Folks,
Here's another YouTube comment that needs to be preserved for posterity. There was a clip of "American Made", starring Tom Cruise. Though I don't care for the Scientology stuff, I think that Tom Cruise is a great actor; he does a great job in every role he plays, so I like to see his movies. In "American Made", Tom plays Barry Seal. Mr. Seal was, shall we say, an enterprising businessman? He started an air freight service specializing in Colombian pharmaceuticals! It's a good movie, and I recommend it.
One of the commenters to the movie clip said that the Feds were in on the drug trade, and many agreed. I submitted the below comment. It was too good to lie buried in obscurity in some forgotten YouTube comment, so I'm reprinting it below. Enjoy!
-------------
Shoot, I figured that out when I was in the service! I was in the US Navy. Though I normally operated the sonar, we were on drug patrol a few miles off the coast of Colombia. That put us in shallow water, so our sonar was useless. The ship's officers had us stand radar watches instead. I thought that was cool, as I got to learn something new, and I had the chance to do something different. While I don't know if I can say the exact altitude and speed parameters we'd use for flagging northbound (i.e. to the US) aircraft, I can say this: the parameters they were using would only catch the small time smugglers flying small, piston twin aircraft; it wouldn't get the bigger smugglers flying DC-7s or Mitsubishi MU-2s.
Another tell for me was how our ships were deployed. They had us only a few miles of the Colombian coast where everyone could see us; of course the smugglers hid like a bunch of cockroaches under rocks! The smarter way to deploy our ships would've been to put one or two in between the western end of Cuba and the Yucatan Peninsula; put another one between Hispanola and Cuba; then put another ship between eastern Hispanola and Puerto Rico; finally, use some USN PHMs or USCG patrol boats between the Bahamas and the FL coast. If you look at a map, anyone coming from South America HAS to go through these points! The capabilities of the USN's air and surface search radars would be more than adequate to catch anyone heading through the aforementioned choke points. Wouldn't that be the smart way to catch the drug smugglers?
Ah, but the US NEVER did that! Why not? If I, a humble PO2 sonar operator, could figure this shit out, then surely the Generals and Admirals of the Pentagon could; after all, they'd attended either the Navy or Army War College, so they knew about strategy, right? Since they'd studied and forgotten more about strategy than I'd ever learned, wouldn't the Pentagon brass be able to figure this out? The answer is yes, of course. I could only draw one, logical conclusion: that people in the upper levels of the Federal Gov't were on the take, that they were allowing the drugs to come in.
I can tell of another experience on a different drug patrol that cements my opinion for me. On this patrol, we were operating in deep water, so we were using our sonar. I was standing watch one morning when I heard this LOUD contact; he was making enough noise to wake up everything and everybody for miles around! I called it into radar, and they got it. To make a long story short, we boarded this tramp steamer. He said he was going to Panama, yet his charts had a track laid into Santa Marta, Colombia. IOW, we got him before he picked up his load of pot. We had to let him go, as he was clean; they'd lied to us, but that wasn't illegal. However, we never waited on the guy to pick up his load; we never tried to get him on the way out. Why not? IMO, to ask the question is to answer it.
Yes, boys and girls, the Federal Gov't is on the take! While I don't have hardcore proof of that, I have circumstantial evidence that certainly points in that direction. I knew 40 years ago that the Feds were on the take, and I still stand by that today.
No comments:
Post a Comment