“Two Intellectual Systems: Matter-energy and the Monetary Culture” | Population Politics: The Carrying Capacity Choices that Shape Our Future

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The question is not whether the carrying capacity of land, air, and water ultimately limits how many people can subsist on Earth and in the United States. The limits are real; the only discussion can be about whether we have passed them or how close they are coming. The ultimate question is: What combination of population size and standard of living is wanted?

Any number of elements or systems can be hurt by overuse: A population cannot be stable if, by its size or behavior, it destroys the very life-support systems on which it depends. Sooner or later, degradation of the environment is felt in inadequacies of the food or water supply, shelter, or havens where individuals can be safe and the young can develop. Sustainability requires human or animal populations to stay at or below the carrying capacity of their physical environment.
~ “Two Intellectual Systems: Matter-energy and the Monetary Culture” | Population Politics: The Carrying Capacity Choices that Shape Our Future ~

The related terms, "sustainable" and "sustainability" are popularly used to describe a wide variety of activities which are generally ecologically laudable but which may not be sustainable. An examination of major reports reveals contradictory uses of the terms. An attempt is made here to give a firm and unambiguous definition to the concept of sustainability and to translate the definition into a series of laws and hypotheses which, it is hoped, will clarify the implications of the use of the concept of sustainability. These are followed by a series of observations and predictions that relate to "sustainability." The laws should enable one to read the many publications on sustainability and help one to decide whether the publications are seeking to illuminate or to obfuscate.
~ Reflections on Sustainability, Population Growth, and the Environment: Carrying Capacity & Denial of Population Problem ~

The U.S. is desperately dependent on the availability of cheap, plentiful oil and natural gas, and addicted to economic growth. Once oil and gas become expensive (as they already have) and in ever-shorter supply (a matter of one or two years at most), economic growth will stop, and the U.S. economy will collapse. The lack of attention paid to the subject over the decades resulted not from ignorance, but from denial: although the basic theory that is used to model and predict resource depletion has been well understood since the 1960s, most people prefer to remain in denial.

What tends to collapse rather suddenly is the economy. Note that the exercise carries a high human cost: without an economy, many people suddenly find themselves as helpless as newborn babes. Many of them die, sooner than they would otherwise: some would call this a "die-off." There is a part of the population that is most vulnerable: the young, the old, and the infirm; the foolish and the suicidal. There is also another part of the population that can survive indefinitely on insects and tree bark. Most people fall somewhere in between.
~ Surviving Peak Oil & Economic Collapse: Post-Soviet Lessons for a Post-American Century.. ~

“Two Intellectual Systems: Matter-energy and the Monetary Culture”

(summary, by M. King Hubbert)

During a 4-hour interview with Stephen B Andrews, SbAndrews at worldnet.att.net, on March 8, 1988, Dr. Hubbert handed over a copy of the following, which was the subject of a seminar he taught, or participated in, at MIT Energy Laboratory on Sept 30, 1981.

"The world's present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, and incompatible intellectual systems: the accumulated knowledge of the last four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy; and the associated monetary culture which has evloved from folkways of prehistoric origin.

"The first of these two systems has been responsible for the spectacular rise, principally during the last two centuries, of the present industrial system and is essential for its continuance. The second, an inheritance from the prescientific past, operates by rules of its own having little in common with those of the matter-energy system. Nevertheless, the monetary system, by means of a loose coupling, exercises a general control over the matter-energy system upon which it is super[im]posed.

"Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems during the last two centuries have had one fundamental characteristic in common, namely, exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable coexistence possible. But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phase is by now almost over. The monetary system has no such constraints, and, according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest. This disparity between a monetary system which continues to grow exponentially and a physical system which is unable to do so leads to an increase with time in the ratio of money to the output of the physical system. This manifests itself as price inflation. A monetary alternative corresponding to a zero physical growth rate would be a zero interest rate. The result in either case would be large-scale financial instability."

"With such relationships in mind, a review will be made of the evolution of the world's matter-energy system culminating in the present industrial society. Questions will then be considered regarding the future:

• What are the constraints and possibilities imposed by the matter-energy system? human society sustained at near optimum conditions?
  
  
• Will it be possible to so reform the monetary system that it can serve as a control system to achieve these results?
  
  
• If not, can an accounting and control system of a non-monetary nature be devised that would be approptirate for the management of an advanced industrial system?

"It appears that the stage is now set for a critical examination of this problem, and that out of such inquries, if a catastrophic solution can be avoided, there can hardly fail to emerge what the historian of science, Thomas S. Kuhn, has called a major scientific and intellectual revolution."

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The following is from an article entitled "King Hubbert: Science's Don Quixote," in the February 1983 issue of Geophysics magazine, by Robert Dean Clark, assistant editor:

"Hubbert has had serious health problems for several years. Both his eyesight and hearing now give him problems. But neither the ailments nor the recent adulation have eroded his zest for intellectual combat. In recent years, he has assaulted a target--which he labels the culture of money--that is gigantic even by Hubbert standards. His thesis is that society is seriously handicapped because its two most important intellectual underpinnings, the science of matter-energy and the historic system of finance, are incompatible. A reasonable co-existance is possible when both are growing at approximately the same rate. That, Hubbert says, has been happening since the start of the industrial revolution but it is soon going to end because the amount of [that the?] matter-energy system can grow is limited while money's growth is not.

"'I was in New York in the 30s. I had a box seat at the depression,' Hubbert says. 'I can assure you it was a very educational experience. We shut the country down because of monetary reasons. We had manpower and abundant raw materials. Yet we shut the country down. We're doing the same kind of thing now but with a different material outlook. We are not in the position we were in 1929-30 with regard to the future. Then the physical system was ready to roll. This time it's not. We are in a crisis in the evolution of human socienty. It's unique to both human and geologic history. It has never happened before and it can't possibly happen again. You can only use oil once. You can only use metals once. Soon all the oil is going to be burned and all the metals mined and scattered.'

"That is obviously a scenario of catastrophe, a possibility Hubbert concedes. But it is not one he forecasts. The man known to many as a pessimist is, in this case, quite hopeful. In fact, he could be the ultimate utopian. We have, he says, the necessary technology. All we have to do is completely overhaul our culture and find an alternative to money.

"'We are not starting from zero,' he emphasizes. 'We have an enormous amount of existing technical knowledge. It's just a matter of putting it all together. We still have great flexibility but our maneuverability will diminish with time.'

"A non-catastrophic solution is impossible, Hubbert feels, unless society is made stable. This means abandoning two axioms of our culture...the work ethic and the idea that growth is the normal state of life...."

During his interview with Dr. Hubbert, Mr. Andrews asked him for his updated perspective, five years later, about his comments as quoted in the article above. He said:

"our window of opportunity is slowly closing...at the same time, it probably requires a spiral of adversity. In other words, things have to get worse before they can get better. The most important thing is to get a clear picture of the situation we're in, and the outlook for the future--exhaustion of oil and gas, that kind of thing...and an appraisal of where we are and what the time scale is. And the time scale is not centuries, it's decades."

Source: Hubbert Peak

Population Politics: The Choices that Shape Our Future

“The Carrying Capacity of the United States”

by Dr. Virginia Abernethy

Published in 1993

The carrying capacity is the number of individuals that an area can support without sustaining damage. Carrying capacity is exceeded if so many individuals use an area that their activities cause deterioration in the very systems that support them. Exceeding the carrying capacity sometimes harms an environment so severely that the new number who can be supported is smaller than the original equilibrium population. The carrying capacity would then have declined, perhaps permanently.

Any number of elements or systems can be hurt by overuse. A field can be grazed down until the root systems of grasses are damaged; or so much game can be hunted off that food species are effectively extirpated. Now, the foragers that ate the grass or the predators that killed the game have lost a food source. In effect, the carrying capacity has been exceeded so that the population dependent on the area's productive systems is worse off than it was originally.

Animal populations that destroy their niche come and go. If not too many examples come to mind, it is because they rather quickly go. The miniature ponies on Assateague Island illustrate a point on the continuum. They would overgraze their island, seriously depleting their future food supply, except for the fact that a portion of each year's colt crop is removed. Without human intervention (there are no predators and apparently no reservoir of infectious disease), the pony population would explode. Probably it happened in the past. Their very small size today is a vestigial effect of starvation, when only the tiniest, for whom the least blades of grass were lifesaving, survived.

A population cannot be stable if, by its size or behavior, it destroys the very life-support systems on which it depends. Sooner or later, degradation of the environment is felt in inadequacies of the food or water supply, shelter, or havens where individuals can be safe and the young can develop. Sustainability requires human or animal populations to stay at or below the carrying capacity of their physical environment.


PHYSICAL AND CULTURAL CARRYING CAPACITY

Humans are a little different because of wanting more than bare subsistence. Humans value their aesthetic, intellectual, cultural, and political creations. People want more than a loaf of bread and processed grape juice. For humans, then, carrying capacity refers to the number who can be supported without degrading the physical, ecological, cultural, and social environments. Carrying capacity relates to the desired quality of life.

The carrying capacity of the United States depends upon standard-of-living targets, including high-quality recreational opportunities, coexistence with an abundance and diversity of wild species, tolerable work-to-home commuting conditions, favorable conditions for childrearing, and safe neighborhoods. Where population size detracts from the capacity to provide these amenities, overpopulation exists.


RECOGNIZING STRESS

One may discern overpopulation quite apart from large systems and specific resources. Overpopulation shows up in quality of life and cost of living. Repeatedly one seesleast those who wish to, will seethat more people mean more problems from pollution, crowding, and resource scarcity because even conservationists pollute and consume. The costs of adjusting (i.e., decently accommodating more and more people in the same amount of space and with the same fund of natural resources) are monetized. Garbage is the topic of the hour. In just a few years, dumping fees in U.S. cities have skyrocketed, from $5 or $10 a ton to an average of over $150. Burning questions are whether to incinerate or not, how to recycle, and how to make money from one's ash heap.

The rising cost of water in areas that are not naturally arid makes the same point. Even if the quantity of water is sufficient, purity tends to suffer when population density grows. It costs money to keep clean or clean up. A 1992 Wall Street Journal account (Poor Pay, 1992) states that "Boston water and sewer bills have risen 39% in the past two years as the costs of cleaning up Boston Harbor have been phased into rates." In 1991, the average household paid $500 a year in water and sewer bills, and "water shutoffs as a result of nonpayment of water bills…tripled."

Demands on the public sector also increase as population grows. Taxes invariably rise to meet the higher demand for education, social services, health care, law enforcement, infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, prisons, systems for human transportation, and disposal of sewage and other wastes. Concurrently, systems are often left to deteriorate, an attractive option because taxpayers and users may not see meaningful gains even with higher spending. Infrastructure is decaying nationwide, but goes unnoticed until a bridge collapses, sewers leak, or tunnels cave in.

The disappearance of natural capital is equally silent, but it is continuing at a great rate and is compromising future production. Iowa has lost 50 percent of its topsoil since the advent of farming in the nineteenth century. The drawdown of U.S. aquifers is also proceeding quickly and, so far, has led to abandonment of over 300,000 formerly irrigated acres in Arizona alone. Seventy-five percent of irrigation is threatened in Nebraska. Good air, land, water, and energy are the nuts and jolts of carrying capacity. It is not trivial for the sustainability of our society that, as summarized by Carrying Capacity Network (1991), the United States is "currently losing topsoil 18 times faster than [it is being replaced; or that] groundwater,…much of which we stored during the Ice Age and is nonrenewable, is currently being pumped out of the ground 25 percent faster than it is being replenished."

Substitution for very basic inputs such as soil and fresh water will be difficult. Moreover, there may be an interactive effect: Up to now, irrigation and petroleum-based fertilizers have compensated for deterioration in the innate productivity of the land. But even a temporary rise in the price of petroleum, if it led to cutbacks on fertilizer use, could unmask the hidden cost of topsoil loss. When farmers recognize that their long-term income stream is jeopardized by present farming practices, they are likely to shift toward a more sustainable process. Holding farmers' capitaltheir soilintact will have the immediate result of lowering production to below what can be realized by current, soil depleting agricultural methods.

Recognition of true costs and adoption of alternate (sustainable) agricultural technologies could come suddenly, wiping out food surpluses in just a few growing seasons. Some farmers already forgo maximizing the size of crops in order to preserve soil. But a prudent farmer might not switch all his acreage at one time. He knows that prices will not rise to compensate him for the decreased size of his crop until virtually all farmers make the transition. Changes will come when the cost of production on depleted soils rises, that is, ever-larger fertilizer and pesticide requirements and/or higher-priced petroleum force a reduction in production targets. This paradigmatic shift in agricultural accounting will be a cultural as much as an economic phenomenon.

The price of food might rise if the crop got smaller, but that effect would be limited by market mechanisms. Demand falls when prices rise, keeping downward pressure on prices of even the most essential commodities. This constitutes price elasticity, and it implies a question: Can people afford to buy?

Commodity prices are an unreliable indicator of scarcity, in fact, because workers in rapidly growing populations command less and less for their labor and thus have little to spend. Poor people do not buy much. They exert negligible effective demand. They go without. Thus, rapid population growth causes very little pull on most commodity prices. The price of food might not go up even if the crop were small and the number of hungry people, large.

Most of the world's 5.5 billion people are becoming poorer as they compete against each other for jobs. Most lose purchasing power on a yearly basis. Increasing numbers drop out of the consumer market altogether, exerting no effective demand. Thus; it was a fact that December, 1990, oat and wheat prices sank to their lowest levels since 1972 while more people than before starved or lived on the edge of famine. The multitudes do not bid up prices. Quality of life and environmental health, not commodity prices, are clues that the carrying capacity is being exceeded.


ENERGY AND CARRYING CAPACITY

Energy security is a key element of America's long-run, sustainable carrying capacity. Estimates of the carrying capacity assume a particular standard of living. The focus on energy recommends itself because, except for amenities provided by nature and our communities, per capita energy use is a good proxy for standard of living.

The eighty years between 1890 and 1970 were marked by the fastest rise in the standard of living that a whole country has ever seen; indeed, the first three-quarters of the twentieth century saw real disposable personal income rise at an average rate of 2.2 percent per year. This same period, according to energy specialist John Holdren (1991) of the University of California (Berkeley), saw a record 7 kW per capita increase in use of energy (from about 4 kW to over 11 kW). That works out to about 1.75 kW per twenty-year period, which is important for comparison with the latest twenty years: From 1970 to 1990, per capita energy use increased just 0.18 kW. Growth in inflation-adjusted after-tax income also stalled, averaging about 0.5 percent per year from 1973 to 1990.

The link between energy use per capita and standard of living is clear enough in concrete terms: Energy in the form of petroleum is the base for fertilizer, pesticides, on-farm mechanization, and much food processing and distribution. Energy lets us live somewhat distant from our place of work. Energy is the basis for heating, cooling, lighting, much communication, and most laborsaving devices in the home. Without plentiful energy, would your job exist?

