Oliver North, ex-CIA, oud-drugslord en oorlogsmisdadiger waarschijnlijk nieuwe president terreurorganisatie NRA......

Lees het volgende uitstekende artikel van Jon Schwarz, gepubliceerd op The Intercept, over Oliver North die van drugslord, nu waarschijnlijk snel zal worden gebombardeerd (deden ze dat maar letterlijk) tot president van terreurorganisatie NRA, ofwel de National Rifle Association......

Leden van de NRA snappen nog steeds niet dat alcohol één van de dodelijkste harddrugs op de wereld is, maar hebben wel de pest aan alles wat men verder illegale drugs* noemt (waar ze uiteraard ook cannabis toe rekenen......). Geen nood voor deze veelal hypocriete christenen, Oliver North wordt ondanks zijn rol als 'drugslord' en terrorist gewoon als held gezien, terwijl hij een oorlogsmisdadiger is die berecht zou moeten worden voor het Internationaal Strafhof in Den Haag (het ICC).....

Als North bijvoorbeeld een Colombiaan was geweest, had men hem al lang opgesloten in de VS vanwege zijn bemoeienis met de invoer van enorme hoeveelheden cocaïne (in de VS).....

Voorts heeft North de Contra's in Nicaragua, een terreurgroep die tegen de socialistische regering vocht, gesteund met wapens, die hij kocht van de winsten gemaakt met drugshandel....

Ach het voorgaande geeft ten overvloede nog eens aan waarvoor de NRA staat: grootschalige terreur op de straten, scholen en andere openbare gelegenheden van de VS.......

OLIVER NORTH WORKED WITH COCAINE TRAFFICKERS TO ARM TERRORISTS. NOW HE’LL BE PRESIDENT OF THE NRA.

     Jon Schwarz

  May 12 2018, 2:03 p.m.

THE NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION has always been clear about drugs: They’re terrifying.

Last year, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre darkly warned that members of drug gangs “are infiltrating law enforcement and even the military.” In 2013, LaPierre proclaimed that “Latin American drug gangs have invaded every city of significant size in the United States,” and are a key part of the “hellish world” that awaits us in the future. When Charlton Heston was president of the NRA in the 1990s, he declared that regular Americans would soon be besieged by 10,000 drug dealers freed from prison by the Clinton administration.

It seems odd, then, that the next president of the NRA will soon be Oliver North, who spent years in the 1980s working together with large-scale cocaine traffickers and protecting a notorious narco-terrorist from the rest of the U.S. government.

This reality about North has been largely covered up, first by North himself and then by Fox News and the passage of time. Thirty years later, it’s been almost totally forgotten. But the facts remain genuinely appalling.

North was an active-duty Marine when he joined the Reagan administration’s National Security Council in 1981. One of Reagan’s top priorities was organizing and funding the Contras, a guerrilla military force, to overthrow the revolutionary socialist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. But the Contras engaged in extensive, gruesome terrorism against Nicaraguan civilians. Congress gradually reduced and then eliminated appropriations supporting them, leading the Reagan administration to secretly search for money elsewhere.

According to the report from a later congressional investigation, North was put in charge of this operation, which participants dubbed “The Enterprise.”

"Report of the congressional committees investigating the Iran-Contra Affair,” U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Transactions with Iran; U.S. Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition, 1987

North enthusiastically looked for cash wherever he could find it, and led many of the clandestine schemes that later became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. The Sultan of Brunei donated $10 million (which North’s secretary Fawn Hall accidentally wired to the wrong Swiss bank account), and Saudi Arabia ponied up as well. North also pushed what he called “a neat idea”: selling U.S. military equipment to Iran, with the proceeds passed along to the Contras.

Meanwhile, the Contras had a neat idea of their own: facilitating cocaine trafficking through Central America into the U.S., with a cut going toward supporting their war against the Sandinistas. Some Contras were themselves cocaine traffickers, and others were simply happy to make alliances of convenience with drug cartels.

There’s no evidence North actively wanted cocaine to be smuggled into the U.S. It was simply that he had other priorities. But was he aware of the Contras’ drug trafficking? Yes. Did he try to shield one of “his” cocaine traffickers from consequences from the other branches of the U.S. government? Yes. Did he work together with a known drug lord? Yes.

