War on Drugs News Stories
THE BIG PICTURE:
Our Mindful News Brief video explores who's really behind the War on Drugs.
Our investigative Substack article investigates the dark truths behind the US war on drugs that the mainstream media ignores.
Last Tuesday, former president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte was arrested in Manila and taken to the Hague, where he will be tried for crimes against humanity at the International Criminal Court. From 2016-2022, Duterte’s government carried out a campaign of mass killings of suspected drug users. It’s estimated that 27,000 people, most of them poor and indigent, were executed without trial by police officers and vigilantes at his behest. Children were also routinely killed during Duterte’s drug raids- both as collateral victims and as targets. While this happened, the United States provided tens of millions of dollars annually to both the Philippine military and the Philippine National Police. Many of the killings examined by [Human Rights Watch] followed a pattern: a group of plainclothes gunmen would enter the home of a suspected drug user, kill them without ever issuing an arrest, and plant drugs or weapons next to the body. Sometimes the gunmen would self-identify as police officers, and other times they would not. Police would also detain suspected drug users without charges and torture them for bribes. Less than a month after Duterte took office, then- Secretary of State John Kerry announced a $32 million weapons and training package specifically to support the Philippine National Police. Obama’s administration authorized $90 million in military aid to the Philippines in 2016 and roughly $1 billion during the 8 years he was in office.
Note: Read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.
The countless victims of former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte’s bloody war on drugs are celebrating his arrest on charges of crimes against humanity as a momentous first step toward justice. Many of those who financed, enforced, and even continued in his state-sponsored killing campaign have not been held accountable. That list includes U.S. presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and current Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The Philippines remains one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid in the Indo-Pacific region. In 2018 and 2024, two international people’s tribunals in Brussels brought together families of victims of extrajudicial killings in the Philippines under both the Duterte and Marcos administrations. Both tribunals ... found the Trump and Biden administrations complicit in heavily funding state-sponsored killings in the Philippines. The killings targeted not only drug users, but also dissidents and activists as well. Duterte established, and Marcos beefed up and continued, the National Task Force to End Local Communist Armed Conflict, or NTF-ELCAC, which immediately weaponized the Philippines civilian bureaucracy to go after government critics and activists on the grounds that they were fronts for the Communist Party of the Philippines. With no due process, activists under Duterte and Marcos continued to be systematically killed, illegally arrested, and targeted by state forces, even going as far as to be subjected to abduction, torture, and forced to sign affidavits claiming to be captured guerrillas.
Note: Read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.
For decades, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has been unaccountable to taxpayers as it funnels massive sums of money to the ridiculous — and, in many cases, malicious — pet projects of entrenched bureaucrats, with next-to-no oversight. Here are only a few examples of the WASTE and ABUSE: $1.5 million to “advance diversity equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces and business communities”; $70,000 for production of a “DEI musical” in Ireland; $47,000 for a “transgender opera” in Colombia; $32,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru; $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala; $6 million to fund tourism in Egypt; Hundreds of thousands of dollars for a non-profit linked to designated terrorist organizations — even AFTER an inspector general launched an investigation; Millions to EcoHealth Alliance — which was involved in research at the Wuhan lab, Hundreds of thousands of meals that went to al Qaeda-affiliated fighters in Syria; Funding to print “personalized” contraceptives birth control devices in developing countries; Hundreds of millions of dollars to fund “irrigation canals, farming equipment, and even fertilizer used to support the unprecedented poppy cultivation and heroin production in Afghanistan,” benefiting the Taliban. The list literally goes on and on — and it has all been happening for decades.
Note: USAID may have funded the creation of COVID-19 and has funneled billions into Ukraine. Could it be that this organization is a front for an intelligence agency? For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on government waste.
Drugs were the elephant in the room during the failed U.S. war in Afghanistan. Because opium was such a large part of the poor and war-torn country's economy, the fighting between the Taliban and the U.S.-backed Afghan republic often looked more like a turf war between rival narco gangs, with the U.S. military protecting some opium fields and bombing others. Afghan farmers were happy to take USAID's help while continuing to grow opium. For example, opium cultivation increased by 119 percent in the Kandahar Food Zone between 2013 and 2015, after USAID helped expand the irrigation systems there. A USAID-funded charity in Kenya allegedly covered up rampant sex abuse of children, and USAID funded a second charity in the Central African Republic a month after a major sex abuse scandal broke. The Children of God Relief Institute, which ran an orphanage for Kenyan children affected by AIDS and similar projects, received high praise from the U.S. government. From 2013 onward, USAID gave the institute $29.3 million. In 2021, a whistleblower told USAID that the charity was harboring a dark secret. USAID's inspector general soon determined that Children of God Relief Institute officials "knew or should have known of multiple incidents" of child sex abuse "but failed to take effective remedial measures to address the abuse." In some cases, the victims were forced to apologize for provoking their own abuse, The Washington Post reports.
Note: Watch our latest video on government waste, where we take a thoughtful look at the current political landscape and explore powerful solutions that have the potential to tackle wasteful spending and restore financial freedom. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on the war on drugs.
On Friday, March 8, former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was convicted on three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy in a Manhattan federal court. Extradited to the United States shortly after completing his second presidential term in 2022, the 55-year-old Hernández is up against a mandatory minimum sentence of 40 years in jail. US Attorney General Merrick Garland accused Hernández of having run Honduras as a “narco-state where violent drug traffickers were allowed to operate with virtual impunity”. Hernández was until very recently a good chum of successive US administrations, which appointed him a vital ally in the so-called “war on drugs” and flung money at Honduras accordingly. The messianically right-wing leader came to power five years after the 2009 US-facilitated coup d’état against Manuel Zelaya. The fabricated pretext for the coup ... was that Zelaya was scheming to remain president of Honduras in violation of the constitutional one-term limit. Later this limit was quickly dispensed with in order to enable the continued reign of Hernández. Post-election protests triggered a characteristically lethal response from Honduran security forces, which didn’t stop the US from continuing to fund those very same forces. The CIA’s narco-operations have spanned the globe from Pakistan to Laos to Venezuela, while many an international narco-politician has – like Hernández – found at least fleeting favour with the US government.
Note: Read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.
