Was the CIA Probing Bob Marley?
I've come to the conclusion that progressive reggae music was kidnapped over a decade ago. A bunch of lightweights and imposters are being held up as reggae superstars and the musical culture that these usurpers are bringing forward is undermining true Rasta culture. Within my hypothesis, the degradation of modern Rasta culture has been orchestrated in large part by the hidden hand of the U.S. national security establishment.
In this chapter we examine how this network operates overseas, principally through the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), but also with the assistance of agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). These comprise an intelligence network of U.S. government institutions that have a presence throughout the world. These government agencies are major players in this conspiracy.
The scheme includes a number of non-governmental entities as well as corporate and private interests. I charge that, beginning in the 1970s, a Cabal, operating in and around this network, conspired to implement a covert psychological warfare program aimed at thwarting the rapid diffusion of conscious reggae music and its attendant culture. Today's popular reggae contrasts immensely with that which was created by the Rasta pioneers.
The best of the socio-political and cultural reggae music was recorded from the late sixties, throughout the seventies and early eighties. Our criticism is not intended to condemn all "New School" recording artists or to trash all contemporary reggae. To issue such blanket condemnations is usually not productive or accurate. What I am saying is that that much of the more recent popularized reggae music has retreated from the humility, creative spark and cultural integrity of "Roots" reggae music.
Just as contemporary rap and hip hop have strayed (or been deflected) from their roots within the black protest motive, dance hall, the preferred groove of Reggae Gen-X, has become too firmly bound to trifling clichés centered around ghetto bravado, "dissin" other deejays, sexual bombast and materialism.
In addition, certain disturbing facts surround this reggae conspiracy, as I have examined them, encompassing a broad spectrum of affairs. The plot involves U.S. foreign intrigue, psychological warfare, social engineering, smuggling drugs and guns, shootings and killings. Central to all of this mayhem is involvement of the entertainment industry-a vast cult of vampirology that thrives upon money laundering.
The end result of the Cabal's machinations is the production and distribution of a huge mass of unconscious musical recordings and videos that are being fronted off on undiscriminating reggae fans. Within the lives of these unenlightened listeners, certain productions are actually serving as mind control and propaganda-influencing the behavior of those who listen as well as many who don't listen but might only glimpse in passing certain video distortions of ghetto life.
One might imagine this an improbable conjecture, but I contend that the Cabal has been motivated, to a large degree, toward the goal of stemming migration from Jamaica into America and Europe. I have prepared an accompanying chart that shows demographic trends for a selected group of countries. Note that the islands of Jamaica and Haiti, along with Mexico, serve as the most efficient birthing centers in the Western Hemisphere. It must be taken into account that, originating from within these populations, migration rates were forecast to explode during the next century.
Additionally, the formation of cultural enclaves usually accompanies such migrations, and cultural awareness generally gives rise to political, social and spiritual awakenings. Thus Rasta music showed up increasingly throughout the Western world. Eventually it became imperative that this radical social force had to be taken down.
So we have a fourfold network of U.S. agencies: 1) the CIA, 2) USAID, 3) DEA, and 4) USIA; for each of which we must later go into further detail. Each had a role to play in this conspiracy. Each had installed its own set of operatives in this little Caribbean Island paradise, Jamaica. How this network was set up, the various players, the gathering of "indigenous resources" and the hijacking of the island's culture-this makes for one fascinating tale of conspiracy. This story entails a clash of cultures.
The Cia And Bob Marley
:Much of our insight into the details of the life of reggae' s most celebrated champion, Bob Marley, comes from the superb journalism of Timothy White, author of the definitive biography CATCH A FIRE: The Life of Bob Marley. In an interview in High Times magazine, on the 45th anniversary of Marley's birth, White told how he secured once-classified documents on Bob Marley from the CIA and the U.S. State Department, through the Freedom of Information Act. The following lengthy excerpts from White's book support our allegation that the U.S. was very concerned over the impact that the Rastafarian songwriter was having throughout the world:
In April of 1981, a few weeks prior to Marley's death, recently elected Prime Minister Edward Seaga announced that the stricken singer had been awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit, officially designating him as a national hero. Since Marley was still critically ill in Dr. Issel's Bavarian clinic in Rottach-Egen, Seaga arranged for Marley's eldest son, Ziggy, to accept the honor in Kingston. In the ghetto, the move was celebrated as a gesture of acquiescence to the desperate agenda of the sufferah-especially since it coincided with a Seaga-urged announcement early that year by Ronald Reagan of a US-backed Caribbean Basin Initiative...
