C.I.A. Said to Aid in Steering Arms to Syrian Opposition

Published: June 21, 2012

WASHINGTON — A small number of C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers.

The weapons, including automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, ammunition and some antitank weapons, are being funneled mostly across the Turkish border by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries including Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood and paid for by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the officials said.

The C.I.A. officers have been in southern Turkey for several weeks, in part to help keep weapons out of the hands of fighters allied with Al Qaeda or other terrorist groups, one senior American official said. The Obama administration has said it is not providing arms to the rebels, but it has also acknowledged that Syria’s neighbors would do so.

The clandestine intelligence-gathering effort is the most detailed known instance of the limited American support for the military campaign against the Syrian government. It is also part of Washington’s attempt to increase the pressure on President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who has recently escalated his government’s deadly crackdown on civilians and the militias battling his rule. With Russia blocking more aggressive steps against the Assad government, the United States and its allies have instead turned to diplomacy and aiding allied efforts to arm the rebels to force Mr. Assad from power.

By helping to vet rebel groups, American intelligence operatives in Turkey hope to learn more about a growing, changing opposition network inside of Syria and to establish new ties. “C.I.A. officers are there and they are trying to make new sources and recruit people,” said one Arab intelligence official who is briefed regularly by American counterparts.

American officials and retired C.I.A. officials said the administration was also weighing additional assistance to rebels, like providing satellite imagery and other detailed intelligence on Syrian troop locations and movements. The administration is also considering whether to help the opposition set up a rudimentary intelligence service. But no decisions have been made on those measures or even more aggressive steps, like sending C.I.A. officers into Syria itself, they said.

The struggle inside Syria has the potential to intensify significantly in coming months as powerful new weapons are flowing to both the Syrian government and opposition fighters. President Obama and his top aides are seeking to pressure Russia to curb arms shipments like attack helicopters to Syria, its main ally in the Middle East.

“We’d like to see arms sales to the Assad regime come to an end, because we believe they’ve demonstrated that they will only use their military against their own civilian population,” Benjamin J. Rhodes, deputy national security adviser for strategic communications, said after Mr. Obama and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir V. Putin, met in Mexico on Monday.

Spokesmen for the White House, State Department and C.I.A. would not comment on any intelligence operations supporting the Syrian rebels, some details of which were reported last week by The Wall Street Journal.

Until now, the public face of the administration’s Syria policy has largely been diplomacy and humanitarian aid.

The State Department said Wednesday that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton would meet with her Russian counterpart, Sergey V. Lavrov, on the sidelines of a meeting of Asia-Pacific foreign ministers in St. Petersburg, Russia, next Thursday. The private talks are likely to focus, at least in part, on the crisis in Syria.

The State Department has authorized $15 million in nonlethal aid, like medical supplies and communications equipment, to civilian opposition groups in Syria.

The Pentagon continues to fine-tune a range of military options, after a request from Mr. Obama in early March for such contingency planning. Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told senators at that time that the options under review included humanitarian airlifts, aerial surveillance of the Syrian military, and the establishment of a no-fly zone.

The military has also drawn up plans for how coalition troops would secure Syria’s sizable stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons if an all-out civil war threatened their security.

But senior administration officials have underscored in recent days that they are not actively considering military options. “Anything at this point vis-à-vis Syria would be hypothetical in the extreme,” General Dempsey told reporters this month.

What has changed since March is an influx of weapons and ammunition to the rebels. The increasingly fierce air and artillery assaults by the government are intended to counter improved coordination, tactics and weaponry among the opposition forces, according to members of the Syrian National Council and other activists.

Last month, these activists said, Turkish Army vehicles delivered antitank weaponry to the border, where it was then smuggled into Syria. Turkey has repeatedly denied it was extending anything other than humanitarian aid to the opposition, mostly via refugee camps near the border. The United States, these activists said, was consulted about these weapons transfers.

American military analysts offered mixed opinions on whether these arms have offset the advantages held by the militarily superior Syrian Army. “The rebels are starting to crack the code on how to take out tanks,” said Joseph Holliday, a former United States Army intelligence officer in Afghanistan who is now a researcher tracking the Free Syrian Army for the Institute for the Study of War in Washington.