In 2016, Flaviu Georgescu was found guilty and sentenced of attempting to traffic weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, an insurgent group on the U.S. terror list. But when he was arrested by Drug Enforcement Administration agents, he told the officials he was working for the CIA. The majority of defendants in post-9/11 terrorist cases had no actual ties to terrorism or to terrorist organizations. Many were caught in FBI stings, where informants posed as terrorists often crossing the line into encouraging and even facilitating crimes that would otherwise not have occurred. As the war on terror has waned, the DOJ has shifted its focus, with its agencies – including the DEA – now targeting people for similar sting operations on allegations of involvement in so-called “narcoterrorism.” The FBI ... would identify someone who was espousing views that might be sympathetic to those organizations, or even an attack, and they would encourage that person to get involved. Some of the targets of investigations were very financially desperate. The FBI, through the informant, would dangle the opportunity to make money. In those cases, the vast majority of people have no connections to real terrorist groups, they have no access to weapons. And the FBI provides everything. A bomb, grenades, automatic rifles ... guns that would be very difficult to obtain, even by sophisticated criminals. When the defendant goes about to use the weapon, they’re arrested, and they’re charged, and announced to the public as a terrorist who was about to get involved in this very deadly plot were it not foiled by the FBI. The Intercept [documents] these cases through Trial and Terror. We’ve seen hundreds of these cases involving sting operations since 9/11. What this has done ... in the post-9/11 era, was really exaggerate the threat of terrorism from within Muslim communities in the United States. And, on the news, it really made the public think that the threat of terrorism within the United States from these communities was much, much greater than it really was.
Note: The FBI has had a notorious history of manufacturing terrorist plots, often targeting vulnerable minors who have significant cognitive and intellectual disabilities yet no history of harming anyone. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on intelligence agency corruption.
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”. “It’s like pest control companies,” Guillermo Terrazas Villanueva, the Chihuahua spokesman, [said]. “If you finish off the pests, you are out of a job.” 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. “It’s true, they want to control it,” a mid-level official with ... Mexico’s equivalent to the US Department of Homeland Security, told Al Jazeera of the CIA and DEA’s policing of 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.”
Note:The US helped arm and finance the Sinaloa cartel for decades, which was barely covered in the American media. For more, read our Substack on the dark truth of the war on drugs.
In 2017, the drug industry middleman Express Scripts announced that it was taking decisive steps to curb abuse of the prescription painkillers that had fueled America’s overdose crisis. Why hadn’t the middlemen, known as pharmacy benefit managers, acted sooner to address a crisis that had been building for decades? One reason, a New York Times investigation found: Drugmakers had been paying them not to. For years, the benefit managers, or P.B.M.s, took payments from opioid manufacturers, including Purdue Pharma, in return for not restricting the flow of pills. As tens of thousands of Americans overdosed and died from prescription painkillers, the middlemen collected billions of dollars in payments. The P.B.M.s exert extraordinary control over what drugs people can receive and at what price. The three dominant companies — Express Scripts, CVS Caremark and Optum Rx — oversee prescriptions for more than 200 million. The P.B.M.s are hired by insurers and employers to control their drug costs by negotiating discounts with pharmaceutical manufacturers. They often pursue their own financial interests in ways that increase costs for patients, employers and government programs, while driving independent pharmacies out of business. Regulators have accused the largest P.B.M.s of anticompetitive practices. In addition ... P.B.M.s sometimes collaborated with opioid manufacturers to persuade insurers not to restrict access to their drugs.
Note: A former DEA agent has said that Congress helped drug companies create the opioid epidemic. Read how pharmacy benefit managers inflate the price of medications behind the scenes. For more along these lines, read our concise summaries of news articles on Big Pharma corruption.
Twenty years ago this month, on December 10, 2004, former San Jose Mercury News investigative reporter Gary Webb died by apparent suicide. Webb had left the newspaper in 1997 after his career was systematically destroyed because he had done what journalists are supposed to do: speak truth to power. In August 1996, Webb penned a three-part series ... that documented how profits from the sale of crack cocaine in Los Angeles in the 1980s had been funneled to the Contras, the right-wing, CIA-backed mercenary army responsible for helping to perpetrate [a] large-scale terrorist war against Nicaragua. At the same time, the crack epidemic had devastated Black communities in South Central LA—which meant that Webb’s series generated understandable uproar among Black Americans. Webb was subjected to a concerted assault by the corporate media, most notably the New York Times, Washington Post and LA Times, as detailed in a 1997 intervention by FAIR’s Norman Solomon. The media hit job relied heavily on denials from the CIA itself—as in “CIA Chief Denies Crack Conspiracy.” In December 1997, the same month Webb left the Mercury News after being discredited across the board and abandoned by his own editors, the New York Times reassured readers that the “CIA Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade.” Leading media outlets ... buried or obstructed news suggesting Contra-cocaine links.
Note: Read more about journalist Gary Webb. Learn more about the dark truth behind the US war on drugs. For more, read our concise summaries of news articles on war on drugs.
On Sept. 24, 2007, a red, white, and blue Gulfstream II fell from the sky over the Yucatán Peninsula. From the wreckage, [Mexican commandos] removed 132 industrial trash bags, weighing around 4 tons. The bags were filled with cocaine. The Gulfstream ... had flown for the CIA’s rendition program. When it went down, it belonged to a newly-formed company near Boca Raton, Florida, called Donna Blue Aircraft ... an “undercover company” of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A Rolling Stone investigation into thousands of pages of government documents, flight logs, court filings, and local news reports ... confirmed there was a secret ICE operation called Mayan Jaguar. According to classified reports, ICE bought private planes from 2004 to 2007, intending to tag them with hidden tracking beacons and, through front companies like Donna Blue, sell them to drug traffickers. ICE agents would draw “approximately 20 planes” into Operation Mayan Jaguar. ICE stopped none of them, while other governments thwarted some, without ICE. The Drug Enforcement Administration, convinced that traffickers controlled Mayan Jaguar, ordered ICE to shut it down. “ICE Headquarters advised the agents … to continue working,” according to another agent’s IG testimony. Operation Mayan Jaguar would be “a coordinated interagency task force developed by the intelligence community,” according to an internal ICE memo. The narcotics trade was largely legal until global prohibition began in the early 20th century. Waves of drug planes and state-sponsored trafficking weren’t far behind. From the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA proprietary airlines flew arms into the Golden Triangle for anti-communist guerillas, and were suspected of flying out with the guerillas’ opium. It was allegedly the same deal in the Eighties, but in Central America, with cocaine. In Asia, the CIA paid Afghan heroin lords to fight the Soviets, and later to fight the Taliban. In 1998, the CIA’s marquee aviation front, Southern Air Transport, declared bankruptcy a week before the CIA’s inspector general implicated the company in cocaine trafficking.