However, a confidential CIA airgram dispatched to the State Department from the American embassy in Kingston on April 28, 1981-about four months after Ronald Reagan's inauguration-revealed the cynical motive behind Seaga's oddly timed bestowal of the Order of Merit, to depict as disreputably unpatriotic Opposition leader Michael Manley's People's National Party. As the classified communiqué carefully explained:
"Jamaica's Governor General, Florizel Glasspole, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II on April 17, four weeks after Prime Minister Edward Seaga had announced the Government of Jamaica's decision to allow Jamaicans to accept foreign honors...(The Governor General received 150 congratulatory messages and cables on the first day after the announcement and many more on subsequent days.) Government members in the House of Representatives paid tribute to and congratulated the Governor General when the House met on April 22.
At the same time that Jamaica House released the news of the Governor General's knighthood, it was announced that Jamaican reggae star Bob Marley, who is being treated for cancer in the Federal Republic of Germany, had been awarded the Order of Merit, Jamaica's third highest honor. In responding to the government's tribute to the Governor General, the Opposition moved to congratulate Marley at the same time and allowed itself to be maneuvered into a position of not paying tribute to the popular Governor General.
Thus, in one stroke, Seaga had both humiliated Manley's democratic socialists and defused the explosive legacy of the Third World's most renowned rabble-rouser. Once it might have been unseemly for Seaga's Reagan-steered regime to have celebrated a musician who actively endorsed black leftist struggles for freedom and self-determination in Zimbabwe, Angola, Mozambique and South Africa. But Marley's terminal illness and Seaga's election mandate of October 30, 1980, had allowed the canny new prime minister to cloak the courage of the reggae firebrand's convictions with a cultural garland that smacked of a gratuity.
We can thus conclude through such documentation that there had been quite an interest in the Rastafarian reggae movement and those who had risen to lead such a progressive struggle. And as indicated in the previous paragraphs, the issue of the British Crown issuing such titles to non-British subjects leaves room for suspicion and speculation. A similar title was bestowed on former U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman (Sir) Colin Powell, in violation of the U.S. Constitution. Could it be true, as some have suggested, that the British aristocracy is quietly reestablishing its global empire by co-opting the loyalties of government officials within the United States, Jamaica and other countries? I suggest that the answer to that question is an unambiguous "yes!
The Attempted Assassination Of Bob Marley In 1976
Marley biographer Timothy White gives us a further insight into the CIA's and U.S. State Department's obsessions with Bob Marley and Peter Tosh. The following excerpts are from the White interview published in High Times in February 1990:
I think the CIA and the State Department paid attention to Bob Marley for the same reason they took an interest in John Lennon-because he was such a huge figure in Caribbean culture. It's very important for people to realize two things: that the Third World is most of the world, and that, from a philosophical standpoint, no one is free until everyone is free. People in government realize that. There's so much of a focus on the Caribbean in the last 20 or 25 years as a strategic point in the Western Hemisphere, in terms of both military and cultural significance.
So someone like Bob Marley, who was supporting freedom struggles around the world, in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and behind the Iron Curtain, was a very threatening figure for the conservative presence around the world...Some people have said Bob Marley was Socialist, or that he was Marxist, but that's not true. He didn't approach politics from an ideological standpoint. He felt the people of South Africa had a right to be free because it's their country and their culture. Everybody has to share in it, in terms of the democracy of their numbers. He didn't feel they deserve to have self-determination because of some political standpoint, but because it was their country and the majority should rule.
