Excellent piece. You've researched it well and kept it quite objective. I venture to say this is one of the first Steemit posts with "conspiracy" in the title that I have voted for because this story was proven to be quite accurate. Also, don't forget what happened in Panama when the U.S. went in to get Noriega and depose his government. That was billed as a gigantic drug bust, when in fact the accepted back story (it's even on Wikipedia and in the history books this way) was that Noriega had stopped cooperating with the CIA's programs. He was running drugs, too, but when he switched teams, he had to be replaced.