Note: Our investigative Substack article explores the dark truths behind the US war on drugs that the mainstream media ignores. For more, watch our Mindful News Brief on who's really behind the war on drugs. Check out our database of concise and revealing news summaries on the war on drugs from reliable media sources.
Two years after former President Richard M. Nixon launched a war on drugs in 1971, calling substance use the nation’s “public enemy No. 1,” he made a startling admission during a meeting in the Oval Office. Speaking to a small group of aides and advisers at the White House in March 1973, Nixon said he knew that marijuana was “not particularly dangerous.” Nixon, who had publicly argued that curbing drug use globally warranted an “all-out offensive,” also privately expressed unease about the harsh punishments Americans were facing for marijuana crimes. The remarks were captured on the president’s secret recording system amid a set of tapes that were only recently made widely available. The comments, on scratchy, sometimes hard-to-hear recordings, provide a surprising glimpse into the thinking of the president who implemented the federal government’s drug classification system and decided that marijuana belonged in a category of substances deemed most prone to abuse and of no proven medical value. Over five decades, that designation has led to millions of arrests, which disproportionately affected Black people and hobbled efforts to rigorously study the therapeutic potential of cannabis. Experts on the Nixon years said that they were previously unaware of the recordings of Nixon speaking about marijuana and that the remarks were significant in light of the policies he had championed, which remain the backbone of today’s drug laws.
Note: Our investigative Substack article explores the dark truths behind the US war on drugs that the mainstream media ignores. For more, watch our Mindful News Brief on who's really behind the war on drugs. Check out our database of concise and revealing news summaries on the war on drugs from reliable media sources.
On June 28, 2009, democratically elected Honduran President Manuel Zelaya was ousted by a military coup. The coup led to nearly 13 years of right-wing rule, marked by collusion with drug trafficking organizations, widespread privatization, violence, repression, and a significant migrant exodus. "During these 13 years that the right wing was in power, they were fully supported by the U.S. government," [said Zelaya]. "There was a lot of repression. There were killings of activists and land defenders throughout the country. Also, a lot of right-wing neoliberal policies that were put in place. We have no preference in [US] elections, between the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. In the end, they act the same. They act in the interest of Wall Street, the military industrial complex, the interest of a global elite that, through capitalism, has already taken over all the assets of wealth: the rivers, the seas, the forests, oil — the world elite manages it all through the speculative financial system. The planet’s main resources, of raw economic goods, are those that influence the United States’ government. Here, the coup plotters don’t even get a traffic ticket — not even a slap on the wrist. Instead, they are offered political parties as if they are a democratic option. It is so absurd: the Honduran right, which put the generals in office who carried out the coup, proclaim themselves to be a democratic alternative. Those who murdered, those who looted, are democratic alternatives — totally absurd."
Note: Read more about the narco-state that the US supported in Honduras. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.
Honduras’s former president Juan Orlando Hernández has been jailed in the US for drug trafficking. But the narco-state he ran was a product of US foreign policy and of the US-backed coup against Manuel Zelaya’s left-wing government. By the time Hernández was extradited to the United States on April 22, 2022, the former director of the Honduran police was already in US custody. Juan Carlos Bonilla, known as “El Tigre” and trained and educated at Fort Moore, Georgia, was on August 2 sentenced to nineteen years in prison in the United States. Bonilla had been a “highly trusted” torpedo loyal to the Hernández tribe. According to a Justice Department press release, the president and his brother had “El Tigre” shielding their drug shipments while also conducting “special assignments, including murder” of a rival trafficker. In heading the Honduran police, Bonilla also organized the return of death squads, tasked with “socially cleansing” Honduras of environmental activists, indigenous spokespersons, and investigative reporters. Hernández began his second term in 2017 atop a heap of killed and tear-gased protesters. [Honduras] was, according to Honduras scholar Dana Frank, “the first domino that the United States pushed over to counteract the new governments in Latin America.” After Honduras, a parliamentary coup took place against Paraguay’s progressive president Fernando Lugo in 2012, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff was impeached in 2015, and Brazil’s current president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was sentenced to a now-annulled prison sentence in 2017. Obama, hailed as the US president of “hope” and “change,” oversaw all three modern coups that overthrew left-leaning governments in favor of undemocratic, conservative, and US-friendly replacements.
Note: Bonilla was trained at the School of the Americas at Fort Moore, Georgia (now known as The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation), which graduated more than 500 human rights abusers all over the world. For more along these lines, watch our latest Mindful News Brief on who's really behind the deadly war on drugs.
Justified by the Monroe Doctrine — the United States’ claim to unchallenged dominance over the Western Hemisphere — the United States has criminalized asylum seekers, militarized the southern border, and intervened directly in Latin America. Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis ... is a harrowing indictment of the United States’ criminal role in Latin America, a region in which it has sown crisis for over a century with scant regard for the lives of millions. Ronald Reagan ... was keen on avoiding another nation falling into the sphere of influence of Cuba and the Soviet Union. To prevent a drift away from the United States’ orbit, he pumped military aid to El Salvador’s caudillismo military. The result was carnage and mass displacement. In 1992, three million Salvadoreans were living in Los Angeles, a tenfold growth. [Guatemala's] General Fernando Romeo Lucas García adopted El Salvador’s El Mozote strategy of “cleansing” ... indigenous Mayans. By 1984 around 1.5 million people were internally displaced. Thousands would flee to the United States. Two hundred thousand civilians had been killed; there were 669 massacres; 93 percent of the crimes involved the US-funded and -trained military. The Reagan administration “transformed Honduras from a banana republic where the United Fruit Company picked the country presidents . . . into a virtual US military base.” By the 1990s, the states of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras were heavily militarized. The armed forces acted with impunity, civil organizations had been hollowed out or were nonexistent, and gross inequality and racism were rampant. The CIA decided that the cocaine and heroin coming through Central America could be trafficked by various local military forces. The Northern Triangle countries [El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras] were used by the CIA to generate illicit earnings that financed the Contras — right-wing militias of Nicaragua — and Iran during its war against Iraq, an episode that came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair.
Note: This article also goes into how Reagan's war on drugs and the crack epidemic in Los Angeles fueled rampant gang violence, creating conditions that formed the Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13) gang. Watch our Mindful News Brief videos on how the US government facilitates child trafficking at the border and who's really behind the deadly war on drugs.
