The Anglo-American Empire has declared war on humanity

Historically, American unconventional warfare (UW) doctrine evolved from the Nazi experiences in dealing with ”freedom fighters” in various European countries during World War II. As analyst and researcher Michael McClintock details in his important study, American unconventional warfare borrowed extensively from the methods used by the Wehrmacht and SS to terrorize civilian populations and, perhaps more importantly, to co-opt local factions to combat resistance movements. The Army Department’s ”A Study of Special and Subversive Operations” (November 1947) was an early assessment of the lessons learned from World War II concerning the authoritative Cold War. (”Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, Counterterrorism, 1940-1990,” New York: Pantheon Books, 1992, p. 59)

But the United States did more than translate confiscated documents from the Wehrmacht and SS; they recruited many Waffen-SS veterans, often with the assistance of high-ranking officials in the Vatican. Tens of thousands of war criminals were smuggled out of Europe along ratlines into American hands for clandestine warfare against the new enemy: the Soviet Union and the international left.

Pathological murderers like SS veteran Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, played a significant role when the CIA and Argentina’s death squad generals targeted Bolivia in the ”cocaine coup” of 1980. Together with agents connected to the CIA, Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, and existing Nazi networks, Barbie ”restructured” Bolivia’s intelligence service to reflect the ”new reality” in the southern parts of South America. (For background, see Robert Parry’s excellent series, ”Dark Side of Rev. Moon,” The Consortium for Independent Journalism).

The cocaine coup began on July 17, led by Barbie and his new fascist henchmen known as the ”Death Squad.” Michael Levine, one of the DEA’s top infiltrators, writes in his book, ”Levine’s Big White Lie,” that ”The masked thugs were not Bolivians; they spoke Spanish with a German, French, and Italian accent.” Their uniforms displayed no national insignias or rank markings, but many wore armbands with swastikas and Nazi insignias. The violence was brutal. When insurgents stormed the national labor movement headquarters, they injured labor leader Marcelo Quiroga, who had attempted to prosecute former military dictator Hugo Banzer for drug and corruption charges. Quiroga was ”dragged off to the police headquarters to be put through a game that was being played by some of the torturers imported from Argentina’s notorious School of the Navy Mechanics.”

”These ’experts’ practiced their ’science’ on Quiroga to teach the Bolivians a lesson, since they were a little behind in this particular field. They kept Quiroga alive and in agony for hours. His castrated and tortured body was found several days later in a place called ’The Valley of the Moon’ in southern La Paz.” Women captured were subjected to group rape as part of their torture. For Levine, who was in Buenos Aires, it soon became clear that ”the revolution’s principal goal was to protect and control Bolivia’s cocaine industry. All the major cocaine barons were released from jail and subsequently joined forces with the Nazis in their rampages. Government buildings were occupied, and files of cocaine barons were stolen or burned. Government employees were tortured and shot, women were bound and raped repeatedly by paramilitaries and released cocaine lords.” The fascists celebrated with swastikas and shouts of ”Heil Hitler!” reported the German investigative journalist Kai Hermann. Colonel Arce-Gomez, the stereotype of a medal-bedecked, grandiose Latin American dictator, seized extensive power as the Minister of Interior. General Luis Garcia Meza was sworn in as Bolivia’s new president.

The socialist Bolivian government was a natural enemy of the drug lords because it had robust anti-drug programs. Bolivia’s cocaine-related underworld was hostile to any government that enacted anti-drug legislation, making the Bolivian drug lords ideal proxies to support a coup in Bolivia. As the drug lords sought to expand their cartel, and as the CIA and the Argentine government aimed to suppress socialism in South America, an alliance was formed against Bolivia’s legitimate government. By this point, it was inevitable that the Bolivian government would be overthrown by drug fascism. The result: a drug-fascist government. Once in the hands of the drug lords, Bolivia’s drug production was organized into a plantation and refinement cartel known as La Corporacion, which Michael Levine describes as the General Motors of cocaine. Simultaneously, Argentina was organizing Contras in Nicaragua at the time, not long before the CIA took over control of the Contras operation. All the functional dots had been arranged, and it was a simple matter to connect the various interests to form a connection from ”Point A” to ”Point Z.” ”Point Z” may not have worked as well if the CIA-supported Contras had not provided an incredible mechanism for access to the final market in America’s inner cities: a protected channel for narcotics.

