Some Prior Guests David Moorhouse
Ray McGovern
Dr. Rick Nuccio
Renee Boje
Daniel Ellsberg
Richard Stratton
Gerard Colby
Greg Palast
Dennis Dayle
Ralph McGeehee
Stan Goff
Mark Levine
Vincent Bugliosi
J.H. Hatfield
Siobhan Reynolds
Charles Bowden
Katherine Gun
Bob Parry
Sandy Gonzalez
Sibel Edmonds
Ellen Mariani
Peter Lance
Senator Bob Graham
Cele Castillo
Tosh Plumlee
Donald Bains
Will Northrop
Aukai Collin
John Loftus
Joyce Reilly Von Kliest
Kelly O' Meara
John P. Flannery
Bill Conroy
Sander Hicks
Paul Williams
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Mainstream Media: The Drug War Shills
by Michael Levine
(unedited draft of essay now published in
INTO THE BUZZSAW, Prometheus Press, edited by Kristina Borjesson)
Everything you need to know about mainstream media’s vital role in perpetuating our nation’s three—decade, trillion dollar War on Drugs despite overwhelming evidence that it is a fraud you can learn by watching a Three Card Monty Operation.
Three Card Monty is a blatant con game where the dealer lays three cards on a folding table, shows you that one of them is the Queen of Spades, turns them over, shuffles them quickly. You’re sure you know where the queen is and you saw a guy before you win easily a couple of times, so you bet your money. If that dopey looking guy can win, so can you. But, incredibly, you’ve guessed wrong. You lost. You’ve been taken for a sucker.
Continue reading Essay: Mainstream Media: The Drug War Shills
The “Perception of Cover-up”
by Michael Levine
On April 1, 1992, a House committee chaired by Congressman John Conyers Jr., declared that U.S. Customs and other Federal law enforcement agencies are poorly trained, badly supervised and that there is a “perception of cover-up” for their misdeeds.[1] (emphasis mine). At about midnight, August 25, 1992, just four months after those hearings, and a few days after the shooting of White Sepratist Randy Weaver’s wife and child by the FBI agents, Customs, DEA, BATF and Border Patrol agents launched a joint, military style invasion of the San Diego home of Mr. Donald Carlson, a 41 year old, computer company executive. The feds had a search warrant indicating that they expected to find 5,000 pounds of cocaine (having a street value of roughly $100 million), and four heavily armed Colombian drug dealers hiding in Mr. Carlson’s garage.
Continue reading Essay: The “Perception of Cover-up”
The Emperor is Butt Naked
by Michael Levine
To the Reader: This article was first published in 1997, four years prior to 9/11. Imagine what a difference it might have made if mainstream media had really played its “watchdog” role and forced Congress to demand the best from our first line of defense, instead of their looking the other way at the kind of ineptitude exposed here…and only here.
Yesterday upon the stair
I met a man who wasn’t there
He wasn’t there again today
I think he’s from the CIA
At this moment the next big and terrible secret that our CIA and some of their shills in congress and the media are scrambling to keep under wraps is that for the past eight years, they have been protecting and covering up for yet another world class drug trafficker while he and his family amassed a colossal fortune by flooding American cities with drugs. Ex- President of Mexico, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, linked to a half billion dollars in suspected drug money is now in hiding,[1] only I’m betting that my own government sources are right when they say that he is in daily contact with his CIA handlers.
Continue reading Essay: The Emperor is Butt Naked
KING RAT[1]
The American Justice System – Where the Rat is King.
by Michael Levine
“Gentlemen, in this business, you’re only
as good as your rats.”—Lecture on the Handling of
Criminal Informants (CIs) from U.S. Treasury Law
Enforcement Academy, August, 1965
“I’m looking for Mike Levine, ex-DEA,” said the man’s voice.
“How’d you get this number?” I said. It was close to midnight and my wife and I were in a San Francisco hotel on business.
“Man, you don’t know what I went through to find you.”
The voice belonged to a well known California defense attorney who said that he’d tracked me through my publisher.
“I’m in the middle of trying a case,” he said. “I need you to testify as an expert witness. The judge gave me over the weekend to find you and bring you here—”
“Whoa! Whoa!” I said. “Back up. I’m not a legal consultant—”
Continue reading Essay: KING RAT
Funeral Train
by Michael Levine
“Any day is a good day to die”—Arab proverb
On Saturday, June 8, 1968, I witnessed violent death. It wasn’t the first time, it wouldn’t be the last. Yet the images of that day festered in my memory for three decades. It wasn’t until recently that I understood why.
It is a hot day and I’m leaning out from between two cars of a southbound train trying to catch a breeze. Throngs of people line the tracks as far as the eye can see, gawking at us. Here and there an American flag hangs limp in the dank heat. The body of the Senator Robert F. Kennedy in a flag draped coffin is in the rear compartment. More than a million people line the tracks between New York and Washington DC where he will be buried. My train is packed with (literally) the year’s hottest celebrities— the air-conditioner, unimpressed, has quit.
Ahead, some of the crowd push onto the tracks for a closer look. A northbound train suddenly speeds around a curve heading right at them. I wave and shout. Most scatter to safety. But a few freeze in their tracks like frightened deer an instant before the mass of steel grinds them into road kill. I’m thinking, “I didn’t see that.” There is an explosion of sound. Shrieks of horror over screeching steel. A blur of dirty brown metal. The indescribable smell of death.
Continue reading Essay: Funeral Train
I Volunteer to Kidnap Ollie North
by Michael Levine – ©1992
We Americans have no idea how the image of our great country has suffered throughout the world as a result of our leader’s so-called war on drugs. I just returned from an international drug symposium under the auspices of the OGD ( ), where I spent a week listening to representatives—members of police agencies, college professors, bureaucrats, elected officials and journalists—of virtually every nation in the world affected by drug problems, all of whom seemed to have one point of view in common: that the U.S. war on drugs was both a failure and a fraud.
The fact that it is a failure is readily evident on the streets of our country where it is proven in blood every day. The indications that it is a fraud, however, are much more public knowledge around the world than they are right here, where our media has lost its courage to confront political power and continue to be the kind of watchdog over our Constitution that it started to be during the Watergate years.
Continue reading Essay: I Volunteer to Kidnap Ollie North
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