CIA Promotes Narcotics Trade - Junge Welt, Germany

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

Even FUBAR isn't an adequate description of our lost war in Afghanistan.

http://watchingamerica.com/News/36568/cia-promotes-narcotics-trade/

“There’s no significant drug trafficking anywhere in the world in which the CIA isn’t involved.” This truism has again been confirmed by a report in the New York Times. While in the past it was limited to hanky-panky with drug lords in Latin America or Southeast Asia, this time the agency, according to the New York Times article, is actually part of an organized crime operation in the Hindu Kush war zone. Active and former U.S. intelligence personnel claim that Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, is a known key player in the Afghan drug world but has nonetheless been on the CIA payroll for the past eight years. It is therefore absurd that U.S. politicians and the American media are condemning President Karzai for not prosecuting his brother.

The campaign began about a year ago, after the White House decided to start looking for an alternative to President Karzai. But apparently the left hand in Washington did not know what the right hand was up to, as it became known that Karzai’s brother was at that time considered a valuable employee of the CIA. As a Pashtun, Ahmed is both the eyes and ears of the intelligence service deep within the Taliban-controlled Pashtun tribal areas where, thanks to his criminal network, he has many connections. At the same time, Ahmed was helping the CIA to set up contact with tribal leaders who either were cooperating with the Taliban or wished to switch allegiances to the U.S. side. CIA special units would be able to use Ahmed’s far-flung areas of influence as a base for their clandestine operations.

As pay, the CIA helped President Karzai’s brother by ridding him of two bothersome competitors: Matiullah Qati, Police Chief of Kandahar province, was “accidentally” shot to death by a CIA special operations unit, and Karzai also inherited drug baron Hajji Bashir Noorzai’s business after Noorzai, with Ahmed’s help, fell into an American trap, was arrested, later convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. The New York Times reached either the pinnacle of naïveté or was playing administration apologist by saying, “CIA practices in Afghanistan suggest that the United States isn’t doing everything in its power to eradicate the lucrative narcotics trade in Afghanistan.”

Meanwhile, hostilities in Afghanistan are escalating. October is, so far, the bloodiest month for U.S. forces since the start of the fighting, with 55 killed in action. The second worst month was the preceding August, when 51 died. Simultaneously, predictions that armed enemies of the occupation might begin operating in the relatively secure capital city of Kabul seem to be have been accurate. This was demonstrated by the Wednesday morning attack on the United Nations guesthouse in the government zone that had previously been considered “absolutely secure.” Nine people died in that attack, six of them foreign U.N. workers. This attack underlines the U.N.’s total failure. Because of pressure from the United States and other NATO countries, it has now become a handmaiden of the occupation forces and thus also a target of the insurgency.

[mmonk]

1. Bookmarked for future use.

[jwirr]

2. This should come as no surprise to anyone. Behind the scenes in

the Iran/Contra hearings was a hearing led by John Kerry on this very topic. Nothing was done and nothing changed.

[SpiralHawk]

3. CIA-BFEE Family Values

Ptoooey.

[Octafish]

4. Outstanding article.

Alfred M. McCoy warned us. Corporate McPravda didn't.

[panader0]

5. What if the US just bought the entire opium crop?

It would be much cheaper than war with no lives lost. The opium itself could be used to make medicines. The Taliban, Al Queda, etc would be fundless. I've seen this idea raised here at DU, and there were several other good reasons why it's a good idea.

[mmonk]

6. Because opium is the funding mechanism, not the end game of the means.

[MadHound]

7. NEWSFLASH! WATER IS WET! FILM AT ELEVEN!

This isn't news, not really. This has been known for a long while. After all, the CIA started the crack epidemic in order to open up new coke markets so they could sell arms to Iran. SE Asia, they've been involved in the region and the heroin trade for over fifty years now. If you want the complete and sordid history, I suggest that you read "The Politics of Heroin" by Alfred McCoy.

[mmonk]

8. True but even old news is news to those who have never heard it.

In our country, there is a lot of old news which would be news if heard more often in our broadcast news culture.

[Sinti]

9. K&R for those who don't yet know or understand n/t

[Orwellian_Ghost]

10. K&R

I highly recommend this book and any articles you can find online by the author:



The Politics of Heroin:
CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade

Interview with Alfred McCoy, professor of Southeast Asian History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade

Part One
"The problem with America's failed chance at essentially reducing if not eliminating drugs as a problem was a contradiction between the needs of domestic policy and the national security state."

Part Two
"When the Americans moved into Indochina after the French departed in 1955, we picked up the same tribes, the Hmong, the same politics of narcotics, the politics of heroin, that the French had established. By the 1960s we were operating, particularly the CIA, in collusion with the major traffickers exporting from the mountains not only to meet the consumption needs of Southeast Asia itself, but in the first instance America's combat forces fighting in Vietnam and ultimately the world market."

Part Three
"Moving on to our fourth instance, one close to home, is the whole Iran-contra operation . . . All the personnel that are involved in that operation are Laos veterans. Ted Shackley, Thomas Clines, Oliver North, Richard Secord - they all served in Laos during thirteen-year war. They are all part of that policy of integrating narcotics and being complicitous in the narcotics trade in the furtherance of covert action."

Part Four
Because of their mandate to stop communism or to run a secret army in Laos or to harass the Nicaragua government with the contra operation - because they've had a political covert action mandate - they have found it convenient to ally themselves with the very drug brokers the DEA is trying to put in jail. While you're working with the CIA you are untouchable. The CIA backs you up. There are instances of minor traffickers being arrested in the United States for importing drugs and the CIA will actually go to the local police and courts and get them off and out because oftentimes they threaten to talk, make trouble, so the CIA just gets them out.

http://www.lycaeum.org/drugwar/DARKALLIANCE/ciaheron.html

[AntiFascist]

11. K&R...

how many of our own congresspeople are tied into this criminal empire, like Hastert was?

[juno jones]

12. K&R! n/t

[JohnyCanuck]

13. Britain is protecting the biggest heroin crop of all time

This was the title of a 2007 article in The Daily Mail written by the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray.

Our economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and 'value-added' operations.

It now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.

How can this have happened, and on this scale? The answer is simple. The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government ? the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect.

When we attacked Afghanistan, America bombed from the air while the CIA paid, armed and equipped the dispirited warlord drug barons ? especially those grouped in the Northern Alliance ? to do the ground occupation. We bombed the Taliban and their allies into submission, while the warlords moved in to claim the spoils. Then we made them ministers.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-469983/Britain-protecting-biggest-heroin-crop-time.html#ixzz0VfmNNwUO