That's a very simple, non-ideological philosophy. His support of freedoms for those around the world had a real purity of purpose. It was very deeply felt. The United States government disagreed with Bob Marley in terms of who he chose to support, and the way he saw the freedom struggles in South Africa or wherever. In modem times, certainly in the post-war era, the United States government has been very conservative in its perspective. It has supported a lot of sleazy dictatorships, for cynical reasons, figuring that if the government that's in power is friendly toward us, especially from a business standpoint, they're the lesser of two evils. Marley felt that was a lousy way of looking at the world.
We recognize that Timothy White is speaking to the politically immature readers of High Times, a magazine largely dedicated to the psychedelic experience, and thus is not expected to address certain hardball aspects of the international political struggle. The Conscious Rasta does not have such limitations. In 1976, Jamaica, because of the intensity of political violence, was under martial law. Political warfare was taking place in the streets of the island's major cities.
The populace was divided along class lines with the masses of the working class, poor and dispossessed supporting Prime Minister Michael Manley's People's National Party (PNP) and the elite backing the opposition Edward Seaga's Jamaican Labor Party (JLP). Both camps made use of armed street gangs recruited from the ghettos of Kingston and outlying areas. Additionally, offshore influences deepened the conflict; the leftist PNP in solidarity with regional socialists and the JLP backed by the wealthy Western powers.
In an attempt to quell the political violence, the PNP planned a peace concert to be entitled the "Smile Jamaica Concert," for which Bob Marley penned one of his more renowned compositions. For insight into the role this event likely played in triggering the attempted assassination of Marley in 1976, we again refer to the White interview:
The concert wasn't political, it was just intended to cool the country down, and make it stop thinking so intensely about politics and think more about itself and the fact that people in the outside world were coming to like and admire it. Marley got induced to do the concert, but since Manley's People's National Party was in power and it was their cultural ministry that prevailed upon Marley to give the concert, it was seen as a political act. And enemies of Bob Marley in the rival Jamaican Labor Party, as well as ghetto associates were involved in their own mischief.
They all pointed to Bob Marley as the cause of their problems. There was a lot of jealousy. As a result, a number of people conspired to assassinate Marley in the days before the concert. The men who tried to assassinate Bob were never brought to trial; they were all murdered themselves. Vigilantes hung them in the ghetto long before the police could even find out who they were. It was pretty grisly.
After Bob was shot and he survived, he went on to perform at the concert, which was December 5, 1976, in Jamaica. He was supposed to be under government protection, but many of those men vanished. He was supposed to take a plane out of Jamaica the following day under police protection. And those guards vanished. It was a very mysterious thing, the point being that he was left vulnerable again if someone else wanted to try to kill him. It was a very spooky, sinister set of circumstances. Pictures that were taken of Marley and people hanging around his house, where the assassination attempt took place, later vanished under very mysterious circumstances. Any kind of record of who those people might have been just vanished.
Jamaica's high natural fertility rate, which because of the small size of the island produces a subsequently high rate of emigration, posed no small threat to other Western countries. In particular, the migration of Jamaica's sons and daughters to the cities of England, the United States, Canada and other predominantly-white countries threatens to overwhelm the current low birthrates of those country's dominant populations. To disregard the long-term consequences of this disparity in childbirths between whites and nonwhites is to perhaps miss the principal modern motivation for social engineering on such a grand scale.
I have for years been describing the effect of such population wars on national affairs and how they have directly led to cultural warfare on a massive scale. Accompanying the high number of Jamaican immigrants was the profoundly influential reggae music and Rasta culture. It is obvious that reggae has rapidly produced a distinct cultural explosion within the cities where these immigrants have largely settled, chief among them Miami, New York, D.C., Los Angeles, London and Toronto.
The infectious sound of the cool reggae music combined with the enticement of "ganja" (marijuana) to produce a significant cultural influence on the sons and daughters of America's middle and upper classes; similar to the hippie movement, but more politically evolved. Particularly threatening was the effect on America's disenfranchised classes who reflected not only artistic and fashion styles of the Rastas, but increasingly adopted a militant posture influenced by the lyrics of artists such as U-Roy, Big Youth, Culture, the Mighty Diamonds, Burning Spear, Steele Pulse, Third World and the Wailers.
