Bush with DEA agent Castillo at the Guatemala City embassy reception, January 14, 1986 (Castillo)

The Safari Club

In President Ernesto Samper’s Colombia, 1994–1998, the MAS (Muerte a Secuestradores, Death to Kidnappers) death squads were originally formed by the Medellín cartel as a tactical answer to the military pressure put on them by M-19 guerrillas. The death squads were staffed by CIA-trained Colombian officers, who already had a significant piece of the Medellín action. “The drug dealers’ core military power lies in paramilitary groups they have organized with the support of large landowners and military officers,” explained Alberto Galán, brother of assassinated 1994 presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán. 1

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), were protecting not only their campesino constituents, but some of the most powerful dealers in Colombia. They were, in part, Fidel’s contribution to Colombian politics. Rather than target the hard-to-hit guerrillas, who hit back, and who in any case had fighters capable of protecting, or destroying, jungle labs, the MAS death squads hit journalists, drug legalization advocates, labor leaders, human rights activists and other political threats to a drug-dealing military police state. 2 3

After 50 years of guerrilla war, of course, since military power is built on money, the Colombian left had become as deeply dependent on the artificial Prohibition value of drugs as the right. That is, the artificially inflated value of drug crops had created powerful institutional support, on all political sides, for continued, endless drug war.

The New York Times: 3/27/95: “In Guaviare - described as a ‘sea of coca’ by one police official - officials estimate that traffickers pay $5 million a year in protection money to the state’s main guerrilla group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.... To make peace, the Government promised to use aerial eradication only against plots larger than 7.5 acres....A week after the President’s speech, guerrillas shot down a police helicopter in Putumayo, killing three police officers.”

That chopper was worth $200,000 to the guerrillas that downed it - that was the Cali cartel bounty. Between 1994 and 1997, FARC rebels downed twelve government planes. Because of cocaine’s artificial value, the campesino-guerrillas working with the cocaine wholesalers to keep their family land are almost as well-armed as the government itself. They were as tough and angry as the Viet Minh.

And they had the same political depth. The early summer 1996 aerial spraying of Ultra Glyphosate (Monsanto’s ‘Round-Up’) on 45,000 acres of Guaviare coca caused convulsive vomiting and hair loss among the children. The enraged mothers organized the August 1996 march of more than 150,000 campesinos in Guaviare, Putumayo and Caqueta provinces. The Colombian federales diffused the protest with false compromises, then stealthily assassinated the march leaders. Many of the surviving campesinos turned, for the first time, to the guerrillas. The U.S. then insisted that Colombia allow it to switch to the far more poisonous tebuthiuron (Dow’s ‘Spike’). That is, American drug policy had turned FARC into a major factor in Colombian politics and driven the nation into full-scale civil war. 4

Imagine the fascist insanity of systematically spraying thousands of campesino farmsteads with food-crop killing herbicides. The Turbo Thrush and armored Bronco OV-10 crop dusters were flown for Colombia’s National Police by the CIA’s DynCorp, under a State Department contract. Barry McCaffrey, as head of the U.S. Southern Command and head of the ONDCP, arranged this deployment. Privateer McCaffrey now holds a very lucrative position as a director of DynCorp.

DynCorp did not spray Army-protected coca fields. This was a street fight for control of the crop. As Randall Beers, acting Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics Matters, put it in his fluent McCaffrese, crop dusting is “the most cost-effective way to reduce narcotic substances, particularly in areas not under control of the central government.” That subsistence food crops were also destroyed along with the “narcotic substances” wasn’t mentioned by Beers, nor was the fact that the “narcotic substances” are traditionally considered food. 5

In government-held areas the drug economy was run by the large, paramilitary-connected landowners. On these large protected drug-crop plantations the campesinos were treated as powerless sharecroppers. Since these plantations aren’t in rebel territory, they were never targeted by the CIA crop-dusters. That’s why all that “antidrug effort” had no strategic effect on the flow of drugs. It was these growers who financed Samper’s 1994 election campaign, and who continue to finance Colombia’s generals. The Samper investigation revealed that, while coordinating drug shipments, Cali traffickers racked up a $200,000 phone bill on a number assigned to Brig. Gen. Ismael Trujillo, then head of the Federal Judicial Police, McCaffrey’s opposite number, the guy in charge of the U.S. drug war in Colombia that McCaffrey, through the U.S. Southern Command, had organized and supplied. 6

The November 2016 peace accord between the government and the FARC guerrillas ended the high-altitude crop spraying and demilitarized control of the coca crop. The U.S. didn’t really like the end of the spraying, but it had no choice since the spraying inevitably hit valuable food crops like pineapples and beans, leaving subsistence farms livid with rage – and fully in support of the guerrillas. It became politically impossible for the dope-dealer government in Colombia to continue with crop-duster spraying, but the fascists are now experimenting with more accurate low-flying drones.

There is no cultural or economic reason to suppress coca growing, since it’s a health food. The only motive the dope-dealer Colombian government has to continue eradication efforts is to keep the street price of cocaine, its most lucrative product, high, and to continue to profit from American largesse. The effort should be to replace cocaine on the street with more healthful coca leaf products, but that thinking simply is too indígena for the militaristic White dopers running Colombia. They’re the descendants of the Spanish slavers, not the Native slaves.

With the end of the FARC war, supply and demand being what it is, cocaine production went through the roof. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Colombia produced 649 tons of cocaine in 2015, 866 tons in 2016. A 2017 UNODC report showed that the number of hectares under coca cultivation leapt from 96,000 in 2015 to 146,000 in 2016.

Coca leaves can be picked every three months, making coca paste, thanks only to the artificial value our Prohibition gives their coca, the most profitable cottage industry in Colombia. The harvested leaves are mixed with gasoline, sulfuric acid and other chemicals to make the white coca paste, which, when dry, has the consistency of caked corn starch. The producing campesino then sells the paste for conversion into snortable or mixable powder cocaine. A pound of coca paste sells for more than a ton of corn, and it’s far less labor-intensive, so our Prohibition has fulfilled Kennedy’s wildest dreams for the Alliance for Progress. We are putting food and economic security on campesino kitchen tables all over Colombia.

The only alternative, as Native Colombian politicians are well aware, is to collapse the value of drug crops with controlled legalization, thereby financing start-up businesses and crop substitution, as is happening in the U.S. with hemp. But, of course, legalization of coca would collapse the whole defense contractor-banking boondoggle built on cocaine, hurting DynCorp’s bottom line. Legalization would also leave coca leaf products, once again, as they had been 120 years ago, far more popular than cocaine. As Thomas Edison, Jules Verne, Pope Leo XIII, Queen Victoria, Sarah Bernhardt and Emile Zola, all friends of Mariani, happily told the world in Mariani’s full-page ads, Vin Mariani, whole coca leaves infused in good French wine, sweetened with sugar, is delicious, delightful and good for you.

Colombian coke bounces into the U.S. via the ‘Mexican trampoline.’ Phil Jordan, 1995 DEA director of the El Paso Intelligence Center, had his brother shot dead in an El Paso street by a Mexican hit squad. And they’re not above hitting his kids, either. This gives Jordan’s subordinates serious pause when offered a piece of the action by a Mexican hit team. “It’s kind of like this,” explains Robert Nieves, former DEA Chief of International Operations, “You’re offered a bribe. If bribery doesn’t work, you’re offered violence. And that violence will be exacted against you or your family members.” Plata o Plomo, Silver or Lead, as the famous phrase goes. 7

In 1996, The Christian Science Monitor informs us, in its fluent McCaffrese, “AWACS [Airborne Warning and Control System] provided information that led to four cocaine interdictions worth $945 million - about 35 percent of all cocaine intercepted coming into the US.” $945 million, that is, if sold as nickel bags on the street. In reality, about 1/20th of 1% of all the cocaine coming into the U.S.. “Interdiction, although it is often bad-mouthed, has to be one of the principal components of the fight against drugs,’ says a retired military officer who now serves in the president’s Office of National Drug Control Policy [McCaffrey]. ‘The capstone is the AWACS with their special “look down” radar. Nothing gets by them when they are up.’ As it turns out, the green blip - signifying a small airplane flying low over the ocean, southeast of Florida - was not trafficking in illegal drugs.”

That is, the celestial AWACS has no earthly way of distinguishing between the scores of small aircraft on its screen at any one time. That means that one scramble in 100 hits the mark. The AWACS is just running a price support for the coke dealers. The only people actually profiting from the AWACS deployment is the manufacturer, Boeing, the military contractors flying the planes, and the coke dealers. 8

The other answer to the porous border question is that their TECS (Treasury Enforcement Computer System, NADDIS (Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Information System) and NIN (Narcotics Information Network) computer system is just another impotent eye in the sky. It don’t tell them squat about the cucarachas. NADDIS can go after money-laundering “kingpins” all it wants. But it’s the system - the bottom-up economics of street-dealing – the nine pounds stuffed into the drive shaft of a beat-up old Chevy driven by a mother with two kids - that generates the “kingpin,” not the other way around.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Ronald Rose: “Instead of seizing pounds of cocaine, we now seize buildings full of the stuff. The drug lords in South America are laughing at us all the way to the bank. They know that for every mule or mid-level dealer we take out, there are fifty more waiting to take their place. There is just so much money to be made that the slim chance of being caught is always worth the risk. Believe me, after twenty years as a prosecutor and a judge, I can assure you that we only catch the stupid ones.” 9

As Clinton deplaned in Mexico on 5/5/97, I heard reporters on all the major networks authoritatively declare that the Mexican drug problem was really “kingpin” Amado Carrillo, ‘the lord of the skies,’ just brought down in the Gutiérrez affair. That’s just the fluff of the moment, the dehydrated, homogenized formula - just add air time and whip. The breathless reportage on all the networks was virtually identical, word for word, as if these guys were reading ONDCP press releases.

The exact same thing happened in November and December of 2017 with ‘Shorty’ ‘Chapo’ Guzmán, whose arrest was an ongoing Mexican telenovela - starring Sean Penn and Kate del Castillo no less - that changed absolutely nothing. Actually getting ‘Shorty’ was as farcical as the hilarious movie Get Shorty. The General Accounting Office, in 1997, reported that all interdiction and seizure efforts made by the U.S. Government between 1988 and 1995 “made little impact on the availability of illegal drugs in the United States and on the amount needed to satisfy U.S. demand.” The 2016 DHS OIG report says the same. 10

As Interpol’s Secretary General Raymond Kendall indicates, so far from being the exception, the Vietnam or Iran-Contra drugs for arms operation was Standard Operating Procedure executed by experienced professionals who, over the decades, did it again and again. Today we have ‘terrorism’ or ‘drugs’ substituted for ‘communism’ in the drugs-for-arms script, but it is the same script, written by the likes of McCaffrey, Secord, Aderholt and Singlaub, privateers all.
In 1981 Major General John Singlaub, forcibly retired in 1978 by President Carter for policy insubordination, financed by heroin-dealing Taiwan, founded the United States Council for World Freedom (USCWF), a vehicle for the cooperation of ‘distinguished’ American conservatives with the Koumintang’s World Anti-Communist League (WACL). Singlaub was assisted in his efforts by Gen. ’Heinie’ Aderholt, head of the 56th Air Commando Wing operating from Thailand in support of the KMT and the Hmong heroin operation. He headed the United States Military Assistance Command Thailand when the U.S. finally lost in Vietnam in 1975. Aderholt was the unconventional warfare editor of Soldier of Fortune magazine, which actively supported Ian Smith’s glorious defense of Cecil’s White Rhodesia. 11

Iran-Contra indictee Richard Secord had been Singlaub’s Laotian air wing commander, he who delivered the Hmong opium. Secord, truly expert at financing covert arms sales with drugs, established the dummy bank account in Geneva, ‘Lake Resources,’ through which the heroin-dealing KMT’s Taiwan funneled money to the Contras. Secord had been the USAF Chief of the Military Assistance Advisery Group (MAAG) in Iran from September 1975 to July 1978, when Richard Helms was our Ambassador to the Shah’s government, managing $13 billion in arms sales. From July 1978 to March 1981 Secord served at USAF headquarters as Director of International Programs. Secord’s final Department of Defense posting, from April 1981 to May 1983, was as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.

Secord; Aderholt; Singlaub

Secord ran Operation Tipped Kettle from his DOD perch, transferring PLO weapons seized by Israel in Lebanon to the Contras. After formal retirement from DOD, in 1983, Secord went into business with Albert Hakim, Frank Terpil and Ed Wilson, becoming President of Stanford Technology Trading Group Intl., selling arms to the dope-dealing Contras and dope-dealing Iranians.

Secord, using his influence in Iran, enabled Wilson to complete the sale of a classified airport radar system by changing the Iranian purchase order from ‘military’ to ‘commercial.’ The final report of Iran-Contra Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh concluded that Secord had received at least $2 million from these sales, and had lied to Congress about it. ‘The enterprise’ also handled illegal arms sales to Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan - at inflated prices that left cash free for personal profit. 12

This operation was run through BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, founded in 1972 by Agha Hasan Abedi, a Pakistani financier, with 75% of the financing coming from Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the ruler of Abu Dhabi. By 1976 the bank was co-owned by Saudi military intelligence (GID), the Pakistani ISI, and the CIA, or their fronts, with 108 international branches and assets of $1.6 billion. By 1980, the bank had assets of over $4 billion with 150 branches in 46 countries. By 1982 BCCI had over 400 branches in 78 countries, and assets in excess of $20 billion, making it the 7th largest private bank in the world. The bank’s two holding companies were based in Luxembourg and the Cayman Islands, that is, as the U.S. Federal Reserve cautioned at the time, the bank was virtually unregulated. With its own diplomatic corps, paramilitary and enforcement units, BCCI was an opaque global platform for drug and arms financing.

The BCCI-CIA connection was solidified in 1976 by CIA Director George H.W. Bush and Saudi intelligence chief Kamal Adham, both major personal investors in BCCI, as was Pakistani, French, Moroccan, Egyptian and Iranian military intelligence. Although a Turk, not a Saudi royal by blood, the independently wealthy Kamal Adham was part of the household of Saudi King Faisal, who was married to Adham’s older half-sister. These secret services, calling themselves the Safari Club after their Kenyan meeting place, shared not only a rabid 1950s-era colonialist antiprogressivism, that is, antinationalism, but heavy investment in the drugs for arms trade, needed to effect colonialist conquest, and so needed a covert money-transfer platform inaccessible to political oversight, such as the oversight the Senate’s Church Committee subjected CIA Director George Bush to in 1976.

Fascist dopers were muscle for hire, progressive nationalists were not. The Bank of England’s June 1991 accounting report declared that BCCI engaged in “widespread fraud and manipulation” that made it impossible to reconstruct BCCI's financial history. The bookkeeping was so fuzzy that investigators couldn’t say for sure whether the insolvent bank had defrauded depositors of $5 billion or $15 billion. It was the biggest bank fraud in history. Banking authorities worldwide shut BCCI down, but very little followed in the way of consequences for the perpetrators, except modest fines they could easily afford, as the Safari Club just switched banks.

Here’s a few selected paragraphs from Senators Kerry and Brown’s 583-page report describing the institutionalization of the protected drug trade as part of the covert global arms trade engineered by the Safari Club: The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations United States Senate by Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank Brown, December 1992:

“BCCI's unique criminal structure -- an elaborate corporate spider-web with BCCI's founder, Agha Hasan Abedi and his assistant, Swaleh Naqvi, in the middle -- was an essential component of its spectacular growth, and a guarantee of its eventual collapse. The structure was conceived by Abedi and managed by Naqvi for the specific purpose of evading regulation or control by governments. It functioned to frustrate the full understanding of BCCI's operations by anyone.”

“Unlike any ordinary bank, BCCI was from its earliest days made up of multiplying layers of entities, related to one another through an impenetrable series of holding companies, affiliates, subsidiaries, banks-within-banks, insider dealings and nominee relationships. By fracturing corporate structure, record keeping, regulatory review, and audits, the complex BCCI family of entities created by Abedi was able to evade ordinary legal restrictions on the movement of capital and goods as a matter of daily practice and routine. In creating BCCI as a vehicle fundamentally free of government control, Abedi developed in BCCI an ideal mechanism for facilitating illicit activity by others, including such activity by officials of many of the governments whose laws BCCI was breaking.”

“BCCI's criminality included fraud by BCCI and BCCI customers involving billions of dollars; money laundering in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas; BCCI's bribery of officials in most of those locations; support of terrorism, arms trafficking, and the sale of nuclear technologies; management of prostitution; the commission and facilitation of income tax evasion, smuggling, and illegal immigration; illicit purchases of banks and real estate; and a panoply of financial crimes limited only by the imagination of its officers and customers.”

“Unanswered questions include, but are not limited to, the relationship between BCCI and the Banco Nazionale del Lavoro; the alleged relationship between the late CIA director William Casey and BCCI; the extent of BCCI's involvement in Pakistan's nuclear program; BCCI's manipulation of commodities and securities markets in Europe and Canada; BCCI's activities in India, including its relationship with the business empire of the Hinduja family; BCCI's relationships with convicted Iraqi arms dealer Sarkis Sarkenalian, Syrian drug trafficker, terrorist, and arms trafficker Monzer Al-Kassar, and other major arms dealers; the use of BCCI by central figures in the alleged ‘October Surprise’…”

“Similar techniques were used by Italian financier Michele Sindona in connection with his management of Banco Ambrosiano in Italy; and by former CIA agent Michael Hand in the drug money laundering Nugan Hand Bank in Australia during the late 1970's and early 1980's. The latter institution had numerous ties to U.S. intelligence and military personnel which have never been explained.”

“The Subcommittee investigation of BCCI began in February, 1988, early in the second year of a two-year investigation of the relationship between drug trafficking to U.S. foreign policy and law enforcement that had been authorized by the full Committee. During a hearing on General Noriega's drug trafficking and money laundering, BCCI was identified as facilitating Noriega's criminal activity.”

“In January, 1990, when the Justice Department entered into a plea agreement with BCCI, Senator Kerry criticized the plea agreement for permitting BCCI to avoid trial, and the $14 million fine as insufficient punishment for an institution which had a corporate policy of laundering drug money. At the same time, the Subcommittee published a report on drug money laundering which focused in part on further questions concerning BCCI, including BCCI's alleged secret ownership of First American.”

“On December 18, 1991, in an agreement with the Justice Department and New York District Attorney, BCCI's liquidators pled guilty to having engaged in a criminal conspiracy through financial fraud, and thereby constituting a Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organization (RICO), whose entire assets, legitimate and illegitimate, were subject to confiscation by the government. Specific crimes admitted to by BCCI's liquidators in the agreement included:

** Seeking deposits of drug proceeds and laundering drug money

** Seeking deposits from persons attempt to evade U.S. income taxes

** Using ‘straws’ and nominees to acquire control of U.S. financial institutions

** Lying to regulators and falsifying regulatory documents

** Creating false bank records and engaging in sham transactions to deceive regulators.”

“The letter went on to describe the knowledge of principal officers of BCCI, including its chief executive officer in the Americas, knowledge of money laundering, drug trafficking, loans created in ‘bogus’ names, and advances of funds to non-existent companies in London, Luxembourg, Cyprus, Malta, the Channel Islands, and other locations.”

“From the time of BCCI's indictment on drug money laundering charges in Tampa, Florida in October, 1988, there was little doubt to anyone looking at the facts that BCCI had been used to launder drug money. Abedi told him that he needed to increase BCCI's activity in Colombia to $1 billion in local currency in deposits, and $1 billion in U.S. denominated deposits -- funds which obviously could only be generated, directly or indirectly, from the drug trade.”

“BCCI's December, 1991 plea agreement with U.S. law enforcement outlines the systematic nature of the money laundering as follows:

40. The BCCI Defendants and their affiliates . . . would and did formulate and implement a corporate strategy for increasing BCCI's deposits by encouraging placements of funds from the proceeds of drug sales, in conscious disregard of the currency regulations, tax laws, and antidrug laws of the United States, and of other nations;

41. In furtherance of the BCCI Group's corporate strategy to pursue deposits in disregard of United States and foreign law, the BCCI Defendants . . . would knowingly offer a full range of services to drug importers, suppliers and money launderers;

42. Co-conspirators would and did conduct . . . financial transactions with narcotics drug proceeds including the wire transfer of said proceeds from places in the United States to and through other places outside the United States, with the intent to conceal and disguise the nature, location, source and ownership of these drug proceeds.”

“By the summer of 1988 [U.S. Customs Service agent Robert] Mazur had compiled enough evidence to indict the bank and several of its officers. But Mazur believed that the corruption went much higher than the mid-level officers with whom he had been dealing. As he explained to the Subcommittee, ‘It appeared to me that the knowledge of the source of the funds and the method of seeking out drug proceeds as a source of deposits for the bank was something that was promoted at every level of senior management within the bank.’”

It was President Ford, heavily influenced by his Chief of Staff Dick Cheney, and his Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who had appointed George H.W. Bush as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency in January, 1976. Bush coordinated the growth and use of BCCI with his global partners, the Saudis. This team, who later dragged us into Iraq under blatantly false pretenses, for profit, then replaced National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, who favored military détente with the Soviets, with Brent Scowcroft, who did not.

They then created ‘Team B,’ loaded with radical right-wingers with no technical military training, like Professor Richard Pipes, who was a McCarthyite Russia scholar with no military experience, and academic political scientist and Nixon operative Paul Wolfowitz, to present ‘alternative’ technical assessments to CIA leadership, that is, politicized right-wing ‘alternative facts.’

Legendary CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman, who was one of the real lead CIA Soviet analysts at this time, calls this “tantamount to selecting Dracula to run a blood bank.” Goodman had been the lead Soviet analyst attached to the 1972 interagency team that negotiated the seminal Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty of 1972 (SALT I), a benefit of U.S.-China rapprochement that made the Russians more willing to deal. It was an historically significant deescalation of the nuclear arms race – saving both sides billions. The Team B purpose was to reverse disarmament, so as to generate more missile contracts.

Goodman: “The deputy director for intelligence in the mid-1970s, Sayre Stevens, aggressively fought the idea of a right-wing team entering the CIA, but couldn’t persuade CIA director Bush to block the efforts of the Ford administration. Stevens was one of the finest analysts that the CIA ever produced, and I knew him well from my experience with the SALT talks. On a key technical issue involving the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972, Stevens stood up to the Pentagon to argue that the Soviet surface-to-air missile system could not be considered an anti-ballistic missile system…. Stevens also fought the Pentagon on a key issue involving the SALT treaty in 1972. The Department of Defense and the Pentagon didn’t want a ban on MIRVs—weapons of mass destruction that launch as a single missile but separate into multiple bombs directed at multiple targets—and believed that a demand for on-site inspection of MIRV sites would ensure there would be no agreement… Ironically, the Department of Defense eventually found on-site inspection a bitter pill to swallow when it was introduced into treaty provisions…. According to Team B, the Soviet Union rejected nuclear parity, was bent on executing and surviving a nuclear war, and was radically increasing its military spending. Team B predicted a series of Soviet weapons developments that never took place, including directed-energy weapons, mobile anti-missile systems, and anti-satellite capabilities.”

“CIA deputy director Gates used Team B assessments in speeches and articles in the Washington Times to ingratiate himself with the Reagan administration and to garner increased defense spending. By pitching policy, Gates violated the CIA’s charter, which stipulated that there should be no policy advocacy from the agency. As CIA director in 1992, Gates exaggerated the threat from Iran and the threat of nuclear proliferation to stave off cuts in the intelligence budget…. Just as Vice President Dick Cheney’s relentless pressure on the CIA led to false reports on Iraq in 2002–2003, Team B’s pressure led to exaggerated estimates of Soviet military spending and the capabilities of Soviet military technology….President Carter…ignored its bogus findings….The Reagan administration in the early 1980s, however, used the [Team B] estimates to double defense spending, garnering $1.5 trillion in additional spending against a Soviet Union in decline and a Soviet military threat that was exaggerated…. One of my CIA colleagues noted that putting Team B outliers up against Team A insiders was like ‘putting the Washington Redskins against Walt Whitman High School.’” 13

BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, was the primary mechanism for logistical cooperation between Bush, Casey, Gates and Webster’s CIA and the Saudi GID (General Intelligence Directorate). CIA insiders regarded Carter and his 1977 replacement for Bush, new DCIA Admiral Stansfield Turner, as amateurs who were hostile to unapproved covert criminal operations, so the dopers proceeded to build a system not subject to political control, despite the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the expansion of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

At the same time he solidified the BCCI connection with the Saudis, DCIA Bush gave the Directorate of Operations, run by William Wells and Ted Shackley, blanket approval of all operations and a completely free hand to outsource covert operations to privateers like Shackley, Secord and Wilson, operating not as CIA employees, but as shell companies. These ruthless, amoral, talented old pros cut the Carter administration out of the intelligence loop, so that Carter was flying blind, with no warning, for instance, of the impending collapse of the Shah in Iran, although elements of the CIA, such as Ambassador to Iran Helms, understood full well that the Shah was collapsing.

Admiral Turner never even came close to understanding, let alone controlling, the Directorate of Operations, which was sophisticated and connected enough to control appointments throughout the entire CIA. Turner’s two major aides, E. Henry Knoche, replaced by Frank Carlucci, were old CIA Dulles men, long connected to Rumsfeld (President Ford’s Secretary of Defense), Shackley and Secord. Carlucci went on to become Reagan’s Deputy Secretary of Defense under Weinberger. DCIA Admiral Stansfield Turner, assuming he was demoting Shackley in December of 1977 from Deputy Director of Covert Operations to the CIA office that liaised with cooperating intelligence agencies, actually increased Shackley’s ability to help run the Safari Club’s off-the-books, outsourced covert international operations.

Carter believed, like Kennedy, that support for responsive democracy, not support for dope peddling fascism, was the way to defeat communism. In 1978, new Pretoria station chief Gerry Gossens received unique orders from DCIA Turner – start operating against the white supremacist South African secret police we had been supporting, the Bureau of State Security, and the neighboring Rhodesian regime, in favor of Mandela’s African National Congress, which, until then, had actually been a CIA target. Cooperating elements within the CIA and the apartheid regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia worked to blow the cover of these pro-ANC CIA operations. In July of 1979, Pretoria station chief Gossens was intentionally outed in a CIA-arranged book, Dirty Work 2: The CIA in Africa, putting Gossens and his family in physical danger.

Then, without DCIA Turner’s knowledge, the clandestine service at CIA headquarters wired strict orders to every CIA station in the world to keep all major operations secret from the local U. S. ambassador. This crippled DCIA Turner globally. Finding the Directorate of Operations downright mutinous, Admiral Turner nonetheless pruned carefully on 10/31/1977. Of the Directorate of Operations’ 8,000 employees, Turner fired only 17 outright. Another 147 were forced into early retirement. The rest of the cuts, about 600, were done through attrition. But direct control from the top offended the corrupt likes of Shackley, Clines and Wilson. Turner found himself facing a smear campaign run by pros who really knew how to do it.

CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman, who was there in the Intelligence Directorate: “The [anti-Turner] operatives had good connections with the press, and the mainstream media cooperated in finding fault with Turner. Intelligence analysts at the time should have played their own game of leaking to the press, because, by and large, Turner was popular at the Agency for his integrity and his support for analysts…. Turner was charged with cutting back covert actions in the wake of the war. Most of the personnel cuts came from attrition; very few clandestine officers actually lost positions. But operatives went to the press with protests over personnel losses, particularly overseas. The media dutifully reported rumors from operatives, although few of them were true…. Turner was popular in the Intelligence Directorate because he challenged the plans and personnel of the Operations Directorate. He was appalled to learn that two operations officers had assisted Edwin Wilson, a former operations officer, in providing intelligence and military assistance to Libya…. Turner fired them both and courted a potential mutiny in the Directorate.…As a naval admiral, moreover, Turner was accustomed to quick and direct responses to his inquiries; instead, he found himself stonewalled by senior operatives.” 14

Gary Sick, on Carter’s National Security Council staff, wrote in his book October Surprise that one CIA mole on Carter’s staff stole Carter’s briefing book, which Reagan was then able to use against Carter in their one debate (“There you go again.”). Another CIA mole who played a pivotal role in doublecrossing Carter with the Iranians was Donald Gregg, who joined the CIA in 1951. Gregg had served under Shackley in Vietnam, was CIA Seoul Chief of Station from 1973-1975 and was DCIA Bush’s liaison to Congress. Gregg was an Asia policy specialist on Carter’s NSC, who met secretly with Khomeini’s representative Cyrus Hashemi without Carter’s knowledge, reporting to Bush, Shackley and Clines. After Reagan’s election, Gregg became Vice President Bush’s National Security Adviser.

Jimmy Carter: “We tried to cleanup the CIA. It had been shot through with people that were later involved in the Iran-Contra affair; people like Secord and so forth had been in the CIA when I took over… We knew that some of the people were loyal to Bush and not particularly loyal to me and Stan Turner… I never did have an official report come to me and say that Bill Casey was meeting with Iranian officials in Paris or anything specific, just allegations and rumors… I didn’t believe them.” 15

1976 DCIA George H.W. Bush was the son of investment banker and Harriman partner Senator Prescott Bush. Bush inherited the holdings his father shared with the Dulles brothers at Sullivan and Cromwell. Bush was in every sense, including blood, a protégé of Allen Dulles’ Sullivan and Cromwell privateer methodology. Bush’s son, George W. Bush, repeatedly dined with Osama’s bin Laden’s older brother, Salem, in 1977, at their mutual friend Jim Bath’s home in Texas as they set up Arbusto [‘bush’ in Spanish] Energy together. Both Bush administrations protected their business partners, the Saudis, even after Saudi involvement in 9/11 had become obvious.

President Reagan’s DCIA Casey, Shackley, Wilson, Helms and Secord learned the esoteric craft of off-the-books covert action in Asia from its innovator, Paul Helliwell, the co-creator of Civil Air Transport, SEA Supply of Bangkok and Air America. These were contractors, privateers - off-the-books, private corporations performing government-financed covert operations for profit. Since they were private corporations, they were not on the CIA’s public books, not subject to political scrutiny. Ed Wilson took over Paul Helliwell’s legal and organizational function before Helliwell left the scene in 1976.

Richard Helms, DCIA from June 1966 to February 1973, so deeply involved in the Kennedy assassination, was fired by Richard Nixon in 1973 for not taking the Watergate heat, and for insufficiently politicizing the Vietnam intelligence. In fact, Helms did hide much of the negative intelligence about the war as it was raging because he did not want to confront the Pentagon, which saw the endless Vietnam War as a cash cow. James Scheslinger replaced Helms as DCIA in February of 1973. Scheslinger had that job for six months, until July 1973, when he became Secretary of Defense, at which point William Colby, who ran the Saigon station and the Phoenix assassination program in Vietnam, became DCIA. In 1976, George H.W. Bush replaced Colby.

In response to the Watergate heat, 1973 DCIA Schlesinger ordered the CIA high command to compile a report of current or past CIA actions that may have fallen outside the agency’s charter. New DCIA Colby, in December of 1974, released the 693-page collection of memos, called ‘the Family Jewels’ in the press, to select members of Congress only, but members who wanted this information out found many ways to release much of it to hungry reporters. The actual memos were released to the public only in 2007, still heavily redacted. Though redacted and far from complete, it was a hell of a hangout, revealing illegal wiretapping of journalists, domestic surveillance, assassination plots, coup attempts, drug dealing, human drug experimentation, Nixon’s 1970 Huston Plan and Operation Chaos making war on the American left, and the overthrow of Allende’s elected government in Chile. Colby also gave, in the opinion of many CIA insiders, too many straight answers when put under subpoena by Deputy Attorney General Laurence Silberman, 12/31/1974, including all the files on the illegal Chile overthrow operation.

Colby had revealed Helms’ perjury regarding Chile to the Intelligence Subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee in closed session on 4/22/1974. He intentionally broke ranks: “I considered it my responsibility to keep them informed, even about CIA matters that they would have no way of even suspecting, and therefore would be unable to question me on.” Rep. Michael Harrington (D-MA) summarized Colby’s classified testimony in a letter to Rep. Thomas Morgan (D-PA), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and then published that summary in the Congressional Record. The dam had broken, culminating in a tidal wave of revelations, including the domestic spying Operation Chaos run out of Angleton’s office by Richard Ober, reporting to DCIA Helms. DCIA Colby fired Angleton as Chief of Counterintelligence on 12/17/1974. On 1/27/1975, the Senate created the Select Committee on Intelligence, the Church Committee.

Seymour Hersh’s front page story in The New York Times on December 22, 1974

Colby then publicly read, before the Senate Appropriations Committee, his summary of all the subjects brought up by the family jewels memos he had sent to President Ford on 12/24/1974. Colby, displaying great political courage, then subjected himself to repeated, extended, public grillings by the Church and Pike Committees. He answered all questions, denied very little, admitted much, and then went into technical managerial detail on each subject. The problem with that, from Helms’ institutional point of view, was that all the rest of CIA management now had to appear to emulate that performance.

Colby leaned to the political center, not the right. He had led OSS Jedburgh paratroopers behind enemy lines in France, arming and organizing the rural guerrilla bands, the Maquis. Then, in April of 1945, he led a high-altitude Norwegian Special Operations (NORSO) paratroop ski team behind German lines near the Arctic Circle in northern Norway. His team had to rappel down icy 1500 foot sheer cliffs in fierce temperatures of 20-30 below zero to blow up the Germans’ only railway link to German-held territory, taking 150,000 Nazi troops out of the war, trapping them in the frozen north, just as Germany was collapsing. “Picture the Hudson River, visualizing the Palisades three times their true height. Place a railroad snug against the foot of the cliffs, and then crust the whole thing with four feet of snow and six inches of wet ice. Now, place 23 skiers atop the mountain, and they are carrying revolvers, tommyguns, Garandes, Brens, and 180 pounds of TNT plus other equipment on a massive sled.” The Allied Eighth Air Force made German air transport suicidal, the combined Allied navies eliminated sea transport, and the Norwegian winter rendered the rural roads impassable, so blowing 2.5 km. of their heavily guarded Nordland rail line into irreparable pieces, their only north-south troop transport, trapped their entire army, forcing it to surrender. This intrepid hero then seriously proposed, through channels, that he take his paratroopers to Spain to hook up with anti-Franco partisans in the Pyrenees to begin the process of overthrowing the fascist Franco – that’s how Major William E. Colby thought WWII ought to have ended.

Senator Church and DCIA Colby

Needless to say, he soon discovered that the OSS leadership was rightwing, not left or center. Colby went on to become a lethal CIA operative who did follow his orders, moving to the political right largely because he believed the Dulles myth of monolithic communism, which conformed with his own conservative Catholicism. Like most of the rest of the U.S. high command, he remained delusional about Vietnam, insisting we could have, and should have, won. But, as DCIA, he took the position that sunlight was a needed corrective, and ended up testifying 35 times to various congressional committees. Colby was particularly disturbed by the widespread domestic CIA spying on Americans for political purposes, specifically forbidden in the National Security Act of 1947. “The CIA, it seemed obvious to me, was in very real danger of ultimately being crippled as an effective weapon in the defense of the nation’s security if not in fact threatened with being destroyed outright.”

The liberal Colby and the conservative Angleton had been at each others’ throats since 1955, when Angleton and Ambassador to Italy Clare Boothe Luce prevented Colby, running the Italian election-rigging operation under State Department cover, from supporting the moderate left in Italy. Colby argued that only the moderate center-left could provide the social and economic reforms needed to create a lasting non-communist majority, rendering the radical left superfluous. Ambassador Luce was a red-baiting fascist, to the right of Allen Dulles. As Senator Fulbright put it, “Sort of like what you would associate with Louis XVI.” James Angleton, Ambassador Luce’s political partner in the Italian operation, which covertly supported Italy’s murderous fascists, ran CIA Counterintelligence from 1954 to 1975: “Colby destroyed counterintelligence. But because Colby was seen by Shackley and Helms as having betrayed the CIA to Congress they simply began working with outsiders like Adham and Saudi Arabia. The traditional CIA answering to the president was an empty vessel having little more than technical capability.”

The powerful Angleton had hurt his own credibility with his monolithic view of communism, his paralyzing tautological insistence that any operative who came to us from the Russians was automatically a KGB double agent, and the 1967 to 1974 running of Operation Chaos out of his CIA Counterintelligence office. The rightwing obsession with protecting against penetration, the endless McCarthyite mole hunt, rather than focusing on penetrating the enemy ourselves, meant that, globally, we supported fascists rather than parliamentary democrats. Demonizing the center-left as communist was the tried and true McCarthyite technique to force support of the far right. Using that classic fascist calumny as its rationale, Operation Chaos made war on the domestic American left, violating the CIA charter, which specifically forbids “police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers or internal security functions.” Operation Chaos surveilled more than 300,000 American citizens and organizations, including Martin Luther King.