To judge if we are within the carrying capacity of the United States, given the present standard of living, ask if our rate of energy use is sustainable. The related policy question is: Does the United States enjoy energy security? Geologists, computer modelers, petroleum industry analysts, and life scientists largely concur in projecting a bleak future.

A 1986 book, Beyond Oil The Threat to Food and Fuel in Coming Decades by John Gever et al., develops the concept of "energy/profit ratio": How much usable energy comes out for every unit of energy put in? That is, how much energy does one get for the energy used to find, produce, refine, and distribute energy? Long before all petroleum is used up, the best and easiest to recover deposits will be gone. Thus, the cost in energy associated with recovering petrochemical energy (oil and natural gas) will rise so that the profit ratio becomes less and less favorable. This ratio will be reflected partly in higher prices and partly in lower use of oil-based products.

In the decade or so after World War II, the supply of oil seemed inexhaustible. John Gever and his coauthors point out that oil fuels were easy to tap because fields lay close to the surface; the wells were shallow and cheap to drill. Prospecting revealed so many good sites that dry wells were few and far between. The energy/profit ratio for domestic petroleum stood at about 50 to 1. But by the mid-1980s, the situation was far different. The energy/profit ratio of domestic oil was 8 to 1; of foreign oil (because of greater distribution costs), 5 to 1.

The 1991 Gulf War made the energy/profit ratio of foreign oil dramatically, if somewhat temporarily, still less favorable: Add together the investment in transporting and operating allied tanks, planes and all else. How much energy did it take just to save future units of energy from Kuwaiti fields?

When the energy/profit ratio reaches 1 to 1, there will be little point in going back to the well. Effectively, we will be out of oil; the cost of production will exceed the value of the goods and services derived from oil. New domestic oil production will reach this point, predict Gever and company, between 1995 and 2005. Although older wells will continue to pump profitably for some years longer, the diseconomies of new production signal the beginning of true energy insecurity. The point of vanishing returns for foreign producers extends out for another fifty years.

Geologists with the U.S. Geological Survey do not contradict John Gever or others' similar conclusions. Beyond Oil appeared in 1986. In 1991, C. D. Masters et al. of the U.S. Geological Survey wrote that:

Fleshing out scientific overviews, Gutfeld (1992) reports the American Petroleum Institute's early 1992 estimate that "Total United States output is currently declining at an annual rate of 300,000 barrels a day." That is, the year by year decline represents 300,000 barrels less production each day. Speaking for the institute, Edward Murphy warned of this "substantial and largely unanticipated" trend: "The evidence indicates that the exploration and production sectors of the petroleum industry in the United States have entered a period of accelerated decline." The output picture is not expected to "righten unless the oil industry wins greater access to public lands such as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska and certain offshore areas."

Mention of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska arouses environmentalists. For good reason, says Jan C. Lundberg, former publisher of the Lundberg Oil Letter and founder of Fossil Fuels Policy Action (Arcata, Calif.). A large and pristine environment would be put at risk for an amount of oil that would make only a small contribution to U.S. security. At best, the ANWR field would extend domestic oil supplies by two years.

Energy security is in far greater jeopardy from our population growth than from denying access to the few remaining pools of oil in the northern hemisphere. Indeed, population growth in the United States drives the increasing use of energy: From 1970 to 1990-while per capita use hardly budged-total energy consumption increased by 24 percent. John Holdren (1991) states that 93 percent of the increase in the United States' use of energy in this twenty-year period can be traced to population growth. With population growth, planning for energy security means taking aim at a moving target.

The next several decades will not likely experience just a gradual exhaustion of oil as the primary energy source. Rather, the supply of oil likely will be periodically disrupted owing to its increasingly narrow geographic distribution into the single dominant area of occurrence the Middle East.

We can be substantially confident that new, large occurrences of oil, such as would be necessary to alter the proportional contribution of the Middle East to world petroleum, are not likely to be found; certainly, no such occurrences have been found in the several recent decades of intense worldwide petroleum exploration.

OIL FOR FOOD

Even without figuring in population growth, consensus among experts about the steep decline in domestic oil production means that we should evaluate oil's most essential uses. Perhaps domestic production for use in those most essential sectors will have to be subsidized by the society at large. That is other energy sources might be diverted to production of oil even from wells where the energy profit ratio is 1 to 1 or less. The policy question now becomes: Where is fossil petrochemical fuel most productive, and where is substitution most difficult?

Agriculture is Gever at al.'s selection for this most sensitive sector of the U.S. economy. Food is essential. It generates much of our foreign exchange. No good substitutes for petroleum-and natural-gas-based pesticides and fertilizers exist, although a switch to organic farming (and avoidance of removing crop residues for alcohol-based fuels) would preserve soil fertility and minimize demand for artificial fertilizer.

These changes will be driven by the rising price of petroleum based agricultural inputs. Supply will be in jeopardy when new wells cannot be brought in with better than a I to I energy/profit ratio, and old wells peter out. The prediction is that 2007-2025 will become the watershed years for agriculture. By this time, say Gever et al., 10 percent of all U.S. oil consumption (from domestic and imported sources combined) and 60 percent of all natural gas will be required for on-farm uses. Not coincidentally, the United States will have ceased by then to be a net exporter of food.


POPULATION SIZE AND THE STANDARD OF LIVING

Now for the bad news. Depletion of soil, water, and fuel at a much faster rate than any of these can be replenished suggests that the carrying capacity of the United States already has been exceeded. David and Marcia Pimentel (1991) of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, Cornell University, take these three factors into account to estimate that, at a standard of living only slightly lower than is enjoyed today, the sustainable population size for the United States is less than half its present number. Beyond this, we abuse the carrying capacity and should expect sudden shocks that will massively drive down the standard of living.

The Pimentels embrace the desirability and potential for a transition to clean, renewable energy sources as substitute for most uses of oil. The very breadth of their approach leads to their addressing all present and potential energy sources. They find:

Evaluating land, energy, and water, the Pimentels conclude that the United States is rapidly depleting its nonrenewable or very slowly renewable resources and overwhelming the capacity of the environment to neutralize wastes. The present level of resource use is probably unsustainable in even the minimal, physical sense. If population increase and the present per capita use of resources persist, a crash becomes likely.

The Pimentels do, however, offer two alternate scenarios. Either one of them is stable and sustainable. They differ only in population size and standard of living. Both scenarios envision the United States moving to a solar-energy-based economy, that is, to total replacement of our current fossil-fuel energy dependence. Solar energy is a renewable, steady stream, so it meets a key criterion for sustainability. From renewable sources alone, however, only one-fifth to one-half of the present level of energy use would be available. To maintain a standard of living only slightly lower than we enjoy today, population size would need to decline to about 100 million people.

The estimate of maximum sustainable population size takes into account both the source and sink functions of Earth. At least two effects of pollution­greenhouse warming and the ozone hole are poorly understood. One can only estimate the extent of change to which present levels of pollutants commit us already, the lead time before effects become manifest, and the damage that is being done. Nevertheless, the shift away from a fossil-fuel based economy, adopted in order to minimize greenhouse gas emissions and/or as a market response to high prices, will be one of the severest constraints.

Others, more sanguine, peg the U.S. carrying capacity at a higher level. Economist Robert Costanza of the Marine Biological Institute (University of Maryland) and editor of Ecological Economics thinks the carrying capacity is closer to being 150 million persons (Carrying Capacity, 1991).

In the United States, humankind is already managing and using more than half of all the solar energy captured by photosynthesis. Yet even this is insufficient to our needs, and we are actually using nearly three times that much energy, or about 40% more energy than is captured by all plants in the United States [italics in the original]. This rate is made possible only because we are temporarily drawing upon stored fossil energy; the very use of these fossil fuels, plus erosion and other misuse of our natural resources, are reducing the carrying capacity of our ecosystem.

The Pimentels, Jan Lundberg, and John Gever et al. start from very different premises and institutional biases. But their conclusions accord well with each other and with earlier estimates. With twenty years' hindsight, respect for Dennis and Donnella Meadows's Limits to Growth is renewed. This computer model of global dynamics was published in 1972 by the Club of Rome. It traces five factors including population size, energy throughput, and pollution under different assumptions (values and feedback loops) to conclude that the system faces collapse before the end of the twenty-first century. Fossil fuels still are being depleted at a faster rate than new discoveries are made (or likely to be made in the United States, which is thoroughly explored). Nuclear-waste disposal remains an intractable problem. Water for farmers and population centers is scarcer and more contaminated. Plus, threats the Meadows foretold in general, but could not have known specifically in 1972, now include possible global warming and the widening ozone hole. The time frame for experiencing "udden shocks"is perhaps thirty to fifty years-beyond most legislators' lifetimes. But all our children and grandchildren should prepare, if our generation cannot reverse present demographic and environmental trends.


PLANNING AHEAD

The question is not whether the carrying capacity of land, air, and water ultimately limits how many people can subsist on Earth and in the United States. The limits are real; the only discussion can be about whether we have passed them or how close they are coming. The ultimate question is: What combination of population size and standard of living is wanted in America?

We need ask only for ourselves. American influence truly extends little beyond U.S. borders. Sovereign nations brook no outside interference with population targets or the fertility of their people. Money, they take; pressure to democratize and free their economy is grudgingly heeded as the price paid for aid. But unsolicited advice on fertility? That is an affront!

So, for the United States and the United States only we may ask: What is the optimum population size? If a target is not chosen as a matter of policy, if we continue to grow by more than 3 million persons a year, one of the Pimentels' scenarios becomes academic, a nonpossibility. The larger we grow, the less likely we are to shrink gracefully back to 100 million or 150 million people; that is, we probably cannot hope, in the long term, to maintain a standard of living that much resembles what we now enjoy.

One need not accept the Pimentels' or Costanza's estimates of limits in order to see that overpopulation is not just a third world problem. It is America's as well. Population stabilization was the target spelled out in the 1972 recommendations of the President's Commission on Population Growth and the American Future (the Rockefeller Commission). Citing considerations such as energy and mineral resources, water supply, agricultural land supply, outdoor recreation resources, and environmental pollution, the commission concluded that "Neither the health of our economy nor the welfare of individual businesses depends on continued population growth. In fact, the average person will be markedly better off in terms of traditional economic values if population growth slows down than if it resumes the pace of growth experienced in the recent past." The Commission dosed with the recommendation "that the nation welcome and plan for a stabilized population."


TAKING STOCK

In 1972, the population of the United States had just passed the 210 million mark. In 1990, it passed 255 million. Because of immigration, population stabilization is a more distant goal today than in 1972, when replacement-level fertility was the issue. Moreover, the American future foreseen two decades ago appears to have arrived.

The standard of living has barely risen, and even this has come at the cost of borrowing from abroad. In many households, two earners are needed where one formerly sufficed. Home ownership and a college education are unaffordable for many Americans. Public parks and recreational areas are deteriorating from overuse. Wilderness, a refuge in thought even when not easily reached, is disappearing from America. The very poor are often "discouraged" workers, uncounted in unemployment statistics. Education, health-care, garbage-disposal, correctional, water, and highway costs have become more burdensome, while education, housing, social-service, and welfare monies are spread mere thinly. The number of poor grows constantly. More children (and a larger proportion) than before live in poverty. Homelessness appears chronic.

Domestic population stabilization will not instantly cure these ills, but all become more intractable as population grows. Generations of Americans have been believers in abundance (their legacy from the frontier) and in immigration (to populate that frontier). National needs change, however.

Events will show how long complacency with domestic population growth survives realization that overpopulation causes poverty; or that the poverty of the high-fertility-rate countries which send their unskilled emigrants to the United States is being shared with most native-born Americans.

1993 Plenum Press Population Politics: The Choices that Shape Our Future. By Virginia D. Abernethy, Ph.D. Reprinted with permission.

Source: Die Off.Org

The Humpty Dumpty Economy | The Socio-Economic Collapse of '09

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Ever since the invention of coins monetary and military history have been inter-related to a degree that is both depressing and surprising. Glyn Davies goes so far as to paraphrase Clausewitz's famous dictum and refer to war as the continuation of monetary policy by other means, and quotes a remark by an eighteenth century writer (Davenant) that "nowadays that prince who can best find money to pay his army is surest of success."
~ History of Money: Warfare and Financial History: Violence & The Origin of Money: Money is Coined Liberty ~

The “Report from Iron Mountain” was a 1967 publication that claimed to be a leaked, top secret government report. It argued that though world peace was a nice idea, the economy of war was such a vital part of global stability, it was difficult to come up with substitutes. A hoax? Satire? Or the truth? For more than three decades, the Report has been a cornerstone of intelligent debate… sometimes.
~ Iron Mountain Blueprint to Tyranny Full RARE Documentary (02:20:55 min) & Iron Mountain Report ~

In Godfather Government, published at FTW just days ago, Carolyn Baker described one of the most significant and ominous developments in the continuing devolution of American government into a pure organized crime operating system... In other words, the rats are starting to leave the ship.
~ FTW Economic Alert #4: The Abyss Awaits: GodFather Goverment & the SEC ~

Forecast 2005: The Humpty Dumpty Economy

Jesse's Café Américain

The current trend in the United States economy is not sustainable. This is a realization that will penetrate the national consciousness slowly and unevenly. Most economists agree on how this cycle will end (even if it is only privately), but the great debate is in the details of how, and most importantly, when.

If one does not accept that the situation is unsustainable, and believes that things can continue on endlessly just as they are, with the United States consuming the bulk of the world’s savings and production because of who we are, then perhaps this is symptomatic of the national epidemic we now suffer which the ancient Greeks called hubris.

"Where else will they put their surplus if not our debt? To whom will they sell their goods if not to us? Who will teach them how to live, and govern them?" History shows that even if such trends last far beyond most expectations, eventually a day of reckoning arrives, in some frequently repeated patterns of systemic failure....

Things rarely reach a turning point when we expect it. A true sea change is slow to permeate the mentality of most people, because our experience is that what happened yesterday will happen again tomorrow, and a long cyclical turn occurs gradually and incrementally. We forget what happened even a few years ago.

Predictions of a continuance of recent trends are the common currency of most pundits...

However, and this is a common sense notion that has been nearly forgotten by our generation, we have the ability to act in such a way so as to make the improbable more likely to occur, to tempt fate by our actions. For example, there is a certain probability of sustaining an automobile accident in the normal course of our daily activities. High risk behaviors, such as speeding excessively or drinking while driving, increase the chance of an accident. If one engages in high risk activity, and nothing unusual happens, we become emboldened and think that since we were able to drink moderately and drive last month, so we can drink and drive this month and thereafter. Perhaps next month we drink a little more for an indulgence, and again nothing happens. This cycle continues until something changes our behavior, or simply ends when we literally hit the wall.

It would be our contention that the US is like such a driver, and we have been economically tempting fate with increasingly risky behaviors. We are persuaded that there is almost nothing we cannot do, almost nothing that can happen, that is beyond our control. It is the propensity for people to increase and repeat what they have been doing over time, to tempt fate through repeated and increasingly risky behavior, and to forget the possibility of a sequence of unfortunate events if you will, that gives rise to memorable events in history...

