The Islamic State is destroying opium fields in Afghanistan as it routs the Taliban, according to witnesses.
The reports may ultimately result in the US sending troops back into the country to protect these valuable and highly lucrative assets.
CIA and Afghan Opium
In 2009 it was reported that the CIA controlled the opium trade in Afghanistan through Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the former president, Hamid Karzai, who began his career as a fundraiser for the CIA’s mujahideen during the 1980s.
“CIA-supported Mujahideen rebels engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the Soviet-supported government and its plans to reform the very backward Afghan society,” William Blum writes in The Real Drug Lords.
“The Golden Crescent drug trade, launched by the CIA in the early 1980s, continues to be protected by US intelligence, in liaison with NATO occupation forces and the British military. In recent developments, British occupation forces have promoted opium cultivation through paid radio advertisements,” Michel Chossudovsky wrote in 2007.
The corporate media, however, has portrayed the Taliban as the source of opium cultivation in the country. Prior to the U.S. invasion of the country, the Taliban were instrumental in outlawing the opium trade, according to the United Nations.
Several years after the invasion and during the occupation by the United States, the drug trade soared to a record $65 billion and Afghanistan produced 92 per cent of the world’s opium, with the equivalent of 3,500 tons leaving the country each year. Other figures put the number far higher, at around 6,100 tons a year.
In 2010 Infowars.com reported on a Gerald Rivera interview with an American soldier who admitted guarding opium fields in Afghanistan.
In 2014 the opium trade reached a new high, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime’s 2014 Afghan Opium Survey.
Opium Trade Floats Wall Street
Banks and financial institutions have long been suspected of using illegal drug sales as a source of profit.
“In many instances, drug money is currently the only liquid investment capital,” said Vienna-based UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Costa said in January of 2009. “In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor.”
Former Managing Director and board member of Wall Street investment bank Dillon Read, Catherine Austin Fitts, says banks launder imponderable amounts of drug money.
“According to the Department of Justice, the US launders between $500 billion – $1 trillion annually. I have little idea what percentage of that is narco dollars, but it is probably safe to assume that at least $100-200 billion relates to US drug import-exports and retail trade,” writes Fitts.
The CIA has long secured the lucrative global drug market for Wall Street and for its own operational “off-the-books” purposes.
“The CIA’s operational directorate, in other words that’s their covert operations, para-military, dirty tricks — call it whatever you want — has for at least 40 years that we can document paid for a significant amount of its work through the sales of heroin and cocaine,” Guerrilla News Network reported in an interview with Christopher Simpson.
The CIA has been in the drug running business since the 1950s. In Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Latin America, and Afghanistan, the CIA — also known as the “Cocaine Import Agency” — has remained at the forefront of the international illicit drug trade. The journalist Gary Webb and the San Jose Mercury News tied the CIA and the Contras to a large crack cocaine ring in Los Angeles. Webb paid with his life for revealing this information to the public.
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