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The Deep State's Drug Racket
by Pepe Escobar via mitch - Sputnik News Monday, Aug 28 2017, 12:37am
international / prose / post

Afghanistan is now the world's largest supplier of opium/heroin, no surprise. If readers care to join the dots with a little research, it would become apparent that wherever the CIA/Pentagon wage their illegal wars over an extended period, that area/region becomes a HUGE source of heroin (and cocaine from Latin America).

This is no coincidence, everything has a source and is therefore traceable -- understand that fact first and never take ANY information at face value, verify everything for yourselves. I have applied as a matter of survival/sanity in my life, a popular Irish adage, "never believe anything you hear and only half of what you see!" That advice alone has saved me countless times from falling into disasters in every aspect of social life. Everyone would do well to heed the advice, however, to return to this story of the REAL, verifiable, criminality of the nefarious US deep state.

Ever since the CIA's disastrous ‘Bay of Pigs’ attempt to oust Castro in Cuba, which prompted JFK to threaten to dismantle and reform the existing CIA, various actions were taken by that organisation to ensure its independent survival, as Kennedy also threatened to cut FUNDS. Naturally Kennedy was murdered in a bungled, easily exposed assassination as a result by deep state forces, make no mistake, however, the CIA learned that it couldn't depend on government funds alone for its highly costly nefarious criminal activities and so it arranged to fund itself in order to avoid impacts from the meddling, chaotic US government, of course, via the usual criminal means, as that most heinous organisation with its partner in crime, the Pentagon, are the most criminal organisations in the world today.

These two groups alone are responsible for most of the WORLD'S illegal drug trade, the easiest and most lucrative source of finance that exists, as production costs are negligible but profits are stupendous/monumental, in the $trillions globally. And so wherever the CIA/Pentagon remains for an extended period, you can be sure that region becomes a major source of illegal drugs -- the Golden Triangle initially (Vietnam war), soon after the Bay of Pigs disaster, and today Afghanistan, which now supplies over 90% of the world's heroin, which is shipped by various Muslim and other small fry criminal organisations throughout the world, especially the KLA and Albanian crime syndicates, into Europe. All this information is easily verifiable. So what that should obviously suggest to the media-numbed, ignorant public is that the USA, is the world's leading drug supplying, mass murdering criminal State, I regret to truthfully say.

Forget the CFR controlled mass media that does everything in its sweeping power to lead you to erroneous conclusions as that is its job, you would note if you research that everything in large criminal organisations is connected and therefore traceable to its origins, even the CIA/Pentagon serve others, known as the global elite, which parade openly as the world's mega-BANKERS, make sense, it should?

The vast sums of filthy money must go somewhere and the global elite have arranged various havens to launder and re-invest that blood money, but that is another aspect of the truly horrifying story I urge everyone to pursue, as it makes plain the REAL CRIMINAL powers that lord over the entire WORLD.

But to return to just one aspect, the CIA/Pentagon, as the source of most of the global trade in heroin (and cocaine) and be assured those drugs will never be legalised as that sensible act would drastically devalue the products, and clearly the deep state that rules America and its presidents today, would never allow that to occur.

However, I would refer readers to the much lauded work of academic Dr. Alfred W. McCoy, who alone while researching and writing his Ph.D thesis, since published in book form, "The Politics of Heroin in South East Asia,” to awaken to REALITY; it is a must read for every intelligent person that wishes to learn the Truth behind criminal States.

I read this text in the 70's in the region, while serving as an Australian Military Intelligence Officer and it changed my life and world view. I have since vigorously opposed these supremely EVIL, nefarious, mass murdering forces and will continue to do so until the DISEASE is eradicated. But that's just a small part of my story so I would now leave you with Mr. Pepe Escobar, competent investigative journalist, for the latest information on recent developments.

Afghanistan and the CIA Heroin Ratline

The Persian Gulf harbors an array of extremely compromising secrets. Near the top is the Afghan heroin ratline -- with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) positioned as the golden node of a transnational, trillion dollar heroin money laundering operation.

In this 21st century Opium War, crops harvested in Afghanistan are essentially feeding the heroin market not only in Russia and Iran but especially in the US. Up to 93% of the world's opium comes from Afghanistan.

Contrary to predominant Western perception, this is not an Afghan Taliban operation. The key questions -- never asked by Atlanticist circles -- are who buys the opium harvests; refines them into heroin; controls the export routes; and then sell them for humongous profit compared to what the Taliban have locally imposed in taxes.

