All language subtitles for CI2

"The director was

interested in

the ability to go to an existing, as he put it,

off the shelf, self-sustaining, stand-alone entity

that could perform certain activities on behalf of the US.

"Are you not shocked

that the Director of Central Intelligence

is proposing to you the creation of an organization

to do these kinds of things outside of his own organization?"

"Council, I can tell you, I am not shocked."

They called it "Iran Contra."

For many Americans, it provided their first peak behind the curtain of the National Security state.

Others were old enough to remember similar scandals.

"I believe Congress set up the FBI to determine what was going on in this country, didn't it?"

"Among other things, Mr. Chairman."

"It set up the CIA to determine what was going on

in respect to foreign intelligence, didn't it?"

"Yes, sir, and a number of others."
"But it didn't set up the Plumbers, did it?"

"Of course, the Congress doesn't do everything, Mr. Chairman."

"No, but the Congress is all in one that's got legislative power

and I don't know anything, any law that gave the president the power to set himself up,

what some people have called a secret police, name of the Plumbers."

Perhaps the most important investigation into America's burgeoning secret government was the Church Committee.

In 1975 and 1976

it published 14 reports on US intelligence agencies.

"You were specifically asked about shellfish toxins and shellfish poisons.

You say it's inconceivable

the secret intelligence arm of the government

has to comply with all the overt orders of the government.

Is that an accurate quote, or not an accurate quote?"

"Well, if it's accurate, it shouldn't have been said."

"Well, now, I... (laughter)

looks like we're on plausible denial again, is all I can say here, Mr. Chairman."

"Quite a lot of detailed information

and we will

evaluate it and we will include any

evidence of wrongdoing

or any evidence of impropriety

in our final report and make recommendations."

Whatever the intentions of the committee, very little changed.

By the mid 1980s, it became apparent that the intelligence bureaucracy

had not been reigned in by the Church Committee.

Rather, like a black flower in the dark, it had blossomed.

"They did all this in the dark because it would never stand the light of day.

Secrecy is the freedom zealots dream of,

no watchmen to check the door, no accountant to check the books,

no judge to check the law.

The secret government has no constitution.

The rules it follows are the rules it makes up.

So William Kacey could dream that the enterprise might take on a life of its own,

permanent and wholly unaccountable."

The Iran Contra scandal revolved around the illegal sale of arms to Iran

and the equally illegal funding of the Nicaragua Contras.

Under the Boland Amendment, funding of the Contras had been prohibited by Congress.

"Am I correct, Mr. Secord, that from December, 1984 until July, 1985

you were engaged in selling arms to the Contras for profit?"

"That's correct."

Prior to the rise of the Sandinistas,

members of the same family had ruled Nicaragua for over 40 years.

The Somoza clan had monopolized almost every industry in the country,

stealing millions from their own people.

When Anastasio Somoza the 2nd,

was finally overthrown and fled to Miami,

a US intelligence report placed his net worth

at nearly 100 million dollars.

Anastasio had been a particularly sadistic ruler.

One of his favorite methods of execution

was to throw dissidents from helicopters into the Masaya volcano.

In 1979, the people revolted.

The Sandinistas undertook radical reforms.

They established the first public education system for children,

building thousands of schools and playgrounds.

They cut illiteracy to less than 10% of the population.

They cut infant mortality by a third.

They established the national health service.

They abolished the death penalty.

They allowed the development of independent cooperatives,

increasing food production by over 100%

and they enjoyed the support of the vast majority of Nicaragua's people.

This revolution was not made by a proletariat part.

It was produced by a popular insurrection. Everybody took part in the

destruction of the dictatorship.

This is not a political party, is a front who made the revolution,

and you have in this front different parties: the socialist party,

the christian-democratic party, the liberals, the conservatives,

all of them took part in this insurrection.

The Christians, [at] the same time with Marxists, took part in this insurrection.

The Church - many priests and nuns supported the insurrection, even fought in the insurrection.

After a study of 76 developing countries, Oxfam stated that Nicaragua

was exceptional in the strength of that government's commitment

to improving the condition of the people

and encouraging their act of participation in the development process.

But it was not to last.

Fearing that the Sandinista model may spread to other countries,

former Treasury secretary George Shultz called the Sandinistas:

Trained in neighboring Honduras, as well as back home in Florida, the Contras would unleash a reign of terror on the people of Nicaragua.

They focused heavily on economic targets.

Missions included the blowing up of oil pipelines,

the illegal mining of Nicaraguan ports,

the burning and bombing of green silos, farmhouses and machinery

and numerous other wanton attacks.

It is possible that the Nicaraguan people may have been able to withstand these assaults,

but the brutality of the Contras took its toll.

"So I guess, in a way, they are counter-revolutionary and God bless them for being that way.

And I guess that makes them Contras, and

so it makes me a Contra too.

As long as there is breath in this body,

I will speak and work, strive and struggle

for the cause of the Nicaraguan freedom fighters.

A later congressional intelligence committee

revealed that the Contras had raped, tortured and killed

unarmed civilians, including children,

and that groups of civilians, including women and children

were burned, dismembered, blinded and beheaded.

There was an election here in Nicaragua in 1984, I think most people have probably forgotten that

because there was some brilliant piece of agenda

setting up in Washington, whereby they suddenly

decided that the Sandinistas

were getting MiGs into the country,

and although the entire press corps down here knew that this wasn't true,

but because it had been announced in Washington we were all obliged

by our foreign editors and our news desks to go running up to the port

and investigate the arrival of these mythical and non-existent MiGs,

and the whole election coverage was abandoned.

So everybody had covered the entire campaign,

but everybody ceased to cover the election itself

because Washington very cleverly changed the issue

from the issue of democracy in Nicaragua

to the issue of national security."

"The US has circumstantial evidence

suggesting that as many as a dozen Soviet MiG 21 jets

may have arrived today at the Nicaraguan port of Corinto."

If the most immediate goal of the Reagan administration

was to topple the government of Nicaragua,

the details of their destabilization campaign were equally alarming.

Testimony would reveal a network of criminal enterprises involving drug traffickers,

money launderers, organized crime figures and death squads,

all working in concert with America's secret government.

Independent journalist Danny Casolaro, who allegedly commited suicide

during an investigation into Iran-Contra and related scandals

described this network as "The Octopus".

Authorities are investigating the mysterious death of a journalist

and possible connections to the BCCI bank scandal

and the weapons for Iran case.