A notable example of direct U.S. support for dictatorships is when, in 1975, Henry Kissinger traveled with Gerald Ford to Indonesia, where they met with the U.S.-backed and armed dictator Suharto, under whose 35-year rule millions of people were killed. On the same day Ford and Kissinger departed, Indonesian troops invaded the independent territory of East Timor. One-third of the country’s population was exterminated over the next 20 years of occupation, but this had little impact on continued U.S. and Western arms shipments to the regime in Jakarta. Documents recently released by the National Security Archives confirm that Suharto received approval for the invasion from the American president and Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger.

Nixon and Kissinger, along with John Negroponte, one of Kissinger’s advisors and the officer responsible for Vietnam on the National Security Council, orchestrated a government coup in Cambodia in March 1970, which created chaos. Negroponte would later serve as the U.S. Ambassador to Iraq from 2004 to 2005 and as National Security Director from 2005 to 2007. On March 26, 2001, the Los Angeles Times reported, ”While serving as U.S. ambassador to Honduras from 1981-85, Negroponte played a critical role in the secret arming of Nicaraguan Contras, and he has been accused by human rights groups of overlooking – or perhaps even overseeing – human rights violations by CIA-trained Honduran death squads during his tenure.” The CIA had limitless resources to assist the government in its depopulation efforts. Along with Oliver North, ”he also helped orchestrate a secret agreement, later known as Iran-Contras, to send weapons via Honduras to assist Contras in overthrowing the Sandinista government.” Negroponte was the U.S. Ambassador in Honduras when hundreds of Hondurans, labeled ”insurgents,” were arrested, raped, tortured, and slaughtered by Battalion 316, a Honduran intelligence unit that was trained, financed, and supported by the Pentagon and the CIA. Battalion 316 also participated in CIA’s secret operations in Nicaragua. Negroponte served as Deputy Secretary of State under Condoleezza Rice.

Even when ”competitors” were peaceful and limited to the political-economic sphere, violence, war, and chaos ensued when the U.S. intervened. This scenario played out in Chile during the 1970s, Afghanistan, Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua, and El Salvador during the 1980s, in Yugoslavia and the Balkans in general during the 1990s, and in Bolivia, Venezuela, and across the globe under the guise of the ”Global War on Terror” (GWOT). The lesson for those who defy the global hegemon? American political subversion and state-sponsored terrorism that will create chaos and thwart independent development.

And when the global Godfather’s military power intervenes directly? Although the U.S. was defeated in Southeast Asia, the countries targeted, such as Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, were destroyed by the U.S. in the process. These countries were ravaged economically and socially and, decades later, have yet to fully recover from the devastation wrought by their American ”liberators.” However, the U.S. military learned some unique skills, not least of which is how selective violence could be applied against the civilian infrastructure of the communist National Liberation Front.

The Phoenix program, detailed to the smallest degree in researcher Douglas Valentine’s outstanding account, was launched in 1967 by the CIA and American special forces as a way to win ”hearts and minds.” But from its inception, Phoenix agents worked side by side with ”allies” in South Vietnam and Laos with drug connections, and the program gradually morphed into a program of executions and torture that killed thousands. Long after the U.S. withdrew from Southeast Asia, the lessons learned from Phoenix and similar programs like Condor and Gladio in the 1970s and 1980s in Afghanistan, Italy, Turkey, and Central America were ”refined,” and these now form the foundations on which Pentagon’s unconventional warfare doctrines rest today.

During the Cold War, American power was exercised in ”proxy states” through oppressive police forces, intelligence services, and civilian allies on the far right (termed ”foreign internal defense,” FID). Such forces, trained and financed by the U.S., combined a neo-fascist political outlook with organized criminal activity, often within, but not always limited to, the international drug trade.