Of all these groups, it was the Wailers, led by Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingstone, which became the most celebrated proponent of revolutionary Rasta music. In the immediate aftermath of the passing of Bob, Peter and others of the "Old School" reggae generation, mainstream record companies elevated a new class of "artists" whose lyrics reflected the opposite of the powerful revolutionary message that arose from the initial Kingston wave. In comparison, "New School" reggae and dancehall styles, which reached heights of popularity championed by such performers as Yellowman, Shaba Ranks, Patra, Shaggy and numerous others, largely reflected the same obsessions with violence, drugs, sex, egoism and materialism as has become all too prevalent in "New School" rap and hip hop.
Yet the voice of the sufferer and the revolutionary within reggae and Rasta music has never completely been silenced. Every few years another set of artists arrives to return consciousness to the forefront, only to be countered by subsequent rounds of disparaging popular hits promoted by the major labels.
The Cia & Assassination Attempts On Foreign Leaders:
According to William Blum's 1988 book THE CIA, A FORGOTTEN HISTORY: U.S. Global Interventions Since World War 2 (Zed Books), the United States undertook to assassinate a long list of "prominent foreign individuals, including many national leaders." The list, which was published in CovertAction Quarterly in its Fall 1993 issue, included, but was not limited to:
Jose Antonio Remon, President of Panama (1955)
Achmad Sukarno, President of Indonesia (1950s)
Gamal Abdul Nasser, President of Egypt (1957)
Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of the Congo (1961)
Gen. Rafael Trujillo, leader of Dominican Rep. (1961)
Fidel Castro, President of Cuba (at least 9 separate attempts from the 1960s to the 1980s)
Charles de Gaulle, President of France (1965-66)
Pierre Ngendandumwe, Prime Minister of Burundi (1965)
Che Guevarra, socialist freedom fighter (1967)
Gen. Omar Torrijos, leader of Panama (1970s)
Mobuto Sese Seko, Zairian Dictator (1975)
Michael Manley, Prime Minister of Jamaica (1976-79)
Muammar Qaddafi, leader of Libya (1981-87)
and over a dozen other national leaders. By no means is Blum's list complete.
Here on the domestic front we have evidence of the complicity of CIA elements in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (1963), black nationalist leader Malcolm X (1965), Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968) and then-presidential candidate and former U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy (1968). I believe that when the final records become available, the role of U.S. government agencies in assassinations and attempted assassinations, within this country and without, will stand to shame the American government's behavior throughout the 20th Century in a manner similar to which Germany was impugned by the actions of the Nazis.
In addition, as I will detail later in this chapter, documents have surfaced, through Freedom of Information Act inquiries, which indicate that the U.S. government had a close interest in the career and politics of Bob Marley. These documents reveal an intense concern for foreign intelligence agencies over the 1976 attempted murder of Bob along with his wife Rita and others. They hint at a likely motivation for what many are convinced was the elimination of Bob Marley in 1981 through "induced cancer." The record stands clear that the U.S., through its agencies of the State Department, the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency, had the motivation, opportunity and capability of causing such a death to the world-renowned Rasta pioneer.
Did The Cia Cause Marley's Death In 1981 From Cancer?
Since Bob Marley's death in 1981 from melanoma cancer there has been a swirl of speculation that his political enemies induced the disease. Among those who were close to him during his lifetime there is divergence on whether this is a fact or not. While I cannot say definitively whether or not Bob Marley was the victim of a murder plot that involved cancer, I can point to indicators that would hold out the very real possibility that it could have been so.
In a murder case where direct, concrete evidence of guilt is absent, a good prosecutor must establish three things in order to secure a conviction: 1) motivation, 2) capability and 3) opportunity. As revealed throughout this chapter, the motivation for removing Bob Marley and Peter Tosh from the international political scene is incontestable. They had become revolutionary cultural icons whose profound influence on young people worldwide had presented a direct challenge to the self-interests of the Western security establishments.
