CANADA SUPPORTING BOGUS DRUG WAR

The Senlis Council, a think tank devoted to global drug policy,
recently issued a report condemning the Canadian military deployment
in Afghanistan as "an impossible mission which can only lead to
significant military casualties" because it supports impotent
American policies in the region aimed at depressing the illegal opium trade.

Prime Minister Harper responded by saying Canada is not directly
enforcing poppy eradication programs, but that it supports such
efforts and continues to advance "alternatives for agriculture."

The premise of both the report and Harper's comments is that the US
wants to eliminate the illegal opium trade in Afghanistan, which
provides 87 per cent of the world's illegal opium, and this premise is wrong.

America is not interested in halting the drug trade from Afghanistan,
because it generates hundreds of billions of dollars in dirty money
that gets cleaned on Wall Street every year.

As Michael Ruppert explains in his book, Crossing the Rubicon: The
Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil, there is
a longstanding relationship between Wall Street and the CIA. Ruppert
names several CIA directors and high ranking officials since the
agency's founding who have either moved from major investment banks
to the CIA, or from the CIA to major investment banks. "The CIA is
Wall Street. Wall Street is the CIA," Ruppert writes.

Ruppert identifies major CIA players such as Clark Clifford, John
Foster, Allen Dulles, Bill Casey, Stanley Sporkin, John Deutch, and
A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, all who represent the nexus of military
intelligence and high finance in America.

"Among the many kinds of illegal activities in the world," Ruppert
writes, "the production and laundering of drug money is central
because it establishes channels for the flow of other criminal
profits." The IMF estimated this annual "flow" of about $1.5
trillion, and the drug trade directly accounts for anywhere from $400
to $700 billion of annual money laundering. Heroin and cocaine make
up most of the drug trade profits, "and from 1997 to 2000 and again
in 2002, the world's largest producer of opium (from which heroin is
made) was Afghanistan."

That brief interruption of Afghanistan's opium production is a result
of the Taliban's efforts to destroy opium crops in the summer of
2000. Consequently, opium production in 2001 plummeted 94 per cent.
This is after opium production in Afghanistan reached a record high in 2000.

Wall Street is not likely to approve of the disappearance from the
stock market of half a trillion dollars in laundered drug money.
That's liquid cash, as valuable to propping up the consensus trance
that is the stock market as, say, Enron's bogus profits were. "In
this context," Ruppert writes, "it is not surprising that the US
completed its invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001 in the middle
of the opium planting season.

Among the first things the US forces and CIA did was to liberate a
number of known opium warlords who, they said, would assist US
forces." Reports suggested the opium farmers were encouraged to plant
massive crops. "In December, former CIA asset and opium warlord Ayub
Afridi was released from prison and recruited by the CIA to unify
local leaders against the Taliban."

Two years later, the World Bank reported record levels of opium
production in Afghanistan. Ruppert argues the Taliban's destruction
of the opium crops was a form of "economic warfare" that removed
billions from world markets.

The American invasion, whose primary objective was certainly
establishing a more comprehensive military presence around Eurasian
energy resources, achieved the added bonus of ensuring the global
illegal opium trade would continue to flourish.