Drugs For The World

But there were also the spoils of empire to be considered. With the help of President Zia, Afghanistan was deemed a country perfectly suited for the production of vast quantities of opium, the proceeds from which the empire would use to fuel its progress and at the same time flood certain population centers with narcotics and engage in a little "social engineering" (the black neigborhoods of America being a case in point).

CIA covert weapons shipments were sent by the Pakistani army and the ISI to rebel camps in the North West Frontier province near the Afghanistan border. The governor of the province, Lieutenant General Fazle Haq, who author Alfred McCoy calls Pakistani President Muhammad Zia ul-Haq's "closest confidant and the de facto overlord of the mujaheddin guerrillas" allowed hundreds of heroin refineries to set up in his province. Beginning around 1982, Pakistani army trucks carrying CIA weapons from Karachi (Pakistan) would arrive in Haq's province and return loaded with heroin, protected from police search by Pakistani intelligence (ISI) papers. By 1982, Haq was listed with Interpol as an international drug trafficker, not to mention a CIA asset. Despite his worsening reputation, visiting US politicians such as CIA Director William Casey and Vice President George H. W. Bush continued to meet with him when they visited Pakistan. Haq then moved his heroin money through the criminal Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). A highly placed US official later stated that Haq "was our man... everybody knew that Haq was also running the drug trade" and that "BCCI was completely involved".

...the CIA profited indirectly from the drug traffic, and developed over the years a close relationship with it. The CIA's off-the-books war in Laos was one extreme case where it fought a war, using as its chief assets the Royal Laotian Army of General Ouane Rattikone and the Hmong Army of General Vang Pao, which were, in large part, drug-financed. The CIA's massive Afghanistan operation in the 1980s was another example of a war that was in part drug-financed.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has most certainly not asked for U.S. 'help' bombing Syria. Any U.S. actions there will not only be unwanted, they'll be blatantly illegal, like the vast majority of 'help' the U.S. offers countries, i.e. bombs, murder and chaos. Speaking of which, who invaded Saddam's Iraq? Were Iraqis begging to be bombed back to the Stone Age when the U.S. 'shocked and awed' the people of Iraq, leading to hundreds of thousands of deaths? Recall that other classic idiotic remark from Kerry in an interview with NBC's Meet the Press on March 2nd of this year: "You just don't invade another country on phony pretext in order to assert your interests." Right. Look in the mirror.