(MUSIC)
(Host) Good evening. Welcome to the
Grenada Forum,
an organization dedicated to the truth.
At the end of the program,
our speaker's presentation,
there'll be a question-and-answer
program without restriction.
Feel free to ask any question.
That's the true meaning of
freedom of speech.
Even the press is invited to ask
questions, if any of them are here.
As children, we are taught of
a word called character.
As adults, we seldom run into
those with it. (laughter)
Leastwise in the media or
nside the Beltway.
It takes character to stand alone
and, like David, challence Goliath.
Like Terry Reed of Compromised,
Like Gary Aldrich of Unlimited Access,
like Chris Ruddy of Death of Vince Foster,
like Ambrose Pritchard of
The London Daily Telegraph.
We have men of character in our own midst.
They seldom are forced into the limelight
until the conduct of others that betray
their public trust force the issue.
The fabric of our society has been torn
by some that have an agenda
and have suppressed it.
On November 15th of 1996,
just three months ago,
a dedicated true patriot stood his ground
and did what we call... what we can appreciate.
Picture in your mind's eye
CIA Director John Deutch
on a propaganda mission to Los Angeles
to calm the waters as a result of article
that appeared in the
San Jose Mercury News.
He was hosted by Congresswoman
Juanita McDonalds.
Without blinking an eye,
our speaker said,
"I am a former Los Angeles
Police Narcotics Detective,"
"And I can tell you that the Agency"
"has been dealing in drugs in
this country for a long time."
It is my distinct pleasure and honor
to greet in the behalf
of the Granada Forum
and introduce a man who deserves
our respect and attention.
Please welcome Mr. Michael Ruppert.(applause)
(Michael) Thank you.
Thank you very much.
I guess the first thank you
I'd like to give tonight
is to someone who's not here:
Mr. Peter Ford of KIAV Radio,
who introduced me to you all,
and who made it possible for me
to be here tonight.
I did a show last night
from midnight to 2:00,
and it was a wonderful experience.
And if what we do tonight is
anything like that,
I think we're all gonna have a lot of fun.
I would also like to thank Anne,
who was very kind to make
arrangements for me tonight.
In 19 years, this is the first chance,
believe it or not, that I have had
to address an assembled group of
people on one issue
and to teach what I know,
to share my experiences.
I've done it in snippets;
I've done it on radio talk shows;
but never with the opportunity to lay
out some evidence and make a case.
And I'm very grateful for that:
it was a long wait.
And I am here tonight in two capacities.
If there's any lawyers in the room,
I'll pray for you but... (laughter)
You know that in a court of law,
they talk about evidence.
And one of the first kinds,
and actually the most preferred
kind of direct evidence
is witness testimony.
And all over the major media
and in Congress,
you hear statements that there is
no evidence that CIA deals drugs.
Well, a wittnss can raise his hand
under oath in court,
and that becomes evidence when
he tells his story.
And I have evidence to give you
from my own experience.
I am also here as a detective,
if you will,
although I have not carried a bad for...
since November 30th, 1978,
I consider myself to have been a detective
working on one case for all these years.
And so I'm going to present to you
some of that evidence tonight.
I want to start by giving you just
a little historical background;
and you'll see all these books
on the table here.
And I don't know if they're
in frame or not;
they're probably not.
But you'll see The Big White Lie
by Michael Levine
who is a former DEA Station Chief
-- or country attaché, they call it --
from Argentina.
He was present in Argentina
in 1980
when the Central Intelligence Agency
installed [in Bolivia] the government
of Luis García Meza,
who was a cocaine lord,
and gave him the whole country.
And that was done in conjunction
with the Argentine military.
García Meza's Chief of Security
was Klaus Barbie,
the Butcher of Lyons.
So there was heavy Nazi infiltration
into the Argentinean military.
Mike Levine was there.
He documented it; he protested it;
and of course it fell into this black hole
that those of us in law enforcement
know so well.
The next book that you see there
is written by the only man
that I'm aware of
who's been at this longer
than I have.
And I'm gonna hold this one up.
It's called The Politics of Heroin.
It was originally called The Politics
of Heroin in Southeast Asia,
by Professor Alfred McCoy.
Published first in 1972.
That's 25 years ago, OK?
It is a Bible for those of us who do this.
When we talk about names, dates, places:
the names, the dates, and the places
are in here.
Now, again, if there's any lawyers
in here,
lawyers love to sue people, OK?
Why is it that this book has
never been sued?
There's a saying in the law:
"The truth is an absolute defense
against libel."
OK?
This is one of our major Bibles.
It's in here.
It was recently revised and updated
to include all kinds of information
on Iran-Contra, OK?
The next book that I want to show you...
actually, there are two, both written
by the same authors.
And these two men, I know both of them.
They're both brilliant men.
Professor Peter Dale Scott is a Professor
of English, believe it or not,
at UC-Berkeley.
He got into this many years ago,
and he had a Ph.D,
and he is a dedicated researcher.
His co-writer, Jonathan Marshall, is a...
About as rare as a good lawyer,
he's a good reporter.
He works for the San Francisco Chronicle.
He's an award-winning journalist.
Neither one of these two books,
which name names, dates, places, times,
quantities, relationships, documents
have ever been sued. Ever. OK?
So when Jack Blum,
who was Chief Counsel for this Kerry
Committee during the Iran-Contra era,
recently testified to your friend
and mine Arlen Spector,
he said, "We don't need to go out
and investigate: we know."
What he was alluding to,
is what is contained specifically
in this book,
which is all about Iran-Contra.
Names, dates, places, computer logs:
everything, it's all in here, OK?
We already know. We don't have
to investigate.
We know the CIA deals drugs.
And of course the Los Angeles Times
completely omitted
any reference to Jack Blum's testimony
in their stories.
These two books will give you
anything you need to refute...
you could take Oliver North apart
with about ten pages from this book alone,
and bury him. OK?
The last book that I wanted to show you,
it's almost impossible to get
in this country.
I wonder why?
You can get it in Canada.
Written by my dear friend
Celerino Castillo.
Cele was a DEA agent.
He's a decorated Vietnam vet
who served first in Peru,
and then in the Iran-Contra era
he served in Central America.
He served in Honduras and Salvador
and Guatemala;
and he was at Ilopango Airport,
which was the major Contra supply
airport in El Salvador
for the northern front of the
Contra war effort.
And he describes in this, at the airport,
two hangars:
Hangar Four and Hangar Five.
Now, he's got the records.
Hangar Four was the CIA hangar;
Hangar Five was the NSC hangar:
Both controlled by Oliver North.
He recorded tail numbers;
he watched the cocaine being loaded;
he talked to the pilots;
he got the flight plans;
he watched as the planes
were given gratis entry
across the border in the United States.
He wrote reports.
And what happened was
Ambassador Edwin Corr
-- who is now teaching at the
University of Oklahoma at Norman --
came to Cele and said, "Leave it alone,
bud. It's a White House operation."
That's evidence. That's a clue.
(laughter)
Cele had this wonderful experience
of going to a formal dinner at
the US Embassy in El Salvador.
And the guest of honor that night
was Vice-President George
Herbert Walker Bush.
(audience: "Ooh!")
So Cele was there, and Bush was there,
and they bring Bush over to Cele,
and, "Mr. Vice-President, this is Celerino
Castillo, our senior DEA agent."
and: "How do you do?" -- Mr. Bush --
"You're a hero to the country."
Cele said, "Mr. Vice-President:
I've gotta talk to you!"
"There's something really
wrong going on here!"
"They're flying drugs out of four and five,
and CIA's behind it!"
And George Bush said,
"Nice to meet ya,"
And walked away, you know.
Don't let anybody tell you
there is no evidence.
There is a mountain of evidence
already in existence, OK?
It is irrefutable; it is iron-clad.
All right?
Now, given that, I want to paint
a little picture for you.
I want to go back historically,
because my own experience is going
to add a little dimension to this for you.
Picture that I have a blackboard behind me
-- which I don't, OK? --
But say there's a blackboard
and we're gonna say that right here
is Southeast Asia,
and right here is the United States,
and right here is South America,
and over here is the Middle East, OK?
Somebody was talking earlier about
organized crime and CIA.
And of course, my opinion is CIA is
organized crime. (laughter)
In the Second World War,
some deals were made between
the Office of Strategic Services
and the Mafia in New Orleans.
We were afraid of Nazi sabotage,
so we took a guy named Lucky Luciano
out of prison in New York.
And he guaranteed that there would be
no sabotage on the docks in New York.
We took a guy named Vito Genovese
-- I like that: (exaggerated, languorous
Italian accent) Vito Genovese
And we let him to back to Sicily
so spy on it so we could go and invade
Sicily when Patton went in there.
Of course, they went right back
into the drug business.
They went right back into
their operations.
The bond is very, very close.
Stop there: fast-forward to 1954.
1954: Diên Biên Phu.
The French were kicked out
of Indochina.
Now, almost everybody knows that
the Golden Triangle in Indochina
is where most of the world's heroin
has come from for a long time.
It is the largest opium-growing
region in the world.
There are several others.
The French, in order to sustain their war,
had been paying the local tribesmen,
the Hmong tribesmen,
and Kuomintang
-- the Chinese who were
kicked out of China --
with opium: which was a long holdover
from the British opium trade
from the 18th Century.
When the French went out,
we filled that void,
and we went some people to Indochina.
Their names were Aderholt, Singlaub...
-- does that ring a bell to anybody? --
there was also a guy by the name
of Paul Helliwell,
and there was a guy by the name
of Richard Stillwell,
and these are the people that we
sent into Southeast Asia, CIA,
to take over where the French left.
Extremely well-documented.
And one of the first things
John Singlaub did,
and one of the first things
Paul Helliwell did,
was to take over the payment
of Kuomintang and other
rebels with heroin.
It was just the way you did business.
As we moved closer to the Vietnam era,
that trade began to expand
because of the relationship
between CIA and the Mafia.
As we get to the Vietnam War...
now, again, picture I'm drawing on the
board up here some other names.
If we fast-forward to the Vietnam era,
I'm gonna write some other
names in Southeast Asia:
Theodore Shackley: Station Chief
in Laos; later, Station Chief in Saigon.
Richard Secord: anybody ever
hear that name? (laughter) Nah.
Richard Armitage: anybody
ever hear that name?
Eric von Marbod: anybody
ever hear that name?
OK. von Marbod was in the military at
the time, Department of Defense.
They all worked extremely
closely together.
Tom Clines is another one who was
Ted Shackley's deputy in Laos.
Extremely well-documented.
There are still living witnesses.
There are Air America pilots still alive
who later became involved in Iran-Contra,
that we ran the whole war in Laos...
-- which was completely without, outside
of Congressional oversight --
with heroin.
We've all heard the stories about heroin
coming back in body cavities
in the dead GIs.
Air America: Air Heroin, OK?
The black planes.