Predicting the failure of a complex system is not easy. One can examine it as a whole, and determine that it will fail, and often calculate what must change in order to allow the system to function more reliably. But it is often beyond our power to calculate exactly how it will fail, and consequently when it will fail.

This does not invalidate the observation that the system will ultimately fail. It merely underscores the unpredictability of timing a failure with the degrees of freedom inherent in a calculation with a large number of exogenous variables. It is not easy to predict exactly when a chronic DWI will demolish their automobile, but it
remains relatively predictable to say that they will do so as long as they maintain
their current mode of behavior....

There are four major types of tipping points:

• Demand: a break in the level of consumption in the US caused by the unwillingness or ability of households to incur further debt to support consumption beyond real wage growth
  
  
• Supply: a major disruption in the supply of an essential commodity like energy, food, or raw materials, or even the realization that a major commodity is in shorter supply than expected, such as silver or oil.
  
  
• Monetary: an inability of foreign central banks to continue to monetize the US trade deficit and budget deficit through the recycling of
  their trade surplus into US debt securities.
  
  
• Systemic failure: the failure of a major counter party that threatens the US financial system, particularly in the hugely leveraged derivatives market.

Two of the seals, Demand and Systemic Failure, have been broken, and the horsemen unleashed. Next comes Monetary, and then Supply, which is a Pale Horse.

There is still time to end this spiral of decline.

Source: Jesse's Americain Cafe

The Collapse of ‘09

Daily Reckoning | By Gerald Celente

03/19/09 Rhinebeck, New York The "Panic of ‘08" will be followed by "The Collapse of ‘09." In 2008, when the world’s largest financial firms and equity markets crumbled, Wall Street’s woes preoccupied the media.

In 2009, the focus will broaden to include a range of calamities that will leave no sector unscathed. Next in line is retail, which accounts for some 70 percent of consumer spending, 26 percent of which is holiday sales.

After the numbers are tallied to reveal a dismal retail Christmas, more big chain bankruptcies will follow. Besides leaving masses unemployed, defunct retailers will leave behind thousands of empty stores. Who will rent them? Nobody!

Add to these empties commercial space vacated by defunct financial firms and an array of troubled businesses, from restaurants to architectural firms, to high tech operations, to offset printers, etc., etc. The inescapable result (that we predicted over a year ago and is only now being discussed in the business media) is a commercial real estate bust that will be costlier, wreak greater havoc and prove more intractable than the residential market decline.

Because most people don’t live and shop on Wall Street, the "Panic of ‘08" was viewed by Main Street as if from afar - even though many were losing money. But when commercial real estate crashes it will hit much closer to home. The depressive atmosphere of thinly shopped, half-vacant malls will strike emotional chords and all the senses.

In office buildings, vacant floors and empty cubicles will dampen the workday spirit of the still-employed; ever present reminders of laid-off friends and colleagues and of the fragility of employment.

Abandoned, untended business and industrial parks will highlight the already mournful scene. In cities studded with soaring towers and new construction predicated on eternal economic growth, streets lined with "For Rent/For Sale" signs will complement stilled cranes and uncompleted buildings.

As retail and commercial real estate collapse, the credit card sector and all its interrelated processing and back office support businesses will suffer and be forced to scale back. Hordes of consumers who have been living off credit cards and racking up debt to the limit will lack the funds to service their debt… much less pay it off, and they will be forced to default. Given the nearly $3 trillion in consumer debt at risk (excluding auto and mortgage) an inevitable default snowball will add momentum to the in-progress Collapse of ‘09.

While we alone predicted the "Panic of ‘08" (and even took out the domain name "Panicof08.com" on 7 November 2007), we are not alone in predicting a Depression.

The "D" word is being uttered - in some cases by those who have the most to lose and whose best interests are not served by spreading gloom and doom. "The world and country are in a depression," said celebrity tycoon Donald Trump. He then later softened the blow, downgrading it to a "virtual depression."

"Virtual" to the few who will never have to worry where the next dollar will come from, it will be painfully real and hardly virtual to the multitudes who are and will be worrying. The virally proliferating Greatest Depression is the Trend of Trends for 2009.

Even so, beware! Over the course of free-falling 2009, the word from most official sources will be "recession," and from the few mainstream trophy pessimists,
"deep recession."

For example, the oft-quoted naysayer, Nouriel Roubini, New York University professor of economics, forecasts a two year recession … not Depression. On the sunnier side of Wall Street, the Federal Reserve predicts the US economy will contract only through the middle of 2009 and pledged, "In any event, the Committee agreed to take whatever steps were necessary to support the recovery.”

What "steps?" The Bernanke Two-Step? Adjust interest rates or print more money? Neither stopped the credit crisis from worsening, the real estate market from tanking or the stock markets from crashing.

It was Fed finagling, Washington deregulation and Wall Street’s compulsive gambling that created the crisis. To trust or to seriously consider pronouncements, analyses and predictions made by any of these sources is an exercise in willful self-deception. Yet, with pensions, IRAs, 401ks, stocks and mutual funds evaporating, many of those most affected deny reality and take hope that forecasts made by proven incompetents will miraculously restore their losses.

Throughout the many years leading up to what we term the "Greatest Depression," The Trends Research Institute provided copious data and Globalnomic analysis to support our forecasts of economic upheaval. In the past year alone, we have provided so much hard evidence (housings starts, home sales, foreclosures, bankruptcies, bank failures, unemployment figures, stock indices, leading economic indicators, retail sales, etc.) that further elaboration should be superfluous.

Those waiting to hear the "D" word from economic experts, talking heads and TV anchors before taking action will most certainly regret their indecisiveness.

Absent from the economic scenarios ranging from second quarter recovery, deep recession and "virtual" depression are the multiplicity of social, environmental, health, political, emotional/psychological and geopolitical factors that point beyond just Depression. They point to The Decline and Fall of Empire America.

Well before Inauguration Day, Barack Obama was cast as the next Franklin Delano Roosevelt. If he follows in FDR’s footsteps he could freeze deposits by declaring a "holiday" to stop a run on the banks. While FDIC insurance may cover deposits, even after banks reopen, withdrawal amounts may be restricted. (As the Argentine government did in 2001-2002.)

Author’s Note: Suspicious of the soundness of the banking system, I requested to withdraw a substantial sum from our Key Bank account, leaving funds sufficient to cover ongoing business operations. First they tried to dissuade me, then they stonewalled me, and finally they turned openly hostile.

I was forced to sign a series of documents, including one acknowledging that since I was carrying a large sum I could be the target of a robbery. To enhance that possibility, the teller slammed down the bag of cash on the counter and publicly announced the sum.

Despite repeated requests in the days preceding my withdrawal to get the cash in hundreds, they gave it to me in twenties, making for a bag five times the size and more robber-friendly. When I complained to the bank manager who had processed the request, the response amounted to "take it or leave it."

This will not be an isolated event. If you attempt to withdraw a large chunk of money from your account, negotiate the details in advance and anticipate possible hassle and obstruction.

We’ve heard similar accounts from clients and Trends Journal subscribers who, over the past several months, tried to close out mutual funds, 401ks and assorted sinking equities. They were dissuaded, cajoled, belittled and arm-twisted by brokers desperate to keep their accounts. Many caved in under the pressure, didn’t close them and lost most of what they had.

So, we leave you with a Greatest Depression consideration: How safe is your money? How sound is your bank? At the end of November, Citigroup, once America’s largest bank, was on the rocks. Fifty-two thousand employees were laid off. In just three days its stock lost more than half its value. Rumors swirled that Citi was so desperate they were looking to sell or split up the company.

Is your money deposited in a local bank whose reputation you can bank on? Are you with a teetering giant or a poorly-managed regional? If either of the latter, it would be in your best interest to assess the risks.

Take some out if you think there is risk; take it all out if you think there’s high risk. You may consider spreading it around and even banking abroad … after all, this is the Global Age.

Source: Daily Reckoning

ArticBeacon :: “What does a mid/low-level player in a corrupt game do when he discovers a few of the larger dimensions of that game?” :: ArticBeacon

.

You see, we live in an age when humanitarianism is the — Propaganda foundation stone. So the strategy of the controllers is to go with that. Just like in judo. You go with the motion of your opponent. You don’t try to lash out at it. Part of the Art of War. You become the great peacemaker and mediator. That’s the ultimate trump card.

The whole idea of being nice to people who will do everything they can to control you never works. And if you understand the real motives and intentions of the enemy, you WON’T make that mistake.

I think that’s characterized as a Cover Story. You’ll find it in a number of areas. The enemy you prop up or invent to solidify your group is really YOU. It’s pretty clever.

Because I think they miss the point that the Vatican has been about deception and control since its beginnings. After all, why bother to build a global organization to dominate a path that is supposed to lead to personal salvation? Why not just mark out the path and let people walk it on their own? If they want to? You can’t force someone to take that path. If you do, you get a false result, a fake result.
~ ArticBeacon :: “What does a mid/low-level player in a corrupt game do when he discovers a few of the larger dimensions of that game?” :: ArticBeacon ~

I was hitchhiking down the highway back in ’69, .. My thumb never failed. After a man picked me up in his beat-up Chevy van, he looked over at me and asked what I thought of Nixon and the whole Watergate thing. I scrunched my nose, when I told him. “Man, I’m not really into politics.”

He took his eyes off the road, looking at me with the eyes of age. His words sunk in like water splashed on a sponge. “Really? Well, politics is into you.”

It took a dozen years for those words to ferment. They mixed with the sun of the Mohave, the salt water of Alaska’s bays, the forests of Humboldt, the rocks of Mount Index, seasons of wandering in the desert, mountains and seashores of a continent.

They made a bitter wine of that truth… politics is into you!
~ Buck v Bell Whitey :: Population Policy Geo-Politics 101 & Military Strategy Valour :: Thomas James Clarkson ~

“A man is not what he says, but what he fights for; you will be fighting for much more than yourself. You will be fighting for your children, and your children’s children. For generations to come. You are but one link in a millennia-long chain of warriors, but you are called, and much depends on you. Your fight rests on the fight you bear within yourself. The gift is the power – not you, the gift. The test of your strength will be in your ability to bring the gift to others. Remember, the gift is the power! Give the power to others when the time is right. You’ll know when it is right.
~ Guerrylla Warrior: Inside the CIAs Stargate Program, The True Story of a Soldiers Espionage & Awakening, by David Morehouse, US Army Rangers ~

“What does a mid/low-level player in a corrupt game do when he discovers a few of the larger dimensions of that game?”

BlackfootSwan SageRedRussian CheyenneMission RedArticBell

Five Arctic states – Canada, the United States, Denmark, Norway and Russia - have been arguing about the waters and lands of the region for quite a while. The most important questions are as follows: who owns what and where, where exactly the natural resources are located, and who owns the waterways that can be used to access the resources.

Were the world system static, no further theorizing would be necessary. Since it is not, we must constantly reevaluate our fundamental assumptions to see whether or not any "eternal" rules of the game, geopolitical and otherwise, truly exist. Policymakers in the United States vastly underestimate the hegemon's potential to shape the nature of the international system. Intellectuals wedded to old ideas about the unchanging nature of power have so far failed to lead the world in the new directions that it expected. The rules that govern international relations evolve. No so-called permanent interests, or eternal geographical realities, exist. The only way that the next century can be better than the one we are leaving is with a reevaluation of the assumptions and attitudes that underlie our actions. A prolonged investigation into the utility of all geopolitical theory would be a good place to start.

~ CheyenneMission RedArticBell :: Great Game ArticGeoPolitics; From WorldIsland, With HeartLand :: BlackfootSwan SageRedRussian ~

Vatican and Jesuits Wage Financial War On U.S. Stock Market, According to Wall Street Insider

Richard Bell, a former stocks manipulator, claims Vatican and Jesuits are the “Real Rulers of Evil”, wanting total world domination

By Greg Szymanski, JD

Jan 3. 2009

A former Wall Street insider and mega-finacier recently said The Vatican and Jesuit Order, working through certain players in the European Union (EU), have been waging war on the US stock market.

In an interview given to John Rappoport, financier Richard Bell, privy to the Vatican’s hidden manipulation of the U.S. economy through its “shills” working in finance and government, said the Jesuits and Vatican are the real “rulers of evil” as portrayed in Tupper Saucy’s book under the same name.

“The shill is the magnet, if you will,” said Bell a former stocks manipulator himself, “that sucks in the customers, the adherents, the loyal ones, the people of hope. It’s the oldest trick in the book. And the people who play this trick on a grand scale are very, very clever. They want total domination, but they carve out a circuitous route, because that is the way to arrive.

“They set up a front which is the shill, and the shill looks very, very good. I don’t mean to offend anyone by this, but for the Vatican, Jesus is a shill, the ultimate shill. Of course, their version of him is so far from the older concept it isn’t even funny.”

Besides waging war on the U.S. economy, Bell said the Vatican and Jesuit Order’s plan for world domination encompasses every aspect of human life and touhes every corner of the globe. Here is Rappoport’s interview with Bell:

Q: So, foreign investors are accelerating their withdrawal of money from the US.

A: A significant amount is being shifted to Europe.

Q: So is this current stock market debacle an OP run by the European Union (EU)?

A: That is true, but too simplistic. Dr. Paisley points out that the EU has been a stepoperation.

Q: Meaning?

A: First came the Common Market. Then we had the European Community. Now we have the Europe Union. At each step, people were told, “This is a good and limited concept.” That was all a joke. It was always about creating one giant Euro-super-state, under the control of a few people.

Q: And so?

A: So, the Vatican has been everywhere during this step-operation, urging the parties forward, promoting the idea of UNITY. Which is always a winner. People like that concept. Paisley points out that unity is used as a soft hammer to make people forget who is doing the wrong thing and who is doing the right thing. UNITY as a tool of propaganda means: No one is really bad. Make alliances with everyone. Melt into One. That is a disastrous political policy.

Q: And the Vatican is pushing the mission of the EU because?

A: Because making friends and influencing people and playing nice and urging unity IS the current strategy of the Vatican, in these times. It is using that soft approach to create bigger political structures, over which it can exercise control. People forget that a dedicated Roman Catholic, if he is at the head of a large organization, can easily function as a front for the Vatican. If you have ten men like this, all of them powerful,

all of them who have been helped by the Church into their positions of power, then you are looking at a formidable controlling force—which owes its allegiance to the Vatican.

Q: Name such a man.