All in all, North’s connections to drug trafficking were so egregious that in 1989 he was banned from entering Nicaragua’s neighbor Costa Rica by Oscar Arias, the country’s president and 1987 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize.

This may seem shocking to the easily shocked. But it’s all been documented in various government investigations. All you need in order to learn about it is curiosity and an internet connection. For instance, here’s a screenshot from the CIA’s website about the Nicaraguan Revolutionary Democratic Alliance, or ADREN by its Spanish acronym, which was later folded into the Contras:

"Allegations of Connections Between CIA and The Contras in Cocaine Trafficking to the United States,” CIA, 1998

The full extent of North’s complicity in cocaine trafficking will never be known. When the Iran-Contra scandal story broke in November 1986, he ordered Hall to destroy so many documents that the shredder malfunctioned, and she had to ask White House maintenance to come and fix it. Moreover, when North was removed from his National Security Council (NSC) job, he took with him 2,848 pages of daily notes — which legally belonged to the federal government. By the time a congressional investigation was finally able to examine the notes, North and his lawyers had redacted huge amounts of information.

Nonetheless, 543 of the pages mentioned drugs or drug trafficking, with the probe finding that “in many of these cases, material in the Notebooks adjacent to the narcotics references has been deleted.”

"Drugs, Law Enforcement And Foreign Policy,” U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 1989

But despite North’s cover-up, what we do know for sure is incredibly damning.

Perhaps most significantly, according to North’s own notes he met with Panama’s then-dictator Manuel Noriega in London in September 1986 to collaborate on a plan for Noriega to support the Contras in return for American money and arms. They discussed sabotaging a Nicaraguan airport and oil refinery, as well as creating a program to train Contra and Afghan mujahedeen commandos in Panama with Israeli help. (It’s not completely clear, but North appears to have written that “Rabin” – i.e., Yitzhak Rabin, who was then Israel’s minister of defense – “approves.”)

North was clearly enthusiastic about the potential partnership with Noriega. In an earlier email selling the proposal to one of his superiors, he wrote that “we might have available a very effective, very secure means of doing some of the things which must be done if the Nicaragua project is going to succeed. … I believe we could make the appropriate arrangements w/ reasonable OPSEC and deniability.”

Email, Oliver North to John Poindexter, May 8, 1986 (neem aan dat het niet om een email ging destijds....)

But of course, Noriega was himself a powerful drug trafficker. Knowing this didn’t require a top-secret clearance: It was published on the front page of the New York Times three months before North met with him. According to the Times article, “A White House official said the most significant drug-running in Panama was being directed by General Noriega.”

The North-Noriega operation ultimately didn’t come to fruition; the Iran-Contra affair was exposed just two months after they met. But the planning that did occur is conclusive evidence that North eagerly worked with drug dealers operating on the largest scale imaginable.

“Panama Strongman Said to Trade In Drugs, Arms and Illicit Money,” New York Times, June 11, 1986

North also went to great lengths to protect an ally who was a key participant in what the Justice Department called “the most significant case of narco-terrorism yet discovered.”

In 1984, José Bueso Rosa, a Honduran general, plotted with several others to assassinate the president of Honduras. They planned to fund the hit with the proceeds from selling 760 pounds of cocaine in the U.S.

The FBI, however, had the participants under surveillance, intercepted the shipment when it arrived at a small airfield in Florida, and arrested everyone involved.

But Bueso had played a key role in Honduran support for the Contras. So North went to work to get him off as lightly as possible. (Bueso had not himself been charged with drug trafficking, but wiretaps made it obvious he participated in that part of the project.)

In email, North explained his plans to “cabal quietly” with other Reagan administration officials “to look at options: pardon, clemency, deportation, reduced sentence.” Eventually, North planned to have the case’s judge informed “in camera” — that is, secretly — about “our equities in this matter,” in order to push for leniency. Then, North wrote, it would be necessary to quietly brief Bueso, so that he wouldn’t “start singing songs nobody wants to hear.”

North didn’t get everything he wanted, but did succeed in having Bueso transferred to a “Club Fed” minimum security prison. Bueso was released on parole after 40 months.

THERE ARE ALSO numerous documented examples of North being informed that members of the Contras were involved in drug trafficking, with no signs that North took any action.