In the last 19 years, I have spoken
to more than a dozen members
-- former members --
of the US Army Special Forces,
the Green Berets,
who were sometimes ordered
to carry the heroin by CIA.
We ran this whole war there
on heroin money.
That heroin money did not
just pay for the war:
it paid for a lot of other things.
Now, what happened is...
-- and the picture I want
to paint to you is --
I don't know if anyone here is familiar
with the disease of alcoholism? OK?
I happen to be an alcoholic.
I'm sober 14 years, OK?
So I know a little bit about it. (applause)
And what happens is that it's
a progressive disease.
One is too many, and ten thousand
is not enough.
Once you take a little,
you have to take more,
and there's no way to stop
until you crash and burn,
until you eventually burn yourself out.
What happened in Vietnam
was that by 1970,
the heroin trade had spilled over,
and we were selling it to our own GIs.
One third of the GIs in Vietnam were
addicted to heroin when they came back.
OK? They were smoking it or tootin' it.
They'd get what's called
a stomach jones, OK?
So, that war continued, I think,
until the military-industrial complex
kind of milked it for all it was worth,
and until White Middle America
took to the streets.
OK?
1975, it ended.
Now I'm gonna tell you about my story,
because this is where I come
into the picture.
I come from a CIA family.
I was born in Washington, DC.
My father was an Air Force officer;
he worked for Martin-Marietta
building the Titan IIICs which
put up the Keyhole Spy Satellites.
My father's cousin Barbara was CIA;
her husband Sam had been OSS,
even before CIA.
They both did 25, 30 years and
retired from the Agency.
My mother had been Army Intelligence
working in the code-breaking section
in the Pentagon
during the Second World War.
So I come from a family of spooks,
and I will tell you: it was a
dysfunctional family. (laughter)
I was an honors student; I am an honors
graduate in Political Science from UCLA.
I went there from '69 to '73,
and I was one of two living Republicans
on the UCLA campus during
those years. (laughter)
The other one was a guy by
the name of Craig Fuller.
Now, I was chosen to intern
for Chief Ed David as LAPD,
having been groomed and
having already been spotted
as part of -- what? -- the Establishment?
The in-crowd? An up-and-comer.
Craig was chosen to intern
for Governor Ronald Reagan.
Craig was George Bush's Chief of Staff
during Iran-Contra.
As I was chosen to intern for Chief Davis,
I began...
I was exposed to people
from Army Intelligence
and an operation known as Garden Plot.
I was told that I had a Q Clearance
when I was 20 years old,
and I had to go home and ask my father
what the hell a Q Clearance was:
I didn't know!
In the Organized Crime
Intelligence Division,
I got exposed to one guy in particular
by the name of John Xavier Bach,
and I was told that he had... or, he
was a CIA-connected guy in LAPD.
Well, it gets to where I'm just about ready
to graduate from UCLA in 1973.
I'm magna cum laude,
and the world is my oyster.
I had interned for LAPD for three years.
My family buys me a plane ticket;
I go back to Washington, DC,
and I go for an interview with the CIA
in the old Executive Office Building.
And here's this guy behind this desk
with this huge CIA emblem
on the wall behind him.
And he says, "Mike, I've looked
at all your stuff."
"You're just a wonderful kid."
"You've got a great background; you're in
great shape..." you know, da-da-da.
"What we'd like you to do is
to graduate from UCLA,"
join the CIA as a Case Officer...
-- and a case officer is the highest
rank within the Agency;
that's the highest level;
there are levels above that, but
that's the crème de la crème --
"And we want you to, then, after you're
a CIA Case Officer, go back,"
"and go through the Los Angeles Police
Department Academy,"
"and LAPD will be your cover."
I sat through the interview,
and I got a stack of papers about
that thick for my clearances,
and I said, "Thank you very much,"
and I came back to LA,
and I threw 'em away.
And I said, "That's illegal. I don't want
anything to do with that."
I joined LAPD in 1973, was Valedictorian
of my Academy class.
Went to work in an area
called The Jungle,
which is down near Crenshaw
and Martin Luther King.
Was having a great time:
I was a good cop; I loved it.
I'd never had so much fun in my life.
I mean, it was what I wanted to do,
and I thrived on it.
I specialized in narcotics...
-- and then I met and fell in love
with a CIA agent.
She came to my regular old cop bar,
and we met and fell in love.
This is what we call the "unofficial
recruitment." (laughter)
It was more fun than the one in the office,
I'll tell you that! (laughter)
And she knew people in LAPD's
intelligence divisions.
I didn't even know who they were.
She kept mentioning this General
by the name of Lee Goforth.
And I'm going, "Well, who the heck is he?"
"Well, he's a General, and
he deals with terrorists."
I'm like, "Uh, well, that sounds great."
Then she'd mention organized
crime figures:
Carlos Marcello, New Orleans;
Hank Friedman, Dan Horowitz,
and other naems like that.
And then she'd tell me things out of my
confidential personnel package at LAPD.
There are two packages:
one in your division,
and a master one at Parker Center.
And then after a while,
when we got engaged,
she said, "I work for the government."
"My people are very interested in having
you go to work for me..." or, "for us."
Bada-bing, bada-boom: and
then she started taking trips;
and she'd come back from Hawaii and say,
"Yeah, I was in this room, and there
were 50 kilos of cocaine"
"And close to a thousand M-16s."
Now, me being a narc...
-- by the way: LAPD, when I was in
Watts and I confronted John Deutch said,
"He's never worked narcotics." OK?
"United States Department of Justice
Drug Enforcement Administration"
"Michael Craig Ruppert"
-- that's me --
I didn't get it for writing
parking tickets.
I just wanted to do that in case LAPD
was watching. (applause)
I said, "Look, if I'm ever in a room
with 50 kilos of cocaine,"
"somebody's going to jail!" (laughter)
I mean, what's wrong with you people!
I mean, here I had been on loan
to Wilshire narcotics a few times,
writing search warrants,
happy to get an ounce,
and she's talking about fifty keys!
And I, you know... "Wow!"
"No, we never touch the drugs."
"What?"
"No, we don't touch the drugs."
"We kind of follow the guns."
"Okay. I'm not gonna get involved
in anything that overlooks drugs."
Well, she related the same stories
as having occured
in Baja California;
in Del Rio, Texas;
in The Bahamas;
in New Orleans;
and I kept saying...
(responding to inaudible comment)
Oh, it was long before Mena.
This was in 1976.
We hadn't even got to Mena yet.
And I kept saying, "I'm not gonna..."
And I thought it was some kind of test!
You know, I thought they were
testing my integrity.
"I'm not gonna do anything
that overlooks drugs."
"Forget it: I'm a cop!"
Anyway, after a while, it became clear
that I was not gonna roll over,
and she disappeared. (laughter)
Very suddenly.
Right after she disappeared,
a bunch of Italian thugs walked into
my mother's real estate office.
And then I found myself on loan to
Organized Crime Intelligence Division.
And who do I find myself working with
but a guy named Lee Goforth,
who was a senior detective, Detective III
in Organized Crime Intelligence
and a Brigadier General in
the California National Guard.
He was also LAPD's representative
to LEIU,
Law Enforcement Intelligence Unit,
which is very heavily influenced
by the alphabet soup.
His younger partner, Norm Bonneau,
and who's in OCID but
John Xavier Bach!
So, now I'm having all kinds
of weird things happen:
hang-up phone calls, burglaries;
I'm getting followed;
I have to spy on my mother,
gather intelligence.
This is a little stressful.
In 1977, I got burglarized.
Now, she left saying that someone was
trying to kill her, and that was the cover.
Somebody stole one of my guns;
somebody stole a photograph of her;
somebody got an address that I had
just gotten on her in New Orleans.
So my Captain, who was, to this day,
one of the finest men I've ever known,
a guy by the name of Jesse Brewer,
who was the black Police Commissioner
here in Los Angeles
during the time of the riots
-- a wonderful human being --
went to bat for me. He said,
"Look, OCID is lying. What do you want?
Take a vacation."
I went to New Orleans. And that was
the biggest mistake of my life.
I got to New Orleans, and she's got an
apartment with a scrambler phone.
And I didn't know what it was.
It's just like this eight-pound telephone
that looks like a normal phone,
but it has a little thing that you plug
into a wall socket,
and you plug that in.
And I had to describe it years later
to an Air Force officer.
He says, "That's a KY3."
At the time, it required a TS Clearance.
A TS or Crypto Clearance.
She had this black night vision device
that she carried around in a paper bag.
Naval and Air Force NCOs from
Belle Chase Naval Air Station
were bringing her communiqués.
And it was funny, because
they'd be in civilian clothes,
but they'd have the military shoes on
and their military ID card sticking up
out of their shirt pocket.
I mean, great disguise! (laughter)
And they'd bring these
sealed communiqués.
And then there was this guy
named Freddy
who had been a veteran of the Third
Battalion Fifth Special Forces,
who she went out with at night,
and I got to meet a whole
bunch of people
that worked for a company
named Brown and Root.
Major CIA contractor. They built
Cam Rahn Bay.
They are one the major homes
of sheep-dipped employees.
For those of you who don't know
what sheep-dipping is,
it's when CIA takes a guy out
of the Agency spy school
and puts them in IBM or some company
as their cover
to go travel around the world.
So all these people are
shipping out for Iran.
Oh, by the way: I didn't mention
that Teddy grew up with the
niece of the Shah of Iran,
and she used to get letters
all the time from Iran,
and Teddy was American.
And one time the Shah's nephew,
Shahyar [Pahlbod]
came and picked her up,
took her out to dinner.
So anyway, I'm watching her
make arrangements
for all kinds of guns to leave.
And then later I'm hearing
her make arrangements
for certain packages to be dropped
off on oil rigs in the Gulf.
And they would be stashed on the
oil rigs, down on the pilings,
and bubbleheads, as they call them
-- deep-sea divers, hardhats --
would go down and pull up
the packages of heroin
at the same time that a service boat
coming out to bring food
would arrive at the oil rig, not subject
to Customs search.
And the divers would just toss
the heroin, then home.
Carlos Marcello controlled the whole
dock operation in New Orleans,
so here I saw...
and the name CIA was dropped six
or seven times while I was there.
I saw scrambled communications,
and letterheads, and all this stuff.
So they were controlling an operation
where drugs were going out
and guns were coming in.
This is was in 1977.
So after eight days, I said,
"Goodbye, I'm leaving"
"I don't want anything to do
with you people."
And for those of us who have
been through this,
it is a very painful loss of innocence.
I can't tell you how painful it is to begin to
discover that your country is really dirty.
And you do it in stages.
You don't let go all at once.
I came back, I told everybody,
"Leave me alone," and they wouldn't.
I kept getting followed, chased.
I got shot at once in New Orleans.
And I would up going into a hospital
for stress,
basically because OCID said
they were gonna commit me under one
of their psychiatrists. (crowd murmurs)
So I said, "OK, I'm going into
my own hospital."
And I got tested eight ways from Sunday,
and they said I was perfectly sane,
and I fought a little battle
and was injured on duty.
