Is the CIA smuggling cocaine? Or is it that simply CIA airplanes are smuggling cocaine, again?

Hugh O'Shaugnessy has been covering the Western Hemisphere for British newspapers for 40 years. In this recent article in The Independent in London that looks at various strands that overstates the U.S. government's commitment to ending the war on drugs, he alleges that two CIA aircraft that the British Government and the European Parliament had identified as involved in the rendition of terror suspects had crashed in the Western Hemisphere carrying large loads of cocaine in 2004 and 2008 during the Bush Administration!

Evidence points to aircraft – familiarly known as "torture taxis" – used by the CIA to move captives seized in its kidnapping or "extraordinary rendition" operations through Gatwick and other airports in the EU being simultaneously used for drug distribution in the Western hemisphere. A Gulfstream II jet aircraft N9875A identified by the British Government and the European Parliament as being involved in this traffic crashed in Mexico in September 2008 while en route from Colombia to the US with a load of more than three tons of cocaine.

In 2004, another torture taxi crashed in a field in Nicaragua with a ton of cocaine aboard. It had been identified by Britain and the European Parliament's temporary committee on the alleged use of European countries by the CIA for the transport and illegal detention of prisoners as a frequent visitor in 2004 and 2005 to British, Cypriot, Czech, German, Greek, Hungarian, Spanish and other European cities with its cargo of captives for secret imprisonment and torture in Iraq, Jordan and Azerbaijan.

Readers will remember that during the Reagan Administration, the CIA was aware that its assets were engaged in extensive cocaine trafficking to fund the Nicaraguan contras, and that staff of Reagan's National Security Council, Lt. Col. Oliver North, was keeping track of this traffic in his diaries.