A: Jacques Delors, who was president, at one point, of the European Commission. He met with Dr. Carey, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and they spoke of this “shared spirituality” that was needed. But that term, for the Vatican, is code for “the one and only Church.” Its Church. People shrink away from realizing that the Vatican has ALWAYS considered itself the rightful ruler of Earth. I can’t be any plainer than that. And all this footsy-playing with other religions and churches is just drivel, behind which lies the real agenda. Paisley, in his article, quotes a letter from the Pope John Paul II to the Archbishop of Prague—”We cannot simply conceive of Europe as a market of economic exchanges or a place for the circulation of ideas but, above all, it must be a genuine community of nations, which want to unite their future and live like brothers, respecting the cultures and spiritual traditions…” You KNOW this is a fraud, because if there is one thing the Roman Church, behind the scenes, does NOT respect, it is the “various spiritual traditions.” That’s the soft soap. That’s the New Agey stuff, the warm fuzzy. That’s the front behind which the Vatican licks its chops, as it contemplates an EU which is fully organized and ready for further takeover from Above. Above, being the Vatican itself. This is no joke. This is almost two thousand years of plotting and conniving and working toward the goal of Rule. But people reject the idea because they think that the Vatican is weak and lost and can never command billions of people to walk into a Church and fall on their knees. But you see, the Vatican, above all, has patience. The long-term goal has thousands and thousands of steps. I know this from numerous contacts over the years. Near the end of my career on Wall Street, I used to tell my friends—changing a quote I had once read—”The Jews who are not Jews run Wall Street at the pleasure of the British financiers who have an illusory idea about the primacy of England, and they in turn serve at the pleasure of the Vatican, which remains in the shadows.” It’s more or less a straight line, and the top of the line gives you the group which appears to be the weakest. Appears. That’s the operative word. If you read Tupper Saussy’s fine book, Rulers of Evil, you will discover that the first translation of Sun-tzu’s classic treatise, Art of War, into a Western language was made in 1772, in French. By Joseph-Marie Amiot, an astronomer in the court of the Emperor of China. Amiot was a Jesuit priest. The Jesuits know all about appearing weak into order to win, and they are perhaps the world’s greatest appliers of Sun-tzu. And they are in it for the long haul.

Q: Then what function, in this scheme, does the EU play?

A: The shill.

Q: Explain.

A: The shill parks himself near the con man and makes it seem like the game can be won easily. The shill is the man who makes it look easy. I stretch the meaning of the term a little. But a shill is a bright penny that attracts attention. The EU represents UNITY. Unity is the bright penny that exclaims, “Look! We can do it. We can all live in harmony. All we need to do is sit down and talk long enough, and all our divisions and conflicts will be solved.” The shill draws the crowds. The shill makes the crowd think there is something very good here. The shill is the magnet, if you will, that sucks in the customers, the adherents, the loyal ones, the people of hope. It’s the oldest trick in the book. And the people who play this trick on a grand scale are very, very clever. They want total domination, but they carve out a circuitous route, because that is the way to arrive. They set up a front which is the shill, and the shill looks very, very good. I don’t mean to offend anyone by this, but for the Vatican, Jesus is a shill, the ultimate shill. Of course, their version of him is so far from the older concept it isn’t even funny. But I digress.

Q: So you’re saying that the Vatican looks for a group that can appear to be very, let’s say, humanitarian, and it uses that to attract followers.

A: Of course. What do you think they spend their time doing? But in their secret “catechism,” creating groups which appear to do good works is really the creation of shills. That’s half of what the Vatican DOES.

Q: People at large would appear to be quite hypnotized NOT to believe this.

A: That’s why I don’t like to talk about it too often. It’s frustrating. People look at me like I’ve stepped on their precious cat.

Q: Okay. Let’s take this a step further. How about this? “The Vatican, working through certain players in the EU, have been making war on the US stock market.”

A: Now you’re clicking.

Q: And the motive is?

A: To weaken anything powerful that is not completely within the circle of power of the Vatican.

Q: Even if such weakening brings about chaos.

A: Especially if it brings about chaos. The very atmosphere in which the Vatican thrives. Chaos ALWAYS equals new followers who are looking for a way to assuage their fear.

Q: You’re saying this is just a current OP that follows along with a very old strategy.

A: A strategy in which the Vatican is the master.

Q: Now, in your years on Wall Street, did you run into people who knew all this, who saw the larger dimensions of the game?

A: I did. Mostly, they kept their mouths shut. Essentially, you’re asking me, “What does a mid-level or low-level player in an ultimately corrupt game do when he discovers a few of the larger dimensions of that game?”

Q: Well, you could say that question applies, in a sense, to all of us, if you stretch the meaning a little.

A: Exactly. That IS the question, isn’t it? We may not be willing and conscious participants in the direction the game is going, but we are in the game, one way or another. I myself WAS a man who twisted the truth to maneuver money in certain ways. And finally, because I was very bull-headed, because I was very selfish—it took me quite awhile to wake up and get out of my own trap.

Q: Here is another Paisley quote. “Deliberate engineering to create the coming about of the European Union provides an enormous opportunity to develop and extend the influence of the Church of Rome. Remember, it is Roman Catholic laymen who, from the beginning, were behind the formation of, and today continue to push the growth of, the European Union.”

A: And look at something else. What is one of the most important economic wars for market share on the planet?

Q: The one between the US and what is now the EU.

A: Yes.

Q: Part of the reason the EU was formed was to give a Europe a chance to compete with the US in that area.

A: Yes. And, situated above all this, its sights set on weakening that “far too independent nation,” the US, has been the Vatican. And one step in that weakening operation is the current trashing of US corporations and the stock market. Which, covertly, was an OP launched by the EU, behind which firmly stands the Vatican.

Q: Layers of the onion.

A: Right.

Q: There are undoubtedly other forces at work in the weakening of the US trading markets.

A: There are. But the big unnoticed one—that’s what I’m describing.

Q: Let’s get back to the shill. Who stands behind him?

A: In a very mild situation, it’s just a con man. But when you get really nasty, you’re talking about somebody who operates like a demon.

Q: Do you mean that literally?

A: No. But other people would. I’m talking about somebody who OWNS somebody else.

Q: Take a very loyal Roman Catholic businessman of great wealth.

A: Yes. One who owes the Church and its agents all he has—because they engineered a lot of it for him. This is a kind of shill, who attracts people to his side. And behind him is the possession force—the people who own him, who, if they want to, can destroy everything he holds precious. And the businessman knows that. Somewhere inside him, he knows it and is afraid of it. The shill and the demon.

Q: A good title for a book.

A: Yes.

Q: Along this line, here is another quote cited by Paisley. This is from Paul Henri Spaak, who has been called one of the founding fathers of the Euro Common Market, the forerunner to the EU: “We [Europe] do not want another committee. We have too many already. What we want is a man of sufficient stature to hold the allegiance of all people [of Europe] and to lift us out of the economic morass in which we are sinking. Send us such a man and be he god or the devil we will receive him.”

A: Yes. I read that quote with great interest. It gives off quite a bit of flavor, doesn’t it?

Q: Yes.

A: All sorts of resonance. On one level, it almost seems to be a call for a Satan. On another level, for a fascist dictator waving a wand over Europe.

Q: The Vatican did support Hitler in certain ways and felt it could control him.

A: And that was so. If Hitler had conquered Europe, the Vatican, with its far-flung and very well-placed agents of distinction, would have controlled him sooner or later. Hitler, despite some of his statements, was quite enamored of the Church.

Q: What other resonances do you get from Spaak’s statement?

A: He is asking for someone like a Pope, if a Pope could move out of being a figurehead into real power day to day. I also get the sense that Spaak is willing to roll the dice against any odds because he feels, at that time, that the future of Europe is in a very desperate situation.

Q: So the formation of the EU was really a desperate move, in some ways.

A: At the level of business-people and financiers and bankers in Europe, it was. At the mid-level. And when you are in that frame of mind, you are willing to do anything to regain the kind of power you feel is rightfully yours. Your solution is ALWAYS for a form of fascism, regardless of what face you put on it. You have to remember that.

Q: The EU was a fascist movement.

A: Covertly, yes. Absolutely. Whether you have one man standing on a balcony shouting to crowds, or a bunch of men quietly sitting in a room making all the really important decisions, it is fascism.

Q: Paisley also quotes from—

A: You mean the Sunday Telegraph article?

Q: Yes.

A: I have it here.

Q: Read it.

A: July 21, 1991. The headline was, “Hatching a New Popish Plot.” It reads, “Karol Wojtyla [the Pope] is calmly preparing to assume the mantle which he solemnly believes to be his Divine Right—that of the new Holy Roman Emperor, reigning from the Urals to the Atlantic.”

Q: What do you think of that?

A: If you insert the word “secret” in there, I think they’ve got it right. You see, we live in an age when humanitarianism is the—

Q: Propaganda foundation stone.

A: Right.

Q: Why is that?

A: Because so many popular movements aimed at freedom and justice have filled the landscape. So the strategy of the controllers is to go with that. Just like in judo. You go with the motion of your opponent. You don’t try to lash out at it. Part of the Art of War.

Q: You become the great peacemaker and mediator.

A: That’s right.

Q: That’s the ultimate trump card.

A: And the Vatican has a long history of being able to play that card.

Q: Does there come a time when, even if enough people see through the crap, it’s too late?

A: No. But you do have to do certain things.

Q: Like what?

A: You have to expose the propaganda. That’s number one. You have to do that. Then you have to build alternative structures. All sorts of them. And you have to forget about asking the bad guys for help. The whole idea of being nice to people who will do everything they can to control you never works. And if you understand the real motives and intentions of the enemy, you WON’T make that mistake.

Q: You won’t assume that nicey-nice will turn them around.

A: Correct.

Q: The shill and the demon.

A: The front and the back.

Q: Some stories about demons have them feeding off and enjoying the emotions and pain and troubles and suffering of the people they lock on to.

A: I think that’s a fairly good description of the Vatican down through history. If you add in, bilking the people of their money and possessions.

Q: Then it would seem a little curious to have the Vatican calling demonic stuff the evil that must be opposed and defeated.

A: I think that’s characterized as a Cover Story. You’ll find it in a number of areas. The enemy you prop up or invent to solidify your group is really YOU. It’s pretty clever.

Q: Several writers have suggested the Vatican has fallen into being the epitome of devilishness, within its own walls.

A: I enjoy those stories. Because I think they miss the point that the Vatican has been about deception and control since its beginnings. After all, why bother to build a global organization to dominate a path that is supposed to lead to personal salvation? Why not just mark out the path and let people walk it on their own? If they want to? You can’t force someone to take that path. If you do, you get a false result, a fake result.

Q: So you feel that secret societies are important in the telling of real human history. Since the Vatican is really such a society.

A: Yes, that’s right. I’m a person who’s come to conclude that people really do sit down and meet in rooms, that even if they share common goals—and they do—that’s not enough to mount long-term projects and operations. It’s just common sense. If you fight a land war, don’t you have meetings? Don’t you iron our strategy? Don’t you hide that strategy? Don’t you use many agents in the intelligence field? Don’t those agents pretend to be something other than what they are? Imagine what would happen if the generals just assumed they all had shared objectives and proceeded on their own. It would be a moronic thing from the outset. The Jesuits are the intel arm of the Church, in exactly the same way that the CIA works. They obtain information, and they also do covert OPS. I have met more than a few very, very bright Jesuits who are in the financial field. They certainly know what they’re doing. They certainly keep their real objectives close to the vest.

Q: How low do you think the Dow is going to fall?

A: I think to make a serious estimate of that would be a mistake, if you are a person who is trying to acquire useful knowledge about markets. It’s too up in the air. It’s the wrong target of knowledge to shoot for. But just to guess, for the hell of it—we could see the Dow go down from 11,000, where it was, to 7500 or even 7000, or 6500. But that’s just a foolish guess.

Q: If it did go that low, what would it mean?

A: (laughs) It would mean it’s going to go back up. But just as a top in the market is a confusing time, the same is true of a bottom. All sorts of false starts that go nowhere. Up, then collapse. Up, then collapse again. And then, it finally begins to move up. But you see, all this is thinking about a fantasy, really. Because we don’t know. We could make a hundred predictions and then say, after one of them turns out right—see, on August 24, I said 7000 and I was right. As a market drops lower, more of the big-time money people grab up what they want. And the lower it gets, the MORE big-time are those who grab up huge numbers of shares in their areas of interest. It’s feeding time for the vultures and vampires and demons. They could be ready to take the market up by next week, or it might be two years from now. When the trinket that is dangling from your wrist is the stock market or the economy of a nation, you can pretty well figure that WHIM and SADISM are prominent motives. And also, what you can get away with, given your goals.

Q: But if the Vatican is a major force behind the current weaken-America OP, when is enough going to be enough?

A: Now you’re talking a lot of different of different factors.

Q: Such as?

A: The most important ones are those around the question, “How many of your own people, who are very loyal, but also not in on the true Game—how long can they hold out and stay loyal and not just go nuts?” You want to keep your structure in place. You want chaos, but you also want your vast network to be able to act. Those are tricky questions for controllers. All sorts of personal feelings can enter in.

Q: In the past, I’ve heard you talk, in relation to investing, about over-focus and under-focus. What do those terms mean?

A: Under-focus would be, I want to predict how far the market is going to fall, and THEN I’ll decide what to buy or sell and when. That doesn’t work. Over-focus would be, at the close of trading on Monday, when everyone is getting in to buy up the stocks that have fallen heavily during the morning, I’m going to get in and pick the heaviest loser of the day and buy it, because it’s going to go back up tomorrow. That’s a complete crap-shoot, too. But you know, these two principles work in all sorts of areas. In personal relationships, an over-focus would be, he scratches his face once in awhile and that bothers me. Under-focus would be, he’s spending all our money but I’m sure he knows what he’s doing. Neither extreme works.

Q: Do you think the world is doomed?

A: What do you mean by doomed?

Q: All 6 billion of us are going to fall under a steel-trap tyranny and we won’t be able to get out.

A: Well, we can always get out. But it has to start from the bottom. To try to change everything from the top is a waste of time. You have to know as much as you can about what’s going on at the top to know what to do at the bottom.

Q: I thought you’d say that my question was asking you to do an under-focus.

A: Very tricky. No, I think the closer you get to an understanding of what’s going on at the top, the better prepared you are to take action.

Q: It occurs to me that your analysis of shills and demons applies to the medical cartel.

A: It certainly does. You have your studies and your testimonials from celebrities and your poster kids for diseases and socialite fund-raisers for research—and they are all shills. Most of them are unknowing shills. The studies are fakes, by the way. But all the shills are fronting for the same system of medicine that kills so many people. The demons are certain people who really set the agenda, the research agenda for the drug companies. They know they are killing people and making money doing it.

Q: They take pleasure from death?

A: It’s very politically incorrect to suggest that, but it’s true.

Q: Many people would say, how can it be true?

A: You have to realize that there are people in this world who do, in fact, take pleasure from that. That’s the way they are. You can offer all sorts of explanations for how they got that way, but most of that is just to let them off the hook. They don’t deserve that reward. They are evil, and they want to be evil. On a much smaller scale, look at the corrupt broker who enjoys hyping stocks to customers when he knows that he has no idea whether the stock is going to go up or down. He enjoys the weird power in that. He likes it. He likes stealing money and lying and getting away with it. The sooner we come to grips with this, the sooner we’ll be able to get our nations back on the right course. Do you feel how much opposition there is to saying that so-and-so criminal just wanted to commit his crimes? We retreat from that, we try to make it all so complex and nice and we want to restore “harmony” by explaining away the whole thing. But these people do exist. They wear very expensive suits, some of them, and they get their feeling of life from destruction. It’s a kick for them.

