Tonight’s show is a smorgasbord… from violence & US weapons in Mexico, to corruption in the U.S., to a resolution ensuring that citizens retain a right to videotape law enforcement pros on the job.
Our favorite reporter Bill Conroy joins us to discuss these and more…
About the Guest:
Bill Conroy has worked as a reporter or editor for the past eighteen years at newspapers in Wisconsin, Arizona, Minnesota and Texas.
His investigative reporting over the past five years has focused on corruption and discrimination within federal law enforcement agencies.
He is also a journalist for Narco News. His investigative pieces, particularly those on the House of Death, have made him our most-favored guest.
Plunder: The Crime of Our Time is a hard-hitting investigative film by Danny Schechter. The “News Dissector” explores how the financial crisis was built on a foundation of criminal activity uncovering the connection between the collapse of the housing market and the economic catastrophe that followed.
The film opens with the conviction of Ponzi King Bernie Madoff, whose acknowledged criminality drove a $65 billion dollar pyramid scheme. It argues that the wrong doing committed by a few individuals distracts from the real story, implicating the best-known institutions that financed and profited from fraudulent sub prime lending. This connection is now being investigated by the FBI as part of a probe into what it calls a “fraud epidemic.”
PLUNDER shows how these firms created special securities to repackage and resell these dubious loans after they were re-rated as Triple A. These firms then bet against many of these toxic assets with credit default swaps and other insurance scams. By leveraging these investments, they recklessly put trillions of dollars and the world economy at risk.
Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Danny Schechter about the film, media and about 20 other things…. a great, freewheeling conversation with the “Uber-investigative-journalist.”
More on the film at the Plunder website – or click on the cover above to purchase.
About the guest:
Danny Schechter is a journalist, author, television producer and an independent filmmaker who also writes and speaks about economic and media issues.
He is the executive editor of MediaChannel.org, the world’s largest online media issues online network, and recipient of many awards including the Society of Professional Journalists’ 2001 Award for Excellence in Documentary Journalism.
His latest films are “Barack Obama, People’s President [2009], an examination of how Obama won and “IN DEBT WE TRUST: America Before The Bubble Bursts,” [2007] an investigation of the impact of credit and debt on American society.
In Debt We Trust was one of the first films or media coverage to expose subprime lending and warn of an economic crisis. He was a director on “Viva Madiba,” a feature-length biopic tribute to Nelson Mandela on his 90th Birthday. (2008).
He is the author of nine books.
Schechter is co-founder and executive producer of Globalvision, a New York-based television and film production company now in its 21st year. He founded and executive-produced the TV series “South Africa Now” and co-produced the series “Rights & Wrongs: Human Rights Television.”
Schechter has specialized in investigative reporting and producing programming about the interface between human rights, journalism, popular music and society. His career began as the “News Dissector” at Boston’s leading rock station, WBCN. Later, he moved into television as an on-camera reporter for WGBH (Channel 2) in Boston and then as a producer for WLVI (Channel 56) and WCVB (Channel 5).
Schechter then joined the start-up team of CNN and later became a producer for ABC News 20/20. He produced 50 segments for ABC News, winning two national Emmys and nominated for two others.
He has produced and directed many TV specials and documentary films. click here for a full listing. He has spoken at scores of universities – from Harvard to Hamline, from Minnesota to MIT, NYU to Georgia State, Santa Monica to the University of Hawaii, Princeton to Cornell.
A Cornell University graduate, he received his Master’s degree from the London School of Economics, and an honorary doctorate from Fitchburg College. He was a Neiman Fellow in Journalism at Harvard, where he also taught in 1969. After college, he was a full time civil rights worker and then communications director of the Northern Student Movement, and worked as a community organizer in a Saul Alinsky-style War on Poverty program. Then, moving from the streets to the suites, Schechter served as an assistant to the Mayor of Detroit in 1966 on a Ford Foundation grant.
Schechter has reported from 61 countries. He was an adjunct professor at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University and taught investigative reporting at the New School. Schechter’s writing has appeared in leading newspapers and magazines including the Newsday, Boston Globe, Columbia Journalism Review, Media Studies Journal, Detroit Free Press, Village Voice, Z, Mediachannel.org, OpedNews.com, ZNET, Creative1, Global Research, Alternet and many others.
A targeted assassination on the Texas border… Corruption in a New Mexico drug task force… How safe IS the Canadian border… and the U.S. Military has Special Ops Boots on the Ground in Mexico…
All border stories, plus an amusing piece from Slate.
This is a jam-packed show with Bill Conroy of Narco News, covering the above and more.