NATO’s infamous ”stay-behind” Operation Gladio networks in Italy and Turkey, to name a couple, worked directly with international drug syndicates and political parties with fascist sympathies, such as the Italian Avanguardia Nazionale (The National Vanguard) founded by terrorist and drug smuggler Stefano delle Chiaie and the Turkish Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi (National Action Group, MHP) and the terrorist group the Gray Wolves, also with drug ties, founded by Alparslan Türkeş, who sympathized with Germany during World War II.

Linked to these nations’ intelligence services as well as the CIA and the Pentagon, these organizations waged a ruthless war against the left through terror bombings, murders, and executions in an attempt to destabilize these governments and trigger complete military takeovers. Together with the CIA, the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) has been instrumental in the organization and execution of unconventional warfare with the stated purpose of maintaining an economic-political status quo in the targeted countries.

As loyal readers of Antifascist Calling know, there are some very important themes explored here, including those related to the intersection of corporate and military power and how these powers interact on the contemporary political stage to undermine democracy and social justice movements. In fact, what has come to be identified as the corporatist ”deep state” is often mentioned: i.e., the objective interface between political elites, multinational corporations, the military, intelligence services, and organized crime. These connections are part of the war Washington has waged for decades against movements for social justice in general and democratic and grassroots movements in particular.

As we will see in this analysis of FM 3-05.130, USSOCOM makes these connections clear and reasons: ”UW must be conducted by, with, or through surrogates; such surrogates must be unconventional forces.” Deputy groups, often allied with far-right groups and linked to organized crime (mostly interchangeable players), are the ”unconventional groups” that Washington prefers to use. USSOCOM claims that this definition ”is consistent with the historical reasons the U.S. has engaged in UW” and continues by citing the country’s ”support” during the 1980s, both for insurgencies such as the Contras in Nicaragua, and resistance movements to defeat an occupying power, such as the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. It cannot get much clearer than that!

ideologically consistent
The authors of FM 3-05.130 are far from warmongering cavemen; they are knowledgeable and scholarly. They provide a broad and ideologically consistent description that is both informative and historically interesting in its openness and methodological purposes. In other words, they get straight to the point, unlike their political leaders.

They inform the reader straightforwardly that UW establishes a ”litmus test” that is warfare ”by, with, or through surrogates” and that they prefer ”unconventional forces.” ”Unconventional forces” are individuals or groups of individuals who are not members of the regular army, police, or other internal security forces. They are usually not sponsored by the state and not bound by the laws and boundaries of independent nations. These forces may include, but are not limited to, specific paramilitary forces, contractors, individuals, companies, foreign political organizations, resistance or insurgent movements, immigrants, transnational terrorist adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorist members, black-market operators, and other social and political ”undesirables” (Unconventional Warfare, p. 1-3).

While ”conventional warfare” is seen as conflict between states, Irregular Warfare (IW) and UW, according to FM 3-05.130, ”are about people, not platforms.” Irregular and unconventional warfare ”depend not solely on military skills.” They also depend on an understanding of dynamic forces such as political regimes, social networks, religious influence, and cultural practices. Although IW is armed conflict, not all participating unconventional forces need necessarily be armed. People, rather than weapons, platforms, and advanced technology, are the key to success in IW. Successful IW is built on establishing relationships and partnerships at the local level. It requires patient, persistent, and culturally informed individuals within the joint forces to conduct IW (Unconventional Warfare, p. 1-5).

It is explicitly stated in FM 3-05.130 that its ”strategic purpose [is] to gain or maintain control or influence over relevant populations and to support these populations with political, psychological, and economic methods.” While both IW and UW aim to gain influence over ”relevant population groups,” UW, unlike IW, is ”always by, with, or through unconventional forces.” In other words, local surrogates drawn from suitable right-wing groups and/or organized crime are the tools to exert ”influence” over ”relevant population groups.”

