From the Radio Free Michigan archives ftp://141.209.3.26/pub/patriot If you have any other files you'd like to contribute, e-mail them to bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu. ------------------------------------------------ The following is a transcript of a tape of The Barry Young radio show out of Phoenix, courtesy of Toni Plinka. The guests are Sally Denton and Roger Morris. They are the authors of the Mena story that was permanently spiked by the Washington Post. To expedite the typing of this I will preface the quotes as Y=Young, D=Denton, M=Morris. Y-Sally you are in Santa Fe, is that right? D-Yeah, I am. Y- and Roger, where are you M- I'm in Santa Fe also. Y- Now that's a long way from Washington, DC, before we start I would like to explain to the folks, I'd like you to explain for the audience before we talk about Mena, how you got hooked up with the Wash. Post. because you were putting this t for a year, he almost virtually went into seclusion. People would ask him about Clinton and he would purposely not say anything about Clinton and the feeling has been for a long time that they made an agreement that they would not talk about Iran-Contra because it would be mutual assured destruction, both of them had enough on each other to sink each other's boat. D-The policy as I said, transcends both party lines and Mena was certainly the brain child of Ronald Regan, I would think. Y-But of course, you can't separate Bush and Regan. M- No, this is a bi partisan disaster and is part of the dark side of American government which American journalism and the public have a tough time coming to grips with. It is not a pretty sight, it is not something one wants to tell their children at bedtime. It is a grim and shameful episode in American history. Y- Did those drugs make their way to the streets of the United States? M- OH, Yes! There is no question about that. We know there was a distribution system that made their way to most of the major cities in the Midwest and in the east and Detroit and Philadelphia, New York and Boston, there were lives shattered literally all over America as a result of this traffic. D- Not to mention the money that was laundered through institutions, further destabilizing the economy. We are going to pause now for those of you who have questions, ( and for the typist to take a break.) The guests are Sally Denton and Roger Morris. They are the authors of the Mena story that was permanently spiked by the Washington Post. To expedite the typing of this I will preface the quotes as Y=Young, D=Denton, M=Morris. Y- Now that's a long way from Washington, DC, before we start I would like to explain to the folks, I'd like you to explain for the audience before we talk about Mena, how you got hooked up with the Wash. Post. because you were putting this story together on whatever was going on at the Mena airport before you got hooked up with the Wash. Post and as I understand it the story was ready to go, is that right? M-That's right we had developed the story independently and we were looking for a national outlet, one that would have high impact in Wash and elsewhere and we went to the Post in the hopes that they of course would publish it. Y- and they initially said what M -They initially were very supportive and receptive in fact they got back with us within the hour after we had faxed the story to them and said they would indeed be interested in publishing it and we worked with them over the course of an eleven week period on editing and checking again and again the article was vetted line by line by the Wash Post lawyers , looked at not by just one editor, but several. Y-now when you say vetted line by line what does that mean? M-Well, they were interested in checking the factual basis for everything we had said, it is a very controversial story that is sensational in its content. Y- They didn't want to get sued in other words. M- They wanted to make sure that everything was backed up, I'm not sure if it was so much a case of libel as it was making sure it was well documented. And we of course had that documentation and then some. D- I might add that this didn't just kind of come about Richard is in the midst of completing a book about the Clinton's which is due out shortly so this was an outgrowth of over a year of research that he had been doing. Y-Nothing's worse for a major newspaper than to have to come back and do a retraction. Allright folks , if you worked with them over an eleven week period, that is almost three months, that story had to get honed down and verified and rewritten a number of times till it was polished up and ready to go. Would that be a fair assumption of the status of the story is? M-It was very polished. It was not so much rewritten as added to, they were interested in supplementing various things we had included in the first draft. They reviewed a lot of the documentation and we amplified and clarified a number of things. I think well honed and well polished is a good way of describing it. Y - So what happened? M- Well at the very last moment, the contract had been signed, the story had been laid out in galleys the art work had been commissioned, the photographs had been sent and so on, at the very last moment the managing editor of the Wash. Post, Robert Kaiser, decided to put another hold on it, for no reason really that could be explained to us, no substantive reason. We were simply told that he didn't feel that he wanted to do it at that point, and as a result we, in great regret and frustration, pulled the story from the Post. Our feeling was that they were openly going to kill it. Y- And how close to publication, if it had been printed what date are we talking about. D- Well, Jan 29 was the day it was scheduled, and we pulled it on Thursday before that. so that was the 25 or 26th Y-Pulled it meaning that you had the story back now D Well its true we always had our original copy of the story and the galleys that they had sent us. they obviously still have a copy of it and somehow the London Sunday Telegraph received a bootleg copy of it from the Washington Post as well. Y. Incredible, did the telegraph print the story as well? D. No but they quoted from it, they didn't print it in its entirety, I think they wanted to , we were pretty definite with them that was the last thing we wanted/. M- It was a copyrighted story, we had copyrighted it and Sally told them not to published because we thought it would jeopardized publication ultimately in this country. Y- What about publication in the United States? D-Well, I think we've got the story placed in a national venue I'm a little reluctant to say for sure because we haven't signed the contract, but we are very confident that it will be published in the near future. Y- allright, since the London Times or was it the Telegraph? The Telegraph since they have printed some of the quotes from the story, let me ask you this, knowing that the story is still to come out, if you were a mystery writer, I wouldn't ask you to give away if the butler did it, but what have you found about Mena, what was going on, what can you tell us about this story? M. I think the principle importance of this story is really in old fashioned terms a "smoking gun" there been a lot of suspicions and allegations about Mena for