Wyatt Andrews tells us that puzzling tale:

Freelance journalist Danny Casolaro told friends he was onto the political conspiracy of the century.

He was meeting a source in West Virginia. He was about to discover all.

Instead, his body was discovered in a hotel room with 12 slashes in his wrist,

but when the local authorities ruled it suicide, the family said: 'No way!'

The housekeeper had taken calls threatening his life.

"I picked up [the] telephone. I said hello,

and he say to me:

'You son of a bitch, you is dead.' "

Despite that sounding straight from the movies, the medical examiner today

held to the suicide finding saying Casolaro, apparently, was alone.

"There were no other contusions, lacerations or other trauma to the body that would indicate a struggle."

"In my heart I remember Danny telling us:

'If I'm in an accident, don't believe it.' "

Casolaro was probing a conspiracy he called The Octopus

which involved the Iranian hostage crisis, the Iran-Contra affair,

with, believe it or not, all funds channeled through BCCI,

the international bank charged with everything, from money laundering to fraud.

The common thread within Octopus is the infamous Inslaw affair,

when a court ruled the Reagan Justice Department stole

valuable law-enforcement software from the Inslaw Corporation.

Casolaro's theory is that right-wing zealots sold the software for profit.

The money went to Iranian officials who supposedly delayed the release of the American hostages

back in 1981, the so called 'October surprise',

and later went to the back-channel funding of the Contras.

"What about all the papers he had with him,

the investigation he was doing? And the sergeant was clearly...

really didn't have any idea about this,

and at that point told me they found no papers in his room."

The papers Casolaro had with him in Martinsburg

included hundreds of notes and documents

from more than a year of investigation.

Not one has ever been found.

"From the moment we heard about his reported suicide, we doubted it, questioned it, wondered about it.

It was not his nature to kill himself, so we were suspicious from the first,

and the deeper we dug into it, the more suspicious we became.

Suspicious circumstances surrounding the investigation of his alleged suicide."

Danny Casolaro's fear of blood tests, another minor medical procedure, was well known to his family.

They found it incomprehensible that he committed suicide

by slashing his wrists a dozen times.

Just days before his death, Danny Casolaro enthusiastically told friends

he was close to breaking the story that had consumed him the past year.

It has started as an inquiry into computer software theft,

but soon mushroomed into a broad investigation of government corruption,

that Casolaro believed implicated US Justice Department officials."

The deep state is much easier to define in a country like Turkey,

where in addition to the regular government,

there is a concealed apparatus which unites

the intelligence networks with

drug mafias and other people capable of carrying out killings.

In America it's more complicated,

I would say that America use of term deep state to refer to

that whole complex of ways in which

power is exerted off-camera by people who are not elected, who are not part of the

Constitution or the bureaucracy, but have real power

and assert themselves from time to time in American politics.

This is, or was, the section where Phoenix City's principal industry flourished and gave employment to a part of the town's citizens.

Some worked in factories like this one, making the industry's tools.

Dice, shaved by skilled hands or loaded with mercury.

Slot machines rigged to pay off one cent on a dollar, if at all.

Whiskey that looked like bonded stuff, but wasn't.

Cards marked with tiny pin-breaks or trims so the dealers could recognize the aces and face cards.

Tools of an industry that flourished for half a century, because the good men looked the other way.

An industry run by men I went to school with,

their fathers ran it,

and their fathers' fathers before them.

An industry that made Pheonix City the most vicious town in the US.

That industry was VICE.

The old Italian mafiosi that came here,

were part of what they considered a societa honorata,

and they didn't believe in prostitution or drugs,

you know, they didn't mind breaking your leg over a loan,

or loan sharking or gambling,

but they had certain crimes they wouldn't participate in, they thought were beyond the pale.

There was a night in the 30s,

that was called The night of the Italian vespers, and about

30 top,

old mafia dons were murdered the same night.

The FBI knew that something was coming because „Lucky“ Luciano bought a thousand dollars worth of flowers the day before.

They killed all these old mafia and then they created a new, more cross-ethnic

mafia that rose under Luciano and Meyer Lansky

and included the Jewish mob and had

other connections to international money.

The old mob was useful to that point

and more aligned with the FBI,

and Hoover said that there was no such thing as organized crime,

and so never pursued the mob.

He liked to gamble on horses and he and Clyde Tolson would go to

Del Mar, the mob-owned race tracks, and they'd put him up

and give him free gambling money, in the same way that Nixon was taken by the Florida mob

down to gamble in Cuba before the rise of Castro.

"Derby day in old Kentucky, and Churchill Downs is a mecca for 60,000 race fans.

And here's head G-man J. Edgar Hoover with a last-minute tip for dam (?)."

And they befriend people, and surround people in political circles,

help them get into office so that they could have some political influence,

but during WWII, the Office of Naval Intelligence

made deals with Lucky Luciano

to supposedly protect the docks of New York from German saboteurs,

since the mob was in control of the labor in the docks.

The mafia then also

was assisted by Patton, general Patton

who came in to Italy and got the foothold in Italy

by coming up into the mountains instead of going down into the cities.

"I want you to remember

that no bastard ever won a war

by dying for his country.

You won it

by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his country."

"This is Patton: a salute to a rebel,

a man whom the New York Times described in an editorial two days after his death

as a legend, spectacular, swaggerant,

pistol-packing, deeply religious and violently profane.

A strange combination of fire and ice."

Mussolini had regarded the mafia as a rival.

He had broken up crime syndicates and imprisoned or executed mob bosses.

Leaders in the US and Britain took a more nuanced approach.

Cities were controlled by Mussolini who had chased the old mob

and the mafia up into the hills. So,

Patton attacked through the mountain (?)

and he brought with him a scarf

with double L on it from Lucky Luciano

as a symbol to Don Calogero Vizzini, who was the head of the Italian mobs

and the don of the dons at the time,

for his credentials, and then Vizzini rode in the tank with him into these

cheering cities of mafia-controlled elements in Italy

who wanted revenge against Mussolini.

300 miles they penetrated without hardly any opposition,

and Keefauver, who later studied organized crime here in the US

and had hearings about it, had a special hearing

to try to figure out what Patton had done and unearthed some of this information

at the time.

After that, Patton's 3rd army was called „Lucky Forward“ after Lucky Luciano.

Under the guise of being the victims of fascism,

mafia hit-men are released from Italian prisons.