But a senior American officer who receives classified intelligence reports from the region, compared the rebels’ arms to “peashooters” against the government’s heavy weaponry and attack helicopters.

The Syrian National Council, the main opposition group in exile, has recently begun trying to organize the scattered, localized units that all fight under the name of the Free Syrian Army into a more cohesive force.

About 10 military coordinating councils in provinces across the country are now sharing tactics and other information. The city of Homs is the notable exception. It lacks such a council because the three main military groups in the city do not get along, national council officials said.

Jeffrey White, a defense analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy who tracks videos and announcements from self-described rebel battalions, said there were now about 100 rebel formations, up from roughly 70 two months ago, ranging in size from a handful of fighters to a couple of hundred combatants.

“When the regime wants to go someplace and puts the right package of forces together, it can do it,” Mr. White said. “But the opposition is raising the cost of those kinds of operations.”

 

Drug Lords, Drug ‘Ladies,’ & Former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe’s sister-in-law

Posted on August 16, 2012

In the noise and confusion attending the extradition to the US  on the same day last week of three women involved in cocaine trafficking from South America,  questions raised by the family connection of one to the former President of Colombia went unanswered.

Did Alvaro Uribe okay the loading of 3.6 tons of cocaine at an airport he controlled in Rio Negro Colombia onto a “former” CIA Gulfstream (N987SA) jet from St. Petersburg Florida that crashed in the Yucatan in 2007?

Why did two successive U.S. Administrations lavish  billions of dollars to stop drug trafficking on a President of Colombia who was himself involved in the drug trade?

While any further emphasis of the ties to the drug business of a global elite of the parasitic rich seems unnecessary at this late date, all three of the extradicted women belong to the families of legendary drug-trafficking dynasties.

A Godfather, a Tiger, and Sandra Avila

Receiving the lion’s share of last week’s media attention was femme fatale Sandra Avila Beltran, known as the Queen of the Pacific, whose seductive persona has fascinated Mexico for much of the past decade.

Avila, who faces charges of money laundering and drug trafficking, belongs to the Beltran-Leyva  family, which has been involved in drug trafficking for three generations.

She is the niece of the man known as the original “Godfather” of Mexico’s drug business, Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, currently in prison in Mexico.

Avila’s “claim to fame” is that she, and her significant other, Colombian Juan Diego Espinoza Ramirez, alias El Tigre, established ties between the Sinaloa Cartel and Colombia’s dominant Cartel del Valle.

“She used her physical attributes to do business and gain allies,” says noted journalist Ricardo Ravelo. “Her character is violent and manipulative; she has a very active social life, loves  parties, jewels and pleasures.”

Quietly extradicted, almost as an afterthought

By contrast, Dolly Cifuentes-Villa and her daughter Ana Maria Uribe Cifuentes flew in under the radar, almost unnoticed.

Yet, shockingly, both belong to the family of the former President of Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, and were actively involved in drug trafficking while Uribe was at the same time being paid $8 billion by the U.S.’s  Plan Colombia to pursue a war against that country’s cocaine traffickers.

She is charged with conspiracy to manufacture and distribute narcotics between 2003 through 2009, as well as laundering drug money through shell companies and real estate in Colombia, Panama, and Mexico.

She was either married or the long-time mistress—accounts differ—of Jaime Uribe, Alvaro Uribe’s brother. Their daughter, Ana Maria, also a part of the family business, is Alvaro Uribe’s niece.

Like Sandra Avila, Dolly Cifuentes’ dynastic ties to drug trafficking go far beyond her marriage to the brother of former President Alvaro Uribe.

She is the sister of a clan of drug trafficking Cifuentes Villa brothers, led, until his 2007 assassination, by Francisco Cifuentes, known as “Don Pancho,” who cut the historic deal with Sandra Avila’s assistance, to distribute Columbian cocaine into the U.S. through Mexico with Sinaloa Cartel honcho El Chapo Guzman.

That deal, cut shortly after Guzman’s “escape” from prison while Vicente Fox was president of Mexico, has led to Mexico’s current horrific drug war, as rival Mexican cartels scramble for their share of Colombia’s business.

The tangled past of George W. Bush’s ‘great good friend’ Alvaro Uribe

If having close family members involved in drug trafficking was the first taint of corruption to besmirch the reputation of Alvaro Uribe, it might be possible to explain it by saying he is not responsible for the actions of others in his family.

