Free press in U.S. vs Mexico: Que es mas macho?

 

Three Mexican journalists—each a woman who has spent years living with the real possibility that the death threats she regularly receives will one day result in a slow, gruesome death—heroically continue to report the truth about the drug war in their country that no mainstream American journalist has the balls to report about the drug war in ours: 

"Mexico's war on drugs is one big lie."

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Carmen Aristegui (above,left) Lydia Cacho (above, center) and Anabel Hernández(above, right) report Mexico’s drug lords and the Mexican government are two sides of the same coin. Each has more courage in her little finger than do hundreds of toadies, lapdogs, and sniveling careerists in the U.S. mindlessly passing along press releases fed to them by government handlers as news.

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The “Zapruder Film” of the “War on Drugs”

Most people have already heard something about the assassination of Barry Seal, gunned down in cold blood in Baton Rouge Louisiana in 1986, supposedly for ratting out the head of the Medellin Cartel, Pablo Escobar.

 

But that’s not what happened. And it’s one place where the big lies of the war on drugs lie exposed in a way that’s understandable to almost anyone.

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Did Tom Cruise helicopter clip doomed ‘Mena’ plane?

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Both men who died in the crash of a twin-engine plane in Colombia last week on the shoot for Tom Cruise’s new “Mena” movie have backgrounds more like those of spies, spooks, drug movers or clandestine agents than pilots on a film shoot.

One owned offshore entities in the Netherland Antilles that controlled even more offshore entities, very useful for money laundering; owned a $2 million home on the Intracoastal Waterway with a dock handy for unloading knick-knacks and bric-a-brac from cruises in the Caribbean; and once lived in a small town in Texas next to a secret CIA base.

The other was even more mysterious.

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Jeb Bush’s 9/11 problem

 

On the campaign trail in New Hampshire two weeks ago, Jeb Bush was asked a question for which he clearly wasn’t prepared, which hearkened back to Bush’s time as Florida Governor. You can see the question here.jeb10

 

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True Detective III: “The Cowles’ Identity”

million_bills_harvest_640_01According to the DEA—which, caveat emptor, lies like a dog when it suits its purposes—El Chapo Guzman’s Sinaloa Cartel  “supplies 80% of the heroin, cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine, with a street value of $3 billion, that floods Chicago each year.”

Though it seldom comes up, that flood flows both ways. And since the money from a ton of cocaine is several times the volume of the cocaine itself, the flood of drugs into Chicago must resemble a tsunami of cash surging back to Mexico. Only… it doesn’t.

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True Detective II: “The Vaughn Addendum”

(sharon-vince-vaughnIn 2003,  Directors Performance Fund, a hedge fund controlled and run by Sharon Vaughn, mother of actor Vince Vaughn, capitalized a “bank” specializing in providing financing to drug traffickers and snake oil salesmen peddling goat’s blood.

The deal received attention  only after Vaughn’s hedge fund went fully rogue two years later,  in a much larger financial scam which caught the eye of the SEC first, before becoming the subject of a federal criminal investigation that resulted in federal charges against three men.

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True Detective: Chicago, El Chapo, & Vince Vaughn’s Mom

vince-vaughnActor Vince Vaughn, in the news for his starring role in HBO’s True Detective and recent controversial statements advocating more guns in schools, now has a new source of notoriety guaranteed to keep him in face time: his family.

Vaughn’s mother, Sharon Vaughn, a sparkling and vivacious Chicagoland socialite, and his step-father, Stephen Ferrone, a lawyer and former brokerage manager, both have links to a criminal enterprise involved in the biggest seizure of drugs on a plane in Mexican history.

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Zacarias Moussaoui and The Ghosts of 9/11

More than 14  years and five months after an attack which took more than 2800 lives in ways so horrible that the U.S. Government and the nation’s television networks seamlessly colluded—in real time—to prevent the American people from seeing what really was happening, last month some were finally hailing a “break” in the case. 

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In a deposition in a lawsuit filed by families of 9/11 victims against the Saudi Government,  Zacarias  Moussaoui, the man authorities dubbed the 20th hijacker, fingered a dozen prominent Saudis—including several Princes of the Royal House of Saud— as patrons of Al Qaeda whose support enabled the 9/11 attack. Continue reading

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A Muckrakers Life, Interrupted

Last week, after almost four months of silence,  I published a 2400-word initial account about what’s been learned about the man who became a daily fixture on cable and network news when his nephews were accused in the Boston attack. Ruslan Tsarni is also—and not coincidentally—an unacknowledged spook with ties to the CIA.

On a personal note, I figured the astonishing news would let my four-month absence here  pass unnoticed.  I was wrong. Major scandals and jaw-dropping disclosures no longer pack the wallop they once did.  After last week’s story I received expressions of concern—”Daniel, I was getting worried that we’d lost you!”— and more pointed questions as well: “Where have you been?”

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Former CIA Official Lied in Boston Bombing Cover-Up

 

Boston Marathon bombingFormer top CIA official Graham Fuller lied in a press interview about his former son-in-law, Ruslan Tsarni, the uncle of “The Brothers Tsarnaev,” Tamerlan, now dead, and Dzhokhar, soon to go on trial in Boston for allegedly planting a homemade pressure-cooker bomb packed with shrapnel near the finish line of the Boston Marathon.  Continue reading

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