For evidence of the capability of inducing cancer by method of injection or other means of directly introducing cancer into an individual, we again can look to America's secret defense establishment for what could be considered clear cut evidence of the desire to develop such a capability. Among our favorite research journals is CovertAction Quarterly. The Winter 1991-92 issue featured an exposé written by Richard Hatch entitled "Cancer Warfare."
In the article, Hatch examines the history of research into possibly cancer-causing agents during the years immediately after then-President Richard Nixon's 1969 order to halt U.S. offensive weapons research and stockpiling of biological warfare (BW) agents. The government extracted big propaganda over the destruction of the Army's BW stocks of toxins, viruses and bacteria that had been developed as weapons of mass destruction. Less-known at the time was that certain of the stored materials, along with a number of BW researchers, went to work for other branches of the government, including the CIA and the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
The NCI, a wing of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), subsequently embarked upon "a highly politicized public relations effort" as part of Nixon's "War on Cancer." According to Hatch's article, the "stated aim of the program was to organize experiments aimed at finding cancer-causing viruses." Hatch described the program as such: Potentially cancer-causing viruses were collected, grown in huge amounts, and distributed through the VCP; thousands of animals were infected experimentally, and the aerosol distribution of carcinogenic viruses was studied.
As a key component of the NCI's Viral Cancer Program (VCP), the government enlisted the assistance of what Hatch calls "The Military-University Complex." Chief among the numerous universities which became a part of this vast pseudo-biowarfare network are some of this country's most prestigious research colleges including Johns Hopkins University, University of Maryland, University of Minnesota, Ohio State University and UC Berkeley (which helps manage the U.S. Naval Biosciences Laboratory). Some of this university-based research is quite alarming in its broad implications.
Hatch continues: While UC Berkeley appears to have been at the heart of aerosol BW research, it was by no means alone. Other Universities collaborated with the BW effort while working on the VCP in parallel. From 1955 to 1965, the Ohio State University College of Medicine conducted research for Fort Detrick into the aerosol transmission of BW agents including tularemia and Q fever.
In some of these studies, prisoners from the Ohio State Penitentiary were used as guinea pigs. Between 1952 and 1969, the affiliated Ohio State University Research Foundation had eight contracts with the U.S. Army for BW research. [Tularemia ("rabbit fever") and Q fever were ultimately stockpiled by the U.S. Army.] Before he worked with UC, Dr. [Alfred] Hellman supervised an NCI contract for Ohio State University. Designed to study the aerosol transmission of cancer-causing viruses, this research started in 1965 and continued at least until 1972. The principal investigator for this work, Dr. Richard Griesemer, would eventually succeed in giving tumors to mice and monkeys.
If the aforementioned success of Richard Griesemer is accurate, we could determine that at least 9 years before Bob Marley's death to melanoma cancer, the capability of induced cancer in laboratory animals is reported to have been a fate accompli. In addition, there was cooperation between the military research community and numerous corporations, including two major defense biosciences contractors: Charles Pfizer & Co. and Litton-Bionics. A number of notable researchers evolved from this network, some of which are associated with some of America's more sinister and secretive research.
These include: Robert Gallo (NCI), Jack Gruber (NIH), Alfred Hellman (US Air Force), James Duff (US Army), Richard Griesemer (Department Of Energy-the agency exposed in 1993 for its involvement in widespread human radiation experiments) and Seymour Kalter (NCI). Throughout my extensive research into some of the greatest conspiracies of our time, certain of these names appear in the midst of some disturbing activities.
It serves us well to remember the names of such individuals and to remain vigilant to their activities In addition, this secret research into cancer-causing agents partially overlapped with the CIA's projects MK-ULTRA (covert human experimentation with psychedelic drugs and "other chemical agents") and MK-NAOMI (the agency's managing of biological toxins and diseases, some of which, as revealed in congressional hearings, were utilized in attempted assassinations of foreign leaders). This becomes highly relevant when we consider that it is the CIA that is most suspected as having a clandestine influence in the lives and deaths of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh.
