Barry Seal was a threat to testify against Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush. In fact, in early 1986 Barry Seal was threatening GHW Bush to get the IRS off his back or he (Seal) was going to blow the whistle on the Contra scheme and CIA drug smuggling. Two weeks after his argument with Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush, Barry Seal was pumped full of bullets and murdered outside his Baton Rouge halfway house on Feb. 19, 1986.
The three Columbians who were convicted of the crime thought they were working for Lt. Col. Oliver North of the National Security Council. North’s alias in the 1980’s was “John Cathey.” The personal phone number of George Herbert Walker Bush was found in Seal’s possessions, even after the “men in black” had swept in to pick car of the slaughtered CIA drug smuggler clean of evidence.
Years later, Texas Gov. George W. Bush was literally being flown around in what had been the favorite plane of Barry Seal. Many folks don’t know that on the exact same day (2/19/86) Barry Seal was murdered in Baton Rouge, his mistress “Barbara” was also murdered in Miami; two other men also affiliated with the Medellin drug cartel, Pablo Carrera (Medellin’s #2 man) and Pablo Ochill, were also assassinated in Colombia.
Some people think the CIA American drug cartel were switching horses from the Medellin drug cartel to a partnership with the Cali, Colombian drug cartel. The three men convicted of murdering Barry Seal were from Cali, Colombia. The CIA American drug cartel was using the Cali cartel in a killing spree to wipe out the competition and murder anyone who might pose a threat to spill the beans on CIA drug smuggling and the participation of very high U.S. officials.
More Daily Kos info
Progressive Review, 1984 - Hot Springs police record Roger Clinton during a cocaine transaction. Roger says, "Got to get some for my brother. He's got a nose like a vacuum cleaner." Roger is arrested while working at menial jobs for Arkansas "bond daddy" Dan Lasater.
Barry Seal estimates that he has earned between $60 and $100 million smuggling cocaine into the US, but with the feds closing in on him, Barry Seal flies from Mena to Washington in his private Lear Jet to meet with two members of Vice President George Bush's drug task force. Following the meeting, Seal rolls over for the DEA, becoming an informant. He collects information on leaders of the Medellin cartel while still dealing in drugs himself. The deal will be kept secret from investigators working in Louisiana and Arkansas. According to reporter Mara Leveritt, "By Seal's own account, his gross income in the year and a half after he became an informant - while he was based at Mena and while Asa Hutchinson was the federal prosecutor in Fort Smith, 82 miles away - was three-quarters of a million dollars. Seal reported that $575,000 of that income had been derived from a single cocaine shipment, which the DEA had allowed him to keep. Pressed further, he testified that, since going to work for the DEA, he had imported 1,500 pounds of cocaine into the U.S. Supposed informant Seal will fly repeatedly to Colombia, Guatemala, and Panama, where he meets with Jorge Ochoa, Fabio Ochoa, Pablo Escobar, and Carlos Lehder - leaders of the cartel that at the time controlled an estimated 80 percent of the cocaine entering the United States."
Clinton bodyguard, state trooper LD Brown, applies for a CIA opening. Clinton gives him help on his application essay including making it more Reaganesque on the topic of the Nicaragua. According to Brown, he meets a CIA recruiter in Dallas whom he later identities as former member of Vice President Bush's staff. On the recruiter's instruction, he meets with notorious drug dealer Barry Seal in a Little Rock restaurant. Joins Seal in flight to Honduras with a purported shipment of M16s and a return load of duffel bags. Brown gets $2,500 in small bills for the flight. Brown, concerned about the mission, consults with Clinton who says, "Oh, you can handle it, don't sweat it." On second flight, Brown finds cocaine in a duffel bag and again he seeks Clinton's counsel. Clinton says to the conservative Brown, "Your buddy, Bush, knows about it" and, of the cocaine, "that's Lasater's deal."
Progressive Review - Wikipedia puts some numbers on it all: "Tax havens have 1.2% of the world's population and hold 26% of the world's wealth, including 31% of the net profits of United States multinationals. . . The IMF has said that between $600 billion and $1.5 trillion of illicit money is laundered annually, equal to 2% to 5% of global economic output."
While the illegal drug trade might not compete in numbers with corporate tax laundering, it is hardly insignificant. Its size has been estimated at $400-$500 billion, roughly that of the legal pharmaceutical industry or twice as large as Saudi Arabia's annual oil exports.
What is astounding about this is that an industry so big would have - at least if you only listen to law enforcement and the media - no lobbyists in Washington, no political agenda and make no contributions to politicians. Based on the way the story is being told to America, the illegal drug trade must be the most politically ethical business in the land.
In fact, of course, the money and its travels are just well hidden and nobody in the establishment really wants you to spend the slightest time worrying about it. Just like nobody in the establishment seems to care that the drug war hasn't worked at all for four decades (money launderer Richard Nixon first used the term in 1971). And just like only a handful seem concerned about offshore tax havens.
If it were otherwise, then there would have been far more interest when an investigator discovered in the 1990s that the Development Financial Authority of the drug-infested state of Arkansas [where Bill Clinton was governor] had made an electronic transfer of $50 million to a bank in the Cayman Islands. At the time Grand Cayman had a population of 18,000, 570 commercial banks, one bank regulator and a bank secrecy law. It was a favorite destination spot for laundered drug money.
One of those bringing drugs into Arkansas was Barry Seal, then the biggest drug importer in the country. He was murdered and after his death it was found that among his bank accounts was one in the Cayman Islands branch of the Fuji Bank containing $1.6 million.
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Mara Leveritt, Arkansas Times - On the subject of Seal, the usually astute governor had come across as unusually uninformed. A citizens' group called the Arkansas Committee suspected that state and federal authorities had agreed to protect Seal in Arkansas. Disturbed by Clinton's apparent disinterest, members of the group at one point unfurled a 10-foot-long banner at the state Capitol that asked: WHY IS CLINTON PROTECTING BUSH? In 1992, when Clinton and George H.W. Bush opposed each other for president, neither candidate mentioned Seal.
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Roger Morris & Sally Denton, Penthouse Magzine - Seal's legacy includes more than 2,000 newly discovered documents that now verify and quantify much of what previously had been only suspicion, conjecture, and legend. The documents confirm that from 1981 to his brutal death in 1986, Barry Seal carried on one of the most lucrative, extensive, and brazen operations in the history of the international drug trade, and that he did it with the evident complicity, if not collusion, of elements of the United States government, apparently with the acquiescence of Ronald Reagan's administration, impunity from any subsequent exposure by George Bush's administration, and under the usually acute political nose of then Arkansas governor Bill Clinton. . .