In Bosnia and Kosovo during the 1990s, elements of the ”unconventional forces” deployed during the U.S. and NATO destabilization operations in former Yugoslavia included members from the Afghan-Arab database of available intelligence agents, e.g., al-Qaeda, which has been linked to the CIA, MI6 in the UK, the German Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), and Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI), as well as well-established networks for smuggling drugs, weapons, and people linked to the mafia in Albania and Turkey. In fact, ”unconventional forces” such as the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) exhibited all these connections as clearly as possible.

According to FM 3-05.130, modern IW theory includes the following components: insurgency; counterinsurgency (COIN); unconventional warfare (UW); terrorism; counterterrorism (CT); foreign internal defense (FID); stability, security, transition, and reconstruction operations (SSTR); strategic communication (SC); psychological operations (PSYOP); civil-military operations (CMO); intelligence operations (IO); espionage and counterespionage (CI); cross-border criminal activities, including drug trafficking, illegal arms sales, and illicit financial transactions that support or assist IW; and policing activities focused on countering unconventional adversaries (Unconventional Warfare, p. 1-5).

The transition from quoting parts of UW to using very dubious players as strategic partners in global U.S. destabilization operations is not a big one at all.

The role of the media
The role of the media is clearly pronounced when it comes to advancing the goals of U.S. national power. As recent exposés in The New York Times and other sources have documented, ”message force multipliers,” such as retired Pentagon employees and former high-ranking officers, often with connections to defense companies that rely heavily on Pentagon generosity, have maximized their expertise and carried out illegal domestic psychological operations (PSYOPS) and information warfare, with the participation and full knowledge of media giants.

It is important for official authorities, including the military, to realize the fundamental role that the media plays in conveying information. The USG uses Strategic Communication (SC) to provide top-down guidance regarding the use of the instruments of national power through coordinated information, themes, messages, and products synchronized with other instruments of national power. The military supports SC themes and messages through Information Operations (IO), Public Affairs (PA), and support for Public Diplomacy (DSPD). The military must ensure that the media’s access to information is in line with classification requirements, legal constraints, and individual privacy. The military must also provide the public with current and accurate information. Success in military operations relies on acquiring and integrating the most critical information and the ability to prevent the adversary from gaining access to it. The military is responsible for conducting IO, protecting what should not be disclosed, and aggressively attacking the adversary’s information systems. IO can involve complex legal and political issues that require approval, review, and coordination at the national level. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 2-2)

As the authors actually claim, ”since UW consists of operations conducted ’by, with, or through’ non-conventional forces, ’warfare in the human terrain’ is ’primarily a clash of ideas’!” In short, ”the human terrain” explicitly includes the American public, which is also a target of Pentagon propaganda-like ”information operations.” The following is expressed without reservation: USG-controlled specific instruments can, however, despite being of limited scope, achieve specific and measurable results useful for conducting UW. ARSOF [Army Special Operations Forces] can work with counterparts within DOS [government departments] to identify and ”engage” selected TAs [target audiences] that can influence behavior in a UWOA [unconventional warfare operational area]. Such TAs may exist within the UWOA itself or outside it but with the potential to influence the UWOA. The USG can then expose these TAs, directly or indirectly, to a DOS public diplomacy (PD) campaign coordinated to support the UW effort. Since UW can be a protracted and politically sensitive issue, ARSOF and its DOS partners can similarly construct a PA campaign to keep the [American] domestic audience informed of the truth in a way that supports USG’s goals and enables the effective pursuit of UW. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 2-3)

Economic undermining
The authors of FM 3-05.130 believe that the ”appropriate integrated manipulation of economic power can and should be one of the components of UW.” It doesn’t matter that such ”manipulation” led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq before the U.S. invasion and occupation in 2003, as well as in a dozen other countries that have defied the USA.

Cases like Chile and Nicaragua are illustrative in this regard: Richard Nixon, the disgraced president, promised to ”make the economy scream” before the 1973 coup; similarly, crippling sanctions and an economic embargo were imposed on Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. Various sanctions against regimes ”can build and maintain international coalitions that conduct or support American UW campaigns. A similar approach is being used today against Iran as ”punishment” for its legal development of civilian nuclear power.