For instance, after meeting with a key assistant, North wrote in his notebooks about a plane being used by the brother of a top Contra leader to ferry supplies from the U.S. to Central America. “Honduran DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans,” North jotted down, “is probably being used for drug runs into U.S.”

North testified in front of Congress that he’d passed this information along to the Drug Enforcement Administration. When later questioned by the Washington Post, the DEA, the State Department, and the U.S. Customs Service all stated that there was no evidence North ever said anything about the matter to them.

Oliver North, notes, August 9, 1985

The same aide who told North about the plane also informed him about the “potential involvement with drug running” of one Contra official and that another was “now involved in drug running out of Panama.” And after a call from another subordinate, North noted that the Contras were planning to buy weapons from a Honduran warehouse — and “14 M to finance came from drugs.”

North was getting similar reports from outside the government as well. Dennis Ainsworth, a Republican real estate investor who’d volunteered to help the Contra cause, informed a U.S. attorney that the top Contra commander “was involved in drug trafficking,” but that the Nicaraguan community was frightened to come forward because “they could be blown away by Colombia hit squads.” Ainsworth said he’d tried to inform the White House about this but “we were put off by Ollie North,” and “I was even physically threatened by one of Ollie North’s associates.” (The U.S. attorney later wrote a memo with Ainsworth’s statements and transmitted it to the FBI.)

“Regarding Dennis Madden Ainsworth, Information Concerning,” FBI, January 6, 1987

North and the NRA did not immediately respond to requests for comment on this history. When North ran for Senate in 1994, his campaign spokesperson said his involvement with the Bueso case was “old news and garbage and nobody cares about it.” In a 2004 appearance on Fox News, North called a congressional investigation that focused on the Contra-cocaine connection “a witch hunt” with witnesses “who clearly had a political agenda.”

But the extraordinarily sordid nature of North’s past will be clear to anyone who appraises it honestly. In announcing North’s appointment, Wayne LaPierre said there’s “no one better suited to serve as our President,” and he’s correct. Oscar Arias wrote Thursday that the NRA “finds in Oliver North a leader worthy of its mission.” Peter Kornbluh, who was co-director of the Iran-Contra documentation project at the National Security Archive, is even more straightforward: North, he says, is “the perfect pick to further the NRA’s reputation for favoring bloodshed and criminality over responsible gun control and ownership.”

Top photo: Former U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North gives the Invocation at the National Rifle Association-Institute for Legislative Action Leadership Forum in Dallas on May 4, 2018.

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* Let wel: in het Engels zijn drugs ook de medicijnen tegen ziekte enz. Het gebruik van opiaten als pijnbestrijder is één van de redenen waarom er nu zoveel ophef is in de VS over verslaafden aan die opiaten, ofwel synthetische opium zoals Oxycontin. Bij velen wordt de werking van deze opiaten in de loop van de jaren steeds zwakker, waarna ze hun toevlucht nemen tot echte, niet synthetische opiaten als heroïne.....

PS: in de kop staat dat North ex-CIA werknemer is, in feite was dit zo gezien zijn handelen met de CIA, echter officieel heeft hij nooit op de CIA loonlijst gestaan.

Martin Luther King: de moord van 50 jaar geleden door de VS overheid uiterst beperkt herdacht

Het zal je niet ontgaan zijn, de moord op Martin Luther King, vandaag precies 50 jaar geleden. Op BBC en WDR lange bijdragen over het leven van King, waarbij de moord op hem alleen wordt genoemd, maar waar men niet ingaat op de vraag wie er achter de moord zat.......



Intussen is het al lang duidelijk dat meerdere geheime diensten uit de VS verantwoordelijk zijn voor de moord op King. Sterker nog: in 1999 werd in een rechtszaak van de familie King tegen de landelijke overheid*, deze overheid (meerdere geheime diensten als de FBI en de CIA) schuldig verklaard voor de moord op King en niet de veroordeelde James Earl Ray, die niets maar dan ook helemaal niets met de moord te maken had....

'Toevallig' waren er op de dag van de moord 8 scherpschutters van het 20ste Special Forces Team in de directe nabijheid van het motel waar King verbleef en waar hij van grote afstand werd neergeschoten......

