Ex CIA Larry Johnson: Terrorism Isn't A Threat, But Big Tobacco Is!

As you may know, ex CIA agent and lefty stooge Larry C. Johnson is everywhere accusing the White House of leaking Valerie Plame's identity and blowing her CIA covert cover.

Johnson, along with a cadre of other leftwing hacks, has written a letter to Congress demanding this be investigated and that all Republicans be summarily punished.

Previously Johnson was best known for his constant downplaying of the terrorist thread--most famously in a New York Times editorial posted here:

Flashback: "Intelligence Analyst" Larry C. Johnson: "The Declining Terrorist Threat (July 10, 2001)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1447248/posts

CBC News: Disclosure
Cigarette Case> On the Tobacco Trail> Printer Version

Broadcast: April 8, 2003

Private eye Larry Johnson says big tobacco companies are like "the conductor of the orchestra" when it comes to tobacco smuggling. "They’re moving the product," he says. "They're moving the money. They're helping orchestrate it, helping build new markets."

Duty-free cigarettes from Miami arrived in Aruba’s duty-free port, just 125 kilometres from the Colombian coast.

The European Union's lawsuits say the green light to smuggle cigarettes came from the Miami offices of RJ Reynolds International. Larry C. Johnson is a CIA agent turned private eye. He’s been hired by lawyers for the European Union and the provinces of Colombia to prove some extraordinary allegations.

DISCLOSURE: If you’re looking at the entire roadmap or flowchart of the smuggling, what roles does [RJR] play?
JOHNSON: The conductor of the orchestra… They’re moving the product. They're moving the money. They're helping orchestrate it, helping build new markets.
DISCLOSURE: So you say the marching orders for all of this came out of [RJR]?
JOHNSON: Yes.

Based on his investigation for the EU lawsuits, Johnson believes he’s figured how RJR International did it.

As many as 9-million cigarettes can be packed into just one container. RJR International was shipping containers to ports in the Caribbean every week.

“Charleston, Savannah, Miami. Those have been the '“big three' in terms of cigarette shipping to overseas,” says Johnson.

At the port of Miami, companies ship all kinds of tax-free goods from here to the Caribbean – including cigarettes loaded into containers.

As many as 9-million cigarettes can be packed into just one container. And RJR International was shipping containers to ports in the Caribbean every week.

“You can see the numbers on the sides of some of the shipping containers,” says Johnson. “And those numbers … I mean it's, it's like a code... So that's one way that you can track that a cigarette shipment went from Miami to Aruba, and then even into Colombia.”

The cigarettes arrived in Aruba’s duty-free port, just 125 kilometres from the Colombian coast. Run almost as a separate country, the port is fenced off from the rest of the island.

“Those containers we saw being loaded in Miami, they get dumped [in Aruba],” says Larry C. Johnson, a CIA agent turned private eye. “There’s only a certain amount that you can sell to the tourists coming off the cruise ships, or coming into the airport. If there were that many tourists that they were selling to, that meant there were a 100 million people coming here very year. Well, 100 million people don’t come here.”

A group of men load boxes of cigarettes onto a boat in Aruba.

Johnson says once the cigarettes made it to Aruba, they were “either stacked in a warehouse or they’re put on a ship. They’re loaded on the ships called ‘costales’… and then they’d take off in that direction heading for Turbo, Colombia.”

Johnson figures the illegal tobacco trade between 1990 and 1997 raised “well over a billion dollars.” The smugglers, he says, were dealing with an “enormous amount of cigarettes.”

As for the tobacco companies, “this was easy money,” says Johnson.

RJR International shipped its cigarettes to an Aruban company called International Duty Free [IDF].

[DOCUMENT] Exhibit 27 [PDF] - this 1994 letter was filed as an affadavit as part of the European Union's first smuggling lawsuit [PDF]. The first part of the letter deals with Canada, followed by a discussion of the Colombia and Caribbean connection.

That should have been the end of RJR International’s involvement, but the EU lawsuits claims IDF was merely warehousing the cigarettes, acting as a middleman between RJR International and Colombian smugglers.

RJR International has always maintained that while its cigarettes may have been smuggled, it had nothing to do with that.

DISCLOSURE: If someone’s going to break the law and it’s a multinational company that’s going to do it, they’re not going to leave the evidence out in the open for you.
JOHNSON: Well, you would think that they wouldn't, but they have. There are records, paper records… We have trip reports. We have letters. We have e-mail. We have faxes. We have records of their travel going there. We have eyewitness accounts. We have dollars coming out. It's a mountain of evidence. I just want to see them stand up in front of a jury and explain it.

“Maicao is too dangerous to go to this day,” says Johnson. “It's filled with terrorists. It's filled with drug runners. It's the wild west of capitalism in Colombia.”

