Bali drugs: Death sentence for Briton Lindsay Sandiford

[marble falls]

30. No doubt, spycraft has been around for a long time. My personal feeling about Luciano ...

is he reached out to the gov't explaining that he had control of the ports and docks and was in a good position to not only watch for saboteurs but also the muscle required to do something about it and he also had some influence on Mafia partisans in Italy that could help deal with extremely tough German defense. And he was deported. A good deal, I'd say.

Situations may cause some questionable allies. I think WWII qualifies a situation that called for the unique abilities of some questionable sorts - Mao, Stalin, the Shah's father comes to mind. And some of these other sorts had access to Heroin and the marketing of it. But I also don't think the OSS or CIA had any much to do with it other than say in Afghanistan we overlooked the Northern Alliance funding itself with opium. We overlook Karzai's drug dealing brother, right now. Is that the CIA? Or is that the official policy at least defacto policy of the US. CIA is not a policy organization. It is not autonomous. It is an instrument of the gov't. It doesn't set policy, it is an instrument of policy.

My wife is a nice lady. I like her lots. But CIA subverts nothing it isn't ordered to subvert. And a lot of the secret armies are made up of active duty personnel.

Frankly the mercenary armies we call "contractors" bother me a lot more. Why is it I wonder after Congress went through Iran/Contra and people were put in jail and disgraced, what they only reported for financing was selling missile parts to Iran to raise money for the Contras. $10M was raised in what I believe was one of the few instances where the US sold arms at a profit for itself. To put that $10M into perspective, the British, the French and the Russians sold $1.5 billion in arms at the same time. We won't discuss the assassinations the Sandanistas committed while coming into power or the fact that when the Sananistas allowed free elections, they were voted out. Thats not suppositions, that's facts.

When dealing with a lot of the accusations made against Langley, I try to apply Ocham's razor. Blaming the CIA for drug use or availability of drugs in the US as a reality or the result of rogue operations to fund other operations just as rogue just doesn't make the cut.