the capitals on the first one, the words you picked are effective enough on their own. Keep up the good work mister.
Posted by Owen on from Barcelona 09/21 at 10:24 AMThanks Owen, that first one is a little childish, but I was feeling like an angry child on that day 3-3-03. I felt like there was nothing I could do.
Those words (without the capitalization) were sent in an email to my friends and family on that day, many of whom felt I was being overdramatic. So I just keep it that way to remind me that immature anger is not an effective tone to try and change people’s minds.
I think I’ll add this explanation to that one…
Posted by JOS on from Puerto Rico 09/21 at 10:35 AMI liked your poem, Mickey. Anything to do with a game show is a nightmare - well said.
Your poems are impressive, James. As Owen said, you should keep at it. Truly, you should keep at it.
Drugs: In Cockburn’s “Whiteout,” or Peter Dale Scott’s “Deep Politics and the Death of JFK” - or both, there is reference to a guy who was a very successful narcotics cop from L.A. (?), who went on to be a mucky-muck in the DEA. When he retired, after a lifetime of trying to bring down the very big drug cartels, he said something like this: “Throughout my career as a cop, and with the DEA, every time, every single time we got very close to the top of a major drug organization, the CIA suddenly showed up and told us to back off.”
The implication, of course, was that the CIA is involved. There was a time when I was doing lots of reading about drugs. One gets the distinct impression that the various “Intelligence Organizations,” in the West, and the CIA, in particular, are THE major players in illegal drugs, throughout the world.Posted by joe on from Oregon 09/21 at 11:30 AMAn interesting source on this topic is former DEA agent Michael Levine; http://www.serendipity.li/wod/levine.html.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 09/21 at 03:43 PMThanks for the link, Mickey. I’ve just “scanned” the article, but it looks great. Levine and McCoy sound alot like the guy to whom I was refering.
Hey, isn’t that pic from Rosemarie just wonderful? I hope those penguins can fly…Posted by joe on from Oregon 09/21 at 07:52 PMFunny thing is that Levine once worked with my Dad in law enforcement. Many years later, he had me on his radio show to talk about the WWII book. Talk about full circle.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 09/21 at 08:25 PMA chilling interview, Mickey. This guy is the real thing, no doubt.
How does your dad feel about all this stuff - and about what you do? Do you two get along?
I don’t think you’ve spoken much about him since I’ve been around.
I guess I just thought about the various possibilities inherent in a relationship between an ex-federal agent and a radical, when they’re also father and son. Must be sometimes stressful.But, please, if you find this an uncomfortable topic, just forget I asked. I know that family can be beyond “figuring out,” and certainly beyond the bounds of “reasonable” questions…
Posted by joe on from Oregon 09/22 at 01:53 AMHey Joe. My Dad and I get along extremely well. We’re an odd couple in one sense...but alike in many ways. Maybe I’ll write more about him soon.
Posted by Mickey Z. on from Astoria 09/22 at 05:10 AMNot really OT: I have just decided to visit your website EVERY DAY Mickey! Do I hear applause?
Thanks for the Gene Kelly update and, as always, for the great quotes.
And considering the quality of the contributions on this thread I’ll leave it at that ..Posted by Helga Fremlin on from Daylesford, Australia 09/22 at 04:04 PMOne more thing: another source on the topic ‘CIA and drug-dealing’ was Gary Webb who committed suicide a little while ago. Robert Parry has written articles on him which can be read here: http://www.consortiumnews.com.
Posted by Helga Fremlin on from Daylesford, Australia 09/22 at 04:09 PM
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