Pubdate: Thu, 06 Jul 2006
Source: View Magazine (Hamilton, CN ON)
Copyright: 2006 View Magazine
Contact:  http://www.viewmag.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2393
Author: Michael Truscello
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

CANADA SUPPORTING BOGUS DRUG WAR

The Senlis Council, a think tank devoted to global drug policy, 
recently issued a report condemning the Canadian military deployment 
in Afghanistan as "an impossible mission which can only lead to 
significant military casualties" because it supports impotent 
American policies in the region aimed at depressing the illegal opium trade.

Prime Minister Harper responded by saying Canada is not directly 
enforcing poppy eradication programs, but that it supports such 
efforts and continues to advance "alternatives for agriculture."

The premise of both the report and Harper's comments is that the US 
wants to eliminate the illegal opium trade in Afghanistan, which 
provides 87 per cent of the world's illegal opium, and this premise is wrong.

America is not interested in halting the drug trade from Afghanistan, 
because it generates hundreds of billions of dollars in dirty money 
that gets cleaned on Wall Street every year.

As Michael Ruppert explains in his book, Crossing the Rubicon: The 
Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, there is 
a longstanding relationship between Wall Street and the CIA. Ruppert 
names several CIA directors and high ranking officials since the 
agency's founding who have either moved from major investment banks 
to the CIA, or from the CIA to major investment banks. "The CIA is 
Wall Street. Wall Street is the CIA," Ruppert writes.

Ruppert identifies major CIA players such as Clark Clifford, John 
Foster, Allen Dulles, Bill Casey, Stanley Sporkin, John Deutch, and 
A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, all who represent the nexus of military 
intelligence and high finance in America.

"Among the many kinds of illegal activities in the world," Ruppert 
writes, "the production and laundering of drug money is central 
because it establishes channels for the flow of other criminal 
profits." The IMF estimated this annual "flow" of about $1.5 
trillion, and the drug trade directly accounts for anywhere from $400 
to $700 billion of annual money laundering. Heroin and cocaine make 
up most of the drug trade profits, "and from 1997 to 2000 and again 
in 2002, the world's largest producer of opium (from which heroin is 
made) was Afghanistan."

That brief interruption of Afghanistan's opium production is a result 
of the Taliban's efforts to destroy opium crops in the summer of 
2000. Consequently, opium production in 2001 plummeted 94 per cent. 
This is after opium production in Afghanistan reached a record high in 2000.

Wall Street is not likely to approve of the disappearance from the 
stock market of half a trillion dollars in laundered drug money. 
That's liquid cash, as valuable to propping up the consensus trance 
that is the stock market as, say, Enron's bogus profits were. "In 
this context," Ruppert writes, "it is not surprising that the US 
completed its invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001 in the middle 
of the opium planting season.

Among the first things the US forces and CIA did was to liberate a 
number of known opium warlords who, they said, would assist US 
forces." Reports suggested the opium farmers were encouraged to plant 
massive crops. "In December, former CIA asset and opium warlord Ayub 
Afridi was released from prison and recruited by the CIA to unify 
local leaders against the Taliban."

Two years later, the World Bank reported record levels of opium 
production in Afghanistan. Ruppert argues the Taliban's destruction 
of the opium crops was a form of "economic warfare" that removed 
billions from world markets.

The American invasion, whose primary objective was certainly 
establishing a more comprehensive military presence around Eurasian 
energy resources, achieved the added bonus of ensuring the global 
illegal opium trade would continue to flourish.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom