American Conspiracies - Jesse Ventura [75]
Another of the traffickers, Marshal Muhammad Qasim Fahim, who was the country’s defense secretary and may be its next vice president. He was a general when the U.S. swept into Afghanistan after 9/11, worked closely with the CIA, and got rewarded with millions in cash. Except by 2002, the CIA was well aware that Marshal Fahim was into the heroin trade—long before the invasion, and after becoming defense minister. “He now had a Soviet-made cargo plane at his disposal that was making flights north to transport heroin through Russia, returning laden with cash.” So what was the Bush Administration’s response? “American military trainers would be directed to deal only with subordinates to Marshal Fahim.”34 Gee, I’ll bet they were clean! As clean as Karzai’s brother anyway.
Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service, which we’ll be talking about again in terms of financing the 9/11 terrorists, is another big player. One expert says there is an ISI-backed Islamist drug route of al Qaeda allies that stretches across all of North Central Asia.35 Richard Holbrooke, who is now Obama’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, wrote in an op-ed in 2008 that “breaking the narco-state in Afghanistan is essential, or all else will fail.” Holbrooke also said that it’s a complete waste of money to aerial-spray the poppy fields, which costs about a billion dollars a year, as this only serves to strengthen the Taliban and al Qaeda with the local people.
Of course, Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon under Bush-II “fiercely resisted efforts to draw the United States military into supporting counternarcotics efforts” because they feared this “would only antagonize corrupt regional warlords whose support they needed.” Now, under Obama, supposedly “fifty suspected Afghan drug traffickers believed to have ties to the Taliban have been placed on a Pentagon target list to be captured or killed.”36 But at the same time, the CIA and the DIA now say that the Taliban are getting much less money from the drug trade than was previously thought, and “that American officials did not believe that Afghan drug money was fueling Al Qaeda.” The question this raises in my mind is: then who’s making off with the profits? Karzai’s brother, Marshal Fahim, the Pakistani government, and some people in the CIA maybe?
The heroin trade took a dive at the beginning of this century because the Taliban put them out of business. When that poppy supply was put on hold for awhile, isn’t it ironic that some of the big banks tumbled? Is it because that dirty money wasn’t getting laundered through their establishments? But apparently, we think it’s better to be in bed with the heroin producers than work with the Taliban.
Now let’s turn our attention closer to home, and our neighbor Mexico. “Even in the last decade, when it has become more fashionable to write about Mexico as a ‘narco-democracy,’ few, if any, authors address the American share of responsibility for the staggering corruption that has afflicted Mexican politics.”37 Drug trafficking in Mexico actually dates back to the Harrison Anti-Narcotics Act of 1914 that made it illegal here at home, coupled with Mexico’s revolution making its northern section pretty much ungovernable.
The same year the CIA was formed in 1947, the U.S. helped create Mexico’s intelligence service called the DFS. Colonel Carlos Serrano, the brains behind that, was already connected to the drug traffic. Mexico soon became the main way station for smuggling heroin into the U.S. and Canada. Over time, the collusion only increased. Just as in Afghanistan, the CIA “was consciously drawing on Mexican drug-traffickers and their protectors as off-the-books assets.” When Miguel Nazar Haro got busted in San Diego in 1981, the FBI and CIA both intervened because he was “an essential repeat essential contact for CIA station in Mexico City.”38 When DEA agent Enrique Camarena was murdered, the CIA got busy protecting the top traffickers behind it. During the