I returned, earned the highest rating
reports possible in LAPD;
was about to be promoted; was
on staff at the Police Academy:
And the Iranian Revolution broke loose.
And I started to make some more
connections,
and that's when I started getting
death threats, and burglarized.
I wound up taking a tape-recorded
eath threat,
and I asked to see Chief Daryl Gates.
Where do you go if Organized Crime
Intelligence is lying to you?
In LAPD, there is no place else
you go but the Chief.
And I said, "I've got a problem."
Because Daryl Gates had just
been made Chief,
and his bodyguard-driver was a guy
by the name of John Xavier Bach.
(crowd murmers)
And I said, "I can't see Daryl while
Bach's there, because he's CIA."
And I got a message back from
Sergeant Pickering,
a friend of mine who had
relayed the message:
"Well, the chief realizes that somebody
may be trying to kill you."
"He's kind of busy. He can give you five
or ten minutes in a week or ten days."
"Would you like to make
an appointment?"
I wanna show you something.
I'm gonna being giving this out
at the press conference
at the rally that we're doing
this weekend.
This is from the Los Angeles Times, and
the date on this is November 17th, 1984:
"Officers' Moonlighting Probed."
If you read this, it talks about
a Detective
who went back to Organized Crime
Intelligence
named John Xavier Bach.
And it says... it says here... it says...
"Copies of official records of the
California Department of Justice that"
"contain information about criminal
history"
"of members of the Jewish
Defense League..." da-da-da,
"government code," da-da-da...
OK:
"turned over a transcript of the
conversation between Glalley and Earl (sp)
to an employee of the
Central Intelligence Agency
whom Ripaski (sp) identified
as Jack Harmeyer (sp).
He was moonlighting for the Central
Intelligence Agency on city time,
and he was convicted in
municipal court, OK?
No corroboration for my story
whatsoever, right?
Not according to the LA Times.
I had alleged in 1978
that he was CIA, OK?
So I wound up resigning.
I got an attorney,
and I got an attorney who was
a former FBI Intelligence agent.
(laughter)
Don't hold it against me.
Look we have to learn...
I was way ahead of you guys on this,
you know. This was in '78.
I went to the FBI, went to Sam Hayakawa,
Bob Dornin, Alan Cranston. (sp)
Sam Hayakawa was a very gracious
and wonderful gentleman.
He was the only elected official
who ever went to bat for me.
In all these years, he is the only
one who ever did.
Anyway: got on the record
wherever I could,
and I documented everything
I had seen in New Orleans.
So sum up: the points that I made in
four-and-a-half hour complaint to the FBI
that I later made to a reporter David
Rosensweig (sp) at the LA Times
-- who, until recently, was Assistant
Managing Editor at the LA Times --
to all the Congresspeople,
to everything else, I said:
"Carlos Marcello, guns, drugs, CIA, Hawaii,
California, Mexico, submarines,"
"Texas, Louisiana, terrorism,
and rebel groups"
That was in 1978.
Item from the Los Angeles Times:
-- you're gonna love this one --
"Guns for drugs trade booming,
reports disclose.'
From Newsday.
Times didn't write it, but they
reprinted this story from Newsday, OK?
And what it says is: "Carlos Marcello,
guns, drugs, terrorist groups,"
"Baja California, submarines, Texas,
Louisiana, The Bahamas..."
and everything I had said a year before.
The LA Times said, "There's no
story here!" (laughter, murmuring)
No corroboration.
David Rosenzweig (sp), after this
came out, was promoted
from Staff Writer to
Assistant City Editor, OK?
I called the writer for that story,
Tom Renard (sp),
and I mentioned the name Bonneau.
He said, "Wait a minute: LAPD, Bonneau?"
-- turned through his pages --
"I've got this guy Bonneau's name"
"in connection with a CIA machine gun
factory in Mexico."
-- "Uh, wait a minute. OK." --
So he says, "Call this investigator,
Bill Christianson, who's working for"
"Deconcini's [Sub-]Committee on Improvements in Judicial Machinery"
Great name.
So I call Christianson up and
I run through all the stuff.
Now I know: CIA is dealing drugs.
They're protecting Marcello.
They're hand-in-glove;
they're partners, and CIA is
profiting from the deals, OK?
I call Christianson, I lay it out.
He says,
"You're right! My offices are bugged;
I'm getting followed;"
"We were burglarized last week."
This is a Senate investigator.
This is 1979. OK?
He says, "We'll get you back
here to testify."
That was the first time I was
promised I could testify.
A short time later, I had to start
looking for a job.
I was a writer.
I had been laid off from one writing job,
and I couldn't find a job
anywhere in this city.
And I would see unmarked
LAPD cars turning up
outside of places where
I would go for interviews.
After about three weeks,
I took a job at a 7-11 store,
because I needed to eat.
My first day on the job,
somebody calls up and says,
"Is Mike Ruppert working today?"
My second day on the job,
I was arrested for selling
liquor to a minor.
The second time I was shot at:
after that, I was dead drunk.
I was on my lawn.
I mean, I really didn't care much
anymore, and somebody shot at me.
I didn't even bother
to report it at that time.
I was just ready to give up.
But you can't give up.
That's what I found out.
(applause)
I wish I had a choice.
I really do wish I had a choice.
So I kept pursuing and pursuing
and pursuing,
and eventually one reporter,
from the days when we had a paper
in this town... (laughter) (applause)
Randall Sullivan.
I made the front page of the Herald Examiner two Sundays in a row,
October 11th and October 18th, 1981.
There's a full page.
I love this part: it says, "Mike Ruppert,
perhaps LAPD's most intelligent officer."
I really like that one.
If I'm so intelligent,
what am I doing this for?
OK, it lays out all this stuff about CIA.
It actually even finally mentioned
down here
-- after the end of two parts
in two weeks --
CIA dealing drugs.
So I am on the record in October of 1981.
I even have documents back from the
FBI saying that I said it back in 1980.
So I do have a claim to some
seniority here. (laughter)
What that gets me, I have no idea.
Now, by this time, Ronald Reagan
is President.
Craig Fuller is Assistant to President
Reagan for Cabinet Affairs.
Craig Fuller's name turns up
in this article.
I had a letter from Craig:
"Any time you're in Washington,
come and see me."
"I'd love to see ya."
So I fly back with Part Two
under my arm.
October 26, 1981, I am invited into
the West Wing of the White House.
(silence; single audience
member whistles)
And I get into the basement.
Now, the Senate was gonna say that...
Senate Intelligence was gonna
say I was never there,
because two original White House letters
were burglarized from my home
just three months ago.
The same day that a senior investigator
for Senate Select Al Cummings
called me and asked me if I had original
letters on White House stationery.
(audience murmurs)
He's been very helpful,
by the way, though.
I mean, he told LAPD he was
doing an active investigation:
"Yeah, we were trying to get
these letters,"
"and everything Mike said is true,"
"and we had trouble faxing them,"
and all kinds of shit.
Excuse me: I said a bad word.
So anyway, I get into Craig's office,
and just for the record, Craig's office:
if you're looking at the West Wing,
you go in through the portico.
You take a hard right past
the receptionist,
and on the far side of the reception area,
there's a very steep and
narrow staircase,
because it's built over so many years.
You go down to the bottom
of the staircase;
you take a hard right and come back,
and he had the corner office facing
Pennsylvania Avenue and 17th.
Tell me I wasn't there, OK?
I sat in his office and
we talked for a while,
and then I said,
Craig, look: CIA's really heavily
infiltrated LAPD,
and CIA is complicit in bringing
drugs into this country,
and it's wrong.
Now, I'll tell you exactly
what Craig said:
(silence)
(laughter)
He did not move; he did not breathe;
he did not anything,
until I changed the subject, OK?
Not:
"Oh my God, I'm a public servant!"
"What you're alleging is a great
outrage to the American people."
"It's offense to the Constitution
and any sense of decency"
"possessed by any human being
anywhere in the world."
Not:
"My God, this is terrible! Somebody
needs to look into this! This is awful!"
He just sat stone silent.
And then George Bush made him his
Chief of Staff in the second Reagan term.
And I remember walking out of the
White House and saying to myself,
"Self, where do I go now?"
So I came back to Los Angeles,
and it was one of the several times
I tried to put all this behind me.
And of course, events just
kept catching up again,
because in 1981 Oliver North
was just getting started.
Now, in January of '82, I went to UCLA
-- which was my school --
and I sought out the ranking expert
on Middle East affairs
in the Political Science department,
a guy named Paul Jabber.
You're gonna love this one, this story!
So, I go to Paul Jabber's office.
Now, by now I've pieced
some stuff together
about why the guns are going
and where they're going.
And I've narrowed it down to probably
the Kurds, maybe the Baluchis,
and it had to do with arming a group
in Iran to fight somebody...
-- excuse me --
mildly in connection, maybe,
with the revolution,
but I wasn't sure.
But I had names of people like Shackley
-- and we'll get to that in a minute.
See, he says, "My God, Mike:
your analysis is brilliant!"
"Did you know, by the way,
hat I was a CIA consultant"
"and a State Department consultant
for Jimmy Carter?" (laughter)
Do you ever feel like God's following
you around with this stuff? (laughter)
And I said, "No..."
And he said,
"Listen: I have secrecy oaths,"
"and I have these agreements
that I've signed."
I can't tell you outright;
but why don't you go read the
New York Times on these dates,
articles by C. L. Sulzberger and
William Safire,
and look up the Kurds,
and tell me what you think.
So I went and did it, and I
pieced it all together.
And what happened was,
on March 3, 1975...
-- March 3, 1975: April, 1975
is when Saigon fell.
Remember the context of history. --
March 3, 1975: the Shah of Iran
and Saddam Hussein
signed the Treaty of Algiers.
We had been arming the Kurds for
decades to fight against Iraq
so that Iraq could not attack Israel, OK?
Through Iraq. And what
the Shah said was,
S"Saddam, if you give me the
hatt al-Arab waterway,"
"I can double my oil exports, and
I'll cut off all aid to the Kurds,"
"and you can massacre them,"
"and then your army's free to do
whatever you want to do."
So they shook hands at the
Treaty of Algiers: March 3, '75.
Within weeks, about 8-10,000 Kurds
were massacred.
So I pieced it together, and I
went back to Paul Jabber,
and I said,
"Well, what happened was, then,"
"in order to keep the Kurds alive,"
"they used the opium-smuggling
routes..."
-- Kurdistan being, by the way,
the second-largest opium-growing
region in the world --
"to smuggle out opium,
which was made into heroin"
"and sold here to buy the guns
to keep the Kurds alive."
He says, "You're absolutely right."
"The decision was made at the
National Security Council level..."
-- read that, folks: that's
the White House! --
to sell heroin to American citizens
to keep the Kurds alive. OK?
(Man in audience) Maybe
that was just a pretext!
Moving right on.
Do you guys pay him, or what?
(laughter, applause)
OK.