If this were just the second time that charges of involvement in drug trafficking have been leveled against him, there might still be an innocent explanation, however implausible, that could be used.

But this is at least the the fourth time credible allegations of involvement in drug trafficking have been leveled against Uribe.

A declassified report made public in 1991 by the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), directly linked then-senator Alvaro Uribe to Pablo Escobar’s Medellin Cartel (as well as naming Saudi financier Adnan Khashoggi as a trafficker).

The report referred to Uribe as “a Colombian politician dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin cartel at high levels,” claiming Uribe was “a close personal friend” of Escobar’s.

Using US money to take out the competition

Then in 2007 another US intelligence report was leaked to the LA Times by a CIA official described as “unhappy that Uribe’s government had not been held to account by the Bush administration.”

According to this report, Uribe tasked his defense minister, General Mario Montoya, with leading a controversial counterinsurgency push in the city of Medellin in 2002 which relied heavily on the support of a right-wing paramilitary group, the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), which was itself involved in drug trafficking.

While Uribe’s rival cocaine barons in Colombia were being hunted, their coca sprayed, and their flights regularly interdicted, officials in both the US and Colombia turned a blind eye to Uribe-backed traffickers who the U.S. now says sent 500 tons of cocaine to the U.S.

According to a 2004 U.S. Government Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) indictment, the Norte del Valle cartel exported more than 1.2 million pounds – more than 500  tons – of cocaine worth in excess of $10 billion from Colombia to Mexico and ultimately to the United States for resale.

But the organization, according to a senior official of the National Police of Colombia who spoke to a Colombian journalist,  was not pursued between August 2002 and August 2010, during Uribe’s two terms in office.

In the past three years, say Colombian police, the Cifuentes Villa brothers’ Norte del Valle cartel, with operations in five countries, has sent 30 tons of cocaine into the United States.

Dolly Cifuentes’s story, which US officials will no doubt dissuade her from telling, makes clear that the $8 billion in Plan Colombia money was criminally wasted.

It presents a potentially major embarrassment to the US Government,  threatening the very premise behind America’s War on Drugs while raising the specter that the U.S.  is engaged in selective prosecution, favoring some drug traffickers while prosecuting others.

The War on Drugs, whose $40 billion a year price tag is footed by US taxpayers, benefits just a small group of insiders who are able to command the official complicity of their governments in their drug trafficking endeavors.

This would all be a huge scandal, if we had a free press.

Ex-CIA Agent: America creates its own enemies

Uploaded by RussiaToday on Nov 13, 2011

Americans are in the crosshairs of terrorists worldwide purely due to Washington’s policy in the Muslim world, not because there is an Islamic enemy whose only aim is to kill Americans for their freedoms and lifestyle, insists a former CIA officer. Historian Michael Scheuer, an author of “Through our enemies’ eyes”, who worked for the agency for over 20 years till 2004 and at one time was the chief of the CIA’s ‘Bin Laden unit’, says America’s greatest enemy — radical Islam — never existed: neither when Bin Laden was alive, nor now.

British Intelligence Asset Haroon Rashid Aswat Escapes Extradition

April 11, 2012

A British court has ruled that intelligence asset Haroon Rashid Aswat will not be extradited to the United States to face terrorism charges. According to The Telegraph, a deportation appeal was adjourned because of concerns over Aswat’s mental health. He is said to be suffering from schizophrenia and is currently interned at the Broadmoor Hospital, a high-security psychiatric hospital in Berkshire, England.

Both Haroon Rashid Aswat (background) and Abu Hamza al-Masri worked for British intelligence.

Aswat attended militant training camps in Pakistan and Afghanistan. He recruited al-Qaeda fighters for the covert U.S. and NATO efforts to destabilize Bosnia and Chechnya. In the late 1990s, he became a “highly public aide” to London Finsbury Park mosque imam Abu Hamza al-Masri, who worked as an informer for the Special Branch of the British police and MI5.

Aswat is billed as the “mastermind” behind the 7/7 London bombings. Prior to the bombings, he was “monitored” (handled) by U.S. and British intelligence, according to the London Times.