Operation Chaos was revealed to the public first by Seymour Hersh in The New York Times, 12/22/1974, in front-page banner headlines, and then by the Church Committee in the Senate, the Pike Committee in the House, and the Ford administration’s Rockefeller Commission, which was, from Kissinger’s point of view, aimed at deflection of the Allende operation. President Ford, however, looking to his reelection, was not interested in appearing to deflect. David Belin, the Rockefeller Commission’s executive director, who had been an obedient apparatchik on the Warren Commission, got the bit in his teeth, using Colby and Helms to reveal the anti-Castro Operation Mongoose with its Mafia component (see Vol. 1), the assassination attempts aimed at Lumumba, Trujillo and Sukarno, and the CIA drug experimentation on unwitting people. Although Kissinger did succeed in suppressing the ‘classified’ assassination materials, the Rockefeller Commission report surprised many by being more of a partial hangout than a complete whitewash. As The New York Times put it, 6/10/1975, “a trenchant, factual and plain-spoken document.” President Ford turned over the assassination materials to the Church Committee. 16

But Angleton, even with his credibility in tatters, had been proven right about the Soviet penetration of the CIA, right the way a stopped clock is right twice a day. Angleton helped to unmask the legendary double agent ‘Sasha,’ who turned out to be a Russian who went by the name named Igor Orlov, a sleeper planted by Beria into Gehlen’s Vlasov Army in 1943, recruited as part of Operation Paperclip in 1945, in which Angleton participated. Orlov used his Russian-supplied information and connections to run KGB operations in the U.S. and penetrate the highest levels of the CIA, until his death in 1982. And Angleton himself had been badly burned by the Russian double-agent Kim Philby. He knew how covert operations worked. He was not wrong about the loss of operational control caused by Safari Club commercial outsourcing.

WWII, Korea and Vietnam veteran Marine Lt. Col. William Corson, Deputy Director of the Southeast Asia Intelligence Force in the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense: “The reforms of the CIA started by the Church Committee in its 1975 hearings came to a dead halt under [DCIA] Bush…the goal was to better hide things, not fix things.” Former CIA Associate Director Robert Crowley: “taking operations and putting them in the hands of private businessmen and other countries, Congressional accountability could be avoided, and that’s what Bush allowed.” Reagan called concern about CIA operations targeting Americans for their political beliefs “anti-intelligence hysteria.” But of course, Reagan had been an active supporter of Senator Joseph McCarthy, a pioneer of the politicization of intelligence. 17

DCIA George H.W. Bush, of course, went on to become Reagan’s Vice President, in charge of all Reagan administration intelligence operations. Italian Mafia and P-2 chief Licio Gelli, an operative of Italian military intelligence, was an honored guest at Reagan’s inauguration. The P-2 (Propaganda Due) Masonic Lodge, composed mostly of the political and military elite in Italy, functioned as a major international drug money laundry, financier and coordinator of fascist death squads and false-flag black ops globally, using Bush’s BCCI. Propaganda Due is a direct reference to false-flag black ops. P-2 was connected to right-wing Catholic organizations such as Opus Dei, political home of Vietnam War engineer Cardinal Spellman (Diem was a protégé of Spellman), and the Knights of Malta, which counted Reagan’s DCIA Casey as a member as well as Nixon and Ford DCIA Colby. Both Casey and Colby were personally close to Licio Gelli.

Gelli used Milan-based Stibam International Transport to help Reagan with his October Surprise, by shipping arms to the Iranians. Stibam also supplied the Contras. Milan’s Stibam International Ltd. offices were in a building owned by Banco Ambrosiano, an arm of the Vatican Bank, which did all its banking.

UPI: ‘World's biggest' weapons and drug operation,’ 11/25/1982, Varese, Italy:

“Italian investigators cracked what was called ‘the world's biggest illegal arms trafficking organization’ that sent millions of weapons to the Middle East in return for heroin and other drugs.”

“Judge Carlo Palermo, in charge of the investigation, told a news conference in Varese Wednesday the arms sent to various Middle East countries by the organization based in nearby Milan included helicopters, German Leopard tanks and machine guns.”

“In return the organization brought into Italy heroin and other drugs through agents in Turkey and other Middle East countries, the judge said.”

“‘We have cracked the world's biggest illegal arms trafficking organization, which had Milan and the Middle East as its terminals,’ Palermo said.”

“‘Over a period of years they sent millions of war weapons, including heavy tanks and helicopters, to the Middle East, for which they were paid in narcotics.’”

“The judge said 41 members of the ring have been arrested and would face trial in February. Arrest warrants have been issued against another 159 suspects, but action on these would depend on the outcome of the continuing investigation, he said.”

“The investigation started in December 1980 as a routine investigation into drug running in the Milan area.”

“A Turk named Asim Akkaia reportedly gave police information that led to the discovery of 310 pounds of heroin buried in zinc packets near a villa in Bolzano and a hotel in Trento, in the Alpine region of northeast Italy.”

“But the judge said the full extent of the arms-for-drugs ring emerged only recently when police arrested Henri Arsan, 70, a Syrian, in Varese. Palermo described Arsan as ‘a big shot in the world scene’ of arms trafficking.”

“From documents found in Arsan’s possession police located the headquarters of the ring in an import-export company in Milan called Stibam International Transport.”

Stibam was also the Milan hub for the Grey Wolves’ protected Bulgaria to Milan heroin route. Albanian and Turkish hoods transported the morphine base through Kosovo into Albania, Greece, and Yugoslavia and then to Milan. The Mafia’s TIR (Transport Internationaux Routiers) trucks used Italy’s nearby ports to ship the morphine base to Sicily’s Corsican chemists. As a 1996 DEA report for the National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee put it: “Drug-trafficking organizations composed of ethnic Albanians from Serbia’s Kosovo Province were considered to be second only to Turkish groups as the predominant heroin smugglers along the Balkan Route. These groups were particularly active in Bulgaria, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, and Serbia. Kosovan traffickers were noted for their use of violence and for their involvement in international weapons trafficking.”

The refined Sicilian heroin was then shipped to the U.S. by Stibam International. The Milan office of Ted Shackley’s Research Associates International, founded by Shackley just after he left the CIA in 1979, coordinated with Mafia and P-2 chief Licio Gelli to use Stibam International Transport to ship arms and drugs internationally as well. 18

Here’s how privatization, sans accountability, actually works. Throughout the 60s, Edwin Wilson was a key agent of the CIA’s Special Operations Division (SOD), for which he set up supposedly private companies like Maritime Consulting Associates (1964) and Consultants International (1965) to covertly support CIA operations. Wilson delivered disassembled speed boats and other surplus JM/WAVE (anti-Castro) equipment to Lake Tanganyika to be used to intercept Soviet arms destined for nationalist rebels in the Congo; arms to Savimbi in Angola; arms to the White supremacist regime of Ian Smith in Rhodesia; intelligence and crowd-control equipment to Iran, Brazil, Chile and Venezuela; arms for the upcoming anti-Sukarno coup in Indonesia; and boats and barges to Vietnam.

In 1971 Wilson moved to the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), where he worked full-time for a unit of the Naval Field Operations Support Group, called Task Force 157, performing similar deniable covert logistical functions. Upon the 1971 move, Wilson was granted personal ownership of some of the CIA-funded front companies he founded. Ed Wilson, with Ted Shackley and Tom Clines, created the private security firm J.J. Cappucci & Associates, named after former Air Force Brigadier General and CIA Libya station chief Cappucci with whom Wilson worked. On Gadaffi’s 1969 overthrow of King Idris, the CIA’s Cappucci rescued prominent Egyptian General Kamal Hassan Ali, engineer of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, who became Sadat’s deputy prime minister and foreign secretary. Since CIA security assistance was part of the deal, the 1978 Camp David Accords found J.J. Cappucci & Associates holding the contract for Sadat’s personal security. 19

Jimmy Carter hosts a luncheon at Blair House for Israeli and Egyptian negotiators Moshe Dayan and Kamal Hassan Ali, 10/19/1978 (Wikimedia Commons)

The Camp David Accords promised Egypt a $4 billion military aid package. Erich von Marbod, administrator of the Defense Security Assistance Agency, and his assistant, General Richard Secord, had to certify any military aid shipper. As Ed Wilson recalled to journalist Joe Trento, “We all met in this hotel room [Crystal City Marriott at DC’s Reagan National Airport] – von Marbod, Shackley, Clines and Secord and myself. Just five of us.”

This was the birth of ‘the Enterprise.’ From 1978-1983 General Secord was USAF Director of International Programs and Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. With tens of millions in shipping charges in the offing, and von Marbod and Secord in position to guarantee the military aid delivery contract, just as they had delivered Sadat’s security contract, they formed the Delaware-based Egyptian American Transport and Services Corporation, EATSCO. Clines had been CIA Chile station chief during the overthrow of Allende in 1973, and in 1978 he was just ratcheting up the Contra resistance to the Sandinistas as the lead agent. Shackley, until December, 1977, was CIA Associate Deputy Director for Operations, another enormously powerful operative.

Since von Marbod, Secord, Clines and Shackley were all high-level government officials, their ‘Enterprise’ partnership needed to be secret. The Egyptian government also had to certify its own military aid shipper, and it chose the Mubarak-connected Egyptian shipper TERSAM. Working with Mubarek partner Egyptian mogul Hussein Salem as CEO of EATSCO, dividing the profits 51% to TERSAM and 49% to EATSCO, the shipping overcharges ran into the tens of millions, and the unauthorized arms diversions to the Afghan mujahideen into the hundreds of millions. Having weaned Egypt from Russia with Saudi help, EATSCO developed a considerable trade shipping old Russian equipment from Egypt to Afghanistan and delivering new American equipment to Egypt. All involved happily profited from the double billing and the shipping overcharges. With Saudi money greasing the skids, they achieved considerable influence on basic policy. The Defense Department did eventually accuse EATSCO of fraudulent overbilling as part of Iran-Contra, but the arms diversions were never addressed, and legal consequences were traded for minimal testimony.

Shackley, who became the CIA’s Associate Deputy Director for Operations under DCIA Bush in May of 1976, was relieved of his powerful post by Carter and Turner in December of 1977. Shackley wanted control of EATSCO and most of the rest of Wilson’s operations. In the CIA turf war engineered by Shackley, Wilson was convicted in 1982 for illegally arming Gaddafi with 22 tons of C4 plastic explosive. Wilson was released from prison in 2004 upon proof that most of his activities, including heavily arming and training Gaddafi and his Libya-based terrorist groups, for personal profit and the acquisition of intelligence, were under indirect CIA or ONI contracts originating with Shackley, Clines, von Marbod and other elements of DOD covert operations. Texas federal judge Lynn Hughes: “There were in fact over 80 [Wilson] contacts [with the CIA or ONI], including actions parallel to those in the charges… Because the government knowingly used false evidence against him and suppressed favorable evidence, his conviction will be vacated.” 20

Richard Helms; Ted Shackley (left) with General Creighton Abrams (center) and Thomas Polgar at the CIA station in Saigon, January 1972; Tom Clines, (Wikimedia Commons)

Because of the political scrutiny Wilson’s operations were attracting under the FBI investigation encouraged by Shackley, the CIA took Sadat’s security contract from J.J. Cappucci in 1980. It was the Federal Maritime Commission’s audit of EATSCO that caused Sadat to initiate his own audit. These 1981 audits of TERSAM/EATSCO threatened not only Mubarak’s survival and the EATSCO contract, but the covert aid to the Afghan mujahideen. But Mubarak’s military people were responsible for coordinating security with the CIA when it took over Sadat’s security contract. This resulted in Sadat’s 1981 assassination, and new head of state Mubarak in charge of the shipping profits from TERSAM and EATSCO.

Bin Laden’s famous double-agent, Ali Mohamed, got his first CIA training as a member of this Sadat security unit, although he was training at Fort Bragg with U.S. Special Forces at the time of the actual assassination. Ali Mohamed later worked closely with the assassination engineers Ayman al-Zawahiri and the ‘Blind Sheikh’ Omar Abdel Rahman after they fled Egypt. It was the Blind Sheikh who handed the fatwa down to his Muslim Brothers to kill Sadat. It can be argued, of course, that another of the assassination engineers was Hosni Mubarak himself. Sadat’s audit of Mubarak disappeared with Sadat. On his early 1980s visits to DC, Mubarak was photographed socializing with Clines and other EATSCO principals. General J.J. Cappucci told Joe Trento that Israel had “no motive [to assassinate Sadat]… But Mubarek did… Sadat found out about Mubarek’s corruption in EATSCO, when he ordered his own investigation.” 21

In July, 1982, Defense Department General Counsel formally notified General Richard Secord that he was the subject of a criminal investigation: “The investigation involves …EATSCO; Erich von Marbod; Edwin Wilson; Thomas Clines; Hussein K. Salem and officials of the United Arab Republic and employees of the DSAA [Defense Security Assisstance Administration].”

Von Marbod quit the DSAA and Clines sold his share of EATSCO to TERSAM for more than $2 million. Deputy Secretary of Defense Carlucci invoked national security to thwart the Department of Justice investigation. To make this work, Wilson needed to be painted as a rogue. Wilson was convicted on three separate arms smuggling charges between November 1982 and November 1983, the total jail time amounting to life in prison. The 1983 adjudication of EATSCO saw all others involved pay relatively minor fines for their shell companies and go on with their business.

President Carter’s Director of Naval Intelligence, Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, who strongly disapproved of these crooked privateers, shut down Wilson’s sanctioned Task Force 157 in 1976. Wilson’s government-financed front companies, which Wilson ended up owning since he was the ‘front,’ World Marine, Consultants International and others, earned him a multimillion dollar fortune. Wilson, a real spy as well as a real profiteer, survived illegally arming Gadaffi for so many years because he was also a real Mossad agent, feeding the Israelis a steady stream of valuable inside information, as well as the names of Khomeini’s opposition, dealing with Gadaffi, marked for assassination by the Iranians. Planes and training facilities that Wilson sold Gadaffi were thoroughly bugged by the Israelis.

Wilson, preoccupied with his vast Libya operation, left the running of EATSCO to his partners, Thomas Clines and Ted Shackley. EATSCO moved its offices to 7777 Leesburg Pike in Falls Church, Virginia, which was the home office of the Viguerie Company, run by powerful conservative propagandist Richard Viguerie. It was from 7777 Leesburg Pike that Shackey and Clines used their Iranian contacts and armament transshipment abilities to support the Reagan campaign, lending credence to Casey’s promise to arm the Iranians in exchange for the Iranian delay in releasing the hostages. Viguerie made sure to capitalize on that information, making Carter look weak during the 1980 campaign. Carter had already been staggered by the 1979 oil crisis engineered by the Saudis and OPEC, driving the price of gas through the roof and causing long waits at gas stations, thanks to the artificial shortage. The sabotage of Carter was, ultimately, a very crafty Safari Club operation.

Wilson knew how to swim in shark-infested waters, except, of course, when one of those sharks was a trusted partner like Shackley, who, by disappearing Wilson’s CIA and ONI covert operations records and lying through his teeth to the FBI in 1980-81, made Wilson the ‘rogue,’ the patsy. Wilson had also become a problem for the Israelis, because of his threat to their reliable agent, Ted Shackley.

This corrupt infighting and incestuous trading in government contracts, causing loss of policy and logistical control, of course, was precisely what Counterintelligence chief Angleton, Admiral Inman, DCIA Turner and President Carter had been trying to avoid. As Philip Taubman put it in The New York Times, 9/6/1981: “Already, that puzzle has raised questions for many senior Government officials about the Government’s lack of control over the transfer of sensitive technology abroad by former senior military and intelligence officials. They also say they are troubled by the CIA’s inability to prevent private misuse of intelligence and international connections by its current and former employees. The sale of advanced technology and military equipment abroad is carefully controlled by Federal law and Government regulations that are enforced by the Department of Commerce and the Department of State, but officials at both agencies acknowledge that the laws and regulations have frequently been circumvented by Mr. Wilson and others. CIA officials say the agency has no mechanism to prevent former employees from capitalizing in private life on intelligence connections and information they acquired while working for the agency. William J.Casey, the Director of Central Intelligence, announced earlier this summer that, largely in response to Mr. Wilson's activities, he had ordered a review of agency policies in this area.” Given that Casey was one of the inventors of this privateer scam, and that he was, like Shackely and Clines, one of arms and drugs shipper Stibam International’s best customers, Casey’s verbal boilerplate was followed by no action whatever.

This lack of executive control pertains to this day. John Gannon, between 1997 and 2001, was chairman of the National Intelligence Council, the CIA unit that creates the National Intelligence Estimate, the official consensus of the U.S. intelligence community on key issues, produced for governmental use. He ran BAE Systems Global Analysis unit from 2005 to 2010, with more than 800 experienced analysts with top secret security clearances for hire to security agencies on the federal, state and local level, providing analysis, information and security management systems. In 2010 he moved up to become overall director, president, of BAE Systems’ entire Information Solutions business. This top-flight security contractor warned the Senate Judiciary committee in 2006 that the “core problem” in U.S. intelligence today “is that there is minimal executive branch supervision…and inadequate congressional oversight.”

Gannon told Tim Shorrock, author of the excellent Spies for Hire, that the solution “will be a much more surgical approach, where it relates to programs that are competently managed by the government and where contractors are not a substitute for management….A lot of it [contracting] is bad, and there’s a lot of real hucksters out there. It does need greater oversight and more stringent management to be effective and so we can rein in some of the abuses.”

In other words, Bush, Casey, Shackley, Wilson and Clines are archetypes, not one-off instances of corruption. It proved to be very damaging to the U.S. to allow these corrupt privateers to make basic international policy on weapons sales, classified information, technology transfer and equipment sharing.

As Ray McGovern, co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity told Tim Shorrock, of his CIA briefing of President George H.W. Bush, “[we] often took a perverse delight in telling the president that the Soviets weren’t twelve feet tall, like the Pentagon said, but were instead five foot nine, and shrinking. That was heady stuff… There’s an absence of any of that courage now - an absence of the ethos that you really do owe the president the truth, and not something contractors want. I did a little bit of contracting myself, and I know that the contracting officer wants a certain gloss on things and most people are paid to provide that. And that’s anathema to intelligence analysis.” Adds former senior CIA Soviet analyst Melvin Goodman, author of Whistleblower at the CIA, “There’s been a real corruption and a real loss of the whole moral compass of the place. But when you add the contractors, that just makes it worse, because then there is no accountability at all.” 22

Privateer Shackley, who formally left the CIA under Carter in late 1979, did end up in control of many of Wilson’s lucrative operations as Wilson languished in prison. Using Clines as their front man, Wilson and Shackley founded API Distributors Inc. providing petroleum service and delivery, and Aroundworld Shipping and Chartering Inc., specifically charged with its role in the shipment of 22 tons of C-4 plastic explosives to Libya in 1977, obviously something no witting U.S. government agency would do, given that malleable, lightweight C-4 is the perfect terrorist weapon. They also founded Systems Services International Inc., called SSI, and International Research and Trade Ltd., IRT. When Shackley left the CIA in September 1979, after founding EATSCO, he founded Research Associates International (RAI), using the offices of SSI and IRT. RAI used its Milan office to coordinate with Stibam International Transport, also based in Milan, to deliver arms on contract internationally, including top secret heavy weapons to Khomeini’s Iran for the Reagan administration, and to Gaddafi’s Libya for profit. 23

Vice President Bush, using his Carlyle Group connection, helped Shackley establish Theodore Shackley and Associates in Kuwait. Cooperating with Shackley was Frank Carlucci, who went into business with Fritz von Marbod and General James Allen as Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of Sears World Trade Inc. from 1983 to 1986. General Allen, another Air force logistical expert who led the Military Airlift Command, headed the Sears subsidiary, International Planning and Analysis Center Inc. Carlucci became Managing Director of The Carlyle Group, an arms manufacturer holding company, in 1989.

In 1973, for non-cooperation with Tricky Dick, DCIA Helms was banished to Iran as our ambassador, partly because he went to prep school with the Shah in Switzerland before the war and had stayed in touch. The Shah’s Iran was a Safari Club founding partner, enabling Helms to covertly run the Safari Club from Tehran from 1973-1977.

The modus operandi of the head of the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, GID, Kamal Adham, and his 1979 successor Prince Turki bin Faisal, since they controlled Saudi Aramco, was to fund everything they approved of, even to the tune of hundreds of millions if necessary. This meant that the Saudis were in charge of Safari Club, that is, Reagan and Bush administration covert policy. This is how the U.S. missed the 1991 Soviet collapse and the spectacular jihadist attack of 9/11/2001, and why it automatically tilted to the radical jihadists funded by the Saudis, including bin Laden, in Afganistan, to the exclusion of the democratic forces in Afghanistan. That meant that we built and funded bin Laden’s operation, and had no independent eyes to see the consequences coming, despite the fact that our best analysts did, and said so. Our Republican privateer policy makers insisted on pro-Saudi intelligence manipulation, literally looking through Saudi eyes and operating through Saudi mechanisms and orders, because they were invested in the same corporations and shared the same fascist methods and objectives. 24

That’s what Angleton meant by “destroying counterintelligence.” We did not go to the trouble of building our own independent base in West Asia, which would have been far cheaper and more effective in the long run. We were bound, by treaty, to operate exclusively through the Pakistani ISI – we could not run our own independent intelligence service in Afghanistan – we had to clear everything, including finance, through the ISI. NSC Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke: “First, the fact that the CIA became dependent upon the Pakistani intelligence service to aid the Afghans meant that we developed fewer ties and loyalties among the Afghans that we should have been able to generate for our multibillion-dollar effort. (Later in the 1990s, CIA would also make a similar mistake, failing to put U.S. operatives into the country to kill bin Laden and the al Qaeda leadership, relying on hired Afghans instead.)…. The Saudis took the lead in assembling the group of volunteers. The Saudi intelligence chief, Prince Turki, relied upon a man from a wealthy construction family that was close to the Saudi royal family. Turki empowered a son of that family, one Usama bin Laden, to recruit, move, train, and indoctrinate the Arab volunteers in Afghanistan.” 25

Here is Prince Turki bin Faisal, in his Georgetown University alumni association speech, 2/2002: “In 1976, after the Watergate matters took place here, your intelligence community was literally tied up by Congress. It could not do anything. It could not send spies, it could not write reports, and it could not pay money. In order to compensate for that, a group of countries got together in the hope of fighting communism and established what was called the Safari Club. The Safari Club included France, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Iran. The principal aim of this club was that we would share information with each other and help each other in countering Soviet influence worldwide, and especially in Africa.” Key CIA agent and privateer Ed Wilson: “If I needed money for an operation, Prince Turki made it available.” 26

A frequent path for this money was through the Bush-controlled Texas and London-based First International Bancshares, the largest bank holding company in Texas. Bush was Chairman of the Board of FIB from 1977 to 1980. Prince Turki often routed his BCCI remittances through the First International London branch, as did Global International Airways, a division of Shackley’s EATSCO. The management of Global was shared with Saudi GID chief Kamal Adham and elements of Iran’s SAVAK. Global International was used to ship arms to Iran and to the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

Another major arms shipper was the Gulf Group, a collection of shipping companies owned by the three Pakistani Gokal brothers. Saudi money to cover these operations often flowed from the Bank of Oman through Israeli Bruce Rappaport’s InterMaritime Bank of Geneva and New York, one of Rappaport’s many banks with a reputation as stellar as that of BCCI. Rappaport’s partner was E.P. Barry, a former partner of CIA grey eminence Paul Helliwell. Independent Counsel Robert McKay investigated Rappaport as one of DCIA Casey’s Contra paymasters, who was discovered to have misplaced $10 million.

Major arms deals with the Saudis themselves, of course, were also a huge generator of covert funds, amounting to more than $200 billion over the decade of the 1980s. The deals often included payment for many times the actual cost of the arms, the balance being diverted for covert CIA, GID and ISI activities, such as Contra funding or fixing the Italian elections (DCIA Casey’s project with the Vatican bank). These deals included the 1981 AWACS deal with the Saudis, and the huge Saudi purchase of 72 Eurofighter Typhoon multirole fighter bombers from BAE Systems in 1985, called the Al Yamamah (The Dove) deal, worth an incredible $80 billion, nearly half of it commissions and royal rake-offs. The Saudis contracted to deliver 600,000 barrels of crude oil per day to the UK government in payment. The Binladen Group Mecca reconstruction project also saw half of its vast budget go to Saudi royals off the books.

Much of Saudi Arabia’s vast oil income had been leveraged through corrupt deals. King Fahd’s youngest son, Abdul Aziz bin Fahd, called ‘Azouzi,’ ‘Dearie,’ by his powerful father to please his powerful mother, Jawhara al Ibrahim of the merchant-king Al Ibrahim family. Jawhara is said to have raked off nearly a billion dollars from the $4.1 billion AT&T contract. Azouzi just got a pat on the head from the King when he spent $4.6 billion on a sprawling palace and Muslim theme park outside Riyadh.

But Azouzi’s funding of radical Wahhabi terrorists and the Muslim Brotherhood seemed threatening to many in the Saudi high command itself, like Crown Prince Nayef, Minister of the Interior, despite, of course, long-standing Saudi support for the radical Wahhabis and the Brotherhood. Domestic blowback, like the presence of committed jihadists in the Saudi military, was starting to be a problem. As CIA Agent Bob Baer puts it, “In September 1997 he [Azouzi] coordinated a $100 million aid package to the Taliban. It didn’t make the slightest bit of difference that the Taliban were protecting bin Laden, a man who had vowed to overthrow the Al Sa’ud. All Azouzi cared about was the support of the Wahhabis, come hell or high explosives.” But as long as Azouzi had the protection of King Fahd and his successor, King Abdullah, and his dragon-lady mother Jawhara, there was no one in the kingdom to stop him, until the 2017 ascension of ‘reformer’ Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, MBS, who scared the hell out of Azouzi by kidnapping him. 27

However corrupt or murderous the Saudi royal family, money is still money. As the basic Safari Club funder, the Saudis achieved complete penetration of U.S. intelligence operations and a policy veto. Per the CIA’s 1978 request, the Saudi GID allowed the CIA drug money laundry Nugan Hand Bank to open a branch in Riyadh, a rare privilege. CIA oil expert Walter McDonald went from his position as CIA Deputy Director for Economics to a managing position in Nugan Hand, always reporting to the top of the Saudi GID.

By the mid-1980s, 30% of BCCI stock was owned by the Saudi royal family’s main banker, Khalid bin Mahfouz, owner of the National Commercial Bank (NCB) of Saudi Arabia, one of the most active financial supporters of bin Laden and al Qaeda. Khalid bin Mahfouz was also an important Carlyle Group investor. In the $1-trillion lawsuit filed by four thousand relatives of the victims of 9/11 against hundreds of wealthy Saudis, including the royals, alleging their financing of bin Laden, “A bank audit of NCB in 1998 showed that over a ten year period, $74 million was funneled by its Zakat Committee to the International Islamic Relief Organization, a Muslim charity headed by Osama bin Laden’s brother in law.” Many similar money transfers through the Saudi NCB reveal financial links to bin Laden operatives.

Nonetheless, these charities were real charities, advertising charity, not terrorism. In dismissing the suit for lack of evidence of intention to fund terrorism, Judge Wechsler added, “The search for the sin of commission makes people overlook the vast sin of omission, which is definitely true. These guys did not pay any serious attention to this issue. They did not give us all the cooperation we needed. There was no real political will to stop this. That’s clear.” NSC Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke always got a brick wall from the Saudis when he tried to penetrate their banking system, which could have as much to do with their BCCI-style drug money laundering as terrorism, since drug money laundering is support for terrorism. Elite Saudi opinion varied, but “Some of them were clearly sympathetic to al Qaeda,” Clarke says. Al Qaeda, of course, was, among other things, a drug gang.

Robert Baer is a former CIA Middle East Directorate of Operations case officer with 21 years of on-the-ground experience working throughout the region, 1976-1997. He is fluent in Arabic, Persian, French and his native English. He is also conversant in Russian, Tajik, and Baluch. Some of his amazing adventures were portrayed by George Clooney in the 2005 Academy Award-winning film Syriana. As Baer puts it, “Quite a few of the junior princes hate the U.S.” With their security services thoroughly infiltrated by jihadis, the Saudis felt that, for their own security, they needed to be utterly duplicitous with the U.S.. Despite good evidence, the Saudis refused to indict bin Laden for the 1995 Riyadh bombing. The Saudis funded the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.

“The idea was to get the Saudis to underwrite the U.S. budget deficit. Eager to become America’s lender of last resort, with all the leverage that implied, the Saudis took the bait and happily swallowed it. Soon [Secretary of Treasury] William Simon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger had cooked up another scheme: the Saudi–U.S. Joint Commission on Economic Cooperation [1975], which would create an infrastructure for ‘the new Saudi Arabia,’ one modeled on the United States…. The White House put out its hand to fund pet projects that Congress wouldn’t fund or couldn’t afford, from a war in Afghanistan to one in Nicaragua. Every Washington think tank, from the supposedly nonpartisan Middle East Institute to the Meridian International Center, took Saudi money. Washington’s boiler room - the K Street lobbyists, PR firms, and lawyers - lived off the stuff. So did its bluestocking charities, like the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Children’s National Medical Center, and every presidential library of the last thirty years…. Saudi money also seeped into the bureaucracy. Any Washington bureaucrat with a room-temperature IQ knows that if he stays on the right side of the kingdom, some way or another, he’ll be able to finagle his way to feed at the Saudi trough. A consulting contract with Aramco, a chair at American University, a job with Lockheed—it doesn’t matter. There’s hardly a living former assistant secretary of state for the Near East; CIA director; White House staffer; or member of Congress who hasn’t ended up on the Saudi payroll in one way or another, or so it sometimes seems. With this kind of money waiting out there, of course Washington’s bureaucrats don’t have the backbone to take on Saudi Arabia…. Collectively, two-way trade between Saudi Arabia and the United States grew from $56.2 million in 1950 to $19.3 billion in 2000.”

The Iran-Contra arms sales supplemented the Contra cocaine money, which was made available to the Contras through the same BCCI and other opaque international banks. New York Times, 4/8/1987, “Millions Untraced In Aid To Contras Over Last 3 Years:” “The help for the contras appears to have come from these sources: * $32 million from Saudi Arabia. * $10 million from Brunei. * $27 million in United States Government aid for nonlethal purposes, of which $22 million went to the main rebel group.” The Times then goes on to list millions from other sources, but completely omits Barry Seal’s operation, the Contra Cocaine income coming out of the Casey-Bush operation from El Salvador’s U.S. airbase in Ilopango, which dwarfed all the other income sources combined.

The first shipment of HAWK anti-aircraft missiles to Iran, in January 1986, left $850,000 in a Swiss bank account controlled by Richard Secord and Oliver North, which North transferred to the Contras. Upon Casey’s approval of Iran’s request for battlefield intelligence to be used against Saddam’s Iraq, the CIA’s second in command, John McMahon, protested and resigned. The next transfer to Iran, for 1000 TOW anti-tank missiles, went from the CIA to arms dealer Maj. Gen. Richard Secord, then to the Iranian middleman, Manucher Ghorbanifar, and into Iran in February of 1986. Both middlemen took a multi-million dollar cut, selling the weapons to Iran at six to eight times actual cost, but still leaving millions for the Contras.

Ghorbanifar’s partner in many of these regional deals was the flamboyant Saudi Adnan Khashoggi, accustomed to brokering arms deals since his days financing Richard Nixon. Khashoggi, close to both the Saudi and Jordanian royal families, operated the Mount Kenya Safari Club where his close friends, Kamal Adham and Prince Turki, the heads of Saudi military intelligence, could host the leaders of their right-wing alliance of secret services. As the Senate investigation of BCCI reported: “Both Saudi businessman Adnan Khashoggi and Iranian arms merchant Manucher Ghorbanifar were central agents of the United States in selling arms to Iran in the Iran/Contra affair. According to the official chronologies of the Iran/Contra committees, Khashoggi acted as the middleman for five Iranian arms deals for the United States, financing a number of them through BCCI. . . . According to his own and other published accounts, he provided some $30 million in loans altogether. . . . Both Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar banked at BCCI’s offices in Monte Carlo, and for both, BCCI’s services were essential.” 29

These arrangements were off the books, that is, not a State or Defense Department operation. There needed to be no paper trail of the arms coming from the USA to Iran. Instead, they needed to go through Israel. The deals were an evolution of arms deals put together by Khashoggi at his Safari Club in Kenya, in May of 1982, and in Hamburg in 1985, with the CIA’s legendary old Mideast hand Miles Copeland, and CIA agent Larry Kolb, legendary Israeli General Ariel Sharon, experienced Israeli arms dealer Yaacov Nimrodi, Israeli-American industrialist Al Schwimmer, the founder of Israel Aerospace Industries, and Mossad’s David Kimche - and, of course, Khashoggi and Ghorbanifar. Communications help in the sale of the Tube-launched, Optically tracked, Wire-guided missiles was also provided by CIA grey eminence Ted Shackley and asset Michael Ledeen.

Khashoggi was the Saudi agent for Kenworth heavy trucks, which he supplied to the Saudi Binladin Group. He also supplied the Saudis and other regional players with Raytheon’s Hawk missiles, Lockheed’s C-130 cargo planes and Northrop F-5 fighters. CIA agent Bob Baer: “Khashoggi was serving by the mid-1970s as middleman on an estimated 80 percent of all arms deals between the United States and Saudi Arabia….Northrop officials told a Senate subcommittee looking into foreign payments by U.S. corporations that it had given Khashoggi $450,000 to bribe Saudi generals into buying the company’s wares - an allegation that didn’t prevent the Reagan administration from using Khashoggi as its own middleman during the Iran-Contra fiasco.”

The more illegal weapons sales to Iran, through cutouts such as Secord, Ghorbanifar, Khashoggi, the Israelis and their shell companies, the more untraceable money for the Contras. National Security Adviser Admiral John Poindexter reported to Reagan on April 4, 1986, that Iranian arms sales so far had yielded “$12 million… to purchase critically needed supplies for the Nicaraguan Democratic Resistance Forces.” The Reagan in-house excuse for the illegal sales was that they were trading arms for hostages held by the Iranian proxy army Hezbollah in Lebanon, but all these arms transfers actually did was encourage more Hezbollah hostage-taking. Reagan’s public lying about the arms transfers, despite his charming Will Rogers impersonation, was believed by very few policy wonks, but by far too many voters. 30

“Using the Ayatollah’s money to support the Nicaraguan resistance is a neat idea,” chirped Ollie. Except if you get caught. On March 16, 1988, North, his immediate superior Deputy National Security Adviser John Poindexter, Poindexter’s predecessor National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, General Richard Secord, and Secord’s business partner Albert Hakim were indicted for violating the Congressional ban on arming the Contras, illegal arms sales, conspiracy, fraud and theft. Other supporting players, including Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, CIA officers Duane Clarridge, Alan Fiers and Clair George were charged with perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to the FBI. All were convicted and pardoned by Vice President Bush when he left the presidency in 1992. Two of the convictions were reversed on constitutional grounds. The massive cocaine export operation run by Vice President Bush out of Ilopango in El Salvador uncovered by heroic DEA agent Cele Castillio was not mentioned at all in the indictments, because that would have put Castillo, with his professional DEA evidence, much of it given to me and others by Castillo for this book, on the stand, and Bush on trial. Castillo’s evidence did prove essential to Senator Kerry’s Contra-Cocaine investigation. 31

The Iran-Contra operation was coordinated by Vice President Bush, in charge of all Reagan administration intelligence operations, and DCIA Casey, the actual organizer of the system. CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman: “Soon after Gates removed me from my position as chief of the division on Soviet–Third World relations, I learned of yet another effort to distort intelligence on behalf of White House policy. This involved an effort by the National Security Council and the CIA to produce a document that would provide intelligence justification for the scandal known as Iran-Contra….In order to conduct arms sales to Iran…the Reagan administration had to demonstrate that Iran was no longer involved in the conduct of state terrorism, which of course was not true. Gates was intimately involved in the effort to change the CIA’s analytical line on Iran in order to demonstrate that Tehran had ended support for international terrorism…. Gates used his positions as director of the National Intelligence Council and deputy director for intelligence to make sure there would be no opportunity to counter the final product.”

“Just as Gates had picked the drafters of the Papal Plot assessment that was done in camera, he picked the major players in the estimate on Iran. When I testified against Gates in his 1991 confirmation hearings, I referred to this process as ‘judge-shopping in the courthouse,’ for there is no better way to assure the outcome of a tendentious intelligence product…. The Iran-Contra operations were run by Ronald Reagan’s National Security Council, but several high-ranking CIA officials, not only Gates were witting…. Bob Gates blocked language in the analysis that reflected the views of the Soviet analysts regarding the unlikelihood of a Soviet-Iranian détente and inserted language that concluded Iran had given up terrorism as an instrument of policy. Gates was wrong on all counts, and the White House proceeded to pursue weapons sales to Iran and channel cash and resources to the Contras….”