Col. Elias Melgar Urbina, a top-ranking Honduran military official and U.S. partner in joint drug war operations, has been tied to a Honduran drug trafficker, according to a U.S. Justice Department filing, and a private security company accused of assassinating land rights activists, according to eyewitness testimony and documents obtained by The Intercept. During the trial of Geovanny Fuentes Ramírez in federal district court in Manhattan, U.S. prosecutors suggested the possibility that Melgar himself had links to the drug trade. Fuentes was convicted in March 2021 of conspiring with high-ranking Honduran politicians and military officials to traffic tons of cocaine into the United States. One of Fuentes’s “military contacts,” according to prosecutors, was Melgar. For decades, the U.S. has supported Honduran governments whose security forces have violently repressed protest, protected select figures in the drug trade, and executed perceived criminals with so-called extermination squads. Since 2009, when a military coup greenlit by the State Department ousted former President Manuel Zelaya, the husband of current president Castro, the U.S. has supported sweeping security initiatives to militarize Honduran forces in the name of the war on drugs — even as they engaged in widespread human rights abuses. “The armed forces have been the key for turning Honduras into a narco-state,” [Pro-Honduras Network head Cristián] Sánchez told The Intercept.
Note: The US government has a long history of involvement in drug trafficking. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.
The Taliban government in Afghanistan – the nation that until recently produced 90% of the world’s heroin – has drastically reduced opium cultivation across the country. Western sources estimate an up to 99% reduction in some provinces. This raises serious questions about the seriousness of U.S. drug eradication efforts in the country over the past 20 years. And, as global heroin supplies dry up, experts tell MintPress News that they fear this could spark the growing use of fentanyl – a drug dozens of times stronger than heroin that already kills more than 100,000 Americans yearly. A similar attempt by the Taliban to eliminate the drug occurred in 2000, the last full year that they were in power. It was extraordinarily successful, with opium reduction dropping from 4,600 tons to just 185 tons. However, as soon as the United States invaded in 2001, poppy cultivation shot back up to previous levels and the supply chain recommenced. Afghanistan’s transformation into a preeminent narco-state owes a significant debt to Washington’s actions. Poppy cultivation in the 1970s was relatively limited. However, the tide changed in 1979 with the inception of Operation Cyclone, a massive infusion of funds to Afghan Mujahideen factions aimed at exhausting the Soviet military. The U.S. directed billions toward the insurgents, yet their financial needs persisted. Consequently, the Mujahideen delved into the illicit drug trade. By the culmination of Operation Cyclone, Afghanistan’s opium production had soared twentyfold.
Note: Read powerful evidence that the CIA and US military are directly involved in the drug trade. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on military corruption from reliable major media sources.
In 1979 the Sandinista revolution overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua. As a Spanish speaking Latino, [Enrique] Prado ... was recruited as a CIA officer responsible for overseeing the development of the Contra army based in Honduras and conducting cross border attacks on communities in Nicaragua. Prado believes they [were] the "good guys". The International Court of Justice thought otherwise. In 1986 the court ruled the US attacks on Nicaragua were violations of international law. The Reagan administration and media largely ignored the ruling. Later, journalist Gary Webb documented the catastrophic social damage inside the US caused by the cheap cocaine flooding some US cities. Webb was attacked by establishment media. In 1998 the CIA Inspector General acknowledged, "There are instances where C.I.A. did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug-trafficking activity, or take action to resolve the allegations." The US deployed Nicaraguans, Afghans and extremist Arab recruits in proxy wars across the globe. "The attacks of September 11 descend in a direct line from events in 1979, the year in which the CIA, with full presidential authority, began carrying out its largest ever clandestine operation - the secret arming of Afghan freedom fighters (mujaheddin) to wage a proxy war against the Soviet Union," [said author Chalmers Johnston].
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on intelligence agency corruption from reliable major media sources.
After flying under the radar for years, the case of Genaro García Luna is finally raising alarms in Congress, with one of the Senate’s top Republicans demanding answers about how Mexico’s highest-ranking cop was able to partner with DEA and FBI, “at the time that he funneled roughly 103,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States” for the Sinaloa Cartel. García Luna became the most senior Mexican law enforcement official ever convicted of narco-corruption when a Brooklyn federal jury delivered a unanimous guilty verdict on a five-count indictment that charged him with taking massive bribes to enable cartel drug smuggling, kidnappings, and murders while he was in office from 2001 to 2012. García Luna’s position involved close collaboration with U.S. anti-narcotics agencies that operate in Mexico, and it gave him discretion over the spending of hundreds of millions in American tax dollars delivered as security aid. That money was supposed to go toward fighting the cartels, but his trial showed he was leaking sensitive intelligence, protecting drug shipments, and disrupting efforts to capture ... cartel leaders. On Feb. 22, a day after the guilty verdict, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley sent a letter to the heads of the DEA and FBI asking what the agencies knew about García Luna and when, and demanding evidence ... that could shed new light on the relationship. In short, Grassley wants to know if American tax dollars were being sent to Mexico while the DEA and FBI were tolerating García Luna’s corruption.
Note: This case adds to the evidence that the War on Drugs is a trillion dollar failure. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption from reliable major media sources.
Genaro García Luna, Mexico’s former top law enforcement official known as the “architect” of the Mexican side of the drug war, was found guilty in New York federal court of collaborating with the Sinaloa cartel, the biggest organized crime group in North America. For years, García Luna was the U.S. government’s most trusted ally in the war on drugs. As public security secretary, he wielded incredible power, overseeing Mexico’s Federal Police, the prison network, and a vast intelligence-gathering infrastructure, while working with the Drug Enforcement Administration, FBI, CIA, and Department of Homeland Security in the fight against Mexican cartels. The case portrayed García Luna and his network of corrupt officials as a handful of bad apples, and what U.S. officials knew about García Luna’s illicit activities went mostly unexplored, despite the government’s role in providing funding, equipment, and training that has fueled drug-related violence. García Luna was found guilty of all five charges, including drug trafficking and continuing a criminal enterprise. Prosecutors alleged that he received around $274 million in bribes from the cartel from 2001 to 2012, first as head of the Federal Investigative Agency, the Mexican equivalent of the FBI, and then as secretary of public security. García Luna left public office in 2012 following a change in presidency and moved to Miami where he started a security consulting company and lived a lavish lifestyle.
Note: The War on Drugs has been described as a trillion dollar failure. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in intelligence agencies from reliable major media sources.