After the Times reported that Aswat had been in regular phone contact with the supposed bombers Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, British authorities warned “that the calls may have been made to a phone linked to Aswat, rather than the man himself.” It would be revealed later that U.S. intelligence was surveilling calls between Aswat and the alleged bombers on the day of the attack.

Khan was also working for the British intelligence agency MI5 as an informant at the time of the attacks, according to Charles Shoebridge, a noted terror expert.

“This is the guy [Aswat], and what’s really embarrassing is that the entire British police are out chasing him, and one wing of the British government, MI6 or the British Secret Service, has been hiding him. And this has been a real source of contention between the CIA, the Justice Department, and Britain,” former U.S. government prosecutor and former Army intelligence officer John Loftus told Fox News after the bombings.

Authors Sean O’Neill and Daniel McGrory have pointed out that many of the radical London imams, including Abu Hamza al-Masri and Abu Qatada, worked with British intelligence and were protected by them. “The [imams] all claimed that Islamist radicals felt safe in London as they were protected by what they called the ‘covenant of security.’ This, they explained, was a deal whereby if extremist groups pledged not to stage attacks or cause disruption in [Britain], the police and intelligence agencies left them alone,” the authors write.

As usual, the corporate media is ignoring the real story behind the Haroon Rashid Aswat extradition – British intelligence is protecting Aswat by claiming he is in a hospital suffering from mental illness. If it is determined he is insane and thus untouchable, he will not be sent to the United States and the degree of his complicity with intelligence agencies may never be known.

This article was posted: Wednesday, April 11, 2012 at 1:53 pm

David Cameron Outraged by Release from Prison of MI5 Asset Abu Qatada

November 13, 2012

Following British authorities “reluctantly” releasing Abu Qatada from prison on bail after a British court ruled the radical Muslim cleric should not be extradited to Jordan, British prime minister David Cameron complained,

“I am completely fed up with the fact that this man is still at large in our country. We believe he is a threat to our country… We have moved heaven and earth to try and comply with every single dot and comma of every single convention to get him out of the country.”

Mr. Cameron would like the British people to believe he is disgusted with the misdeeds of Mr. Qatada. Cameron, however, is leaving out the part about Qatada’s service to British intelligence.Former Home Secretary John Reid fails to mention Qatada’s sterling record in cooperating with British intelligence.

Former Home Secretary John Reid fails to mention Qatada’s sterling record in cooperating with British intelligence.

Abu Qatada, described as “the spiritual head of the mujaheddin in Europe,” worked with British intelligence and ratted out his fellow Islamic extremists. In 1997, he met with MI5 and French officials say his continued cooperation with the authorities allowed him to avoid arrest after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001. The MI5 went so far as to set him up in a safe house and protect him.

Qatada’s friend, Bisher al-Rawi, served as an informant and a go-between MI5 and Qatada in numerous meetings between late 2001 and 2002. Al-Rawi also served as Qatada’s MI5 translator.

The cozy relationship ended in 2002 when Qatada was arrested, mostly because he was an embarrassment – he had attempted to morally justify the attacks in New York and Washington D.C.

For more on Qatada’s role as an informer and his relationship with the late CIA asset Osama bin Laden, see the entry on him at the History Commons website.

The CIA’s Covert Operations: Afghanistan, Cambodia, Nicaragua, El Salvador

A 2002 article by Michael Rubin stated that in the wake of the Iranian Revolution, the United States sought rapprochement with the Afghan government—a prospect that the USSR found unacceptable due to the weakening Soviet leverage over the regime. Thus, the Soviets intervened to preserve their influence in the country. According to Vance’s close aide Marshall Shulman “the State Department worked hard to dissuade the Soviets from invading.” In February 1979, U.S. Ambassador Adolph “Spike” Dubs was murdered in Kabul after Afghan security forces burst in on his kidnappers. The U.S. then reduced bilateral assistance and terminated a small military training program. All remaining assistance agreements were ended after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Following the Soviet invasion, the United States supported diplomatic efforts to achieve a Soviet withdrawal. In addition, generous U.S. contributions to the refugee program in Pakistan played a major part in efforts to assist Afghan refugees.