Mafia chiefs replaced fascist mayors in Sicilian towns.

All of this, thanks to Lucky Luciano and his negotiations with the US government,

but the deal has a price tag.

By using the mafia in war time, the US government

helped re-establish the syndicate as a major criminal force,

a force that will plague America for decades to come.

Yet the relationship between the intelligence agencies

and organized crime would not stop there.

On both sides of the Atlantic,

the Mob proved to be a valuable tool in attacking and corrupting labor unions.

Corsica and Marseille*, these two islands in Italy, [see appendix]

they had connections with the Mob.

There was a chance after WWII because,

if you studied the actual resistance to Hitler

and the underground resistance in WWII

in both those countries,

it was led primarily by the communists and the left.

So, they were the ones that drove Hitler out but the US

in the new Cold War mentality that the Nazis helped give them,

didn't want them to rise to power politically

in those countries, or want communism to spread. So,

they then enlisted the mob

– Naval Intelligence again, and then early OSS,

Brown, Lovestone, labor organizers -

enlisted the mob to break the backs

of the unions in Marseille.

The reason they broke the back of unions in Marseille

was that they were actively opposing the French war in Indochina.

"It might be rarely repeated here - there is no two Vietnams.

There is only one Vietnam

temporarily divided in Geneva in '54

between a free zone with the North Vietnam

and an occupied zone,

occupied by the French, but now the French had still, after Geneva,

the jurisdiction over south Vietnam

because they could not hand it over to a regime that did not exist -

it is not even mentioned in the Geneva agreement.

The regime of Saigon is only a temporary one

in waiting for election."

"You ought to have sat with me on the Foreign Relations Committee in 1956,

when our intelligence forces brought in their reports, warning

that if the election called for by the Geneva Accords for July, 1956

were held, Ho Chi Minh would be elected president

in South Vietnam by at least 80% of the vote.

And our country that boasts about believing in self-determination

used its power and its prestige and its influence,

really to get our first puppet government under Diem

not to cooperate in holding those elections – that's just a matter of historic record."

At the time, they were trying to stop

the war opposition of the Unions and so, by breaking their back,

they opened up Marseille to, and the docks there, to Mob control.

They already had it in Corsica

and so, then, that became the route

for the heroin and the heroin profits to come down.

That connection, or what was called The French Connection out of Marseille,

dominated a new money

in the organized crime sector and also included prostitution, drugs and other

criminal activity that the old mob wouldn't participate in.

"I'm not on."

"What do you mean, you're not on?"

"Just what I said. I'm not on, I don't take money."

"Some gag. Here." -
"No, I told you straight.

I don't take money and that's the truth."

This was Sicily in the mid 1980s.

A gang war had broken out between competing mob bosses.

In itself, this was not an unusual occurrence,

but the body count was alarmingly high.

Five corpses were being found every single day.

Other patterns were emerging.

Were once the bosses had sought, though frequently failed,

to abide by a code of honor,

the new gang wars involved the slaughter of women and children.

The escalation in violence corresponded with an escalation in drug traffic.

Billions of dollars were now involved.

In 1992, after decades of increasingly violent rule by the mafia,

Sicilians took to the streets to demand their government take action.

The uprising was precipitated by the assassination of Giovanni Falcone,

who had launched the largest prosecution of the mob in history,

only to be shut down by the Italian government.

Finally, Italy's leaders responded.

7,000 army troops were sent into Sicily

and new anti-mafia legislation was passed.

Government spokespersons declared that the war on the mafia had been won.

This would soon prove to be an illusion.

Though the Sicilian mafia had been temporarily beheaded,

the same social conditions that had allowed the underworld to flourish, remained in place.

Like the hydra, the mythical creature that grows two heads when one is severed,

the Mafia would emerge with new found strength.

"Hear nothing. See nothing. Say nothing.

Those three things will keep you alive."

That is the code of Italy's most violent mafia, the Camorra,

and this is where its grip is strongest: Naples,

a city in the heart of Europe.

Its brutality is notorious.

It's killed more people than the IRA.

"It stands for death, terror, trauma, blood and tears."

But senior insiders, who have never spoken publicly before, tell me

the power of Camorra clans is all pervasive.

"Take away the word Naples and leave the word Camorra.

It's the city of the Camorra."

This organized crime syndicate rakes in billions by poisoning

its own backyard with toxic waste,

and the Camorra has poluted politics in Naples.

"It used to be that the Camorrista would knock on the politician's door for favors,

today, in this city, it's the politician who needs the Camorrista."

The Camorra has more blood on its hands than Sicily's infamous mafia.

What will it take to stop it?

But there was more disturbing news in the fall of 1993

when a report revealed that government itself may have been running drugs.

The head of the DEA at the time, Robert Bonner,

said that a ton of pure cocaine worth hundreds of millions of dollars

had been smuggled into the US.

He blamed the CIA,

saying the agency had joined the Venezuelan National Guard

in drug smuggling.

"Let me understand what you're saying: a ton of cocaine

was smuggled into the USA,

by the Venezuelan National Guard

in cooperation with the CIA?"

"That's exactly what appears to have happened."

Former DEA agent Levine said that

equally shocking was the fact that for more than 30 years

the federal government had protected some drug dealers.

"As officers in the narcotic war,

we saw the political choice made

up-close and personal."

One example, Levine said, was during the Nixon administration

when he was about to bust a major source of heroin.

"I was stopped, stopped cold, because that source

were our allies in the Vietnam war."

Levine said this was not an isolated incident,

that it had happened many times in his 25-year career.

"If it was a question of

supporting people who supported our

economic and political philosophies in other parts of the world,

and they happened to be drug dealers – as most of them are –

we supported them and we protected them.

It's very hard to point to an area of the world where you have

major drug trafficking, where the CIA

has not been a factor

in allowing that drug trade to prosper

because of the protection

which they conferred upon their assets.

The CIA, in trying to

create an anti-communist presence in Southeast Asia,

they were very worried, especially after China went communist.

The CIA built up what was left of

Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang, which

always had financed itself by the drug traffic

and, starting officially in the year 1951,

the CIA's 'Operation Paper'

started supplying arms and

other material assistance to

a group of KMT former soldiers in Burma,

whose main activity was controlling the

drug traffic there and exporting drugs out of Burma,

mostly through Thailand to Hong Kong,

to Taiwan and, eventually, to the US.

