Saturday, March 20, 2010

Lo And Behold: U.S. Troops Turn Blind Eye to Opium Fields

Mmm....Why not ship it in to the States and fund more war with it like you did for the Contras?

Here is the article from the New York Times.
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2 comments:

  1. yardfarmerMarch 20, 2010 at 9:12 PM

    The production of heroin was marginal to unknown in the Golden Crescent of Afghanistan and Pakistan before the CIA/Russian conflict commenced in earnest in 1979. Since then the region has grown into the largest center of heroin production in the world, producing by late 1997 some 500 tons of the white powder with wholesale value of $50 billion in the U.S. alone,an amount roughly 10 times the level of pre-war years. The result in North America was an increase of more than 100 % in recorded heroin related fatalities. Add to that an exponential increase to 1.7 million addicts, including 200,000 children, in Pakistan itself, in a country where heroin usage was again marginal or unknown in the pre-war years.

    In an operation reminiscent of the transshipment of weapons to the Illopango Air Force Base in San Salvador, El Salvador and the return of the same Air Force Cargo planes laden with tons of cocaine much of it destined for clandestine air strips in Mena, Arkansas, opium and heroin were moved down into Pakistan from heroin labs in Landi Kotal back over the Khyber pass in the same vehicles which had previously carried CIA weaponry into the Afghanistan from forward positions in Pakistan.

    Of course the American public remains either completely indifferent or inured to this complex and insidious web of government drug trafficking, and prefers the sanitized pablum and red herring journalism which typifies the MSM reports such as the NYT article.
    Criminal enterprises draped in the flag of empire have been the unfortunate history of Central and South Asia since colonial times when the Dutch East India Trading Company opened the original trade routes to the Far East.

    For more information pertinent to the heroin and opium production in Afphak and the Afghan conflict in general, refer to the most excellent, exhaustive, and informative chronicle, "Unholy Wars" by John K. Cooley from Pluto Press.

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  2. GeorgeMarch 21, 2010 at 1:32 AM

    Thanks for the info as always yardfarmer, and the book tip. "Unholy Wars" is an excellent title. I started learning of this drug trade angle when I read about AIG in relation to 9/11 and the whole history there with Starr. I think your friend Michael C. Ruppert got into it. Empires are run like mafias it seems. I was watching Lawrence of Arabia tonight and thought how the British Empire also needed its propaganda just like our American empire seems to. One difference however is that America doesn't claim to actually have an empire. It's all become more devious. Propaganda and whitewashing of public image were always needed by governments, but it seems now to be more grotesque then ever. And to what end?

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