“In a closed session in the evening of September 25, 1991, Jennifer Glaudemans, a key dissenter on the Iran estimate, told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Gates’s ‘heavy-handed’ supervision of the CIA’s Intelligence Estimates had ‘tragic consequences’ for American policy. Glaudemans, who eventually left the CIA to go to the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, described the ‘atmosphere of intimidation in the office of Soviet analysis’ as well as the ‘under-handed efforts to reverse or to impose analytical conclusions.’” 32

It was Saddam Hussein’s September 22, 1980 invasion of Iran, covertly backed Safari Club elements looking for another arms customer and international leverage against Iran, that sabotaged Carter’s negotiations for a timely Iranian hostage release, thus swinging the election to Reagan. Iran-Contra was managed through Israeli military intelligence, using BCCI, which received cash payment for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of arms twice. First, the U.S. Congress authorized payment for delivery to Afghan rebels, and then the arms, stockpiled in Pakistan, were actually delivered to the Iranians, who also paid for them. The Israeli motive was the defeat of Iraq, at that time far more dangerous to Israel than Iran. That American motives and Israeli were different is demonstrated by the fact that while Israel was playing the Iran card, America was playing the Iraq card, although the supply chain to both Iran and Iraq was an incestuous mélange. 33

In 1982, the Reagan administration, as it had done with Iran, removed Saddam’s Iraq from the list of nations that sponsored terrorism, enabling military support to Saddam, to prevent an Iranian victory. As NSC Counteterrorism director Richard Clarke puts it, “Shortly thereafter, I saw American intelligence data begin to flow to Baghdad. When Iran was preparing an offensive in a sector, the Iraqis would know from what U.S. satellites saw and Saddam would counter with beefed-up defenses. In 1984, the United States resumed full diplomatic relations with Iraq. Although the U.S. never sold arms to Iraq, the Saudis and Egyptians did, including U.S. arms. Some of the bombs that the Saudis had bought as part of overstocking now went to Saddam, in violation of U.S. law. I doubt that the Saudis ever asked Washington’s permission, but I also doubt that anyone in the Reagan administration wanted to be asked.” Through the Banco Nazionale del Lavoro (BNL), which is tied to the Vatican Bank, between 1985 and 1989, Reagan’s CIA/DIA, along with our Saudi partners, illegally funneled at least $5 billion worth of arms, including chemical weapons, cluster bombs and napalm, to Saddam Hussein. 34

The Shia fundamentalists around Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini also benefitted by the delay in the hostage release, which happened on the very day Reagan took office, January 20, 1981, an obvious quid pro quo for illegal arms sales to Iran. Per Safari Club policy, the Reagan administration immediately reversed the Carter administration’s Iran arms embargo, legally green-lighting massive arms shipments to Iran from Israel, through the opaque BCCI. Thanks to Reagan’s DCIA Casey and the political clout of the famously flamboyant Rep. Charlie Wilson, this same nexus was used, over the next few years, to support massive arms deliveries to the mujahideen in Afghanistan through Pakistan.

In 1980 Carter thought he had reached a deal with newly-elected Iranian President Abolhassan Banisadr: “I openly opposed the hostage-taking throughout the election campaign.... I won the election with over 76 percent of the vote.... Other candidates also were openly against hostage-taking, and overall, 96 percent of votes in that election were given to candidates who were against it.” 35

Casey, Gates Bush, the CIA’s Donald Gregg and communications director Robert Gray, representing the Reagan campaign, met three times with the Iranian leadership in Madrid and Paris during the run-up to the election, asking the Iranians to delay the hostage release until after the election, in exchange for the shipment of armaments already sold to the Shah by the U.S. and Israel. Given that war with Saddam’s Iraq was a certainty, beginning 9/22/1980, the Iranians were more than willing to deal. The meetings were arranged by Iranian banker and arms dealer Jamshid Hashemi, a supporter of the Iranian revolution connected to the CIA and MI6, and former French SDECE chief Alexandre de Marenches, BCCI cofounder and arms dealer. Hashemi testified at length in 1992 to the House October Surprise Task Force, and in the mid-1980s about the Iran-Contra affair. Hashemi’s testimony was encouraged by the extensive contemporary 1980 FBI wiretaps of him arranging these meetings, and the related arms transfers. Two multimillion dollar transfers were made in 1980 to Hashemi through BCCI by a Houston lawyer connected to George H.W. Bush, Reagan’s chief of intelligence operations. 36

Former Iranian President Abolhassan Banisadr, in his 1991 book, My Turn to Speak: “I have proof of contacts between Khomeini and the supporters of Ronald Reagan as early as the spring of 1980…the sole purpose of which was to handicap Carter’s re-election bid by preventing the hostages’ release before the American election in November 1980. Rafsanjani, Beheshti, and Ahmed Khomeini [the Ayatollah’s son] played key roles in proposing this agreement to the Reagan team.” 37

Nixon had used the same tactics in 1968, employing the influential Anna Chen Chennault to pressure Thieu in South Vietnam to scuttle the cease-fire talks with North Vietnam. Thieu walked away from the talks the day before the 1968 election. The treason worked in both 1968 and 1980. Reagan won the 1980 election against a seemingly impotent Carter. A politically weakened Banisadr was overthrown in June of 1981 and replaced with Mohammed Ali Rajai, a favorite of Khomeini, from whom the Reagan administration, despite the boilerplate moral opprobrium, continued to receive “the Ayatollah’s money” for covert arms sales and transfers.

Nixon’s Kissinger, Carter’s Brzezinski and his mentor, Chase Manhattan bank’s David Rockefeller, who controlled much of the Iranian wealth frozen in 1979, and Reagan’s Bush, Baker, Casey and Gates thought of themselves as geostrategic chess players, but this seems to be a lot more like tic-tac-toe. These great ‘chess players’ delivered Iran to Khomeini’s crazies and Afghanistan and Pakistan to the jihadi heroin gangs so avidly supported by the totalitarian Saudis. It also gave those jihadi heroin gangs the logistical clout to pull off the 9/11 attacks, about which elements of the ISI and the GID were fully aware, before the fact.

In a famous December 26, 1979 memo to President Carter, National Security Adviser Brzezinski, sharing the Dulles brothers’ myopic Soviet fixation, wrote, “To make the above [trapping the Soviets in Afghanistan] possible we must both reassure Pakistan and encourage it to help the rebels. This will require a review of our policies toward Afghanistan, more guarantees to it, more arms aid, and alas, a decision that our security policy toward Pakistan cannot be dictated by our nonproliferation policy.”

We did not object to the Saudi-run Safari Club and Islamic Development Bank funding of the ‘Islamic bomb’ in Pakistan, which became real in 1984. Saudi funds were inextricably mixed with American Safari Club funds, so that Pakistan actually built its atomic bomb not only with an overt American green light, but with American funding, controlled by the Saudis.

Senior CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman: “In South Asia, the Directorate of Operations censored or ignored reports on strategic weapons programs and human rights abuses in Pakistan to satisfy the Nixon and Reagan administrations. The few reports that did get to the analysts were difficult to circulate, because Gates as the deputy director of intelligence, blocked their distribution. Casey and Gates knew that, if intelligence on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons reached the Congress, all aid to Pakistan would have to stop…. The politicization of clandestine collection of intelligence has always been a problem for the intelligence analyst, but the years under the stewardship of Casey and Gates were the worst.” 38

The FBI’s 1991 investigation into CIA-connected arms dealer Sarkis Soghanalian, the famed ‘merchant of death,’ led directly to Pakistani A. Q. Khan’s nuclear black market run by the Saudi GID and the Pakistani ISI, with the cooperation and full knowledge of covert elements of the CIA, including its leadership. The CIA contracted with Soghanalian to supply arms to Saddam Hussein during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war, as well as to the Fujimori government in Peru, Somoza in Nicaragua, Polisario forces in Mauritania, and the Phalange militia during the Lebanese Civil War. Soghanalian had been a U. S. intelligence asset ever since the 1958 Lebanon incursion. As a deniable off-the-books contractor able to funnel weapons through third parties, he was able to violate the Iraq arms embargo without involving the U.S.. With covert approval from Mitterrand, given at U.S. request, he famously sold French 155mm self-propelled howitzers to Saddam, valued at an estimated $1.4 billion.

The first Gulf War changed the politics of the situation, when Iraq, instead of Iran, became the enemy, causing a great deal of information to be revealed in Soghanalian’s 1991 U.S. trial. Soghanalian was very close to the Saudi GID and the Pakistani ISI. He was a major covert arms supplier to the Afghan mujahideen throughout the 1980s. He explained: “As in Iraq, the U.S. did not want to get its hands dirty. So the Saudis’ money and the U.S. money was handled by the ISI. I can tell you that more than three quarters of the money was skimmed off the top. What went to buy weapons for the Afghan fighters was peanuts… Khan’s network was controlled by the Saudis, not Khan and not Pakistan. The Saudis were in on every major [nuclear] deal including Iran, Libya, North Korea, and Malaysia.” 39

When Ed Wilson forwarded his direct knowledge of Gaddafi’s budding nuclear program to Shackley in Reagan’s CIA and to Reagan’s National Security Adviser Richard Allen, they just buried it, and forwarded no further information requests to Wilson, a professional spy on the ground in Libya working closely with Gaddafi. Instead, they protected the ISI’s A.Q. Khan. In direct contravention of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, CIA elements, in the name of nothing more than commercial equipment sales and good relations with the ISI, helped A.Q. Khan obtain U.S. hardware essential to the Pakistani bomb.

The CIA’s own June 2002 Top Secret National Intelligence Estimate details the history of the Pakistani transfer of nuclear know-how and equipment to North Korea, beginning in the early 1980s with Reagan and stretching all the way through the late 1990s under Clinton. Speaking of the 1980s, an American intelligence official, referring to the 2002 CIA report, told Seymour Hersh, “The transfer of enrichment technology by Pakistan is a direct outgrowth of the failure of the United States to deal with the Pakistani program when we could have done so. We've lost control.” 40

When Mohammed al Khilewi, the second-ranking official at the Saudi Mission to the United Nations, defected to the U.S. in May of 1994, protesting King Fahd’s despotism, he brought with him thousands of original Saudi documents proving Saudi financing of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb program and Pakistan’s transfer of nuclear bomb technology to Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Libya and North Korea. Journalist Greg Palast: “Clinton granted the Saudi defector asylum, but barred the FBI from looking at the documents. Al Khilewi’s New York lawyer, Michael Wildes, told me he was stunned. Wildes handles some of America’s most security-sensitive asylum cases. We said (to the FBI), ‘Here, take the documents! Go get some bad guys with them! We’ll even pay for the photocopying!’ But the agents who came to his office had been ordered not to accept evidence of Saudi criminal activity, even on U.S. soil.”

At this time, when the DIA warned that the Saudis needed to be monitored because they were funding terrorism, the DIA was ordered to stop all eavesdropping on the Saudis. This is the juice the Saudis used to support the 9/11 hijackers, with the President of the United States acting as a willing Saudi agent giving Saudi orders to the CIA. Khan’s network was finally exposed in October of 2003 when Italian authorities seized a shipment of Malaysian-built centrifuges bound for Libya. 41 42

Our Safari Club financed and protected bin Laden, and simultaneously sold arms to the Iranians and the Iraqis, as did the British, the French and the Israelis. The arms sales themselves became the policy driver, so that anything that abetted the arms sales, like heroin sales, nuclear proliferation or support for Saudi terrorists, became protected covert policy. Iran’s Bank Melli used the BCCI throughout the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war to pay for hundreds of millions of dollars worth of arms and equipment. Israel was an important middleman in this operation, helping to keep Iran’s American-made weapons, acquired under the Shah, operating under the Ayatollah. The U.S. shipped arms and parts to Israel, which Israel, at considerable profit to itself and its contractors, forwarded to the Ayatollah.

The policy of helping both countries wreck each other killed a million people and left them both utterly exhausted. The July 3, 1988 accidental downing by the USS Vincennes of an Iran Air passenger jet, supposedly mistaking it for a fighter plane, killed 290 civilians. Iran, fearing that overt war with the U.S. was in the offing, accepted the U.N. brokered cease-fire. The policy of arming both sides was hailed as a success by President Bush’s Secretary of State, James Baker, since “The outward thrust of the Iranian revolution has been stopped. Iraq’s interests in development, modernity and regional influence should compel it in our direction.” 43

Iraq’s Saddam realized that the U.S. had armed Iran while it was heavily arming Iraq, and intentionally fed Iraq doctored satellite photographs prior to the pivotal 1986 battle of Al Faw, costing thousands of Iraqi lives and causing the peninsula, which controls the Shatt al-Arab waterway, to fall to Iran. Saddam repaid the U.S. with the August, 1990 invasion and annexation of the oil-rich dictatorship in Kuwait, thus starting the Persian Gulf War, Operation Desert Sheild, 1/15/1991. President Bush, on Voice of America radio, February 5, 1991, said “There is another way for the bloodshed to stop: and that is, for the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside and then comply with the United Nations' resolutions and rejoin the family of peace-loving nations.” He said the same thing again on March 1, two days after the liberation of Kuwait.

Iraq’s Shias in the south and Kurds in the north, bordering the victorious 34-country Coalition forces, fully expecting Coalition military support, rose up against Saddam. But the duplicitous Bush, still playing the ‘great game’ in the interest of preserving an ‘asset’ that could continue to threaten Iran, ordered Coalition troops not to intervene. The most powerful Muslim nations in the Coalition, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria, also strongly objected to turning Iraq into a majority Shia-led country, inevitably strengthening Iran. So the surrender deal at Safwan left Saddam in possession of his heavy armor and helicopter gunships.

NSC Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke, then Baker’s Assistant Secretary of State for Political-Military Affairs: “A joint U.S.-U.K. working group I led had discussed proposed surrender terms, including the destruction of the heavy armor of the Guard divisions. In the talks at Safwan, however, the Iraqi units were allowed to withdraw intact… What I cannot understand is how anyone can defend the Bush administration’s decision to stand by and let the Republican Guard mass-murder the Shi’a and the Kurds. We had it within our power to resume the bombing of the Republican Guard and regime targets. Our Arab coalition partners and the world in general would have had to respect an American decision to renew hostilities for the limited purpose of stopping the slaughter…. If we had bombed the Republican Guard and defended the Shi’a and Kurds, the Bush calculus that Saddam Hussein would fall without our occupying Baghdad might have proved true.” 44

President Bush meets with General Colin Powell, General Scowcroft, Secretary James Baker, Vice President Quayle, Secretary Dick Cheney, Governor Sununu and Robert Gates about Operations Desert Shield and Storm, 1/15/1991 (Wikimedia Commons)

Over 100,000 people were slaughtered by Saddam with no Coalition interference, despite the fact that we had a largely Muslim Coalition army that had just defeated Saddam sitting right there, literally bordering the slaughter. Saddam was preserved as a militarily viable arms customer, helicopter gunships and all. Ridding Iraq of Saddam and establishing a parliamentary democracy, which would have required a minimal effort against Saddam’s already defeated army, never even occurred to Bush, his Dulles protégés and the Coalition’s fascist Arab dictatorships.

Colin Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was former military assistant to Reagan’s Secretary of Defense Weinberger, former Deputy National Security Adviser to Reagan’s Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci, and former National Security Adviser to President Reagan. In his 1996 book My American Journey, Powell confirmed that “Our practical intention was to leave Baghdad enough power to survive as a threat to an Iran that remained bitterly hostile toward the United States.” 45

We played it the way the Saudis wanted it played. Saudi Arabia pumped millions into our shared banks to make sure that Iraq remained a threat to its mortal regional enemy, Iran. It was Saudi Arabia that was driving this policy, however many Shia and Kurds got killed. The American guarantors of the “agricultural loans” to Saddam Hussein and his gang of Sunni killers, and the Pakistanis and their gangs of Sunni killers, were the Export-Import Bank and the Commodities Credit Corporation, dealing opaquely though the Safari Club’s BCCI. The Department of Justice, refusing to follow up on the Arms Export Control Act and Boland Amendment violations, because they are not criminal statutes, and would have involved the Reagan/Bush administration and the CIA, simply indicted 6 BNL executives for bank fraud. 46

Afghanistan

In 1964 the liberal nationalist King Mohammed Zahir Shah, whose inefficient rule began in 1933, engineered a new constitution introducing free elections, a parliament, civil rights, women’s rights and universal suffrage. This was anathema to the Pakistani military, preoccupied with its contest with India over Kashmir, because it meant an independent Afghanistan, depriving Pakistan of ‘strategic depth.’

Mohammed Zahir Shah with Kennedy 9/5/1963; Zahir Shah seated far right, overseeing Hamid Karzai sworn into office, 12/7/2004 (Wikimedia Commons)

Pakistan, in the name of Islam, backed Afghan mercenary killers and heroin dealers like Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who was arrested in 1972 by King Zahir Shah for killing a left-wing student activist. But the King was overthrown by his cousin and brother-in-law, the Prime Minister, Mohammed Daoud Khan, a secular parliamentary democrat who favored a republic over a monarchy. This enabled Hekmatyar to escape to Pakistan, where he joined a right-wing ISI death squad. The ISI was directly funded by the Saudis, cofounders of BCCI, who insisted on the widespread promotion of their jihadist Wahhabism throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan, in concert with the very similar Pakistani brand of obscurantism, Deobandi Islam, imported from an anti-British movement born in the town of Deoband in northern India in the late 1860s.

In 1979, three years after DCIA Bush put together the Safari Club’s cooperation in BCCI, Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud took the reins from his uncle, Kamal Adham, as the head of Saudi Arabia's Al Mukhabarat Al A'amah, the General Intelligence Directorate (GID). He held that position for 23 years - from 1979 until just 10 days before the 2001 September 11 attacks. Given Saudi Arabia’s preeminent position as the major U.S. and British oil supplier and arms customer during these years, the Dulles protégés leading American policy gave Saudi Arabia pride of place in U.S. Mideast policy. Just as I began Vol. I of this book talking of the American political tradition of free speech that is native to me, it is worth mentioning Saudi tradition here, because that is what was leading U.S. policy in this part of the world.

The colonial power Great Britain, in 1915, in the process of ending the Ottoman Empire’s hold on the Middle East, found itself supporting two pretenders to the Arabian throne, that is, to the title of Sherif of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, Hussein bin Ali and Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud. Hussein bin Ali was the Hashemite leader who proclaimed the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire in 1916, claiming the title of Sherif and Emir of Mecca and King of the Hejaz. The Hashemites are the putative descendents of Hashim ibn Abd Manaf, great-grandfather of the Prophet Muhammad, the traditional rulers of Mecca. It was the army lead by Hussein’s son, Faisal, and T.E. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, that became the global image of Arab nationalism during these years. Hussein’s rival, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, came from a tribal sheikhdom centered in Riyadh. Prince Turki, the seminal leader of Saudi military intelligence during the 80s and 90s, is the grandson of Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud. As a British foreign service officer put it in 1915, “What we want is not a United Arabia, but a weak and disunited Arabia, split up into little principalities so far as possible under our suzerainty – but incapable of coordinated action against us, forming a buffer against the Powers in the West.” 1

Hussein bin Ali, c. 1915; Iraq’s King Faisal with Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, 1931 (Wikimedia Commons)

The Brits recognized Hussein’s sovereignty over only the Hejaz, western Saudi Arabia, although he also declared himself ‘King of the Arab Countries.’ The Brits accepted Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud’s sovereignty over the Nejd region, central Saudi Arabia, with its capital at Riyadh, recently reconquered by Saud. Hussein’s traditional orthodox Sunnism threatened to unite the entire Muslim world, including India’s very large Muslim population, whereas Saud’s radical ultra-conservative Wahhabism, based on the revisionist teaching of Mohammed ibn Abdul al-Wahhab, 1703 - 1791, was guaranteed to divide it.

Ibn Saud’s militia, the Ikhwan, or Brotherhood, were savage Bedouin tribesmen who believed in the purification of Islam by blood and the establishment of radical Sharia law, providing, like the Taliban, a very militaristic, right-wing, originalist interpretation of Sharia. Sharia is actually early medieval Bedouin tradition put into writing centuries after the Prophet’s death by scores of different writers.

The Brits had signed a treaty with Ibn Saud in 1915 that heavily armed him and recognized him as the legitimate ruler of the Nejd region, while still supporting Hussein in the Hejaz region. Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud then proceeded to militarily challenge Hussein’s control of the Hejaz with his 150,000 Bedouin troops, decisively taking control of all of ‘Saudi’ Arabia by 1924. The Palestinian writer Said Aburish described Abdul Aziz as “a lecher and a bloodthirsty autocrat . . . whose savagery wreaked havoc across Arabia.” Since Saud’s forces did not take prisoners, the conquest of Arabia cost approximately 400,000 lives, mostly innocent women and children. More than a million people fled the country. 40,000 people were publicly executed, and some 350,000 had limbs publicly amputated. The territory was divided between Saud’s relatives, creating the political districts currently in use today. Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, 1875-1953, fathered 41 children by 17 wives. Given vague Bedouin rules of tribal succession, that was not a formula for political stability.

The Brits recognized Abdul Aziz ibn Saud’s conquests. Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill raised Ibn Saud’s subsidy to £100,000 a year. But Churchill told the House of Commons in July, 1921 that the Saudis were “austere, intolerant, well-armed and bloodthirsty… they hold it as an article of duty, as well as of faith, to kill all who do not share their opinions and to make slaves of their wives and children. Women have been put to death in Wahhabi villages for simply appearing in the streets. It is a penal offence to wear a silk garment. Men have been killed for smoking a cigarette.” Nonetheless, Churchill supported Abdul Aziz ibn Saud “because of his unfailing loyalty to us.” 2

The U.S. followed the British lead. Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud met Franklin D. Roosevelt on the USS Quincy in the Suez Canal on February 14, 1945, solidifying the commercial and military relationship with the U.S., in exchange for an endless, regular supply of cheap oil, a foundation stone of American power. This is the tradition the CIA gave pride of place to U.S. policy in the Mideast, their calculation being identical to the Brits, that fundamentalist Islam replaced Arab nationalism, was inherently anticommunist, and, since usually ruled by a venal monarch, manipulable. The Saudis also had the added advantage of being underpopulated and in desperate need of an enormous amount of advanced weaponry they could not manufacture themselves but could easily afford. The Saudis are the largest arms customer of both the U.S. and Great Britain.

Saud and Roosevelt aboard the USS Quincy, 2/14/1945

This Wahhabi theocratic fascism masquerading as Islam was a convenient cudgel with which to beat progressive political factions, much as theocratic ‘in God we trust’ Christian ‘anticommunism’ has been in the USA. The ISI’s Hekmatyar founded Hezb-e-Islami (Islamic Party) in Afghanistan in 1975, the radical right-wing Pashtun spinoff of the liberal, mainly Tajik Jamiat-e Islami (Islamic Society) led by Burhanuddin Rabbani and Ahmad Shah Massoud. Hekmatyar’s complaint was that Rabbani and Massoud were too inclusive and tolerant. Pakistani agent Hekmatyar actually advocated, like his ally the Afghan Taliban, throwing acid in the faces of women who wouldn’t wear the medieval burqa over their face and body. Hekmatyar spoke for God, doncha know, and all who disagreed were ‘unIslamic.’

Rather than tilting to Afghan democrats like Zahir Shah or the followers of Mohammed Daoud Khan or Abdul Haq, Pashtun nationalists who claimed Pashtun-inhabited Pakistani territory for Afghanistan (the Durand Line controversy), or to the inclusive Islamists led by Rabbani and Massoud, the Reagan administration chose to back the factions backed by the Saudis - the Pakistani ISI’s heroin dealing Afghan death squads. The CIA station in Islamabad, running the anti-Russian mujahideen supply operation, was under specific orders not to act ‘unilaterally’ but to ‘liaise’ with the ISI on all things. Per the CIA’s 1980 agreement with Zia, it was actually illegal for the CIA station chief in Islamabad to enter Afghanistan on his own. All arms distributed to the mujahideen must be distributed to them by the ISI. The weapons were Russian, Egyptian, Chinese, French, Turkish – anything but identifiably American. The ISI’s Generals Akhtar Abdur Rahman, Hamid Gul and Fazle Haq were unilaterally in charge of operations. The U.S. role, by contract, was entirely financial and logistical. 3

In National Security Decision Directive-166, 1985, Casey’s radical increase of U.S. aid to the mujahideen, the CIA did an end-run around the ISI’s stifling monopoly on mujahideen contact. The transparent charade hiding U.S. involvement ended with the 1986 introduction of our amazingly effective Stinger ground to air missiles, distributed by our own, as well as the ISI’s operatives. Direct CIA aid to Abdul Haq and Ahmad Shah Massoud were among the most important covert, non-ISI-approved actions. At first, Soviet choppers had no defense against the Stingers, so the Russians lost all the tactics built around their new armored Hind Mi-24D helicopters, which, until then, had been impervious to ground fire. The Russian lost tactics included low-level strafing, insertion of special forces and evacuation of the wounded. Within a few months Soviet countermeasures such as nap of the earth flying, starburst flares, beacons and exhaust baffles rendered the Stingers less effective, but the infrared heat-seeking Stinger homing system remained crippling up to 12,500 feet, costing the Soviets way more aircraft than they could afford.

December 7, 1982, National Security Adviser William Clark, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq and Ronald Reagan, with Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger on the phone, rear, finalize American support for Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program (Wikimedia Commons)

Reagan and Bush’s CIA, run entirely by Allen Dulles’ protégés and operatives – Casey, Bush, Walters, Rumsfeld, Carlucci, Weinberger, Cheney, etc. - completely surrendered American autonomy in Afghanistan, right from the start, to Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, a fascist dictator who instituted Deobandi Sharia law in Pakistan. As Zia put it, “in Islam there is no provision for Western-type elections.” That meant that they surrendered control to Zia’s major financier, the equally anti-democratic Saudi Arabia.

Reagan himself, of course, had been a McCarthyite Dulles protégé and operative, and many of Saudi Arabia’s most valuable companies have been Sullivan and Cromwell type U.S. clients since the birth of the Saudi Aramco consortium in the 1940s. Saudi Aramco now has a market value in the trillions, and is one of the most valuable companies in the world. The original 1947 organizing principle of the CIA had been to “prevent another Pearl Harbor.” Instead, by doing what Truman never would have done, outsourcing control, the CIA engineered another Pearl Harbor. In a formal agreement with the CIA in 1980, Saudi Arabia agreed to match American funds for the Afghan mujahideen dollar for dollar, all to be paid directly to the CIA, but dispensed in Afghanistan only by the ISI. 4

Motivated exclusively by the collective myopia of Daddy Dulles’ anti-democratic, anti-Soviet dichotomy, billions in American military aid went through Zia’s ISI for distribution to fundamentalist mujahideen heroin gangs like that of Hekmatyar, Haqqani, bin Laden and the Taliban, giving Pakistani military intelligence control of most U.S. aid in Afghanistan, institutionalizing Pakistan’s protected global heroin trade, which remains institutionalized and protected to this day. After all, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. were already partners in the same BCCI covert banking system, and Hekmatyar and bin Laden’s Afghan and Arab crazies were willing to accept the British-drawn 1893 Durand Line, which turned over traditional Afghan Pashtun territory to British India, which became Pakistan, in exchange for license to run lucrative heroin refineries in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Reagan-Bush groupthink rationale for this support of Pakistan’s global heroin business was Dulles’ archetypal Soviet boogeyman, which was invented by the Dulles brothers to rationalize their very profitable corporate colonialism.

One of the lead CIA Soviet analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence, Melvin A. Goodman, through technical analysis shared by other experienced analysts, had consistently pointed to Soviet military and economic weakness. But both Casey and his successor Gates under whom they worked, buried their reports. In protest of the politicized corruption of CIA analysis, Goodman, who had been the lead CIA analyst attached to the SALT talks in 1972, quit the CIA in 1986: “CIA director Gates had not only been wrong about the Soviet Union, but had made sure that the entire CIA was wrong as well.” That is, it was the Sullivan and Cromwell-type privateer spending that was driving the policy, not the objective facts. Goodman, the Russian-speaking PhD expert with top security clearance to analyze diplomatic cables and signals intelligence, thought that lying about the intelligence to the senior strategists was treasonous and suicidal. The myopia was so acute that the Reagan-Bush administration completely missed the best of its own intelligence, that the Soviet Union, so far from being the overwhelming global threat, justifying promiscuous U.S. overspending on defense and military support of every ruthless fascist dope peddler in sight, was collapsing.

President Reagan and CIA agent Gust Avrakotos meeting with Muhammad Omar Babarakzai; Mohammed Ghafoor Yousefzai; Habib-Ur-Rehman Hashemi; Farida Ahmadi; Mir Niamatullah and Gul Mohammed, 2/2/1983 (Wikimedia Commons)

As Goodman put it: “Gates like his mentor Casey, had the simplistic ideological view of the Soviet Union that had dominated strategic thinking during the Cold War….As Secretary of State, George P. Shultz concluded, ‘The CIA’s intelligence was in many cases simply Bill Casey’s ideology’…. Shultz emphasized that he had been kept out of the loop by the CIA. When Frank Carlucci, a former deputy director at the CIA, was named to head the National Security Council to replace Admiral Poindexter in 1987 because of Poindexter’s involvement in Iran-Contra, Shultz told Carlucci that he had been ‘misled, lied to, cut out’ by the CIA. Shultz emphasized that ‘CIA analysis was distorted by strong views about policy,’ particularly its inability to recognize that Gorbachev’s accession to power and his pursuit of glasnost and perestroika - openness and restructuring - marked a transformation of Soviet society and political structure….The next day, Gates who had just been named acting director of the CIA, called Shultz to discuss the remarks that Carlucci had passed on, giving Shultz an opportunity to repeat the message: ‘I don’t have any confidence in the intelligence community. I feel you all have very strong policy views. I wouldn’t trust anything you guys said about Iran no matter what. I feel you try to manipulate me…. Now I feel that the CIA is an alternative State Department with its own strong policy views….The director of central intelligence should not be part of the policy process; heavy involvement just can’t help but influence you. In the policy business you develop a bias. The CIA should be objective, and if it is not, that means what you say must be discounted.’… My dispute and falling-out with Bob Gates was not personal; it was a battle between the need for objective and balanced intelligence analysis versus the manipulation of evidence for preconceived ends.” 5

On 12/1/1988, the CIA told the outgoing Reagan and incoming Bush administrations that “the basic elements of Soviet defense policy and practice thus far have not been changed by Gorbachev’s reform campaign.” A week later, The Washington Post, ‘Gorbachev Announces Troop Cut Of 500,000,’ By Michael Dobbs, 12/8/1988: “United Nations, Dec. 7 -- Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, condemning the ‘one-sided reliance on military power’ that has shaped the nature of Soviet foreign policy in the past, today announced unilateral cuts of half a million men, including six divisions based in Eastern Europe, in the Soviet armed forces over the next two years.”

President Reagan walking with George Shultz outside the Oval Office December 4, 1986; Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci press conference, 8/19/1988 (Wikimedia Commons)

The CIA’s chief of Soviet analysis, Douglas MacEachin, described by senior CIA analyst Goodman, who served in that unit for two decades, as an “acolyte” of DDCIA Gates, told Congress the next week, “Had we done so [predicted the Soviet military stand-down], people would have been calling for my head.’ It was MacEachin’s job to exaggerate Soviet military might. MacEachin cooperated politically with Gates and the rebellious Goodman resented it, but so, ultimately, did MacEachin himself, who had a hand in the March, 2001 FOIA release of the ‘Princeton Papers.’ The Washinton Post, 3/11/2001: “In an interview, MacEachin said ‘we gave up on the [National Intelligence] Estimates after '86 or '87’ because it was so difficult to get realistic assessments into them. In 1986, MacEachin tried to attach a CIA ‘dissent’ to the NIE, with the agency noting that the continued Soviet arms buildup predicted by the NIE was greater than any known Soviet buildup since the ‘60s and would cost far more than the Soviet Union could afford to invest in arms. The dissent was not included, though its suggestion that such a buildup would not occur proved to be accurate.”

As a measure of how easy it was for a real objective analyst to see the coming Soviet collapse, Goodman points to the well-known actions of General Colin Powell: “Powell, moreover, was an important ally in my struggle to charge the CIA with a major intelligence failure for its inability to track the Soviet decline. Powell was particularly critical, charging that CIA analysts could not ‘anticipate events much better than a layman watching television.’ Former CIA director Turner was another who could not believe the ‘enormity of the failure to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis.’ He concluded that the CIA’s ‘corporate view missed by a mile.’….In fact, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time, General Powell, who was a big supporter of the National War College [where Goodman went in 1986 upon leaving the Directorate of Intelligence], was out in front of his policy and intelligence counterparts in anticipating the Soviet decline. Long before any department in the government started to prepare for such a demise, Powell was working on alternative budgeting and force strategies for a global arena without a Soviet threat. No planner at the CIA had such foresight.” 6

“Gorbachev opened the door to détente and disarmament with the United States as well as to the liberation of the East European communist states, but Gates’s Cold War mentality left him blind to the notion of change. When Senator Bill Bradley (D-NJ) introduced the possibility of change at the confirmation hearings in 1991 [of Gates for DCIA], Gates totally dismissed the idea and sarcastically responded that he had more important matters to handle. Bradley knew that Gates was wrong about every key intelligence question concerning the Soviet Union as well as other critical intelligence issues, and thanks to Gates the CIA was equally far afield. Gates’s memoir didn’t reveal his deep affection for CIA director Bill Casey or how the two men colluded. The director wanted to intensify the Cold War with the Soviets, and Gates was Casey’s man for tailoring intelligence to justify doing so. Both men were part of a crusade to give the CIA a first-tier seat in the councils of the White House. The ideological fervor of Casey and Gates were anathema to most analysts in the Directorate of Intelligence, including me.”

Casey and Gates used political, professional and personal pressure that convinced most old pros in the Directorate of Intelligence that both men were politicized martinets not to be trusted. Both Casey and Gates, in favor of the privateer defense spending they were charged to promote, made sure that the analysts’ final product failed to anticipate the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Warsaw Pact, and the Soviet Union. Privateer spending was predicated on a strong, threatening Soviet Union, whether it was or not. A generation later this same Republican team, cheerleading for the Saudis, made sure, through browbeating analysts and suppression of the evidence, that we were institutionally unable to see 9/11 coming, even though some of our best analysts and operatives did, and said so.

With Goodman in the room, Gates put it this way in his January 1982 speech to the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence, three days after becoming DDCIA, angrily accusing the analysts of “irrelevant or untimely or unfocused…. close-minded, smug, arrogant responses to legitimate questions and constructive criticism….flabby, complacent thinking and questionable assumptions combined with an intolerance of others’ views…poor, verbose writing…[and a] pronounced tendency to confuse objectivity and independence with avoidance of issues germane to the United States and policymakers.” That was the kind of inane right-wing browbeating to which these PhDs, each with fluent Russian, high level security clearance and access to much more information than is in the public domain, were regularly subjected. These analysts had access to, as Goodman put it, “clandestine reports from the CIA; cables from foreign service officers; military attaché reports from the Department of Defense; satellite photography from the National Reconnaissance Office; and signals and communications intelligence from the National Security Agency (NSA).” Nonetheless, they were rudely and regularly ordered, as if in reform school, to either twist their work product to the leadership’s political demands or get out.

“The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence confirmed Gates [in 1991] by a vote of 64–31, the most contentious vote for a CIA director in the Agency’s history up to that point…. [Senators] Bradley and Moynihan went out of their way to thank me for my efforts to bring the issue of politicization before the American public, and both believed that Gates was not fit to serve….When Casey had been dead for over a decade and could do Gates no harm, he acknowledged watching Casey ‘on issue after issue, sit in meetings and present intelligence framed in terms of the policy he wanted pursued.’… Gates never addressed his own role, including informal memoranda to Casey providing ammunition in support of those policies…. Life under Casey and Gates however, became capricious, inconsistent, and totally biased. Too many analysts began to write for their new bosses: it was easy to produce intelligence if they took certain postures toward the Soviet Union, the leftist governments in Central America, or the ‘success’ of U.S. efforts in Afghanistan. If you refused to accept these frameworks as a given, then you were taking on Gates personally, and were treated to his ad hominem attacks in the form of cover sheets attached to intelligence products. I garnered my share of them.”

When Porter Goss was appointed DCIA by Bush II in September of 2004, he distributed this message to the entire CIA, including the Directorate of Intelligence, specifically ordering them to “support the administration and its policies in our work,” which is the exact opposite of the job of an intelligence analyst, which is, as Goodman puts it, “to speak truth to power.” Happy talk about Afghanistan doesn’t change the strategic facts on the ground, any more than happy talk about Vietnam did. 7

The real global threat these Republican privateers were opposing, from the Dulles perspective, the one they never mentioned, was anti-colonial nationalism, almost always caricatured by these oil and weapons systems privateers as demonic ‘communism.’ When the Soviet Union finally did collapse in 1991, the year Gates was confirmed as DCIA, someone did a search-and-replace in all the groupthink boilerplate, substituting ‘terrorism’ or ‘drugs’ for ‘communism,’ and the defense spending continued apace. For that to work, of course, ‘terrorism’ needed a validating event, like Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin, or 9/11.

So Afghanistan became Vietnam redux, with the actual domestic politics of Afghanistan ignored, per agreement with Saudi Arabia, in favor of the promiscuous defense spending justified by 9/11, in which attack the Saudis had a major hand. Remember, in the hands of Bush Jr., Cheney and Rumsfeld, the practical effect of 9/11 was to force massive U.S. and Saudi funding of the jihadi heroin gangs working for the Saudis and the ISI in Afghanistan, the very ones who actually pulled off 9/11, the ones we originally funded throughout the 1980s.

