Ladies and Gentlemen:
I thank you all! I've used my WATS votes for the month on the two main posters here, and am glad to do so.
To the best of my knowledge, CIA drug dealing goes back to the days of the OSS: in exchange for help in planning the Allied invasion of Sicily, Mafia
guys in the US were given free rein in what became known as the French Connection. In his "At War With Indochina" (hope I've got that title right,
this is all coming off the top of my head) Noam Chomsky briefly but tellingly intimates that much of the CIA activity in that region, particularly in
Thailand, was financed through drug smuggling. And so it goes on.
Allegedly GHW Bush used his offshore oil rigs as way stations for the transfer of drug shipments onshore. Also I have myself spoken to a guy who used
to run a secondhand bookshop in Key West who claimed to have been at Mena and hinted darkly at what went on there.
One particularly good book I read on the subject is
Whiteout by Jeffrey St.Clair and (I think) Alexander Cockburn. In it there are mentions of
other books, particularly one that details US narcotics trafficking in the Vietnam war.
There's also a great book about the Nugan Hand Bank scandal called
The Crimes of Patriots by Jonathan Kwitney, who used to write for the WSJ.
It also details how Kissinger and the CIA overthrew Gough Whitlam, who was about to reveal in the Aussie Parliament who was being funded by the CIA -
the company was funding smear campaigns and dirty tricks against his government because, amongst other things, the lease on super-secret weird outback
US base Pine Gap was up for renewal, and the signs were Whitlam was in no mood to renew the lease.
And here's something I noticed at the time of the Afghan invasion. In the run-up, the Administration were desperate to demonise the Taliban, and
accused them of cultivating opium and trafficking in heroin. The trouble with that was, the UN, in the same week, released a report saying that the
Taliban had pretty much eradicated opium farming throughout Afghanistan. As the Taliban were religious fundamentalists and as Islam prohibits even
intake of alcohol, this perspective made more sense to me.
Then the invasion went ahead and the US got into bed with the warlords. Quelle surprise. And how inevitable it was that news reports (forgetting
about the US accusations of but a few months earlier) started saying that opium production had been
resumed (in other words, there had been
little or no production before) in Afghanistan as the economy was so shafted that farmers had little alternative.
And only a few months later I see a piece on Channel 4 news here in the UK saying that the American Ambassador, no less, is warning about the
smuggling of cheap heroin into this country! Being of
that kind of suspicious turn of mind, I'm thinking, how does
he know? And which
US bases is it coming into?
Sure enough, a few weeks/months later, the first news reports of cheap heroin becoming available on sink housing estates start rolling in...
By the way, in an earlier post, someone (logoncole?) hinted that the serial numbers for one of the planes were different on two different sources. I
only came to this thread just now, and on checking the links, those serial numbers are now identical. Funny old world, eh?
Whoa! Nearly forgot... reading through this post, as soon as I saw that the 'plane had been transferred to Venezuelan ownership, I thought, this is
to further USG plotting against Chavez. My guess would be that some part of the deal is to fund opposition to Chavez, and that the plane itself has
gone to a trusted partner in Venezuela's bogus 'opposition'. But of course (and so it proved in a later post) this can be used as a smear on
Chavez himself who, as was reported, is not co-operating in the US' "war on drugs". That's because it's as bogus as the "war on tourism" as
Dubya pronounces it...
Anyway, good on you, the lot of you! Keep up the good work. And you could find some stuff on
www.narconews.com... useful.
[edit on 4-5-2006 by rich23]