Niet toevallig is het verzwijgen door de reguliere media van het hiervoor genoemde feit, al helemaal niet wat betreft deze media in de VS..... Nee veronderstel dat de VS nogmaals door de mand valt als terreurstaat...... Hetzelfde geldt dus ook voor het overgrote deel van de reguliere westerse media buiten de VS..... Tja, je gaat natuurlijk niet de 'geweldige' VS, 'de politieagent van de wereld', ons 'grote voorbeeld' beschuldigen van massamoord, verkrachting, marteling, coups plegen, geheime militaire acties zoals de moord op King en Kennedy, of erger nog het voluit voeren van illegale oorlogen....

Na de moord op King hebben de CIA en de DEA ervoor gezorgd dat de zwarte woonwijken werden overspoeld met heroïne, dit om verder verzet van de gekleurde bevolking te smoren, een doel dat voor een groot deel is behaald......

Overigens spreekt men alleen over King in samenhang met de strijd voor gelijke rechten in de VS, geen woord over zijn denkbeelden bijvoorbeeld over het inhumane kapitalisme...... (zie daarvoor de berichten onder de tweede en derde link hieronder) Alleen zijn verzet tegen de Vietnam Oorlog wordt 'in de kantlijn' nog even genoemd.....

* Zie de video van Brasscheck TV over de jury en de rechter die de overheid van de VS aanwees als dader van de moord op King:

Zie ook:
'Als Martin Luther King nog zou leven was hij onderwerp van censuur en was zijn Facebook pagina verwijderd'

'NAVO, het grootste militaire verbond maakt zich schuldig aan grootschalige terreur i.p.v. de vrede te bewaren' (o.a. geluidsfragmenten met het protest van King tegen de oorlog in Vietnam)

'Thomas Merton >> een kritische rk geestelijke vermoord in hetzelfde jaar als Robert F. Kennedy en Martin Luther King'

'Fred Hampton 30 augustus 1948 – 4 december 1969 >> mensenrechtenactivist vermoord door FBI en Chicago politie'

'Martin Luther King: de moord van 50 jaar geleden door de VS overheid uiterst beperkt herdacht'

'Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.: 8 wijze lessen!'

'Martin Luther King jr. vermoord door de overheid, aldus rechter........'

'De langzame moord op de ideeën van Martin Luther King................. Ofwel: Dr. Martin Luther Kings lessen willens en wetens verzwegen....'

'De oorlog tegen het arme deel van de VS bevolking'

'Nam Kurt Cobain zijn eigen leven? Niet volgens een flink aantal mensen'

'Martin Luther King misbruikt door Radio1'

 'Paul Scheffer, het media-orakel met een 'vlijmscherpe analyse' over het racistische optreden van de politie in de VS......... AUW!!!'

'Willem Post over de zegeningen van het zero tolerance beleid in de VS en ach, het is misschien ietsje doorgeschoten.......'

De kop na plaatsing aangepast, met de toevoeging dat King werd vermoord door de overheid (mijn excuus), zie daarvoor de links hierboven, op 11 april 2018 toegevoegd.

De war on drugs is veel dodelijker dan over het algemeen gedacht

De war on drugs is veel dodelijker dan u zich realiseert, zo luidt de kop boven een artikel van Brian Saady. Daar moet ik hem toch corrigeren, die oorlog is veel dodelijker dan gedacht door het publiek dat hier weinig of geen aandacht voor heeft, immers er wordt behoorlijk bericht over het enorme aantal doden dat jaarlijks valt in Mexico en in andere Midden- en Zuid-Amerikaanse landen, plus de VS....* Neem alleen al de massagraven die men in Mexico heeft ontdekt (en nog zal ontdekken...).....

Voorts komt Saady met beschuldigingen als zou Hezbollah verantwoordelijk zijn voor drugssmokkel, een vaststelling die eerder al onderuit werd gehaald vanwege het ontbreken van enig bewijs....... Hetzelfde geldt voor zijn uitlating t.a.v. de Koerdische PKK..........