About the Guest:
Bill Conroy has worked as a reporter or editor for the past eighteen years at newspapers in Wisconsin, Arizona, Minnesota and Texas.
His investigative reporting over the past five years has focused on corruption and discrimination within federal law enforcement agencies.
He is also a journalist for Narco News. His investigative pieces, particularly those on the House of Death, have made him our most-favored guest.
The House of Death 12, Plagiarism, and the Rick Horn Case.
The House of Death is the story of how an informant for Homeland Security, working “undercover” under the direct control of a Bush appointed United States Attorney, participated in a macabre house of horrors in which more than a dozen people were tortured to death. There have been a continuing series of articles at Narco News on the subject, reported by Bill Conroy, who has been a frequent guest.
In previous broadcasts, for the first time anywhere, Bill Conroy brought us the voice of the informant himself. Now, after an extended court battle, that informant has won the right to stay in the U.S. – as extradition to Mexico would certainly result in his death.
Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Bill Conroy about the House of Death and this informant – and also about how another online organization has taken to plagiarizing Bill’s work on the subject. See below for details.
Lastly – we discuss the latest in the Richard Horn case.
About the Guest:
Bill Conroy has worked as a reporter or editor for the past eighteen years at newspapers in Wisconsin, Arizona, Minnesota and Texas. His investigative reporting over the past five years has focused on corruption and discrimination within federal law enforcement agencies. He is also a journalist for Narco News. His investigative pieces, particularly those on the House of Death, have made him our most-favored guest.
The U.S. domestic War on Drugs is still being waged IN YOUR NAME with numerous atrocities and injustices that would shock you, except that no one is paying any attention. Do not miss the major new article by T.J. ENGLISH entitled DOPE in the Dec. ’09 issue of Playboy. The article details the story of Lee Lucas, a corrupt DEA agent who framed innocent people on narcotics charges and is soon to go on trial in Cleveland for civil rights violations, falsification of evidence and other criminal charges. It is a story that you should know about if you care about issues of criminal justice and the drug war, America’s longest-running war (now going on 40 years!).
Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with T.J. English about this devastating article.
About the guest:
Thomas Joseph “T.J.” English comes from a large Irish Catholic family of ten brothers and sisters. Early in his writing career, English worked as a freelance journalist in New York City during the day and drove a taxi at night. He often refers to cab driving as a metaphor for what he does as a writer – cruising the streets, interviewing strangers, exploring the unknown, reporting on what he sees and hears from his sojourns in and around the underworld.
In 1990, English published his first book, The Westies, an account of the last of the Irish Mob in the infamous Manhattan neighborhood known as “Hell’s Kitchen.” The book was the result of a series of reports English wrote for a weekly Irish American newspaper based in New York…
His second book, Born to Kill (1995), was an unprecedented inside account of a violent Vietnamese gang based in New York’s Chinatown, that operated up and down the East Coast. In 2005, English published Paddy Whacked, a sweeping history of the Irish American gangster in New York, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, and other U.S. cities. Most recently, English published Havana Nocturne (2008), an investigative account of U.S. mobster infiltration of Havana, Cuba, in the years before the Revolution swept Fidel Castro into power.
As a journalist, English has written for many magazines and newspapers including: Esquire, Playboy, Irish America, The Village Voice, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times…
In the mid-1990s, he wrote a three-part series for Playboy entitled “The New Mob” that explored the changing face of organized crime in America. His work as a writer has taken him to Cuba, Jamaica, Hong Kong, Mexico, Ireland, and all around the U.S… Most of his articles are on the subject of crime and criminal justice, though English writes on a wide variety of subjects including music, politics, and movies. He has published full-length interviews with Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, actor Bill Murray, director Martin Scorsese, and comedy legend George Carlin, to name a few.
In addition, English is a screenwriter and has penned episodes for the television crime dramas “NYPD Blue” and “Homicide,” for which he was awarded the prestigious Humanitas Prize.
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
Founded on March 16, 2002, LEAP is made up of current and former members of the law enforcement and criminal justice communities who are speaking out about the failures of our existing drug policies. Those policies have failed, and continue to fail, to effectively address the problems of drug abuse, especially the problems of juvenile drug use, the problems of addiction, and the problems of crime caused by the existence of a criminal black market in drugs.
Although those who speak publicly for LEAP are people from the law enforcement and criminal justice communities, a large number of their supporting members do not have such experience.
Tonight, Mike and Mark speak to Terry Nelson – law enforfcement veteran and Leap spokesperson – about LEAP’s efforts, and the failed war on drugs.