In so far as the opportunity to have attacked Bob Marley with a potentially cancer-causing agent, there has been speculation that, during the time Marley was initially being treated for the foot injury which is believed to be the beginning of the cancer in his body, Bob was given some kind of an injection by a French doctor. Later Marley did travel to the Federal Republic of Germany to undergo radical naturopathic cancer treatments by one Bavarian Dr. Issels, who is revealed to have had former Nazi SS and intelligence connections.
This area of research remains somewhat vague on Marley's life. Six years following the death of Bob Marley, the murder of reggae's then most powerful voice, Peter Tosh took place. Shortly after settling a protracted lawsuit against his distributor, EMI Records, for unreported foreign sales, Tosh was gunned down in an "apparent robbery." The beloved reggae superstar was killed along with 2 others, Jamaican Broadcasting Corporation deejay Jeff "Free-I" Dixon and Wilton "Doc" Brown, on Friday September 11, 1987 in Kingston, Jamaica. The third surviving member of the original Wailers triumvirate, Bunny Livingston, has lived in virtual rural isolation since Bob was still alive.
In the wake of the deaths of Bob and Peter, a new set of Jamaican reggae artists has risen to prominence whose ideologies run counter to the revolutionary music of the Wailers and their contemporaries. Chief among these include Yellowman (described by noted reggae historian L.A.-based Rojah Stephans as a "salacious, foul-mouthed rapper"), Shaggy, Shabba Ranks and grind-queen Patra, nearly all of whose artistic merits center around their own sexual prowess. As Rojah Stephans explained on a recent television program, even if the CIA wasn't directly responsible for the deaths of Bob Marley and Peter Tosh, the shift in cultural focus of reggae music since these men's deaths has accomplished the very goal of Western intelligence establishments.
The Cia And Dea In Jamaica: America's Dirty Little Secret:
An interesting series of articles appeared in the Los Angeles Times between September and December 1994 which shed further light on the CIA's presence in Jamaica. The articles focused on a lawsuit brought by Janine Brookner, "the first female chief of station in Latin America." Brookner had been assigned to head the CIA's Jamaican station in 1989; her mission was to "clean up the Jamaican operation." News accounts of her rotten experience in Kingston focused on sexual shenanigans and the rampant alcoholism that had come to distract several of the agency's operatives in Jamaica. The Times article yielded a few tawdry bits of gossip regarding such behavior:
According to accounts reaching Washington in the late 1980s, the Central Intelligence Agency station in Jamaica was a menagerie of misfits, incompetents and twisted personalities-an overstaffed way station for time-servers no one else wanted. The deputy station chief reportedly assaulted his wife repeatedly, once throttling her until she passed out. Another agent was cited for getting drunk in a hotel bar and screaming out her rage against the CIA. A third allegedly threatened to kill his own security guards.
These sordid details leap out of a sex-discrimination lawsuit filed in August by the CIA agent-the first female chief of station in Latin America-assigned to clean up the Jamaica operation... At least two of the current top operations directorate chiefs have had sexual affairs with subordinates, the Brookner suit alleges. One of them was discovered in flagrante delicto with a female employee on the couch in his office at CIA headquarters.
Aside from such sordid episodes, which were generally the focus of the Times' articles, the story did allude to one detail that caught my interest. Brookner was accused by her detractors of "misusing a CIA helicopter assigned to Jamaica for anti-drug operations." As we should be aware, such operations are typically conducted under the agency of the DEA.
But another more recent Times news story appeared to confirm our more sinister interpretation of the CIA's clandestine history in Jamaica. Convicted drug baron Charles "Little Nut" Miller is a native of, and currently residing in, the tiny Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Times writer Mark Fineman posted an article dated December 7, 1997, which detailed much of Miller's activity as a CIA operative active in Kingston during the tumultuous 1970s.
Miller operated under the cover of Cecil Conner, a "political enforcer." The article, which contained a number of devastating revelations similar to the "Dark Alliance" series (CIA links to crack cocaine sales in California), written by Gary Webb and originally posted in the San Jose Mercury News, contained the following accounts of covert U.S. intelligence activities in Jamaica and elsewhere:
The U.S. government indicted him [Charles Miller], then protected him as a key federal witness who helped put two gang leaders in prison for life, only to have him emerge nearly a decade later as one of Washington's worst nightmares. Today, Miller is the target of one of the U.S. Justice Department's most intensive and frustrating extradition efforts-a two-year court battle in this tiny Caribbean island nation that is made all the more confounding for U.S. law enforcement officials because, they acknowledge, Miller was once one of theirs.