9/11 also confirmed unilateral Saudi control of all U.S. funding filtering through the ISI to the Afghan jihadis. Musharraf, a terrorist himself, made a few heroin gang name and leadership changes and went right on financing the very same jihadis – Hekmatyar, Haqqani, the Taliban, bin Laden and his al Qaeda associates, whose favorite chant was “Death to America!” We said we were financing democracy in Afghanistan, but we gave unilateral control of that financing to the ISI, which had no such thing in mind. So the 9/11 black op worked! In Pakistan, the 2000s were a seamless repeat of the 1980s, run by an American government largely in the same Republican privateer hands. The same individuals who gave us Contra Cocaine gave us Jihadi Heroin. After the shock of 9/11, the blind, addlebrained American cash cow offered itself up once again for milking by the demonic Pakistani milkmaid.

Ace researcher Kevin Fenton: “Whatever Bush et al. knew and when they knew it about the hijackers’ communications (and perhaps the long-term effort to prevent domestic agencies from foiling their plot) has no bearing whatever on the fact that these communications were known, and known by people with enough clout to prevent other authorities from carrying out what should have been routine tasks, especially in the high-alert environment following the African embassy bombings and the Cole attack. And by December 2005 Bush et al. certainly knew that the operatives’ communications had been monitored, and that the plot should have been easily rolled up. Imagine how our world would look today had the morning of 9/11 brought us breaking news of the simultaneous arrests of four groups of hijackers as they were preparing to board those planes and carry out their missions. The system would have worked, and there would have been no need for the Orwellian ‘War on Terror,’ with its dismantling of Constitutional liberties under the veil of necessity. No Patriot Act. No war in Iraq. No war in Afghanistan.” 8

Despite the fact that it was the Soviet-backed Afghan communists led by Nur Muhammad Taraki who assassinated the Afghan nationalist Mohammed Daoud Khan in 1978, thus starting the Soviet-Aghan War of 1979-1989, the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations backed the very pro-Pakistani Afghan fascist drug gangs opposed by Mohammed Daoud Khan, because that’s what the Saudi purchasers of our weapons systems, our partners in BCCI and our commercial allies in the global oil, weapons and drug business, wanted.

Daoud Khan, King Zahir Shah and Abdul Haq represented the majority southern Durrani Sunni Pashtuns around Kandahar, the ones who actually spearheaded the anti-Soviet resistance, as did the Dari or Herati Persian-speaking Sunni and Shia nationalists of Herat under Ismail Khan in the west, and the Tajiki Persian-speaking Sunni Tajiks under Ahmad Shah Massoud in the north. Theirs was a non-ideological resistance based on tribalism and clan politics, not religion, and only the Durranis were native Pashto speakers. Pashto, of course, is an Afghan lingua franca and most Aghans can use it. Massoud spoke not only his native Tajiki Persian, but Pashto, Urdu, French and passable English. The most common Pakistani languages are the two legal official languages, Urdu and English, and Punjabi (45%), Pashto (15%), Sindhi (12%) and Saraiki (10%).

The Tajik leader Massoud was not a supporter of Mohammed Daoud, who was too financially corrupt and too much of a secular leftist for this moderate Islamist Tajik nationalist from the Panjshir Valley, too willing to do business with the Russians. But the fine points of actual political and military intelligence were of no concern to the Reagan-Bush administrations, which had sold U.S. policy in Afghanistan to the Saudis and their puppets, the Pakistani ISI. Reagan hailed Massoud’s mortal enemy Hekmatyar, a minority Ghilzai Pashtun from the north, as a “freedom fighter,” despite the fact that Hekmatyar was a major global heroin dealer who made war on the liberal Kandahari, Herati, Hazara and Tajik nationalists for covert fascist purposes. Hekmatyar’s battlefield ally Osama bin Laden also financed himself with massive global heroin sales run through the ISI.

One of the greatest and most successful of the mujahideen, Abdul Haq, whose unit destroyed a 200-vehicle Soviet convoy and a major Soviet arms depot, could get no support or weaponry from the ISI, because he was too secular and pro-western, although he did get some covert support in the early years of the anti-Soviet war directly from then CIA Islamabad station chief Howard Hart. One of Casey’s boys, Milt Bearden, CIA Islamabad station chief in 1986, derided the eloquent political superstar Abdul Haq as “Hollywood Haq,” and supported the ISI in cutting him off from the American arms spigot, over which the ISI had unilateral control. Hekmatyar, Reagan’s “freedom fighter,” was actually a Pakistani and Saudi puppet dependent not on Afghan popular support, but on the opium and heroin business controlled by Pakistan’s ISI, a parrot spouting Zia’s fascist fundamentalism as a pious cover for his murderous anti-democratic depredations. This was a fundamentalism familiar to the totalitarian Saudis, who have always used the same tactic, and whose own idea of law and order is, to this day, public beheading. The bloodthirsty Hekmatyar was actually famous for skinning his captives alive, which made him the most hated of the Afghan mujahideen.

The Saudi-controlled ISI cut the Durranis, the Heratis, the Hazaras and Massoud’s Tajiks off from the American aid spigot they controlled, giving Hekmatyar 60% of the U.S. aid for the mujahideen, hundreds of millions in weaponry, and reselling much of the rest. This, despite the fact that Massoud and Haq were not only proven military and political geniuses, able to unite the resistance, but tolerant and democratically-minded, capable of creating a stable, independent Afghanistan. But the Pakistanis and the Saudis didn’t want an independent Afghanistan – they wanted a Pakistani and Saudi puppet. So they institutionalized and protected Hekmatyar’s vast international heroin business.

Ahmad Shah Massoud; Mohammed Daoud Khan visiting National Iranian Radio and Television, 1974; Abdul Haq (Wikimedia Commons)

One supporter of the Afghani center blurted out to U.S. State Department Special Envoy Edmund McWilliams in 1988, “For God’s sake, you’re financing your own assassins!” After two months of interviews throughout Afghanistan following Zia’s death, the alarmed McWilliams, himself a conservative Republican, but one who spoke Russian and Dari Persian, cabled the State Department warning that the ISI was running Hekmatyar’s death squads in Afghanistan, wiping out the moderate jihadis in favor of Hekmatyar’s radical, America-hating fascist dopers. McWilliams warned that the ISI intended to set up a puppet dictatorship in Afghanistan run by Hekmatyar.

Cabled McWilliams: “There is a growing frustration, bordering on hostility, among Afghans across the ideological spectrum and from a broad range of backgrounds, toward the government of Pakistan and toward the U.S. . . . The extent of this sentiment appears unprecedented and intensifying. . . . most of these observers claim that this effort [by Hekmatyar and ISI] has the support of the radical Pakistani political party Jamaat Islami and of radical Arabs. . . . While these charges may be exaggerated, the perception they give rise to is deep and broad—and ominous.”

McWilliams was largely ignored, but the warlord civil war initiated by Hekmatyar’s death squads that he predicted came to pass – almost immediately. Fully aware of Hekmatyar’s death squads, our CIA did covertly finance Massoud as well, hoping for something other than an ISI-Hekmatyar dictatorship. We remained, however, firmly in the heroin business with the ISI as well, that is with Hekmatyar and the Saudis, meaning that real Afghan ‘self-determination,’ the stated conservative goal, was not to be. Robert Oakley, Ambassador to Pakistan, 1988–1991, and CIA chief Milton Bearden, argued in favor of a Pakistani sphere of influence in Afghanistan. Special Envoy Edmund McWilliams argued that this was strategically suicidal, as it has proven to be, 30 years after McWilliams warned of this quagmire.

The warlord puppet Afghan interim government set up by the ISI in Pakistan cabled that McWilliams “is the wrong vehicle to advance the entirely correct U.S. policy objective of achieving a genuinely representative Afghan government through Afghan self-determination.” Journalist Steve Coll: “The State Department’s intelligence bureau privately endorsed McWilliams, citing in part the detailed evidence in his cables. British intelligence officers in Islamabad and London also weighed in on his behalf. After earlier backing the anti-Soviet jihad, they now wanted the CIA to move away from Hekmatyar and an ISI-led military solution…. the time had also come to work with the United Nations to develop a political compromise for Afghanistan.”

So there was plenty of common sense about this at the time, but just as in Vietnam, the privateer militarists backed the fascist dopers, who were running operational policy. State Department Special Envoy Edmund McWilliams: “I believed and continue to believe that we were wrong to have been so close to some in the alliance; wrong to have given ISI such power and (now) wrong not to be actively seeking a political settlement.”

Mohammed Daoud Khan had been Prime Minister of Afghanistan from 1953 to 1963 under his cousin, King Mohammed Zahir Shah, and President of Afghanistan from 1973 to 1978. This was a peaceful and prosperous period in Afghanistan. During the 70s, Mohammed Daoud had the Cold War superpowers bidding for his support, to the tune of hundreds of millions each. “I feel the happiest,” he said, “when I can light my American cigarettes with Soviet matches.” But his pro-Soviet assassination by a competing Afghan faction ended the bidding.

The Geneva Accords of 1988, signed by the USA, the Soviet Union, Afghanistan and Pakistan, allowed the Soviets to withdraw their troops while still supporting their puppet Najibullah. The USA continued to arm the ISI’s proxies in Afghanistan, since Russia’s Najibullah was still in power, so the warlord civil war, which institutionalized the drugs-for-arms trade on all sides, continued unabated. There was also meaningless boilerplate in the Accords between Pakistan and Afghanistan about non-interference and non-intervention, and refugee return. All the Accords really did, by enlisting American and Pakistani support, was provide the Soviets a face-saving way to withdraw without being put under ferocious mujahideen attack.

Our Republican privateers, by lying through their teeth about the basic intelligence, engineered, as they did in Vietnam, the longest unnecessary war in American history, and complete and total defeat. The managers of Reagan and Bush Sr.’s 1980s war were the very same managers of Bush Jr.’s war in the 2000s. The 2,300 American dead in Afghanistan and 20,000 badly wounded didn’t do so well, but Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz’s military contractors came out in the black, as they did in Iraq, which they chose, through raw deceit and racism, to conflate with 9/11. That’s because Iraq has 10% of the world’s oil, and strategic position in the greater Caspian basin, and Bush Sr. and Jr., Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were all in the oil, armaments, defense contractor and banking business, with the Saudis. 9

Just as during the Vietnam years, CIA analysts and contractors who wanted to keep their jobs had to spout the company line. When Gorbachev, in late 1986, formally decided in the Politburo to withdraw from Afghanistan because the war was bankrupting Russia, the CIA’s politicized Directorate of Intelligence reported that the Afghan war “has not been a substantial drain on the Soviet economy” and that Moscow “shows continued willingness to incur whatever burden is necessary.” The CIA station in Islamabad said that “it still looked as though the war might just go on indefinitely or that the Soviets might even be on the verge of winning it.” That was obviously just political CYA, not empirical analysis. A high-level CIA official told journalist Joe Trento, “You were relying on two intelligence services [the Saudi GID and Pakistani ISI] to act in the United States’ best interest without any ability to verify their promises or their work. That is what the Agency had become – simply a group of bureaucrats writing checks. We had no control over what was being done with the money and we deliberately ignored danger signs – and there were plenty.” 10

Coll reports that Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze solemnly revealed to his friend Secretary of State George Shultz in September of 1987 that the Soviets had taken the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. Secretary Shultz was so afraid of confronting the privateers in the Reagan administration that he kept this incredible intelligence to himself for weeks, despite the fact that he knew it to be true, for fear of being accused of being ‘soft’ on communism, that is, not enthusiastically supportive of Republican war profiteering.

Shevardnadze suggested to Shultz that ISI-Saudi support of the jihadists was creating a serious problem for both sides. Shultz agreed, but felt that he didn’t have the political room to question the Reagan administration’s blind support of the ISI. CIA acting Director Bob Gates, supposedly the CIA’s top Soviet analyst, told Shultz that the announced Soviet withdrawal was just a political deception. Mark Palmer, one of the CIA’s real Soviet analysts, told journalist Tim Weiner, of Gates, “He’d never actually been to the Soviet Union! He’d never once been there, and he was the top so-called expert in the CIA!” Three years later the Soviet Union collapsed. 11

Shultz, it should be remembered, is the one member of the Reagan administration who had the strategic integrity to point to our Prohibition as the main source of income for the jihadists. Shultz split with his fellow Reaganauts and began calling for international drug decriminalization so as to collapse opium’s value (there goes DynCorp’s opium-eradication contract!). But Reagan’s and Bush’s Dulles team continued to spout their pious prohibitionist–red menace nonsense while intentionally sacrificing parliamentary democracy in Afghanistan, in favor of the BCCI jihadist-dope dealer structure shared with the Saudis and the ISI. This was classic Allen Dulles privateer methodology – go with the dope-dealing fascists (Batista, Castillo, Trujillo, Salazar, Stroessner, the Shah, Suharto) rather than support democratic nationalism, because the mercenary drug dealers were perfectly happy to assassinate their own nationalists and sell their own natural resources, as democratic nationalists like Massoud and the supporters of Mohammed Daoud Khan were not. The fact that this formula meant endless warfare in the third world simply meant more profit for those in the warfare business.

CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman: “The debate began in the intelligence community in the first months of 1979, when I was the first analyst to draft an assessment that argued the Soviets would use force to prevent the Afghan civil war from spilling over to their Muslim republics…. I was certainly aware of the covert aid by 1986, when I was leaving the building on the way to an assignment as a faculty member at the National War College. Prior to my departure, I encountered the CIA’s chief of operations in Afghanistan, Milton Bearden, and offered my criticism of military assistance for fundamentalist groups that had taken up residence in Pakistan’s disputed territories. Bearden merely replied, ‘We simply send the arms over there and will let God sort it out.’…. Bob Gates wrote in his CIA memoir that covert action in Afghanistan marked the greatest clandestine adventure of all. My own view is radically different. I believe that the most vehemently anti-American Islamists currently operating in Afghanistan are part of the very organizations, such as the Haqqani network and the forces of Gulbiddin Hekmatyar, that the CIA assisted, which tags military support as a glaring CIA failure. Afghan militants such as Haqqani and Hekmatyar have long been considered ‘global terrorists’ by the intelligence community. There were individuals linked to al Qaeda that received support from the CIA. The United States took steps against the perceived ideology of the Soviet Union, only to create a more virulent ideological enemy, militant Islamic jihadism. We have been at war with this new historical enemy for three decades….” 12

Some of Hekmatyar’s and bin Laden’s terrorist dope dealers were actually brought to the U.S. in the 1980s for training in the terrorist arts, just as Dulles had imported and financed the postwar Nazi drugs-for-arms networks in his death-squad war against democratic nationalism throughout Europe, Asia and South America. Other jihadis went to Saudi Arabia and Pakistan for training. Michael Springman, head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in the mid-80s, told the BBC: “In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high level State Dept. officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants…What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama bin Laden, to the U.S. for terrorist training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the then-Soviets.” 13

Melvin Goodman; Milton Bearden

The training included car bombing, construction of IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices), assassination, hijacking planes and hitting the tail rotor of a helicopter with an RPG to bring it down. This sophisticated technique was taught by our trainees, some of whom were members of bin Laden’s al Qaeda, to their students in Mogadishu, Somalia, who brought that famous Black Hawk Down in October of 1993, and to their students in Iraq, who brought many other Black Hawks down. Zachariah al-Tunisi, the al Qaeda fighter who allegedly fired the RPG that brought down the Black Hawk in Somalia in 1993, was blown to bits by the U.S. Air Force in bin Laden’s main Kandahar camp in Afghanistan in November, 2001. 14

Washington Post, 5/13/1990: U.S. Declines to Probe Afghan Drug Trade by James Rupert and Steve Coll: “Afghans, including mujahideen guerrillas, have given U.S. officials firsthand accounts of heroin smuggling by commanders under Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a guerrilla leader with close ties to the Pakistani military who until recently was the foreign minister of the guerrilla-declared, U.S.-backed Afghan Interim Government. Officers of Pakistan's military intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), protect and participate in the trafficking, according to the sources, who were interviewed in Pakistan and Washington.”

In 1989, as the provisional post-Soviet Afghan government was taking shape, Hekmatyar attacked his chief rival for leadership of the mujahideen, Mullah Nasim Akhundzada, who controlled so much of the fertile Helmand Valley that he could produce 260 tons of opium per year. Although the initial attack failed, Hekmatyar engineered Akhundzada’s assassination a few months later, giving him control of the entire Helmand Valley. 15

Early in 1986, Pakistani Army Maj. Zahooruddin Afridi was arrested driving to Karachi from Peshawar with 220 kilos of pure snow-white #4 heroin. Two months later, Air Force Flt. Lt. Khalilur Rehman was intercepted with exactly the same load. He said it was his “fifth mission.” The heroin was converted Afghan opium delivered to Pakistani refineries by Hekmatyar’s collection system. As The Washington Post reported in 1990, “Hekmatyar commanders close to ISI run laboratories in southwest Pakistan.” The retail value of the two intercepted loads alone, at least $600 million, was equivalent to a full year’s worth of U.S. foreign aid to Pakistan. 17

Professor McCoy, drawing from Pakistani sources, estimates that by 1988 there were as many as 200 ISI-connected heroin refineries in the Khyber district alone. ISI arms trucks, from their National Logistics Cell, delivered CIA arms from Karachi to all points on the Afghan border. Those trucks, protected from police search by their ISI papers, often returned loaded with heroin from Hekmatyar’s rural refineries. Of 40 major heroin syndicates identified by DEA agents operating out of Pakistan and Afghanistan during the 1980s, not one was busted by Pakistani enforcement. The DEA was loudly complaining of this to U.S. military intelligence, and McCoy, Coll, Rupert, Rashid and others publicly reported this, but the U.S. funding of the ISI continued unabated. Speaking of CIA-sponsored raids on Russian bases in Uzbekistan, just north of Afghanistan, during this time period, Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid writes that the job “was given to the ISI’s favorite Mujahideen leader Gulbuddin Hikmetyar,” who was running his heroin labs “in the Koh-i-Sultan area [of Pakistan], where the ISI was in total control.” 18 19

Peshawar, the bordertown metropolis in northern Pakistan, became an ISI-Saudi mujahideen global organizing hub. It was built on heroin profits. The key jihadi organizers were the Muslim World League, founded by Saudi military intelligence in 1962, and the Egyptian-founded Muslim Brotherhood offices run by Abdullah Azzam, a radical Palestinian scholar who was a mentor to Osama bin Laden in Saudi Arabia and a cofounder of Hamas, al Qaeda and the Kashmiri Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Righteous). Azzam was a prayer leader at King Abdul Aziz University mosque in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, when he first met Osama bin Laden in the late 1970s. Bin Laden got his engineering degree in 1979. The internationally influential Azzam, along with Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, established the Maktab al-Khidamat (Services Bureau) in 1984 to prepare international recruits for the Afghan war, often using Abdul Sayyaf’s Dawa al-Jihad (Call to Struggle) training camp just outside Peshawar in the Tribal Areas, not far from the sprawling refugee camps. Most of these troops became cannon fodder for Hekmatyar.

Saudi Arabia’s leading cleric, the elderly, blind, medieval-minded Abd al-Aziz bin Baz, who was to become Grand Mufti in 1993, taught that the sun rotated around the earth. It was chief cleric bin Baz whose 1990 fatwa declared that female driving was a source of depravity (doesn’t that sound like the setup for a comedy routine?). Bin Baz wrote the preface to Azzam’s famous 1979 fatwa, “Defense of Muslim Lands, the First Obligation of Faith.” Like the al Sauds themselves, the Saudi-supported Azzam did not teach parliamentary democracy in Peshawar: “Jihad and rifle alone. No negotiations. No conferences and no dialogue.”

This effort was directly financed, to the tune of hundreds of millions per year, by Prince Turki, the head of the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate (GID). Turki’s Chief of Staff was Ahmed Badeeb, bin Laden’s former high school science teacher. Bin Laden and Prince Turki became personal friends in the mid-1980s. Steve Coll: “As the Afghan jihad roused Saudis to action, bin Laden met regularly in the kingdom with senior princes, including Prince Turki and Prince Naif, the Saudi minister of the interior, ‘who liked and appreciated him,’ as Badeeb recalled it. And as he shuttled back and forth to Afghanistan, bin Laden developed ‘strong relations with the Saudi intelligence and with our embassy in Pakistan.’ The Saudi embassy in Islamabad had ‘a very powerful and active role’ in the Afghan jihad. The ambassador often hosted dinner parties for visiting Saudi sheikhs or government officials and would invite bin Laden to attend. He ‘had a very good rapport with the ambassador and with all the Saudi ambassadors that served there.’ Prince Turki has acknowledged meeting bin Laden ‘several times’ at these embassy receptions in Islamabad.” These meeting coordinated the delivery and use of bin Laden’s imported bulldozers to build the weapons-delivery and troop-support roads and depots directly west of Peshawar, logistically connecting Pakistan with Afghanistan. 20

Ibn Saud’s post-WWI conquest of ‘Saudi’ Arabia was executed by his militia, the Ikhwan, or Brotherhood, savage Bedouin tribesmen who believed in the purification of Islam by blood and the establishment of radical medieval-slaver Sharia law, in other words, the Taliban. They completed the conquest of ‘Saudi’ Arabia in the 1920s in a genocidal bloodbath that killed about 400,000 people, mostly women and children, who did not share Bedouin ethnic roots or the correct religious, musical or sartorial orientation. The traditional Sufi decoration of graves, for instance, was anathema to these Wahhabi warriors, as was the playing of most musical instruments, so that celebratory pilgrims on their hajj to Mecca were attacked by Saud’s Ikhwan. Therefore, immediately upon the conquest of Saudi Arabia, ibn Saud was forced to control his murderous Ikhwan, who were visiting never-ending jihad on Saudi Arabia’s pilgrims and neighbors alike. In 1929, in a fierce confrontation, Saud used British air power and automatic weapons, and his Wahhabi religious police, to reserve unto himself the right to declare jihad.

The father of the house of Saud, Muhammad ibn Saud, who died in 1765, found the radical xenophobic puritanism of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792) to be a convenient religious veneer for his murderous campaign of conquest. It was Wahhab who gave his followers the right to kill, rape or plunder those who were insufficiently halal, which fit right in with Bedouin rules of warfare. The house of Saud conquered ‘Saudi’ Arabia over a period of about 150 years. Whole villages were massacred because of their ethnic or religious identification.

Abdul Aziz bin Saud, the son of dynasty founder Muhammad bin Saud and the son-in-law of al-Wahhab, sacked the holy Shia city of Karbala in 1802. The shrine of Husayn ibn Ali (d. 680), grandson of the Prophet Muhammad and a central figure of Shia Islam, was plundered and destroyed, leaving 5000 dead. The Saudi Wahhabis needed more than 4,000 camels to carry off their plunder. This rape and massacre earned Abdul Aziz bin Saud a stiletto in the heart in 1803, and everlasting Shia hatred.

“Jihad and rifle alone. No negotiations. No conferences and no dialogue.” was, essentially, the Saudi Wahhabi ruling philosophy. The al Sauds thought the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood were the perfect vehicle to spread Saudi Wahhabism throughout the Muslim world. “By 1961 the Brotherhood had become so entrenched in the kingdom that it convinced King Sa’ud to fund an Islamic university in the holy city of Medina to replace Cairo’s al-Azhar, the historical center of Islamic learning. The Brothers claimed that Nasser [the secular socialist who expelled the Brotherhood in 1954] had destroyed al-Azhar.” 21

As Ali Soufan, the learned, Arabic-speaking Muslim Lebanese-American FBI agent who led the fight against al Qaeda puts it: “Even at its highest levels, Arab education is a backward affair. Egypt, historically the center of Arab learning, is home to the region’s leading universities; but its top graduate students are mostly learning how to memorize exactly what their professors tell them. Refuse to parrot back what you have been fed and you are apt to fail. Think for yourself, critically weigh what you have been taught, express yourself originally, and you are sure to. Over the centuries, this perpetual drilling and memorization has forcibly stunted the imagination and hobbled the critical thinking of generation after generation. The result is a region not only ill-prepared for modernity but also shockingly removed from it.”

“For decades, Arab governments have exhibited a cavalier disregard for education, with catastrophic consequences. Arabs aged twenty-five and older have an average of just six years of schooling—roughly equivalent, in American terms, to having completed elementary school. According to a 2012 report by the Arab Thought Foundation, the average Western child spends around 200 hours per year reading, while his or her Arab counterpart spends six minutes. Adults do even worse. In the West, adults read an average of eleven books each year; in Arab countries they read one-quarter of one page. Almost one hundred million Arabs cannot read or write at all. The Arab world displays relatively little intellectual openness to the wider world. Greece, with a population of eleven million, translates five times as many books annually as every Arab country put together.” 22

Saudi Wahhabism, taught by rote, is the mandatory state religion. The Saudi regime pretends that the thirteenth century reactionary literalist Ibn Taymiyyah, the father of jihadi Salafism, Wahhab’s inspiration, is the only interpretation of Islam. The first three Muslim generations, from the Prophet to his grandchildren, are known collectively as the salaf. Salafi originalists think these ancients are to be emulated in all things. But it was the mystical teachings of the eighth century Harith al-Muhasibi, the founder of Sufism, and the nineteenth century rationalist school of Muhammad Abduh, the father of Islamic Modernism, that gave us the intellectual and spiritual treasures of ancient Córdoba, and the best of modern Islamic reformism. Education in Saudi Arabia is largely, as Ibn Taymiyyah would have it, parroting conformist Islamic text and wrote memorization. Two out of every three doctorates earned in Saudi Arabia are in Islamic studies. Most graduates, of course, can’t find jobs that employ their degree, except as Quran-thumping religious police, who infest every public space in Saudi Arabia, creating a true police state. The sexes cannot legally intermingle, in school or at the mall. ‘Islamically correct’ niqab (covering everything but a woman’s hands and eyes) is mandatory, enforced by religious police. The World Economic Forum’s 2016 Global Gender Gap Report ranked Saudi Arabia 141 out of 144 countries for gender parity.

Last known photo of Dina Ali, being bullied by her uncles at the airport (Wikimedia Commons); The brutally murdered Princess Mishaal

Particularly revealing, and heartbreaking, is the story of 24 year old Dina Ali, who attempted to flee to Australia to escape Saudi guardianship laws, which literally prevented her from going outside the house without a male guardian. The muttawa, the religious police, would flog her savagely on the spot with their swagger sticks if her niqab did not cover every inch of her body. She could not legally drive a car. This dynamic, computer-literate modern young women found the situation unbearable. She was stopped in transit to Australia at Ninoy Aquino Airport in Manila on April 10, 2017 and forcibly sent back to Saudi Arabia the next day in the company of her two big, beefy uncles, who told her they would kill her as a matter of family honor when they got her back to Saudi. She has not been seen since. This is, essentially, a repeat of the case of Princess Mishaal bint Fahd al Saud, who, as an 18 year-old college freshman in Lebanon, fell in love with the Saudi ambassador’s son. Both were executed in Jeddah, she by repeated gunshots to the head, he by beheading, in July of 1977. She was 19, executed by her own mad family, the al-Sauds, for falling in love.

Despite their post WWII oil wealth, it is hard to say that the Saudis are living in the same century as the Americans, the Europeans, the Indians, the Chinese or the Nigerians. Finally, in 1960, Crown Prince Faisal introduced the important innovation of female education. In 1962 he abolished slavery, aimed mostly at Africans and Asians – 1962! In 1965 he coopted the religious establishment by making all clerics employees of the state. As Saudi law puts it, “opposition to the government, especially street protests, is religiously forbidden.” Since the thousands of Saudi royals have governmental status, this means that opposition to an arbitrary Saudi royal property confiscation, a common occurrence, is both treason and heresy.

Saudi stores must close five times a day for the obligatory prayers. In 2011 King Abdullah let women vote for the first time - in the 2015 local elections, and be appointed to the Consultative Assembly. Women still can’t vote in national elections. In 2017, King Salman ordered that women be allowed access to government services such as education and healthcare without the need of consent from a male guardian. In 2018, King Salman issued a decree allowing women to drive, lifting the world’s only ban on women drivers. But work places still must be sexually segregated. Their textbooks for children teach religious bigotry, pounding especially on Shia Muslims. although the Jews are a special target as well. It is not legal to play music in public. A man and a woman can’t hold hands in public. There is no freedom of speech or the press. It is illegal to use a camera in public.

Saudi Arabia beheaded 48 people in the first 4 months of 2018, half for non-violent drug crimes. On 8/28/2018, the public prosecutor called for non-violent 29-year-old feminist activist Israa al-Ghomgham and other defendants to be beheaded, particularly for documenting the brutal Saudi reaction to the non-violent Shia pro-democracy demonstrations in Qatif. She remains indefinitely detained in Al-Dhamam General Intelligence Prison.

Most Saudis who are not royals live in squalor, which is illegal to film. Needless to say, Saudi Arabia is not a locus of industrial, political or artistic creativity. As Lawrence Wright put it, “if one subtracted the oil revenue of the Gulf countries, 260 million Arabs exported less than the 5 million Finns.” No wonder so many impoverished, bored, emotionally and intellectually starved young people, seeing no future for themselves, were drawn to the jihadi death cult. 23

A founding father of that death cult was the verbose, ultra-pious Egyptian Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966). Referring back to the Mameluke Sultans of Egypt and to the contemporaneous writings of Ibn Taymiyya (1268-1328), Qutb promoted Takfir, the excommunication of another Muslim who is not sufficiently conformist after he has been labeled Kafir, a non-believer, quite like what the Catholics did to the Protestants during the Inquisition. The seminal Egyptian radical Qutb was a young man when Ibn Saud’s Bedouin brotherhood, the Ikhwan, was on the march in the 1920s. He became a proponent of the doctrine of murder by excommunication practiced by the Ikhwan. Qutb, editor of Egypt’s Muslim Brothers magazine, Al-Ikhwan al-Muslimin, was financed by the Saudis, who feared Nasser’s populist socialism. Qutb laid his pious hex on the secular regime of Nasser, which aimed not at theocracy, but at a modern industrialized welfare state.

Nasser, military dictator though he was, promoted a popularly elected National Assembly and kept his populist ear to the ground, as the predecessor he overthrew in 1952, the grotesque King Farouk, did not. Nasser did not think private sexual behavior, or dictating women’s dress, had anything to do with Egyptian progress. In a famous 1953 televised speech, Nasser, a very charismatic public speaker, turned the Muslim Brothers’ and Qutb’s attempt to dictate women’s dress into a national joke. Qutb thought women’s place was in the home, but Nasser thought women’s place was on the payroll. He plastered Egypt with egalitarian socialist images of strong women working in factories, farms, schools and hospitals. Feminism and secular education were not dirty words in Nasser’s Egypt. Nasser’s 1956 constitution granted women’s suffrage, prohibited gender-based discrimination, and provided special protection for women in the workplace. His 1962 National Charter called for universal health care, affordable housing, vocational schools, greater women’s rights and a coordinated national family planning program.

To the sexually anorexic celibate bachelor Qutb, who piously dreamed of a Taliban-like global theocracy, just like the al Sauds, the liberation of women was heresy meriting death. Many things qualified one for death according to this nihilistic megalomaniac who dreamed of murdering all the world’s non-Muslims. Nasser hung Qutb in 1966 for declaring Nasser himself a non-Muslim and then conspiring to kill him, achieving several near-misses. Takfir, excommunication, circumvents the absolute proscription in the Holy Quran that “It is unlawful for a believer to kill another believer…. He that kills a believer by design shall burn in Hell forever.” (4:92-93)

A follower of Sayyid Qutb, Abdullah Azzam of King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, was the most influential jihadi ideologue involved in the founding of Hamas by Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi and Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in 1987. Bin Laden often attended the weekly lectures of Sayyid Qutb’s slightly more liberal brother Muhammad at King Abdul-Aziz University in the late 1970s, where he also studied the works of Sayyid Qutb under Abdullah Azzam. Like the WWII Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Yasser Arafat’s uncle, to whom all these leaders constantly referred, Yassin taught that “Reconciliation with the Jews is a crime.” “Israel must disappear from the map.” Perhaps Jewish erudition, commercial, technical and artistic creativity, sexual egalitarianism and freedom of speech and assembly was a factor in that bigotry. Speaking of terrorism, Yassin’s oft repeated “We chose this road, and will end with martyrdom or victory” became the Hamas mantra.

It was Hamas that intentionally sabotaged the creation of the state of Palestine per the Oslo Accords in the year 2000, something all parties said they were gathered at Camp David to achieve. Hamas was not a signatory to the Oslo Accords and vowed, in 1994 when both sides won the Nobel Peace Prize, to sabotage the treaty, understanding that Arafat’s success in establishing a Palestinian state with the cooperation of Israel would mark the end of Hamas, whose organizing principle was Azzam’s “Jihad and rifle alone. No negotiations. No conferences and no dialogue.”

Sheikh Yassin, like Qutb, insisted that Islam was at war with Israel, which would have come as a surprise to the Prophet Muhammad, who communed with Moses in his Mi’raj from Jerusalem, when he ascended through the seven heavens to the throne of God. The site from which he ascended is now known as the Dome of the Rock. Musa, Moses, alone of all the prophets of heaven speaks at length to the Prophet, advising him to reduce the number of obligatory daily prayers to five. The name of Moses is the most frequently mentioned name in the Holy Quran, and the Torah is sacred in Islam.

For Muslims, Jewish morality is morality. Quran, 6:151-153, is a virtual word for word repeat of the Ten Commandments, which the Prophet Muhammad happily acknowledged. Many of Islam’s most sacred precepts are expressed with reference to Israel: “Because of that We ordained for the Children of Israel: that whoever kills a person—unless it is for murder or corruption on earth—it is as if he killed the whole of mankind; and whoever saves it, it is as if he saved the whole of mankind.” (5:32) Defensive Muslims, thanks to the depredations of the jihadis, are forced to repeat over and over again that Islam is a religion of peace. Until the Nazi Grand Mufti in the 1930s, Islam, all over the world, had been a safe haven for Jewish communities, recognized as ancestral by most Muslims. Jerusalem, under the Ottoman Empire, welcomed a large influx of Jews when they were expelled from Catholic Spain during the 15th and 16th centuries.

Arafat’s problem, at the Camp David Summit in 2000, was that Hamas and Fatah were on the brink of military civil war. Arafat, knowing that Hamas was about to attack, and not able or wanting to stop them, that is, not wanting to go to war with Hamas if he signed the final accords establishing the state of Palestine, had to refuse to sign his own treaty, thus rendering Palestine’s diplomatic word worthless. This despite the fact that Arafat’s Israeli partner in the Accords, Yitzhak Rabin, lost his life defending the Oslo Accords against Israel’s radical right wing. Palestine, diplomatically, had won about 75% of the territory it claimed, including most of the West Bank, all of Gaza, a land bridge connecting the two, and administration of most of East Jerusalem, including most holy sites. And Israel made it clear that it was willing to bargain further. Even Israel’s initial offer would have frozen the Israeli settler movement in place and created the state of Palestine.

But Israel was willing to offer more, as it demonstrated during the hard bargaining designed to finalize the Accords at the Camp David Summit July 11-24, 2000. Israel initially offered only a partial return of the West Bank. No West Bank settlement was to be dismantled, and Jordan Valley water would continue to flow to Israeli settlements. Israeli politics, and the sincere belief that the Israeli claim to that land was every bit as valid as the Palestinian, caused there to be serious sovereignty issues. But Arafat made no counter-offers, as Israel conceded territorial issue after issue during the extended specific negotiations. Clinton finally exploded, “If the Israelis can make compromises and you can’t I should go home. You have been here fourteen days and said no to everything!...A summit's purpose is to have discussions that are based on sincere intentions and you, the Palestinians, did not come to this summit with sincere intentions!” The strategic objective, from the Israeli point of view, was to end the endless warfare, so as to turn the entire region into a trading partner, even if that meant conceding most of the territorial issues. The initial July meeting ended in failure. A last ditch December meeting was scheduled.

Prof. David Shyovitz: “Nonetheless, the three leaders met at the White House in December and a final settlement proposal was offered. The U.S. plan offered by Clinton and endorsed by Barak would have given the Palestinians 97 percent of the West Bank (either 96 percent of the West Bank and 1 percent from Israel proper or 94 percent from the West Bank and 3 percent from Israel proper), with no cantons, and full control of the Gaza Strip, with a land-link between the two; Israel would have withdrawn from 63 settlements as a result. In exchange for the three percent annexation of the West Bank, Israel would increase the size of the Gaza territory by roughly a third. Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem would become the capital of the new state, and refugees would have the right of return to the Palestinian state, and would receive reparations from a $30 billion international fund collected to compensate them. The Palestinians would maintain control over their holy places, and would be given desalinization plants to ensure them adequate water. The only concessions Arafat had to make was Israeli sovereignty over the parts of the Western Wall religiously significant to Jews (i.e., not the entire Temple Mount), and three early warning stations in the Jordan valley, which Israel would withdraw from after six years.” 24

According to Ambassador Dennis Ross, the chief negotiator for the U.S., this offer was initially only verbal. It would be put in writing only upon Arafat’s acceptance, to prevent it being used as a floor for yet another negotiation. Both the Americans and the Israelis made it clear that this offer was the roof, not the floor, a last ditch final offer as the Clinton administration was ending. But Arafat turned the deal down flat and made no counter-offer, despite the fact that almost all his advisers wanted to accept it. Arafat apparently believed that more military pressure on Israel would produce further concessions. Palestine was a dictatorship, not a democracy, so Arafat’s word was final, despite his advisers’ warnings that Palestine would end up with nothing. Arafat had already given Hamas the green light for its intifada, which had already begun. Arafat concluded that political cooperation with Hamas was preferable to establishing the state of Palestine, since statehood would have forced Arafat to incorporate and militarily control Hamas, which would be bound by the strictures of the treaty, including demilitarization, permanent peace, an end to the conflict with a clearly defined modus vivendi. Arafat knew Hamas was beyond his control, and seemed, ultimately, to agree with them in any case. Arafat couldn’t even agree to allow Israel to use Palestinian air space.