Brzezinski, known for his hardline policies on the Soviet Union, initiated in 1979 a campaign supporting mujaheddin in Pakistan and Afghanistan, which were run by Pakistani security services with financial support from the Central Intelligence Agency and Britain’s MI6. This policy had the explicit aim of promoting radical Islamist and anti-Communist forces. Bob Gates, in his book Out Of The Shadows, wrote that Pakistan had been pressuring the United States for arms to aid the rebels for years, but that the Carter administration refused in the hope of finding a diplomatic solution to avoid war. Brzezinski seemed to have been in favor of the provision of arms to the rebels, while Vance’s State Department, seeking a peaceful settlement, publicly accused Brzezinski of seeking to “revive” the Cold War. Brzezinski has stated that the United States provided communications equipment and limited financial aid to the mujahideen prior to the “formal” invasion, but only in response to the Soviet deployment of forces to Afghanistan and the 1978 coup, and with the intention of preventing further Soviet encroachment in the region.

Milt Bearden wrote in The Main Enemy that Brzezinski, in 1980, secured an agreement from King Khalid of Saudi Arabia to match U.S. contributions to the Afghan effort dollar for dollar and that Bill Casey would keep that agreement going through the Reagan administration.

The Soviet invasion and occupation resulted in the deaths of as many as 2 million Afghans. In 2010, Brzezinski defended the arming of the rebels in response, saying that it “was quite important in hastening the end of the conflict,” thereby saving the lives of thousands of Afghans, but “not in deciding the conflict, because….even though we helped the mujaheddin, they would have continued fighting without our help, because they were also getting a lot of money from the Persian Gulf and the Arab states, and they weren’t going to quit. They didn’t decide to fight because we urged them to. They’re fighters, and they prefer to be independent. They just happen to have a curious complex: they don’t like foreigners with guns in their country. And they were going to fight the Soviets. Giving them weapons was a very important forward step in defeating the Soviets, and that’s all to the good as far as I’m concerned.” When he was asked if he thought it was the right decision in retrospect (given the Taliban’s subsequent rise to power), he said: “Which decision? For the Soviets to go in? The decision was the Soviets’, and they went in. The Afghans would have resisted anyway, and they were resisting. I just told you: in my view, the Afghans would have prevailed in the end anyway, ’cause they had access to money, they had access to weapons, and they had the will to fight.” Likewise; Charlie Wilson said: “The U.S. had nothing whatsoever to do with these people’s decision to fight … but we’ll be damned by history if we let them fight with stones.”

Edwin Wilson dies at 84; former CIA operative

Edwin Wilson was convicted in 1983 of shipping arms to Libya and served more than 20 years in prison before his conviction was overturned.

September 23, 2012 | Los Angeles Times Staff and Wire Reports

Edwin Paul Wilson, a former CIA operative who was branded a traitor and convicted of shipping arms to Libya but whose conviction was later overturned after he had served more than 20 years in prison, died Sept. 10 in Seattle. He was 84.

The cause was complications from heart-valve replacement surgery, his family announced.

“I can’t think of one thing I did that I have any guilt about,”… (Associated Press )

Wilson, who posed as a rich American businessman and set up companies that served as fronts for the CIA, was convicted in 1983 for shipping 20 tons of powerful explosives to Libya. At trial, he said he did it to ingratiate himself with the Libyan government at the request of the Central Intelligence Agency.

A federal judge threw out his conviction in 2003, ruling that prosecutors knowingly used false testimony to undermine his defense.

Wilson had been convicted of selling arms and explosives to Libya in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and of other crimes.

He served most of his 22 years in prison in solitary confinement. After his release in 2004, he moved to Edmonds, Wash., north of Seattle, to live with his brother.

While in prison, he sought to prove his innocence by using the Freedom of Information Act to request government documents. Even after his release, the man once described as “a death merchant” and “terrorist” worked to clear his name.

“I can’t think of one thing I did that I have any guilt about,” Wilson told seattlepi.com in 2006. “I didn’t hurt anybody. I didn’t get anyone killed.”

Born May 3, 1928, to a farming family in Nampa, Idaho, he grew up poor. He worked as a merchant seaman and earned a psychology degree in 1953 from the University of Portland.

He served in the Marines in Korea, and after he was discharged he joined the CIA in the mid-1950s.

After leaving the CIA in 1971, he made millions in the arms trade and bought a sprawling farm in northern Virginia.