Documents obtained by Disclosure suggest RJR International not only knew where the cigarettes were going; it was directing the traffic.

In one marketing document it points out that "contraband channels are expanding: Aruba to Colombia."

I think this is the same Larry Johnson

http://www.berg-associates.com/larryc.htm

".....Larry C. Johnson is CEO and co-founder of BERG Associates, LLC, an international business-consulting firm that helps multinational corporations and financial institutions identify strategic opportunities, manage risks, and counter threats posed by terrorism and money laundering.

Mr. Johnson, who worked previously with the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism, is a recognized expert in the fields of terrorism, aviation security, crisis and risk management...."

[home page: http://www.berg-associates.com/ ]

Intersting reading:
The War on Clarke
By Larry C. Johnson, TomPaine.com. Posted March 30, 2004.
http://www.alternet.org/story/18270/
A former intelligence professional who worked with the counterterrorism czar explains why the Bush administration should apologize to Clarke.

Decoding the PDB
By Larry C. Johnson, TomPaine.com. Posted April 12, 2004.
A former CIA analyst explains that in dealing with the 8/6/01 presidential daily briefing the Bush administration ignored huge pieces of the puzzle

"Are George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice really as clueless as they are claiming to be?..."
http://www.alternet.org/story/18393/

But his concern is soley for the safety of Plame--nothing partisan about it. [dripping with sarcasm]

GOODBYE PATTERNS OF GLOBAL TERRORISM? (UPDATED 4/16/05)

by
Larry C. Johnson

(UPDATE, 4/16: Knight-Ridder Newspapers quotes this post in wire story.) Just when you thought the Department of State could not top last year's debacle in failing accurately to count the number of international terrorist incidents, it appears that the State Department is going one step better--they reportedly have decided to not issue a report to the public.

The Counterterrorism Blog: GOODBYE PATTERNS OF GLOBAL TERRORISM? (UPDATED 4/16)
http://counterterror.typepad.com/the_counterterrorism_blog/2005/04/goodby_patterns.html

This from the clown who claimed there was no threat of terrorism just a month before 9/11.

June 25, 2005
NEOCONS DO IT AGAIN IN IRAN
The Counterterrorism Blog: NEOCONS DO IT AGAIN IN IRAN
by
Larry C Johnson

From the same crowd who promised us Iraqis dancing in the street and welcoming us as liberators, another cornerstone of the neocon delusional reality has crashed back to earth. I refer of course to Iran's election yesterday, which provided a relatively unknown hardline fundamentalist a decisive victory with over 60% of the vote. Last Monday I appeared with Daniel Pipes on the MSNBC show, "CONNECTED". Pipes described Iran as a place where most of the people are pro-US. Pipes and other neo-con luminaries, such as Michael Ledeen, have pushed the nonsense that Iran is filled with a bunch of neo-westerners eager to throw off the shackles of Islamic extremism. Whoops! Yesterday's election confirms that the force of Islamic fundamentalism remains very strong in Iran. That in turn means that the new Government in Iran is likely to be more aggressive in backing its Shia brethren in Iraq who will press to install Shariah law as the legal basis of the "new" Iraq. It also means that Iran will continue to use terrorism as an integral part of its foreign policy.

Here's a good rule of thumb: Listen to a neocon prediction and then take the opposite position. You will rarely be wrong.

Posted by Larry Johnson at 10:48 AM | Permalink
http://counterterror.typepad.com/the_counterterrorism_blog/2005/06/neocons_do_it_a.html

LOL. This from the asshat who said that we had nothing to worry about from terrorists one MONTH before 9/11.

The thing is, all of the articles make a point of mentioning he is a Rpubllican and a contributor to Bush. Sounds like a set up to me...
Here is one more I was just looking at:

http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/0315-09.htm

On War Anniversary, New Ads Urge "Censure" of President Bush - More than 500,000 Petition Signatures Will Be Hand Delivered to House Members Wednesday

"...Win Without War and its member organizations, including MoveOn.org, True Majority and Working Assets,..."

:....These experts are available to discuss the war and provide alternative voices for your programming to the Bush Administration happy talk about the Iraq fiasco:..."

"...Larry Johnson - Larry C. Johnson is a former Deputy Director of the U.S. State Department’s Office of Counter Terrorism, who has spoken out for censure of Bush. Earlier, he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency and is an expert in the fields of terrorism, aviation security and crisis and risk management. Johnson is CEO and co-founder of BERG Associates, LLC, an international firm that helps multinational corporations and financial institutions identify strategic opportunities, manage risks, and counter threats posed by terrorism and money laundering. He is a Republican who supported and raised funds for George W. Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign....."

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