In my 30-year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.  - Dennis Dayle, Former DEA Officer

 

Wherever you declare a war on drugs you get more drugs, not less drugs.  That is an absolute certain rule.  - Peter Dale Scott

The same can be said for the "War on Terror".

Harold Pinter Nobel Prize Lecture

 

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn't know it.

 

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

For anyone interested in awaking from hypnosis and taking a look at the actual world of actual US foreign policy, Scott Noble has a new film available on-line for free. (h/t chipmo)

 

 

Imagining the US as a friend of democracy and free speech, as a supporter of human rights and the rule of law, necessitates willful ignorance of decades of history.  For people who have studied this history, the United States government is not thought of as a benign democratic institution with a few blemishes on its record; rather, we think, with Pinter, of the USG as supporting and in many cases engendering

 every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile.

We understand the facts underlying Pinter's assessment of the US government as "Brutal, indifferent, scornful and ruthless."  We do not rest easier when seeing the increasingly lawless behavior of the executive branch and the ongoing transformation of a once-great legal system into something the government makes up as they go along, often discarding over 5 centuries of developed law in the process.  We do not rest easier because we take past motivations as reliable indicator of future goals.  Decades of foreign policy reveal the US as clealy anti-worker, anti-democracy, and anti-human rights.  I wish I were engaging in hyperbole, but these are simple facts.

Below are a few quotes transcribed from the film.  Far from reaching overbroad conclusions on the basis of cherrypicking, the examples given below are a mere taste of the mounds of evidence in support of Pinter's claims and Noble's thesis.  If you are interested in being released from the thrall of propaganda, I urge you to watch the entire feature.

Any mistakes in transcription are my own.

Peter Dale Scott, author The Road to 9 11

It’s very hard to point to an area of the world where you have major drug trafficking where  the CIA has not been a factor in allowing that drug trade to prosper because of the protection which they conferred upon their assets.  The CIA, in trying to create an anti-communist presence in Southeast Asia—they were very worried, especially after China went Communist—and the CIA built up what was left of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang [KMT], which always had financed itself by the drug traffic.  Starting officially in the year 1951, the CIA’s Operation Paper started supplying arms and other material assistance to a group of KMT former soldiers in Burma whose main activity was controlling the drug traffic there and exporting drugs out of Burma, mostly through Thailand to Hong Kong to Taiwan and eventually to the United States.  This grew with time and came to support a whole CIA private army in Thailand which was then used to stir up war in Laos and really is a neglected factor in the origins of the Viet Nam War, the American Viet Nam War.

 

The CIA began going into Afghanistan after the communists seized power there in 1978.  They actually were in there a bit before, and may have helped, by their support of the right, to have precipitated that communist coup. But in a big way the CIA became involved in Afghanistan after December 1979.  The CIA support went not to the general Afghan resistance but to those parts of the Afghan resistance which were trusted by the Saudis and above all by Pakistan.  Pakistan was frightened over generally popular resistance movement, because most of the resistance didn’t like the Duran Line, which is the official frontier between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and which divides Pashtun people.  It even divides tribes and families.  So, all the aid went to those people who would recognize the Duran Line, and these were mostly protégés of the Pakistani Intelligence Service, the ISI, and  who found the convenient situation to support themselves against the West by getting involved in the drug traffic—not just moving drugs but even developing heroine factories inside those parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan which were under ISI control.

In the very early stages of US support for Afghanistan resistance, all that aid was channeled through a bank called the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.  This was a bank which was getting rich by laundering drug money, had a direct stake in the drug trade, and actually may, according to some people who have written about it, have been directly involved in the drug trade itself as well as in creating balances for drug traffickers.  From the very beginning, American aid was skewed away from what an outsider would have said would have been the obvious recipients of aid in Afghanistan, and went to the two outside groups, Amsaef and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, neither of whom had a very solid base in Afghanistan and both groups being involved in the drug traffic.  It’s a real tragedy that perhaps half of all US aid given to the Afghans—this is in the 1980’s—was given to this one man, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who at the time was the world’s biggest drug trafficker.

The CIA has to face the fact that wherever they have been active . . . I mean, the world’s heroin today is coming from three countries, all of them countries where the CIA has been active, most of it in Afghanistan, where they’ve been hyper-active recently with the world’s largest CIA station.  It’s worth mentioning that before the CIA went into Afghanistan in the late 1970’s, Afghanistan had never been a factor in the world drug trade.  There had been opium grown, but it was locally consumed.  Afghanistan produces, I think, 93% of the world’s heroin.  Before that, it was Indochina.  Until American got out of Indochina, it was producing about 90% of the world’s heroin.  The failure of the US media to note this very obvious correlation between CIA activity and drug production is one of the reasons that we have such a problem on our hands, because it’s only a few of us--who are sort of for this reason denied access to the mainstream media--who keep pointing out the obvious:  that there’s a correlation between CIA activity and drug production.  The third area is Colombia.

I don’t want to say that we invented cocaine production there [Colombia], but it has massively increased since . . . It was originally 1962, I think, when under Kennedy United States, very concerned about Castro having taken over in Cuba and frightened that they would export revolution to Latin America, and Colombia would be the coastline that was closest to Cuba.  So they initiated an anti-communist program there which was successful in creating two things:  first of all, a great escalation in the number of drug traffickers and the amount of drugs produced in Colombia, but also in the amount of terrorism.  Because a lot of ordinary trade unionists, once they had this CIA-supported anti-communist drive to deal with, they decided that their only protection was to become a militant revolutionary group.  . . . And now in Colombia, terrorism and anti-terrorism is a drug-related industry on both sides.

 

William I. Robinson, Critical Globalization Studies

But specifically with Colombia, the closest ally, the two allies that the US has right now in Latin America are Mexico and Colombia.  Colombia is the worst human rights violator in Latin America.  Over 3,000 trade unionists have been murdered in the last ten years.  Thousands of journalists have been murdered in the last few decades.  The most dangerous place to be in the world if you are a trade unionist is Colombia.  The most dangerous place to be in the world if you are a journalist is Colombia.  Over 3 million people have been displaced from the land in Colombia by rightwing paramilitarist units that then, once that land is displaced, they turn that land over to multi-nationalists corporations, to local planters and investors, to local capitalists.  And so Colombia is basically a terrorist regime it’s a terrorist state.  It’s a nightmare state for the poor majority, and this is a state that the US is totally aligned with.  So you might ask, why is that the case?  Well, US strategy has been to try to use Colombia as a beachhead, to try to regain influence in Latin America.  So, Obama comes in and says Colombia is the best friend of the United States. 

The War on Terror has nothing to do with the War on Drugs.  - U.S. official informing a British official that the U.S. wanted British soldiers in Afghanistan to stop interfering with the drug trade.