Remember Southeast Asia here,
where I wrote some names
like Ted Shackley, Tom Clines,
Richard Secord?
What happened in 1975?
The Vietnam War ended.
Ted Shackley moved and became
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
in charge of covert operations
for the Middle East.
Richard Secord was transfered
to Iran as the Air Attaché.
Richard Armitage was transferred to Iran
on missions connected with
banking and finance.
Is this beginning to sound familiar here?
Is there a pattern shaping up h
ere somewhere? OK?
The same players from Southeast Asia
moved to Iran.
The same players from Iran in 1980
moved into Pakistan
when the Russians invaded Afghanistan.
Everywhere these people go, there is
a huge boom in the drug trade.
Pakistan, before the invasion
by the Soviets,
had supplied zero percent
f American heroin.
(man in audience) You mean
Afghanistan.
Afghanistan: well, no.
They had invaded Afghanistan,
but all of the American supply operations
were run from Pakistan.
The mujahideen were armed
through American bases in Pakistan
over into the border.
By the middle of that conflict,
40 to 60 percent of the heroin
n this country
was coming from -- guess where? -- Pakistan. Duh!
So, now we move to Iran-Contra.
The Bowen Amendment says,
"No more lethal aid to the Contras."
"Cut 'em off."
Reagan says, "We'll go private..."
Oliver North, by the way, started to get
involved back in Iran and Pakistan.
He starts cropping up.
Now we have the Contra
supply operation.
And who do we find?
-- Oh, by the way: John Singlaub
went to the Middle East, too --
Now, who do we find cropping
up in Iran-Contra?
John Singlaub, Richard Secord,
Ted Shackley, Richard Armitage...
all the same people. Oliver North,
again: the same people
-- for 40 years, 50 years --
have been doing the same thing. OK?
Now we get to Iran-Contra.
And I'm not gonna spend
a great deal of time
on all this stuff that's already out.
I will give you one specific
case illustrating,
and that's the case of Juan Ramón
Matta-Ballesteros, of Honduras.
And during the early years of the
Iran-Contra era,
Honduras was supplying
approximately 50 percent
of the cocaine consumed i
n this country,
through Matta-Ballesteros.
Duane Clarridge, CIA Station Chief,
had contracted with
Matta's airline, SETCO,
for exclusive contracting for
Contra supply operations.
DEA station in Honduras was
ordered closed in 1982.
Juan Ramón Matta-Ballesteros
was very closely connected
with a Mexican cartel run by
Felix Gallardo and Rafael Caro Quintero.
Everybody remember Kiki Camerena?
Kiki Camerena was investigating
Gallardo and Quintero.
He was chasing a CIA drug ring
when he was murdered.
And I have found one of the men,
the CIA agents,
who was on the mission where
Kiki was murdered.
And we're gonna get into that in a second.
Now, I want to backtrack a little bit.
A lot has been overlooked about the
role of the US military in drug-dealing,
as ordered by the CIA.
Over 20 years of my investigations,
what I see is several things.
First of all, what I call the
"shadow government,"
which includes many agencies...
-- DIA, Defense Department, NSA...
they're everywhere, OK? --
had used large components
of the military.
Many people here... let me ask:
is anyone here familiar with
the Watchtower missions?
I see a couple of hands. OK.
The Watchtower missions took
place in the mid- to late-'70s.
Elements of the Seventh Special
Forces Group Airborne
were ordered from Panama by a guy
by the name of Edwin Wilson
on orders from a guy by the name
of Tom Clines
-- Ted Shackley's deputy; Ted Shackley
is now out of the agency --
to take Special Action Teams into
Colombia and plant radar beacons,
so the cocaine flights can fly below radar
and land at Albrook Airfield in Panama.
Special Forces troops were there,
including one William Tyree,
as Manuel Noriega meets the aircraft,
along with Ed Wilson and a
guy named Michael Harari
of the Israeli Mossad, OK?
There were three series
of these missions,
each commanded by a different
Special Forces Colonel.
All of these Special Forces
Colonels are dead.
Actually, there are five Special Forces
Colonels who have been murdered:
Baker, Rowe, Cutolo, Malvesti,
and Bayard, OK?
There was...
it centers around an affidavit
called the Cutolo Affadavit.
These are some of my documents
relevant to Watchtower.
And I'll tell you right up front
that the affadavit of Ed Cutolo,
Colonel at Tenth Special Forces,
-- he went from the Seventh
to the Tenth --
this is the cover sheet:
it was not written by
Colonel Edward Cutolo.
One of the reasons why I know that
is because he refers to the
Panamanian Defense Forces,
and Ed Cutolo was murdered in 1980,
and they weren't named the Panamanian
Defense Forces until '85. OK?
But everything in his affidavit
has been corroborated.
He left files with people at the NSA,
and I know who the people are.
But we're not gonna discuss
names there.
Every aspect of the Watchtower missions
has been corroborated independently
by other affidavits.
We fast-forward to 1978, 1979, '80.
Cutolo is now commander of
Tenth Special Forces Group Airborne
at Fort Devens, Massachusetts.
And we have an operation
known as Orwell.
Due to the massive CIA drug operations,
they were afraid of leaks.
Now remember, when I left LAPD,
it was November 30, 1978.
Orwell was at its peak then.
Army Security Agency,
Special Forces personnel,
military intelligence personnel were
ordered to bug and wiretap courthouses,
politicians, anybody who had
any knowledge.
We have affidavits from people
who pulled mics out of courthouse
walls in Massachusetts.
They did John Kerry.
They did Tip O'Neill.
They did anybody, any politician who
might expose these operations.
Now, we have a Sergeant Bill Tyree
who was on these missions,
who had been on the missions
in Central America,
who had been ordered to do
these surveillances,
-- and he wanted out.
He got sick to his stomach.
He'd had enough.
This was not America to him.
His wife had been keeping diaries.
They murdered his wife,
and they framed him for it.
We have affidavits from people saying
he wasn't even at the murder scene.
We have a letter from the District
Attorney who prosecuted the case,
who was gay,
who was being blackmailed
by Special Forces saying,
"Please destroy the videotape showing
the murderer other than Tyree"
"coming out of the bedroom window."
OK?
There's so much proof that...
he's been in prison now eighteen years.
I talked to him yesterday. OK?
And as we move along with this case,
we get more and more information
about Watchtower.
This -- I will hold up for you here --
this is what the Army has to say
about Watchtower (laughter)
And then they say it never existed;
it just wasn't there.
The Central Intelligence Agency -- if I
can find it quickly, and I probably can't --
but I have documents that he got from
the Central Intelligence Agency
that says, "There was no
Watchtower mission."
-- it's a six-page letter in reponse to his
Freedom of Information Act Request --
They go through three-and-a-half
pages of "There is no Watchtower,"
and then -- badda-bing, badda-boom --
it says at the end, "We are reviewing
all of our Watchtower documents"
"because we've had so many requests
for them; and as soon as..."
Then they wrote him and said,
"Can we have our last letter back?"
Believe it or not, they did. (laughter)
These people are not as smart
as we give them credit for.
(applause) They use fear as a tool, OK?
There is so much evidence
about Watchtower.
And I have spoken to many
Special Forces people.
This came out, by the way, through
Bo Gritz, who I've met several times,
after Paul Neary of the National Security
Agency died of natural causes,
it was forwarded to Bo,
and Bo started to release
it in the early '90s.
And there is a ton...
I mean, if this guy ever gets a trial,
he's free.
And In my speech Saturday at the rally,
I'm going to be talking about Bill Tyree.
I'm going to be talking about the twelve
or so members of Special Forces
who have shared with me
the shame they carry
at having been ordered
to do things like this.
Now, I want to get to someone who's
even gonna make you feel worse,
if that's possible.
Ah, thank you.
Pardon me, I'm gonna hit the glass.
This is a guy that I get to take credit
for discovering all by myself.
Again, I have such wonderful luck.
Colonel Albert Vincent Carone.
In this copyrighted report
that I wrote in 1994,
I called him the missing link
between Iran-Contra cocaine operations
and organized crime.
This man was 20 years with the
New York Police Department,
a detective,
who happened to be involved in
a couple of very key NYPD cases
known as The French Connection
and The Prince of the City,
for which my colleague Jimmy Rothstein
, a retired NYPD detective,
deserves great credit as having
uncovered the CIA links to both cases.
This is a picture of Colonel Albert
Carone after his retirement from NYPD.
He was caught sodomizing
two twelve-year-old boys,
and they gave him a pension.
He had been a bagman and a CIA
operative for his whole career.
He is the counterpart in NYPD
for what they wanted me and others
to do at LAPD,
except for... this guy died,
by the way, in 1990.
I've held his personal phone book
in my hand.
Let me backtrack again:
the death certificate when he died:
we call it "the CIA flu."
The death certificate read
"chemical toxicity of unknown etiology,"
(laughter)
His liver and brain self-destructed
over a period of six months,
and no doctor, of about eleven
doctors who treated him,
could figure out what was causing it.
I've held his phone book in my hand,
Colonel Albert Carone,
and in that phone book, I found William
Casey's home phone number
in Locust Valley, Long Island.
I found the home phone number
for Paulie Castellano.
Anybody know who Paulie Castellano is?
He's the guy who took over
the Gambino crime family.
"Matty the Horse" Ianniello.
Pete Licavoli.
More mobsters than you
can shake a stick at.
Now, I found a couple other
names in the phone book.
Go back to Southeast Asia: remember
what I wrote on the board up here?
Paul Helliwell and Richard Stillwell:
home phone numbers.
Also key players in a bank called the
Nugan-Hand bank, out of Australia,
which was the CIA's drug bank, who had
Bill Colby as its chief counsel.
Uh, this is a clue! This is a clue! OK...
(laughter)
He went on a mission to Mexico in 1985
with a guy named James Robert Strauss.
-- I have no idea how long
I've been going --
(Host) You're OK.
OK. James Robert Strauss:
who used to brag about
having taken quiet walks on the beach
with Richard Nixon.
I hope they weren't too close. (laughter)
And he came back from
this mission saying,
"My God! We killed two DEA agents."
"We massacred a whole bunch
of innocent civilians in Chiapas."
-- you know that there's a revolution
going on in Chiapas, now --
"And I've lost my stomach:
I can't do this anymore."
He had been laundering cocaine profits
from the CIA through the Mafia
for about 25, 30 years,
and he lost his stomach.
Not after sodomizing the boys,
or killing people, or anything,
but when two DEA agents finally killed,
something finally clicked:
"something is wrong."
Do we have any other evidence,
by the way?
Here is one of the pages from
one of his surviving passports.
If anybody knows anything
about passports,
he had a black one,
he had a maroon one,
he had a green one,
and he had a blue one...
-- in three different names.
Here's a passport stamp showing
three-day circuits
from John F. Kennedy, to London Heathrow,
to Nassau, the Bahamas.
Could he have been laundering stuff?
I don't know.