This grew with time and came to support a whole

CIA private army in Thailand, which was then used to

stir up war in Laos, and really is a

neglected factor in the origins of the Vietnam War, the American Vietnam War.

The CIA began going into Afghanistan

after the communists seized power there in 1978.

They actually were in there a bit before and may have helped, by their

sport of the right, to have precipitated that communist coup,

but, in a big way the CIA became involved in

Afghanistan after December, 1979.

US National Security Adviser, Brzezinski

flew to Pakistan, to set about rallying resistance.

He wanted to arm the Mujahideen without revealing America's role.

On the Afghan border near the Khyber Pass,

he urged the 'Soldiers of God' to re-double their efforts.

"We know of their deep belief in God

and we are confident that their struggle will succeed."

The CIA support went not to the

general Afghan resistance,

but to those parts of the Afghan resistance which were trusted by the

Saudis, and above all, by Pakistan.

And Pakistan was frightened of a genuinely

popular resistance movement, because

they, most of the resistance,

didn't like the Durand Line, which was the official frontier

between Pakistan and Afghanistan,

and which divides Pashtun people and even

divides tribes and families.

So, all the aid went to those people who would recognize the Durand Line

and these were mostly proteges of the

Pakistani intelligence service, the ISI,

and who found a convenient situation to

support themselves against the rest by

getting involved in drug traffic. Not just moving drugs,

but even developing heroin factories

inside those parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan

which were under ISI control.

In the very early stages of US support

for Afghanistan resistance,

all that aid was channeled through a bank

called the Bank of Credit and Commerce, International (BCCI).

"To keep the authorities in the dark and prop up their empires,

BCCI and Gulf set up an elaborate money-go-round.

Depositors ranging from the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi to ordinary customers,

put their money into BCCI accounts.

But a secret route was needed to divert it to Gulf.

To do this, Gulf set up dozens of shadow companies in places like Liberia and Panama,

where ownership can be kept secret.

These companies opened accounts with BCCI

through which money started to flow.

They recycled money between them and to other specially created Indian trading companies,

so it looked as if real business was taking place.

The shadow companies opened accounts in New York

and channeled the money there.

But these accounts were also controlled by Gulf.

Gulf returned some of the money to BCCI,

so it appeared BCCI was making profits.

This was a bank which was getting rich by laundering drug money,

had a direct stake in the drug trade,

and actually may, according to some

people who've written about it, had been involved,

directly involved in the drug trade itself, as well as in

creating balances for drug traffickers.

From the very beginning, American aid

was skewed away from,

what an outsider would've said, were to be the obvious recipients of

aid in Afghanistan and went to these

two outside groups, Abu Sayyaf and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,

neither of whom had a very solid base in Afghanistan

and both groups being involved in the drug traffic.

It's a real tragedy that perhaps half of all US aid

given to the Afghan resistance in the 1980s

was given to this one man, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,

who at the time was the world's biggest drug trafficker.

The CIA has to face the fact that wherever they have been active... I mean,

the world's heroin today

is coming from three countries,

all of them countries where the CIA has been active,

most of it in Afghanistan, which where we have been hyperactive recently with the world's

largest CIA station,

and it's worth mentioning that before the CIA went into Afghanistan in the late 1970s,

Afghanistan had never been a factor in the world drug trade.

There had been opium grown, but it was locally consumed.

Afghanistan now produces, I think, 93% of the world's heroin.

Before that, it was Indochina, and until America got out of Indochina,

it was producing about 90% of the world's heroin, and

the failure of the US media to

note this very obvious correlation between CIA activity and drug production

is one of the reasons that we have such a problem on our hands, because

it's only a few of us who are - sort of,

for this reason, denied access to the mainstream media -

who keep pointing out the obvious: that there is a correlation between

CIA activity and drug production.

The third area is Colombia.

Little was known about BCCI

until 6 of its top officers were arrested

in Tampa in October of 1988

on charges of laundering drug money for Colombian cocaine bosses.

The BCCI men were convicted

and the bank itself, pleaded guilty.

But for some reason, the bank was allowed to continue

to operate all over the world,

and investigators say US prosecutors failed to follow up

on evidence of wide-spread corruption and other crimes

that, this month, finally led to the bank being shut down.

I don't want to say that we invented cocaine production there,

but it has massively increased

since, it was originally 1962, I think, when,

under Kennedy, the US were very concerned about Castro

having taken over in Cuba, and frightened that he would export

revolution to Latin America, and Colombia

would be likely the ... (first?),

the coastline that is closest to Cuba.

So, they initiated an anti-communist program there,

which was successful in creating only two things:

first of all, a great escalation

in the number of drug traffickers in Colombia,

the amount of drugs produced in Colombia,

but also in the amount of terrorism,

because a lot of ordinary trade unionists...

Once they had this CIA supported, anti-communist drive to deal with,
because a lot of ordinary trade unionists...

Once they had this CIA supported, anti-communist drive to deal with,

they decided that their only protection

was to become a militant revolutionary movement. So, it was,

I think, a disastrous move on two levels.

Not just the drug level, but also the terrorism level.

And now, in Colombia, terrorism and anti-terrorism

is a drug-related industry on both sides.

But specifically with Colombia, the closest ally - two allies, that

the US has right now in Latin America is Mexico and Colombia.

Colombia is the worst human rights violator in Latin America.

Over 3,000 trade unionists have been murdered in the last 10 years,

thousands of journalists have been murdered in the last few decades.

The most dangerous place to be in the world if you are a trade unionist is Colombia.

The most dangerous place to be in the world if you are a journalist is Colombia.

Over 3 million people have been displaced from the land in Colombia

by right-wing paramilitary units that then, once that land is displaced,

turn that land over to trans-national corporations, to local planters and investors,

to local capitalists, and so, Colombia is basically a terrorist regime.

It's a terrorist state. It's a nightmare state

for the poor majority and this is a state which the US is totally aligned with.

So you might ask, why is that the case? Well,

US strategy has been to use Colombia as a beachhead

to try and gain, re-gain influence in Latin America.

So, Obama comes in and says that Colombia is the best friend of the US.

"And today president Santos and I reviewed our progress and,

I'm pleased to say, reached agreement on several new initiatives.

First, as has already been mentioned, we are moving ahead with our landmark trade agreement."