As of 1982, Wilson was in hiding in Libya but was lured out and brought to New York for arrest.

A federal court in Virginia convicted him of exporting firearms to Libya without permission and sentenced him to 10 years. He was convicted in Texas in 1983 and received a 17-year sentence for similar crimes.

A New York court sentenced him to 25 years, to run consecutively with the Texas and Virginia sentences, for attempted murder, criminal solicitation and other charges involving claims that Wilson conspired behind bars to have witnesses and prosecutors killed.

His survivors include two sons and a sister.

 

The CIA Drug connection under Reagan

The CIA Drug connection under Reagan

Under President Ronald Reagan America not only increased
its involvement in the Middle East by supplying arms to both Iraq and Iran in
their war against each other, but America stepped up its involvement in
conflicts around the world, especially South America.

The “War on Drugs” really started with President Nixon and his attack on marijuana, but Reagan is known as the “Just Say No” president for his campaign against recreational
drugs in America and a strong policy of international drug eradication. Under Reagan’s policy, at a time when Americans were being presented with strong anti-drug propaganda,
the CIA was in fact an accomplice to a large narcotics smuggling ring in the United States. It was in fact Reagan’s policies that led to the cooperation between the CIA and the
Contras. The Contras were a counter-revolutionary group that was fighting against the Sandinistas to return the corrupt Somoza regime to power in Nicaragua.

In a 1986 White House speech Ronald Reagan Stated: “Despite our best efforts, illegal cocaine is coming into our country at alarming levels and 4 to 5 million people regularly use it.”

Alleged Contras in Nicaragua

In 1998 the CIA finally admitted to its involvement in drug trafficking in the United States after years of federal investigation by the Kerry Congressional Committee.  What the CIA
admitted to was allowing cocaine trafficking to take place by Contras who were being supported by the CIA, using facilities and resources supplied by the US government, and preventing investigation into these activities by other agencies. This was done because funds for the support of militant groups in South America had been withdrawn by Congress so the CIA allowed the Contras to engage in the drug trade in the United States in order to make money to fund their military operations. If you are wondering why this was not covered more widely in the news during the Clinton Administration it may be because Arkansas was one of the major trafficking centers for the operations.

These are hard facts.  The
CIA was forced to publish the information by the Congressional Committee when
they were found of wrongdoing.  You can find the official CIA version of the story here:

http://www.cia.gov/cia/reports/cocaine/index.html

CNN, and other major news agencies ran only minor stories covering the revelation:

http://www.cnn.com/US/9811/03/cia.drugs/

As part of the evidence this page from Oliver North’s notepad shows that he was aware of the possibility of Contra drug running to the United States.

The relevant item reads:

“Honduran DC-6 which is being used for runs out of
New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into U.S.”

The truth is that the “War on Drugs” is more about international politics and control then it is about concern for the health of Americans. Drugs have been a major factor in
the funding of revolutions for centuries. This is because drugs are a very high profit product that can be grown by even the most primitive people, and thus it’s very hard to control.  In fact the American Revolution was funded by “drugs”. The main “drug” in the funding of the American Revolution was tobacco, but opium played a role as well. Tobacco was regulated by the King of England not only for health reasons, but also because he knew that it was funding American colonial “terrorism”. America was able to pay for French support in the war against England largely through tobacco money. At the time the American Revolution was also known as “The Tobacco Wars” and the area of Massachusetts Bay was known as “The Tobacco Coast”.

Likewise opium and cocaine have also been products that have funded many wars and revolutions over the past few hundred years. In fact a common strategy of entities
that wish to quickly gain large amounts of money is to sell drugs to their local population. This was done by the British from the 1600s through the 1800s, selling not only to their own citizens, but to all of the people within their empire as well as China. It is estimated that the opium trade was the largest single source of revenue for the British Crown during this time and was one of the major trades that enabled British Imperialism. In addition, during WWII the Japanese began heavy opium production and sales, selling both to their own people and to the Chinese. This opium trade raised significant amounts of money to fund the Japanese military.