Jammer ook dat Saady volkomen negatief spreekt over de FARC, terwijl deze organisatie bijzonder veel heeft gedaan bijvoorbeeld t.b.v. de kleine boeren en een groot aantal van hen heeft bescherming gekregen van de FARC tegen de willekeur van het leger, de politie, de rechtse doodseskaders (die samen met politie en leger) alles wat maar links rook, als het even kon (en nog kan) vermoordde....... Waar de grootgrondbezitters en hun legertjes aan 'beveiligers' in Colombia 'natuurlijk' hun steentje aan bij hebben gedragen, sterker nog: de doodseskaders werden en worden gesteund door die grootgrondbezitters......

Je zou bijna denken dat vooral links verzet tegen willekeur de grote drugskartels vormen, echter dit is uiteraard grote flauwekul!

Lees het artikel van Saady over deze zaak:

The War on Drugs Is Far Deadlier Than You Realize

March 26, 2018 at 12:09 pm
Written by Anti-Media News Desk

(FEE) — While accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos said:

“The manner in which this war against drugs is being waged is equally or perhaps even more harmful than all the wars the world is fighting today, combined.”

The death toll from the drug war is much less than the actual warfare throughout the world. However, his sentiment is quite appropriate because a significant percentage of the world’s violence could be prevented with a flick of a pen by ending the War on Drugs.

Cartels and Violence

Imagine if we could essentially eliminate the black market for drug trafficking in Chicago, which has the highest number of gang members and homicides. It’s estimated that up to 80 percent of the city’s murders are gang-related. And one of the main causes of this violence is connected to controlling turf for drug sales.

Gang violence isn’t as rampant throughout the U.S., but the National Gang Center estimated that 13 percent of the murders in the U.S. are gang-related. That falls in line with a similar report by Narco News that concluded that 1,100 drug war-related murders occur each year in the U.S. Keep in mind, that figure is fairly conservative due to the lack of full transparency with crime statistics.

The U.S. represents the largest market in the world for illegal drugs. Currently, there is a well-documented opioid crisis but the U.S. also consumes more cocainethan all of Europe—and by a wide margin. All told, the U.S. illegal drug black market represents a $100 billion annual industry.

Although there is a serious black market violence problem in the U.S., it pales in comparison to the countries that are source and transshipment points of illegal drugs. For example, there were over 29,000 murders in Mexico last year with roughly 33–50 percent being related to the drug war. That’s not factoring the 30,000 missing persons who are presumed to be dead.

The cartels conduct warfare in a brazen manner that is essentially indistinguishable from terrorist groups. Their conduct is so brutal, they have been known to hang rival gang members from bridges or publicly put bounties on corrupt government officials. Narco money has enabled these organized crime groups to operate with impunity.

The latest example of this corruption involves the leader of the Los Rojos cartel financing the campaigns of 11 mayoral candidates in exchange for political protection. Bear in mind, this isn’t a matter of simple greed. If these officials don’t take the bribes, they’ll likely be killed. After all, over 100 mayors have been murdered in Mexico since 2006.

All in all, narco money has corrupted every segment of the government necessary to protect their organizations. (My free e-book, America’s Drug War is Devastating Mexico, gives much more detail of organized crime’s reign in Mexico.)

As a matter of fact, Los Zetas have even corrupted the highest levels of government in neighboring countries. The Ex-Vice President and former Minister of Interior have each been arrested for allegedly accepting bribes of $250,000 and $1.5 million, respectively.

The Los Zetas cartel is responsible for the worst massacre in Guatemala since the civil war. In 2011, cartel members beheaded 27 innocent farmworkers in search of a ranch owner who the cartel suspected of stealing a drug shipment.

Due largely to the War on Drugs, the four countries immediately south of Mexico (Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador) are listed within the top six highest murder rates in the world. Furthermore, nine out of the top ten are in Latin America or the Caribbean.

Likewise, 43 of the 50 cities with the highest murder rates are in Latin America or the Caribbean. Four of the remaining cities are in the continental U.S., i.e. Baltimore, Detroit, New Orleans, and St. Louis. Only three cities are not in this hemisphere (South Africa).

Obviously, there are a variety of factors that contribute to violence, notably extreme poverty. One city on the list (San Juan, Puerto Rico) has had fairly low crime in recent years, but Hurricane Maria brought about much instability to the island.

Otherwise, it’s clear that the War on Drugs is one of the leading factors to the high violence. Mexico had 12 cities in the top 50, which was the second highest number behind Brazil.