Q: Getting back to the Vatican—

A: Yes. Getting back to that, part of the big psychological OP of the second half of the 1900s has been the idea that everyone is good and should be approached that way. This is one of the front ideas of the Roman Church, in its latest fake incarnation of “share and care.” It’s just a ruse, but it certainly screws up whole civilizations.

Q: I think one reason people love soap operas so much is because they give us a smattering of characters who are evil and like being evil. It’s right out there.

A: I’m sure that’s true.

Q: We’ve just seen the $60 billion merger of two drug companies, Pfizer and Pharmacia. This makes Pfizer, which was already the largest drug house in the US, even bigger.

A: There are many reasons for these mergers, but looking at it from the top of the basic control agenda, it’s all about shrinking down the number of people who have any say in what happens to us. In empire building, the people who really sit behind the scenes want larger and larger structures to emerge, because, if they can control THOSE, they can control the whole show. If you have 4 million important power groups on the planet, then controlling the planet is going to be hard. But if you can shrink that number of groups down to a hundred, you can move in and work on the leaders of those hundred groups—the people who aren’t already in your pocket—and you can begin to move them into your orbit. This is a basic fact that many people seem to understand, but they forget it or ignore the mechanics of how it works, and they move on. They shouldn’t move on. That’s IT.

Q: As we talk here, I get the feeling that you have some experience with Vatican recruiting methods—undertaken, of course, through many lower-level cut-outs.

A: You’re right. I do. It’s in the area of making lay-Catholics into agents. I have known several people who were approached. The basic routine went like this. A Catholic businessman in a large city is contacted by the local chapter of one of those Catholic groups. There are scores of them. They have different names. They all seem benign or charitable or merely honorary.

Q: So this businessman goes to a meeting.

A: Sure. A lunch, a meeting. He ends up joining the group. He’s already a successful man. Very energetic and ambitious. Wants to get ahead. So, after a year or so, an opportunity is placed in his path. One of his new friends in the group introduces him to a loan officer at a bank, and before you know it, he gets cash to expand his business. Things are starting to cook. This is a fairly slow process, and at every step the businessman is vetted. Loosely, because nothing has really happened yet. But after another year or two, he acquires a partner in a new venture. The partner is also a member of this lay-Catholic club. The new venture prospers.

The businessman meets the local bishop. He is nominated for some kind of layman of the year award. He doesn’t win, but his profile is raised. After years of not going to church, he now goes. He even receives confession once a month. After three or four years, he is introduced to a “financial expert” who is also from the same local group. The expert is really a Jesuit, but very few people know that. The Jesuit becomes his friend. He takes him on a trip to Rome, and they have an audience with a cardinal. Brief. On and on it goes. The businessman is vetted every step of the way.

He buys into a construction company. He is now becoming rich. He doesn’t think much about it, but his new lifestyle is really dependent on his acquired Catholic friends. And all they have done for him. He of course would never want to give up the new lifestyle. And now, on a business trip, he meets a woman in a bar. She is quite pretty and friendly. They sleep together. Every time he goes to that city on business, he meets her. Unknown to him, their meetings are recorded on videotape. The Jesuit friend, one day, manages to bring up the subject of this woman. Because the Jesuit friend knows her. He tells the businessman that she is a prostitute, and even though she may not have charged him any money, well—and so the businessman goes to confession and tells the story to his priest. And so on and so forth. And ten years later this man is really all the way in the pocket of his Jesuit friend.

And in the case I’m describing, we eventually get to political office. Running for office. And winning. And down the road, with a lot of money in the bank, and many political favors later, this businessman is offered a post in a federal agency. Has to do with foreign trade. He takes the job, on the strong recommendation of his Jesuit friend. And finally, after several more turns of the wheel which I won’t describe, this businessman becomes an ambassador. And is completely beholden. He takes orders, although he may not think of it that way. And he is an agent. He passes along information to his friend. Lots of information. And he becomes trusted. And now he is told of a larger program. It involves making the Church more prominent in the lives of many people. The expansion of the influence of the Church-because that’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? And this businessman joins another Catholic group, and is made a knight. The businessman is never considered to be an insider, because he has certain scruples. So he is used as he can be used. And one day, for three minutes, he meets the Pope, as part of a group. It is the culmination of his adult life. He has passed along a great deal of information to his Jesuit friend, for years.

Q: What kind of information?

A: From diplomatic cables, for example. Some of these cables contained sensitive information. The Church has been interested in various delicate negotiations between the US and a foreign nation.

Q: So you’re saying, multiply this by a factor of a few thousand such agents—

A: Many more than that.

Q: Okay—

A: And you get a tremendous flow of information coming into Vatican intelligence. And this is just information I’m talking about. There are also favors of all kinds. You know, if you read the first few pages of Saussy’s book, Rulers of Evil, you’ll see a list of Roman Catholics in government who have had key positions vis-à-vis US foreign policy. Positions like CIA Director, National Security Advisor, Secretary of State, Ambassador-at-Large. And there is also a list of senators who run [or ran] the various sub-committees within the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—all Roman Catholics. Biden, Subcommittee on European Affairs. Sarbanes, International Economic Policy. Moynihan, Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs. Kerry, Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Communications. Dodd, Western Hemisphere and Peace Corps Affairs.

Q: Yes. I’ve seen the list. And that is just the beginning. Saussy goes on to name “virtually every aspect of secular life in America,” as he puts it, which is run, as a government chairmanship of a committee, by a Roman Catholic Congressional representative. It’s staggering. Here are just a few of those areas: “…insurance, housing, community development, federal loan guarantees, economic stabilization measures…gold and precious metals transactions, agriculture…flood control, minority enterprise…vaccines, drug labelling and packaging, drug and alcohol
abuse… energy… bank regulation…”

A: And people in America still tend to think of Jack Kennedy as the only Catholic who ever really had huge secular political power in the US. Which, when you think about it, is a very under-mentioned piece of fall-out from the JFK assassination. Makes an excellent cover story, doesn’t it? “No more major presence of Roman Catholic power in the secular US government. Jack is dead.”

Source: Articbeacon/Investigative Journal

Dark BD Surprise :: "Drugs and covert operations go together like fleas on a dog" :: Oct BB Alliance

.

HE TELLS ME I'VE GOT TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT WHEN THE BIG DOG GETS OFF THE PORCH, and I'm getting confused here. He is talking to me from a fishing camp up near the Canadian border, and as he tries to tell me about the Big Dog, I can only imagine a wall of green and deep blue lakes with northern pike. But he is very patient with me. Mike Holm did his hard stints in the Middle East, the Miami station, and Los Angeles, all for the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, and he is determined that I face the reality he knows. So he starts again. He repeats, "When the Big Dog gets off the porch, watch out." And by the Big Dog, he means the full might of the United States government. At that moment, he continues, you play by Big Boy rules, and that means, he explains, that there are no rules but to complete the mission.
~ Dark BD Surprise :: "A lawyer shall not suppress any evidence that he or his client has a legal obligation to reveal or produce." : Oct BB Alliance ~

If you alone found out what the lie was, then you're probably right it would make no great difference. But if you all found out what the lie was, it might conceivably make a very great difference indeed...

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. -- Maj. Gen. Smedley Butler, USMC (Ret)
~ The Black Pope and Jesuit General : The Most Powerful Man in the World : Society of Jesus & Vatican Assassins ~

It is like a Manhattan Project going on behind the scenes of alien grays and praying mantises having sex with humans. However, this eschaton conspiracy is being orchestrated by higher powers, and we don't mean the Committee of 300. Very few of the people even near the center of the orchestration have a clear picture of what is coming down, but they do know that something is coming and that they will have front row seats.

The Manhattan Project relative to the eschaton is a global civilian network of people who will serve as a lightning rod for the cosmic energies coming in during the consciousness revolution. They will be looking to channel these energies into expanded realities. Thus, they will provide a degree of protection for those people who can find their places alongside the network. Outside of the network there will be greater levels of trauma and confusion.

The pieces of the network are already in place, the remaining task is to properly activate and link the pieces into a critical mass of awareness. This last step is now underway. This is how an Aviary helps to spawn an Aquarium, and how birds learn to swim.
~ From Admiral GAMBIT :: CENTCOM's Global Hegemony 'Nuclear-Eschaton-Master' Plan : What To Do With Third World Tyrants? :: With Little ChickenShit! ~

Veteran Drug Agents Back Gary Webb's Story

Contributor's profile:

Two weeks after Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" series appeared in the San Jose Mercury News in August 1996, contributing editor Charles Bowden found himself in a bar, having a few drinks with some narcs (his idea of a good night). "For some reason, Webb's piece came up, and I asked the guys, 'So, what do you think? Is what Webb wrote about the CIA true?'" recalls Bowden, the author of fifteen books, including Blood Orchid and Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future. "And they all turned to me and said, "Of course it is.' That's when I knew that somebody would have to do this story, and I figured it might as well be me." "The Pariah," Bowden's story on Webb -- a man he describes as "real smart, real straight, lives on a cul-de-sac, family man, all that crap" -- begins on page 150.


Editor's letter [excerpt]:

....The world Charles Bowden leads us into in his story, "The Pariah" (page 150), is, on the other hand, a place few would willingly visit. Reporter Gary Webb chose to enter the alternate universe where the CIA sponsors armies and sometimes finds itself allied with drug dealers who sell their wares in the United States. Webb wrote a newspaper series that documented how the Nicaraguan contras of the 1980s were in part financed by just such an arrangement -- and he was then professionally destroyed for it. Bowden, in the course of reporting this story over the last six months, found considerable evidence that parallels and supports Webb's articles -- including revelations from one of the DEA's most decorated agents, who speaks for the first time about the CIA's complicity in the drug trade. It was not, however, the agency's ties to drug traffickers that Bowden found most disturbing. It was that a man can lose his livelihood, his calling, his reputation, for telling the truth....

--David Granger




The Pariah,

by Esquire Magazine, September 1998

Two years ago, Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that said some bad things about the CIA and drug traffickers. The CIA denied the charges, and every major newspaper in the country took the agency's word for it. Gary Webb was ruined. Which is a shame, because he was right.

By Brad Wilson Charles Bowden | Sep 01 '98

HE TELLS ME I'VE GOT TO UNDERSTAND ABOUT WHEN THE BIG DOG GETS OFF THE PORCH, and I'm getting confused here. He is talking to me from a fishing camp up near the Canadian border, and as he tries to tell me about the Big Dog, I can only imagine a wall of green and deep blue lakes with northern pike. But he is very patient with me. Mike Holm did his hard stints in the Middle East, the Miami station, and Los Angeles, all for the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, and he is determined that I face the reality he knows. So he starts again. He repeats, "When the Big Dog gets off the porch, watch out." And by the Big Dog, he means the full might of the United States government. At that moment, he continues, you play by


Big Boy rules, and that means, he explains, that there are no rules but to complete the mission. We've gotten into all this schooling because I asked him about reports that he received when he was stationed in Miami that Southern Air Transport, a CIA-contracted airline, was landing planeloads of cocaine at Homestead Air Force Base nearby. Back in the eighties, Holm's informants kept telling him about these flights, and then he was told by his superiors to "stand down because of national security." And so he did. He is an honorable man who believes in his government, and he didn't ask why the flights were taking place; he simply obeyed. Because he has seen the Big Dog get off the porch, and he has tasted Big Boy rules. Besides, he tells me, these things are done right, and if you look into the matter, you'll find contract employees or guys associated with the CIA, but you won't find a CIA case officer on a loading dock tossing kilos of coke around. Any more than Mike Holm ever saw a plane loaded top to bottom with kilos of coke. He didn't have to. He believed his informants. And he believed in the skill and power of the CIA. And he believed in the sheer might and will of the Big Dog when he finally decides to get off the porch.

As his words hang in the air, I remember a convict who says he once worked with the United States government and who also tasted Big Boy rules. This man has not gone fishing. This convict insisted that I hold the map up to the thick prison glass as he jabbed his finger into the mountains. There, he said, that's the place, and his eyes gleamed as his words accelerated. There, in the mountains, they have a colony of two thousand Colombians out of Medellin, guarded by the Mexican army. I craned my neck to see where his finger was rubbing against the map, and made an x with my pen. That's when the guard burst into the convict's small cubicle and ordered him to sit down.

The convict is a man of little credibility in the greater world. He is a Mexican national, highly intelligent and exact in his speech. He is a man electric with the memory of his days working as a DEA informant in Mexico, huddling in his little apartment with his clandestine radio. He said I must check his DEA file; he gave the names of his case officers; he noted that he delivered to them the exact locations of thirteen airfields operated jointly by the drug cartels and the CIA. The man's eyes bugged out as his excitement shredded the tedium of doing time and he returned to his former life of secret transmissions, cutouts, drinks with pilots ferrying dope, bullshitting his way through army checkpoints.

He said, "I'll be out in six months or one year, depending on the hearing. We can go. I'll take you up there." I have always steered clear of the secret world, because it is very hard to penetrate, and because if you discover anything about it, you are not believed. And because I remember what happened to one reporter who wrote about that world, about the Big Dog getting off the porch, about the Big Boy rules. So I thought about the convict's information and did nothing with it.

But this reporter who went ahead and wrote while I stopped, I kept thinking about him. When I mention him, and what happened to him, to Mike Holm, he says, "Ah, he must have drawn blood." Holm is very impressed with the CIA, and he wants me to slow down, think, and understand something: "The CIA's mission is to break laws and be ruthless. And they are dangerous."

I had been thinking about looking into the claim that during the civil war in Nicaragua in the eighties, the CIA helped move dope to the United States to buy guns for the contras, who were mounting an insurrection against the leftist Sandinistas. So I called up Hector Berrellez, a guy who worked under Mike Holm in Los Angeles, a guy known within the DEA as its Eliot Ness, and he said, "Look, the CIA is the best in the world. You're not going to beat them; you're never going to get a smoking gun. The best you're going to get is a little story from me."

What Berrellez meant by a smoking gun is this: proof that the United States government has, through the Central Intelligence Agency and its ties to criminals, facilitated the international traffic in narcotics. That's the trail the reporter was on when his career in newspapers went to rack and ruin. So I decided to look him up.

His name is Gary Webb.

GARY WEBB LOVES THE STACKS OF THE STATE LIBRARY ACROSS from the capitol in Sacramento, the old classical building framed with aromatic camphor trees. He enters the lobby and becomes part of a circling mural called War Through the Ages, an after-flash of World War I painted by Frank Van Sloun in 1929. The panels start with the ax and club, then wade through gore to doughboys marching off to the War to End All Wars. THIS HOUSE OF PEACE, the inscription on the west wall admonishes, SHALL STAND WHILE MEN FEAR NOT TO DIE IN ITS DEFENSE.

