(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.