Yasser Arafat was born Rahman Abdul Rauf al-Qudwa al-Husseini in Cairo on August 4, 1929. It is sometimes claimed that Arafat’s maternal grandfather was Mahmoud al Husseini, a cousin to Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti, and that therefore the Grand Mufti was Arafat’s uncle. Arafat was proud to claim this lineage. The first time Arafat met the WWII Nazi leader of Palestine, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, was in Cairo in 1946, where the 17-year old Arafat functioned as Husseini’s aide. Arafat revealed how close he was to the Grand Mufti’s Nazi philosophy to Dennis Ross at the negotiations: “Arafat’s only contribution was the assertion that, in reality, no Jewish Temple ever existed on the Temple Mount, only an obelisk; the real Temple existed in Nablus, he said. Not only did he not make any accommodation to Israel, Ross said, ‘he denied the core of the Jewish faith.’ This stunning remark illustrated how Arafat had become caught up in the mythology he had created and indicated to the Americans that he was incapable of the psychological leap necessary — the one Anwar Sadat had made — to achieve peace…. The reason for Arafat’s rejection of the settlement, according to Ross, was the critical clause in the agreement specifying that the agreement meant the end of the conflict. Arafat, whose life has been governed by that conflict, simply could not end it. ‘For him to end the conflict is to end himself,’ said Ross.” Shlomo Ben-Ami, Israel’s Foreign Minister and chief negotiator, came to the same conclusion. The complete capitulation Israel offered on the sovereignty issues would have created a Palestinian state basically consistent with 1967’s U.N. Resolution 242. Like his mentor the Grand Mufti in 1947, Arafat chose war over the peaceful creation of the state of Palestine. 25

Almost immediately after the collapse of the Camp David summit, Hamas took advantage of the physical integration with Palestine that both Labor and Fatah had already begun - shared border crossings, shared industrial parks and water projects. Hamas commenced the most effective terrorist campaign ever run against Israel. At this time, there was no security fence and no Gaza blockade. Hamas, with Arafat’s cooperation, aimed at Israel’s children with suicide bombers – school buses, pizzerias, discotheques, school lunchrooms - making all of Likud’s dire predictions come to pass. Israel did the only militarily effective thing it could do – it built a security fence between itself and Palestinian areas. Suicide bombers would no longer find it so easy to infiltrate Israeli areas dressed as religious Israelis. Israel has no idea of ‘apartheid,’ seeing it as a political loser, since all the sane people on both sides understood that commercial cooperation was essential to both economies. Then Hamas thanked Israel for trying to help create a Palestinian state by murdering a thousand Israelis in three years of terrorism. This permanently destroyed the Labor Party, the founding political party of Israel, and rendered Sharon’s pro-settler Likud electorally unbeatable. Likud, which always kept its eye on Hamas, Hezbollah and their Syrian, Iranian and Saudi backers, had been proven right. As they say in Texas, Arafat was all keffiyeh, no cattle.

With images of little children blown to bits in their school buses, Hamas made sure that, to most Israelis, integration with Palestine now seemed like military suicide, recalling the nightmarish 1947-48 war, which most Israelis thought they would lose, leaving them facing yet more genocide. The leader of the Palestinians in 1947 was the political and spiritual godfather of Yasser Arafat, Abdullah Azzam and Sheik Yassin, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, who, like Azzam and Yassin, was a genocidal maniac. As the joint Palestinian-German declaration of February 1941 put it, “Germany and Italy recognize the right of the Arab countries to solve the question of the Jewish elements, which exist in Palestine and in the other Arab countries, … as the Jewish question was solved in Germany and Italy.”

The Grand Mufti spent all of WWII organizing Muslim death squads for Adloph Hitler, as part of Hitler’s army. The Grand Mufti was paid the equivalent of $12 million a year for his starring role in Arabic Nazi propaganda broadcasts aimed at Muslim audiences worldwide, twice the salary of a German field marshall. Walter Winchell called him “the Arabian Lord Haw-Haw.” On March 1, 1944, while speaking on Radio Berlin, al-Husseini said: “Arabs, rise as one man and fight for your sacred rights. Kill the Jews wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion. This saves your honor. God is with you.” The pamphlet the Grand Mufti wrote for the 13th SS Handschar division, which committed genocide in Bosnia, states: “The Day of Judgement will come, when the Muslims will crush the Jews completely: And when every tree behind which a Jew hides will say: ‘There is a Jew behind me, Kill him!’” How spiritual.

The Grand Mufti served under SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich and his aide, SS-Obersturmbannführer Walter Rauff, who deployed the gas-truck extermination program, which suffocated a hundred thousand women and children to death by reversing the exhaust back into the airtight trucks. With Rauff, the Grand Mufti began organizing Einsatzgruppe Egypt, to be deployed upon Rommel’s victory. The Mufti corresponded extensively at this time with Heinrich Himmler, Erwin Rommel, Franz von Papen, Joseph Goebbels and most other engineers of the Holocaust, including SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann, the logistical manager of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. The Grand Mufti actually personally blocked Adolph Eichmann’s deal with the Red Cross to exchange Jewish children for German POWs. Below are pictures of the Grand Mufti publicly meeting with Hitler to promote the final solution, and happily touring a Nazi death camp with Rommel and Himmler..

The Grand Mufti with Hitler, 11/28/1941; The Grand Mufti with Himmler, 1943 (Wikimedia Commons)

At Nuremberg, 6/26/1946, SS Hauptsturmfuehrer Dieter Wisliceny, hanged by the Czechs for war crimes in 1948, submitted a signed official deposition which said this: “The Mufti [Amin al-Husseini] was one of the initiators of the systematic extermination of European Jewry and had been a collaborator and adviser of Eichmann and Himmler in the execution of this plan, . . . He was one of Eichmann’s best friends and had constantly incited him to accelerate the extermination measures. I heard him say that, accompanied by Eichmann, he had visited in-incognito the gas chamber of Auschwitz.”

Al Husseini personally recruited Bosnian Muslims for the German Waffen SS, including the Skanderberg Division from Albania and Handschar Division from Bosnia. The Handschar (Saber) Division murdered of over 90 percent of the Yugoslavian Jewish population. They just jumped Jewish neighborhoods, lined everyone up against the wall and machine-gunned them all. In 1945, Yugoslavia tried to indict the Mufti as a war criminal for his role in recruiting 20,000 Bosnian and Albanian Muslim volunteers for the SS Einsatzgruppen in Croatia and Hungary, but he escaped French detention and became unreachable in Beirut. 36

The Grand Mufti reviewing the Bosnian Muslim death squads he helped to organize (Wikimedia Commons)

So that when the U.N. passed Resolution 181 in 1947, which split the land approximately 65-35 in favor of the Palestinians, which was all anybody could think of, the Grand Mufti immediately rejected it, despite the fact that Israel had immediately accepted it. Resolution 181 called for Jerusalem to be internationally administered. Jews residing in Palestinian areas, and Palestinians residing in Jewish areas, were to have full civil and political rights. This would have established two politically equal independent states, mutual recognition, trade and peace. Imagine how prosperous and powerful Palestine would now be after 75 years of peaceful development. The Palestinians will never see the like of that deal again. The resolution was passed on 11/29/1947 with 33 votes in favor, 13 against, and 10 abstentions.

By March of 1946 the Nazi Grand Mufti had come into unilateral control of the Arab League’s ‘Arab Higher Committee’ representing Palestinian Arabs at the U.N.. Until the 1948 loss, the Grand Mufti maintained his popularity and power in Palestine, and was the Palestinians’ sole decision-maker at the U.N.. Like Hamas, the Mufti was a political fascist within Palestine itself. Palestinians who disagreed with the Grand Mufti Haj Amin, and there were many, got a bullet in the head, in the name of Islam. As the American consul general in Jerusalem, Robert Macatee, put it in his 12/31/1947 dispatch, “The arabs of Eretz Israel did not dare to oppose Haj Amin, yet neither did they rally en masse around his flag in the war against the Zionists.” Not every Palestinian wanted a fascist dictatorship led by a genocidal maniac. Many favored the pragmatic peaceful solution offered by Resolution 181, which gave Palestine two-thirds of the arable land, counting the Negev Desert given to Israel one-to-one with the arable West Bank land given to the Palestinians. This, of course, was the beginning of the civil war in Palestine between what became Fatah and Hamas, giving Palestine, since 1947, two guns firing in opposite directions, and often at each other, which, obviously, has rendered Palestine impotent.

The Grand Mufti tours a Nazi death camp with Erwin Rommel and Heinrich Himmler

Israel did not repeat these blunders. Ben Gurion risked civil war rather than allow there to be two guns in Israel. On June 20, 1948, Ben Gurion forced the offloading of the cargo ship Altalena, carrying 900 Irgun fighters and 4,500 tons of French weapons for Menachem Begin’s Irgun, which operated as an independent militia. The Irgun was in the process of being absorbed into the Israel Defense Forces, the IDF. The ship carried 5,000 rifles, 250 Bren guns, 5 million bullets, 50 bazookas and 10 light armored tracked vehicles called Bren carriers. The IDF took possession of the weapons by force, provoking a one-day firefight that left 19 dead on both sides. Ben Gurion then ordered Israeli Navy gunboats to sink the Altalena off the coast of Kfar Vitkin, where the ship had been offloaded, between Tel Aviv and Haifa. Despite truly bitter disagreement with Labor’s dovish policies, such as Labor’s insistence on equal rights for Palestinians within Israel, painful battlefield deaths which each side blamed on the other, and the Irgun’s urgent need for weapons in the battle for Jerusalem, Begin ordered a cease-fire and surrender to the IDF. Rather than starting to kill Israelis, Begin swore to take the Israeli government legally, which he and Ariel Sharon did thirty years later after uniting the Israeli right in Likud. And, with freedom of speech and assembly an absolute in Israel, the Israeli left never moved to silence the Israeli right, repaying the Israeli right’s fidelity to parliamentary democracy. Israel emerged with only one gun, firmly in the hands of the government.

After the failure of Camp David, in 2005, Israeli PM Ariel Sharon had to use the IDF to evict adamant Israeli settlers from Gaza, because he intended to hand all of Gaza to Palestine as a demonstration that peace talks were still possible. An Israeli MK put it this way: “Arik Sharon will have to make a Ben-Gurion-like decision. He will not be able to go on juggling all the balls in the air. It’s an Altalena situation...The government has to make it clear that it has cannons. And rifles. And that it is ready to use them...the security cabinet will be ready to make the same tough decision that Ben-Gurion made in the face of the Altalena.” The Israeli settlers in Gaza, however self-righteous their biblical quotations, were not going to dictate Israeli policy. Sharon used the IDF to take those settlers who wouldn’t be bought out by the throat and throw them out of Gaza, then handed all of Gaza to Palestine as a demonstration that Israel wanted to talk, not fight.

The Fatah–Hamas conflict reached its denouement in June 2007 with Hamas taking unilateral control of the Gaza Strip after open warfare with Fatah in which hundreds of Fatah fighters died, effectively giving Palestine two governments. Hamas not only ignored Sharon’s gesture of reconciliation, refusing to discuss anything at all with Israel, even water rights, but proceeded to bomb Israel with rockets from the territory Israel just handed back, convincing most Israelis that they were indeed dealing with jihadi crazies. Sharon never would have become PM without Hamas’ terrorist sabotage of the creation of the state of Palestine, that is, without Fatah’s inability to enforce its own diplomatic word and control Hamas. Labor’s bureaucratic socialist economy was also an issue between Likud and Labor. Israel is powerful because it is a genuine parliamentary democracy with only one gun. Hamas, by sabotaging Fatah with terrorism, handed that gun to the Israeli right – and then blamed Israel for the failure of the Camp David negotiations, despite Arafat’s insane intransigence, which Israel tried desperately to overcome with profound concessions. 27

1947 will not come again. The official Israeli position in 1947, led by Ben Gurion’s decidedly secular socialist Labor Party, was acceptance of U.N. Resolution 181, mutual recognition and trade – not war. Resolution 181 left in Palestinian hands north Palestine around Acre, an internationally administered Jerusalem, a vastly expanded West Bank extending almost to the Mediterranean, and a greatly enlarged Gaza, connected to the expanded West Bank at Gaza’s northeast corner. Palestine got the highlands which contained the major aquifers, the water supply to the coastal cities of central Palestine, including Tel Aviv and Haifa. The bulk of the proposed Jewish State consisted of the Negev Desert, which then was considered unsuitable for agriculture or urban development. But the Jewish State also got sole access to the freshwater Sea of Galilee (Lake Tiberias) in the northeast, crucial for its water supply, much of the land surrounding Lake Tiberias, the Tel Aviv to Haifa coastal strip, access to the economically important Red Sea trade route through the southern tip of the Negev, and control of its own immigration. It was enough to make the plan viable, for both sides.

The Grand Mufti, however, with his Nazi-led military high command organizing five Arab armies, made sure to give Israel no choice but to fight. The Grand Mufti’s Nablus headquarters included many famous Nazis, including SS-Sturmbannführer Rudolf Hoffmann, another blood-soaked war criminal. The Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, in absolute control of Palestinian politics, told the Jaffa daily Al Sarih in March, 1948, that the Arabs did not intend merely to prevent partition but “would continue fighting until the Zionists were annihilated.” Jamal Husseini, the Grand Mufti’s cousin, an influential member of Palestine’s ruling Arab Higher Committee, promised, “The blood will flow like rivers in the Middle East.” Jamal Husseini’s U.N. participation ended in July, 1948 when he refused to attend any debates or meetings at which there were Israeli representatives. The Egyptian nationalist Azzam Pasha, the General Secretary of the Arab League, the parent organization of Palestine’s Arab Higher Committee, told British diplomat Alec Kirkbride, “We will sweep them into the sea.”

Nakba was precisely what Israel was trying to avoid by accepting U.N. Resolution 181, which instantly created a Palestinian state recognized by Israel and the world, meaning that there would have been no 1947 ‘catastrophe,’ simply the U.N. administered peace process. There would have been no 1967 war and no West Bank settler movement, because the West Bank would have been another country legally recognized by Israel since 1947, in fact a trading partner. But the Grand Mufti’s official policy was literally genocide, publicly swearing, over and over again, to murder all of Israel’s children – something he had just finished helping Hitler do in Europe. About 700,000 Palestinians lost their home in the ferocious 1947-1948 war. Throughout North Africa, spurred by racist Nazi propaganda and organized pogroms, about 850,000 Jews lost their homes. Iraq, Yemen and Libya, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, expelled over 90% of their Jewish population. But the Jews had a home to go to. The Palestinians, for the most part, were not allowed to become citizens of the North African countries to which they fled, being legally herded into camps to remain a political irritant.

As with Hamas, the Grand Mufti’s fascism destroyed his military effectiveness. Anwar Nuseibeh was Secretary to the Arab National Committee who coordinated the Arab defense of Jerusalem in 1948, losing a leg in the process. Nuseibeh became part of the Jordanian government, becoming, in 1965, the Jordanian Ambassador to the Court of St. James. He pointed out that the Mufti refused to issue arms to any but his avowed supporters, and recruited only loyal supporters for his Holy War Army. The result was the absence of an organized professional Arab military force and insufficient arms divided by too few Palestinians, which cost the Palestinians the war. The All-Palestine Government established in Gaza with the help of Egypt by the Arab Higher Committee was run almost entirely by the Grand Mufti’s relatives. Nuseibeh thought the Grand Mufti’s nepotism was undemocratic, unprofessional and corrupt. He also thought that the Mufti’s support for Hitler’s genocide was inhuman, profoundly demeaning to the Palestinian cause, and politically self-defeating, given who won the war.

So did the prominent Palestinian Sheikh ‘Abd al-Fattah Darwish, who became a member of the Jordanian parliament. Agreeing with Jordan, Darwish advocated for negotiations with Israel. The Grand Mufti famously replied to Darwish, “when the sword talks, there is no place for talking.” This is where Hamas’ Azzam got his “Jihad and rifle alone. No negotiations. No conferences and no dialogue.” This solipsistic pomposity visited complete defeat on the Palestinians, and cost the Grand Mufti his leadership position in Palestine.

Israel made no such fascist blunders. It dealt with Palestinians, Druze, Circassians and Christians who were willing to make a practical deal, institutionalizing freedom of speech and religion. It armed all supporters regardless of their politics, and insisted on giving Palestinians in Israel full legal rights and the vote, which they now have. Israel jumped at every legitimate chance to negotiate. As Abba Eban, Israel’s first Ambassador to the U.S., famously put it, “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

Official Palestinian advocacy of yet more genocide drove Israel to the right, ultimately, after 2000, completely destroying the Israeli peace movement. U.N. Resolution 181 was the only leash capable of restraining the dogs of war, and the Grand Mufti just threw it away, literally telling the Israelis, traumatized survivors of the worst genocide in human history, that they were going to murder them all, including their children. And this threat was coming from one of the major perpetrators of the Holocaust, the sole leader of Palestine, at a time when Israel, badly outnumbered, expected to lose to the Palestinians as catastrophically as they lost to Hitler. The result was hatred, Nakba, and an Israel that is a cohesive military, industrial, diplomatic and economic powerhouse. 28

Another ISI-Saudi mujahideen organizing center in Peshawar in the mid-1980s was the Wahhabi Islamic Union (Ittehad-al-Islami) of the Afghan Abdul Rasul Sayyaf. Sayyaf, a jihadi hero of the Afghan war, was an early ally of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and bin Laden. Heavily funded by the Saudis, Sayyaf’s Peshawar outfit trained thousands of radical Arab jihadists, a core group of bin Laden’s al Qaeda. He is suspected of direct involvement in the assassination of Massoud, two days before 9/11, although he was ostensibly a supporter of Massoud’s coalition-building efforts. It is possible that the two Tunisian al Qaeda jihadists posing as journalists who assassinated Massoud with an explosive-laden video camera were sent by an innocent Sayyaf who really believed they were Moroccan journalists working for a Belgian outlet.

The man who vouched for the ‘journalists’ was a Saudi-funded Pashtun bin Laden operative, according to Farsi-speaking CIA commando Gary Berntsen, who took commmand of the CIA’s ‘Jawbreaker’ Afghanistan Early Deployment Team from Gary Schroen, 11/02/2001. Jawbreaker was the ground-level coordinating component for the war in the north of Afghanistan operating from the Panjshir Valley with Massoud’s Northern Alliance immediately after Massoud’s assassination. The journalists’ introductory letter to Massoud was forged by Zawahiri in his adequate French. Zawahiri’s group, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, had just become an official part of bin Laden’s al Qaeda. This was a sophisticated ISI-al Qaeda operation linked to 9/11 involving great expense, intricate long-range planning, extensive international travel, forged passports and false identities, and Sayyaf was an ISI operative. Sayyaf got 7% of the vote for Afghan president in the 2014 election and remains a force in Afghan politics. 29

Hekmatyar’s most famous early victim was professor Syed Majrooh, Director of the Afghan Information Center in Peshawar. The erudite Syed Majrooh was a former professor of literature and philosophy at Kabul University, and a provincial governor and diplomat under former Afghan King Zahir Shah. In July of 1987 Majrooh published a survey of 2,000 Afghan refugees in Pakistan, showing that 71% would support the return of King Zahir Shah, that is, constitutional democracy, which would naturally favor Zahir Shah’s Kandahari Durrani tribes. Professor Majrooh objected to the terrorist tactics of Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami aimed at NGO’s and western reporters, driving them out of Afghanistan. “They are doing exactly what the Russians want them to do,” that is, cutting off objective sources of information, and reinforcing the Russian caricature of the rebels as fascist terrorists. Proving Majrooh’s point, he was shot to death by two Hekmatyar gunmen in his home on February 11, 1988. 30

Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, Hamid Mir interview, 11/2001 (Wikimedia Commons)

The Soviets were defeated, but the warlord civil war had begun. On November 24, 1989, the influential Abdullah Azzam, the cofounder of Hamas, and his two sons, Ibrahim and Mohammed, were blown to kingdom come while entering Peshawar’s Saba-e-Leil mosque to lead Friday prayers. Insiders are still arguing over whether it was Ayman al-Zawahiri, Hekmatyar, bin Laden, the Mossad, the Jordanian General Intelligence Directorate or the CIA responsible for that assassination. Azzam tilted heavily toward the unifier Massoud in Hekmatyar’s town, because Massoud did not try to dominate all the anti-Soviet groups. Azzam also wanted to focus on war in Palestine, while bin Laden ignored Palestine, although he used it constantly as a rhetorical device.

Bin Laden hated Arafat because he was a secularist, and knew that war against Israel would inevitably involve war against many of Israel’s neighboring Arab governments. The Jordanians and the Egyptians would hardly prefer bin Laden’s useless nihilistic crazies to their Israeli arms supplier and strategic asset. The ISI’s Hekmatyar was systematically assassinating rival mujahideen commanders. The assassination of Azzam fits Hekmatyar’s modus operandi, and was also convenient to Zawahiri, who saw Azzam as his only rival for the attention of bin Laden and the leadership of the growing number of ‘Arab Afghans.’

Bin Laden and Zawahiri coauthored the famous 1998 fatwa from their ‘International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders:’ “The ruling is to kill the Americans and their allies, civilians and military. It is an individual duty for every Muslim in any country to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque in Mecca from their grip and for their armies to move out of all the land of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.”

By the summer of 1989, Massoud and Hekmatyar were in open full scale warfare in Afghanistan, killing hundreds of each other’s fighters. The extreme Wahhabi bin Laden, an ally of Hekmatyar, took over Azzam’s operation in Peshawar and folded it into his newly founded al-Qaeda al-Askaria, ‘the Military Base,’ contrary to the wishes of Azzam’s Algerian son-in-law, a recruiter for Massoud. Upon the summer 2001 merger with Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad the name morphed into al-Qaeda al-Jihad. 31

On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Gorbachev resigned, and Yeltsin took over as president of Russia. On January 1, 1992 the Russians and the Americans signed a pact pledging the mutual cutoff of arms to both sides in Afghanistan. With no Soviet empire to resist, and bankrupt Russia going capitalist, both sides did indeed cease arming the competing warlords. But the warlord civil war had only just begun. Najibullah’s northern Uzbek commander, Abdul Rashid Dostum, defected to Massoud’s Supreme Council of the North. With 40,000 troops, Soviet tanks, artillery and aircraft, Dostum helped Massoud take Kabul.

Per the Peshawar Accord of April 26, 1992, a broad coalition government was formed. Burhanuddin Rabbani of the Tajik Jamiat-e Islami (Islamic Society) was proclaimed president of the Islamic State of Afghanistan and the charismatic Ahmad Shah Massoud defense minister. After the April 1992 fall of Najibullah, Kabul was defended by the Northern Alliance Tajik leader Massoud, along with Dostum’s battle-hardened Uzbeks. The ISI, fearful of Afghan independence, helped Hekmatyar contest possession of Kabul with Massoud, Dostum and the other cooperating Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks and Pashtuns.

A major source of financing for all sides was their opium and heroin income based on the artificial value our Prohibition gives their opium. Rashid: “Another major source of funds for the NA warlords was the drug trade. NA commanders taxed all opium routed for export through Central Asia by traffickers. After the war ended, poppy production exploded in the northeastern province of Badakhshan—to the advantage of the NA warlords.” 32

Abdul Haq was a prominent moderate Pashtun mujahideen leader and political unifier who worked with Hamid Karzai and Ahmad Shah Massoud during these years. As Haq put it to Peter Tomsen, the State Department’s Special Envoy to the Afghan Resistance in December of 1992, as Tomsen’s post was being closed, “Afghanistan runs the risk of becoming 50 or more separate kingdoms. Foreign extremists may want to move in, buying houses and weapons. Afghanistan may become unique in becoming both a training ground and munitions dump for foreign terrorists and at the same time, the world’s largest poppy field.”

Abdul Haq, who worked across ethnic lines in the interest of an Afghanistan independent of Pakistani or American control, was refused a rescue helicopter by the CIA when he and 20 others tried to start an anti-Taliban uprising in Afghanistan, despite the fact that the CIA knew him to be, with the possible exception of Massoud, the most charismatic moderate mujahid in Afghanistan. On January 12, 1999, a hit team trained by bin Laden at his Tarnak Farm base near Kandahar murdered Haq’s wife and son, then living under guard in Hayatabad in Peshawar, Pakistan. The CIA’s policy was Saudi Safari Club-ISI policy, that was the deal. The Taliban caught and hanged Abdul Haq on 10/26/2001, although the CIA had plenty of time to rescue him. Haq was secular and pro-western, and not approved by the Saudis or the ISI, who held the CIA’s leash in Afghanistan.

In the face of the ISI’s anti-democratic support for the dope dealing assassins of the Taliban, Hekmatyar and Haqqani, Tomsen included these notes in his final classified memos to the State Department, warning that the U.S. would be forced to return to Afghanistan, Soviet Union or no: “U.S. perseverance in maintaining our already established position in Afghanistan – at little cost – could significantly contribute to the favorable moderate outcome, which would: sideline the extremists, maintain a friendship with a strategically located friendly country, help us accomplish our other objectives…, e.g., narcotics, Stinger recovery, anti-terrorism….We are in danger of throwing away the assets we have built up in Afghanistan over the last ten years, at great expense.” Tomsen was not heeded. We abandoned the moderate mujahideen completely, literally as they fought for their lives in Kabul, allowing the ISI’s heroin business to dictate events in Afghanistan for the next decade, which culminated on 9/11/2001. 33

Throughout the mid-1980s, DCIA Casey had been an advocate of using Hekmatyar’s shock troops, coordinated by the ISI, to attack targets in Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, specifically for the purpose of spreading jihadist revolt in what was then the southern Soviet Union. But both the CIA and the ISI ultimately thought that was too dangerous, since overtly illegal. But the dissolution of the Soviet Union created new legal realities.

In 1991, with Bush administration coordination, former Air Force Generals Richard Secord, ‘Heinie’ Aderholt and CIA Air America and Continental Air Services vet Ed Dearborn, they who delivered the Hmong opium and the Contra cocaine, created an airline in Baku, Muslim Azerbaijan’s capital, under oil company cover. They were transporting troops and heroin for Hekmatyar, and training and reinforcing Azeri soldiers for their war against the breakaway pro-Russian Christian Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh. That’s how MEGA Oil got the rights from the state-run Azerineft oil company, which controls all of Azerbaijan’s oil, to reactivate old Soviet-era broken and clogged wells. By June of 1992 MEGA Oil was indeed pumping oil. It was also coordinating with the ISI to deliver more than 2,500 of Hekmatyar’s mujahideen, many recruited in Peshawar with cash bonuses, to Nagorno-Karabakh, Dagestan, Chechnya, and Bosnia. Confirming the story, Secord and Aderholt claim to have left the scene before the mujahideen arrived.

Baku, west, across the Caspian Sea from Turkmenistan, north of Iran, turned into a jihadi base with CIA Special Forces, communications and logistical support. In 1994, this muscular oil company consortium morphed into the Azerbaijan International Operating Company, which included BP, Exxon, Mobil, Amoco, Saudi-owned Delta and Nimir, Turkish Petroleum, Unocal and others. CIA agent Robert Baer: “Here, too, the trail gets complicated. Delta Oil was formed in the early 1990s by fifty wealthy Saudis, including Crown Prince ‘Abdallah, according to a May 1999 report by the U.S. embassy in Riyadh. The greatest among equals, though, appears to be Mohammed Hussein al-Amoudi, a Saudi who operates out of Ethiopia, where he oversees a conglomerate with tentacles in construction, banking, oil, and mining. The al-Amoudi and bin Mahfouz families have formed several partnerships, including Delta-Nimir, an oil venture that joined forces with Unocal in 1994 to develop oil fields in Azerbaijan. Like the bin Mahfouz clan, the al-Amoudis have been accused of giving money to Osama bin Laden, in this case through the family-controlled Capital Trust Bank of London and New York.” 34

These tough entrepreneurs arranged the replacement of the elected Azeri president, Abulfaz Elchibey, weakened by losses against Armenia, with the more pliable old KGB apparatchik turned Azeri ‘nationalist’ Heydar Aliyev. Unlike the nationalist Elchibey, Aliyev had no problem with the projected Baku–Supsa pipeline, which avoided Russian territory altogether, going West a short distance through Azerbaijan and Georgia. Robert Baer: “As Halliburton chairman, Cheney defended Heydar Aliyev against charges that the Azerbaijan strongman routinely violated human rights, while simultaneously castigating the Clinton administration for its ‘failure . . . to recognize the strategic asset of the oil and gas business.’” Clinton listened. As he put it in 1997, “By working closely with Azerbaijan to tap the Caspian’s resources, we not only help Azerbaijan to prosper, we also help diversify our energy supply…” That Aliyev was a repressive dictator did not factor into the equation. The Baku base, originally financed by Hekmatyar’s and bin Laden’s heroin trade, as well as by the CIA, MI6, ISI, the Saudis and the Turks, became another element of the mercenary Hekmatyar’s power, able to project Islamist muscle regionally, financed by Hekmatyar’s huge international heroin business. 35

By 1999 the BP-managed 518 mile-long Baku–Supsa pipeline, which ends at the Georgian port of Supsa on the Black Sea, was pumping 145,000 barrels per day. Thoroughly pleased with their substantial regular income, Azerbaijan and Georgia approved the 1,099 mile-long Ceyhan pipeline, completed in May of 2006. NATO trainers helped Georgia’s troops defend the newly built Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan crude oil pipeline during Russia’s 2008 Georgia incursion. The Ceyhan pipeline sits a few miles south of the Supsa line, veering south through Turkey, taking the long route to the Mediterranean. The new pipeline connects Baku in Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea with Georgia’s capital Tbilisi, going south through Ezurum, Turkey to the Turkish port city of Ceyhan, near the Mediterranean coast. This consortium of 11 energy companies, the BTC Co., is the pipeline offshoot of the exploration and development Azerbaijan International Operating Company organized in 1994 that built the Supsa pipeline. BTC is also managed by BP, with BP, the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan, Chevron, Norway’s Statoil and Turkish Petroleum as major stockholders. By 2009, the Ceyhan pipeline was pumping over 700,000 barrels per day, a spectacular fortune. The heroin trade, that is, the artificial value our Prohibition gives the heroin trade, and the off-the-books guerrilla shock troops financed by that trade, thus became a protected tool of big oil in the new ‘great game’ for control of Caspian Sea pipeline territory throughout the region.

Heidar Aliyev of Azerbaijan (left), Vladimir Putin of Russia (center) and Robert Kocharian of Armenia meet in the Kremlin, 11/30/2001 (Wikimedia Commons)

Hekmatyar, financed by the ISI and the Saudis, as well as by his own booming international heroin trade with its expanded distribution infrastructure, became a major factor in the post-Soviet warlord civil war. He became known as the ‘Butcher of Kabul’ for heavily shelling Kabul in 1993, killing thousands of noncombatants, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross. As part of a cease-fire effort, Hekmatyar was declared Prime Minister of the Islamic Interim Government of Afghanistan from 1993 to 1994 by elderly acting President Mojaddedi, but the cease-fire fell apart almost immediately upon Hekmatyar’s attempt to assassinate Mojaddedi, with Kabul remaining the military bone of contention between the warlord armies.

Hekmatyar’s rival for power, from the ISI’s perspective, the ISI-created Taliban, were more opposed to modernism than Hekmatyar, but possessed a governing philosophy, if medieval. Both were really just rival heroin gangs for sale to the highest bidder, however much claptrap one heard from either about Islam. Although Hekmatyar was a skilled politician, thanks to his wealth and military power, his impolitic brutality against his own fellow mujahideen and lack of a cohesive tribal base cost him the favor of the ISI. His lack of military success against the independent nationalist Massoud and his Tajiks ensconced in Kabul under the relatively liberal President Rabbani caused the ISI to tilt toward its own creation, the Taliban. Unlike the Pashtun Taliban centered in Kandahar, with a traditional collective tribal leadership, Hekmatyar’s power was rooted almost exclusively in the opium and heroin trade he shared with the ISI, preferring, like bin Laden’s al Qaeda, to advocate a post-tribal ‘Islamic’ Aghanistan, led, of course, by Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e Islami.

The more politically powerful Taliban, able to pose as honest conservative populists, also looked forward to a post-tribal Islamic Afghanistan, led by the Taliban, but possessed a more stable base in Kandahar and in Pakistan’s Deobandi and Wahhabi madrassas. The Taliban also had a more traditional tribal structure which governed by consensus of the Kandahar Shura, and so was militarily and politically preferred by the ISI, which armed them heavily. Ahmed Badeeb, Chief of Staff to Prince Turki at Saudi military intelligence, which financed the ISI, had been an instructor at a vocational madrassa that had taught some of Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s talibs.

The warlord civil war had wrecked the economy. The Taliban, with ISI and Saudi military support, cleared the roads of outlaw rebel toll stops and substituted their one-toll system, thus providing the free flow of goods and radically lowering food prices. They disarmed the population and incorporated the smaller of the warlord armies, providing civil peace. They seemed to promise to the ISI the stable and compliant governance that the opportunistic hoodlum Hekmatyar, or the nationalist Massoud, did not. Upon their initial conquests in 1994 and 1995, the Taliban relinquished power as soon as they got it, handing over local governance to local authorities.

The Taliban blessed and encouraged the planting of opium poppies everywhere they conquered, because poppy was a political as well as an economic gold mine - a certain way to provide a good income to Afghanistan’s subsistence farmers – a very good income, garnering substantial tax revenue and political support for the Taliban. Profitable, labor-intensive opium was a rural jobs program in a seed capsule, harvested twice a year. The way the Afghans were doing it, each capsule required individual slitting and gum collection over a period of weeks, providing labor that was far more lucrative than tending wheat or any other crop. According to the U.N. Drug Control Program, opium production in Kandahar province shot from 79 metric tons in 1995, when the Taliban took over, to 120 metric tons in 1996. This pattern repeated itself everywhere the Taliban conquered. 36

The New York Times, 10/29/2017, by Mujib Mashal: ‘Afghan Taliban Awash In Heroin Cash:’ Kabul -

“The labs themselves are simple, tucked into nondescript huts or caves: a couple-dozen empty barrels for mixing, sacks or gallon jugs of precursor chemicals, piles of firewood, a press machine, a generator and a water pump with a long hose to draw from a nearby well.”

“They are heroin refining operations, and the Afghan police and American Special Forces keep running into them all over Afghanistan this year. Officials and diplomats are increasingly worried that the labs’ proliferation is one of the most troubling turns yet in the long struggle to end the Taliban insurgency.”

“That the country has consistently produced about 85 percent of the world’s opium, despite more than $8 billion spent by the United States alone to fight it over the years, is accepted with a sense of helplessness among counternarcotics officials.”

“For years, most of the harvest would be smuggled out in the form of bulky opium syrup that was refined in other countries. But now, Afghan and Western officials estimate that half, if not more, of Afghan opium is getting some level of processing in the country, either into morphine or heroin with varying degrees of purity.”

“The refining makes the drug much easier to smuggle out into the supply lines to the West. And it is vastly increasing the profits for the Taliban, for whom the drug trade makes up at least 60 percent of their income, according to Afghan and Western officials.”

“‘Without drugs, this war would have been long over,’ President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan said recently. ‘The heroin is a very important driver of this war.’”

“At a time when the Taliban have been aggressively seizing territory from the government, particularly in opium-producing regions, the prospect of even more drug profits cuts to the heart of American commanders’ hopes of urging the Taliban to seek peace with the Afghan government.”

“‘If an illiterate local Taliban commander in Helmand makes a million dollars a month now, what does he gain in time of peace?’ one senior Afghan official said.”

This, of course, has been common knowledge long before the Taliban conquest of 1995, and yet not one single American commander has had the cojones to insist that international opium decriminalization is the only way to collapse the Taliban’s income, and thereby collapse their political power. Instead they parrot the same old DEA-approved boilerplate counternarcotics Special Forces counterinsurgency BS. They continue to pretend that destroying an easily replaceable portable heroin lab (a Vietnam-era CIA invention in the service of Vang Pao’s Hmong opium), or a few acres of poppy, has ever done anything but support opium’s price, driving the local growers into the hands of the Taliban, their market. The Army-DEA parrots also give us the same old Little Orphan Annie faux surprise when their ‘National Interdiction Units’ are caught complicit in the trade.

The New York Times, ‘Tasked With Combating Opium, Afghan Officials Profit From It’, 2/16/2016, By Azam Ahmed: “More than ever, Afghan government officials have become directly involved in the opium trade, expanding their competition with the Taliban beyond politics and into a struggle for control of the drug traffic and revenue. At the local level, the fight itself can often look like a turf war between drug gangs, even as American troops are being pulled back into the battle on the government’s behalf, particularly in Helmand, in southern Afghanistan.”