He was here in the summer of 1995 because of a call from a woman named Coral Marie Talavera Baca. She told him her drug-dealer boyfriend was in jail and one of the witnesses against him was "a guy who used to work with the CIA selling drugs. Tons of it." Webb was brought up short: In eighteen years of reporting, every person who'd ever called him about the CIA had turned out to be a flake. Webb started to back away on the phone, and the woman sensed it and exploded: "How dare you treat me like an idiot!" She said she had lots of documents and invited him to a court date that month. And so he went.

Coral's boyfriend turned out to be a big-time trafficker. She brought Webb a pile of DEA and FBI reports about, and federal grand-jury testimony by, a guy named Oscar Danilo Blandon. Webb was intrigued by government files that told of Nicaraguans selling dope in California and giving dope money to the contras. During a break in the hearing, he headed for the restroom and ran into the U.S. attorney, David Hall. Webb told him he was a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News, and Hall asked why he was at a piddling hearing. "Actually, I've been reading," Webb answered, "and I was curious to know what you made of Blandon's testimony about selling drugs for the contras in L.A. Did you believe him?" "Well, yeah," Hall answered, "but I don't know how you could absolutely confirm it. I mean, I don't know what to tell you. The CIA won't tell me anything."

Webb followed a trail of crumbs: some San Francisco newspaper clips, some court records in San Diego, where this strange figure, Blandon, had been indicted for selling coke in 1992 and, according to the documents, had been at it for years and sold tons. He and his wife had been held without bail because the federal prosecutor, L.J. O'Neale, said his minimum mandatory punishment would be life plus a $4 million fine. Blandon's defense attorney had argued that his client was being smeared because he'd been active in helping the contras in the early eighties.

The file told Webb that Blandon wound up doing about two years, and that he was now out. The file recorded that at O'Neale's request, the government had twice quietly cut Blandon's sentence and that he was now working as a paid undercover informant for the DEA.

After about six weeks of this kind of foraging, Webb went to the state library. For six days in September, he sat at a microfiche with rolls of dimes and read an eleven-hundred-page report from 1989 compiled by a subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, a subcommittee chaired by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts that dealt with the contras and cocaine. thememoryhole.org/kerry/index

Buried in the federal document was evidence of direct links between drug dealers and the contras; evidence, dated four years before the American invasion of Panama, that Manuel Noriega was in the dope business; drug dealers saying under oath that they gave money to the contras (and passing polygraphs); pilots talking of flying guns down and dope back and landing with their cargoes at Homestead Air Force Base in Florida.

Suddenly, Coral's phone call didn't seem so crazy. Webb called up Jack Blum, the Washington, D.C., lawyer who led the Kerry inquiry and said, "Maybe I'm crazy, but this seems like a huge story to me." "Well, it's nice to hear someone finally say that, even if it is ten years later," Blum allowed, and then he proceeded to tell Webb almost exactly what he told me recently when I made a similar innocent phone call to him. "What happened was, our credibility was questioned, and we were personally trashed. The [Reagan] administration and some people in Congress tried to make us look like crazies, and to some degree it worked. I remember having conversations with reporters in which they would say, 'Well, the administration says this is all wrong.' And I'd say, 'Look, why don't you cover the fucking hearing instead of coming to me with what the administration says?' And they'd say, 'Well, the witness is a drug dealer. Why should I do that?' And I used to say this regularly: 'Look, the minute I find a Lutheran minister or a priest who was on the scene when they delivered six hundred kilos of cocaine at some air base in contra land, I'll put him on the stand, but until then, you take what you can get.' The big papers stayed as far away from this issue as they could. It was like they didn't want to know."

Webb was entering contra land, and when you enter that country, you run into the CIA, since the contras were functionally a CIA army. (The agency hired them, picked their leaders, plotted their strategy, and sometimes, because of contra incompetence, executed raids for them.) This is hardly odd, since the agency was created in 1947 for precisely such toils and has over the decades sponsored armies around the world, whether to land at the Bay of Pigs or kick the Soviets out of Afghanistan. After a year of research, in August 1996, Webb published a three-day, fifteen-thousand-word series in the Mercury News called "Dark Alliance." It is a story almost impossible to recapitulate in detail but simple in outline: Drug dealers working with the contras brought tons of cocaine into California in the 1980s and sold a lot of it to one dealer, a legend called Freeway Ricky Ross, who had connections with the L.A. street gangs and through this happenstance helped launch the national love of crack. That's it, a thesis that mixes the realpolitik of the-ends-justify-the-means with dollops of shit-happens.

The series set off a firestorm in black communities, where many suspected they had been deliberately targeted with the dope as an act of genocide (there is no evidence of that), and provoked repudiations of the story by The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. The knockdowns of Webb's story questioned the importance of Nicaraguan dealers like Blandon, the significance of Ricky Ross, how much money, if any, reached the contras, and how crucial any of this was to the crack explosion in the eighties, and brushed aside any evidence of CIA involvement. But while raising questions about Webb's work, none of these papers or any other paper in the country undertook a serious investigation of Webb's evidence. A Los Angeles Times staff member who was present at a meeting called to plan the Times's response has told me that one motive for the paper's harsh appraisal was simply pride: The Times wasn't going to let an out-of-town paper win a Pulitzer in its backyard.

Later, when it was all over, Webb spelled out exactly what he meant and exactly what he thought of the CIA's skills: The series "focused on the relationship between the contras and the crack king. It mentioned the CIA's role in passing, noting that some of the money had gone to a CIA-run army and that there were federal law-enforcement reports suggesting that the CIA knew about it. I never believed, and never wrote, that there was a grand CIA conspiracy behind the crack plague. Indeed, the more I learned about the agency, the more certain of that I became. The CIA couldn't even mine a harbor without getting its trench coat stuck in its fly."

After a while, the San Jose Mercury News series disappeared except on a few byways of the Internet, Gary Webb was ruined, and things went back to normal. Things like Oliver North's diary entry linking dope and guns for the contras, like Carlos Lehder, a big Colombian drug dealer, testifying as a prosecution witness in federal court during the Noriega trial about the Medellin cartel's $10 million donation to the contras, like the entire history of unseemly connections between the international drug world and the CIA -- all this went away, as it has time and time again in the past. A kind of orthodoxy settled over the American press that assumed that Webb's work had been thoroughly refuted. He became the Discredited Gary Webb.

And so in June 1997, Webb wound up going to a motel room he hated. The Mercury News's editors were supposed to fix him up with an apartment, but they never figured he'd show up for his dead-end transfer from investigative reporter to pretty much a nothing. So they made no arrangements, just shunted him to the paper's Cupertino bureau on the south end of Silicon Valley, his family 150 miles away in Sacramento. After a few days of the motel, he found himself in a tiny apartment. He was in his early forties, and his life and his life's work were over. He endlessly watched a tape of Caddyshack and tried to forget about missing his wife, Sue, his three kids, his dog, his work. He was an ordinary guy, by his lights, with the suburban home, an aquarium in the study, two games a week in an amateur hockey league. Now, during the day, he visited the bureau, and the guys there treated him okay, because they were all in the same boat, people who had pissed off their newspaper and been shipped to its internal Siberia, where they were paid to retool the press releases of the computer and software companies. Webb was fighting the paper through arbitration with the Newspaper Guild, and so while his case dragged on, he refused to let his byline run. But he did his assignments. After all, they were paying him a solid mid-five-figure wage; he was their star investigative reporter, the guy they had brought in from The Cleveland Plain Dealer in 1987 to do, in their words, "kick-ass journalism." Within two years, he'd helped them bring home a Pulitzer with a team of Mercury News reporters who jumped on the San Francisco earthquake. Then he blew the lid off civil forfeiture in California -- law enforcement's practice of seizing property from alleged crooks and then forgetting to ever convict, try, or even charge them. That series got the law changed. He was hot. He was good. He kicked ass.

Now Caddyshack flickered against his eyes hour after hour. His thirteen-year-old son asked, "Why don't you get another job?" And Gary Webb told him, "That's what they think I'll do. But they're wrong. I'm gonna fight."

But fight how? He was one fucking disgrace. Oliver North described his work as "absolute garbage." Webb was stretched thin. The week the series ran, he and his wife closed on a new house and moved in. Payments. So each morning, he went to the Cupertino bureau, and there were assignments from the city desk. Seems a police horse died, and he was supposed to nail down this equine death. So he did. He investigated the hell out of it and wrote it up, and, by God, the thing was good. Went on page one, of course, without his name on it. The horse died from a medical problem, constipation. The horse was full of shit.

HECTOR BERRELLEZ STUMBLED ONTO GARY WEBB'S STORY YEARS before Gary Webb knew a thing about it. His journey into that world happened this way: Hector was not fond of cops. He remembered them slapping him around when he was a kid. He was a barrio boy from South Tucson, a square mile of poverty embedded in the booming Sun Belt city. His father was a Mexican immigrant. After being drafted into the Army in the late sixties, Berrellez couldn't find a job in the copper mines, so he hooked up as a temporary with the small South Tucson police force to finance his way through college. And it was then that Hector Berrellez accidentally discovered his jones: He loved working the streets with a badge. The state police force hired him, and Hector, still green, managed to do a one-kilo heroin deal in the early seventies, a major score for the time. The DEA snapped him up, and suddenly the kid who had wanted to flee the barrio and become a lawyer was a federal narc. He loved the life. In the DEA, there are the administrators, who usually have little street experience, the suits. And then there are the street guys like Hector, and they call themselves something else. Gunslingers. His hobbies were jogging, weight lifting, guitar playing. And firearms. A Glock? Never. "Only girls carry Glocks," he snaps. "They're a sissy gun. Plastic. You can't hit anyone over the head with a Glock."

In September 1986, Sergeant Tom Gordon of the Los Angeles sheriff's narcotics strike force pieced together intelligence about a big-time drug ring in town run by Danilo Blandon. A month later, on October 23, Gordon went before a judge with a twenty-page detailed statement documenting that "monies gained from the sales of cocaine are transported to Florida and laundered....The monies are filtered to the contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua." He got a search warrant for the organization's stash houses. On Friday, October 24, there was a briefing of more than a hundred law-enforcement guys from the sheriff's office, the DEA, the FBI. That was the same day that President Ronald Reagan, after months of hassle, signed a $100 million aid bill that reactivated a licit cash flow to the beleaguered contras. And on Monday, October 27, at daybreak, the strike force simultaneously hit fourteen L.A.-area stash houses connected with Blandon.

That's where just another day in the life of Hector Berrellez got weird. Generally, at that early hour, good dopers are out cold; the work tends toward long nights and sleeping. As Berrellez remembers, "We were expecting to come up with a lot of coke." Instead, they got coffee and sometimes doughnuts. The house he hit had the lights on, and everyone, two men and a woman, was up. The guy who answered the door said, "Good morning; we've been expecting you. Come on in." The house was tidy, the beds were already made, and the damn coffee was on. The three residents were polite, even congenial. "It was obvious," says Berrellez, "that they were told." The place was clean; all fourteen houses were clean. The only thing Berrellez and the other guys found in the house was a professional scale.

But there was a safe, and Berrellez got one of the residents to open it reluctantly. Inside, he found records of kilos matched with amounts of money, an obvious dope ledger, a photograph of a guy in flight dress in front of what looked to be a military jet, and photographs of some guys in combat. Hector asked the guy who the hell the people in the photographs were, and the guy said, "Oh, they are freedom fighters." What the hell is this? Berrellez wondered. He left and went to a couple of the other houses that had been hit, and Jesus, they were clean, the coffee was on, sometimes there were doughnuts for the cops, and the same kind of documents showed up. But no dope, not a damn thing.

For a holy warrior, October 27, 1986, was a bad day. At the debriefing after the raid, Berrellez remembers one of the cops saying that the houses had been tipped to the raid by "elements of the CIA." And he thought, What? "I was shocked," he says now. "I was in a state of belief." He was supposed to believe that his own government was helping dopers? No way. "I didn't want to believe," he says And so he didn't. He was that rock-solid first-generation citizen, and he believed in America. He remembers having this ongoing argument with his dad about whether there was corruption in the U.S. like the old man had tasted in Mexico. His father would ask, Do you really think things are so clean here? And Hector would have none of it; damn right they're clean here. And he was clean, and he was in a good outfit (a position he is still passionate about -- his absolute love for the troops he served with in the DEA), and he was in a holy war against a tide of poison.

In 1987, he was transferred to Mazatlan in Sinaloa, Mexico, to run the DEA station. Sinaloa was the drug center for Mexico; in the history of the Mexican drug cartels, all but one leader has been Sinaloan born and bred. He took the wife, got a beach house in the coastal city, and ran with the job. Two months into the assignment, narcotrafficantes chased his wife and two-year-old daughter from the beach back to the house, and they had to be evacuated to the States.

In October 1988, Hector and some Mexican federal police hit a small hamlet that housed a ton of coke and twenty tons of marijuana. The firefight lasted three hours, with thousands of rounds exchanged. When three federales were mowed down on the field of fire, Hector managed to pull them to safety with another agent. He commandeered a cab to take the wounded to a hospital, then returned to the shoot-out. For this combat, Hector and two other agents at the scene were brought to the White House and given a medal by Attorney General Edwin Meese. He was on a roll that would eventually earn him twelve consecutive superior-performance awards.

Hector Berrellez, twenty-four years in the DEA, known as the agency's Eliot Ness. As he read about Gary Webb, he thought, This shit is true.

In Mexico, Hector was running two hundred to three hundred informants, and he was bringing in a torrent of information on the drug world and its links to the Mexican government. But something else happened down there in Sinaloa that stuck in his mind. His army of informants was constantly reporting strange fortified bases scattered around Mexico, but they were not Mexican military bases, and, his informants told him, the planes were shipping drugs. Camps in Durango, Sinaloa, Baja, Veracruz, all over Mexico. Hector wrote up these camps and the information he was getting on big drug shipments. And each month, he would go to Mexico City to meet with his DEA superiors and American-embassy staff, and he started mentioning these reports. He was told, Stay away from those bases; they're our training camps, special operations. He thought, What the hell is this? I'm here to enforce the drug laws, and I'm being told to do nothing.

THE EMPTY ROOM SAGS WITH FATIGUE AS THE SPORTS TELEVISIONS quietly float in the corner. California's ban on smoking has emptied the watering holes. The hotel squats by a four-lane highway amid bland suburbs that blanket Sacramento's eastern flank against the Sierra Nevada. Everything is normal here; this is the visual bedrock of Ronald Reagan's America.

Gary Webb orders Maker's Mark on the rocks. He is a man of average height, with brown hair, a trim mustache, an easy smile, and laconic, laid-back speech, the basic language of Middle America. He moves easily, a kind of amble through life. His father was a marine, and his childhood meant moving a lot before finally coming to ground in Indiana, Kentucky, and Ohio. He's married to his high school sweetheart; they have three kids and live on a tree-lined cul-de-sac with a pool in back, a television in the family room, his Toyota with 150,000 miles in the drive, Sue's minivan, and on the cement the chalk outline of a hopscotch game. He looks white-collar, maybe sells insurance.