Well, if what you mean by the US are the dominant system, the rulers in the US,

Colombia is the best friend of the US. And

what the US can do now is attempt to regain its influence by

trying to beef up Colombia, strengthen Colombia and

use Colombia as a staging point to counter the pink tide,

or the US might come up with a more sophisticated

strategy of accepting

some type of reform in Latin America and accommodating itself to that reform.

I think that's, seen from the viewpoint of the US political elite, that's the challenge that it faces.

In 2010, the former head of death squads in Colombia,

Juan Manuel Santos,

claimed to have won the presidential election.

Voter abstention was estimated at over 75%.

Shortly before, the largest mass grave in Colombian history was discovered.

Located just outside of an army base in La Macarena,

it was revealed when children drinking from the nearby stream became ill

from the toxic effects of decomposing flesh.

An editorial in the NY Times described Santos as a role model for Latin America.

Hundreds of bodies buried in unmarked graves.

This cemetery in La Macarena has become president Alvaro Uribe's nightmare

in his last days in office.

La Macarena is located deep into the Colombian jungle

in a place that was once controlled by the

Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

Human rights groups claim that there could be up to 2,000 bodies buried here,

right behind the largest Colombian military base in the area.

The government claims the dead were guerrillas,

but people in the area say many were innocent civilians.

Raquel Benavidez certainly thinks so.

She says her son was killed by the military and passed off as a guerrilla fighter.

He was found in a mass grave.

"They killed my son for holidays for some cash.

They killed him so the government would get more money from abroad.

I feel anger because my son was an educated person

and he was the light of my eyes."

The US government has been dogged by revelations that

thousands of young poor men and women were killed

to increase the combat body count

and then presented as guerrillas.

In exchange, their killers got rewards.

People in the area say that most of the bodies that were buried here were brought

by the Colombian military, and as you can see,

they were buried in unmarked graves.

This number is the number of the registry in the cemetery, and 2010 is the year they were killed.

The president visited the area to reaffirm his support for Colombia's military.

"In 1988, Martha Gomez's husband was murdered

by an army death squad, masquerading as a paramilitary group.

At the time, he worked in a local banana plantation,

and the workers there were striking for better pay and conditions.

When Martha's husband was ordered to break the strike, he refused,

and the paramilitaries beat him to a pulp.

9 years later, Martha's parents and sister were also murdered by paramilitaries in the same town."

"They have a way of killing.

They cut their heads off.

Many people were disemboweled

and their innards thrown in the river.

This is the way they do it.

They are laying down the seeds of terror so people will respect them,

listen to them and obey them."

Without preceding with the horrors in Colombia, what's it all about?

There is an official story, the one you know. It has to do with this so-called drug war.

That's not taken seriously by any competent analyst, and that's no exaggeration.

And there's some very good reasons for it. One reason is that

narcotrafficking is part of the elite culture in Colombia.

The sectors of the population to which the arms are going

are up to their necks in narcotrafficking and that's, by no means, any secret.

Furthermore, they are not being targeted.

So all of the paramilitaries are right in the middle

of the narcotrafficking system

and are responsible for the overwhelming majority of the atrocities,

up to 80% last year if you can believe the Colombian government.

They're not being targeted.

That's not where the fighting is gonna go, not to the territories that they control,

and there's good reasons for that.

They are basically the armies of the land-owners, the narcotraffickers,

the, you know, oil companies and so on and so forth, you don't go after them.

The Colombia Plan, Clinton's Colombia Plan

is specifically directed against the areas that happen to be under guerrilla control.

And it's in that framework that the drug production proceeds.

There's a way to stop it. For example, you could allow commodity stabilization programs in the third world,

you could provide a fraction of the money that's going for -

to kill people - could be used to develop alternative crops.

The socio-economic problems in Colombia, which are extremely severe,

can be dealt with in several different ways.

One way is to try to change the internal structure of the country.

To follow programs that would, in fact, benefit the population,

instead of oppressing them. That's one way.

The other way is to go in and kill them.

There's a further question, kind of lurking in the background,

which is never raised but really ought to be. It's not a very profound question,

and that is: what right do we have to do anything in Colombia?

Wherever you declare a war on drugs, you get more drugs and not less drugs.

That's an absolute certain rule. And when in

1990, I think, it was when the first president Bush

declared war on drugs in Colombia, and I predicted publicly at a conference, I said:

"We will see more drugs coming out of Colombia, now that we've declared war there."

More planes going back and forth, more personnel going back and forth,

and lo and behold, in ten years it was three times the amount of

cocaine being produced in Colombia.

"So you wonder why the US is continuing

with the massive amount of aid to Colombia when

none of the stated goals

for Plan Colombia are being met?"

"Are there any indications that they're re-thinking this aid

now, upon this news, or

with what you're saying, that they haven't made a lot of progress

on the goals that they had in the country?"

"Quite to the contrary, and I would say what this tells us is that

the US actually didn't have these goals in the first place.

The aid that they're bringing in includes seven new military bases,

so there's a huge new influx of military aid to Colombia, rather than

addressing the issues."

There is a continuum of US hegemony

in the Latin American continent, in the region.

People in Latin America are pretty aware of this.

When I go down to Chile, for example, and

people talk about the war on drugs or

the war against terror, people see the continuum

– a continuation of the same mechanisms of violence in order to -

that are targeting, these mechanisms are targeting

exactly the same population: the poor, indigenous peoples.

It follows the same logic of the US

doctrines of national security in the region.

They are all part of the same ideology

which is to demobilize those people

who are mobilizing in order to achieve social justice. It's the same thing.

According to Laura Carlson, the director of the program of the Center for International Policy,

the drug war has become the major vehicle of militarization in Latin America,

a way for the Pentagon to occupy and control countries at the expense of whole societies.

South of the border, the drug war has claimed 47,000 lives between the years 2006 and 2012.

The Iran-Contra affair of the 1980s was a,

as far as the press was concerned – they focused mostly on the fact that

profits from selling arms to Iran, which was actually illegal under US law,

but done by Oliver North for the White House,

those profits had been used to support the Contras.

The drug aspect of Iran-Contra is on the Contra side,

partly because some of the Contras themselves were drug traffickers,

particularly the original core who came out of

Somoza's national guard in Nicaragua,

which had used its privileged position to traffic in drugs back in the 70s before they were ousted.

But on an even bigger level, which the press mostly missed,

the big-time drug traffickers,

the people who moved cocaine from, out of Colombia and through Central America up to the United States

and had major planes for this, they all volunteered to support the Contras

either by lending their aircraft to the movement of arms,

or by direct financial subsidy of the Contras.