We have some bank account
numbers at NatWest,
the National Bank of Westminster,
and Coutts & Co., one of which is still live.
His daughter has it.
We have military records.
We have travel records from
Strauss, Downing and Associates.
His partner had an insurance company,
but for a guy who sold insurance
domestically,
why would he need to go to
Johannesburg; Hong Kong; London;
Kuala Lumpur; Seoul; Luanda, Angola;
the Jersey Islands
-- they do a lot of laundering in the
Jersey Islands off the British coast --
Casablanca; Madrid... and then I've got
five pages of travel records.
When Albert Carone died of chemical
toxicity of unknown etiology,
several things happened.
Every military record of
the guy disappeared.
His New York Police pension
disappeared.
His bank accounts disappeared.
His insurance policies disappeared.
His driver's license record
in New Mexico disappeared.
Every record of this man
was sanitized in the space
of three weeks.
His daughter, Dee Carone Ferdinand
-- whom I love dearly, and who is
one of my closest friends --
was left utterly broke and bankrupt:
wiped out.
She wrote to Pete Domenici's office
and sent a picture of this phtograph,
saying, "My father was a Colonel."
And the Army said,
"He was a Sergeant in World War II,"
and that's what they buried him as:
a Master Sergeant.
Pete Domenici's office called her back
and said, "He rented the uniform."
OK. All right, well, then we'll just have
to assume that twelve years earlier,
he rented a uniform as a Major.
With exactly the same decorations.
Hmm.
She really went to bat, because
everything was sanitized.
And she admits that her father
was not a good man,
but everything that he had left her
was wiped out,
and she lost probably $25-30,000
of her own money,
and she is dying to testify
before Congress.
I went out and met with her
in '94... '93, actually...
and gathered all this information, wrote
my report, talked to the doctors.
I mean, here's some of his diplomas
from Intelligence School,
and so on and so forth.
And he was flying a lot of...
he was involved with people flying drugs
in and out of Mid-Valley Airport.
and Mid-Valley is a counterpart to Mena.
The only reason why Mena is so popular
now is... two reasons:
because of the size and quanity of drugs,
and because it was Bill Clinton's state.
But there are many Menas in this country.
Don't confuse yourself here, folks.
Many Menas, everywhere, OK?
So, after doing all of this investigation,
photographing everything that I could,
I said to her, "Well, from my research
and all these years of study,"
"there's only one guy in the world that
I can think of that you need to talk to"
"who can help you do anything
about your father's case."
"His name is Ted Shackley."
By the way, did you know
that Ted Shackley,
when Oliver North ran for Senate,
was leasing Oliver North office space
for, like, five dollars a month?
No connection, no connection.
So, she finds a guy named
Robert Mayhew
who's living in New Mexico.
Mayhew puts her in touch
with Shackley.
Now, her father's buried, and the
headstone reads, "Staff Sergeant."
After three years of trying to get that
changed to "Colonel,"
she calls Ted Shackley.
Six weeks later, the headstone
says full Colonel.
We have before and after photographs.
We have a copy of the order
when she was...
she's an Italian from Brooklyn:
she stole it.
What can I tell you? (laughter)
We have a copy of the order
directing the change, OK?
No connection. No connection
whatsoever.
This case, if we pull this one,
we'll really pull it apart.
But how many cases like that are there?
There's dozens.
There's dozens and dozens
and dozens of cases.
I want to talk about one more case.
Anybody recognize this guy?
Colonel Jim Sabow.
Full Colonel, United States Marine Corps.
Chief of Air Operations,
El Toro Marine Air Station.
Murdered in 1991.
Now, what's significant about 1991?
The Cold War had been over for about
four years, three years.
Iran-Contra was over.
Why was he murdered?
This guy, by the way, was about
as straight-arrow as you can get.
Devout Roman Catholic. His wife
went to mass every day.
He went every day that he could.
The "family man of doom:"
the best family man you
could ever imagine.
Spotless Marine Corps record.
He caught C-130s flying onto El Toro
with thousand-kilo loads of cocaine.
His brother is one of the main speakers
at our rally on Saturday,
Doctor David Sabow.
Now, the Naval Investigative Service
said that he committed suicide.
Now, why did they say
he committed suicide?
Because he sent a bookcase to his son
on a military flight
that was flying empty from point A
to point B,
and they were gonna ruin his career
for that dishonor.
It happens all the time, folks!
If the space is empty anyway,
who cares?
And he says,
"You're not gonna do that to me!"
He was gonna blow the whistle.
But according to the Naval Investigative
Service and the Marine Corps,
Colonel Jim Sabow went out into his
back yard with a 12-gauge shotgun,
shoved it so hard into his mouth
that he sheared off the uvula
at the back of his throat
-- now, you know, if you're
gonna commit suicide,
why would you put yourself through
all that stuff just to commit suicide? --
The funny thing about the
Sabow murder case
is that he aspirated blood for ten minutes
after they said he blew his brians out.
Now, think about that for a minute, folks.
If you're dead, you're not breathing.
How can you aspirate blood
after you've killed yourself?
It's impossible.
They also found a deep skull fracture
on the back of the skull, right back here,
with a hematoma. You don't hematoma...
-- that doesn't sound like a...
it sounds like a dance --
you don't get hematomas if you're dead.
That's a result of the body
trying to heal itself
and fluid rushing to the wound.
Somebody knocked him out -- boom!
Let him lie on the ground for ten minutes
with a skull fracture, inhaling blood,
before they shoved a shotgun so hard
down his throat it sheared off his uvula.
OK?
This report contains the reports of
eight different forensic pathologists,
who have all said this man did not
commit suicide: he was murdered.
The brother, Dr. David Sabow,
is a medical doctor
who lives in South Dakota.
He's been fighting this case non-stop
since Jim was murdered.
And he's winning some cases.
His attorney now is Daniel Sheehan,
who people have many
mixed opinions about,
who was the head of the Christic Institute
back in the '80s,
but Danny's doing a good job
with this case.
What happened with the Marine Corps
and the Navy
as Dr. Sabow tried to fight this,
was there were some loyal Marines who
snuck out some records and some notes,
which said: "Get David Sabow."
The Marine Corps went after
his medical license,
saying that people should
do illegal things,
and of course that didn't go anywhere.
But they have the documented
records about a strategy
designed to make Dr. Sabow
lose his medical license.
They are trying to move ahead with trial,
and he just won a major decision in
the US Ninth Circuit here in California.
Not on the CIA issue,
but granting him broad discovery
to subpoena the military records
regarding the cocaine activities.
(applause)
Again, David Sabow will be one
of our speakers Saturday,
as weill Cele Castillo.
Mike Levine was supposed to come.
He wound up with a 102
temperature yesterday
after testifying for about
two weeks in San Diego
in a case where two agents
murdered a sailor down there,
and he's been ordered back
to New York to go to bed.
So we're going to miss Mike,
but he's here in spirit.
So I guess what I want
to say to you is this:
this is bigger than any of us think.
They've been flying in drugs
all over this country.
They've been dealing drugs to Americans
for 40 or 50 years.
But go back to the analogy that I gave
you before about the drunk on a binge.
OK? We can see that it's been getting
worse and worse and worse.
They have utterly corrupted
the criminal justice system.
When we have a guy like Stanley Sporkin
sitting on the US District Court
in Washington, DC...
Do you know who Stanley Sporkin is?
Retired Chief Counsel for the
Central Intelligence Agency.
He sits on the bench, on the
US District Court in Washington.
His email messages read:
"To Stanley from Ollie,"
during the Iran-Contra era.
You want to talk about a chokepoint
to control key cases?
I have spoken to people who used to work
for a company called eSystems in Texas.
I see old Bob going crazy over there
about eSystems.
Their children, one of them had
had her son murdered
because he discovered eSystems.
eSystems makes all the encryption
devices for the NSA and CIA.
There is not a secret that
the government has
that eSystems does not also have.
Sitting on the Board of Directors of
eSystems is Admiral William Raborn,
retired Director of Central Intelligence.
We have documented eSystems CIA flights
dropping massive loads of cocaine
into Lake Tawakoni,
landing at the eSystems airport
in Garland, Texas. OK?
There is proof. There is an
enormous amount of proof.
What do we do, OK?
What do we do, all right?
20 years: I want to share with you
my experience, strength, and hope
having looked at this for 20 years,
being a graduate of Political Science
from UCLA,
having knocked on every door.
There isn't a thing you can think of
that I haven't tried, OK?
I'm gonna tell you what we do.
I'll tell you that...
there were times, for me, in the 20 years,
that I've had incredible depressions,
incredible heartache, incredible
disillusionment, utter hopelessness,
knowing that I was going to die
and never see a day of justice.
And I'll tell you, I think I'm beginning
to understand how a slave felt,
knowing that he was going to die
and that neither he nor his children
would have any hope of seeing freedom.
And there were times when I thought...
and I used to manage the largest gun
store in the state, B&B. (applause)
-- And I got so much good information
out of B&B!
Because we'd sell to all these Feds,
and they'd come in.
I'd say, "Yeah, come on back and shoot
this MP-5." And the guy would just
start blabbering all kinds of stuff to me.
It was wonderful! --
There were times when I wanted,
like others
-- and I will not criticize them --
to go to the hills.
I have no family. I've never had children.
I was told that if I ever had children,
they'd kill 'em.
And I thought about going to the hills
and giving up,
and waiting just for a chance
to go out fighting.
But I will tell you what I have
learned in 20 years:
that it takes more courage to stand up
and talk than it does to fight.
(applause)
What is happening now...
-- and in a minute or so, I'm going
to turn it over to Mike Novick
from the Crack the CIA Coalition --
what I see happening now is a potential
miracle of Biblical proportions.
I happen to believe in God.
I have a higher power.
I could not be sober 14 years otherwise.
(applause)
I do not believe that my God
has ordained, for me, suffering.
I don't believe that he has ordained
an Armageddon.
I don't believe that he has asked me
to do anything,
but to do the right thing in faith
one day at a time.
What's gonna happen Saturday
is that, in one sense,
the lion is going to lay down
with the lamb.
These people who are in the
Crack the CIA coalition
-- of which I have been a part, now,
for I guess about a month or so?
Six weeks? Whatever --
are people you would not ordinarily associate with.
On a daily basis, I work hand-in-hand
with a former Black Panther.
There are people from socialist
organizations,
and there are people from labor parties,
and there are black militants.
And there are Indians and Hispanics
and... Democrats! You know? (laughter)
And I want you to know something:
these people are standing up for you.
These people plan to go
to the street to say,
"CIA is dealing drugs, and it's wrong."
And they plan to stand up,
which is the most courageous
thing we can do
to go to the street and exercise
First Amendment rights.
And they're doing it for you, and me,
and the stockbrokers in New York,
and the rich housewives in Saint Louis.
And they're putting aside all of
their differences, saying,
"This is not about anything other
than right and wrong." (applause)
See, what the Agency, what the Shadow
Government has done for so long
is to pit us against each other:
black against white, against rich,
against poor,
against gay, against straight,
against cop...