It's estimated that more than 107,000 people in the United States died due to opioid overdoses in 2021. Washington Post journalist Scott Higham notes it's "the equivalent of a 737 Boeing crashing and burning and killing everybody on board every single day." In the new book, American Cartel, Higham and co-author Sari Horwitz make the case that the pharmaceutical industry operated like a drug cartel, with manufacturers at the top; wholesalers in the middle; and pharmacies at the level of "street dealers." The companies collaborated with each other — and with lawyers and lobbyists — to create legislation that protected their industry, even as they competed for market share. "It really is the companies that run the show," Higham says. "People were dying by the thousands while these companies were lobbying members of Congress ... to pass legislation and to lobby members of the Department of Justice and try to slow down the DEA enforcement efforts." Big pharma fought to create legislation that would limit the DEA's ability to go after drug wholesalers. The efforts were effective; more than 100 billion pills were manufactured, distributed and dispensed between 2006 and 2014. Meanwhile, both federal and state DEA agents are frustrated by the ways in which their enforcement efforts have been curtailed. Right now there are 40,000 Americans who are in jail on marijuana charges. And not one executive of a Fortune 500 company involved in the opioid trade has been charged with a crime.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in the pharmaceutical industry from reliable major media sources.
The first trial against a pharmaceutical opioid manufacturer started Tuesday in Oklahoma in what could be a precedent-setting case for hundreds of other claims around the country. The state's attorney general, Mike Hunter, began the day by accusing Johnson & Johnson of putting profits over responsibility and argued that the company was responsible for the "worst man-made public health crisis in the history of our state and country." In the multibillion-dollar lawsuit against the drugmaker, lawyers for the state argued that Johnson & Johnson knew about the addictive nature of opioids, but misled doctors by downplaying the risks of the drugs while touting its benefits. Brad Beckworth, a lawyer for Oklahoma, argued that Johnson & Johnson was motivated to increase sales on multiple fronts as both the manufacturer of the drugs Duragesic and Nucynta and as a supplier of the raw materials for other opioid manufacturers. He argued that a marketing push by Johnson & Johnson lead doctors to overprescribe opioids in Oklahoma. If you oversupply, people will die, Beckworth repeatedly said in his opening statement while showing email communications from Johnson & Johnson sales representatives. Oklahoma settled with two other drug manufacturers before Tuesdays opening statements. In March, Purdue Pharma settled for $270 million, and on Sunday, Teva Pharmaceuticals settled for $85 million, leaving Johnson & Johnson as the sole defendants in what could a monthslong bench trial.
Note: Many doctors also profited from excessive prescribing of dangerous opioids. And according to a former DEA agent, Congress helped drug companies fuel the opioid epidemic. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on Big Pharma corruption from reliable major media sources.
The Justice Department is investigating allegations that officers of a special Venezuelan anti-drug unit funded by the CIA smuggled more than 2,000 pounds of cocaine into the United States with the knowledge of CIA officials - despite protests by the Drug Enforcement Administration. That is a huge amount of cocaine. But it was hardly a first. The agency has never been above using individuals or organizations with known links to drug trafficking. Until recently, no DEA country attach overseas was allowed to initiate an investigation into a suspected drug trafficker ... without clearance from the local CIA station chief. CIA ties to international drug trafficking date to the Korean War. Nowhere, however, was the CIA more closely tied to drug traffic than it was in Pakistan during the Afghan War. As its principal conduit for arms and money to the Afghan guerrillas, the agency chose the Pakistan military's Inter-Services Intelligence Bureau. The ISI in turn steered the CIA's support toward [an Islamic fundamentalist who] received almost half of the agency's financial support during the war. But many of his commanders were also major heroin traffickers. Soon the trucks that delivered arms to the guerrillas in Afghanistan were coming back ... full of heroin. The heroin traffic blossomed in the shadows of a CIA-sustained guerrilla war. The conflict and its aftermath have given the world another Golden Triangle: the Golden Crescent, sweeping through Afghanistan, Pakistan and parts of the former Soviet Union. Many of those involved in the drug traffic are men who were once armed, trained and financed by the CIA.
Note: The entire article at the link above is highy revealing. Read more about the CIA's ongoing involvement with Afghan heroin trafficking. The Taliban banned opium production in 2000 reducing the yield by 90%. Yet shortly after the U.S. defeated the Taliban, Afghanistan quickly returned to supplying 75% of the world's heroin. Do you think the U.S. is serious about stopping the drug trade? For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing intelligence agency corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
The mayor of the West Virginia city that has come to symbolize Americas opioid epidemic has called for the jailing of pharmaceutical company executives he likens to street corner drug dealers. Steve Williams, mayor of ... a city ravaged by prescription pill and heroin addiction, said he wants to see executives face criminal prosecution, after it was revealed that a member of the family that made billions of dollars from the painkiller that unleashed the epidemic stands to profit further after he was granted a patent for an anti-addiction medicine. They are drug dealers in Armani suits, said Williams. The decisions that have been made within the pharmaceutical industry have ravaged our nation. In June, Massachusetts became the first state to sue individual executives and owners of Purdue Pharma, the maker of the drug, OxyContin, which kicked off the biggest drug epidemic in American history, estimated to be killing more than 115 people a day. The lawsuit seeks to recover the billions of dollars in profit banked by members of the Sackler family, which owns Purdue. Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey, accused the company and its officials of knowingly profiting from overdoses and death. Purdue Pharma and its executives built a multi-billion-dollar business based on deception and addiction. The more drugs they sold, the more money they made, she said in announcing the lawsuit.
Note: According to a former DEA agent, Congress helped drug companies fuel the opioid epidemic. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing Big Pharma corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
In the midst of the worst drug epidemic in American history, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's ability to keep addictive opioids off U.S. streets was derailed - that according to Joe Rannazzisi, one of the most important whistleblowers ever interviewed by 60 Minutes. Rannazzisi ran the DEA's Office of Diversion Control, the division that regulates and investigates the pharmaceutical industry. He says the opioid crisis was allowed to spread - aided by Congress, lobbyists, and a drug distribution industry that shipped, almost unchecked, hundreds of millions of pills to rogue pharmacies and pain clinics providing the rocket fuel for a crisis that, over the last two decades, has claimed 200,000 lives. His greatest ire is reserved for the ... middlemen that ship the pain pills from manufacturers, like Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson to drug stores all over the country. Rannazzisi accuses the distributors of fueling the opioid epidemic. "This is an industry that allowed millions and millions of drugs to go into bad pharmacies and doctors' offices, that distributed them out to people who had no legitimate need for those drugs," [said Rannazzisi]. In 2013, Joe Rannazzisi and his DEA investigators were trying to crack down. Then ... with the help of members of Congress, the drug industry began to quietly pave the way for legislation that essentially would strip the DEA of its ... ability to immediately freeze suspicious shipments of prescription narcotics to keep drugs off U.S. streets.