About the Guest:
Terry Nelson’s law-enforcement career spanned three decades. It included service in the US Border Patrol, the US Customs Service, and the Department of Homeland Security, taking him beyond US borders into Mexico, Central America, and South America. In various capacities he acquired first-hand knowledge of the “War on Drugs,” being directly involved in counter-narcotics missions. He labored with distinction, even receiving special Congressional recognition for his work. “But,” he says, “as the ‘War on Drugs’ went on and on I never saw any visible progress – and only limited discussion about the lack of progress. Something was wrong with this picture.”
The Election, an alleged McCain assault and a HOD update
and MORE…
Tonight, we speak with Robert Parry from Consortium News about the election, candidates and more, Elliot D. Cohen about an alleged John McCain assault on the family of a POW, and Bill Conroy from Narco News about the latest in the House of Death case – and more.
About the Guests:
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It’s also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth.’ We STRONGLY URGE YOU to support the work they’re doing over at Consortium News
Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D. is a political analyst and media critic. His most recent book is The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government are turning America into a Dictatorship. He is the first prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award. Find him at ElliottDCohen.com
Bill Conroy has worked as a reporter or editor for the past eighteen years at newspapers in Wisconsin, Arizona, Minnesota and Texas. His investigative reporting over the past five years has focused on corruption and discrimination within federal law enforcement agencies. He is also a journalist for Narco News. His investigative pieces, particularly those on the House of Death, have made him our most-favored guest.
In the first segment, Mike and Mark discuss THIS New York Times article, but more importantly, the subject of informant handling, who does it, and who hires them.
In the second part, we speak with Celerino Castillo – Vietnam Vet and Ex-DEA agent – about Iran Contra, Death Squads, government complicity in drug smuggling, Oliver North and Cele’s recent arrest..
About the Guest:
CELERINO “CELE” CASTILLO III, is a 20-year veteran of both state and federal law enforcement with 12-year service in the U. S. Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration. Mr. Castillo is a highly decorated DEA agent for his undercover operations in Central and South America. For several years, he was also placed in major cities like San Francisco and New York City for deep cover operations. He is an author of “Powderburns” Cocaine, Contras And The Drug War, and is an acclaimed public speaker and educator.
COURT QUALIFIED EXPERT WITNESS: For 20 years Mr. Castillo has qualified as an “expert witness” in criminal and civil trials, both for and against various state and federal law enforcement agencies, in the following subjects: Undercover tactics, entrapment, informant handling practices and procedures, all subjects related to drugs trafficking, money laundering, and international narcotics investigations, police profiling, research on federal documentation for the defense. (Bates)
MR. CASTILLO has written several internationally known articles against federal law enforcement corruption: “Written Statement of Celerino Castillo III, for The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence” 1998. He was mentioned in several articles on Informant Handling for The National Law Journal. ABC’s Primetime Live, Dateline NBC, Discovery Channel and other numerous news magazines have done exclusive interviews on Mr. Castillo pertaining to “Outrageous Conduct” by the U.S. Government.
A Gulfstream II jet that crash landed in Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula in late September bearing a load of nearly four tons of cocaine. This particular Gulfstream II (tail number N987SA), was used between 2003 and 2005 by the CIA for at least three trips between the U.S. east coast and Guantanamo Bay — home to the infamous “terrorist” prison camp — according to a number of press reports.
Tonight, we talk with Bill Conroy from Narco News, and Sandalio Gonzalez, veteran DEA agent, about this amazing story.
Top, the signature of Gregory D. Smith on Aero Group Jets’ 1998 annual report filing; and below, “Greg Smith” on the Gulfstream II’s September 16, 2007 bill of sale.
Bill Conroy has worked as a reporter or editor for the past eighteen years at newspapers in Wisconsin, Arizona, Minnesota and Texas.
Thomas Joseph “T.J.” English comes from a large Irish Catholic family of ten brothers and sisters. Early in his writing career, English worked as a freelance journalist in New York City during the day and drove a taxi at night. He often refers to cab driving as a metaphor for what he does as a writer – cruising the streets, interviewing strangers, exploring the unknown, reporting on what he sees and hears from his sojourns in and around the underworld.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It’s also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth.’ We STRONGLY URGE YOU to 
Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D. is a political analyst and media critic. His most recent book is The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government are turning America into a Dictatorship. He is the first prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award. Find him at 
CELERINO “CELE” CASTILLO III, is a 20-year veteran of both state and federal law enforcement with 12-year service in the U. S. Department of Justice, Drug Enforcement Administration. Mr. Castillo is a highly decorated DEA agent for his undercover operations in Central and South America. For several years, he was also placed in major cities like San Francisco and New York City for deep cover operations. He is an author of 
