Narco-Terrorists Allege Narco-Terrorism

"Investigators from the United States and Columbia have dismantled an international cocaine smuggling and money-laundering ring that allegedly used part of its profits to finance Hezbollah, the Lebanese-based Shiite militia... The US Drug Enforcement Administration led the investigation, playing a central role in nailing down the alleged Hezbollah connection, Ms Sanchez [ Columbian investigator] said. But US officials in Bogota and Washington declined to discuss details of their evidence." (Cocaine ring 'gave profits to Hezbollah', Chris Kraul & Sebastian Rotella, LA Times, repub. Sydney Morning Herald, 23/10/08)

Ho, hum. Of course, trying to smear the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah in this way has obvious propaganda advantages. And those parties doing the smearing - sorry, conducting the investigation - know a narco-terrorist when they see one. Take note:-

"In a monumental historical study of the link between the drug trade and counterinsurgency, The Politics of Heroin... Alfred McCoy has traced the global expansion of drug-production centers - in Burma (Myanmar), Laos, Columbia, and Afghanistan - to the political cover provided by CIA-sponsored covert weapons. At the heart of the global drug trade after the Second World War has been the trade in opium, the raw material base for the industrial manufacture of high-grade heroin... From 1948 to 1950, the CIA allied 'with the Corsican underworld in its struggle against the French Communist Party for control over the strategic Mediterranean port of Marseille'. The Corsicans triumphed and 'used their control over the Marseilles waterfront to dominate the export of heroin to the US market' for 'the next quarter century'. At the same time, 'the CIA ran a series of covert operations along the China border that were instrumental in the creation of the Golden Triangle heroin complex'. Beginning in 1950, these operations were aimed at creating an anti-Communist Chinese force to mount an invasion of mainland China... The CIA applied these tactics to Laos from 1960 to 1975 when it created a secret army of 30,000 Hmong peasants to battle Laotian Communists near the border with North Vietnam. The Hmong's main cash crop was opium, and the CIA readily turned the other way as the Hmong commander, General Vang Pao, used a Corsican charter to export his crop to distant markets." CIA and USAID funds eventually enabled him to construct airstrips, buy planes, and form his own air-transport company, dubbed by those in-the-know Air Opium. The general went on to supply top-grade heroin to US troops in Vietnam, while the CIA looked the other way. (Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War & the Roots of Terror, Mahmood Mamdani, 2004, pp 66-69)

Moving right along: With the US Congress' capping of CIA funding in 1984, the Reagan administration turned to the drug trade to finance the US proxy terrorist force known as the contras in their attempt to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua: "... CIA assets became key to providing a protective cover for the flow of cocaine from Central America to the United States in return for a reverse flow of materials and armaments from the CIA to the contras... Alfred McCoy observed in his study on the global drug trade, 'the [Columbian] Medellin [cocaine] cartel's rise coincided with the start of the CIA's... support and supply of contra guerillas'. Indeed, McCoy noted that 'all major US agencies have gone on the record stating, with varying degrees of frankness, that the Medellin cartel used the contra resistance forces to smuggle cocaine into the United States'." The "affinity [between US covert military operations and criminal drug syndicates] came to the surface during the Iran-contra affair, most dramatically in the person of Oliver North... It is now widely known that North had formed a private network to fund the contras after official aid was sharply reduced. At the heart of this network was the Israeli connection, and its most ambitious initiative involved the sale of arms to Iran, with the proceeds used to purchase war supplies for the contras. Israel emerged as a significant military supplier to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua in the late 70s and early 80s after those countries were found guilty of human rights violations and the Carter administration terminated aid to all three. As 'a quid pro quo for El Salvador's decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem', Israel supplied the military regime 'with over 80% of its weaponry for the next several years, including napalm for use against the Salvadoran civilian population'. In Guatemala in 1983, as the government carried out massacres of Indian villagers, a Time magazine correspondent reported the 'Israelis have sold the government everything from anti-terrorism equipment to transport planes' and that 'army outposts in the jungle have become near replicas of Israeli army field camps'. Finally, Israel moved into Nicaragua as soon as the Carter administration cut off aid: 'Israel sold [US-backed dictator] Somoza 98% of the weapons he used against the Nicaraguan population' between September 1978 and his ouster the following July [by the Sandinistas]." Israel's arming of Iran arose in the context of the Iraq-Iran War: "The Israelis both openly defied the official American ban on the supply of US arms to Iran and tried to get the Reagan administration to deal with the Iranians. In return, they agreed to take on at least a part of the burden of supplying the contras as Congress began to put restrictions on the supply of US military aid. The heart of the deal that came to be known as Iran-contra was that the US agreed to sell arms to Iran, either directly or through Israel, at prices sufficiently inflated to use the difference to purchase arms for the contras... Most observers agreed that the idea for the deal came from the Israelis." (ibid, pp 109-113)

But there's more. The CIA turned to the drug trade to fund the mother-of-all contra-style insurgencies, that of the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet-backed government in Afghanistan: "Organized and centralized under CIA control, the drug trade combined the peasant's market wisdom with the mujahideens' capacities for extortion and entrepreneurship. Alfred McCoy traced the different steps in the drug economy, beginning with peasant production: 'As the mujahideen guerillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax'. It no doubt helped that for the grower the price of opium was 5 times that for wheat... Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories'... the CIA provided the legal cover without which this illicit trade could not have grown to monumental proportions: 'During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the US Drug Enforcement Administration in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests... US officials had refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan allies 'because US narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there'. Prior to the Afghan jihad, there was no local production of heroin in either Afghanistan or Pakistan. The production there was of opium, a very different drug, which was directed to small, rural, regional markets. By the end of the Afghan jihad, the picture had changed drastically: the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's leading producers of both opium and processed heroin... The heroin economy literally poisoned Afghani and Pakistani life. The figures who thrived in this cesspool had been hailed by Ronald Reagan as 'moral equivalents of America's founding fathers'." (ibid, pp 141-143)

PS: "From his jail cell in Russia, Israeli soldier of fortune Yair Klein is still fighting the Moscow court's decision to extradite him to Columbia, where he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for training militias for drug barons." (Despite recent case, Israelis never excelled as mercenaries, Yossi Melman, Haaretz, 24/6/08)