It’s important to note, Brazil isn’t a major source of drug production. However, it has historically been the second largest consumer market for cocaine and it is the leading transshipment point of illegal drugs into Europe, Africa, and Asia. This is evident in the fact that 17 Brazilian cities are in the top 50 global homicide rates. Fourteen of those cities are located along the Atlantic Coast, which is prime real estate for drug trafficking.

This violence isn’t a result of a “soft on crime” approach; the Brazilian government takes the term “War on Drugs” literally. Like Mexico, the military, along with the police, conduct law enforcement operations and the results are predictable. The Brazilian police kill an average of six peopleeach day. Remarkably, the police are responsible for roughly one out of five murders in Rio de Janeiro, with few being held accountable.

The police, in many cases, are acting in self-defense. However, the Brazilian government has essentially provided the police with impunity for extrajudicial murder and they operate in a brazen manner. In this video, for example, the police performed a drive-by shooting of two unarmed teenagers.

It should also be noted that several of the gangs conduct open warfare against the police. The most gruesome example occurred in Sao Paulo in May of 2006. Over the course of a week, more than 150 people were killed after Brazil’s most powerful gang, PCC, launched a wave of attacks against multiple police stations. The police responded by rounding up suspected gang members and executing them in kind.

Narco-Terrorism

As you read more about the PCC and other criminal organizations, you are likely to come across the term “narco-terrorism.” This term was coined in 1982 by the President of Peru, Fernando Belaunde Terry. Peru was and continues to be one of the top cocaine producers in the world.

The Peruvian communist terrorist group, Shining Path, has been largely funded by “taxing” cocaine traffickers. Those profits have helped them kill approximately 11,000 civilians. Fortunately, the Shining Path’s membership numbers have drastically dwindled and the organization is substantially less active.

Cocaine money also played a major role in the 52-year Colombian civil war that resulted in 220,000 deaths and over seven million domestic refugees. Thankfully, the communist terrorist group, FARC, came to a peace agreement in 2016. This group was responsible for numerous bombings, kidnappings, and thousands of murders.

Most of their members have agreed to lay down their arms. However, an estimated 1,200 dissidents have refused to leave the criminal underworld. Likewise, another communist rebel group and officially designated terrorist group, ELN, has been in on-and-off peace negotiations. However, their group has walked away from the table, each time due to the tremendous profits from cocaine.

Similarly, Colombia’s former right-wing paramilitary terrorist group, AUC, officially disbanded in 2006, but the majority of these men simply splintered into various organized crime groups. The Colombian and U.S. governments haven’t designated these groups as terrorists because they seem to be more driven by greed than ideology.

However, the tactics by Colombia’s crime groups are indisputably terrorizing. These neo-paramilitary organized crime groups, known as BACRIMs, exert totalitarian control in their territory. They indiscriminately murder leftist activists, journalists, and human rights workers. In some cases, they impose a 9 P.M. curfew and invisible borders that are enforced with the death penalty. That’s in addition to their brand of “social cleansing,” i.e. murdering homeless, drug addicts, LGTBQ, etc.

This leads to a concept mentioned in academia, “the crime-terrorism nexus.” In other words, the line dividing organized crime from terrorism is increasingly blurry. Also, many terrorist organizations fund their activities from crime.

Various nations were listed earlier by the highest homicide rates. However, those studies don’t include countries at war. With that in mind, it’s no secret that both sides of the Afghanistan War are funded with opium profits. The Taliban are grossing an estimated $400 million annually from drugs. For many years, the Taliban simply “taxed” drug traffickers in their territory, but credible reports suggest that they’ve expanded into production.

Of the 64 foreign terrorist organizations designated by the U.S. State Department, twenty-three profit from illegal drugs to some degree. Albeit, drug money is generally a small portion of the budget for most terrorist organizations and it is usually derived from “taxing” drug traffickers rather than direct participation.

North Africa has become a major drug transshipment point for South American cocaine headed to Europe and Asia. Heroin from Asian countries is also often smuggled through this region. As a result, the Somali-based, Al Qaeda-linked terrorist group, al Shabaab and the West-Africa based Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) profit from this underground market. Boko Haram not only taxes traffickers, but the group has expanded their role in this racket. Furthermore, ISIS has taxed shipments of Moroccan hashish destined for Europe by way of Libya.