Like all other instruments of U.S. national power, the use and effects of economic ”weapons” are internally related and must be coordinated carefully. Once again, ARSOF must work thoroughly with the DOS and intelligence services to determine which elements of the human terrain in the UWOA are most susceptible to economic interventions and what secondary and tertiary effects are likely after such an intervention. The United States Agency for International Development’s (USAID’s) presence abroad and its mission to employ groups of people provide a channel for reinforcing economic incentives. DOCs can similarly strengthen their routine influence among U.S. companies operating abroad. Moreover, IO effects from economic promises kept (or broken) may prove critical to the legitimacy of U.S. UW efforts. UW practitioners must plan for these effects. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 2-7)

ARSOF’s plans for UW take an integrated approach and claim that they ”can and should exploit the active and analytical opportunities among the financial instruments of U.S. power.” The application of financial warfare, including the ”coercive influence” of ”actors” at the national and other levels concerning the availability and terms of ”loans, aid, or other financial assistance,” however, depends on the willingness to comply with the will of the USA. The authors argue that ”such exercise of financial power must be part of a discreet, integrated, and consistent UW plan.” In other words, threats, bribes, and economic disruption in general can work excellently to get the attention of the recalcitrant states that are not ”on board” with the USA. In Chapter Two, ”Financial Instrument of U.S. National Power and Unconventional Warfare,” they write in black and white how the IMF, BIS, and VB are financial weapons of U.S. national power.

Drug-smuggling networks and the ”Global War on Terrorism”
For decades, investigative journalists, researchers, and analysts have highlighted the symbiotic relationship between international drug smuggling syndicates, neo-fascist political groups, U.S. intelligence services, and U.S. special forces in the war against leftist political opponents.

Dozens of books and hundreds of articles by journalists and authors such as Alfred W. McCoy, Peter Dale Scott, Henrik Krüger, Robert Parry, Gary Webb, Jonathan Marshall, Douglas Valentine, Daniel Hopsicker, Bill Conroy, as well as revelations from former DEA investigators like Michael Levine and Celerino Castillo III, have documented the long and bloody involvement of the United States in the global drug trade.

While the USA has poured billions of dollars into so-called drug eradication programs in target countries like Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Afghanistan, and Mexico through poorly conceived projects like Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative, also known as Plan Mexico, recent reports, especially in The Narco News Bulletin, have revealed the close relationship between drug traffickers, right-wing extremists, political elites, and U.S. intelligence services.

Investigative journalist Bill Conroy has recently reported how a U.S.-trained and equipped special force within the Mexican army (the Zetas) ”is now assisting the Mexican military in its drug smuggling activities along the border.”

However, none of this troubles the authors of Unconventional Warfare. And why should it? As they themselves describe in the doctrine, unconventional warfare is conducted ”by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must consist of irregular forces.” The next logical step is the use of transnational criminal networks to advance U.S. national power. The section, ”Instruments for Maintaining Law and Order for U.S. National Power and Unconventional Warfare,” expresses this without reservation: no conspiracy theories here!

Actors used to support UWOA can rely on criminal activities, such as drug or human smuggling. Political and military adversaries in UWOA exhibit the same sensitivity to public exposure and involvement because criminal entities routinely try to evade law enforcement. In some cases, political and military enemies are also criminal adversaries, which ARSOF’s UW planners must see as a threat. At other times, the methods and networks of actual or perceived criminal entities can be useful as support elements for U.S.-sponsored efforts. Regardless, ARSOF understands the importance of coordinating military intelligence preparation of the battlefield (IPB) for specific war plans with the routine intelligence activities conducted by U.S. intelligence services. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 2-7)

During the disruptive activities of U.S. ARSOF soldiers in target areas, domestic networks, often linked to right-wing extremist and drug-smuggling groups (Nicaragua, Bosnia, Kosovo), including ”former” allies like al-Qaida, ”The Underground,” and ”Support Forces” in FM 3-05.130. However, there are few details, and the authors unequivocally state:

More SF participation occurs in the development and advising of underground [and supporting] elements than is widely known or confirmed. Most of this involvement is classified and not suitable for inclusion in this manual. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 5-5)

Preparing the terrain for U.S. attacks and/or disruptive activities by surrogate forces that share U.S. objectives is one of the key components of UW theory. Whether a population is positively disposed toward U.S. geostrategic goals and the tactical methods used in such campaigns is irrelevant to the new cold-blooded warriors in the GWOT. When ”persuasion” fails, the muscles step in to get the ”natives’ ” attention.

