Reply #20: Exerpts from John Kerry's "The New War" on BCCI...

[frank frankly]

This book, written in 1997 and reissued this year, just crossed my desk and WOW did a few paragraphs leap out!

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/068484614...

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This is the opening paragraph in the Preface and Acknowledgments:

"In a fundamental sense, work on this book began over ten years ago. In 1985, soon after I entered the Senate, a Vietnam veteran called me with information about a group of arms-trafficking mercenaries he had met in Central America. I began investigating and stumbled onto Oliver North's secret network of soldiers of fortune, arms dealers, cocaine traffickers, and corrupt officials who later became the heart of the Iran Contra scandal. Ironically, as I write these words, that scandal has again drawn national attention, as people try to understand how some in the United States government could have allowed foreign policy objectives, like support for the Nicaraguan Contras, to facilitate the transport of illegal narcotics into the United States."

<snip>

"A decade ago I began to uncover portions of a common international infrastructure for transnational crime. I saw it created in changes in the global marketplace, in computerization and globalization, in the realm of illicit arms and espionage, in the networks of terrorism, in banking capitals and financial centers, in far-flung island resorts, and at ports and borders all over the world. I found that most people in the government did not have a clue as to the existance of this infrastructure or how it operated.

"In the years that followed, one investigation led to another. My staff and I interviews criminals from the inside of various U.S. prisons and found that they had had remarkable access to political figures in countries all over the world. I began tracking Colombian drug traffickers to the Bahamas and Haiti, and this work led me to the network of Manuel Noriega. Noriega's drug and intelligence network used some of the same people Olliver North had used in supplying the Nicaraguan Contras, another example of the common infrastructures of transnational crime. Some of Noriega's drug traffickers were, unfortunately, also the Contras', and for some of them were even employed by the United States."

"In turn, the Noriega investigation opened the door to the place where he laundered his money, a bank called the Bank of Credit and Commerce Internationsl (BCCI). My investigation of BCCI, a $23 billion international financial institution, played a key role in shutting down the bank and exposing how dirty money and corruption flowed together in North America and European capitals, as well as in the developing world. The BCCI investigation took me deeper into the clandestine world of money launderers, drug traffickers, arms merchants, terrorists, and covert nuclear programs. During the dozens of hearings I held, I was able to expose a lot about this hidden world. But I felt that in the day-to-day headlines, some of the scope of what I was seeing had yet to be adequately described."