On the other hand, there are terror groups, such as the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Islamic

Movement of Uzbekistan (UMI), that are directly responsible for smuggling large quantities of illegal drugs, which comprises a large portion of their funding.

The U.S. Government’s Role

These links between terrorism and drug trafficking, ironically, have boosted the DEA in a self-serving manner. In 2006, Congress amended the PATRIOT Act with a statute regarding drug trafficking that directly or indirectly benefits a foreign terrorist organization. As a result, the DEA’s international jurisdiction and budget expanded tremendously.

However, the agency has launched a series of high-profile cases that have resulted in major headlines, instead of actual narco-terrorists being captured. Case in point, three West Africans were indicted in 2009 from an undercover sting operation involving DEA informants who posed as members of the FARC.

The informants repeatedly told the traffickers that they wanted to do business with Al Qaeda. Hence, these men simply pretended to have links with a terrorist group to seal the deal. Nonetheless, this aspect of the case hasn’t been widely reported and this case was a major PR win for the DEA.

On the other hand, the DEA had built a long-running and credible investigation, Project Cassandra, against Hezbollah. Their group is widely known as being sponsored by the Iranian government. However, Hezbollah also has generated millions of dollars by smuggling several tons of South American cocaine. The group has business ties with the Colombian FARC and the Brazilian PCC.

Several high-level members of Hezbollah were implicated in Project Cassandra. However, an impressive report by Politico revealed that the Obama administration suppressed this investigation to help finalize the nuclear deal with Iran.

One of the open secrets of the War on Drugs is that the U.S. government, among other nations, has given support to drug trafficking for geopolitical purposes. In this case, the U.S. used the drug war as a bargaining tool with an adversary.

However, the U.S. government’s complicity with drug trafficking has generally benefited its allies. That’s the case in the Afghanistan War and it was certainly the case during the Vietnam War. Likewise, drug money helped U.S. interests in dirty wars, such as the Contras in Nicaragua or the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. Furthermore, several narco-linked, right-wing dictators in Latin America, including Manuel Noriega, have benefitted from strong U.S. support.

All in all, there are many forms of violence resulting from the War on Drugs. Nonetheless, our politicians have been unwilling to address the root cause. As a result, government bureaucrats have pointed to this violence to justify larger budgets for the drug war.

However, with multiple decades of this failed policy behind us, we should realize that the demand for illegal drugs will never decrease in a substantial manner. Hence, continuing down this path will continue to enable the violent tactics of low-level criminals, mafia organizations, terrorists, dictators, and empire-driven governments.

By Brian Saady / Creative Commons / FEE.org / Report a typo

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* Al bericht men dan wel over de vele doden en bijvoorbeeld gevonden massagraven, de oorzaak wordt niet aangegeven in de reguliere (massa-) media en dat is nu juist de meer dan walgelijke oorlog tegen drugs, waar alleen de georganiseerde misdaad, het militair-industrieel complex en de geheime diensten in de VS het meest van profiteren, zelfs de DEA heeft in het verleden drugstransporten geregeld......... (uiteraard aangevuld met lobbyende politici voor één of meerdere van de hiervoor genoemde 3 partijen) Op die manier zijn ook aandeelhouders van het militair-industrieel complex verantwoordelijk te houden voor het enorme aantal moorden in deze smerige oorlog..........) Het feit dat de meeste drugs (en zelfs softdrugs) verboden zijn zorgt er uiteraard voor dat zoals gezegd de georganiseerde misdaad helemaal binnenloopt met de inkomsten uit die drugshandel. Zo kan je dan ook stellen dat regeringen die hard optreden tegen drugs, daarmee in feite lobbyen voor de drugsmaffia!!

Zie ook: 'VS buitenlandbeleid sinds WOII: een lange lijst van staatsgrepen en oorlogen..........'

        en:  'List of wars involving the United States'

        en: 'VS commando's vechten o.a. in Midden- en Zuid-Amerika, aldus het VS ministerie van oorlog.........'

        en: 'NAVO gaat VS helpen in Zuid-Amerika terreur uit te oefenen: Colombia lid van de NAVO.........'