some time and there have been video tapes and stories floating around about a drug smuggling operation there and gun running going on there in the early 1980s under the nose of then Gov. Bill Clinton. Allegations that were never before backed up by any documentary evidence or any hard facts . We unearthed, in the course of a year of searching around the country an archive of more than two thousand documents, all sorts of financial and other records, that established that there was indeed, a multi billion-billion dollar drug running operation around Mena, Ark. from 1981to1986 and perhaps even beyond that time, that it involved massive amounts of drugs , literally, tons of cocaine shipped in from Latin America and that it was done with the complicity if not the active collusion of elements of the US Government. One of the major drug runners involved was a man named Barry Seal who was at the time and had been operating before as a member of the CIA. The details of that are all quite stunning. Y-Well, it is stunning, considering the fact that we spend billions of dollars a year on the so called War on Drugs, nothing is worse than fighting the war and finding out that you have a Benedict Arnold aboard, which it sounds like not only did we have one , we had a lot of them and it was all the way up to the highest levels of government involved in this thing. The obvious question here is to what end was the being done? I mean, if you are going to smuggle drugs, usually we think of Columbian drug lords or Asian drug lords, were pocketing vast sums of money and becoming some of the world's richest people, and at the same time international outlaws, but I take it that's not where this story's going. D-I think the real question here is whether or not this was in fact a rogue operation as most of the findings of the Iran-Contra or the Ollie North allegations or whether this is really a question of foreign policy, that was sanctioned at the highest level, as for drug smuggler and CIA operatives to pose as drug smugglers, or if they are not really posing but are cocaine and heroin profits are necessary to foment foreign policy that is really off the shelf. Y- so the question that I'm asking you is who is getting the money, somebody was getting rich off this thing. M- A lot of people were getting rich, this was an enormous network we simply tell the story of the literally sensational as it is, of one small part of the larger picture. Sally's absolutely right, it was a matter of finance, comes down to money in the end. We were running, we, the United States, covertly running weapons to several countries in Latin America, not just to the Contras in Nicaragua, but elsewhere in Central America and in South America, and that was illegal at the time, they were not doing it with regular appropriations from the congress, the huge hundreds of millions of dollars generated by the drug trade were, in part helping to finance that operation. It was an illegal, extraconstitutional foreign policy being conducted by means of illicit profits from the drug trade. That is of course, just one part of the story. Y- Now the question that I am about to ask you, I know there is no way, but I want the audience to know there is no way you are going to be able to answer this by saying YES absolutely this was the case, but I am going to ask your opinion on this. Everybody knows there was some kind of unwritten agreement between Pres. Bush and Pres. Clinton where they would not beat the hell out of each other after Pres. Clinton took over. I mean, Pres. Bush basically went out of sight ,Y-What could be the purpose of the Wash Post squelching this story? Its not like one side would take a licking and the other side get off scott free. D-There is a whole gamete of potential reasons. It could be so petty as that they didn't get this story first.It could be something as sinister and the CIA or the Whitehouse intervening. I just don't think we are in a position to know that, we have certainly heard a lot of rumors Y- Again, I am going to ask your opinion, is there one prevailing thing that stands out above all the other, what I'm really asking is did the CIA or Whitehouse intervene in your opinion? M- Well, we don't know for a fact that they did, but it would be unusual for the Post to not inform them before the fact. The usual method is for someone at the Post to call someone at the ranking establishment and say we are running the story, or is there anything to this story. Sometimes they are told not to touch that area, they will be burned, things get killed all the time in Washington that way. Y- is that right How many years was it going on? M- we know that it was going on until at least 86, Y- Is it safe to say that it is not going on now. Both D andM in unison- No that is not safe to say. M- we have been told by various sources that shady operations are still going on but we have no proof of that. Y-the CIA often uses airfields in the Us for staging grounds , we have one south of Phoenix where evergreen air operated at one time. Mirana, I think they still do. They are staging grounds, but that is not to say they are all illegal, covert activities have to take place somewhere. but you say that operations still exists in Mena that are illegal. M- As i said, we have no proof, but it appears that operations, and the US government participation in illicit drug trade are still happening. And that of course is a very disturbing charge. Y-it doesn't seem as if that would be hard to verify, afterall, Mena is not the crossroads of America. I f it as a disproportionate amount of air traffic, it would be a safe guess that something is happening. Now to phone calls Mike. I've watched a video depicting drug running operations in Mena and in this video, those unfortunate people that tried to expose the operation were killed and all their evidence was confiscated and destroyed so surely your guests have been warned or threatened no to go forward with their stories, my question is what are you both doing to stay out of harms way and what are you doing to get your story printed? Y- was that video you saw by any chance called the Clinton Chronicles? Mike-certainly was. Y-Sally and Roger, have you seen the video of the Clinton Chronicles? M- Yes Y- What about your safety number one and what about the allegations that others who tired to expose what has been going on in Mena have been killed? D- I don't know about people being killed, certainly law enforcement officers who have attempted to have the activities investigated have had their careers thwarted. think as a journalist, you are always safest when you get your story published, and become visible. Y-in other words, the more people who know your story, the safer you are M-That's right, I think even the Wash. Post killing the story has helped in some respect, that is a protection of a kind. Y- Has anybody ever approached or threatened you? D & M No We have been warned by colleagues and people who are aware as to what happened in the past that this might happen, but it hasn't. ------------------------------------------------ (This file was found elsewhere on the Internet and uploaded to the Radio Free Michigan archives by the archive maintainer. All files are ZIP archives for fast download. E-mail bj496@Cleveland.Freenet.Edu)