We've been turned... you know,
and we react.
Last night I was on the show, KIEV,
and this guy calls in and goes,
"Well, it's the Communist conspiracy,"
"and you've got Tom Hayden
endorsing this, and... my God!"
And, "They're gonna start violence,
and it's the Communists taking..."
I said, "Wait a minute.
Hold it just a minute!"
"You know, sure, there were
Communists,"
"and they weren't good people."
"But how about the fact that we brought
all these Gestapo and SS"
"into our Special Forces and our
Central Intelligence Agency?"
"Those are Nazis!"
I said, "Why don't we just do this
like, 'I'm a cop.'"
"'I don't care what political party
a bad guy belongs to'"
"'I just want to make the arrest,
you know?'"
(applause)
If we can do what I'm hoping
we can do on Saturday,
we will have 10, 15,000 people
in the streets.
And I pray to God some of you are there.
And there are people coming from
various parts of the country,
and there are people
from the right as well.
And we can have a show of Americans
standing up in the street for
American rights,
So that when we do get justice,
everybody can go back to
doing their own thing.
But if we do not hang together,
we shall all surely hang separately. OK?
(applause)
We're trying to do something
which is really dangerous,
and if we pull it off, we're gonna
scare the bad guys to death.
We are gonna make a statement,
when they look through the crowd
and see who's there,
and see that we can pull this off
non-violently, peacefully, with
enthusiasm and cooperation.
This is something that hasn't been done.
It takes more courage to stand up
than it does to fight.
It takes more courage to talk
and to say "I believe,"
"And I am willing to say you are wrong."
Because we're afraid of the ostracism:
well, let's stand up together and see
if we can't change something.
I want to call upon Mike, and we'll
et him talk for a few minutes.
Then we'll take questions.
(applause)
(Michael Novick) Talk about
a tough act to follow.
That's a pretty amazing set of facts,
but really, the life that this
man has lived
to come to this momement and
be here with us,
I think is incredible.
And I really want to thank Mike
for his tremendous courage
and his openness to just deal with
the truth and the speak the truth
and the face the consequences of that.
And I think it's something
we all have to do.
And I am here, basically, tonight,
to tell you a little bit about the
Crack the CIA Coalition,
and about the demonstration.
There are flyers here, and we'd like
to urge you to take some flyers
and pass them out in the next day or two
to bring people.
We want this to be as massive
and as broad
and as open and as democratic a
demonstration as it's possible to have.
We have a set of principles of unity,
and the principles are that
we are opposed
to the crimes that the CIA
has committed
against the people of this country
and against other people
around the world,
and I think one of the things
that has become very clear to us
in doing this work
is that it's impossible to protect
ourselves, somehow
by the use of agencies like the CIA.
Because the crimes that they carry out,
supposedly, in our name,
somehow to protect the
American way of life,
are crimes committed against us
every single day.
And that the crimes they committed
in Nicaragua,
and the crimes they committed
in other parts of the world
inevitably are going to affect us.
And we see the destruction they've
created, the devastation,
not only in South-Central Los Angeles,
but in every village and hamlet
in this country.
And crack is not something,
now, they thought
that they could dump in one community
and somehow destroy that community
and not have it spread out
throughout the society.
So we're seeing the tremendous
connections between what's going on.
And people here, I know, have
no love for Bill Clinton, I'm sure.
And I think it's important to understand
that the people in this coalition
are not in any way part of the coalition
that Bill Clinton represents.
The people in this coalition
are a coalition
of forces trying to claim their
humanity, defend themselves,
to recognize the need for solidarity
to deal with this.
And I've been on talk radio,
and I used that word once,
and somebody said, "When I hear that
word, solidarity, I wanna lock and load."
(laughter)
But I'm telling you that that's
what you need.
That if you want to deal with the CIA,
if you want to deal with Bill Clinton,
you have to recognize what they're about.
And they're about an empire.
And the problem with Bill Clinton is
not whether you think he's a socialist
or you think he's a moderate,
or you think he's this or that.
Bill Clinton is an emperor,
and that's the problem with Bill Clinton.
And Bill Clinton wants you
to be subjects of his empire.
And if you want to have any other status
than as a subject of that empire,
then you have to stand with the former
Black Panthers in this coalition,
and you have to stand up on Saturday
and say that Bill Clinton and the CIA are
not committing these crimes your names
or in our names,
and if we want to protect ourselves
from those criminals,
we have to take action with all the
good people of South Central,
the good people of East Los Angeles,
the good people of the San Fernando
Valley have to stand up together,
and say, "We want a different
and a better world together."
So I would like to urge you
to come out on Saturday.
I would also like to urge you, if you
have some funds to make available,
I know that you all have your own needs
and demands,
but as a representative of this coalition,
I'd like to give you the address
for a moment.
We have a PO Box.
it's the Crack the CIA Coalition,
and it's PO Box 191601,
Los Angeles, California, 90019.
We've been fronting out money to
bring Cele Castillo to Los Angeles,
to bring Dr. David Sabow from
South Dakota to Los Angeles,
to bring documentation information
and to put on this demonstration,
and so we want you definitely
to come out and support.
We want you to be a part
of this process.
We are not stopping with the
demonstration tomorrow.
The demonstration tomorrow
is the beginning.
We are co-sponsoring on March 15th
-- and everyone here is certainly
welcome to come --
a teach-in on all of this material
at Fairfax High School in the
city of Los Angeles.
That will be beginning, I believe,
at eleven o'clock on March 15th,
which is a Saturday in
about three weeks.
We're gonna be having
Peter Dale Scott,
the author of the books that
Mike Ruppert mentioned,
the Cocaine Politics.
We're gonna be having
Dr. Alfred McCoy,
the author of the leading
book on this,
what he referred as "the Bible."
And all of this effort is the effort
to expose these truths and these
realities to all of you
and to the rest of us,
to educate ourselves,
to mobilize ourselves and to support
each other in this movement.
And that's what it's going to take.
It's going to take a movement to resist,
to counter the lies,
and to expose ourselves
to some truth that...
people here certainly understand
what's disseminated in the media
bears very little relation to reality.
but you might want to re-think
some of the things
that you have absorbed from
those same media,
criminalizing and castigating and
demonizing people on the left
who might have something to share
and something to offer you.
Demonizing people who have stood up:
there's a man named Michael Zinzun,
for example,
who is involved with the gang truce,
a former Black Panther. Not closely
involved in this coalition,
but he is somebody who... files
were taken out of the LAPD
to prevent him from running for
the City Council in Pasadena.
These crimes go on and on and on,
and they will not be stopped unless
people stand up and say, "No more."
So we're trying to do that on one
particular day,
but in a very long-term way.
And we're happy to dialogue
about these things.
And I think you for the time.
I thank Michael for his tremendous
presentation,
and I think we owe him a
tremendous debt of gratitude.
(applause)
OK, we're gonna have questions.
Questions from the back of the room.
So those of you who have questions
Mike will be glad to try
and answer for you.
So please feel free to...
I'm sorry, the leaflet actually
(xx) asked:
Twelve Noon at City Hall,
Downtown Los Angeles,
First and Spring Street.
We'll be marching from there
to the LA Times,
to the Los Angeles Federal Building,
and then back for a rally at City Hall.
(inaudible off-mic)
We have a permit. We obtained a permit.
We are marching with police
at a distance,
But it's a complely legal march;
it's a completely non-violent march.
We're there to express these truths
and to take a stand on these issues.
(Woman) Mr. Ruppert?
Yes.
(Woman) You mentioned the
Secret Government.
(Woman) Do you see the CIA
as the ultimate executive?
(Woman) Or who is the ultimate executive
behind the wrongdoing we see?
I tend to be, when I answer... well,
I'm always asked this question.
And I tend to.. I try to be
fairly conservative,
because I try to approach this
as a detective
and answer with evidence that I have.
If you'll recall, I mentioned Paul Jabber,
the UCLA Political Science professor?
Shortly after I met with him,
he left UCLA
to become Vice-President
of Banker's Trust
He took over as Chair of the
Middle East Department
of the Council on Foreign Relations.
That's where I see a lot of this going.
The more I try, logically, as a detective,
using intuitive inductive logic
to get to the bottom of this,
I come to banks. that's where I come.
I come to banks.
And of course, most of the banks
are foreign-owned.
Especially...
(Man off-mic) Follow the money.
Follow the money. That's the bottom line.
(Woman) Do you know if Brian Quaig
(sp) is all right? I assume you know him?
Who?
(Woman) Brian Quaig of Phoenix?
He's the one with the Internet site
with all of the material that you have
been speaking about this evening?
Yeah, I'm not familiar with him.
(Woman) Oh, you don't know him?
No.
(Woman) The book, LA's Secret Police,
Mike Rothmiller
(Woman) Is that fairly accurate?
Yes, I know Mike Rothmiller.
And what's interesting about that is that
Mike touched on a couple of things.
LAPD has been heavily, heavily
infiltrated by CIA for a long time.
Bill Parker, who was a
legendary Chief here,
hated the FBI.
And he invited CIA lock, stock, and barrel
to come in to LAPD.
And there are documented cases
during the Iran-Contra era
of one detective named Hamilton,
of Organized Crime Intelligence,
coming off an airplane
with the Mexico City Chief of Police
Arturo Durazo
-- who was under indictment
for drug corruption --
from The Bahamas.
What's an LAPD detective doing with
the Mexico City Chief of Police
on a flight from The Bahamas?
Daryl Gates made a statement in 1992
that the only position he would
consider in a second Bush term
would be Director of Central Intelligence.
My question for Daryl is: what
are your qualifications?
Mike Rothmiller's book is good.
He kind of stopped short
of some other things,
but he and I have spoken
many, many times.
So, yes, it's a good book.
(Man) Yes: I wonder what your opinion is
of the...
(Man) -- I haven't heard you mention this,
and I'm wondering why --
(Man) the... kind of pulls the rug out
(Man) of all the law enforcement agencies
around the country,
(Man) and has been advocated by the...
(Man) many judges, and many doctors,
and Jocelyn Elder,
(Man) and... is... the answer is the
legalization of drugs.
(Man) And, when... a lot of people here
might not understand:
(Man) what I mean by this, is that I'm not
advocating the use of drugs;
(Man) but by the legalization of drugs,
(Man) we're talking about many solutions
for many problems,
(Man) in that many people, billions of dollars
(Man) that are spent chasing down criminals
are freed up,
(Man) and that many crimes committed
by these so-called druggies
(Man) aren't committed because
it's legally gotten.
(Man) I was just wondering what your opinion...
(Man) I mean, it's just a simple solution
for a whole lot of problems,
(Man) and I'm hoping everyone here
thinks on this for a while,
(Man) because it is the awesome
solution for
(Man) a whole lot of awesome problems.
(Michael) I have thought about this a lot,
and I will say that as a cop,
what really makes me feel good
is when I hurt the bad guys.