The organization of the broader indigenous population, from which the surrogate forces are drawn—the broad mass—must also be carried out by the same organization, under indirect oversight from SF. The primary value of the broad mass in UW operations is not so much a matter of formal organization as it is ensuring that population groups act in a particular way that supports the overall UW campaign. The broad mass, or the general population and society at large, is seen as an operational, rather than a structural, effort for ARSOF in UW. Elements of the broad mass are divided into three distinct groups with respect to purpose or movement—for, against, and those who are neutral, ambivalent, or undecided. ARSOF, ”The Underground,” and ”Support Forces” then conduct irregular activities to influence or reinforce these groups. These groups may be aware or unaware that the operations or activities they are being used for have a UW character. (Unconventional Warfare, p. 5-5)

In, for example, Colombia, U.S. ”anti-drug” aid was provided to the corrupt Uribe government, directly to the right-wing, drug-smuggling death squad, Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC). Despite being designated a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, the top military leadership of the Uribe government, under direct guidance from the Pentagon, smuggled weapons and intelligence used by narco-fascists to murder union leaders, often after payment by U.S. multinationals like Chiquita Brands International and their identification of who they identified as guerrillas.

In ARSOF language, AUC ”influence”—such as forcing unsuspecting citizens to get off a bus and then behead them in front of their children—is what is meant when saying that death squads with connections to big business or drugs ”carry out irregular activities” to ”influence these groups.” The international community uses another term to describe these activities: state terrorism.

As part of extensive U.S. efforts to overthrow Venezuela’s socialist President Hugo Chávez, Venezuelan authorities arrested about 100 AUC fighters in 2004 who were planning to attack selected targets in Caracas. According to published reports, several senior U.S. and Colombian officers were involved in the operation.

The parapolitical scandal that continues to shake Bogotá revealed the high level of involvement in the narco-fascist AUC by Colombia’s political and military elite. However, the scandal also revealed the involvement of the U.S. 7th Special Forces Group and 1st Psychological Operations Battalion in the direct training and advising of Colombian military units responsible for the worst human rights violations. Numerous reports have detailed these connections, including the 2007 revelation by the National Security Archive that Colombian Army commander General Mario Montoya ”participated in a joint operation with a Medellín-based paramilitary group.”

However, this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg
In Afghanistan, the world’s largest producer of opium and its ”end product,” heroin, intended for the European and American markets, the drug trade is ”out of control,” according to a 2008 report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). According to UNODC, drug money is used as ”a lubricant for corruption and a source of financing for terrorism: corrupt officials and terrorists, in turn, make it easier to produce and smuggle drugs.”

Since the US invasion and occupation in 2001, opium production has skyrocketed by 1,000%, now constituting a significant part of the country’s GDP. Significantly, some of the staunchest US allies in the region have direct connections to international drug organizations. According to UNODC, the global increase in opium production ”was almost entirely due to the 17 percent increase in cultivation in Afghanistan, which now covers 193,000 hectares.” This amounted to 8,700 tons in 2007, which is a staggering 92% of the global opium production!

Despite these horrifying figures, the authors of FM 3-05.130 argue that ”real or perceived methods of criminal networks may be appropriate”! Indeed, they can be, serving as a seemingly endless source of black money earmarked for American global subversive activities aimed at expanding the power of American corporations.

According to a June 2008 report in The Times, Taliban drug lords with American connections are stockpiling enormous quantities of opium, as last year’s record harvest caused the price of opium to fall dramatically, to induce a price increase. Time Magazine reported in October last year that the value of the stored opium could amount to as much as $3.2 billion.