The hegemonic narrative rules that Washington bombed Afghanistan in 2001 in "self-defense" after 9/11; installed a "democratic" government; and after 16 years never de facto left because this is a key node in the Global War on Terror (GWOT), against al-Qaeda and the Taliban alike.

Washington spent over $100 billion in Afghan reconstruction. And, allegedly, $8.4 billion in "counternarcotics programs." Operation Enduring Freedom -- along with the "liberation" of Iraq -- have cost an astonishing several trillion dollars. And still the heroin ratline, out of occupied Afghanistan, thrives. Cui bono?

Have a SIGAR

An exhaustive Afghanistan Opium Survey details the steady rise of Afghan opium production as well as the sprawl in production areas; "In 2016, opium production had increased by approximately 25 times in relation to its 2001 levels, from 185 tons in 2001 to 4,800 tons in 2016."

Another exhaustive report issued by the delightful acronym SIGAR (Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction) even hints -- discreetly -- at the crucial connection; Operation Enduring Freedom feeding America's heroin epidemic.

Afghanistan is infested by contractors; numbers vary from 10,000 to tens of thousands. Military and ex-military alike can be reasonably pinpointed as players in the heroin ratline -- in many cases for personal profit. But the clincher concerns the financing of US intel black ops that should not by any means come under scrutiny by the US Congress.

A Gulf-based intel source with vast experience across the Pentagon-designated "arc of instability" tells the story of his interaction with an Australian intel operative who served in Afghanistan; "This was about 2011. He said he gave US Army Intelligence and the CIA reports on the Afghan heroin trade -- that US military convoys from the ports of Pakistan were being used to ship the heroin out of Afghanistan -- much of it was raw opium -- for distribution as their backhaul.

No one answered.

He then cornered the key army intelligence operations and CIA at a meeting and asked why no action was taken. The answer was that the goal of the US was winning the hearts and minds of the population and giving them the poppies to grow won their hearts. He was then warned that if he brought this issue up again he would be returned to Australia in a “body bag."

The source is adamant, "CIA external operations are financed from these profits. The charge that the Taliban was using the heroin trade to finance their operations was a fabrication and a form of misdirection."

And that brings us to a key motive behind President Trump's going against his instincts and accepting a new Afghan surge; "In the tradition of the opium wars of perfidious Albion in the 19th century, in which opium paid for tea and silk from India, and the taxes on these silk and tea imports financed the construction of the mighty British Navy which ruled the seas, the CIA has built itself up into a most powerful agent based on the trillion dollar heroin trade. It is impossible for Trump to overcome it as he has no allies to tap. The military are working together with the CIA, and therefore the officers that surround Trump are worthless."

None of this deviates from the CIA's modus operandi.

Past examples abound. The most notorious concerns the Golden Triangle during the Vietnam war, when the CIA imposed a food-for-opium scheme on Hmong tribesmen from Laos -- complete with a heroin refinery at the CIA headquarters in northern Laos and the setup of nefarious Air America to export the opium.

The whole story was exposed on Prof. Alfred McCoy's seminal The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia -- which drove Langley nuts.

A contemporary counterpart would be a recent book by Italian journalist Enrico Piovesana detailing the New Opium War in Afghanistan.

The return of Air America

A Pakistani intel source with vast Pashtun/ tribal area contacts delves into even more incendiary territory; "According to our best information the CIA has brought in their al-Qaeda-Daesh proxies into Afghanistan to justify the additional American troops." That would neatly tie in with Trump being cornered by his generals.

And then, there's Moscow. Last week, the Russian Foreign Ministry was adamantly denouncing "foreign fighters" transferred by "unknown helicopters" as the perpetrators of a massacre of Hazara Shi'ites in a northern Afghanistan province; "It seems that the command of the NATO forces controlling the Afghan sky stubbornly refuses to notice these incidents."

It does not get more serious than that; Moscow denouncing sectors of the US-trained Afghan Armed Forces side by side with NATO engaged in covert ops supporting jihadis. Russian intel has hinted -- discreetly -- for quite some time that US intel is covertly sponsoring Daesh -- a.k.a. "ISIS Khorasan" -- in Afghanistan.

Russian intel is very much aware of the Afghan chapter in the New Great Game. Russian citizens are "collateral damage" of the Afghan heroin ratline as much as Americans. The Russian Foreign Ministry is tracking how tons of chemicals are being illegally imported into Afghanistan from, among others, "Italy, France and the Netherlands," and how the US and NATO are doing absolutely nothing to contain the heroin ratline.

Well, 'Air America,' after all, never died. It just relocated from the jungles of Southeast Asia to the arid crossroads of Central and South Asia.

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201708251056794770-afghanistan-cia-heroin-ratline/