So, the big drug aspect of Iran-Contra was not what the Contras themselves were doing,

because they were mostly pretty small people,

but it was what major drug traffickers in,

particularly Mexico, in Honduras and in Colombia itself,

what they were doing to buy themselves - become CIA immunity (?)

by being useful to the Contras.

So that the CIA and eventually even US State Department

ended up giving official contracts for movements of supplies

to airlines which the DEA had already recognized as being drug airlines.

Someways, the whole pattern of how the drugs moved

was based on the relationships of all of these

various CIA clients had with each other.

"And I oppose any diversion of funds,

any ransom payments

or any circumvention of the will of the Congress,

the law of the USA."

George Bush Sr. came to Guatemala

on January 13th, 1986

and he approached me and asked me what I did

there at the US embassy, what my job description was,

and I told him (?) DEA working (??)
international narcotics investigation,

and I told him: "Look,

we have gathered intelligence that the cartels are involved in drug trafficking down in El Salvador."

Then he just smiled, shook my hand and walked away from me.

It was then and there that I knew my government knew

that these atrocities were occurring.

We found a number of people in Florida

that were helping the Contras,

taking weapons, guns for drugs, they were involved

in failed banks and savings and loans.

One CIA gun-and-drug runner was a guy named Jack DeVoe,

and DeVoe was actually bringing in his cocaine into the Ocean Reef club

on Key Largo, that was owned by Carl Lindner,

a Cincinnati businessman
- "Oh! He's very close to Bush!" -

Very close to Bush. Bush would go down

and actually vacation at the Ocean Reef club, there's a picture in my book

of Bush in a fishing boat off Ocean Reef.

This is where Jack DeVoe is bringing in his cocaine.

And DeVoe was also taking guns down to Latin America for the CIA.

"There's a new epidemic.

Smokeable cocaine,

otherwise known as crack."

"Let there be no mistake. This stuff is poison."

"Little kids doing drugs. It turns my stomach."

"Don't mess with them."

"Just say no!"

Now, DeVoe's money launderer

was a Miami attorney named Lawrence Freeman.

Freeman had previously worked for Paul Helliwell, one of the founding fathers of the CIA,

and also was laundering money for Santo Trafficante

the Tampa, Florida mafia boss.

Freeman drew up the documents, the sales contract

for a 21,000 acre land deal in Florida Panhandle,

that Hill Financial Savings, the one in Pennsylvania we previously talked about,

and Vision Bank Savings in Kingsville, Texas

that was owned by Walter Mischer's former son-in-law,

financed, there we have Lawrence Freeman

drawing up the papers that involved these people

and he's, you know, closely connected to CIA, he'd been the in-house counsel for Castle Bank & Trust and NASA.

A bank that was used by the mafia and the CIA to hide and launder money

and was shut down when Paul Helliwell died.

It appeared that many of these

off-shore money laundering operations were moved,

after Castle Bank failed and was shut down, to the Isle of Jersey.

And Lawrence Freeman was laundering Jack DeVoe's drug money through the Isle of Jersey.

Robert Corson, Mischer's former son-in-law and Mike Adkinson

were laundering S&L money

through the Isle of Jersey along with some people in Colorado that connect to Neil Bush.

All were using the same, the same trust,

the same trust in the Isle of Jersey - we're getting drug money

and S&L money and they were mixed in in the same bank accounts.

America – land of the free?

Not when one out of a hundred Americans are currently incarcerated in either jail or prison,

making America the country with the highest incarceration rates in the entire world.

The US has only 5% of the population, but holds ¼ of the world's prisoners.

Even more disturbing than the rates of the imprisoned is the privatization of the industry.

The expanding prison-industrial complex has a vested interest in keeping people locked up.

Just like the security industry's growing lobbying efforts to implement

harsher security legislation that would implement their products,
Just like the security industry's growing lobbying efforts to implement

harsher security legislation that would implement their products,

there's a growing trend of private prisons.

The prison-industrial complex, which has grown 350% over the last 15 years

has been lobbying Congress hard

to pass legislation that would imprison more people.

Now, the private prison industry is by no means a new story,

but the growing number of companies reporting record profits

by means of locking people up, is.

Wells Fargo, you know, that bank that received a cool $37 million

from the US government's taxpayer-funded bailouts,

is also the main investor in 4 private prisons.

That's right.

The people that, some say, should be behind bars, are the ones profiting of locking people up.

Is this just an ironic twist, or is it good business practice?

Earlier, I was joined by Russ Baker, founder and editor-in-chief

of WhoWhatWhy.com

and author of the book Family of Secrets.

I asked him what sets the US apart from other nations and

why are so many people behind bars in this country.
Here's what he had to say:

"Right, Abby, what we're doing is we're looking for new excuses to lock people up.

That figure you cited,

1 out of a 100 is quite alarming but even more alarming

is the figure of 6 million Americans

who are under some form of supervision, either in prison,

or they are in the parole-probation system.

That is a staggering figure.

The correct term to use would be gulag.

What we're looking at is essentially the criminalization of extremely minor behavior,

much of it victimless, coupled with

severe and extremely harsh sentences,

compounded by putting people,

who really are not dangerous into very dangerous facilities,

and turning them into hardened criminals.

I certainly agree that prohibition

increases drug trafficking, rather than diminishes it.

What drives the drug trade is profit,

and if the drug traffic is illegal, the profits are far higher than if it's legal.

By now America has well launched into an era of amazing madness,

bootlegging has grown from small individual effort,

to big business embodying huge coalitions and combine.

The chase after huge profits is followed closely by their inevitable partners:

corruption, violence and murder.

A new and horrible tool appears: the Tommy.

A light, deadly, wasp-like machine-gun,

and murder henceforth is parceled out in wholesale lots.

Then, in the depth of the economic despair that has gripped the country,

Franklin Delano Roosevelt is elected president,

partially on the basis of his promise to end prohibition.

In New York City, thousands of jubilant citizens march in a great beer parade

and shortly, 3.2 beer becomes legal.

Finally comes the national referendum on repeal.

Tired of years of violence, corruption and loss of personal liberty,

Americans go the polls and overwhelmingly rout the dry forces.

After 13 years, Prohibition is dead,

leaving in its wake a criminal element used to wealth and power,

but unable, for the most part, to cope with a new determination

by an aroused public that law and order should once more reign.