Hailed by the Pentagon and the American media as an ”outstanding victory,” the 2001 invasion and occupation of Afghanistan has quickly turned into chaos, with the country now facing a resurgent Taliban movement, a new base for al-Qaeda’s operations against the tribal areas in Pakistan, and signs of ISI involvement in aiding fundamentalist insurgents and the global drug trade. A full account of the war crimes planned and led by ARSOF and their ”allies” in the Northern Alliance has yet to be provided.

As Peter Dale Scott noted in 2002, it is a bitter irony: the largely successful American campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is set to increase funding for terrorists worldwide.

It is true, as President Bush has insisted, that global terrorism is funded by the flow of illegal drugs. Nevertheless, the United States itself has helped to reestablish the flow of heroin from Afghanistan to terrorist groups, from the Balkans and Chechnya to Tajikistan, Pakistan, and Kashmir, by installing and rewarding a coalition of drug-financed warlords in Kabul. A full account of the war crimes planned and led by ARSOF and their ”allies” in the Northern Alliance has yet to be provided.

As some of the most steadfast allies of the United States in the region, figures like Hazrat Ali and Gul Agha, ”have been bought” with million-dollar agreements negotiated by American and British intelligence services. However, while the United States was content to support a drug-related status quo relying on the so-called ”warlord strategy” to ”stabilize” Afghanistan, the side effects of these dubious alliances included the possibility for bin Laden to flee to Pakistan in 2001, after the ”battle” at Tora Bora.

For advocates of unconventional warfare in the Pentagon, ”the price is always right” when it comes to strategic and tactical alliances with drug traffickers and international terrorists. Everything is allowed because ”unconventional warfare must be fought by, with, or through surrogates; and such surrogates must be irregular forces.”

An article in The New York Times that dropped like a bomb in October last year reveals how Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s president’s brother, a suspected leader of the country’s flourishing opium trade, has been on the CIA’s payroll for the past eight years. The article is, however, hardly more than a whitewash as it fails to account for the fact that one of the main reasons for the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was to restore the drug trade in the Golden Crescent.

”Heroin is a multibillion-dollar industry supported by powerful interests that require a steady and secure trade flow. One of the ’hidden’ goals of the war was precisely to restore the CIA-sponsored drug trade to its historical levels and exert direct control over drug routes,” writes Chossudovsky.

”After two years of CIA secret operations in Afghanistan ’heroin production resumed,’ the traditional source of funding for the CIA. Since the invasion in October 2001, according to the New York Times, opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan has increased more than 600 percent,” notes Chossudovsky. Fmr. CEO and board member of the investment bank Dillon Read, Catherine Austin Fitts, has long claimed that bankers laundered enormous sums of drug money. ”According to the Department of Defense, the US launders $500 billion to $1 trillion annually. I have no idea what percentage of this is drug money, but one could safely assume that at least $100-200 billion has drug connections to US imports and exports and retail,” writes Fitts.

Fitts’ claim was reinforced by Antonio Maria Costa, head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Vienna, who said in January 2009 that the illegal drug trade has been used to keep banks afloat during the global economic crisis. ”In many cases, drug money is currently the only liquid investment capital,” said Costa. ”In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s biggest problem, and hence liquid capital became an important factor.”

Visselblåsare
Sibel Edmonds has a story to tell. She started working as a translator of Turkish and Farsi for the FBI five days after 9/11. Part of her job was to translate and transcribe recordings of conversations between Turkish intelligence agents and their American contacts. She was fired from the FBI in April 2002 after expressing concerns about a translator in her department being a member of a Turkish organization under investigation for bribing high-ranking government officials and congressmen, drug smuggling, illegal arms sales, and the spread of nuclear weapons. She appealed her dismissal but found it more troubling that nothing was done to address the corruption she had uncovered. John Ashcroft’s Justice Department indirectly confirmed Edmonds’ credibility by twice invoking the State Secrets Privilege to prevent her from disclosing what she knew. The ACLU has called her ”the most silenced woman in U.S. history.”