The reason why the Reagan administration began the War on Drugs was to cut off the money supply to revolutionary groups in South America, the Middle East, and Asia that were using drug money to fund wars for national independence from foreign intervention. America has been able to selectively apply pressure to various regimes under the guise of the War on Drugs, which is just one more way that elements of the American government have been able to get funding for taking action against foreign governments in order to promote American interests. Another of the major problems that prompted the origin of the
War on Drugs and was able to get much of the initial support for the program was the problem of the Medellin Cartel in Columbia run by Pablo Escobar.  This was a very legitimate and problematic issue; the Medellin Cartel was out of control and terrorizing the country of Columbia.

This is really what has always been behind the War on Drugs; the problem that is being addressed is not drug use, but the existence of drug cartels, narco-terrorism, and political groups that use drug money to fund private wars.

In 1999 Congress released a report on the history of CIA involvement in drug trafficking. If you don’t remember seeing anything about it on the news, that because it wasn’t reported by any major news agencies. An outline of the history can be found here:

A History of CIA Complicity in Drug International
Trafficking

For more on this issue see:

http://www.webcom.com/pinknoiz/covert/irancontra.html

http://www.serendipity.li/cia.html

Federal Judge Bonner and Former head of the DEA Says He Intercepted CIA Cocaine Shipments

July 31, 2012

Federal Judge Bonner and Former head of the DEA reveals he intercepted CIA cocaine shipments

This news reports reveals how Federal Judge Bonner intercepted CIA cocaine shipments when he was the head of the DEA

In this video reveals the CIA is working the Venezuela military to smuggle drugs into the United States.

Mexican official: CIA ‘manages’ drug trade

Spokesman for Chihuahua state says US agencies don’t want to end drug trade, a claim denied by other Mexican officials.

Chris Arsenault Last Modified: 24 Jul 2012 14:16

The CIA refused to comment directly on the allegations of complicity made by a low-level Mexican official [Reuters]

Juarez, Mexico – The US Central Intelligence Agency and other international security forces “don’t fight drug traffickers”, a spokesman for the Chihuahua state government in northern Mexico has told Al Jazeera, instead “they try to manage the drug trade”.

Allegations about official complicity in the drug business are nothing new when they come from activists, professors, campaigners or even former officials. However, an official spokesman for the authorities in one of Mexico’s most violent states – one which directly borders Texas – going on the record with such accusations is unique.

“It’s like pest control companies, they only control,” Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva, the Chihuahua spokesman, told Al Jazeera last month at his office in Juarez. “If you finish off the pests, you are out of a job. If they finish the drug business, they finish their jobs.”

A spokesman for the CIA in Washington wouldn’t comment on the accusations directly, instead he referred Al Jazeera to an official website.

Accusations are ‘baloney’

Villanueva is not a high ranking official and his views do not represent Mexico’s foreign policy establishment. Other more senior officials in Chihuahua State, including the mayor of Juarez, dismissed the claims as “baloney”.

“I think the CIA and DEA [US Drug Enforcement Agency] are on the same side as us in fighting drug gangs,” Hector Murguia, the mayor of Juarez, told Al Jazeera during an interview inside his SUV. “We have excellent collaboration with the US.”

Under the Merida Initiative, the US Congress has approved more than $1.4bn in drug war aid for Mexico, providing attack helicopters, weapons and training for police and judges.

More than 55,000 people have died in drug related violence in Mexico since December 2006. Privately, residents and officials across Mexico’s political spectrum often blame the lethal cocktail of US drug consumption and the flow of high-powered weapons smuggled south of the border for causing much of the carnage.

Drug war ‘illusions’

“The war on drugs is an illusion,” Hugo Almada Mireles, professor at the Autonomous University of Juarez and author of several books, told Al Jazeera. “It’s a reason to intervene in Latin America.”

“The CIA wants to control the population; they don’t want to stop arms trafficking to Mexico, look at [Operation] Fast and Furious,” he said, referencing a botched US exercise where automatic weapons were sold to criminals in the hope that security forces could trace where the guns ended up.

The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms lost track of 1,700 guns as part of the operation, including an AK-47 used in 2010 the murder of Brian Terry, a Customs and Border Protection Agent.

Blaming the gringos for Mexico’s problems has been a popular sport south of the Rio Grande ever since the Mexican-American war of the 1840s, when the US conquered most of present day California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and New Mexico from its southern neighbour. But operations such as Fast and Furious show that reality can be stranger than fiction when it comes to the drug war and relations between the US and Mexico. If the case hadn’t been proven, the idea that US agents were actively putting weapons into the hands of Mexican gangsters would sound absurd to many.