Note: See also this informative Washington Post article for more information on this sad topic. Lots more available here. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on corruption in government and in pharmaceutical industry.
Executives with Europe's biggest bank, HSBC, were subjected to a humiliating onslaught from US senators on Tuesday over revelations that staff at its global subsidiaries laundered billions of dollars for drug cartels, terrorists and pariah states. HSBC's subsidiaries transported billions of dollars of cash in armoured vehicles, cleared suspicious travellers' cheques worth billions, and allowed Mexican drug lords buy to planes with money laundered through Cayman Islands accounts. Other subsidiaries moved money from Iran, Syria and other countries on US sanctions lists, and helped a Saudi bank linked to al-Qaida to shift money to the US. The committee had released a damning report on Monday, which detailed a collapse in HSBC's compliance standards. Executives at the bank [were] consistently warned of problems. HSBC's Mexican operations moved $7bn into the bank's US operations, and according to its own staff, much of that money was tied to drug traffickers. Leigh Winchell, assistant director for investigative programs at US immigration & customs enforcement ... said 47,000 people had lost their lives since 2006 as a result of Mexican drug traffickers. The senators highlighted testimony from Leopoldo Barroso, a former HSBC anti money-laundering director, who told company officials in an exit interview that he was concerned about "allegations of 60% to 70% of laundered proceeds in Mexico" going through HSBC's affiliate.
Note: HSBC may have been founded to service the international drug trade. They eventually settled this case for $1.92 billion. The corrupt bankers were not criminally prosecuted. Settlements like this often amount to "cash for secrecy" deals that are ultimately profitable for banks. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing banking corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
Gary Webb knew his story would cause a stir. The newspaper report he'd written suggested that a US-backed rebel army in Latin America was supplying the drugs responsible for blighting some of Los Angeles's poorest neighbourhoods and, crucially, that the CIA must have known about it. [Webb's report, titled] "Dark Alliance" has been called one of the most explosive and controversial exposs in American journalism. Nineteen years on, the story of Webbs investigation and its aftermath has been given the full Hollywood treatment. Kill the Messenger, based on his account of what happened and a book of the same name about the saga by journalist Nick Schou was recently released in cinemas. What Webb did that nobody else had was to follow the supply chain right to the poverty stricken streets of Los Angeles. Webb summed up the heart of his ... series thus: It is one of the most bizarre alliances in modern history. The union of a U.S. backed army attempting to overthrow a revolutionary socialist government and the uzi-toting gangstas of Compton and South-Central Los Angeles. Perhaps most damningly, Webb wrote that crack was virtually unobtainable in the citys black neighbourhoods before members of the CIAs army began supplying it. [In 1999], Webb said that after spending three years of his life looking into it, he was more convinced than ever that the U.S. Government's responsibility for the drug problems in South Central L.A. was greater than I ever wrote in the newspaper.
Note: Read an excellent, concise summary written by Gary Webb himself of what happened on this highly revealing Dark Alliance series. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing intelligence agency corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
In 1996, the award-winning journalist Gary Webb uncovered CIA links to Los Angeles drug dealers. The link between drug-running and the Reagan regime's support for the right-wing terrorist group throughout the 1980s had been public knowledge for over a decade. What was new about Webb's reports, published under the title "Dark Alliance" in the Californian paper the San Jose Mercury News, was that for the first time it brought the story back home. His series of articles ... incited fury among the African-American community, many of whom took his investigation as proof that the White House saw crack as a way of bringing genocide to the ghetto. Webb's reports prompted three official investigations, including one by the CIA itself which ... confirmed the substance of his findings. Webb undeniably made mistakes. But his central thesis - that the CIA, having participated in narcotics trafficking in central America, had, at best, turned a blind eye to the activities of drug dealers in LA - has never been in question. [A 1998] CIA Inspector General's report, commissioned in response to the allegations in "Dark Alliance" ... found that CIA officials ignored information about possible Contra drug dealing; that they continued to work with Contra supporters despite allegations that they were trafficking drugs, and further asserted that officials from the CIA instructed Drug Enforcement Agency officers to refrain from investigating alleged dealers connected with the Contras.
Note: For those interested in the Gary Webb story, this article is possibly the best single summary out there. Read an excellent, concise summary written by Gary Webb himself of what happened on this highly revealing Dark Alliance series. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing intelligence agency corruption news articles from reliable major media sources.
Some drug traders first saw him as a heroin smuggler in Thailand. Others met him as a cocaine buyer in Buenos Aires. And others as a gunrunner in Buffalo. He can recall how they all looked into his eyes, trusted him and, as a result, went to jail. Michael Levine, a special agent of the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration ... is described by his agency as an expert in "deep cover" - an agent who assumes invented characters to penetrate underworld organizations. Deep cover means living among criminals for weeks or months at a time, unable to return home or admit to anyone one's real name. After playing the part of underworld figures for the Federal Government for 21 years, Mr. Levine now works as a supervisor in the D.E.A.'s New York office. Deep cover specialists play a crucial role in the D.E.A.'s long-term narcotics investigations, as well as in major investigations of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms ... and some local police departments. "You have to divide your brain in half," Mr. Levine said. "This half is the character you are playing. This half is always a Federal agent recording the details. If the half that is a Government official becomes inefficient, it can cost you your life." Over the years, [Mr. Levine] has been stationed in New York, Washington, Miami, Buenos Aires and Germany, and has followed investigations to Asia, South America and the Middle East.
Note: Mike Levine went on to blow the whistle about rogue elements in the US government who were directly involved with running drugs and had his life threatened as a result. Read his fascinating and revealing personal story on this webpage.