All he has ever wanted to be is a reporter. He started out as a kid, writing up sports results for a weekly at a nickel an inch. The Gary Webb who suddenly loomed up nationally with this bad talk about the CIA and drugs was a long time coming, and he came from the dull center of the country, and he came from an essay entitled, "What America Means to Me," for which he was runner-up in the fifth-grade essay contest, and he came from the smell of ink, the crackle of a little weekly where he nailed cold the week's tumult in the Little League.

Webb is not a drinker, probably because his marine father was, but now in the empty hotel bar, he is drinking. He is not used to talking about himself, because he is a reporter, and a reporter is not the story, but now he is talking about himself. When Gary Webb talks, he sometimes leans back, but often as not, he leans forward, and when he is really into what he is saying, he grabs his left wrist with his right hand as if he were taking his own pulse, and then his voice gets even flatter, and the words are very evenly spaced, and he never goes too fast, hardly any hint of
rat-a-tat-tat -- he is always measured and unexcited. But when he grabs that wrist, you can tell now that the words really matter. Because he believes. In facts. In publishing facts. In the fact that publishing facts makes a difference in how people look at things. Believes, without reason or question, believes absolutely. As for coincidence, it doesn't fit in with his mission. He also has no tolerance for conspiracy theories. By God, if he finds a conspiracy, it is not a theory, it is a fucking conspiracy, because it is grounded in facts.

When he was twenty-three, he was kind of drifting, living in the basement of Sue's house with her parents. He was writing rock 'n' roll stuff for a weekly, still grinding away at college and about three units shy of a degree. His father walked out on the marriage, leaving his mother, a housewife, and his younger brother without a check. So Webb quit college to support them. A teacher in his journalism department told him that the strange guy who ran the Post in Lexington, Kentucky, set aside one day a week for walk-ins. Webb walked in and said, "I need a job." The editor said, "Go do two pieces and bring them back in a week."

One was on the barmaids and strippers of Newport, Kentucky, the sin town across the river from Cincinnati. The editor tossed it aside and said, "Thrice-told tale." The other was on a guy who carved gravestones; that one the editor kind of liked. He said, "Bring me two more." Webb was shaken, went home and sat in the backyard, and then he thought, Fuck, I can do this. This goes on for weeks. A kid calls the paper about the dog he's found run over in the street. He's taken it to the Humane Society; they want to put it to sleep, and the kid is very upset. Webb is sent out to see if he can do anything fit for a newspaper. He talks to the vet, who says it is hopeless, that the dog will never walk again, whether he operates or not. When Webb reports back to the editor, he says, "Get that guy on the phone," and after a few blunt words from the editor, by God, the vet is going to operate. And it works. The damn dog is leaping in the air. Finally, the dog goes home to the kid who found him, a kid in a wheelchair who seemed to identify with an injured mutt and was horrified at the idea that a cripple should be done away with. Story and photograph on the front page. Webb is hired. Years later, the old editor would tell him, "If that dog hadn't walked, you'd have never been hired."

There is a guy in the newsroom who is kind of burned out, a city editor. He watches the new hire for a few weeks. He tells him he will teach him the ropes, how to ferret out facts, how to find out damn near anything, how to be an investigative reporter. On one condition. He says Webb has to swear never to become a fucking editor. Webb agrees. His first series was seventeen parts on organized crime in the coal industry. Then he moved up to a good job on The Cleveland Plain Dealer and was in heaven: Ohio was the mother lode of corruption in government. He got an offer from the Mercury News in 1987. After a brief bidding war, he moved the family west, great place to raise kids, and besides, during his father's wanderings as a marine, Webb happened to be born in California. Everything was fine. He was in the Sacramento bureau and so hardly ever in the newsroom, much less around editors. In a big story for the paper, he took on one of the area's major employers. After the first day of the story, the company bought a full-page ad refuting it. After the next installment, the company bought a two-page ad. Webb looked around and noticed that nothing happened to him. The paper backed him up.

GARY WEBB'S "DARK ALLIANCE" BROKE AN OLD STORY. THE HISTORY of the CIA's relationship with international drug dealers has been documented and published, yet it is almost completely unknown to most citizens and reporters. Webb himself had only a dim notion of this record. And so he reacted with horror when the implications of his research first began to become clear to him: that while much of the federal government fought narcotics as a plague, the CIA, in pursuing its foreign-policy goals, sometimes facilitated the work of drug traffickers. "Dark Alliance" is surrounded by a public record that bristles with similar instances of CIA connections with drug people:

-- Alan Fiers, who headed the CIA Central American Task Force, testified during the Iran-contra hearings in August 1987, "With respect to [drug trafficking by] the resistance forces...it is not a couple of people. It is a lot of people."

-- In 1983, fifty people, many of them Nicaraguans, were caught unloading a big coke shipment in San Francisco. A couple of them claimed involvement with the CIA, and after a meeting between CIA officials and the U.S. attorney handling the case, $36,000 found in a bedside table was returned because it "belonged to the contras." This spring, when the CIA published its censored report on involvement of the agency with drug traffickers in the contra war (a report that exists solely because a firestorm erupted in Congress after Webb's series), this incident was explained thusly: "Based upon the information available to them at the time, CIA personnel reached the erroneous conclusion that one of the two individuals...was a former CIA asset." Logically, an admission that CIA "assets" can sometimes be drug dealers.

-- In 1986, Wanda Palacio parted company with the Medellin cartel and started talking to Senator John Kerry's subcommittee, which was looking into the byways of the contra war and dope. Palacio said she'd witnessed two flights of coke out of Barranquilla, Colombia, on planes belonging to the CIA-contracted Southern Air Transport. She also had the dates and had seen the pilot. She also said Jorge Ochoa, another drug boss, said the flights were part of a "drugs for guns" deal. On September 26, 1986, Kerry took her eleven-page statement to William Weld, who was then the assistant attorney general in charge of the criminal division of the Justice Department. Weld allowed that he was not surprised to find claims of "bum agents, former and current CIA agents" dabbling in dope deals with the Colombian cartels. On October 3, Weld's office rejected Palacio's statement and offer to be a witness because of what it saw as contradictions in her testimony. On October 5, 1986, the Sandinistas shot a CIA plane out of the sky and captured one of Oliver North's patriots, one Eugene Hasenfus. Palacio was sitting in Kerry's office when a photograph of Hasenfus's dead pilot flashed across the television screen. She whooped that the pilot was the same guy she'd seen in Colombia loading coke on the Southern Air Transport flight in early October 1985. An Associated Press reporter, Robert Parry, investigated the crash and obtained the pilot's logs, which showed that on October 2, 4, and 6, 1985, the pilot had taken a Southern Air Transport plane to Barranquilla, Colombia. Palacio took a polygraph on the matter and passed.

-- Through much of the contra war, SETCO Air, an airline run by Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros out of Honduras, was the principal airline used to transport supplies and personnel for the contras. Hector Berrellez later sent Ballesteros to Marion Federal Prison in Illinois to serve a couple of life sentences for dope peddling.

ABOUT THE SAME TIME GARY WEBB WAS MAKING HIS BONES AT The Cleveland Plain Dealer and winning part of a Pulitzer at the Mercury News, Hector Berrellez was becoming a legend. After two years of living at ground zero in Sinaloa, he was brought home to Los Angeles in 1989 to take over the most significant investigation in DEA history, that of the murder of DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena. Camarena had been bagged in broad daylight from in front of the American consulate in Guadalajara in February 1986. His tortured body was found a month later. The investigation had stalled, so the DEA tossed it in Hector's lap. He ran with the new power, the raft of agents under his command, the huge budget for buying informants in Mexico. The case was a core matter for the DEA: The murder of Camarena was the event that gave the ragtag agency its martyr. The investigation was called Operation Leyenda, "Operation Legend."

During Operation Leyenda, a major drug guy in Sinaloa called Cochi Loco, "the Crazy Pig," put a contract on Hector's head. In the drug world, there are so many possible reasons for murder that a simple one is seldom clear. Whatever the immediate cause, in the early nineties a hit team was sent north to kill Hector.

One day in 1991, in the underground garage of the building in Los Angeles where the DEA and a bunch of federal agencies rent office space, someone walked up to a guy sitting in a car and clipped him in the head with a .22. The man died instantly and fell forward into the steering wheel, and the sound of a car horn wailed through the garage. Hector remembers that they found him with the motor running, and neatly placed on the floorboard of the car was the gun, in a Mexican-tooled holster, and the two latex surgical gloves that had been worn by the hit man. Someone wanted a clear message delivered.

The dead man was a guy from the General Services Administration who happened to work in the same building as the DEA. He had been in some kind of a hurry and had pulled into a DEA parking space. The guy was a ringer for Hector's partner. Three days after the hit, Hector picked up the phone in his office and heard the voice of Chichon Rico Urrea, a significant drug figure who was doing a stint in a prison in Guadalajara. Chichon told Hector, "You see what happened to your guy in the garage? That's going to happen to more of your guys."

Hector told the guy to go fuck himself, said he could kill all the fucking GSA guys he wanted. But Hector was questioning his faith. The faith was the war on drugs. The faith was that he was a righteous soldier in this war. The faith was that he was risking his life for the forces of light against the forces of darkness. And he was Eliot Ness, goddammit; he was the most decorated guy anyone could remember in the DEA, the man running its key investigation, the guy who had killed people, the guy bloodied in the world of Mexican corruption. All of that Hector could handle -- none of that could ever touch the faith. But other things could. Things he saw and learned in Mexico. And things he saw in the United States. He began to doubt that there was a real commitment to win this war on drugs. He saw his government winking at too many narcotics connections. He took Kiki Camarena's murder personally, because as agents they were mirror images -- gung-ho, committed drugbusters. And impediments to his investigation pissed Hector off. So in 1992, four years before Gary Webb sprang "Dark Alliance" on the world, Hector Berrellez sat down in his federal office in Los Angeles and picked up the phone and recommended action to the DEA. Things had come to his attention, and he thought, Somebody's gotta investigate this crap. In fact, he hoped to be that investigator.

Hector Berrellez wanted a criminal investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency. His $3 million snitch budget had brought in an unseemly harvest, report after report from informants that in the eighties CIA-leased aircraft were flying cocaine into places like the air-force base in Homestead, Florida, and the airfield north of Tucson long believed to be a CIA base. And that these planes were flying guns south. One of his witnesses in the Camarena case told him about flying in a U.S. military plane loaded with drugs from Guadalajara to Homestead. Other informants told him that major drug figures, including Rafael Caro Quintero, the man finally imprisoned for the Camarena murder, were getting guns delivered through CIA connections. Everywhere he turned, he ran into dope guys who had CIA connections, and to a narc this didn't look right. "I can't believe," he told his superiors, "that the CIA is handling all this shit and doesn't know what these pilots are doing." His superiors asked if he had hard evidence of actual CIA case officers moving dope, and he said no, just lots of people they employed. All intelligence services use the fabled “cutouts” to separate themselves from their grubby work.

The DEA in Washington asked for a memo, so Hector fired off a summary of his telephone request. Agents were assigned, and Hector shipped every snippet of new information to this team. Nothing came of the investigation. The DEA team came out and debriefed him and some of his agents. And then, silence.

Hector's Camarena work had burrowed deep, very deep, inside the Mexican government and found endless rot. With the vote on NAFTA in the air in the fall of 1993, his investigation started to get pressure, then his budget was cut. By 1994, after Justice Department officials had been in Mexico City, he was told, "Don't report that crap anymore." It was clear to Hector that the Mexican government wanted this Camarena investigation reined in. In early 1995, he learned of his future in a curious way. One of Hector's informants in Mexico City called another one of his informants in Los Angeles and said, Hector's getting transferred to Washington. The guy in Los Angeles said, No, no Hector's still here. Two months later, in April 1995, Berrellez was transferred to Washington, D.C. Over the years, Hector had become used to a certain amount of duplicity in the DEA. Some of his fellow agents, he had come to believe, were actually members of the CIA. The DEA had been penetrated.

At headquarters, Hector sat in an office with nothing to do. "There ain't no fucking drug war," he says now. "I was even called un-American. Nobody cares about this shit." He started going a little crazy. Each day, he checked into a blank schedule. So he caught a lot of double features.

In September 1996, he retired. He had had enough. The most decorated soldier in the war on drugs kind of faded out at the movies.

IN THE NEWS BUSINESS, IF YOU HANG AROUND LONG enough, you get a chance to find out who you are. Gary Webb was determined not to find out he was something ugly.

"I became convinced," he remembers, "that we're going to look back on the whole war on drugs fifty years from now like we look back on the McCarthy era and say, How did we ever let this stuff get so out of hand? How come nobody ever stood up and said, This is bullshit? I thought I had an obligation because I had the power at that point to tell people, Don't believe what you're being told about this war on drugs, because it is a lie. Very few people were in the position I was in, where I was able to write shit and get it in the newspapers. It was a very rare privilege. The editors at the Mercury gave me a lot of freedom because I produced. Then I got into this thing."

In December 1995, Webb wrote out his project memo, and suddenly, "I realized what we were saying here. I'm sitting at home, and this e-mail comes from a friend at the Los Angeles Times. And I had told him vaguely about this interesting story I was working on. I told him that he had no idea what his fucking government is capable of "And I was depressed because this was so horrible. It was like some guy told me that he had gone through the looking glass and was in this nether world that 99 percent of the American public would never believe existed. That's where I felt I was. When I sat down and wrote the project memo and said, Here's what we're going to say, and we're going to be accusing the government of bringing drugs into the country, essentially, and we've spent billions of dollars and locked up Americans for selling shit that the government helps to come into the country -- is just...If you believe in democracy and you believe in justice, it's fucking awful."

For six weeks after his series came out, Webb waited in a kind of honeymoon. His e-mail was exploding, he recalls, "from ordinary people who said, 'This has restored my faith in newspapers.' It was from college students, housewives that heard me on the radio; it was really remarkable to think that journalism could have this kind of effect on people, that people were out marching in the streets because of something that had been hidden from us all these years. The thing that surprised me was that there was no response from the press, from the government. It was total silence."

Finally, in early October, The Washington Post ran a story by Robert Suro and Walter Pincus headlined, THE CIA AND CRACK: EVIDENCE IS LACKING OF ALLEGED PLOT. The story focused in part on the fact that Webb had given a defense attorney questions to ask Oscar Danilo Blandon about his CIA connections. It also quoted experts who denied that the crack epidemic originated in Los Angeles, disputed that Freeway Rick Ross and Blandon were significant national players in the cocaine trade of the eighties (pegging Blandon's coke business at five tons over the decade, whereas Webb had evidence that it was more like two to five tons per year). And, the article continued, there was no evidence that the black community had been deliberately targeted (the "plot" referred to in the headline and a claim never made by Webb), that the CIA knew about Blandon's drug deals (also a claim never made by Webb, who in the series merely connected Blandon to CIA agents), or that Blandon had ever kicked in more than $60,000 to the contra cause (the Post based this number on unnamed law-enforcement officials; Webb based his estimate of millions of dollars to the contras from dope sales on grand-jury testimony and court documents). Perhaps the best summary of the Post's retort to Webb came from the paper's own ombudsman, Geneva Overholser, some weeks later: "The Post...showed more passion for sniffing out the flaws in San Jose's answer than for sniffing out a better answer themselves. They were stronger on how much less money was contributed to the contras by the Mercury News's villains that their series claimed, how much less cocaine was introduced into L.A., than on how significant it is that any of these assertions are true."

