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The Forum > Article Comments > Drug money to die for > Comments

Drug money to die for : Comments

By Harry Throssell, published 16/7/2007

Moral or immoral, criminal or not, at the end of the day, at the end of the money chain, people are dying to get their hands on the wealth generated by illegal drugs.

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This is part of an interview with Professor Alfred McCoy, who investigated the CIA's use of "magic currency":

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They preferred to work through allied banks. Banks that were secure, that were a little bit loose in their accounting procedures. When the Castle Bank was uncovered, the IRS announced a major investigation of the bank's money laundering activities. Suddenly the IRS cancelled the investigation and the Wall Street Journal was told by informed sources in the IRS that the CIA had blocked the investigation.

As soon as Castle Bank collapsed, a small merchant bank based in Australia, operating offshore between Australia and southeast Asia, suddenly mushroomed into a global network of banks, acquiring Latin American and European structures that had belonged to Castle Bank. This bank in Australia called the Nugan-Hand Bank began very quickly in the late 1970's, to acquire a board of retired U.S. intelligence officials, either CIA or various military intelligence services.

The most prominent example, the former Director of Central Intelligence, William Colby, became the legal council of Nugan-Hand Bank. The bank was founded by Frank Nugan, an insecure and incompetent Australian lawyer, and by Michael John Hand, a man with a high school degree who had gone to Vietnam with the Green Berets. He had served in Laos in the 1960's as a contract CIA operative, fighting with three of the people who became very prominent in the CIA's privatized operations, Thomas Clines, Theodore Shackley and Richard Secord, all very big names in the Iran-Contra scandal.

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The rest of the yarn is here:
http://www.bearcave.com/bookrev/nugan_hand.html

There are two CIAs. First there's the one that sets off in hot pursuit of thought criminals like you and me. Then there's the other which oversees the poppy fields of Afghanistan, courtesy of the Great War on Terror and 9-11.

Doesn't it make you so proud to be a partner in the Coalition of The Willing?
Posted by Chris Shaw, Carisbrook 3464, Monday, 16 July 2007 10:57:22 AM
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Great stuff Mr Throssell, there is a real moral issue there beyond the legal issue. Fear tho we have to mostly imagine a world where people cared enough about where goods come from, consider China's use of prison labour in manufacturing our clothes or prevalence of slavery in porn industry.

ChrisS raises a meatier issue, those who would instantly scoff might consider the recent appearance of opium poppy production in southern Iraq
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2573299.ece
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/2/story.cfm?c_id=2&objectid=10441449
Englands grand history of wars & drug trafficking (not called The Opium Wars for the perfume), or how the Nicaraguan Contra's paid for their weapons after Ronald Reagan cut their funding (and Bush I was head of the CIA). "We're not in Kansas anymore Toto", in truth we never were.
Posted by Liam, Monday, 16 July 2007 2:40:04 PM
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