By Jeremy Kuzmarov
Clinton Covered Up for the Mena Affair and a Corrupt Old-Boy Smuggling Network That Helped Flood the Country with Cocaine in the 1980s
[The War on Drugs is now widely recognized as a failed public policy that has resulted in mass incarceration and the over-militarization of American police forces. This article provides a historical lens on that failure, going back to the time when Bill Clinton, a key architect of the modern War on Drugs with Ronald Reagan and Joe Biden, was governor of Arkansas.—Editors]
Jean Duffey is a kindly 76-year-old grandmother living in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, who has a story to tell that is fit for a John Le Carré spy novel or John Grisham crime caper.
The story begins in 1990 when as a 43-year-old deputy prosecutor in Saline County, Arkansas, just north of the capital, Little Rock, Duffey was asked by Prosecutor Dan Harmon and his assistant, Richard Garrett, both Democrats, to head a drug task force for Saline, Hot Springs and Benton counties.
Very quickly, as she told CovertAction Magazine in an exclusive interview, the task force began to unearth evidence exposing deeply rooted, drug-related corruption that went all the way up to Harmon’s office and that resulted in the cover-up of
murder.
Three years before the task force had been initiated, on August 23, 1987, two local teenagers, Kevin Ives and Don Henry, were found dead on the train tracks around Alexander near Little Rock.
State Medical Examiner Fahmy Malak advanced the theory that the boys fell asleep on the tracks after smoking 20 marijuana joints and were run over by a train accidentally. However, an independent investigation revealed that the boys had been beaten to death before-hand and their bodies then laid out methodically on the train tracks under a tarp before they were run over.[1]