According to a released version of a 2005 report by the Justice Department’s Inspector General, Sibel Edmonds’ allegations are ”credible,” ”serious,” and ”warrant careful and thorough review by the FBI.” Perhaps even more condemning, John Cole from the FBI recently confirmed one of the key elements of Edmonds’ claims when he revealed the existence of an ”FBI decade-long investigation” of the State Department’s Marc Grossman. Edmonds claimed that Grossman may be the top U.S. leader of the entire foreign espionage program. Cole further stated that the investigation was ”buried and covered up.” Cole, now working as an intelligence officer for the Air Force, not only believes that Edmonds is ”very credible” but also confirms the ”ongoing and detailed efforts Turkey makes to develop its influence in the United States” through a number of illegal means. ”Turkish individuals request a service – you know, ’If you help me then I will help you’ – and what happens is that the elected official accepts this money or gift,” Cole explained. ”Or, if it’s a government employee, I’ve seen it where after retirement they have a very lucrative job with a Turkish company, or whatever country it is.”

Senator Charles Grassley (R) says of her allegations, ”Absolutely, she’s credible, and the reason I feel she’s very credible is because people within the FBI have corroborated a lot of her story.” Recently released FBI documents provide additional support for many of the claims that former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has been making, publicly and in Congress, since 2002. The documents were released under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for an organization called the Turkish American Cultural Alliance (TACA), an organization that Ms. Edmonds has referred to in the past as part of the American Turkish Council and her “State Secrets Privilege Gallery.” She has said that the TACA was part of the large network that was engaged in the sale of nuclear secrets, arms and drugs, and included both current and former high-ranking U.S. officials.

Sibel Edmonds dropped a bomb on Mike Malloy’s radio show last year. In the interview, Sibel says, ”I have information about things that our government has lied to us about. I know. For example, to say that since the fall of the Soviet Union we ceased all of our intimate relationship with Bin Laden and the Taliban and all of these Central Asian – ’Stans’ and – ’Stans’ meaning countries – it’s a lie. It’s a lie. They were working with these people, and the thing with these ’Stans is, it’s very interesting, the things they’re doing there: when you go back to, these operations involve Central Asia, all the way up to September 11th.”

According to Sibel, this ”intimate relationship” included using Bin Laden for ”operations” in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These ”operations” included using al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the same way ”we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict,” that is, to fight ’enemies’ through proxies.

Sibel says the beginning of this more than 10 years long illegal, covert operation in Central Asia by a small group in the US, within the government, and by several individuals, they were also, the drug barons, also, the oil industry – they get together and the object is to further this goal, and that is to further the American military and financial industrial interest in the region.” Further, it gives Sibel additional credibility because the leader of a Pakistani-based terrorist organization closely linked to al-Qaeda has detailed in court how his group has been getting support from the CIA in exchange for continued attacks on the Iranian government, population and infrastructure. Abdolmalek Rigi, the leader of the Baluchi terrorist group Jundullah, said in his testimony, ”I don’t want to say for sure that the Americans had a plan from the beginning to use the Jundullah for toppling the Islamic Republic of Iran…because the Americans would want to blame the Pakis [Pakistanis] for the terrorism in Iran to justify their own operations in Pakistan and undermine the Pakistani government…But I can say for sure that they wanted to use the Baluchis for pressing their other aims in the region…One of the aims was to bring the Baluchis and their areas under their control and pressure the Iranian government…If you look carefully you will see that the Americans kept away from the Jundullah and did not get too close to them because it was becoming clear that the Jundullah was an Al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist organization.”

Ultimately, as Sibel stated, ”This ’intimate relationship’ included using Bin Laden for ’operations’ in Central Asia, including Xinjiang, China. These ’operations’ included using al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the same way ”we did during the Afghan and Soviet conflict,” that is, to fight ’enemies’ through proxies.”

Research-related links

Obama and Afghanistan: America’s Drug-Corrupted War
State-Sponsored Terror: British and American Black Ops in Iraq
Financial Scams and the Bush Family. NAFTA Negotiations with the Salinas Family

The Anglo-American Empire has declared war on humanity