‘Conspiracy theories’

“I think it’s easy to become cynical about American and other countries’ involvement in Latin America around drugs,” Kevin Sabet, a former senior adviser to the White House on drug control policy, told Al Jazeera. “Statements [accusing the CIA of managing the drug trade] should be backed up with evidence… I don’t put much stake in it.”

Villanueva’s accusations “might be a way to get some attention to his region, which is understandable but not productive or grounded in reality”, Sabet said. “We have sort of ‘been there done that’ with CIA conspiracy theories.”

In 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published Dark Alliance, a series of investigative reports linking CIA missions in Nicaragua with the explosion of crack cocaine consumption in America’s ghettos.

In order to fund Contra rebels fighting Nicaragua’s socialist government, the CIA partnered with Colombian cartels to move drugs into Los Angeles, sending profits back to Central America, the series alleged.

“There is no question in my mind that people affiliated with, or on the payroll of, the CIA were involved in drug trafficking,” US Senator John Kerry said at the time, in response to the series.

Other newspapers, including the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, slammed Dark Alliance, and the editor of the Mercury News eventually wrote that the paper had over-stated some elements in the story and made mistakes in the journalistic process, but that he stood by many of the key conclusions.

Widespread rumours

“It’s true, they want to control it,” a mid-level official with the Secretariat Gobernacion in Juarez, Mexico’s equivalent to the US Department of Homeland Security, told Al Jazeera of the CIA and DEA’s policing of the drug trade. The officer, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said he knew the allegations to be correct, based on discussions he had with US officials working in Juarez.

Acceptance of these claims within some elements of Mexico’s government and security services shows the difficulty in pursuing effective international action against the drug trade.

Jesús Zambada Niebla, a leading trafficker from the Sinaloa cartel currently awaiting trial in Chicago, has said he was working for the US Drug Enforcement Agency during his days as a trafficker, and was promised immunity from prosecution.

“Under that agreement, the Sinaloa Cartel under the leadership of [Jesus Zambada’s] father, Ismael Zambada and ‘Chapo’ Guzmán were given carte blanche to continue to smuggle tonnes of illicit drugs… into… the United States, and were protected by the United States government from arrest and prosecution in return for providing information against rival cartels,” Zambada’s lawyers wrote as part of his defence. “Indeed, the Unites States government agents aided the leaders of the Sinaloa Cartel.”

The Sinaloa cartel is Mexico’s oldest and most powerful trafficking organisation, and some analysts believe security forces in the US and Mexico favour the group over its rivals.

Joaquin “El Chapo”, the cartel’s billionaire leader and one of the world’s most wanted men, escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001 by sneaking into a laundry truck – likely with collaboration from guards – further stoking rumours that leading traffickers have complicit friends in high places.

“It would be easy for the Mexican army to capture El Chapo,” Mireles said. “But this is not the objective.” He thinks the authorities on both sides of the border are happy to have El Chapo on the loose, as his cartel is easier to manage and his drug money is recycled back into the broader economy. Other analysts consider this viewpoint a conspiracy theory and blame ineptitude and low level corruption for El Chapo’s escape, rather than a broader plan from government agencies.

Political changes

After an election hit by reported irregularities, Enrique Pena Nieto from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is set to be sworn in as Mexico’s president on December 1.

He wants to open a high-level dialogue with the US about the drug war, but has said legalisation of some drugs is not an option. Some hardliners in the US worry that Nieto will make a deal with some cartels, in order to reduce violence.

“I am hopeful that he will not return to the PRI party of the past which was corrupt and had a history of turning a blind eye to the drug cartels,” said Michael McCaul, a Republican Congressman from Texas.

Regardless of what position a new administration takes in order to calm the violence and restore order, it is likely many Mexicans – including government officials such as Chihuahua spokesman Guillermo Villanueva – will believe outside forces want the drug trade to continue.

The widespread view linking the CIA to the drug trade – whether or not the allegations are true – speaks volumes about officials’ mutual mistrust amid ongoing killings and the destruction of civic life in Mexico.

“We have good soldiers and policemen,” Villanueva said. “But you won’t resolve this problem with bullets. We need education and jobs.”