American War Machine полностью

131. Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, 1947–2000 (New York: Knopf, 2001), prologue. Sally Denton later enlarged on the details: “When it became clear 70 United States, American, banks were involved, had the complicity, knew about every single one of the wire-transfers and transactions—banks including Chemical Bank, Bank of New York, CitiBank, American Express— . . . President Clinton and Madeline Albright stepped in and intervened and stopped the entire investigation and closed all of the cases” (discussion at Taos Community Auditorium, October 12, 2002, http://www

.taosplaza.com/taosplaza/2003/pages/tmff_drugs.php).

132. Interview with Al Giordano, Multinational Monitor, April 2002, http://multi

nationalmonitor.org/mm2002/02april/april02interviewgiordano.html.

133. According to U.S. sources in 1998, “The Mexican federation of [drug] cartels alone is believed to earn between $17 and $30 billion each year” (Richard Parker, “U.S. Fickle on Anti-Narcotics Aid,” ABQJournal (Albuquerque Journal), http://www

.abqjournal.com/news/drugs/2drug3-5.htm). These estimates seem consistent with official estimates of drug consumption in the United States, in the order of $64 billion a year (Prestowitz, Rogue Nation, 259). To put the Mexican estimates in perspective, consider that the total of U.S.–Mexican trade in both directions, for the first nine months of 1996, was $94 billion.

134. CNN, July 9, 2009; Fox News, January 12, 2009.

Chapter 3: Operation Paper

1. William O. Walker III, “Drug Trafficking in Asia,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 34, no. 3 (1992): 204.

2. William Peers [OSS/CIA] and Dean Brellis, Behind the Burma Road (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), 64.

3. Burton Hersh, The Old Boys: The American Elite and the Origins of the CIA (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 300.

4. Peter Dale Scott, “Mae Salong,” in Mosaic Orpheus (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009), 45.

5. Peter Dale Scott, “Wat Pa Nanachat,” in Mosaic Orpheus, 56.

6. Vietnam Archive, Oral History Project, Interview with Bill Lair, Texas Tech University, December 12, 2001, http://www.vietnam.ttu.edu/star/images/OH/OH0200/OH0200-part1.pdf. Lair also recruited for the CIA William Young, the son of American missionaries who was raised among Thai–Lao hill tribes and spoke their languages. Young also helped to improve relations between the hill tribes and the Thai government. In this effort he was succeeded by Assawin Willis Bird, the Thai-American son of Willis Bird (Lair’s brother-in-law), who figures prominently in the following pages.

7. I write about this practice in Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003).

8. There are analogies also with the history of U.S. involvement in Iraq, though here the analogies are not so easily drawn. The most relevant point is that U.S. success in the defense of Kuwait during the 1990–1991 Gulf War once again produced internal pressures, dominated by the neoconservative clique and the Cheney–Rumsfeld–Project for the New American Century cabal, which ultimately pushed the United States into another rollback campaign, the current invasion of Iraq itself.

9. G. William Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957), 166–67; Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review Press, 2003), 101; Bertil Lintner, Blood Brothers: The Criminal Underworld of Asia (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 234.

10. Carl A. Trocki, “Drugs, Taxes, and Chinese Capitalism in Southeast Asia,” in Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952, ed. Timothy Brook and Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 99.

11. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 102; James C. Ingram, Economic Change in Thailand, 1850–1970 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971), 177.

12. Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand, 166–67, 236–44, 264–65.

13. Cf. Robert Maule, “British Policy Discussions on the Opium Question in the Federated Shan States, 1937–1948,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 33 (June 2002): 203–24.