America faces the

opposition of most of the European countries who favor

a medical approach to drug problem, rather than a police approach to

the drug problem and they have actually instituted programs

in countries like the Netherlands. It's not legal

to buy and sell heroin,

but it's not criminal for people to consume it

and this means that addicts go to government created centers

to get their injections and there's actually been a fall-off in drug consumption.

But the big benefit from this is the

very major fall-off in drug related crime.

You see fewer thefts

for drug purposes, because they don't have to steal to get their drugs.

You see a marked decline in drug related prostitution,

you know, women who are selling their bodies to get their drugs.

I just finished reviewing a book for an academic journal

and the conclusion to the book was my own, as well,

is that the rest of the world is waiting

for America to abandon its prohibition model

of drug treatments and go to a more sane,

more humane and more successful

medical approach to the problem.

It's well known how to deal with drug problems. It's not a small problem,

I mean, substance abuse is a serious problem: the worst part is tobacco, the next is alcohol

and down below are lots of other drugs,

and the way to deal with it is by treating it. Prevention and treatment,

prevention of course means eliminating the social conditions out of which it arises.

But just plain treatment, and it's effective.

There are major studies which compare the effectiveness, government-funded studies,

major ones, that compare the effectiveness of treatment to other approaches.

The major one by Rand Corporation

compared treatment - prevention and treatment -

just in terms of cost effectiveness,

to a Criminal Justice, what's called

– I hate to use the word – what's called Criminal Justice in the United States,

and it was about 7 times as effective. Treatment.

They compared it with interdiction – it's about 11 times as effective.

They compared it with what's called Source Country Control – that's what we're doing in Colombia –

it was 23 times as effective.

So, by substantial measures,

these are much more effective ways of dealing with the substance abuse problem,

which is a problem, you know, and if you wanna deal with it – that's the way to do it.

Well, for years it's been pointed out by critics of these programs that they fail to meet their stated objectives, and that's true.

They completely fail to meet their stated objectives

and that's recognized on all sides. What do you decide when a program fails to meet the stated objectives?

The methods are criminal prosecution at home and, you know, mass murder abroad.

Well, what you do is, you intensify the same efforts and you avoid the methods that you know to work.

Well, you know, assuming everybody isn't totally insane, there's another conclusion to be drawn from this,

and that is that they ARE meeting their objectives – not the stated objectives, but the REAL objectives.

When I talk about the Deep State, I ought have also to talk about

the huge and increasing disparity

of income and wealth in this country.

So that, particularly since WWII, but also before,

is very visible in the early history because

nearly all of the senior directors and deputy directors of the CIA

were recruited from Wall Street, and

not really from Wall Street, but from

that part of Wall Street who figured also in the New York Social Register, that is to say, who were

wealthy, affluent part of the ruling establishment that prevails in Manhattan.

The Deep State is all the ways that those people have influence

over American policy.

The CIA in the early days was like their

special play-thing and when something inside CIA

was created, called OPC, the Office of Policy Coordination,

very innocuous title, very insidious agency,

which started planning coups and assassinations all around the world.

That too was a creation of their policy and

the Deep State was embodied there at that time.

But there are many other ways in which that influence is exerted:

The Council on Foreign Relations, The Federal Reserve.

We've just seen spectacular way in which the Federal Reserve has been using,

which is essentially a banker's institution,

not democratically controlled, by design,

has been using public funds to bailout the banks

which are the institutions who supply

the various board members of the Federal Reserve.

So that too, in my view, is part of the Deep State.

It's a whole milieu, or venue, where private power,

the power of wealth influences policy.

In 2008, capitalism underwent a crisis of gargantuan proportions,

leading to economic devastation around the world.

In response, the US government launched a series of investigations.

As with the Church Committee and Iran-Contra scandal, stern words were spoken.

"What do you think about selling securities which your own people think are

crap. Does that bother you?"

"I think they would...

again, as a hypothetical?"
"No, this is real."

"Well, then I don't-"
"We heard it today."

"Well..."
"We heard it today. This is a shitty deal. This is crap."

"I, I, I heard nothing today that makes me think anything, uhm, went wrong."

"Is there not a conflict when you sell something

to somebody and then are determined

to bet against that same security

and you don't disclose that to the person you're selling it to. Do you see a problem?"

"In the context of market-making, that is not a conflict."

Also like the Church Committee and the Iran-Contra scandal,

none of the top law breakers received any significant punishment.

The problem we were then faced with,

with the Iran-Contra scandal, immediately,

was an effort to contain it.

Once the White House had to admit they've been lying

all those months and all those years,

they then immediately tried to contain it.

In the words of Robert Dutton, one of the operatives,

the word was out to build a Chinese wall around Ronald Reagan.

And they did it. And they did it partly because the Democrats in the Congress

decided that it would be too disruptive to this country,

to our political system, to get to the truth.

With a handful of notable exceptions, US government officials

have repeatedly demonstrated that they are either unwilling, or unable

to rein in the secret government.

On the contrary, the majority of elected officials appear to regard

their shadowy counterparts in the intelligence business as comrades in arms.

The main defense of the CIA was made by democrat John Stennis of Mississippi,

a member of the Senat's CIA Watchdog Subcommittee.

"Was the CIA's inference, in your opinion,

was its inference into the field of public opinion perhaps a little unwise, do you think?"

"Well, I... it might have gone further than I would have gone if

I had been in on making the judgments directly...

This originated in early 50s.

You remember, that's when the Congress was passing here the bill that outlawed

the Communist Party, Francis(?), there was a congressional expression.

Perhaps in some of these programs it didn't change fast enough,

but this is quite serious business, we can't do without it,

we must continue it and I, frankly, think...

I hope, at least, we'll quit talking about it so much

as soon, and people realize, American people realize that this is something different."

The word has already been passed on the hill. Passed from the leadership

and from that inner, inner group of men who watch over the CIA.

The result is that Congress will do virtually nothing publicly to investigate or reform the agency.

Increasingly, when damning information is leaked, it is met with outrage,

not at those whose criminal activity has been exposed,

but the individuals who dare breach the wall of secrecy.

John Kiriakou, former CIA agent and anti-torture whistleblower,

may never see himself in the National Portrait Gallery,

but he was celebrated in a different kind of ceremony Wednesday evening.

The portrait is the newest addition in the Americans who tell the truth series by artist Robert Shetterly.