In late October, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times weighed in on consecutive days. The Los Angeles Times had two years before described Freeway Rick Ross vividly: "If there was an eye to the storm, if there was a criminal mastermind behind crack's decade-long reign, if there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles's streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was Freeway Rick....Ross did more than anyone else to democratize it, boosting volume, slashing prices, and spreading disease on a scale never before conceived....While most other dealers toiled at the bottom rungs of the market, his coast-to-coast conglomerate was selling more than five hundred thousand rocks a day, a staggering turnover that put the drug within reach of anyone with a few dollars." In the 1996 response to Webb's series, the Los Angeles Times described Ross as one of many "interchangeable characters" and stated, "How the crack epidemic reached that extreme, on some level, had nothing to do with Ross." Both stories were written by the same reporter, Jesse Katz, and the 1996 story failed to mention his earlier characterization. The long New York Times piece the following day quoted unnamed government officials, CIA personnel, drug agents, and contras, and noted that "officials said the CIA had no record of Mr. Blandon before he appeared as a central figure in the series in the Mercury News."

A common chord rang through the responses of all three papers: It never really happened, and if it did happen, it was on a small scale, and anyway it was old news, because both the Kerry report and a few wire stories in the eighties had touched on the contra-cocaine connection. What is missing from the press responses, despite their length, is a sense that anyone spent as much energy investigating Webb's case as attempting to refute it. The "Dark Alliance" series was passionate, not clinical. The headlines were tabloid, not restrained. But whatever sins were committed in the presentation of the series, they cannot honestly be used to dismiss its content. It is puzzling that The New York Times felt it could discredit the story by quoting anonymous intelligence officials (a tack hardly followed in publishing the Pentagon Papers). In contrast, what is striking in Webb's series is the copius citation of documents. (In the Mercury News's Web-site version cgi.sjmercury.com/drugs/postscriptfeatures.htm -- are the hyperlinked facsimiles of documents that tug one into the dark world of drugs and agents.) But when Jerry Ceppos, the executive editor of the Mercury News, wrote a letter in response to the Post's knockdown, the paper refused to print it because a defense of Webb's work would have resulted in spreading more "misinformation."

Despite Ceppos's initial defense of the series, the Mercury News seemed to choke on these attacks, and Webb could sense a sea change, But he kept on working, building a a bigger base of facts, following its implications deeper into the government. When the Mercury News forced him to choose between a $600,000 movie offer and book deals and staying on the story, Webb picked the story. He kept discovering people who had flown suitcases full of money to Miami from dope sales for the contras. He documented Blandon's contra dope sales from '82 through '86. Gary Webb was on a tear; he was going to advance the story. Almost none of this was published by the Mercury News; the paper grudgingly ran (and buried) one last story on New Year's Eve 1996.

The paper had printed the story of the decade, the one with Pulitzer prize written all over it, and now was unmistakably backing off it. Webb entered a kind of Orwellian world where no one said anything, but there was this thing in the air. The Mercury News assigned one of its own reporters to review the series, using the stories of the L.A. Times, The New York Times, and The Washington Post as the benchmark for what was fact.

Webb wouldn't admit it to himself, but he had become a dead man walking.

WHEN HECTOR BERRELLEZ SPENT HIS YEAR GOING TO MOVIES IN Washington, he knew he was finished in the DEA. One day in October 1996, a month after he retired, Hector Berrellez picked up a newspaper and read this big story about a guy named Gary Webb. Hector had lived in shadows, and talking to reporters had not been his style. "As I read, I thought, This shit is true," he says now. He hadn't a doubt about what Webb was saying. He saw the reporter as doomed. Webb hit a sensitive area, and for it he would be attacked and disbelieved.

Hector knew all about the Big Dog and the Big Boy rules.

Hector's body aches from the weight of secrets. When we meet, he is in a white sport shirt, slacks, a blue blazer with brass buttons, and a shoulder-holstered 9mm with fifteen rounds in the clip and two more clips strapped under his right arm. He may be a little over-armed for his Los Angeles private-investigation agency (the Mayo Group, which handles the woes of figures in the entertainment industry -- that pesky stalker, that missing money -- for a fat fee up front and two hundred dollars an hour), but not for his history. For the rest of his life, Hector Berrellez will be sitting in nice hotels like this one with a cup of coffee in his hand, a 9mm under his jacket, and very quick eyes.

He saw a lot of things and remembers almost all of them. He wrote volumes of reports. In 1997, he was interviewed by Justice Department officials about those unseemly drug ledgers and contra materials he saw during the raid on the fourteen Blandon stash houses back in 1986. His interviewers wanted particularly to know whether anyone besides Hector had seen them. They then told Hector that they couldn't find the seized material anymore.

Before he retired, Hector was summoned to Washington to brief Attorney General Janet Reno on Mexican corruption. He talked to her at length about how the very officials she was dealing with in Mexico had direct links to drug cartels. He remembers that she asked very few questions. Now he sits in the nice lounge of the nice hotel, and he believes the CIA is in the dope business; he believes the agency ran camps in Mexico for the contras, with big planes flying in and out full of dope. He now knows in his bones what the hell he really saw on October 27, 1986, when he hit the door of that house in the Los Angeles area and was greeted with politeness and fresh coffee.

But he doesn't carry a smoking gun around. The photos, the ledgers, all the stuff the cops found that morning as they hit fourteen stash houses where all the occupants seemed to be expecting company, all that material went to Washington and seems to have vanished. All those reports he wrote for years while in Mexico and then later running the Camarena case, those detailed reports of how he kept stumbling into dope deals done by CIA assets, never produced any results or even a substantive response.

Hector Berrellez is a kind of freak. He is decorated; he is an official hero with a smiling Ed Meese standing next to him in an official White House photograph. He pulled twenty-four years and retired with honors. He is, at least for the moment, neither discredited nor smeared. Probably because until this moment, he's kept silent.

And Hector Berrellez thinks that if the blacks and the browns and the poor whites who are zombies on dope ever get a drift of what he found out, well, there is going to be blood in the streets, he figures -- there is going to be hell to pay. He tells me a story that kind of sums up the place he finally landed in, the place that Gary Webb finally landed in. The place where you wonder if you are kind of nuts, since no one else seems to think anything is wrong. An agent he knows was deep in therapy, kind of cracking up from the undercover life. And the agent's shrink decided the guy was delusional, was living in some nutcase world of weird fantasies. So the doctor talked to Hector about his patient, about whether all the bullshit this guy was claiming was true, about dead men and women and children, strange crap like that. And he made a list of his patient's delusions, and he ticked them off to Hector. And Hector listened to them one by one and said, "Oh, that one, that's true. This one, yeah, that happened also." It went on like that. And finally, Hector could tell the shrink wondered just who was nuts -- Hector, his patient, or himself.

ON SUNDAY, MAY 11, 1997, GARY WEBB WAS hanging wallpaper in his kitchen when the San Jose Mercury News published a column by executive editor Jerry Ceppos that was widely read as a repudiation of Webb's series. It was an odd composition that retracted nothing but apologized for everything. Ceppos wrote, "Although the members of the drug ring met with contra leaders paid by the CIA and Webb believes the relationship was a tight one, I feel we did not have proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship." Fair enough, except that Webb never wrote that top CIA officials knew of the contra-cocaine connection. The national press wrote front-page stories saying that the San Jose Mercury News was backing off its notorious series about crack. The world had been restored to its proper order. Webb fell silent. He had to deal with his own nature. He is not good at being polite. "I'm just fucking stubborn," he says, "and that's all there was to it, because I knew this was a good story, and I knew it wasn't over yet, and I really had no idea of what else to do. What else was I going to do?"

What he did was have the Newspaper Guild represent him in arbitration with the Mercury News over the decision to ship him to the wasteland of Cupertino. "I'm going to go through arbitration, and I'm going to win the arbitration, and I'm going to go to work," he says. "I was just going to fight it out. This was what I did, this was me, I was a reporter. This was a calling; it was not something you do eight to five. People were not exactly beating down my door, saying, Well, okay, come work for us. I was...unreliable." So he went to Cupertino, and he wrote stories about constipated horses and refused to let his byline be printed. And then he went to his apartment and missed his wife and family and watched Caddyshack endlessly. He was a creature living a ghostly life. The only thing he didn't figure on was himself. Webb slid into depression. Every week, the 150-mile drive between his family in Sacramento and his job in Cupertino became harder. Every day, it was harder to get out of bed and go to work.

And he was very angry most of the time. He says, "I was going to live in my own house and see my own kids. At some point, I figured something was going to give." Finally, he couldn't make it to work and took vacation time. When that was used up in early August, he started calling in sick. After that, he went on medical leave. A doctor examined him and said, "You are under a great deal of stress," and diagnosed him as having severe depression. He couldn't sleep. He couldn't do much of anything. He decided to write a book about "Dark Alliance," but this time no one wanted it. His agent was turned down by twenty-five publishers before finding a small press, Seven Stories, that operates as a kind of New York court of last resort.

A job offer came from the California state legislature to conduct investigations for the government-oversight committee at about the same money he made for the Mercury News. His wife said, Take the job. Why hang around in this limbo? Webb thought about her words and told himself, What do I win even if I do win in arbitration? I get to go back to my office and get bullshitted the rest of my life. He watered his lawn, worked on the house, read more and more contra stuff. Drifted in a sea of depression. "I didn't know what to do if I couldn't be a reporter," he says. "So all of a sudden, I was standing there on the edge of the cliff, and I don't have what I was doing for the last twenty years -- I don't have that to do anymore. I felt it was like I was neutered. I called up the Guild and said, 'Let's see if they want to settle this case.' They sent me a letter of resignation that I had to sign."

Webb carried the letter with him from November 19 to December 10 of last year. Every day, he got up to sign the letter and mail it. Every night, he went to bed with the letter unsigned. His wife would ask, Have you signed it? Somebody from the Mercury kept calling the Guild and asking, Has he signed it yet? "I mean," he says softly, "writing my name on that thing meant the end of my career. I saw it as a sort of surrender. It was like signing," and here he hesitates for several seconds, "my death certificate."

But finally he signed, and now he is functionally banned from the business. He's the guy nobody wants, the one who fucked up, the one who said bad things. Officially, he is dead, the guy who wrote the discredited series, the one who questioned the moral authority of the United States government.

If Gary Webb could have talked to a Hector Berrellez in the fall of 1996, when his stories were being erased by the media, Hector would have been like a savior to him. "Because he would have shown what I was reporting was not an aberration," Webb says now, "that this was part of a pattern of CIA involvement with drugs. And he would have been believed." But Webb was not that lucky, and the Hectors of the world were not that ready to talk then. So Webb was left out there alone, one guy with a bunch of interviews and documents. One guy who answered a question no one wanted asked.

I CAN HEAR HECTOR BERRELLEZ TELLING ME that I will never find a smoking gun. I can hear the critics of Gary Webb explaining that all he has is circumstantial evidence. Like anyone who dips into the world of the CIA, I find myself questioning the plain facts I read and asking myself, Does this really mean what I think it means?

-- In 1982, the head of the CIA got a special exemption from the federal requirement to report dealings with drug traffickers. Why did the CIA need such an exemption?
http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/cocaine/13.gif
http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/cocaine/13.gif http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/cocaine/ex1.html
http://www.house.gov/waters/ciareportwww.htm
http://www.motherjones.com/sideshow/cia.html

-- Courthouse documents attest to the fact that the Blandon drug organization moved tons of dope for years with impunity, shipped millions to be laundered in Florida, and then bought arms for the contras. Why are Gary Webb's detractors not looking at these documents and others instead of bashing Webb over the head?

-- The internal CIA report of contra cocaine activity has never been released. The Justice Department investigation of Webb's charges has never been released. The CIA has released a censored report on only one volume of Webb's charges. The contra war is over, yet this material is kept secret. Why aren't the major newspapers filing Freedom of Information [Act] requests for these studies?

-- The fifty-year history of CIA involvement with heroin traffickers and other drug connections is restricted to academic studies and fringe publications. Those journalists who find themselves covering the war on drugs should read Alfred McCoy's massive study, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, or Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall's Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America.

-- Following the release of "Dark Alliance," Senator John Kerry told The Washington Post, "There is no question in my mind that people affiliated with, on the payroll of, and carrying the credentials of, the CIA were involved in drug trafficking while involved in support of the contras." Why has the massive Kerry report been ignored to this day?
http://www.thememoryhole.org/kerry/index.htm

-- On March 16, 1998, the CIA inspector general, Frederick P. Hitz, testified before the House Intelligence Committee. "Let me be frank," he said. "There are instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug-trafficking activity, or take action to resolve the allegations."

Representative Norman Dicks of Washington then asked, "Did any of these allegations involve trafficking in the United States?"

"Yes," Hitz answered.

The question is why a mountain of evidence about the CIA and drugs is ignored and why the legitimate field of inquiry opened by Webb remains unpursued and has become journalistic taboo.

Maybe the CIA is great for America. But if it is, surely it can roll up its sleeves and show us its veins.

WEBB AND HIS WIFE, SUE, ARE STANDING IN the driveway with me after a Thai dinner in Sacramento. The night is fresh; spring is in the air. A frog croaks from the backyard on the quiet and safe suburban street. Sue has just finished rattling off details from one facet of the contra war, the CIA drug-airline operation run out of Ilopango airfield in El Salvador. She seems to have absorbed a library of material over the last three years of her husband's obsession. Before, he always worked like hell, she knows, but on this one he brought it home. He could not keep it separated from his wife and family and his weekly hockey games. So Sue, with her winning smile and cheerful ways, has become an authority on America's dark pages. And we stand there in the fine evening air, the rush of spring surging through the trees and grass and shrubs, talking about the endless details of this buried episode in the secret history.

And I wonder how Webb deals with it, with all the hard work done, with all the facts and documents devoured, and with all this diligent toil resulting in his personal ruin, depriving him of the only kind of work he has ever wanted in his life.

And I remember what he said earlier that day while he sat in his study, leaning toward me, his right hand gripping his left wrist: "The trail is littered with bodies. You go down the last ten years, and there is a skeleton here and a skeleton there of somebody that found out about it and wrote about it. I thought that this is the truth, and what can they do to you if you tell the truth? What can they do to you if you write the truth?"

(c)1998 by Hearst Communications, Inc. Printed in the USA. Copyright © 1997-2004 by the Hearst Corporation.

Source: Who's a Rat? :: Armigideon Recce: Timothy Truthseeker