The Taliban have now actually forced the Ghani government of 2014 - 2019 to fund some Taliban operations, like public schools, in areas it has controlled for years, despite the fact that it still makes war on the government. The important things the Taliban learned from their 2001 defeat at the hands of the Americans was modern production, distribution, finance and PR. Learning from their al Qaeda acolytes, dropping its doctrinaire opposition to modernity, Taliban websites, radio programs and emails proliferate, as Taliban heroin becomes an established global commodity, thanks only to the artificial value our Prohibition gives it.

McCoy and Block, in their seminal War on Drugs, made this point in 1992: “During the 1980s corruption, covert operations and narcotics became intertwined in a manner which makes it difficult to separate Pakistan’s narcotics traffic from more complex questions of regional security and insurgent warfare.” That the privateer-run U.S. military and DEA have never confronted this means, by definition, that the U.S. military is in the opium business and knows it. That is, the military and DEA are profiting from the endless warfare, selling arms and military services that are bought with drug money, and cashiering any officer that dares to point to our opium price support, our Prohibition, as the reason that the Afghan war is endless. You can’t make this stuff worth a hundred times its natural value and then expect to bully people into not making it. That didn’t work with Al Capone and it’s not going to work with Hibatullah Akhundzada.

The Taliban took Kabul in September, 1996, establishing the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Only their financiers, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates, recognized them. As they got more powerful, the Taliban went mad as hatters, combining minute Deobandi behavioral proscriptions with mandatory Wahhabi asceticism. Instead of expanding their small ruling counsel to include those from areas of new conquest, like Kabul and Herat, they became more introverted and dictatorial. The Taliban dispatched Kandahari Pashtuns who didn’t even speak Dari Persian to rule in Mazar-i-Sharif and Herat, where Dari is the lingua franca. They literally tried to turn the entire country into a medieval all-male Deobandi madrassa, like the Pakistani madrassas in which so many of their cadre were raised. ‘Taliban’ is Pashto for ‘students,’ implying ‘students of Islam.’ Women had no place in the celibate world of their fundamentalist warrior academies, which taught, literally, the demonization of women and ‘submission’ to Islamist orders. Women weakened a warrior’s focus on martyrdom. Life was not to be enjoyed, but to be sacrificed.

The Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan closed down all girls’ schools and banned all women from working outside the home or participating in sports. “Women you should not step outside your residence,” ordered the Taliban. War widows could not legally work or even go out alone to buy food. All 8,000 female undergraduates at Kabul University lost their place. All female government employees in Kabul were dismissed. The Taliban-controlled public school system throughout the 85% of Afghanistan the Taliban controlled had to shut down, because most teachers were women, as did most of the civil service and healthcare system. Those women who needed to leave their home to go shopping or visit the doctor had to be accompanied by a male relative, and were required to wear a full burqa. Those who disobeyed were publicly beaten on the spot, often severely. The governing bureaucracy in Kabul was devastated when all senior bureaucrats were replaced with ethnic Pashtuns, many semi-literate, who kept a 4-hour work day. This effectively collapsed the functioning government. With the expulsion of all U.N. aid agencies in Kabul in 1998, food and water distribution, as well as health care, collapsed completely.

Thieves had their hands and feet amputated, adulterers were stoned to death, and drinking alcohol was punished with lashing. The Taliban forbade music, television, the internet, photography, painting, chess, football and most other sports, even the traditional competitive kite flying. All men were required to grow long beards of a specific minimum length. The Taliban published a list of mandatory names for newborn children. Toothpaste was banned, because the Prophet didn’t use it. Households were forced to blacken their windows, lest someone spy a woman inside. Not only were women required to stay home with no occupation, but their windows must block the sun.

The Taliban engaged in repeated acts of mass murder of non-Pashtun groups, like the Hazaras and Uzbeks of Mazar-i Sharif, where, on 8/8/1998, 6000 people died in a matter of days (repaying the Hazara and Uzbek slaughter of Taliban troops the previous year). The Taliban also murdered 11 diplomats in the Iranian consulate in Mazar, earning Massoud as much Iranian help as he could hope for.

A few months after the Mazar massacre, Farsi-speaking CIA officer Gary Berntsen was in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, traveling to the airport for a ride on one of Massoud’s rickety helicopters to deliver money, gear and suppplies to Massoud’s Panjsher Valley mountain redoubt. The specific objective of this ‘Jawbreaker’ team was to snatch a ranking Taliban operative for interrogation, but some politico on the seventh floor at Langley cut that part of the mission short. “No sooner were we on the road in a small caravan of SUVs than a seven-series BMW followed by a pack of SUVs sped past. Through the open windows of the SUV, I saw assault rifles sticking up in the air. ‘What the hell’s that?’ I asked Halsey, sitting beside me. ‘A government official?’ ‘They’re narco-traffickers,’ answered Halsey. ‘It’s very common for them to move around the city like that, armed to protect themselves against attacks by rival groups. Half the guys riding in the SUVs are probably off-duty police or military.’”

The mass murder of non-Pashtun children was standard operating procedure in contested areas. Taliban troops repeatedly just machine-gunned them where they stood. They destroyed whole towns, such as the Shia Hazara town of Bamyan with its 100,000 residents in 1999, the Tajik town of Istalif with its 45,000 residents in 1999, and the Hazara town of Yakawlang with 65,000 residents in January 2001. During the 1998 offensive, the Taliban closed all roads in the entire Hazarajat region, so that about a million people, mostly Shia, were left starving. Berntsen: “Next he spoke about the plight of the Hizb-e-Wahadat Hazara, who were trapped with their backs to the Hindu Kush mountains and starving to death. Commanded by Dr. Karim Khalili, the Hazara were one of three main tribes that made up the Northern Alliance. The other two were Massoud’s Tajiks and the Uzbeks led by General Rashid Dostum.” 37

The sexually egalitarian Hazaras, the largest Shia group in Sunni Afghanistan, with a very high percentage of female leaders and soldiers, were a special target of the Taliban. The Taliban inverted traditional Hanafi and Sufi Sunni ethnic and religious tolerance, the essential message of the Holy Quran, caricaturing Islam itself, globally, as an extreme form of Pakistani Deobandi theocratic fascism. The Taliban were organically connected to the hundreds of JUI madrassas set up in Pakistan and Afghan border areas. Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, Assembly of Islamic Clerics, had become a powerful ISI tool in Pakistan and Afghanistan, feeding the Taliban young troops by the thousands through their warrior academies.

The anti-Taliban alliance, now led by Massoud, had the logistical help of Iran, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakstan, Kyrgystan, India, Turkey and France. But the alliance of Tajiks (led by Massoud), Hazaras (led by Khalili), Uzbeks (led by Dostum) and Heratis (led by Ismail Khan), with their undisciplined warring tribes and shifting leadership, were also guilty of repeated massacre, and badly weakened themselves with their internecine intertribal warfare. Sunni Tajiks and Shia Hazara, although Persian linguistic cousins, had a proper Donnybrook in Kabul in the early 1990s, and the Uzbeks weren’t overly fond of either.

The Taliban substituted public lashings, amputations and executions for stadium sports, sometimes the stoning to death of women accused of ‘adultery.’ The Taliban engaged in massive systematic kidnap and trafficking of women from Tajik, Uzbek, Hazara and other ethnic groups. Berntsen: “They butchered Hazaras, Uzbeks and Tajiks and took their wives as concubines. They treated women like animals, denying them the right to work and get an education and stoning war widows to death for so much as going to a local store to buy bread.”

All the while using tens of millions of Saudi, UAE and Pakistani dollars funneled through the ISI, which finally achieved the ‘strategic depth’ it was looking for. A 1998 U.S. State Department report confirmed that “20–40 percent of Taliban soldiers are Pakistani.” Human Rights Watch adds that many were regular Pakistani troops, especially from the Frontier Corps, with the Pakistani army providing direct logistical and combat support. The Taliban telephone and wireless network was built by Pakistan as part of its own network, and Kandahar’s roads and electric supply were provided by Pakistan’s Public Works Department. Kandahar airport and planes were supplied and maintained by Pakistan. Nonetheless, the impolitic Taliban did not take orders from the more politic ISI regarding its own domestic brutality. Nor did the Taliban accept the Durand Line border, as did the more compliant of the ISI’s mercenary warlords.

What is not as well-known as their brutality is the Taliban’s negotiations with Unocal (Union Oil Company of California). “Turkmenistan [Caspian Sea] was stuck with reserves and no market,” said John Imle, former CEO of Unocal. Unocal's consortium, called the Central Asia Gas Pipeline, Ltd. (CentGas), planned to build two pipelines, one for oil and the other for gas, travelling through Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. Julie Sirrs, a former officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, confirmed that the pipeline had been slated to improve Afghanistan’s economic stability. In 1995, the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, Robin Raphel, did try to bring the competing Taliban and Massoud-Rabbani regimes to the peace table, in the pipeline’s interest: “We are also concerned that economic opportunities here will be missed if political stability cannot be restored.” 38

The 1996 Taliban taking of Kabul sealed the deal for most in Clinton’s State Department, despite Massoud’s accurate warnings of what was to come. Lobbied the Wall Street Journal, 5/20/1997: “The Taliban are the players most capable of achieving peace. Moreover, they are crucial to secure the country as a prime transshipment route for the export of Central Asia’s vast oil, gas and other natural resources.” Unocal’s partner was Saudi Arabia’s Delta Oil. Major elements of U.S. military intelligence supported the Taliban, assiduously ignoring their human rights abuses and their opium income, per ISI instruction, for the sake of the Saudi-supported pipeline. In the offing for the Taliban was international recognition, and regular oil income. 39

Ultimately, of course, American humanitarian political opposition and the ongoing Afghan warfare made pipeline construction impossible. Unocal withdrew from Centgas in December, 1998. The Taliban, with its protection of bin Laden and his al Qaeda Arab, Kashmiri, Tajik, Uzbek, Filipino, Uighur, Malaysian, Algerian, Indonesian and other Islamist crazies, finally succeeded in alienating the Saudis and the Americans, who originally organized and financed them. With the Soviets gone, the Saudis and the Americans were starting to feel the blowback in their own countries. Bin Laden, from Khartoum in 1994, called for the overthrow of the corrupt, westernizing Saudi monarchy with its “insatiable carnal desires.” The Saudis revoked bin Laden’s citizenship in April, 1994, and by 1998 cut off direct funding to the Taliban because of their support for bin Laden.

But institutional funding for al Qaeda and the Taliban from Saudi ‘charities’ continued to the tune of tens of millions of dollars annually. A classified 1996 CIA report asserted that “Islamic activists dominate the leadership of the largest charities….even high-ranking members of the collecting or monitoring agencies in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Pakistan – such as the Saudi High Commission – are involved in illegal activities, including support for terrorists.” 40

The Washington Post reported, 11/29/2001, that one of Saudi Arabia’s largest charities, the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO), sent $60 million to the Taliban. The IIRO had branch offices in over 20 countries in Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Since the allegations of terrorist financing, the IIRO has changed its name to International Organization for Relief, Welfare and Development.

The CIA station in Khartoum documented bin Laden, Zawahiri and the Blind Sheik Rahman cooperating with Sudanese military intelligence to run a global chain of Indian, Indonesian, Albanian, Chechin, Ethiopian, Ugandan, Libyan, Bosnian, Egyptian, Algerian, Tunisian, Palestinian and Philippine terrorist groups, most drug gangs, executing multiple operations, including against U.S. targets. Bin Laden touched off a genocide in Algeria when he sent $40,000 to help establish the Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA). The GIA declared “There is no neutrality in the war we are waging. With the exception of those who are with us, all others are apostates and deserve to die.” Between 1992 and 1998, the basic GIA tactic was civilian massacre. They regularly wiped out entire villages, for no other reason than they weren’t enrolled in the GIA. 41

This was financed through, obviously, drugs and weapons, and through the Philippine-based IIRO branch headed by Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa. Khalifa had been a close bin Laden friend since their college days in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at King Abdul Aziz University. Also involved was the Sudan-based al-Shamal Islamic Bank, financed by the Saudi royal family, including the brother, nephew and cousin of Prince Turki, head of the Saudi GID, and the bin Laden family. Khalifa’s branch of the IIRO was a major funder of the Filipino Wahhabi terrorists calling themselves Abu Sayyaf, and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front. One IIRO branch office director was also Abu Sayyaf’s intelligence chief until he was killed in June 1994. Despite reluctance to offend the Saudis, the US finally declared the Philippine branch of the IIRO a terrorism financier in 2006.

The IIRO was created by Saudi royal decree in 1978 as an arm of the Muslim World League, and was directly managed by Saudi King Fahd’s brother, and his successor King Abdullah’s half brother, Prince Salman (Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud), who became King upon Abdullah’s death in 2015. On 11/2/1999, in a court case in Canada, Arafat El-Asahi, the Canadian director of both the IIRO and the Muslim World League, said in sworn testimony, that “The Muslim World League, which is the mother of IIRO, is a fully government funded organization. In other words, I work for the Government of Saudi Arabia. I am an employee of that government. Second, the IIRO is the relief branch of that organization which means that we are controlled in all our activities and plans by the Government of Saudi Arabia.”

In September of 2001, “When NATO forces raided the offices of the Saudi High Commission for Aid to Bosnia, founded by Prince Salman, they found before-and-after photos of the destroyed U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and of the World Trade Center (when it still stood), and of the U.S.S. Cole, as well as files on the use of crop-duster planes and materials for forging official U.S. identity cards.” A January, 1996 CIA report concluded that the IIRO has funded Hamas, Algerian radicals, Al-Gama’a al-Islamiyya (a.k.a. the Islamic Group, an Egyptian radical militant group led by Blind Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman), Ramzi Yousef, and six militant training camps in Afghanistan. Adds the CIA, “The former head of the IIRO office in the Philippines, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, has been linked to Manila-based plots to target the Pope and US airlines [Bojinka]; his brother-in-law is Osama bin Laden.” 42

On March 19, 2003, Bosnian authorities raided the Sarajevo offices of al Qaeda, called the Benevolence International Foundation, and found a computer file marked ‘Osama’s History.’ It contained a list of twenty wealthy Saudi donors to al Qaeda, revealing ongoing mainstream Saudi support for the terrorists who hit us on 9/11/2001. Among them they owned sixteen of the hundred biggest Saudi companies, controlling more than $85 billion in assets. There were three billionaire bankers, a former government minister, and leading Saudi merchants and industrialists, including the bin Laden brothers who ran the Saudi Binladin Group, still the Saudi government’s contractor of choice. 43

Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law and close friend Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, the IIRO’s Philippine branch manager, was arrested by the FBI on December 16, 1994 in San Francisco. The FBI had a State Department cable describing Khalifa as “a known financier of terrorist operations and an officer of an Islamic NGO in the Philippines that is a known Hamas front. He is under indictment in Jordan in connection with a series of cinema bombings earlier this year.” Khalifa, apparently aware of the high-level protection he had, opened up to the FBI about his identity and his connections. The FBI found “documents [on Khalifa] that connected Islamic terrorist manuals to the International Islamic Relief Organization, the group that he had headed in the Philippines.” They also found evidence linking him directly to the multi-lingual bomb maker Ramzi Yousef, the FBI’s most-wanted terrorist, in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Despite the objections of Counterterrorism Security Group chief Richard Clarke, in January 1995, Secretary of State Warren Christopher and Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick ordered Khalifa transported to Jordan for trial, where he was quickly acquitted and sent to Saudi Arabia for a hero’s welcome. That’s how the CIA protected bin Laden – with a national security block on anything that might reveal the active Saudi participation in the terrorism that was tormenting us. Khalifa was assassinated in 2007 on his way to a gemstone mine he owned in Madagascar. At the time Khalifa was actively communicating with FBI Special Agent Mark Rossini to set up a meeting at which he offered his cooperation. The assassins left the $30,000 he had on him, taking only his computer and files. 44

In June 1995, bin Laden, Zawahiri and the Blind Sheik Rahman, then living in Khartoum, Sudan, used their troops to try to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at the Organization of African Unity meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Mubarak survived thanks only to a malfunctioning grenade launcher. Three of the would-be assassins lived to reveal Sudanese governmental acquiescence to the plot. The U.N. also knew that, two years earlier, Sudan had financed the Blind Sheik’s plot to blow up the U.N. itself in the famous ‘landmarks’ case.

On November 19, 1995, Zawahiri further alienated his Sudanise hosts by blowing up the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, killing 16 and wounding 60. Sudan, until then, had been a safe haven for al Qaeda, Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad and Rahman’s Islamic Group. Zawahiri topped off his actions by executing two teenage boys, 13 and 14, children of his associates, who had been forced by Egyptian military intelligence, using photos of their anal rape, to spy for Egypt. The photos of the drugged boys being raped were effective blackmail because their jihadist parents would have killed them had they seen the photos. The boys were caught by Zawahiri’s agents placing explosives to blow him up. Publicly executing raped children was the last straw, even for the Sudanese fanatic Hassan al-Turabi, who used his National Islamic Front to help General Omar al-Bashir take the Sudanese government in 1989. Zawahiri was asked to take his followers and leave Sudan, depriving bin Laden of some of his toughest Egyptian troops.

In April of 1996 the U.N., prompted by the international organizing of Richard Clarke’s Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG), imposed stiff economic sanctions against Sudan. Many countries, including the U.S., declared Sudan a state-sponsor of terrorism and broke diplomatic relations. At that point the terrorists running the Sudanese government, the uneasy partners Hassan al-Turabi and General Omar al-Bashir, to avoid Egyptian invasion, and to appease an infuriated King Fahd, were forced to ask bin Laden to leave Sudan. By May of 1996 bin Laden was beyond reach with the ISI’s Taliban, who had just taken Jalalabad, Afghanistan, just across the border from the great ISI jihadi organizing hub of Peshawar in Pakistan, where Zawahiri joined him.

MI6 tolerated bin Laden’s London office, the center of his international propaganda operation, the Advice and Reformation Committee, from 1994 through 1998. CIA Director George Tenet accurately told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Feb. 2, 2000, that al Qaeda is “an intricate web of alliances among Sunni extremists worldwide, including North Africans, radical Palestinians, Pakistanis, and Central Asians,” and that “Explosive growth in Afghan opium production is being driven by the shared interests of traditional traffickers and the Taliban. And as with so many of these cross-national issues, Mr. Chairman, what concerns me most is the way the threats become intertwined. In this case, there is ample evidence that Islamic extremists such as Usama Bin Ladin use profits from the drug trade to support their terror campaign.”

There is also ample evidence that Tenet, although complicit in the political selling of the Iraq war, was prescient and alarmed about al Qaeda long before 9/11, and said so, repeatedly, in more than 40 briefings, to both Clinton and Bush. But Tenet never got out ahead of his managerial skis, never called out the ISI and the Saudis for financing bin Laden. Tenet was just taking orders, not making policy. When ordered to do so, Tenet allowed the outsourcing of our al Qaeda intelligence effort to Saudi Arabia, the very people actually funding al Qaeda. As one of Tenet’s Directorate of Operations commandos, Gary Berntsen, who ran the Jawbreaker operation in Afghanistan, put it, “In George Tenet’s CIA the conduct of operations was less important than Beltway politics and networking on the seventh floor.” The Saudis and their privateer Republican partners were calling the shots. Wrote Clarke, “Although West European governments knew what was present in their countries, many continued to turn a blind eye to al Qaeda’s presence. The Finsbury Park Mosque in London, the Islamic Cultural Center in Milan, and similar gathering places for terrorists continued to operate without interference.” 45

Richard Clarke blames the military establishment, not Clinton or Tenet, for the failure to nip al Qaeda in the bud. “The White House wanted action. The senior military did not and made it almost impossible for the President to overcome their objections. …. The fact is, President Clinton approved every snatch that he was asked to review. Every snatch CIA, Justice, or Defense proposed during my tenure as CSG chairman, from 1992 to 2001, was approved.” By the year 2000 Clarke, despite the diplomatic fallout that worried administration bureaucrats, wanted an all-out declaration of war against the Taliban, thus freeing up our cruise missiles and heavy bombers. He also wanted deployment of the new predator drones.

Clarke: “The man working in the Qatar Water Department was reported to be the uncle of 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef, whom we had hunted down in Pakistan in 1995…. The CIA correctly said it had no capability to stage covert snatches in Qatar, nor did the FBI. So, remembering that there were small Special Operations Command units trained to do just such things, I urged that the military be ordered to go in with a small team. The Chairman came back not with a small covert unit of Special Operations forces but with an enormous force package and a recommendation against using it. The principals decided not to overrule the military and instructed us to ask the Qataris to arrest the terrorist. We did, but when the Qatari police went to do so, our terrorist had, predictably, just fled the country. The man in the Qatar Water Department did, as we suspected, go on to plan other terrorist strikes. His name was Khalid Sheik Mohammed. He went on to mastermind the 9/11 attacks on the United States.”

“President Clinton’s desire to destroy al Qaeda before it could do significant damage led him to personally ask the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Hugh Shelton, to consider whether we could launch a special operations strike against al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, or, as the President put it, ‘commandos, guys in black ninja suits jumping out of helicopters.’ Luckily for Osama bin Laden, the Chairman demurred. It would be too difficult, too risky, too likely to involve an unacceptable level of U.S. military casualties. Of course, not doing so ultimately resulted in an unacceptable level of U.S. civilian casualties.”

Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI director Louis Freeh seemed caught up in the legalities of a targeted assassination, despite the fact that the target wasn’t Archbishop Oscar Romero but Osama bin Laden. Even when the U.S. had assets on the ground willing to hit bin Laden or Zawahiri, like the Northern Alliance, it insisted on live capture, not assassination, which seemed completely insane to Massoud’s Northern Alliance guerrillas, who knew what it was to face suicidal al Qaeda fighters. Secretary of State Albright wanted to continue Taliban outreach, and worried about breaking with Pakistan. Secretary of Defense Cohen and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Shelton worried about losing Mideast bases.

The CIA pros who were instructed to induce Massoud to hunt bin Laden were forced to conclude that our covert support for Massoud, still small and hidden from the ISI, wasn’t serious. Even the hawks in the Directorate of Operations, like Director Jim Pavitt, who understood that we needed a strong Northern Alliance to counter the Taliban, cautioned that a large-scale commitment to Massoud, as outlined in the CIA Counterterrorist Center’s ‘Blue Sky’ memo, delivered to Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke 12/29/2000, should not be undertaken so close to the administration’s end. The bulldog hawks, like Richard Clarke and CTC (CIA’s Counterterrorism Center) Director Cofer Black, were driven to distraction by the never-ending bureaucratic vacillation. As Coll puts it, “As in the past, by refusing to take a risk and partner more aggressively with Massoud, the United States passively allowed Pakistan’s policy to become its own.” 46

And we never had a single one of the very smart people inside our policy making institutions, except George Shultz and some politically defeated pioneers in the Carter administration, suggest bankrupting these lunatics by collapsing the price of heroin with controlled global legalization of opium sap and medicalization of the refined concentrate. That would have threatened the covert Safari Club banking system, that is, the covert transfer of arms to the warlord ISI armies we were financing, through the heroin trade, Pakistan’s policy.

Former Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke: “The National Defense University report [2008] said failure in Afghanistan might be worse than failure in Iraq. It pointed a finger at the drug trade as the underlying source of revenue for the insurgents. The largest source of income in Afghanistan today does come from growing poppies to supply the illegal narcotics industry. The Taliban and other destabilizing elements benefit from this illicit traffic.” 47

But even the pragmatic Clarke cannot bring himself to advocate legalization and medicalization, the only solution, because that is a political tool, not in his military kit. He suggests crop substitution, the economics of which has never been made to work. But at least the clear-thinking Clarke correctly identified the problem. I think the real solution might have come to him had he spent some time with Massoud smoking some good Afghan opium under a tree in the beautiful Panjshir Valley.

Thanks to the artificial value our inane Prohibition gives these demanded commodities, and our unempirical legal insistence that opium sap is the same thing as heroin, all sides - literally everyone we worked with in Afghanistan, was militarily dependent on the opium trade. Reports Coll: “The CIA’s Counter-Narcotics Center reported that Massoud’s men continued to smuggle large amounts of opium and heroin into Europe. The British reported the same. They could all readily imagine the headlines if their operation was exposed: CIA SUPPORTS AFGHAN DRUG LORD.”

The CIA’s Counter-Narcotics Center is nothing but a structural price support for narcotics. These shmucks never looked in the mirror and admitted to themselves that everyone we worked with in Afghanistan was a drug lord. Their anthropological tin ear, rooted in our racist, colonialist legal lies, guaranteed their defeat. These jerks really thought they could, or should, wean Afghan warriors from opium. They insisted, with faux political shock, that we break ties with any ally caught dealing opium, which was literally every ally. We never listened to Karzai, another opium-smoking Afghan warrior expected to be above the pure physics of supply and demand, so we busted almost every Karzai ally we caught dealing opium, which was almost every Karzai ally. We couldn’t shoot ourselves in the foot often enough. Newsflash: opium sap is halal, and is as different from heroin as kitchen matches are from grenades. The criminalization of opium sap increases the popularity of the far more dangerous heroin, and the artificial value provided by Prohibition is the most powerful stimulus to production that can be devised. That’s what the macroeconomists and addiction scientists have been saying for the past 50 years.

Raymond Kendall, the Secretary General of Interpol, the world’s top cop, formally suggested controlled global decriminalization in 1995 as the keynote speaker at the 194 nation Interpol conference in Beijing, as had most of the world’s macroeconomic geniuses, like Milton Friedman, Paul Volcker and George Soros. The problem was obvious to George Shultz, who got reasonably vociferous about drug decriminalization after he was out of power, but as he himself understood, and as Richard Clarke understands, insisting on that obvious tactic while in power would have cost him his job. “When I came back here [Stanford’s Hoover Institution] from being secretary of state, I was invited to give a talk to some alumni gathering. And somehow, I made some comments about drugs, and somebody recorded it, and it wound up the next morning in the Wall Street Journal. And I was inundated with letters. Ninety-nine percent of them supported what I said, but three-quarters of the people who supported it said: ‘I'd never say anything like that, because I'd be ostracized.’ So there’s a kind of inability to talk about it. The most poignant letter I got was from Jimmy Symington, which said: ‘Congratulations on your statement. I said something like that a few years ago and that's why I’m no longer a congressman.’” 48

An Afridi warrior prepares charas, often a potent mix of hashish and opium; Asia, 4/1925; Afridi warriors enjoy their traditional smoke, Asia,1925; Opium smoking Iranian “bafouri”; Asia, c.1925

Too much funding, too many covert relationships, too many arms sales, too much imprisonment for profit, too many bureaucratic and municipal budgets, too many international treaties depended on the artificial value our Prohibition gives their opium. The institutional inertia militates in favor of endless war, profitable only to those in the warfare business. Al Qaeda’s and the Taliban’s opium and heroin income, based entirely on the artificial value our Prohibition gives it, was accepted in virtually all the official analyses as an unalterable fact, like the geography or the weather, as if changing our corrupt drug laws, inserted into American law between 1906 and 1918 using the most abysmal scapegoating racism, was beyond the power of Congress. These jerks, almost none of whom have studied addiction science, or smoked opium, would rather finance the Taliban and the ISI than stop pretending, in law, that opium sap is the same thing as heroin.

Steve Coll: “On the ground in Afghanistan during that summer of 1999 there was only one leader waging war and collecting intelligence day in and day out against the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, and their international Islamist allies.… Ahmad Shah Massoud remained a charismatic force among his own Tajik people, especially in the northeastern Panjshir Valley. He was by far the most formidable military commander in Afghanistan yet to be defeated by the Taliban. The CIA had continued to maintain regular contact with Massoud in the two years since Gary Schroen’s visit to the commander in Taloqan in the spring of 1997. A series of clandestine CIA teams carrying electronic intercept equipment and relatively small amounts of cash - up to $250,000 per trip - had visited Massoud in the Panjshir Valley several times since then…. If the CIA really intended to reinvent its plan to disrupt and capture bin Laden, they asked that summer, how could the agency possibly succeed if it did not begin to do serious business with Massoud?”

Although still doing business with the ISI and the Taliban, our State Department did make it clear to India, Iran and Russia that the U.S. had no objection to their arming Massoud, whom the U.S. did not want to fully arm, but whom it did not want to see overrun by the Taliban either. The U.S., at this time, maintained an inane policy of strict neutrality between the ISI’s proxy the Taliban and the ISI’s target, Massoud’s Northern Alliance. As Coll puts it, “[Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, Rick] Inderfurth traveled to Tashkent that July for multiparty peace talks with Afghan leaders sponsored by the United Nations. Massoud also decided to attend. Inderfurth’s opening statement offered olive branches to every group, including the Taliban. The conference’s ‘Tashkent Declaration on Fundamental Principles for a Peaceful Settlement of the Conflict in Afghanistan’ was a testament to muddled policy and dead-end negotiations.” 49

Karzai had been an anti-Soviet fundraiser for the mujahideen during the Soviet war. He became Rabbani’s and Massoud’s Deputy Foreign Minister in Kabul in 1993, but their Tajik-Pashtun alliance fell apart over Tajik suspicions concerning Karzai’s Royalist Pashtun friends and his attempts to negotiate with Hekmatyar and his old anti-Soviet friends in the Taliban. Massoud had come to believe that talking to Hekmatyar was not only pointless, but treasonous. The crazier and more anti-democratic the Taliban became, the more transparent a tool of Pakistan they became, the more alienated the Karzai clan became from their old anti-Soviet Taliban allies.

By 2001, the Taliban’s medieval brutality left Pakistan’s ISI, in the heroin business with the Taliban, as the Taliban’s only powerful support. Even the ISI was starting to worry about the ‘Talibanization’ of Pakistan, the consequent international isolation, and the vulnerability of the Pakistani government itself to radical Islamist coup. Drought compounded catastrophic economic and political failure, causing a sharp rise in Taliban taxation and forced conscription. Holding a huge surplus of opium, hundreds of tons, the Taliban had the bright idea, in July of 2000, to increase the value of its opium reserves and at the same time garner millions in international aid by temporarily banning the cultivation of opium. In the midst of a devastating drought, with opium as virtually the only lucrative cash crop, this move did not go down well on the farm. The Taliban got a little international recognition and a few million in aid, but lost much of its rural base. The Taliban then doubled down on failure, forcing the closure of the U.N.’s World Food Program bakeries, which provided cheap bread to Afghanistan’s hungry millions.

On March 1, 2001, the Taliban announced its intention to destroy all statues in Afghanistan depicting the human form, and then promptly destroyed the 1500 year-old Bamiyan Buddhas in the Hazarajat region of central Afghanistan, one of the most magnificent monuments to Afghanistan’s centrality to human culture. The two giant Bamiyan Buddhas, c. 570 CE and 620 CE, 125 and 180 feet tall, carved into a sandstone cliff, sat on the crossroad between India and Persia, part of the ancient Silk Road. Then, in a Nazi-like move that left the world aghast, the Taliban declared that Afghanistan’s Hindus must henceforth wear yellow badges on their clothing identifying them as Hindu, to segregate the ‘unIslamic’ and ‘idolatrous.’

The Bamiyan Buddhas, before their destruction (Wikimedia Commons)

When the U.S. launched Operation Enduring Freedom in reaction to 9/11, 10/07/2001, the Taliban collapsed within two months without much Afghan support or Pakistani resistance. CIA Commander Gary Berntsen, who led the ‘Jawbreaker’ forward teams: “According to Bob Woodward in his book Bush at War, in less than two months, approximately 110 Agency officers and 350 SF soldiers on the ground with seventy million dollars and the support of U.S. airpower and the help of our Afghan allies had wrested control of the country from the Taliban and destroyed a good part of al-Qaeda…. My thoughts were more shaded with gray. Mostly, I felt frustration. If only headquarters had given me and my team another month. If only CENTCOM had sent the Rangers I asked for to block and hunt bin Laden.”

Like Ahmad Shah Durrani, the 1747 founder of the modern state of Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai was also a Popalzai chief of the Durrani (‘Pearl’) tribal confederation from Kandahar. Pashtuns are divided into six major tribal confederations. Each tribal confederation is divided into 15-20 tribes. Karzai had been heroic in his guerrilla opposition to the Taliban at the very outset of the American invasion, liberating Tarinkot, 70 miles north of Kandahar, on 11/14/2001, and then helping U.S. special forces and air power completely wipe out the 500-man Taliban force sent to take back the town. Karzai, operating 25 miles north of Kahdahar, and his attached Special Forces Team, got hit by a misdirected 2,000 lb bomb launched from a B-52, 12/5/2001, forcing his medical evacuation from the field. His frontline courage earned him widespread liberal Pashtun support. Karzai was legitimized as Afghan President by Loya Jirga (Grand Assembly) called by King Zahir Shah, Ahmad Shah Durrani’s direct political descendent, in June 2002. Per agreement with the Northern Alliance, the interim government included General Mohammed Qasim Fahim holding the Defense Minsitry, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah at Foreign Affairs, and General Abdul Rahim Wardak and then Ali Ahmad Jalali at Interior.

Karzai, who had fought with members of the Taliban in the anti-Soviet war, found the Taliban’s Pakistani madrassa-fed fascism increasingly insane, contrary to traditional Afghan Islamic tradition, which had always been, in Afghan tribal terms, democratic. The Tajik leader Massoud thought the Taliban’s refusal to educate women and to endow them with equal political rights to be inhuman, preferring the traditional sexual egalitarianism of his fellow Persian speakers, the Hazaras. Hazara leader Karim Khalili became one of Karzai’s Vice-Presidents. To force women to wear the burqa and to submit to forced marriage was regarded as beneath contempt. Where Massoud ruled women went to school and work and had equal rights. In September 2000, Massoud signed the Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan Women, which had been drafted by Afghan women themselves.

Karzai’s prominent father, Abdul Ahad Karzai, a former senator under the liberal King Zahir Shah in the 1960s, joined Massoud’s anti-Taliban alliance in 1998. Massoud reciprocated by accepting Zahir Shah as head of the state they hoped to establish. The July 14, 1999 Taliban assassination in Quetta, Pakistan, of Karzai’s father solidified Karzai’s relations with Massoud’s country-wide anti-Taliban United Front, which was coordinating Dostum’s Uzbeks in the north, Ismail Khan’s Heratis in the west, Karim Khalili’s Hazaras from Bamyan province, democratic Royalists in Kandahar and many other anti-Taliban pockets of resistance throughout the country. Massoud announced his goal of “popular consensus and general elections and democracy.”

June 13, 2002 Loya Jirga in Kabul, Afghanistan, proclaiming Karzai’s Presidency (Wikimedia Commons)

The military and political genius Ahmad Shah Massoud of the Northern Alliance was assassinated by the ISI, the Taliban and al Qaeda two days before 9/11/2001. Karzai, who had reconciled with Massoud to stop the Taliban, was left allied with Massoud’s United Front. Karzai’s all-Afghanistan democratic stance and active cooperation with the martyred Tajik leader gave him credibility with many non-Pashtun secular nationalists.

Karzai coordinated with the CIA at the beginning of the October 2001 American invasion in response to 9/11. He was courageous, charming and diplomatically skillful, possessed of Pashto, Dari (Afghan Persian), Urdu (Pakistani and Afghan lingua franca), English and French. The ISI-supported Hekmatyar opposed the American-supported Karzai government, which included way too many Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks from the north and west for right-wing Pashtun comfort, especially in the new Afghan National Army (ANA). Despite this, the U.S. continued to function in Afghanistan mostly through the Saudi-supported ISI. That is, we literally were funding our own enemy. Our deal with the ISI gave them control of our funding in Afghanistan, at least that funding they were aware of, and control of the matching Saudi funds.

Like Massoud himself, the Karzai government was also, from the ISI’s perspective, way too communicative with India, Iran and Russia, all, before 9/11, far more worried about Taliban and al Qaeda terrorism than the U.S. had been. Filled with disdain and strategic insecurity for Pakistan’s support of the Taliban, Karzai actually let major road building and infrastructure contracts to India, which kicked in $500 million for Afghan reconstruction. India was literally flanking Pakistan. The whole point of ISI support for the Taliban, Hekmatyar, Haqqani and al Qaeda was to turn Afghanistan into a Pakistani puppet, providing “strategic depth” in the event of yet another war with India over Kashmir. Many in the ISI high command were actually radical right-wing Kashmiris who resented Pakistan’s 0-3 losing record against India, including the catastrophic 1971 loss of East Pakistan, which became Bangladesh, and who regarded any independent Afghan leader as “pro-Indian.”

Hekmatyar, to protect his competing drug gang, fled to Iran in 1996 upon the Taliban accession to power, returning to rebuild his heroin business in mountainous northeastern Afghanistan in 2002. According to Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, who knew virtually all the players in these events, and was a player himself, Hekmatyar ally Jalaluddin Haqqani was a major factor in bin Laden’s 2001 escape from the Tora Bora, Black Cave complex in the White Mountains (Spin Ghar) of eastern Afghanistan (near the Pakistan border and Peshawar). Jalaluddin Haqqani was heavily armed and funded by the ISI and the Reagan administration during their 1980s anti-Soviet effort in Afghanistan. Haqqani became the Taliban Minister of Tribal Affairs, in effect, military chief.