The CIA employed Charles "Little Nut" Miller as a political thug attached to Edward Seaga's JLP Party and later as a member of a vicious Jamaican "posse" drug gang in the U.S. Now an influential local soft-drink and chicken distributor, Miller is cast by U.S. official sources as an ingenious former federal witness-turned-fugitive who has learned the inner workings of U.S. anti-drug intelligence, law enforcement and judiciary... Working for what he called "the underworld section" of Jamaica's Labor Party in Kingston [allied to Edward Seaga], he stated, he stuffed ballot boxes, intimidated voters, shot and wounded a clerk during a robbery and spent years in prison.
He also testified, according to court records and documents, that he escaped the Jamaican prison using political connections in 1983 and came to the United States, where he became a trusted member of a brutal Jamaican drug gang known as the Shower Posse. The gang's trademark was spraying victims-from California to Miami to New York-with machine-gun fire, often killing and maiming bystanders... He said he was present the day posse leaders opened fire with machine guns in a Florida crack house, killing five people-including a pregnant woman found in a praying position-and shooting the sole survivor in the mouth.
These first-hand revelations from courtroom documents serve to confirm our worst suspicions over criminal provocateur activities that were being carried out by U.S. intelligence operatives. The Jamaican "posses" which are being described here were the subject of a sordid propaganda film produced during the mid-1980s entitled Marked for Death, which significantly elevated the career of action-film heavy Steven Segal. While the violent record of "Little Nut" as revealed in the Times piece is full of such sordid details, it is Miller's experience in Jamaica during the political conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s, which is our principal concern.
The article contained these additional revelations: Under cross-examination, Conner readily admitted to his violent past in Jamaica, where, at 17, he was convicted of a jewelry store robbery in which he shot and wounded a clerk in the chest. He stated that he worked for an armed underground faction in the Labor Party of former Prime Minister Edward Seaga, a close U.S. ally in the fight against Cuba-inspired communism. CONCLUSION: For myself, this investigation has been most satisfying.
We have demonstrated how the U.S. international security establishment created a structure to subvert the social order of another nation. The Jamaican operation ultimately undermined the natural ambitions of we, in this country, as we would seek to operate within reggae and Rasta culture. This research project has led me to a greater insight into related sub-conspiracies, spanning drug smuggling, biological warfare, intelligence activities, mind control and political corruption. Ultimately this is an example of social engineering on an international scale.
As much as anything, this study has reinforced one theme which, for me, has been reoccurring over the past year: the critical importance of culture in shaping the behavior of large groups. I trust that you can now imagine how powerful organizations manipulate conditions in order to apply external pressure to hostile cultural forces. This lesson can and should be applied by we who wish to stiffen the resistance of those who have too long been victim to such clandestine manipulation.
Our intent is to modify the behavior of oppressed groups and to defeat the hidden hand of repression. More so than any other strategy, I have become convinced that we would be best to utilize the tremendous motivation inherent within culture as a force of change. Culture is anchored within our 1) religion, 2) language, 3) traditions, 4) history (or historical perspective), 5) values and 6) logic (mode of thinking).
Reggae and Rastafarian culture has presented to our generation a wonderful opportunity. Through this movement the humble musicians of Kingston's ghettos demonstrated that they could have an impact on people from a variety of ethnic, class and nationalistic backgrounds throughout the globe. Rasta culture transcended economics, politics, gender and language. We did it once; we can do it again. Please recognize this power of culture to reshape whole societies in a relatively brief period of time. Apply the knowledge gained from such insight to your own agenda. Please make sure that your agenda is constructive and non-injurious to any individual or group that displays good intentions. Smash the CIA conspiracy, long live conscious music. Bob Marley and Peter Tosh live on!