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Drug traffickers and mad scientists the CIA's sordid past: Paranoid theories abound The idea that the Bush administration had foreknowledge of 9/11 comes as no surprise to Mike Ruppert, a former Los Angeles Police officer, conspiracy theorist and spook. In an elaborate and plausible, if completely circumstantial, timeline, he "proves" that the war in Afghanistan has been planned for four years, with the criminal complicity of the Bush family and Enron so that they could build a pipeline across a stable Afghanistan from the oil fields in Kazakhstan, in which they have heavily invested. The pipeline would decant into U.S. tankers in the Persian Gulf. This oil would save the teetering world economy, which has been kicked into overdrive by the need for constant growth. And all this would be financed by drug money from the Afghan poppy fields. The theory is ostensibly laid out in former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski's book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives. Ruppert criss-crosses the United States and Canada, lecturing, making his case, and hawking his video, books, Web site and organization, From the Wilderness. He has a substantial audience from which to draw. Between 10 and 15% of us are clinically paranoid at any one time. Mostly, that paranoia is bound in strongly held suspicions with regard to secret agencies: the Central Intelligence Agency, Mossad, Canadian Security and Intelligence Service and so on. But mostly the CIA. Fair enough. The agency has a US$30-billion annual budget. Thirty billion unaccounted-for dollars are enough to fuel an entire army of paranoids poring over documents and constructing stories from scattered bits of reporting from traditional sources. The CIA selling drugs to blacks in south central Los Angeles? Experimenting on blacks, prisoners and U.S. soldiers? Mind control? Financing the U.S. economy by laundering trillions in drug money? Which is true? Out there in Internet land, in high school gymnasiums, church basements, smoky bars and pubs, the case is being constructed from both true and false, with few distinctions made: The political right, and George W. Bush, are truly evil, and are plotting a fascist state with a large servant class. This looks to become as powerful an urban legend as the most recent myth: 500 years of colonialism. In New Age circles, the same story is repeated but with the added filip that demons are slipping through portals in the Middle East with the express design of destroying Earth.

© 2004 Elizabeth Nickson The material at this website is available only for personal non-commercial purposes, and it may not be reproduced without permission.