I'm sorry, that's the way
I feel in my gut.
The way we hurt the bootleggers
was to legalize alcohol.
I do not advocate, necessarily,
legalizing drugs, but
maybe in certain cases decriminalizing
drugs might be an answer.
However, we're dealing with
a situation, historically,
the British in the 1800s established their
whole economy on a trilateral trade:
growing opium in India, selling it
to the Chinese, getting silk,
taking it back to Britain,
and making textiles.
And that set up the cash flow of the
British economy. That's the model.
The different is, now, that we're
poisoning ourselves.
Which is really ugly, OK?
But there was a report
-- which I have not seen, but several
Congressional staffers who I know...
and Bob, if he's still here,
probably knows it, too --
prepared by the House Banking
Committee chaired by Henry Gonzales,
which said something like if all
the drug money were withdrawn,
the eight largest banks in the Western
Hemisphere would collapse.
That would create a depression
the likes of which this country
has never seen before.
So we have to use some thought in,
really, how we approach the problem.
So, anyway...
(Man) Yes: The problem is not the CIA;
(Man) The problem is organized crime,
the Democrat and Republican Party,
(Man) and the real problem is that
we do not have a policy
(Man) of putting the cocaine cartel
out of business
(Man) and destroying the cocaine cartel.
(Man) Instead, you're destroying
the American people.
(Man) My question is, why aren't you
putting the blame
(Man) on the Democrat and Republican
Party and organized crime,
(Man) and why aren't you pointing
out that we have no policy
(Man) to destroy the cocaine cartel?
(Man) That's what you should be using
the opportunity Saturday morning for.
I just was pointing out about a guy
with a phone book
with Paulie Castellano and all that,
so I think I was talking about
organized crime. Yes?
(Woman) Yes. Last night on Peter Ford's
show, you mentioned
(Woman) that you'd sent the material to
Ross Perot, and he had called you twice,
(Woman) but I don't know what he said.
(Woman) Can you elaborate a little more
on that conversation?
Yeah. And, again, from the
Los Angeles Times,
This is what I do when I'm around the press.
I've been published in the
Los Angeles Times.
I don't say anything unless I have it
right in my hand to back it up.
The Los Angeles Times ran this story
in 1987, January, about Ross Perot
backing Richard Armitage into a corner.
If anybody knows Richard Armitage,
he's 6'4" and benchpresses 430 pounds.
And this short little floppy-eared Texan
with a big nose
got him in a hallway in the Pentagon
and backed him into a corner.
And the issue was CIA dealing drugs,
Armitage's involvement,
and the POWs connected in Laos
who were left behind.
(Man) Oh, yeah! (brief applause)
Ross Perot was sent to go see
Vice-President George Bush.
And Bush said, "Go see the FBI," and
threw him out of the White House.
Ross Perot cost Bush the
1992 election, OK?
Now, I wrote to Ross Perot in 1990,
and I sent him all the stuff and my
stories and everything,
and one day the phone rings,
and it goes,
(Ross Perot Impression): "Mr. Ruppert?
This is Ross Perot. How are yeh?"
And I'm going, "Jesus!" You know?
And I just came out of my chair that
it was him. (laughter)
And said, "I want you to know that I've
read every word that you have sent me,"
"And no one has pursued this longer
or harder than you have."
"You should give it up." (laughter)
He said, "I must know 20 or 30
former military officers"
"and law enforcement officers who
discovered the same thing,"
"and they all had their careers ruined,
their lives ruined."
"They do the same thing to everybody"
"You'd think they'd try
something different."
I do a pretty good Ross Perot
after all this time.
And he said, "But they don't
because it works."
And then Ross Perot said to me,
"Mike, even with all of my resources,"
"I don't know why I pursue it:
I can't get anywhere."
The answer is people in the street.
The answer is people standing up
together expressing their will, OK?
Now, I'll tell you a little secret:
I was the press spokesman for
the Perot movement in '92
here in Los Angeles County.
Now, I've parted ways with Ross just
because of the way he pulled out,
and I'm not gonna go into that now.
But what I saw in 1992, we had
a little headquarters
on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks.
We had a list of 15,000 names of people
who wanted to volunteer:
people who had never voted before
in their lives;
people who had never held any hope
that there was any way that their voice
could be heard in this country.
And what Ross Perot did was to tap
into that wellspring of disconcent
which is lying just beneath the surface
in this country.
And that's what we're trying to do with
this rally and with this demonstration.
It's there.
We want to reach that critical mass,
so that the people who know, or suspect,
or just feel in their gut that something's
wrong will come forward.
(Man) Mr. Ruppert, I hope that
I'm not going over
(Man) something that you already
covered; but I came in late tonight.
(Man) Daryl Gates made a statement
that he was part of the CIA.
(Man) Did you cover that, or do
you know? And if so, what was his job,
(Man) or what was he doing?
In 1962, I believe it was,
Daryl Gates was Captain of LAPD's
Intelligence Division,
and there's a well-respected author
named Bill Turner,
who's a former FBI agent who's
written a number of books.
And he describes this incident where
a guy named Dennis Mauer (sp)
was out with a bunch of right-wing paramiltary guys
in the desert way north of Lancaster.
And they were throwing
hand grenades around,
and shooting machine guns,
and having fun.
And up rose Captain Daryl Gates
of LAPD's Intelligence Division,
way out of his jurisdiction, and says,
"Knock it off!"
And they said to Daryl Gates,
"Well, it's OK."
"CIA told us we could be here.
They gave us the stuff.'
And he said, "Screw you!"
"I am CIA, and I'm telling you to stop!"
Well, there was an undercover
Long Beach policeman in that group
who wrote a report which
made it into the file.
So that was the answer to that question,.
(Man) Mr. Ruppert?
Yes.
(Man) I wonder if you could comment
on reports that I have heard
(Man) that a great deal of the money
funding, and indeed creating,
(Man) National Coalition
to Ban Handguns,
(Man) Handgun Control, Incorporated,
and various other activist groups
(Man) and individuals in the
gun-grabbing, anti-Constitutional
(Man) so-called gun control movement,
actually has its souce
(Man) in CIA-affiliated and CIA front
organizations,
(Man) as part of a calculated program
to disarm the American people.
I have not seen any direct
evidence of that,
but I fall back on the old line:
"If it walks like a duck and it
quacks like a duck,"
"and there's duck feathers everywhere,
then we've probably got a duck."
One of the things I study a lot is
something called the Hegelian Dialectic,
which says you create a problem,
and then you solve the problem,
and in solving the problem,
you get the end result
that you were after to begin with.
(Man) (inaudible)
Nobody can dispute...
(Man) (inaudible)
Nobody can dispute the fact that
we have seen utterly repressive laws,
especially vis-a-vis asset forfeiture,
being imposed up on us:
laws which begin to scare me.
And I have interviewed a guy
whose father
was a high-ranking official
in the Abwehr,
which was Adolph Hitler's intelligence
service, who was... his grandfather.
And he used to tell his grandson
-- who is now a very good
friend of mine --
(German accent) "We didn't lose
the Second World War;"
"we just changed venues."
OK? So it's beginning to sound
like that here, yes. (applause)
(Man) Yes, Mr. Ruppert: you mentioned
earlier that our economy
(Man) has become hooked on drugs.
(Man) I wonder to what degree
our major political parties
(Man) have become hooked as well.
(Man) How much drug money has flowed
(Man) into campaign contributions,
do you think?
Again, I don't have any direct
information on that;
and I really only answer stuff
that I know directly.
But there is so much drug money...
I mean, if you look at what
happened in Mena,
there are two retired
Army CID investigators,
of which Gene Wheaton is very public
-- and I known Gene well --
who estimate the amount of drug
money flowing through Mena
at $40 million a month,
and through the Arkansas Development
Financial Authority
-- which is what made Bill Clinton
a hero in the state of Arkansas.
So, yeah: it's probably there.
(Man) Mr. Ruppert, I want to congratulate
you on your courage, sir.
(Man) And I wanted to ask you if you had
any assistance from Officer Rothmiller
(Man) who wrote the book LA Secret
Intelligence [sic] Police?
I just said a few minutes ago:
I know Mike.
We have spoken many times
over the years.
(Man) Yes, sir.
We share a lot of views; his book's
a good book.
He and I actually worked patrol in
Wilshire Division at the same time.
So, yeah.
(Man) Hey, there. I don't know if want
to rub elbows with Tom Hayden,
(Man) but I'll take it on your world that
it's a good thing, the march.
(Man) I have one question:
do you know what happened
(Man) to former CIA director Colby?
He supposedly died mysteriously?
Well...
(Man) (xx)
My attorney called me up the
day they found his body
and wanted to make sure
I had an alibi. (laughter)
No, I don't know personally.
I've just received
an updated copy of
The Franklin Cover-Up,
which contains some very disturbing
questions about Bill Colby's death.
But I don't have any direct knowledge;
but who knows?
(Man) I have two questions.
Your bravery is astounding,
(Man) the past 20, 25 years
of your investigation.
(Man) Is your life still in danger today,
(Man) and is there any contracts
out on your life?
(Man) And secondly, what is
the whole purpose of the rally,
(Man) and how are we going to bring
all these people to justice in the end?
OK. First of all, no, I wouldn't know
if there was a contract out on me.
I haven't been shot at for a long time.
I'm fairly well-known now,
and they tend not to kill people
who are fairly well-known.
The problem is you can
get so well-known
it doesn't make any difference, too: with
Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy,
et cetera, et cetera.
But I'm nowhere near that big yet,
so I think I'm safe for a while.
As for what we're trying to do
and how we're trying to do it,
I am relieved of having to answer that
question. Again, what I have come to
from a spiritual and a constitutional
and an American standpoint,
is that my job is to do the right thing,
and to leave the results to a
power greater than myself.
(applause)
The only sin that I'm aware of
is not standing up.
That's the sin that I'm aware of.
Yes, sir.
(Man) I think it rather paradoxical
that there's enough evidence
(Man) against Mr. Clinton and
his administration
(Man) to put most of them in prison.
My question is,
(Man) how intrusive... has drugs become
part of the operation in Washington, DC
(Man) amongst the Congressmen,
the Senators?
(Man) And why is it we don't have
one person
(Man) who will stand up and initiate
impeachment proceedings
(Man) on this scum that we
have in the office?
(Maen) Now, does drugs have
an affect here?
(Man) And why is it we're not
getting anything done?
(Man) All investigation and
no prosecution?
Drugs have an effect everywhere.
In the Cutolo Watchtower affidavits,
there's a story of one Congressman
named Larkin Smith
who tried to stand up; who was looking
into the Tyree murder case.
He was flying on an investigation when
his plane crashed and he was killed.
Hale Boggs...
They kill Congressmen; they can kill
Presidents.
Maxine Waters walks a fine line.
She is a Democrat, a member of the
minority party.
She doesn't chair any committees.
She is Chairwoman of the
Black Caucus, yes,
but she alone as a member of Congress
doesn't have the power to stand up.