The war on drugs has failed, fuelling higher rates of infection and harming public health and human rights to such a degree that it's time to decriminalize non-violent minor drug offences, according to a new global report. The authors of the Johns Hopkins-Lancet Commission on Public Health and International Drug Policy call for minor use, possession and petty use to be decriminalized following measurably worsened human health. "We've had three decades of the war on drugs, we've had decades of zero-tolerance policy," said Dr. Chris Beyrer, a professor of infectious disease epidemiology at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore and the senior author of the report published Thursday in The Lancet. "It has had no measurable impact on supply or use, and so as a policy to control substance use it has arguably failed. It has evidently failed." Given that the goal of prohibiting all use, possession, production and trafficking of illicit drugs was to protect societies, the researchers evaluated the health effects and found they were overwhelmingly negative. For a role model, the authors point to Portugal, which decriminalized not only cannabis but also possession of heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine. HIV transmission, hepatitis C and incarcerations all decreased, Beyrer said, and there was about a 15 per cent decline in substance use by young people in Portugal.
Note: While the war on drugs has been called a "trillion dollar failure", and the healing potentials of mind altering drugs are starting to be investigated more openly, there remains powerful evidence that the CIA and US military are directly involved in the drug trade.
HSBC Holdings Plcs $1.9 billion agreement with the U.S. to resolve charges it enabled Latin American drug cartels to launder billions of dollars was approved by a federal judge. U.S. District Judge John Gleeson in Brooklyn, New York, signed off yesterday on a deferred-prosecution agreement. HSBC was accused of failing to monitor more than $670 billion in wire transfers and more than $9.4 billion in purchases of U.S. currency from HSBC Mexico, allowing for money laundering, prosecutors said. The bank also violated U.S. economic sanctions against Iran, Libya, Sudan, Burma and Cuba, according to a criminal information filed in the case. The bank, Europes largest, agreed to pay a $1.25 billion forfeiture and $665 million in civil penalties under the settlement, prosecutors announced in December. At a hearing the same month, Gleeson told prosecutors there had been publicized criticism of the agreement, which lets the bank and management avoid further criminal proceedings over the charges. Lack of proper controls allowed the Sinaloa drug cartel in Mexico and the Norte del Valle cartel in Colombia to move more than $881 million through HSBCs U.S. unit from 2006 to 2010, the government alleged in the case. The bank also cut resources for its anti-money-laundering programs to cut costs and increase profits, the government said in court filings. Under a deferred prosecution agreement, the U.S. allows a target to avoid charges.
Note: HSBC was founded to service the international drug trade, and is considered too big to criminally prosecute. Big bank settlements often amount to "cash for secrecy" deals that are ultimately profitable for banks. For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles about financial industry corruption.
Don Winslow['s book] The Cartel, a sequel to 2005's The Power of the Dog [is] a sort of Game of Thrones of the Mexican drug wars, a multipart, intricately plotted, blood-soaked epic that tells the story of how America's unquenchable appetite for illegal drugs has brought chaos to our southern neighbors and darkened our own political and criminal culture. Dog ... traces the rise of the narcotraficantes who split Mexico into territories and smuggled cocaine across the U.S. border by the ton. The violence ... spills out into Mexican society, turning cities like Juarez into Fallujah-like battle zones. But the most shocking thing about these books is that almost all the horror stories Winslow tells ... are largely true – from the narcotrafficker who threw children off a bridge to ... countless murders, kidnappings and tortures. The War on Drugs is a trillion-dollar failure. We spend billions of dollars pursuing drugs and billions imprisoning people that probably shouldn't be in prison. This war has killed a hundred thousand people in Mexico. These ISIS beheadings that we're seeing [are] a direct copy of what the cartels were doing in 2007 and 2008. The Zetas had imported Special Forces veterans from the Guatemalan army – and one of their things was to cut off heads. [There's] a direct line between events in Ferguson and Baltimore and Cleveland to the War on Drugs. The fruits that we're reaping now are seeds that were planted back in 1971, when Nixon declared war on drugs. The War on Drugs is more of a problem to the United States than drugs are.
Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on drugs from reliable major media sources on little-known facts about mind-altering drugs. Then explore the excellent, reliable resources provided in our War Information Center.
In a war full of failures, the US counternarcotics mission in Afghanistan stands out: opiate production has climbed steadily over recent years to reach record-high levels last year. One clear winner in the anti-drug effort is ... the infamous mercenary company formerly known as Blackwater. Statistics released on Tuesday reveal that the rebranded private security firm, known since 2011 as Academi, reaped over a quarter billion dollars from the futile Defense Department push to eradicate Afghan narcotics, some 21% of the $1.5 bn in contracting money the Pentagon has devoted to the job since 2002. The company is the second biggest beneficiary of counternarcotics largesse in Afghanistan. Only the defense giant Northrop Grumman edged it out, with $325m. According to the US inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, the $309m Academi got from US taxpayers paid for training, equipment, and logistical support to Afghan forces conducting counternarcotics. Far from eradicating the deep-rooted opiate trade, US counternarcotics efforts have ... contributed to the opium boom. In December, the United Nations reported a 60% growth in Afghan land used for opium poppy cultivation since 2011, up to 209,000 hectares. The estimated $3bn value of Afghan heroin and morphine represents some 15% of Afghan GDP. Academi and its former Blackwater incarnation have an infamous history in Afghanistan. It once set up shell companies to disguise its business practices, according to a Senate report, so that its contracts would be unimpeded by company employees killings of Iraqi and Afghan civilians.
Note: Blackwater, now called Academi, got caught systematically defrauding the US government, while serving as a "virtual extension of the CIA". The CIA has been linked to the Afghan heroin trade for decades. In 2000, the Taliban had all but eradicated Afghan opium production. Once Afghanistan was under US control, opium production surged to record levels.
As part of their insurgency against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, some of the C.I.A.-backed contras made money through drug smuggling, transgressions noted in a little-noticed 1988 Senate subcommittee report. Gary Webb, a journalist at The San Jose Mercury News, thought it was a far-fetched story to begin with, but in 1995 and 1996, he dug in and produced a deeply reported and deeply flawed three-part series called Dark Alliance. That groundbreaking series was among the first to blow up on the nascent web, and he was initially celebrated, then investigated and finally discredited. Pushed out of journalism in disgrace, he committed suicide in 2004. [The movie] Kill the Messenger ... suggests that he told a truth others were unwilling to. Mr. Webb was not the first journalist to come across [such matters]. In December 1985, The Associated Press reported that three contra groups had engaged in cocaine trafficking, in part to help finance their war against Nicaragua. Major news outlets mostly gave the issue a pass. Peter Landesman, an investigative journalist who wrote the screenplay, was struck by the reflex to go after Mr. Webb. Planeloads of weapons were sent south from the U.S., and everyone knows that those planes didnt come back empty, but the C.I.A. made sure that they never knew for sure what was in those planes, he said. But instead of going after that, they went after Webb." In 1998, Frederick P. Hitz, the C.I.A. inspector general, testified before the House Intelligence Committee that after looking into the matter at length, he believed the C.I.A. was a bystander or worse in the war on drugs. However dark or extensive, the alliance Mr. Webb wrote about was a real one.