Kiriakou was the only CIA officer facing jail time for

any actions surrounding the government's torture program.

"I never tortured anybody,

but I'm heading to prison, while the torturers and lawyers who papered over it,

and the people who deceived it, and the man who destroyed the proof of it, the tapes,

will never face justice."

In 2011 he became the 6th whistleblower charged with

violating the Espionage Act by the Obama administration during the first term.

"Well, when it comes to punishing whistleblowers, president Obama is

proving to be more aggressive than all previous presidents combined.

Pretrial hearings are underway for one of them, Wikileaks whistleblower, Bradley Manning.

The 24-year old army private is accused of releasing a video which shows a US

Apache helicopter shooting and killing Iraqi civilians and two journalists.

Manning faces a slew of charges including aiding the enemy.

If convicted, he could face life behind bars.

"This guy should be tried. Manning should be tried for treason, executed if he's found guilty."

"Whoever in our government

leaked that information is guilty of treason

and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty."

"Through the course of the investigation, and as I have said publicly,

that he should be charged with treason."

"Regardless of the legal standing of this situation,

I do think that it was reckless and

irresponsible to leak all these cables.

I do think that it has the potential,

not only to jeopardize some very sensitive

issues with respect to national security and foreign policy,

but you always run the risk when you do this of literally,

putting people's lives in danger.

I'm gonna have to thank you all very much, I've gotta go."

"Let's dig a little bit deeper. Right now with the chair of the Senat's Elect Committee on Intelligence,

the democratic senator from California, Diane Feinstein. Senator, thanks very much for coming in."
"Let's dig a little bit deeper. Right now with the chair of the Senat's Elect Committee on Intelligence,

the democratic senator from California, Diane Feinstein. Senator, thanks very much for coming in."

"I have some other thoughts, I don't wanna discuss them here.

I'll discuss them with the committee tomorrow morning.

I think what we're seeing, Wolf,

is an anschluss**, an avalanche of leaks, [see appendix]

and it's very, very disturbing.

You know, it's dismayed our allies,

it puts American lives in jeopardy."

"I guess the question is, and you don't have to go into specific details, I would assume

they would be classified, but do you know

of a specific incident

where someone's life has been threatened or endangered,

an actual incident, as a result of these leaks?"

"Yes.

I can tell you where lives have been endangered."

"Has anyone been killed as a result?"

"Not to my knowledge."

"Do you want to go into specifics?"
"No, I do not."

"Alright, though, you don't have to, I suspect that this is sensitive information."
"And I'm not going to."

"The State's Secret Privilege,

which is this doctrine that

essentially puts a censorship veil

over everything you wanna blow the whistle on.

But, this fight

over the exposure of government misconduct

goes all the way back to the American Revolution and the First Amendment.

And the First amendment of the US Constitution

was enacted to prevent

precisely what we're seeing unfolding today.

People in the government witness the abuses

and they have a right to blow the whistle on it,

and that's where Sybelle Edmunds' case is going to be critical,

because we are challenging the legal predicates

that they have used to prosecute and

suppress whistleblowers throughout this country.

We're challenging them now because they're illegal and unconstitutional. We're taking the offensive."

"You are saying that this dates back to the First Amendment – that is freedom of speech, so,

would you say then that this attack on whistleblowers is then an attack on freedom of speech?"

"Absolutely. It's fundamental to speech.

If you go back to what our founding fathers said,

they said that it's government misconduct

that the government wants to suppress

the public ever learning about, so the heart

of the First Amendment, its essential core,

was to permit people

to expose government abuses.

But what we see in these censorship cases

is that the government is using its power to intimidate, to prosecute,

to threaten, and to stop

government employees with information, be it waterboarding,

information like Sybelle Edmunds had about misconduct in the translation services,

preventing the American people learning

about the abuses of their government.

And that's why we have the First Amendment.

You know, OK, it's fun, you can read People Magazine or watch TV, that's great,

it's all protected under the First Amendment,

but the heart of it, the core of the First Amendment

is the protection of people who want to expose the misconduct of government."

There is a consensus, across ideological lines,

and even one that transcends temporal eras about what the rule of law was intended to require,

what it really was intended to require

is nothing more than the fact that we are all equally

bound to a common set of rules,

regardless of power, position or prestige.

So you can look at, for example, contemporary legal scholars

who write about the rule of law and what they will over and over emphasize

is that the rule of law requires,

the defining attribute of it, is that nobody is above the law or nobody is below the law.

And nobody means nobody. Nobody is above the law.
Nobody is below the law.

And you can more interestingly look at

literature from the 1980s and the 1990s, this was during the time

when western institutions, led by the United States,

began lecturing the third world and the developing world

about what it was that they had to do in order to comport with the rule of law.

There were lots of journal articles written about what this term was supposed to mean

and the seminal article, the most influential article, was written by Thomas Carruthers,
There were lots of journal articles written about what this term was supposed to mean

and the seminal article, the most influential article, was written by Thomas Carruthers,

who was an official at the World Bank, and in 1988

he published in the Journal of Foreign Affairs this article entitled The requirements of the rule of law.

It was intended to sermonize to third world countries what they had to do, and what he

warned was that the way that you

become a country not living under the rule of law, the hallmark of a country that

fails to live under the rule of law - that is lawless -

is that: "the ruling elite's tendency to act extralegally

wherever legal systems remain captives of the powers that be“,

and he said that the most crucial challenge for a country

that is lawless, to become one that lives under the rule of law is that:

"Elites in the country must give up the habit of placing themselves above the law."

That was the defining requirement.

The idea that there is nobody above the law or below the law, that

even when our highest ranking political officials

get caught breaking the law, that they are subject to same set of

punishments and investigations and scrutiny and accountability,

as the most powerless American,

but that is literally not a principle that we apply any longer

to the leading members of our political class.

The idea that people should be prosecuted when they commit crimes

using the power that we vest with them in office

is the idea that is considered radical and fringe,

not the other way around. It's the immunity that is truly radical,

but it's the idea that we should hold them accountable on equal terms that is now considered

to be the extremist position.

"And the Emmy

goes to...

The Sopranos!"

"You know, in essence, this is a story about a gangster.

And gangsters are out there taking their kids to college

and taking their kids to school

and putting food on their table,

and hell, let's face it: if the world, and this nation was run by gangsters...

well, maybe it is, I don't know." (laughter)