I'm gonna make it very clear
in my speech Saturday
that where the people lead,
Congress will follow.
We have got the cart before the horse.
We can't expect anybody to do for us
what we will not demand that
they do by ourselves, OK?
We have to stand up together.
Congress ain't gonna listen until we do.
Yes, ma'am.
(Woman) Yes, thank you very much,
Mr. Ruppert.
(Woman) It is very clear to me that you're
a very holy man, and you are totally
(Woman) surrounded and protected
by the love of God wherever you go.
(Woman) And I particularly like the
way you said,
(Woman) "Do you ever get a feeling that
God is following you with this stuff?"
(Woman) I love it. Thank you very much.
I do have a question:
(Woman) It's very clear to me that it's
AAA: All About Addiction.
(Woman) There's no easier way
-- is there? -- to control people
(Woman) than to get them addicted.
Now, whether it's called legal drugs,
(Woman) or illegal drugs, a drug
is a drug is a drug.
(Woman) I would like to know if you
know how far and to what involvement
(Woman) the American Medical
Association is involved in this.
(Woman) Thank you.
I sometimes feel like I would have to be
God to answer some of these questions.
(laughter)
Let me put it this way: we have all heard
stories about a dysfunctional family,
where a father is molesting
a young daughter.
And there are other children in the
family, and there's a wife.
And we look at these tragedies,
and we see how the wife ignores
what's going on,
and the other children ignore
what's going on:
for the sake of maintaining
the family image;
for the sake of looking good;
out of the fear that if they expose
what's going on,
the father will turn his rage
against them.
And that's a dysfunctional family.
This country is in that state of denial.
Every aspect of this country is
affected by this crisis.
Let me define it to you this way
-- and I'll be real brief with this --
Could the President of the United States,
the Executive Branch,
-- which, theoretically, is empowered
over the CIA --
have permitted the Agency to deal drugs
to American citizens?
Or, could it have happened
without him knowing about it?
Either way, you have just defined the
greatest crisis -- Constitutional crisis --
in American history
since the Civil War;
and solving it is going to take
that kind of upheaval.
Leadership in this will have to show
that we can do this non-violently,
in a healthy way, in the American spirit.
Not in the German spirit, not in the
Russian spirit, not in the Chinese spirit;
but in the American spirit.
(Woman) Yes, I appreciate that remark.
(Woman) I would like to have us all
remember that what, I believe,
(Woman) you have described this
evening is not a man-made battle,
(Woman) but we are wrestling against
principalities and powers in high places,
(Woman) and basically that
is a spiritual problem.
(Woman) And we're not going to go out
here as a group of people
(Woman) and conquer this in our own
strength.
(Woman) It'll be like David putting
on Saul's armor:
(Woman) It doesn't fit.
It only weighs us down.
(Woman) But I believe it's in
1 Chronicles where it tells us,
(Woman) "If my people, who are called
by my name, will humble themselves"
(Woman) "and pray, and turn
from their wicked ways,"
(Woman) "then will we hear from
Heaven, and I will heal their land"
(Woman) And that's what we've
got to come back to.
(Woman) We're kidding ourselves
here, sitting here thinking...
(Woman) -- I appreciate the rally,
and I support it wholeheartedly --
(Woman) but as a group,
we're kidding ourselves
(Woman) if we think we're going to go
out and do this in our own strength.
(Woman) Only history will be repeated
again and again,
(Woman) But it's as we turn to
the Lord Jesus Christ
(Woman) and let Him operate
through our lives,
(Woman) and then put our hand
to the plow, we will conquer.
And my fervent hope and response to that:
"Where two or more are gathered in His
name, He is also there." (applause)
What if 10 or 15 thousand are gathered,
and many of those gather
in His name, too? (applause) Yes.
(Man) I very much appreciate
that comment. I did want to...
(Man) You mentioned earlier about (xx),
which we've all been most familiar with.
(Man) As far as my understanding goes,
ten investigations have begun,
(Man) and I guess the tenth one
is in some way going on now.
(Man) But what has caused these
all to end, and the information
(Man) -- the myriad of tons of information
that have been gathered --
(Man) to not result in any
meaningful action?
The way this country works is that unless
it shows up in The Washington Post,
The New York Times, The Los Angeles
Times, Time, or Newsweek,
officially, it doesn't exist.
And there can be investigations
until the cows come home.
And the information is out there.
We have it.
I have, it, everybody else has it.
Dozens of other witnesses have it.
Gene Wheaton has it;
Terry Reed has it. (sp)
I've spoken to Terry several times,
OK? The point is that
we have to make something happen
in the collective consciousness
to get it out to the point where
somebody admits it openly.
(Man) Mike, just one moment on that.
You know that we know two boys,
(Man) we know two young teenage,
nnocent boys were killed,
(Man) and we know a number of other
people relating to that same...
(Man) those deaths, were also killed.
(Man) And we do know that enough
information is extant to make a case.
(Man) It seems to me that a rifle shot
has to be fired
(Man) in order to break through this wall.
(Man) instead of these little hammers
banging away,
(Man) some focal point has
to be singled out.
(Man) And just hammer it through
till it breaks the dam, because...
You raise a beautiful point.
Mike wants to say something in a second,
but let me talk to that point
for a second.
I have met... all over the years, I have
met people who are angry with the IRS,
and I have met people who
are angry over many,
many different righteous,
justified causes,
but they have been a Tower of Babel
As I view this from a political
standpoint alone,
I see the single issue of CIA and drugs
as being the one single issue
which can crack the armor.
And when will the armor crack? The
armor will crack when a farmer in Iowa,
and somebody in Saint Louis,
and Wisconsin, and Colorado
who's Middle America wakes up
and catches on to this:
that's when the armor will crack.
And as far as I'm concerned
-- and I have many opinions about
many other issues --
publicly, I speak only about
CIA and drugs;
because that's the one where I
think we've got a chance to win.
Mike wants to say something.
(Mike) Yeah, I wanted to briefly
say exactly that:
(Mike) The people talking about the
Republican and the Democratic parties,
(Mike) and one of the things they always
talk about is wedge issues,
(Mike) and they always want to try
to drive a wedge.
(Mike) They want to drive a wedge
between Blacks and Whites;
(Mike) They want to drive a wedge
between Latinos and Whites,
(Mike) Between Blacks and Latinos:
They're constantly looking for issues
(Mike) on the theory of divide
and conquer.
(Mike) And when they mean conquer,
that's what they want to do.
(Mike) They're not just talking
in figurative terms.
(Mike) And we're looking
for some cement.
(Mike) We're looing for things that are
going to wedge us together, in a way.
(Mike) And we're looking at this,
as we say, "Crack the CIA,"
(Mike) we want to find something that
is going to affect the conscience
(Mike) and the consciousness of many,
many people to see our commonality
(Mike) and our common struggle.
(Mike) And I want to respond to what...
(Man) Why don't you want to destroy
the cocaine cartels?
(Mike) We want to destroy not only
the cocaine cartels,
(Mike) But we're saying this is much
bigger than the problem of cocaine.
(Mike) This is a systematic...
in other words:
(Mike) before there was cocaine,
there was heroin.
(Mike) Before there was heroin,
there was opium.
(Mike) Before there was opium,
they were selling liquor to the Indians.
(Mike) Before... they traded slaves for
tobacco and addicted people.
(Mike) This is going back half
a millennium and longer.
(Mike) I just want to say that one
of the things about this coalition
(Mike) that I think will distinguish it
is that we are not actually trying
(Mike) to get the government to do
anything about this,
(Mike) because we understand
that they are problem.
(Mike) We are trying to affect ourselves.
(Mike) We're hooked into the
recovery movement.
(Mike) It's not only one person who says
"I'm an addict," alcohlic, whatever,
(Mike) But there are many people
in the Black community:
(Mike) groups called "Mad Dads":
many, many people who are saying
(Mike) we have to take the responsibility
to transform ourselves,
(Mike) and by doing that we will transform
this government and society.
(Mike) We're not expecting them
to solve this problem for us.
(Man) Michael, I'd like to thank you,
first, for coming this evening.
(Man) Standing up, saying what
you've said. I respect you.
(Man) I appreciate your being here
this evening and what you've said.
Thank you.
(Man) I have a brief observation myself,
and I'd like to get your reponse to it.
(Man) And the observation is that
Thomas Jefferson said
(Man) that we need a revolution
every 20 years.
(Man) The last time the people
of this country stood up
(Man) and told the government,
"Enough is enough"
(Man) was 25 years ago when we
told 'em we'd had enough of Vietnam.
(Man) And I think it's time for the people
in this country to stand up and say:
(Man) "Enough is enough,
and we've had it."
(Man) And if that's a revolution,
and we can do it peaceably,
(Man) In the streets like we did
25 years ago, but peaceably,
(Man) Then I'm 100% behind it, and I
think it's an idea whose time has come,
(Man) and there's nothing that's going
to stop it.
(Man) And I'm very glad that you're doing
that you're doing, because we need it.
(applause)
Thank you.
(Man) Your response, anybody else's
response.
All I can say to that is "ditto."
(Man) Yeah: I just want to make a
comment that I think that rally
(Man) will be real important to this
neighborhood in showing,
(Man) in bringing it out to light to
the average public
(Man) how you aren't just hurting
yourself when you use drugs,
(Man) but you're hurting your country.
(Man) And it's OK if people want to
hurt themselves, but when you realize
(Man) and when people who are out
there using realize
(Man) that it's actually hurting their
country, and their country's behind it,
(Man) and you're sponsoring something
(Man) that's gonna break your
livelihood apart, and other people's,
(Man) I think it's gonna bring a lot
of light to the neighborhood, so thanks.
I think you're right.
(Man) ...last question...
(Man) Yes. Unless you demand that the
government destroy the cocaine cartel
(Man) and organized crime who have done
(Man) all this damage to the
American people,
(Man) you're not gonna get the
American people behind you.
(Man) You're not gonna get
American justice.
(Man) My question is, why aren't you...
why don't you have a plan
(Man) to destroy the cocaine cartels,
(Man) and why don't you want
to make the government do that?
(different man) This is the plan!
(Man) No, I want him to answer
this question.
We have to fix the government first.
We can't get a government that
doesn't respond to us
to do anything in our interest until
we fix the government.
(Man) If you're gonna be there
tomorrow morning,
(Man) why don't you make that
demand in front of the press,
(Man) and for the press to print,
saying,
(Man) "Why isn't the government
destroying the cocaine cartels?"
(Another Man) Because they
are the cartel!
(Host) It's nice to have a spirited group,
and on behalf of the forum,
(Host) we want to thank Mike Ruppert
or an interesting talk.
(Host) Please bear with us. Looking
forward to having you come back.
(Host) I do hope you do. Thank you
very much, appreciate it.
(Host begins unrelated announcement)
[MUSIC]
[Subtitled by "Adjuvant" | CC-BY 4.0]
Rest in peace, Mike.