Note: Webb's story was not deeply flawed, as reported in this article. His editor even commented that four Washington Post writers could not find one significant factual error, but then changed his mind after CIA leaders threatened the paper. Read a Sacrament Bee newspaper article for more on Webb and his story. For more along these lines, see the excellent, reliable resources provided in our Mass Media Information Center.
Since [the days of Al Capone,] Chicago officials have awarded "Public Enemy No 1" status to only one other person: cartel billionaire Joaqun Guzmn Loera, better known now to the world over as "El Chapo". But nearly seven weeks before [his February] capture at a beach resort, the Mexican newspaper El Universal reported how US agencies had armed and financed El Chapo's Sinaloa criminal empire for at least 12 years. That link has been substantiated by DEA and Justice Department court testimonies, and even US agents confirmed the financing had been approved by high-ranking officials and federal prosecutors. But the American media barely reported how entrenched the American government has become in the Mexican drug trade. The latest installment of the "war on drugs" has killed 100,000 people since its official declaration by Mexican President Filipe Calderon and US President George W Bush in 2006. During this period, the US-El Chapo partnership was reportedly never closer: under the deal, Washington allowed El Chapo's Sinaloa cartel to carry on business as usual while top Sinaola members, for their part, provided information on their rivals. DEA agents met with their informants more than 50 times, El Universal reported, as the agents offered their whisperers immunity. American patronage goes well beyond stoking the largest and most powerful of the Mexican cartels (Sinaloa), as well as the most heinous (Golfo and Los Zetas). Drug arrests of cartel associates amounted to less than 2% of over 50,000 arrests made in the first four years of the Bush-Calderon partnership.
Note: For more on government corruption, see the deeply revealing reports from reliable major media sources available here.
The United States continues to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on "good governance" initiatives [in Afghanistan]. This $760 million program, to strengthen government agencies, was America's single largest nonmilitary expense in Afghanistan over the past year. All of it was money thrown away. Last year, the U.S. Agency for International Development began promoting what it calls "Afghanization of aid." Well, in Afghanistan, government leaders have only one use for foreign aid. They stuff the cash into suitcases and fly it to secret bank accounts in Dubai. Afghanistan remains the world's largest grower of opium poppies. It supplies 90 percent of the world's heroin. Many thousands of its citizens are addicts. Earlier this month, the United Nations put out its annual "Afghanistan Opium Survey" and found that, even after the United States has spent more than $2 billion on drug enforcement there, "the total area under cultivation" during 2010 "and the number of families growing opium poppy, remained the same as in 2009" - but for one thing. The U.N. found "an alarming increase of 97 percent" in opium-poppy cultivation among northeastern provinces that are not traditional poppy-growing areas.
Note: For shocking stories by two award-winning journalists suggesting direct involvement by government agencies in the drug trade, click here. And for key reports from reliable sources on government corruption, click here.
The Taliban ... briefly banned poppy cultivation in 2000 in an effort to gain U.S. diplomatic recognition and aid. When the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan in October 2001, poppies were grown on only 7,600 hectares. Under the American occupation ... poppy cultivation spread to every province, and overall production has increased exponentially ever since -- this year by 60 percent. Within Afghanistan, where perhaps 3 million people draw direct income from poppy, profits may reach $3 billion this year. In-country profit adds up to an estimated 60 percent of Afghanistan's gross domestic product, or more than half the country's annual income. Afghanistan provides 92 percent of the world's heroin. Through many administrations, the U.S. government has been implicated in the Afghan drug trade. Before the American and Pakistani-sponsored mujahedeen took on the Soviets in 1979, Afghanistan produced a very small amount of opium for regional markets, and no heroin at all. By the end of the jihad against the Soviet army, it was the world's top producer of both drugs. The CIA made it all possible by providing legal cover for these operations. The United States [encouraged] Islamist extremists (then "our" soldiers) and ... set the stage for the Taliban. [Currently,] President Hamid Karzai['s] strategy is to avoid confrontation, befriend potential adversaries and give them offices, often in his Cabinet. The trade penetrates even the elected Parliament. Among the 249 members of the Wolesi Jirga (lower house) are at least 17 known drug traffickers, in addition to 40 commanders of armed militias, 24 members of criminal gangs, and 19 men facing serious allegations of war crimes.
Note: Could it be that some U.S. officials are turning a blind eye, or even supporting this drug trade? For some very strong evidence of this from a former award-winning DEA agent turned journalist and author, click here.
Ten years ago today, one of the most controversial news articles of the 1990s quietly appeared on the front page of the San Jose Mercury News. Titled "Dark Alliance"...the three-part series by reporter Gary Webb linked the CIA and Nicaragua's Contras to the crack cocaine epidemic that ripped through South Los Angeles in the 1980s. Most of the nation's elite newspapers at first ignored the story. A public uproar, especially among urban African Americans, forced them to respond. What followed was one of the most bizarre, unseemly and ultimately tragic scandals in the annals of American journalism. Top news organizations closed ranks to debunk claims Webb never made, ridicule assertions that turned out to be true and ignore corroborating evidence when it came to light. The whole shameful cycle was repeated when Webb committed suicide in December 2004. At first, the Mercury News defended the series, but after nine months, Executive Editor Jerry Ceppos wrote a half-apologetic letter to readers that defended "Dark Alliance" while acknowledging obvious mistakes. Webb privately (and accurately) predicted the mea culpa would universally be misperceived as a total retraction, and he publicly accused the paper of cowardice. He resigned a few months later. Meanwhile, spurred on by Webb's story, the CIA conducted an internal investigation that acknowledged in March 1998 that the agency had covered up Contra drug trafficking for more than a decade. History will tell if Webb receives the credit he's due for prodding the CIA to acknowledge its shameful collaboration with drug dealers.
Note: Many thanks to the Los Angeles Times for the courage to report this story. For more on this incredibly revealing, yet very tragic case which reveals corruption in both the government and media at the highest levels: http://www.WantToKnow.info/mediacover-up#webb
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