The Cost of Empire - Sword and Dollar: excerpt 6

additional ways that the empire strikes back home: the narcotics that victimize whole segments of our population are shipped in through secret international cartels linked to past and present CIA operatives - large-scale drug trafficking has been associated with CIA-supported covert wars in Cuba, Southeast Asia, and Central America - as of 1988, evidence was mounting linking the US-backed Nicaraguan counter-revolutionaries to a network of narcotics smuggling that stretched from cocaine plantations in Columbia to dirt airstrips in Costa Rica, to pseudo-seafood companies in Miami, and, finally, to the drug-ridden streets of our society.

the empire victimizes its own people in other grim ways - thousands of Army veterans exposed to nuclear tests after World War II are now dying of cancer - Vietnam veterans who came back contaminated by the tons of herbicides sprayed on Indochina are facing premature death from cancer, while their children have suffered an abnormally high rate of birth defects (in common with the children of Vietnam) - the US military has experimented on Americans with its chemical and bacteriological warfare methods - the Navy sprayed bacteria in San Francisco in 1950, an experiment that has since been implicated in the illness of several residents and death of at least one person - in 1955, the CIA conducted a biological warfare test in Tampa Bay area, soon after which twelve people died in a whooping cough epidemic - in the 1950s and 1960s, biological warfare tests were done in various cities including St. Louis and New York, using bacilli that were known to be infectious but supposedly not fatal.

The Cost of Empire - Sword and Dollar: excerpt 6