Another major factor in bin Laden’s escape was Cheney and Rumsfeld, who provided so few troops that the lead special ops agent in the field, Commander Gary Berntsen, was refused the few hundred extra troops he requested while hot on bin Laden’s heels with his high-altitude spotter teams in the White Mountains. Writes Berntsen, “In his thick southern accent, Dusty described the terrain and the large number of possible escape routes. Then, he gave his assessment of our [Afghan] allies, which was not encouraging. He said that a battalion of U.S. Army Rangers would be an immeasurable help. He recommended that Rangers be dropped behind al-Qaeda positions to block their escape to Pakistan….I also informed General Dell Dailey [of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC)] I’d sent a message to Langley requesting the introduction of ground forces into Tora Bora. He said, ‘Gary, you’ve done great down there. Now we’ll finish it off.’ ‘With what?’ I asked, venting my frustration. ‘Forty JSOC and a dozen SF [Special Forces] troops? You think that somehow they’re going to block escape routes across hundreds of miles of caves and mountain passes? It’s not enough.’….We needed U.S. soldiers on the ground! We need them to do the fighting! We need them to block a possible al-Qaeda escape into Pakistan! I’d sent my request for 800 U.S. Army Rangers and was still waiting for a response. I repeated to anyone at headquarters who would listen: ‘We need Rangers now! The opportunity to get bin Laden and his men is slipping away!!’”

“CENTCOM commander General Tommy Franks later explained to Frontline: ‘The Afghans themselves wanted to get into Tora Bora. They wanted to do it very quickly. At that time, our Special Forces troopers were not yet in large numbers, even with those forces that we were providing support to. …I think it was a pretty good determination, to provide support to that operation, and to work with the Pakistanis along the Pakistani border to bring it to conclusion.’ He was either badly misinformed by his own people or blinded by the fog of war. I’d made it clear in my reports that our Afghan allies were hardly anxious to get at al-Qaeda in Tora Bora. So why was the U.S. military looking for excuses not to act decisively? Why would they want to leave something that was so important to an unreliable Afghan army that’d been cobbled together at the last minute? This was the opportunity we’d hoped for when we launched this mission. Our advantage was quickly slipping away…. My men and I had risked our lives to do something that few people in Washington had thought possible and succeeded in record time. Now that we finally had bin Laden and his al-Qaeda cadres trapped in the White Mountains why was headquarters pulling us out? And why was Washington hesitant about committing troops to get bin Laden? These were the questions that kept me up at night.” 50

As if to answer Berntsen’s questions, Rumsfeld ordered the Central Command’s General Tommy Franks, while in the midst of air combat operations on the mountainous Tora Bora cave complex, to finalize plans for the new Iraq war. Rumsfeld actually replaced Berntsen right in the middle of the Tora Bora battle – just as he was urgently asking for those backstop troops. Rumsfeld broke it off, ordering Berntsen to stand down, despite the fact that Berntsen’s intrepid high altitude teams, amazing warriors, had trapped bin Laden! Was bin Laden an asset the Saudis didn’t want dead? Was Rumsfeld just executing policy? The same incompetents who were running Afghan policy also, simultaneously, were running Iraq policy, leaving both countries vulnerable to terrorist, drug-financed rule, turning both countries into major drug entrepots. I learned as a kid watching WWII movies not to make the kaiser’s mistake, not to fight a two-front war. Rumsfeld never learned that lesson.

Iraq

Rumsfeld actually replaced Berntsen right in the middle of the Tora Bora battle – just as he was urgently asking for those backstop troops. Rumsfeld broke it off, ordering Berntsen to stand down, despite the fact that Berntsen’s intrepid high altitude teams had trapped bin Laden! Was bin Laden an asset the Saudis didn’t want dead?

General Franks, a follower of Rumsfeld, was, like Rumsfeld, a policy bully. His Central Command was no place for empirical dissent. Thomas Ricks, in his mesmerizing, fact-filled Fiasco, quotes a high-ranking staffer who worked closely with Franks in CENTCOM saying, “Central Command is two thousand indentured servants whose life is consumed by the whims of Tommy Franks. Staff officers are conditioned like Pavlovian dogs. You can only resist for so long. It’s like a prisoner-of-war camp - after a while, you break. I am convinced that much of the information that came out of Central Command is unreliable because he demands it instantly, so people pull it out of their hats. It’s all SWAGs [scientific wild-assed guesses]. Also, everything has to be good news stuff…. You would find out you can’t tell the truth.” 1

Equally catastrophic, Cheney and Rumsfeld, in pursuit of Iraqi oil and strategic position in the greater Caspian Basin, actually ordered George Tenet, their DCIA, to repeatedly lie through his teeth to Congress. CIA analyst Melvin Goodman: “The vulnerability of the intelligence process to political manipulation involves the conscious decision not to share relevant information that fails to support policy preferences of the White House. For example, an informant told the CIA in the spring of 2001 - a full two years before the invasion of Iraq, that Iraq had abandoned its uranium enrichment program, a major element of the nuclear weapons program, and that centrifuge components from the scuttled program were available for examination and even purchase. But in October 2002, without any additional new evidence, the CIA reversed direction and charged Iraq with taking energetic steps to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program.” 2

Tenet’s October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, was a tissue of politicized lies, exaggerations and cherry-picked hearsay – propaganda, not intelligence. Tenet famously replied to President Bush, 12/21/2002, asking for his level of confidence that Saddam possessed WMD, “Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk.” It was DDCIA John McLaughlin who gave the January 2003 ‘slam dunk’ briefing to President Bush and General Powell that led to Powell’s fateful U.N. appearance. On 2/5/2003, with Tenet and Negroponte sitting like stone lions behind him, Secretary of State Colin Powell ruined his reputation by repeating the same BS before the U.N., including nonsense from DIA-paid Iraq war promoter Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress pitchman ‘Curveball’ about mobile “chemical and biological weapons” labs that didn’t exist

‘Curveball,’ Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, was a 1999 Iraqi defector debriefed by German intelligence. He was a failed chemical engineering student who actually worked for Uday Hussein’s television production company. Both German and British intelligence warned Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet and Company that the ‘mobile labs’ were no more than doctored graphics of mobile milk pasteurization and hydrogen generation trailers taken off the internet – and that ‘Curveball’ was an alcoholic nut trying to please his interrogators in exchange for German citizenship, which he got. MI6 reported that “elements of Curveball’s behavior strike us as typical of ... fabricators.” Iraq did in fact have mobile hydrogen generation trailers, to float weather balloons.

DDCIA McLaughlin, anxious to please his bosses, ignored the Germans and the Brits, and so approved the inclusion of Curveball’s BS in the famous 2002 NIE. Ever the politician, General Powell did not blame Tenet and McLaughlin specifically for hanging him out to dry at the U.N., but he did tell The New York Times, “There were some people in the intelligence community who knew at that time that some of these sources were not good, and shouldn't be relied upon, and they didn't speak up. That devastated me.” But some did speak up, and Powell knew it. If Knight Ridder’s Jonathan Landay, Warren Strobel, John Walcott and Joe Galloway got it right in real time while it was happening, and they were outside the administration, then obviously the truth, like MI6’s opinion of Curveball, was available to all inside the administration. Rob Reiner’s 2017 film Shock and Awe is a brilliant dramatization.

The CIA’s own agent on the inside, Ambassador Joe Wilson, spoke up quite loudly, before Powell made the phony case for war at the U.N.. At the root of this was the Iraqi National Congress (INC), which was created by the CIA’s Directorate of Operations in 1991 per President Bush Sr.’s order. Heading up the INC was Curveball’s sponsor, the right-wing Iraqi grifter Ahmed Chalabi, who fed the Bushies any story they would buy, such as that he had evidence that the Iraqi military had trained Arabs, in Iraq, to hijack airplanes. That was nothing but an opportunistic yarn.

The INC, between 2000 and 2003, was paid $36 million by the Directorate of Operations to spin this BS. Chalabi later became interim Minister of Oil in Iraq in April - May 2005 and December 2005 - January 2006, and Deputy Prime Minister from May 2005 to May 2006, which gives some idea of how Iraq turned into such an ungovernable disaster. In January 2012, a French intelligence official asserted that he believed Chalabi to be “acting on behalf of Iran.” Chalabi was heavily promoted by Republican advertising powerhouse BKSH & Assoc., now called the Prime Policy Group. The INC was just a false flag Directorate of Operations propaganda operation, P-2, from SISMI, which ran P-2 in Italy. It was Italian military intelligence, SISMI, that created the forged contract to buy yellowcake uranian from Niger, and supported the INC in the field. 3

Ahmed Chalabi, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Bremer (Wikimedia Commons); Curveball

Rumsfeld and Cheney made sure that the National Security Agency (NSA) and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) moved from management by CIA analysts to direct Pentagon control, that is, direct Rumsfeld control. In 2002, they created the Pentagon’s new Office for Special Plans (OSP), managed by right-wing ideologues Douglas Feith and Abram Shulsky. CENTCOM commander General Tommy Franks called Feith “the dumbest fucking guy on the planet,” essentially for his inane military assumptions based on absolutely no military experience whatsoever. Per Cheney’s orders, these ideologues created fake intelligence linking Saddam to al Qaeda to justify the Iraq invasion. A July, 25, 2002 OSP intelligence report was entitled ‘Iraq and al-Qaeda: Making the Case.’ They also produced another masterpiece of analysis, ‘Assessing the Relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda,’ contradicting virtually all the real intelligence produced by the CIA and the DIA.

Although the terrorist-supporting Saddam did make himself useful to anti-U.S. and anti-Israel groups he found convenient, his support of these groups was sporadic and opportunistic, using them as propaganda tools. During the 1991 Gulf War, for instance, Saddam used Palestinian jihadi groups connected to the Muslim Brotherhood to attempt anti-U.S. operations. But the secular Saddam, in fact, had banned the Muslim Brotherhood and al Qaeda throughout his reign. During the Second Intifada which followed the Hamas destruction of the Camp David Summit of 2000, Saddam offered $25,000 to each Palestinian family that suffered a death in the Israeli counterattacks.

Elements of the CIA Directorate of Intelligence had flagged Chalabi and his 1991 Directorate of Operations-created Iraqi National Congress as a right-wing con job from the get-go. From July 2001 to August 2005, Douglas Feith held the post of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. It was Feith’s enthusiastic ‘intelligence,’ based on Chalabi’s fabrications, which Vice President Cheney continually advertised in the press. Once the Iraq BS hit the fan, militarily engulfing the U.S. in one more bloody quagmire, for privateer commercial purposes, even the Pentagon’s own Inspector General concluded in 2007 that the Office for Special Plans had “fixed” the intelligence to produce “alternative intelligence assessments,” which had been “inappropriate.” Feith’s office had “developed, produced, and then disseminated alternative intelligence assessments on the Iraq and al Qaeda relationship, which included some conclusions that were inconsistent with the consensus of the Intelligence Community, to senior decision-makers.”

Feith’s office, which had, per Rumsfeld’s instructions, insisted that the Iraq invasion would be a cakewalk, was put in charge of post-combat operations in Iraq, which included the abrupt deBaathification policy of May, 2003. The problem with that was that the engineers of this policy, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith, had no military experience and no knowledge of Iraq, leaving U.S. troops on the ground dealing with easily avoidable full-scale Sunni-Shia civil war, costing too many American soldiers their lives.

Just before the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz, Feith’s immediate superior, told the Detroit News, in a perfect summary of their cakewalk theory of invasion, “And once that [the invasion] happens I think what you’re going to find, and this is very important, you’re going to find Iraqis out cheering American troops….I think the ethnic differences in Iraq are there but they’re exaggerated.” This conclusion based on absolutely no Iraqi or military experience whatever, just salesmanship. 4

Around the time that Army Chief of Staff General Shinseki, a past-master technical expert, was telling the Senate that “several hundred thousand” U.S. troops would be required in Iraq, late February, 2003, Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz was telling senior Army officers that, a few months after the invasion, U.S. troop level would be down to 34,000. A three-star Army general at headquarters was told to have plans ready to reduce U.S. troops to 30,000 by Auguest, 2003. By Decmber 2005, the U.S. coalition had 210,000 troops in Iraq, including ‘contractors,’ and that was proving to be inadequate. General Zinni’s original invasion plan had called for twice that number. A month after Shinseki told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “several hundred thousand soldiers” would be gobbled up in Iraq, an administration official told the Washington Post that the war in Iraq would cost $95 billion. Wolfowitz, insisting the war would pay for itself through oil revenue, replied, “I don’t think he or she knows what he is talking about.” By 2007 the cost of the war was up to $300 billion.

Bush Jr., Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith were lifelong defense contractor and oil privateer shills, jawboning the political sheep into a very profitable war by intentionally confusing their sales pitch with reality. As any number of professional soldiers like Zinni and Shinseki recognized, these corporate operatives, for all their bureaucratic expertise in DC, literally didn’t know what they were doing with troops in Iraq. None had military training or ever been in battle, and none accepted the Pentagon’s sophisticated troop to task analysis, based on decades of military experience, which indicated the need for many more troops. They just flippantly overrode the judgement of the best technical military planners in the world. They were experimenting with U.S. troopers’ lives, as if they were just so much expendable equipment.

General Anthony Zinni, from August of 1997 until September of 2000 the Commander of Central Command, had seen all the intelligence. “In my time at Centcom, I watched the intelligence, and never - not once - did it say, ‘He has WMD.’” Zinni, a badly wounded Vietnam vet who had campaigned for Bush in 2000, thinking that Bush, as he said, was militarily conservative, went into full opposition mode: “Iraq is in serious danger of coming apart because of lack of planning, underestimating the task and buying into a flawed strategy.”
A note taker at a major interagency conference on Iraq, February 21-22, 2003, pointed to the widespread professional conclusion that “There weren’t enough troops in the war plan ‘for the first step of securing all the major urban areas, let alone for providing an interim police function.’ Without sufficient troops ‘we risk letting much of the country descend into civil unrest, chaos whose magnitude may defeat our national strategy of a stable new Iraq, and more immediately, we place our own troops, fully engaged in the forward fight, in greater jeopardy.’” It was perfectly obvious to the military pros, but it was too late. General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and General Tommy Franks, Commander of the U.S. Central Command, were enthusiastically on board for the March 20th invasion, ready for Rumsfeld’s inane orders. 5

Needing evidence of the fictitious Saddam–al Qaeda connection, various members of the Bush administration repeatedly used testimony obtained by torture from Ibn al-Shaykh al Libi, a Libyan jihadi captured in Afghanistan in November of 2001. This evidence was strongly questioned by the CIA and DIA at the time. They concluded, after debriefing al-Libi themselves, that al-Libi had been spinning yarns to stop the torture. Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby visited the CIA 12 times in the run-up to the 2002 NIE, to strong-arm the analysts into providing the ‘correct’ analysis. When NSC Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke reported that there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11, Cheney told him “Wrong answer. ... Do it again.” This, despite the fact that DDCIA John McLaughlin backed up Clarke.

Cheney went around repeatedly insisting that 9/11 hijack leader Mohamed Atta traveled to Prague and met with Iraqi intelligence. The CIA, not thrilled with being bullied, replied that it had sensitive telephone intercepts that placed Atta in the United States at the time of the alleged meeting in Prague. This information rolled off Cheney’s back like water off a duck, who continued, with that condescending authoritative air of his, spouting this BS at every opportunity. “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.” 6

Ali Soufan, the FBI’s lead Arabic-speaking al Qaeda expert: “In December 2001 I returned to the United States [from Yemen], where the FBI’s al-Qaeda team had gone through a reorganization: headquarters didn’t want the investigation into 9/11 and al-Qaeda to be run out of the New York field office anymore, despite the institutional knowledge base there, and created a new squad based in Washington, DC, known as the 9/11 Team…. Prior to the Iraq war, when there was a lot of pressure on the FBI from the White House to produce a ‘link’ between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, the 9/11 Team’s assessment, again and again, was that there was no link. The White House didn’t like that answer, and told the bureau to look into it more and ‘come up with one.’ [New Deputy Division Chief] Andy [Arena] refused, and in an exchange (now famous among bureau agents), he told Robert Mueller: ‘Sir, in the FBI, we present facts. We don’t manufacture reasons for White House wars.’ The director agreed, and the message went back that the assessment wouldn’t be changed.” 7

Ali Soufan and Richard Clarke (Wikimedia Commons)

Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the U.N.’s International Atomic Energy Agency, and Hans Blix, the previous director, led the U.N. Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission allowed in by Saddam in 2002 in an effort to avoid attack. Their experts searched every site suggested by U.S. intelligence. They had inspected over 500 sites before the bombing began, but found no WMD of any kind. The DIA reported that chemical or biological weapons didn’t exist in Iraq as a result of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, the first Gulf War in 1991, and the 1991 Security Council Resolution 687, the 1994 SCR 949 and the 1995 SCR 986. SCR 986 established verifiable WMD inspection in Iraq in exchange for license to export oil in exchange for food and medicine. Iraq cooperated with this inspection regime until the short 1998 four-day bombing campaign called Desert Fox, which completely collapsed whatever weapons infrastructure the bankrupt Saddam had left.

Army Col. Alan King, chief civil affairs officer of the invading 3rd Infantry Division, spring of 2003, said that “The chairman of the Iraqi atomic industry surrendered to me, and I found out that our reason for invading pretty much went away in 1998.” Asked Blix, the former Swedish Foreign Minister, “Could there be 100-percent certainty about the existence of weapons of mass destruction but zero-percent knowledge of their location?” ElBaradei, insisting that the inspections proved that there was no WMD, said that “Iraq is a glaring example of how, in many cases, the use of force exacerbates the problem rather than solving it.” ElBaradei and the IAEA shared the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize. 8

We pushed over Saddam’s statue in Baghdad’s Firdos Square on April 9, 2003, with a macho, flight-suited Bush declaring that “Major combat operations in Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have prevailed.” Bush Jr. basked in the applause below that big “Mission Accomplished” banner on May 1 on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, parked off the California coast. But this same macho poseur had refused to meet the families of the 17 sailors who died on the USS Cole because that advertised his initial somnambulance and impotence, especially since the Cole bombers had been working with the perpetrators of 9/11, about which his pro-Saudi political leadership had been repeatedly warned by the best American pros, like Soufan and Clarke, and failed to stop, although the CIA knew who they were and were tracking them. These are the same geniuses who ignored the CIA station chief in Baghdad about deBaathification.

Upon conquest, the CIA sent its own weapons inspectors into Iraq. But David Kay, who led the CIA team of 1,400 on-the-ground specialists, the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), also couldn’t be bought or bullied by Cheney, Rumsfeld & Co. Kay told the Senate Armed Services Committee, 1/28/2004, “We were almost all wrong…. What intelligence really does when it is working well is to help avoid wars.” After that testimony, Kay was reassigned to a windowless office without a working telephone. Kay resigned and went public. Kay’s report was finished by Charles Duelfer. The Duelfer Report repeated everything Kay had been saying. Saddam had no WMD, there was no attempt to buy uranium from Niger, and the aluminum tubes were for conventional military rockets.

During the runup to the Iraq war, when the Presidential Daily Briefing wasn’t sufficiently slanted, Cheney actually fired two of the senior CIA analysts for being too empirical. The minutes of a 7/23/2002 secret British government meeting, the ‘Downing Street memo,’ recorded Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, officially reporting to the British high command on his recent conferences with the American high command in Washington, that “Bush wanted to remove Saddam Hussein, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.…. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.”

The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Prewar Intelligence, July 7, 2004, concluded that the September 2002 National Intelligence Estimate resulted from a “broken corporate culture and poor management” that resulted in a NIE which was completely wrong in almost every respect. “Most of the major key judgments either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting….A series of failures, particularly in analytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization of the intelligence.” Which is, of course, exactly what the Pentagon Papers revealed – privateers fixing ‘intelligence’ to justify sending our troops to die for commercial goals, even when the real intelligence militated against it.

In August of 2002, the clear-eyed Republican realist Brent Scowcroft, National Security Adviser to Bush Sr., warned on CBS’s Face the Nation that invasion of Iraq “could turn the whole region into a cauldron, and thus destroy the war on terrorism.” That, of course, is exactly what happened. Other Republican heavyweights, like Henry Kissinger and James Baker, and especially serving Secretary of State General Colin Powell, echoed Scowcroft’s warning, but to no avail. 9

On May 11, 2003, Paul Bremer, a former State Department official and managing director at Kissinger and Associates, was named head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). First he destroyed the Iraqi government administration by firing all members of Saddam’s Baath party, in other words everyone running the Iraqi government, and then, on May 23, 2003, he dissolved the Iraqi military and intelligence services without pay, cancelling all pensions, throwing upwards of 400,000 armed Sunnis out of work with no social support. Army Col. John Agoglia, the military’s liaison to Bremer, told Bremer, “You guys just blindsided Centcom.” That was the day, he told reporter Thomas Ricks, “that we snatched defeat from the jaws of victory and created an insurgency.” The military guys, the command with its feet literally on the ground, turned these complaints at the 11/4/2003 monthly commanders’ meeting in the Green Zone, into a full-scale verbal donnybrook. Thomas Ricks: “…senior Army officers lashed out at the CPA’s free market and deBaathification policies for throwing people out of work and alienating a large part of the population. They also were openly unhappy with the lack of consultation between the CPA and commanders in the field.”

That is, there were two command structures in Iraq, the CPA and the military command, CJTF-7, both reporting up to Rumsfeld, but not forced to coordinate with each other. With Rumsfeld trying to manage two wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as redesign the Defense Department, the two Iraq centers of power were left to improvise the management of Iraq on their own. The result was a hopelessly muddled chain of command, in fact two chains of command engaging in turf warfare.

The fish rots from the head. Rumsfeld, determined to cut the State Department off at the knees, threw away the best post-invasion planning produced by the U.S. government, the State Department’s ‘Future of Iraq’ program, the result of almost two years of work. The Washington Post’s Baghdad bureau chief Rajiv Chandrasekaran: “Run by midlevel State Department personnel, the project organized more than two hundred Iraqi exiles into seventeen different working groups to study issues of critical importance in the postwar period, including the reconstruction of shattered infrastructure, the creation of free media, the preservation of antiquities, the administration of justice during the transition, the development of the moribund economy, and, most important, the formation of a democratic government. The working groups produced reports with policy recommendations that totaled about 2,500 pages.”

The ‘Future of Iraq’ program was organized by a talented human rights lawyer from State, Thomas Warrick. We could easily have turned Saddam’s army into a CCC or WPA. We could have paid the army what Saddam was paying, which would have been infinitely cheaper than facing the insurgency and the related terror-group formation. We could have coopted the Shias the same way – by paying them and turning them into a Civilian Conservation Corps or Works Progress Administration concerned with improving Shia neighborhoods and infrastructure. As State laid out in detail, we could have easily started a healthy economic competition between Shias and Sunnis, in a profitable peace.

State had seventy-five Iraqi-speaking experts from all ethnic groups ready to implement its detailed blueprint for successful transition to democracy. But Cheney and Rumsfeld summarily rejected the entire State Department ‘Future of Iraq’ program. Retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner was the first Director of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance, which became the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in May. Garner specified to Rumsfeld that it is “necessary to keep Iraqi army intact for a specified period of time. Serves as ready resource pool for labor-intensive civil works projects.” Instead Rumsfeld ordered Garner to fire his most expert adviser, Tom Warrick, the original designer of the ‘Future of Iraq’ program who moved from State to join Garner’s DOD team. Chalabi viewed Warrick as a threat to his turf. None of the State Department experts were allowed in, and the military and CIA professionals who were recommending the same things were ignored.

Said Garner of Chalabi, “I thought he was a thug, very sleazy.” That was also the opinion of Secretary Powell’s State Department and the CIA. General Garner’s undisguised disrespect for the Iraqi grifter, and Iranian agent, Chalabi, the neocon thug, and his basic disagreement with Rumsfeld’s radical deBaathification, got Garner replaced by the neocon darling Paul Bremer in early May.

The CPA the neocons built demonstrated the utter disrespect Bush Jr., Cheney and Rumsfeld had for their own troopers’ lives. The CPA was not a professional office designed to run Iraq with troopers’ lives on the line. These corporate pros knew perfectly well how to build a serious mission-oriented office, to build and run a deep-water oil rig, for instance. But their CPA was not staffed by professional office managers and experts who had the language or relevant military or technical skills. The CPA was staffed by doctrinaire young Republican campaign workers in need of a job, and Republican contract grifters, many of whom were outside the States for the first time. An old pro like retired Army Col. Ralph Hallenbeck, a communications contractor who had to deal with the CPA, characterized a spectacular level of incompetence: “No clear strategy, very little detailed planning, poor communications, high personnel turnover, lots of young and inexperienced political appointees, no well-established business processes.”

Many of the CPA’s 1500 staffers were hired on a 90-day rotation, as if it were summer camp, or a semester in England. The hiring process consisted almost entirely of a political vetting for Republican activism. RNC contributors were hired over far more qualified technocrats. James O’Beirne, the White House liaison at the Pentagon, was gleaning his CPA hiring recommendations from Republicans who submitted their resumes to the Heritage Foundation. Republican activists, or their just-graduated children, were strongly preferred. Six of these young Republican amateurs were put in charge of Iraq’s $13 billion budget, even though none had any previous financial management experience. A 24 year-old with no experience was put in charge of reestablishing and writing the rules for a new Baghdad stock exchange. These were young amateurs who couldn’t even speak the language trying to run the country. Fred Smith, senior adviser to the CPA helping to build the new Iraqi Ministry of Defense, told Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “I just don’t think we sent the A-team. We didn’t tap - and it should have started from the White House on down - just didn’t tap the right people to do this job. It was a tough, tough job. Instead we got people who went out there because of their political leanings.” Donald Rumsfeld in action.

By the time the staffer was up to speed, the staffer was rotated out. Projects were continually started, dropped upon staff rotation, and then restarted with new people. General Zinni called it “a pickup team.” Senior career diplomat Ambassador Robin Raphel, who left the CPA in disgust in August of 2003 after trying to set up a Trade Ministry, said, “it was very obvious to me that we couldn’t do this, we could not run a country that we did not understand.” Ricks hilariously quotes a colonel who worked in the CPA characterizing its work as “pasting feathers together, hoping for a duck.” The CPA got bad reviews from every entity it worked with - the military, the media, the Iraqis. 10

Simultaneously, just as Bremer’s new Coalition Provisional Authority was being set up, the loopy Rumsfeld, the demonic puppetmaster from DC, transferred control of all military in Iraq from Army Lt. Gen. David McKiernan’s Coalition Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC), the original ground control component of the invasion force, to the staff of V Corps, a smaller, less competent, completely inexperienced group with no institutional knowledge of Iraq’s tribal culture. V Corps ran Combined Joint Task Force 7 (CJTF-7), coordinating all U.S. military components in Iraq. This was the group, under the famously short-tempered and undiplomatic Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, that oversaw the Abu Ghraib debacle.

The Republican privateers running the defense department contracted CACI International (formerly California Analysis Center Inc.) and Titan Corporation to provide interrogation and translation services at military prisons in Iraq. It was CACI and Titan that gave us Abu Ghraib, through the hurried hiring of 31 interrogators required by one of CACI’s subcontracts. Army Reserve elements, from the 372nd Military Police Company, basically unsupervised, were also involved. These included Staff Sgt. Ivan ‘Chip’ Frederick II, Spec. Charles Graner, Jr. and Graner’s girlfriend, PFC Lynndie England. Their sadistic, sexual selfies with tortured, naked detainees are now iconic – just the thing to completely devastate America’s credibility in a conservative Muslim country. Instead of teaching these amateur interrogators Arabic, psychology and IT, that is, the eliciting, management and coordination of information, CACI’s strong suit, they were taught coercion and torture, Rumsfeld’s strong suit, originally instituted by Rumsfeld and Cheney for Afghan prisoners at Guantanamo.

Abu Ghraib was stuffed with over 10,000 people, most of whom were caught up in indiscriminate neighborhood cordon and sweep operations executed by troopers who spoke no Arabic, breaking into private homes in the middle of the night, often humiliating parents in their bed clothes in front of their families, literally mass-producing more insurgents. According to U.S. military intelligence, 90% of these prisoners were innocent and had no intelligence value. Rumsfeld then sent his Gitmo commander, Major General Geoffrey Miller, to Baghdad to ‘Gitmoize’ the Iraqi prison system, or, as Miller’s subsequent report put it, “to rapidly exploit internees for actionable intelligence.”

Teaching overworked low-level operatives to forcibly extract information that isn’t there from low-level, often random, captives through torture is not a good idea. Frustrated ‘interrogators’ often turned sadistic. One nauseated MP, Specialist Joseph Darby, stopped it in January, 2004, by blowing the whistle to the Army’s criminal command, a whistle heard by the likes of famed reporter Seymour Hersh. The Army found “sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuse” led by four CACI contractors and twenty-three military interrogators, some Titan contractors. Rumsfeld and Cheney couldn’t have given the jihadi crazies a better recruiting argument – with pictures.

No strategy statement came from CJTF-7 or Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, so individual divisions in different parts of the country acted in an uncoordinated manner. As Ricks points out, the 82nd would sweep up 25 Iraqis, interview them, and send three to Abu Ghraib for further interrogation. The 4th ID would sweep up 25, and send 25. There was no coordination or specific guidance. One prominent military scholar, Maj. Gregory Peterson, pointed out that, “Currently, the U.S. military does not have a viable counterinsurgency doctrine, understood by all soldiers, or taught at service schools.”

Planning for counterinsurgency, of course, doesn’t generate huge orders for new weapons systems designed to fight WWIII with a superpower, so the less profitable counterinsurgency planning was allowed to atrophy. The result was an army that was neither equipped nor trained for the war it was actually fighting. What was needed was body armor, lightweight automatic weapons, up-armored humvees and lessons in community relations and Arabic. Too often, overworked, exhausted, bloodied troops unable to communicate with the locals resorted to hair-trigger violence, heavy weapons, military bullying and mass arrests, especially when their own leadership hadn’t taught them culturally sensitive policing and intelligence gathering.

As in Afghanistan, the neocon privateers turned to a war strategy when they could have had a much more successful peace strategy. Commanding General Ricardo Sanchez had plenty of access to good advice. Ricks points to one prominent Special Forces officer turned diplomat, Keith Mines, assigned to represent the CPA in al Anbar province in 2003. Mines told the U.S. high command that the solution wasn’t military, but “police, power and political process.” But rather than insure reliable community policing, electrical power and community meetings, the neocons ignored local needs, and lessons learned in Vietnam, in favor of their solipsistic racist fantasies.

It’s as if Rumsfeld wanted to start an insurgency. Surely Bush Jr., Cheney and Rumsfeld knew they were kicking a hornets nest. Surely they knew that in the event of an intractable insurgency, their contractors and bankers would clean up, just as they did in Vietnam. Both Rumsfeld and Cheney worked together as Counselors to Nixon in 1970, as Nixon escalated the Vietnam war, rather than continue Johnson’s peace initiative, which Nixon intentionally sabotaged. Apparently Rumsfeld and Cheney were angling for a similar result in Iraq - a long, protracted, profitable war. The Washington Post’s Rajiv Chandrasekaran documents this in Imperial Life in the Emerald City. The superb film Green Zone is a riveting dramatization.

Speaking of Bremer’s summary disbanding of the Iraqi government and military, CIA Director George Tenet said, “In fact, we knew nothing about it until deBaathification was a fait accompli . . . Clearly, this was a critical policy decision, yet there was no NSC Principals meeting to debate the move.” Within a couple of days of arriving as the new head of the Coalition Provisional Authority, May 16, 2003, Bremer officially declared that “Senior [Baath] Party Members are hereby removed from their positions and banned from future employment in the public sector.” Seven days later, May 23, with CPA Order 2, Bremer disbanded the entire Iraqi military.

The CIA station chief in Baghdad warned Bremer that “none of the postwar Iraqi political institutions and leaders have shown an ability to govern the country.” Bremer was about to fire the key technicians who operated the electric, water, transportation, university, hospital and government infrastructure of the country. He told Bremer, “By nightfall, you’ll have driven 30,000 to 50,000 Baathists underground. And in six months, you’ll really regret this.” Most of the transition experts in the CPA told Bremer the same thing. One U.S. expert trying to set up the Finance Ministry told a Bremer aide of deBaathification, “If you want me to enforce this, I’m leaving on the next plane out of the country, because it’s ill-advised, and you have no idea how far you’re gonna set us back.” As the first Iraq ground commander of U.S. forces, Lt. Gen. David McKiernan put it, “There are a large number of Iraqi soldiers now unemployed. That is a huge concern.”

Bremer’s orders came from Cheney and Rumsfeld, the two to whom Bush had delegated the management of the war. It was Rumsfeld who chose Bremer, with orders designed by Feith’s Office of Special Plans to empower Chalabi, the major Iraqi advocate of deBaathification, who dreamed of filling all those empty slots with his own appointees. Bremer kept adamantly repeating to the in-house critics of his disastrous decisions, “I have my instructions.”

Most of the school teachers in Sunni areas had been required to join the Baath Party, so they were all summarily fired as well – about 15,000 people, according to Chandrasekaran. Babbling about a ‘free-market’ and ‘privatization,’ neocon Bremer began working to eliminate the Soviet-style consumer subsidies on gas, electricity, food and fertilizer. In June, 2003, Bremer eliminated all tariffs on foreign goods, flooding Iraq with consumer goods with which Iraqi companies could not compete. Bremer also allowed 100% foreign ownership of Iraqi business. With no income, state owned enterprises collapsed, throwing yet more tens of thousands of people out of work.

Chandrasekaran tells this amazing story: The CPA called in an experienced German team which had helped to convert East Germany’s huge state-owned manufacturing sector to private ownership. “…the CPA team was told that the Germans had eight thousand people working on the project. ‘How many do you guys have?’ one of the Germans asked…. ‘Three people,’ Corliss said. ‘Don’t bother starting,’ the German said.” And those three people were all young Republican political operatives with no relevant commercial experience. Leading that team was young Glenn Corliss, still in his twenties: “That’s what the Iraqis were like to us. They were like, ‘What are you talking about? There’s three of you. There’s 150,000 of us [in the Ministry of Industry]. You haven’t seen most of the factories. Why do you think that you’re going to make any of the decisions?’”

The real target of the neocon fixation on ‘privatization’ and ‘free enterprise’ was Iraq’s nationalized oil industry, providing 99% of the country’s revenue. Iraq’s proven oil reserves rank third in the world behind Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. Through production contracts and leases, most Iraqi oil is now firmly in the hands of the usual suspects. As CNN put it, 4/15/2013, The Iraq war, 10 years on: “Yes, the Iraq War was a war for oil, and it was a war with winners: Big Oil….Before the 2003 invasion, Iraq’s domestic oil industry was fully nationalized and closed to Western oil companies. A decade of war later, it is largely privatized and utterly dominated by foreign firms….From ExxonMobil and Chevron to BP and Shell, the West’s largest oil companies have set up shop in Iraq.”

The whole point of U.S. support for al-Maliki was his support of denationalization and privatization. Al-Maliki’s government endorsed the first draft of a privatization law in February 2007, but, despite failure to adopt the law, private contracts and leases continued to be awarded. President Bush’s Executive Order 13303, May 22, 2003, later reaffirmed by Obama, declared that future legal claims on Iraq’s oil wealth constitute “an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” USAID, by now run on contract by BearingPoint Incorporated, a Virginia-based consulting firm, required contractors to promote “private sector involvement… especially in the oil and supporting sectors,” and to be “blind as to whether the investor is from that country or elsewhere.” 11

With state socialism gone, hundreds of police cars were stolen, to be used as private taxis. With no functioning police force, Rumsfeld sent his old associate Col. James Steele, commander of the U.S. Military Group at Ilopango, who ran the Reagan-Bush Contra Cocaine operation, to rebuild the Iraqi police. Steele was the ‘Contra’ in ‘Iran-Contra.’ Steele served as Bremer’s chief security consultant. He helped Bremer set up his hit squad, the Special Police Commandos known as the Wolf Brigade, composed of the Badr Brigade’s toughest Shia thugs. Despite anarchy in the streets, the Wolf Brigade did generate some good J. Edgar-style publicity with the occasional bust of a kidnapping, car-theft or drug and arms ring. Unfortunately, the Wolf Brigade itself was also a kidnapping, car-theft and drug and arms ring that amused itself with gang-rape and torture.

Special Forces officer turned diplomat Keith Mines criticized Rumsfeld’s “minimalist force structure” as counterproductive in the summer of 2003, leaving the terrorists free to raid Saddam’s unguarded arms dumps, travel unhindered over the Syrian border, and recruit the newly unemployed soldiers and government workers. The Saudis and the Iranians had a field day financing the new insurgency, Bremer’s strategic gift to them. Whole tribes rose in revolt. Keith Mines pointed out that the CPA should be built around “a large-scale public sector jobs program” like President Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, not this Hooveresque neocon nonsense of throwing people out of work with no financial support - for their own good.

There was plenty of good planning after 2004, but it was almost always frustrated by the lack of sufficient troop numbers, insisted on by Rumsfeld. Ricks quotes the pithy summary of Col. John Toolan, commander of the 1st Marine Regiment: “The challenge was, when we controlled the MSR [major supply routes] and developed the ISF [Iraqi security forces], there was no one left to eliminate sanctuaries or create jobs. So it was like whack-a-mole.” The scheduled one year military rotation was done in one fell swoop. Throughout the country, experienced outfits were replaced by smaller, inexperienced outfits. It’s as if Rumsfeld was writing a textbook on how to create a popular insurgency.

