Does Osama give dope to Republicans?

[Jim Sagle]

Just askin'...

[Minstrel Boy]

1. actually...

could be.




No Easy Answer: Heroin, Al Qaeda And The Florida Flight School
by Sander Hicks

Last March, on the first day of the 9/11 Commission hearings, commissioner Richard Ben-Veniste opened his remarks with sharp criticism of the current White House and the delays in processing the commissioners' security clearances. Ben-Veniste, who first came to prominence as a Watergate special prosecutor from 1973 to 1975, was counsel for the Democratic minority on the Senate Whitewater committee. Today he is a major attorney with a top firm in D.C.

But what makes Ben-Veniste such an intriguing player on the 9/11 Commission (The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States) is his experience with rogue drug-running CIA operatives. Ben-Veniste defended Barry Seal, the notorious smuggler who flew C-123 military cargo planes filled with cocaine into Mena, Arkansas on behalf of the contras.

Al Qaeda's lead 9/11 hijacker, Mohamed Atta, was allegedly partying with CIA-connected pilots while he got his flight training in fall/winter 2000 at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Fla., where two of the other 9/11 hijacker pilots trained. Atta wasn't acting much like a holy martyr: He wore jeans and sneakers, played video games, bought himself a red Pontiac and was said to be a hedonist. The Press posed the question to Ben-Veniste: If Atta belonged to the fundamentalist Muslim group, why was he snorting cocaine and frequenting strip bars?

"You know," said Ben-Veniste, as he smiled a little. "That's a heck of a question."
http://longislandpress.com/v02/i08040226/news_02.asp


"CIA officials say the underground network frequently crosses into gangsterism. One official cites `ample evidence' that Bin Laden's group uses profits from the drug trade to finance its campaign. Followers also have been tied to bank robberies, holdups, credit card fraud and other crimes." (Los Angeles Times, 9/15/01)

Very belatedly, the New York Times, on 12/10/01, confirmed the bin Laden-heroin connection. It noted that after al-Qaeda mujahedin collaborated with the US in Bosnia, "The bin Laden financial machine blossomed, according to officials who have been informed of intelligence information on the matter. Charities around the Arab world proclaimed that they were raising money for humanitarian purposes in Bosnia, but in fact portions benefited Islamic extremist groups in the area, including Al Qaeda.

"Militants linked to Al Qaeda also established connections with Bosnian organized crime figures. The officials said Al Qaeda and the Taliban found a route for the trafficking of heroin from Afghanistan into Europe through the Balkans."

In other words, the CIA knew that al-Qaeda was involved in heroin-trafficking, but (as is so often the case with big-time drug-traffickers) was not widely sharing it. Why is this? Le Monde in particular has charged that bin Laden's network now uses the drug connections which bin Laden developed with his friend, the former CIA protege Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. This claim is developed at some length in a well-documented but tendentious book by a Swiss journalist who draws on European intelligence sources: Richard Labeviere, Dollars for Terror: The United States and Islam. (See especially pp. 105-18; this book was originally published in French).
http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/q3.html

The history of the drug trade in Central Asia is intimately related to the CIA's covert operations. Prior to the Soviet-Afghan war, opium production in Afghanistan and Pakistan was directed to small regional markets. There was no local production of heroin. 11 In this regard, Alfred McCoy's study confirms that within two years of the onslaught of the CIA operation in Afghanistan, "the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands became the world's top heroin producer, supplying 60 percent of U.S. demand. In Pakistan, the heroin-addict population went from near zero in 1979... to 1.2 million by 1985 -- a much steeper rise than in any other nation":12

CIA assets again controlled this heroin trade. As the Mujahideen guerrillas seized territory inside Afghanistan, they ordered peasants to plant opium as a revolutionary tax. Across the border in Pakistan, Afghan leaders and local syndicates under the protection of Pakistan Intelligence operated hundreds of heroin laboratories. During this decade of wide-open drug-dealing, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency in Islamabad failed to instigate major seizures or arrests ... U.S. officials had refused to investigate charges of heroin dealing by its Afghan allies `because U.S. narcotics policy in Afghanistan has been subordinated to the war against Soviet influence there.'
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO109C.html