Fox News Makes Excuse for CIA’s Afghan Opium Cultivation

(Infowars 30 April 2010 Kurt Nimmo)

In an amazing propaganda segment, Fox News’ Gerald Rivera talks with an occupation soldier about U.S. support of the opium trade in Afghanistan. The soldier tells Rivera he does not like supporting Afghan opium production. The U.S., he insists, has turned a blind eye to the cultivation because it is a cultural thing. He’d rather the Afghans grow watermelons. Is it possible the U.S. will tell the brother of Afghanistan’s U.S.-installed ruler he should get in the watermelon business? It was reported a few months ago that Ahmed Wali Karzai was on the CIA payroll and intimately involved in the opium trade Fox News and the rest of the corporate media tell us is run by the evil Taliban.

Fox News did not report that before everything changed on September 11, 2001, and before the U.S. invaded Afghanistan, the Taliban had imposed a ban on opium production. This resulted in opium production collapsing by more than 90 per cent. It was the U.S. supported Northern Alliance that came to the rescue and began protecting the production of raw opium. “CIA-supported Mujahedeen rebels [who in 2001 were part of the Northern Alliance] engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting against the Soviet-supported government and its plans to reform the very backward Afghan society,” William Blum writes in The Real Drug Lords. Under the interim government of Hamid Karzai, opium poppy cultivation once again began to skyrocket and opium markets were restored. According to the United Nations Drug Control Program (UNDCP), opium cultivation increased by 657 per cent in 2002 in relation to its 2001 level. The UNDCP estimated 2002 opium poppy cultivation would cover an area between 45,000 and 65,000 hectares. Opium cultivation in 2001 had fallen to an estimated 7,606 hectares. According to the UN, in 2006 alone Afghanistan supplied 92 percent of the world’s supply of opium (see Apratim Mukarji’s Afghanistan: From Freedom to Terror, p. 22-23).

“The Golden Crescent drug trade, launched by the CIA in the early 1980s, continues to be protected by US intelligence, in liaison with NATO occupation forces and the British military. In recent developments, British occupation forces have promoted opium cultivation through paid radio advertisements,” Michel Chossudovsky wrote in 2007. “Respected people of Helmand. The soldiers of ISAF and ANA do not destroy poppy fields,” the radio promo said. “They know that many people of Afghanistan have no choice but to grow poppy. ISAF and the ANA do not want to stop people from earning their livelihoods.” This is basically the same excuse used by the soldier interviewed by Geraldo. “Senior Bush Administration officials had displayed a complete lack of interest in the Afghan opium problem ever since 9/11,” James Risen writes in State of War. “In fact, the White House and Pentagon went out of their way to avoid taking on the Afghan drug lords from the very outset of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan.”

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