The CIA has long secured the lucrative global drug market for Wall Street and for its own operational “off-the-books” purposes. “The CIA’s operational covert, black op’s, para-military, black-water, call it whatever you want, has at least 40 years of documentable paper trails tying their budgets to the sales of heroin and cocaine.
The CIA AKA “Cocaine Import Agency” has been in the drug running business since the 1950s. In Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Latin America, and Afghanistan, the CIA has remained at the forefront of the international illicit drug trade. The journalist Gary Webb and the San Jose Mercury News tied the CIA and the Contras to a large crack cocaine ring in Los Angeles. Webb paid with his life for revealing this information to the public. He tried to get in the way of the people who control a trillion dollar syndicate. And it’s a fact that more than 95 percent of the revenue generated by opium and cocaine production is siphoned off to these business syndicates, organized crime families and banking and financial institutions.
In an amazing propaganda segment, Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera talks with a soldier about U.S. support of the opium trade in Afghanistan. The soldier tells Rivera he does not like supporting Afghan opium production. The U.S., he insists, has turned a blind eye to the cultivation because it is a cultural thing. He’d rather the Afghans grow watermelons. What they fail to mention is that before the 1980 Afghanistan produced zero percent of the Worlds heroin so the “it’s a cultural thing” argument is bullshit!
The thing is that Afghanistan grows poppies because CIA paid farmers since the 1980’s to grow poppy fields rather than watermelons! The Golden Crescent drug trade, launched by the CIA in the early 1980s, continues to be protected by US intelligence, in liaison with NATO forces and the British military. In recent reports British occupation forces have even promoted opium cultivation through paid radio advertisements! One was reported to say, “Respected people of Helmand. The soldiers do not destroy poppy fields,” The radio promo said. “They know that many people of Afghanistan have no choice but to grow poppy. They do not want to stop people from earning their livelihoods.” This is basically the same excuse used by the Bush and Obama Administration based on their display of a complete lack of interest in the Afghan opium trade. And especially since 9/11, the White House and Pentagon have gone out of their way to avoid taking on the Afghan drug lords from the very outset of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan since it started a decade ago and currently on into today.
It was reported by The New York Times (link below) a few months ago that Hamid Karzi, the president of Afghanistan, was on the CIA payroll and intimately involved in the opium trade. The rest of the mainstream news and the corporate media tell us the drug trade is run by the evil Taliban. They never seem to report that before September 11, 2001, and before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban had imposed a ban on opium production! This resulted in opium production collapsing by more than 90 per cent. It was the U.S. supported Northern Alliance that came to the rescue and began protecting the production of raw opium!
Under the interim government of U.S. appointed Hamid Karzai, opium poppy cultivation once again began to skyrocket and opium markets were restored. According to the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP), opium cultivation increased by 657 per cent in 2002 in relation to its 2001 level! The UNDCP estimated 2002 opium poppy cultivation would cover an area between 45,000 and 65,000 hectares. A hectare equals 2.4 acres! Opium cultivation in 2001 had fallen to an estimated 7,606 hectares! According to the UN, in 2007 alone Afghanistan supplied 93 percent of the world’s supply of opium.
So where does all of this money end up? We’re talking hundreds of Billions every year. Well, in many instances, drug money ends up as liquid investment capital for a wide range of organizations. Former Managing Director of Wall Street investment bank Dillon Read has long alleged that the banksters launder imponderable amounts of drug money. According to the Department of Justice, the US launders between $500 billion – $1 trillion annually. Imagine what percentage of that is narcotic dollars! It is probably safe to assume that at least a few hundred billion relates to US drug import-exports trade.
This bombshell article in the New York Times lifts the lid on how the brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, the suspected kingpin of the country’s booming opium trade, has been on the CIA payroll for the past eight years. However, the article serves as little more than a whitewash because it fails to address the fact that one of the primary reasons behind the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was the agenda to reinstate the Golden Crescent drug trade.
The CIA pays Karzai and his brother for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.” The Times reveals how, after security forces discovered a huge tractor-trailer full of heroin outside Kandahar in 2004, the commander, Habibullah Jan, received a telephone call from Ahmed Karzai, the brother of President Hamid Karzai, asking him to release the vehicle and the drugs.”
In 2006, following the discovery of another cache of heroin, “United States investigators told other American officials that they had discovered links between the drug shipment and a bodyguard believed to be an intermediary for Ahmed Wali Karzai.”
The Times article discusses how the CIA uses Karzai as a go-between between the Americans and the Taliban. He is also directly implicated in the manufacturing of phony ballots and polling stations that were attributed to the President’s disputed election victory.Officials quoted by The Times described Karzai as a Mafia-like figure who expanded his influence over the drug trade with the aid of U.S. efforts to eliminate his competitors.
That’s why the Afghan opium trade has exploded since the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan! The U.N says that the drug trade is now worth $65 billion. Afghanistan is exporting the equivalent of 3,500 tons that leave the country each year. Other figures put the number far higher, at around 6,100 tons a year.
The New York Times exposé pins the blame on Karzai, but fails to mention that behind the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was the United States’ agenda to restore, not eradicate, the drug trade.
The notion that the “Taliban benefits from the drug trade” and that the U.S. is trying to stop it, as both Bush and Obama claimed, seems to be the complete opposite of what is actually happening.
What is actually happening is that their flooding the streets of America and Britain with cheap heroin, destroying lives while making obscene profits!The New York Times implies that the drug lord Karzai being on the CIA payroll is just an embarrassing coincidence. In reality he is a middle man working for the U.S. military-industrial complex’s whose obvious control of the drug trade in Afghanistan stretches back decades and was only interrupted when the Taliban came to power.
So this is the real history of the Afghan opium trade that the Times won’t tell you, and in failing to do so the article serves only to whitewash the true scale of the agenda behind the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan and the real role that the CIA plays in the world wide drug trade!
-Jean Claude Audet III
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