Instead of the State Department’s ‘Future of Iraq’ program run by culturally sensitive Iraq experts who spoke the language, the neocons installed pro-Iranian Shia extremists and Iranian agents bent on revenge against Saddam’s Sunnis, starting a sectarian civil war which engulfed us. We gave Iran a military and political foothold in Iraq, and enabled Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leading a cadre of Baathist ex-Iraqi army officers, to establish the terrorist Sunni replacement for the Baathists, the Congregation of Monotheism and Jihad, which became al Qaeda in Iraq, then renamed the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, ISIS. The CIA station chief who had predicted this response to blanket deBaathification was replaced, apparently for being too smart. 12

On 4/23/2003, 150 members of Charlie Company, 82nd Airborne Division, occupied a primary school in Fallujah. About 200 unarmed citizens showed up on 4/28 demanding that the school be given back to the municipality so the kids could go back to school. A little community relations, over a bullhorn in Arabic, could have deescalated the situation, but the combat troops of the 325th Airborne Infantry Regiment, which had reenforced Charlie Company, had no community liaison officers. Instead they lobbed smoke gas canisters into the crowd. The protest turned into a riot as rocks and bricks, and then bullets, started to fly. The overworked, spooked and exhausted American soldiers opened up on the crowd, killing 17 and wounding more than 70.

This level of military incompetence, not embedding political officers who could speak Arabic, not giving our combat units the ability to communicate in real time so as to avoid conflict, undercuts one of the most basic principles of counterinsurgency, the goal of which is to win the population politically. Machine-gunning unarmed protesters is not the way to do that. Ceremoniously handing back the school building to the protest leaders, with the gift of a loaf of bread, is the way to do that. The fiercely partisan Sunni town exploded, with help from Zarqawi, who found plenty of new support.

By 2/12/2004, the insurgents were powerful enough to send a few RPGs into the convoy of General John Abizaid, commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, and the 82nd Airborne's Major General Charles Swannack. Then, just a few days later, on 2/23, the insurgents simultaneously attacked three police stations, the mayor’s office and a civil defence base. They killed at least 17 police and released 87 prisoners. The insurgents had turned into an effective guerrilla army. On 3/31/2004, four Blackwater contractors in Fallujah were machine gunned, chopped to pieces and dragged through the streets. The gory global publicity caused the civilian leadership to force Marine General Mattis to ditch his preferred slow, gradual, political approach to Fallujah in favor of a hurried massive invasion.

Operation Vigilant Resolve, the 1st Battle of Fallujah, 4/5/2004, left 600 Iraqi civilians, 200 insurgents and 27 Americans dead. The U.S. succeeded in bringing cooperation between Shia and Sunni when Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army joined Zarqawi’s Sunni al Qaeda fighters in attacking the U.S.. The 620-man 2nd Battalion of the Iraqi Army that the U.S. had trained, lauded by Rumsfeld as the long-term solution, refused to join the battle, insisting that “We did not sign up to fight Iraqis.” The cultural dissonance of newly-rotated Marine trainers with no Arabic barking at Iraqis as if they were new recruits at Parris Island didn’t help. Iraqi men don’t take kindly to public humiliation. The counterproductive cultural ignorance and insensitivity of the American high command can hardly be exaggerated. Major General James Conway, leading the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force, actually built his main base, ‘Camp Alpha,’ on top of irreplaceable ancient Babylonian ruins, using bulldozers to level and pave over some of Iraq’s proudest cultural heritage. Archeologists worldwide were horrified.

Fought to a political, not a military, standstill in Fallujah, Lt. General Conway was ordered to announce a unilateral ceasefire by Bremer and the thoroughly confused American leadership. General Abizaid, in charge of CENTCOM, Marine commander General Conway and Major General Jim Mattis, in charge of Conway’s 1st Marine Division, were enraged. Our troops were on the brink of destroying the Fallujah insurgency. The rebels, unable to break our cordon, were being choked to death, running out of ammo and secure firing positions. But our flailing political leadership was still trying to outfox a culture it didn’t understand. Devoid of military experience as they were, and fearing permanent political damage due to all that civilian death, facing British and Iraqi Sunni opposition to the Fallujah fight, they ordered our unilateral ceasefire, ignoring our own people doing the fighting, handing victory to the enemy. Ricks quotes Col. John Toolan, commander, 1st Marine Regiment, who was leading the fight, protest, “We were relatively close to seizing the final objectives.”

Two weeks later, on 5/1/2004, General Conway announced that the security of Fallujah was being turned over to the CIA-created Fallujah Brigade, a Sunni security force composed mostly of Saddam’s Baathist ex-army. By September the Fallujah Brigade deserted en masse to Zarqawi’s insurgents, bringing their very large American-supplied arsenal with them. The insurgents once again controlled the city. Needless to say, Fallujah became a magnet for Sunni jihadi crazies worldwide. Iraq, in fact, had surpassed Afghanistan as the premier jihadi training ground according to the CIA’s think tank, the National Intelligence Council.

The 2nd Battle of Fallujah was fought November through December of 2004, with a properly prepared and executed attack by nearly 14,000 U.S. personnel. The entrenched insurgency in Fallujah was broken in a fierce, complex battle that saw the death of 107 Coalition personnel, mostly Americans, 1500 enemy guerrillas and 800 civilians. The guerrillas fought tenaciously, requiring house to house clearing. But by September 2006, almost all of al Anbar province, except the wrecked Fallujah, was declared to be under insurgent control by the U.S. Marines. The insurgent center of gravity in Anbar simply moved to Ramadi and spread to most major cities in Iraq.

The insurgency soon proved that it was able to coordinate attacks nationally. And the U.S. didn’t have the cultural acumen to avoid falling into the various insurgent traps. The insurgents snookered us into a reactive nationwide hot war that drove us firmly into the role of conquistador, mole whacker. We forgot what we were there to do, which was to win the population, and concentrated instead on what the enemy wanted us to do, chase them. We were repeating the Vietnam idiocy. Since we couldn’t tell friend from foe, we descended into beating the hell out of the civilian population, leaving our troops hated, isolated and directionless.

One overworked squad of the 1st Marine Regiment in the western al Anbar city of Haditha, 11/19/2005, went nuts after losing a crew member to an IED. They attacked three uninvolved nearby civilian homes, killing 24 Iraqi civilians, including several infants and little children, at point blank range. A year later, on 12/21/2006, eight Marines were finally charged, but all got off. One Army general quoted by Ricks, speaking in the Spring of 2005, said, “I do not believe we had a clearly defined war strategy, end state and exit strategy before we commenced our invasion. Had someone like Colin Powell been the chairman, he would not have agreed to send troops without a clear exit strategy. The current OSD [Rumsfeld] refused to listen or adhere to military advice.” As General Zinni put it in April, 2004, “I have seen this movie. It was called Vietnam.”

Construction Electrician 3rd Class Joe Tank mans a turret mounted M-240B machine gun to provide security while Seabees assigned to Naval Mobile Construction Battalion Four clear debris from the streets of Fallujah, 11/17/2004

Only in the face of imminent defeat, in early 2007, after firing Rumsfeld, did President Bush allow recently retired General Jack Keane, former Army Vice Chief of Staff, working with his former subordinates General David Petraeus, the new Iraq commander, and General Ray Odierno, second in command, to insert serious counterinsurgency discipline and strategy into American tactics. Col. Peter Mansoor, General Petraeus’ executive officer, called Rumsfeld, who, until he was relieved in December of 2006 was still refusing the help of the State Department, a “fucking idiot.” That was the considered opinion of the bulk of the American military high command.

Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who had overseen the Iraqi military training effort until 2004, wrote in the New York Times, March 19, 2006, that “…Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is not competent to lead our armed forces. First, his failure to build coalitions with our allies from what he dismissively called ‘old Europe’ has imposed far greater demands and risks on our soldiers in Iraq than necessary. Second, he alienated his allies in our own military, ignoring the advice of seasoned officers and denying subordinates any chance for input. In sum, he has shown himself incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically, and is far more than anyone else responsible for what has happened to our important mission in Iraq. Mr. Rumsfeld must step down…. Mr. Rumsfeld has put the Pentagon at the mercy of his ego, his cold warrior's view of the world and his unrealistic confidence in technology to replace manpower. As a result, the Army finds itself severely undermanned -- cut to 10 active divisions but asked by the administration to support a foreign policy that requires at least 12 or 14.”

Maj. Gen. Eaton was joined by a raft of other heavyweights, including Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, recently retired director of operations of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Maj. Gen. John Batiste, commander of the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, 2004-5. Before that Batiste was Deputy Secretary of Defense Wolfowitz’ top military aide. Joining the Revolt of the Generals was retired Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, former commander the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq; retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, former chief of CENTCOM; and retired Lt. Gen. John Riggs, former Assistant Deputy Chief of Staff Operations and Plans. Riggs got himself busted from three stars to two stars by Rumsfeld when he raised hell over Rumsfeld’s amateurish insistence on inadequate troop strength to manage two wars simultaneously. Riggs, in 2005, had been one of the military’s top technical planners, and he knew that what Rumsfeld was doing was getting our troops killed unnecessarily. “I think they’ve made fools of themselves, and totally underestimated what would be needed for a sustained conflict.”

President Bush finally awoke from his slumber nine months later, just after the Republicans lost both houses of Congress in the November 2006 elections. That wake-up call saw Bush fire Rumsfeld, December 18, 2006, replacing him with Bob Gates, a member of his bipartisan Iraq Study Group. Bush and Gates, with the ostensibly retired General Jack Keane providing strategic guidance, then asked Petraeus to replace General George Casey as force commander in Iraq. The influential Vietnam vet Keane had first reviewed the situation in Iraq in-country in the summer of 2003, as the Army’s Vice Chief of Staff, the second highest ranking position in the Army. “I knew the Army collectively was not prepared to deal with irregular warfare. I said to my guys, we simply are not prepared to do this.”

Paul Eaton; Anthony Zinni; John Riggs

Having been a platoon leader and company commander in Vietnam, General Keane understood that effective counterinsurgency meant befriending the population, not demonizing and killing them. That was Rumsfeld’s old racist Cold War/Dulles brothers strategy, employed with such catastrophic results in Vietnam and Nicaragua. Petraeus’ mission was to change course in Iraq so that it didn’t turn into another Vietnam, employing the kind of crafty counterinsurgency strategy that his longtime friend and mentor Keane, ‘the council of colonels,’ and the State Department, had long been advocating. 13

One of new Iraq commander Petraeus’ important teachers was British liaison officer Brig. Nigel Aylwin-Foster, who argued that American military “cultural insensitivity….arguably amounted to institutional racism [which] exacerbated the task it now faces by alienating significant sections of the population.”

As Australian army Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, a Ph.D. historian whom Petreaeus brought into his command, put it in his famous essay Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency: “Only attack the enemy when he gets in the way. Try not to be distracted or forced into a series of reactive moves by a desire to kill or capture the insurgents.” That is, make the enemy irrelevant. If we had entered Iraq solely to kill people, we could have just dropped an A-bomb. The purpose of being there was to seduce Iraq into friendship and stability, not create ‘collateral damage,’ which is a euphemism for mass murder. As Petraeus put it in his groundbreaking new Counterinsurgency manual, originally published 12/15/2006: “An operation that kills five insurgents is counterproductive if collateral damage leads to the recruitment of fifty more insurgents.” As Lt. Col. Kilcullen, who called the Iraq war “fucking stupid” put it, “There undeniably would be no ISIS if we had not invaded Iraq.” 14

Petraeus in a Baghdad market, 2007; Keane in Afghanistan, 2010; Lt. Col. David Kilcullen

Knowing their culture as we did not, capitalizing on our political leadership’s cultural arrogance and racism, the insurgents had turned the U.S. Army into a recruiting engine for al Qaeda. Those mindless neighborhood sweeps and mass arrests of all military age males recruited virtually the entire neighborhood for the insurgents. Al Qaeda became movie directors, as our ‘Crusader’ troops became the cast in their viral videos. The U.S. Army broke every rule in Petraeus’ new Counterinsurgency manual. We consistently allowed ourselves to be baited into combat we hadn’t planned. We holed up in big bases rather than live among the people we were attempting to govern. It was only by living with the sheikhs in Ramadi in 2006 that Army Col. Sean MacFarland, commander, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 1st Armored Division, was able to understand the tribal structure of the Ramadi militias, and what their specific grievances were with the murderous al Qaeda bullies. Living amongst his prospective allies also gave them the security of being able to call for help, or call in intelligence, around the clock. That enabled Col. MacFarland to provide the protection, equipment and coordination the tribes needed. Those personal relationships and real-time responsiveness enabled MacFarland to turn tribe after tribe into allies cooperating against al Qaeda, in the first demonstration of the ‘Sunni awakening’ and ‘Sons of Iraq.’

Per Rumsfeld’s loony orders, too many of our undermanned, overworked troops killed indiscriminately, abused prisoners, ‘Gitmoized’ Abu Ghraib and other less famous prisons, and took relatives of suspected insurgents hostage – making enemies of the entire population. Rumsfeld tried to turn the Iraqi Army into the American Army, rather than understanding and building on Iraqi militias. Ultimately, it wasn’t by destroying those militias but by buying them and adopting their intertribal etiquette that we were able to extricate ourselves and simultaneously avert full-scale sectarian civil war.

According to the final report to Congress of the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, 9/9/2013, Rumsfeld and his successors flushed billions down the drain building grandiose infrastructure projects the Iraqis couldn’t use or manage, projects of use only to Rumsfeld’s pet Republican contractors. SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation, got the lucrative no-bid contract to build Iraqi Media Network (IMN), comprising a national television station, a national radio station, and a newspaper printed six times a week. “The contract was written by [Under Secretary of Defense for Policy] Doug Feith’s office. Feith’s deputy, Christopher Ryan Henry, had been a vice president at SAIC before joining the Pentagon. SAIC hired Robert Reilly, a former Voice of America director, to head the IMN project. During the Reagan administration, Reilly had headed a White House information operations campaign in Nicaragua to drum up support for the Contra rebels.”

The CPA flew $12 billion in cash to Iraq, delivered by C-130 cargo planes on shrinkwrapped pallets of $100 bills. Wrote the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, “Many of the funds appear to have been lost to corruption and waste.... Some of the funds could have enriched both criminals and insurgents....” Henry Waxman, the chair of the House Oversight committee, asked, “Who in their right mind would send 363 tons of cash into a war zone?” In 2011, an American audit found that almost all of the missing $6.6 billion had been transferred to the Central Bank of Iraq. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart Bowen said that “Any doubts about how the money was handled after it left U.S. control is an Iraqi -- not U.S. government – question.”

In Iraq's eastern Diyala province, the U.S. began building a 3,600-bed prison in 2004, the Khan Bani Saad Correctional Facility, at a cost to American taxpayers of $40 million. It is now rubble. Subcontractors for Anham LLC, based in Vienna, Va., charged the U.S. government $900 for a control switch valued at $7.05 and $80 for a piece of pipe that costs $1.41. Custer Battles charged the CPA $9,801,550 for work that had cost $3,738,592. Their helipad in Mosul cost $97,000, but was billed at $175,000. They repainted Iraqi Airways forklifts found at the airport and then billed the CPA thousands per month, claiming the forklifts were leased from abroad. A $108 million wastewater treatment center in Fallujah services only 9,000 homes.

After blowing up the al-Fatah bridge in north-central Iraq during the invasion, on which sat an oil and gas pipeline, U.S. officials decided to rebuild the pipeline under the Tigris River. After spending $75 million, the underwater pipeline, as the engineers had warned, failed. The original bridge over the river was then rebuilt and the pipeline was put back on the bridge, for an additional cost of $29 million. All that was really needed, politically, was the Seabees, the Corps of Engineers and USAID making sure everyone had water and electricity. As Petraeus said, “Remember, small is beautiful.” Expensive projects, like sewage treatment facilities, that the Iraqis knew perfectly well how to build for themselves, were invariably given, at wildly inflated prices, to connected American contractors like Halliburton and Bechtel. 15

The most extreme of the Sunni insurgents was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of what became known as al Qaeda in Iraq. Zarqawi, rolling in money from Afghan heroin, extortion, burglary, bin Laden, and the ISI, became the most influential leader of the insurgency. He was a particularly vicious terrorist. On 9/30/2004, 35 children gathering for candy from American troops at the opening of a much-needed sewage treatment plant in Baghdad were killed and another 200 wounded. Zarqawi’s lunatics hailed this as a “heroic operation.” Bin Laden announced, in October, 2004, “Know that the warrior comrade Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is the emir of al-Qaeda in the Land of the Tigris and the Euphrates, and the comrades in the organization there must obey him.”

A few months before his death, on 2/22/2006, Zarqawi bombed the Golden Dome Mosque in Samarra, the Al-Askari Shrine, one of the holiest sites in Shia Islam, setting off a bloodbath that lasted for two years. By the end of 2006 more than 2 million Iraqis fled the country. We had triggered a full-scale sectarian civil war in which we were only one of the belligerents. Shia death squads, Sunni death squads, Iraqi police, Iraqi army, U.S. army – it was a multisided orgy of violence. The week of May 7, 2006, a typical week, saw the civil war claim 263 Iraqi lives. The month of July, 2006, saw more than 3,000 Iraqis slain by sectarian terrorism. By June 2006 the World Health Organization estimates that 151,000 Iraqis died since the U.S. invasion of March 20, 2003. The Lancet says it’s 655,000 dead. U.S. forces found themselves reeling from a massive barrage of RPGs, IEDs, car bombs, land mines, grenades, mortars and snipers, launched by a huge, well-coordinated Sunni jihadi army that was growing by leaps and bounds.

The radical Shia partisan Nouri al-Maliki assumed the premiership on May 20, 2006, in a deal brokered by Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force. Exactly as Brent Scowcroft had warned, the whole region had turned into a cauldron, thus destroying our war on terrorism. Aside from Zarqawi’s al Qaeda, U.S. troops were also targeted by Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr’s Iranian supplied Mahdi Army (Jaysh al-Mahdi, JAM).

Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani in the Syrian Desert during a local pro-government offensive, 6/12/2017; Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

The Shia partisan al-Maliki, using the Iraqi Army and police to coordinate with Sadr’s Shia death squads, was worse than useless. The Iraqi army and police the U.S. stood up at such great expense just turned into more sectarian gangs, especially the National Police, with Shia elements of the Iraqi constabulary joining al-Sadr’s neighborhood-by-neighborhood anti-Sunni ethnic cleansing. So the Sunnis, 11/23/2006, hit the Shia stronghold of Sadr City, Baghdad, with a ferocious artillery and mortar barrage that killed 200. The Shias hit back at Sunni mosques, at which the Sunnis hit Shia mosques. Ambassador Robin Raphel was right, “we could not run a country that we did not understand.” Muqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army were using sophisticated IEDs and EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) made in Iran and distributed by Iranian Quds Force pros to hit American troops. By the summer of 2006, the U.S. Army was subjected to 800 attacks per week. To date American troops suffered 4,500 KIA in Iraq. 16

But we did not find ourselves facing Condoleezza’s “mushroom cloud,” biological or chemical weapons. Those fantasies were just lines in Cheney’s script. Cheney and Rumsfeld were the Dulles brothers reborn – fixing the intelligence for corporate profit and political control. American troops were expendable, just so much ammo. All that mattered was getting their corporate hands on Iraqi oil. Cheney’s gang created the McGuffin of ‘yellowcake’ to drive Saddam’s demonic WMD image, so in late February, 2002, at CIA request, diplomat Joe Wilson went to Niger to investigate Saddam’s alleged attempt to buy 500 tons of enriched yellowcake uranian ore, more than Niger’s entire annual output. The CIA had used Wilson before for a similar mission. The National Counterproliferation Center picked Wilson for this mission because he was an expert on both the nuclear industry and Niger. CIA agent Valerie Plame, who worked in the same division, answered a query about her husband Joe Wilson from an operative who didn’t know him from the previous mission, but she did not originate the original mission request to Wilson which came before the agent’s query to Plame.

The only source for this yellowcake allegation was a transparent forgery distributed by SISMI, Italian military intelligence, a long-time tool of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations. Investigators like journalist Seymour Hersh and Glenn Greenwald have concluded that right-wing trickster Michael Ledeen, a long-time SISMI operative, cooked up the forgery with Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, for whom he worked as a consultant, and with Iraqi National Congress (INC) leader Ahmed Chalabi.

Vincent Cannistraro, until 1991 Chief of Operations and Analysis at the CIA Counterterrorist Center, insisted that “The [INC's] intelligence isn't reliable at all. Much of it is propaganda. Much of it is telling the Defense Department what they want to hear. And much of it is used to support Chalabi's own presidential ambitions. They make no distinction between intelligence and propaganda, using alleged informants and defectors who say what Chalabi wants them to say, cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches. They're willing to twist information in order to serve that interest. They've opened up a channel at the Pentagon to collect intelligence from Iraqi exiles, using people off the books, contractors. It’s getting pretty close to an Iran-Contra type of situation.” Ledeen had been up to his neck in Iran-Contra. As Alain Chouet, director of French intelligence put it, “We told the Americans, ‘Bullshit, this doesn’t make any sense.’”

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in May 2004, issued a statement which said: “However, we have learned nothing which would cause us to change the conclusion we reported to the United Nations Security Council on March 7, 2003 with regards to the documents assessed to be forgeries and have not received any information that would appear to be based on anything other than those documents.” Objective analysts in our own CIA’s Office of Current Intelligence, who were not part of this false-flag operation, warned both the American and British governments that this supposed ‘supply contract’ or ‘accord’ between Niger and Iraq was a forgery, but the selling of the war continued apace - the analysts did not have the juice that the operatives had. Note that Vincent Cannistraro, who spent nearly three decades running CIA field operations, specifically named President Bush and Vice President Cheney as the juice behind the BS, the “cooked information that goes right into presidential and vice-presidential speeches.” He is talking specifically about profiteering by creating unnecessary war.

Joe Wilson had been Clinton’s National Security Council Senior Director for African Affairs. He had served in Niger and knew the country well. From 1988 to 1991, Wilson was the Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. When Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, he threatened to execute anyone, including American diplomats, sheltering international fugitives sought by Iraq. Wilson conveying America’s order to Saddam to leave Kuwait, was the last American diplomat to meet with Saddam before the war. Saddam then sent a note to all embassies that anyone sheltering foreigners in Iraq will be executed. Wilson reacted by appearing at a press conference wearing a noose around his neck instead of a tie and declaring “If the choice is to allow American citizens to be taken hostage or to be executed, I will bring my own fucking rope!” Wilson risking assassination by a true genocidal maniac, made it his business to use the American embassy to organize the evacuation of several thousand Americans and other nationals whose lives were on the line, for which President George H.W. Bush called Wilson “a true American hero.”

In March, 2002, after thorough investigation in Niger, Wilson concluded, in his trip report to the CIA, that “it was highly doubtful that any such transaction had ever taken place,” not least because 500 tons of yellowcake was beyond Niger’s ability to produce and would require a truck convoy beyond Niger’s ability to deploy. Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley got the CIA’s final report, incorporating Wilson’s conclusions, on 10/5/2002. Wilson, who knew all of Niger’s governing officials and industrialists, could find no one who had participated in such an operation.

Wilson’s findings, by the way, had already been confirmed by two previous in-country investigations conducted by JCS representative Marine General Carlton Fulford Jr., and the State Department’s Ambassador to Niger, Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick. Our Ambassador emphatically rejected the idea of massive uranium production in Niger as absurd in light of Niger’s limited capacity, given that their main mine was flooded and the only other significant mine was French, bound by heavy international controls on uranium, requiring very formal export licenses. The Senate

Intelligence Committee confirmed General Fulford’s and Ambassador Wilson’s conclusions, and the National Intelligence Council told the Pentagon, “The Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest.” 17

Wilson was shocked when President Bush, in his 1/28/2003 State of the Union Address, asserted that “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” The Brits were only referencing the same SISMI forgery, which MI6 had identified as such, and Bush knew it. Wilson responded in The New York Times, July 6, 2003, “What I Didn't Find in Africa,” “Based on my experience with the administration in the months leading up to the war, I have little choice but to conclude that some of the intelligence related to Iraq's nuclear weapons program was twisted to exaggerate the Iraqi threat.”

In order to counter this inconvenient information the Bush administration created a silly conspiracy theory involving family nepotism. The Bush administration intentionally outed Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, to conservative columnist Robert Novak. That meant that Novak indirectly disclosed the organizational name of the company Plame used as cover, Brewster Jennings & Associates, all the other operatives connected to Brewster Jennings, and all the informants who met with them. Plame was indeed a real CIA agent whose team was running multiple labor-intensive, dangerous and expensive operations involving nuclear scientists on the ground all over the Muslim world, agents who were risking their lives to prevent nuclear proliferation. Cheney, Libby and Novak got courageous people killed.

Years before, in 1982, the Reagan administration, in opposition to the press outing of CIA agents, forced through Congress ‘The Intelligence Identities Protection Act,’ making it a federal crime to do what the George W. Bush administration had just done. In response to CIA insistence, Vice President Cheney’s Chief-of-Staff ‘Scooter’ Libby was convicted on two counts of perjury, one count of obstruction of justice and one count of making false statements to federal investigators, and sentenced to thirty months in jail. The CIA, in a court filing related to the Libby case, asserted that Plame was indeed a covert agent at the time of the leak, meaning that the Identities Protection Act had been violated.

Plame and Wilson on their 2011 book tour

CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman: “There was very little human intelligence [on Iraq], virtually no useful signals intelligence, and, most important, no effort to rectify this gap. Investigations of both the Silberman-Robb Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee point to senior Defense Department officials, particularly undersecretaries of defense Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, who led the way in distorting and politicizing intelligence on Iraq. The militarization of intelligence prior to the Iraq War resembled the militarization of intelligence that preceded the Vietnam War…. When the economic adviser in the White House, Larry Lynn, candidly predicted in September 2002 - just as the White House was beginning its marketing campaign - that the actual cost of the rehabilitation effort would be over $200 billion, he was forced to resign. The actual price tag exceeded $1 trillion by 2012…. CIA analysts anticipated the serious sectarian fighting that took place in post-war Iraq, a line of analysis that supported the thinking of Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki, who predicted that it would take more troops in the post-war situation than during the battle against Saddam. Like Lynn, Shinseki was marginalized and humiliated for his prescience.”

Former DDCIA Richard Kerr said in 2003 that there had been “significant pressure on the intelligence community to find evidence that supported a connection” between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Kerr headed a group of former senior intelligence officers who concluded that there had been “intense policymaker demands in the run-up to the war, which some in the community believed constituted inappropriate pressure on intelligence analysts.” 18

Both Cheney and Rumsfeld learned their cynical manipulation of intelligence from Richard Nixon in 1968, when he was their boss while Nixon was running the Vietnam War. They thought, and said at the time, that keeping the Vietnam War going for another five years after it had been lost was sensible national policy – just look at the intelligence, we’re winning! Well, Hughes Aircraft was anyway – all those workhorse helicopters needed maintenance and replacement, and Hughes was an important Nixon contributor, so when Hughes requested that the Vietnam War be extended, Nixon listened.

Special intelligence inspector Judge Laurence Silberman, appointed by the overwhelmed President Bush, 2/6/2004, concluded, “If the American Army had made a mistake anywhere near as bad as our intelligence community, we would expect generals to be cashiered…. the daily reports seemed to be "'selling’ intelligence—in order to keep its customers, or at least the First Customer, interested.”

Bush Jr., Rumsfeld and Cheney had privateer motives for the war, per their Dulles brothers training. From 1995 to 2000, when he became Vice-President, Cheney had been CEO of military construction, supply, contracting and oil services giant Halliburton, which shot from 22nd largest military contractor in 2000 to 7th largest in 2003. This includes Halliburton’s engineering subsidiary Kellog Brown & Root, KBR, which was awarded $7 billion in no-bid government contracts to restore and operate Iraq’s oil wells. Halliburton was also a major oil services contractor in Saudi Arabia.

Senator John Kerry, 10/17/2004: “Dick Cheney’s old company Halliburton has profited from the mess in Iraq at the expense of American troops and taxpayers. While Halliburton has been engaging in massive overcharging and wasteful practices under this no-bid contract, Dick Cheney has continued to receive compensation from his former company.” Whether Cheney needed the money or not – he didn’t – Halliburton’s policy goals – possession of Iraqi oil and strategic position in the greater Caspian basin – became the U.S. policy goals, and were achieved by the war. Said Halliburton CEO Cheney at an oil industry forum in 1998, “I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.”

In 2006 DCIA Tenet admitted, of his political corruption of the intelligence, “It was the wrong thing to do.” This did not prevent Tenet from becoming a director or adviser to major military contractors L-1 Identity Solutions, The Analysis Corporation, Guidance Software and QinetiQ. Tenet is also managing director of the secretive investment bank Allen & Company. Bush Sr. & Jr., VP Cheney, Rumsfeld, Secretary of the Army Thomas White, U.S. trade representative Robert Zoellick, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff Lewis ‘Scooter’ Libby and former Chevron board member Condoleezza Rice were all heavily invested in the oil industry.

James Baker, former Reagan Chief of Staff, Secretary of State and Secretary of the Treasury, served as chief legal adviser for George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential election campaign and the Florida recount. Baker is a senior partner at Baker Botts, the international powerhouse Houston law firm founded in 1840 and renamed by Baker’s grandfather in 1874. Baker Botts attorney Robert Jordan was Bush Jr.’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia. Baker Botts represents ExxonMobil, ARCO, BP Amoco, and Halliburton, all of which do substantial business with the Saudis and in Iraq.

It is fair to say that oil was a major strategic focus of the George W. Bush administration. Other leading lights, like Reagan’s Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci of the Carlyle Group, were heavily invested in armaments. So whatever the actual intelligence, war to acquire Iraq’s considerable oil reserves made sense for the privateers’ bottom line. An extended guerrilla war, like Vietnam, also produces very lucrative catering, gas supply, construction and weapons contracts. Plans for occupying Iraq were discussed months before 9/11, at NSC meetings in January of 2001, immediately upon Bush Jr.’s acquisition of the presidency. By March, the Pentagon had drawn up a document entitled “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.” 19

Richard Clarke, the clear-headed NSC Counterterrorism Coordinator who held senior State Department positions since 1979, quit in disgust in 2003. He sums the Iraq War up this way: “Now most Americans accept seven damning facts: (1) President Bush did little or nothing about terrorism before 9/11, (2) there was no Iraqi threat to the United States, (3) the Bush administration began plotting to invade Iraq early in their term, well before 9/11, (4) there is no evidence of an Iraqi hand in 9/11, or of any significant support to al Qaeda, (5) there were no weapons of mass destruction and the White House and Pentagon justified their claims about WMD by citing phony evidence from Iraqi exiles to whom they paid millions of dollars, (6) the Bush administration had no real plan to administer Iraq after the invasion, and (7) Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ignored professional military advice and sent too few troops to Iraq to protect our forces.” Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak warned at the time, “Before you invade Iraq there is one Usama bin Laden, after you invade there will be hundreds.” 20

9/11 Is On Us

Our pro-Saudi Safari Club leadership had the CIA and MI6 supporting recruitment for murderous heroin kingpins like Hekmatyar and bin Laden, intentionally letting infamous protected jihadis like Zawahiri and Ali Mohamed into this country. The ‘Blind Sheikh’ Omar Abdel Rahman leading what he called the Islamic Group, was allowed to settle in the U.S., even though he was a famous jihadi. Bin Ladin’s brother-in-law Mohamed Jamal Khalifa was allowed in, and, if Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer’s testimony to the 9/11 Commission is to be believed, and it is, 9/11 hijack ringleader Mohamed Atta was protected by CIA operations and allowed to enter the country. Shaffer’s testimony was confirmed, with proof, by many others in his advanced data-mining unit, called Able Danger.

The Times of India, 10/9/2001, also confirmed that ISI chief Lt. Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed had wired $100,000 to Atta’s bank accounts in Florida. Gen. Ahmed used ISI and MI6 protected double agent Omar Saeed Sheikh, a Briton of Pakistani origin, to transfer the funds. This was confirmed by Indian military intelligence working with the FBI. It was apparently the FBI that forced Lt. Gen. Ahmed’s retirement from the ISI less than a month after 9/11.

General Ahmed’s financier, Saudi Minister of the Interior Crown Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz; Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf; ISI Director Lt. Gen. Mahmoud Ahmed

In 2002, Omar Saeed Sheikh was sentenced to death in Pakistan for orchestrating the beheading in Karachi of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter who got too close to the ISI-al Qaeda connection. As a chief aid to Jaish-e-Mohammed chief Masood Azhar, Omar Saeed Sheikh is suspected of helping to organize the July 7, 2005 London bombings, which killed 52 and injured 700. Three of the four British Pakistanis who executed the 7/7/2005 London bombings took ISI training in Pakistan, and enjoyed protected travel to and from Pakistan. One FBI official complained that Alec Station [the CIA’s bin Laden unit, part of the Counterterrorist Center, located a few miles from CIA’s Langley HQ] had degenerated into “an early warning mechanism to tell the CIA we were getting too close to the relationship with the Saudis.”

Contemplating the intelligence failures of 1993, President Clinton ordered “The Directors of Central Intelligence and FBI together shall personally ensure that their Agencies achieve maximum cooperation regarding terrorism….The CIA and FBI shall ensure timely exchanges of terrorist information.” Implementation fell to the new DDCIA, George Tenet. They decided to trade senior liaison officers. Four senior FBI agents were placed with the Agency and four CIA officers were deputized at the FBI. Dan Coleman became the first FBI agent liaised to Alec Station.

Lawrence Wright: “In July 1998 CIA operatives kidnapped Ahmed Salama Mabruk and another member of Jihad outside a restaurant in Baku, Azerbaijan. Mabruk was Zawahiri’s closest political confidant. The agents cloned his laptop computer, which contained al-Qaeda organizational charts and a roster of Jihad members in Europe—‘the Rosetta Stone of al-Qaeda’—as Dan Coleman called it, but the CIA refused to turn it over to the FBI…. Overvaluing information for its own sake, the agency was a black hole, emitting nothing that was not blasted out of it by a force greater than gravity—and it recognized that O’Neill was such a force. He would use the information—for an indictment, a public trial—and it would no longer be secret, no longer be intelligence; it would be evidence, it would be news, and it would become useless as far as the agency was concerned. The agency treated the exposure of any bit of intelligence as a defeat, and it was in its nature to clutch the Mabruk computer as if it were the crown jewels. Such high-quality information was difficult to come by and, when acquired, even more difficult to act upon…. O’Neill was so angry that he sent an agent to Azerbaijan to demand the actual computer from the president of the country. When that failed, he persuaded Clinton to appeal personally to the Azerbaijani president. Eventually the FBI got the computer, but the ill will between the bureau and the agency continued unabated, damaging both in their attempts to round up the al-Qaeda network.” 1

Clinton’s NSC Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke: “Before leaving this period, I want to make a slight diversion to go into detail on one of the more incredible parts of the 9/11 tragedy, the fact that the CIA did not tell the FBI, Immigration, the State Department, or the National Coordinator for Security and Counterterrorism (me) that two known al Qaeda terrorists had made it to America and were running around somewhere in this country. A year and a half later those two terrorists participated in the 9/11 attacks. As jaded and cynical as I am about government failures, I still find this one mind-boggling and inexplicable.” 2

CIA Alec Station Deputy Chief Tom Wilshire was powerful enough to stop the FBI from investigating the CIA protection of jihadis. Wilshire was the one, according to the 9/11 Commission and the U.S. Department of Justice, who blocked CIA notification to the FBI’s counterterrorism unit that one of the hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar, had obtained a U.S. visa in Yemen, 12/29/1999. Khalid al-Mihdhar fought in the Bosnian War in the 1990s and in Afghanistan in 1999, where he was attached to Osama bin Laden’s unit.

Mark Rossini, another FBI agent liaised to the CIA’s Alec Station, filed a formal complaint, 1/5/2000, regarding the suppression of this information to the FBI, information obtained by his fellow FBI agent Doug Miller, also attached to Alec Station, and sent through regular channels to the FBI. Miller had complained to Rossini that Tom Wilshire, the Alec Station Deputy Chief, had instructed his staff operations officer Michael Anne Casey to send Miller this note: “pls hold off on [the cable] for now per [Tom Wilshire]….This is not a matter for the FBI.” When Rossini questioned this decision, Wilshire operative Casey replied that “this was not a matter for the FBI. The next al-Qaeda attack is going to happen in Southeast Asia and their visas for America are just a diversion. You are not to tell the FBI about it. When and if we want the FBI to know about it, we will.” The implication being that action on this at the FBI could jeopardize an ongoing CIA operation. These FBI liaison agents at the CIA’s Alec Station, Coleman, Miller and Rossini, had to follow the CIA chain of command. Not to follow orders was a firing and criminal offence. The order to block the cable to the FBI, since it was a violation of the FBI liaison agreement with the CIA, had to come from Wilshire’s commanding officer, Alec Station Chief Richard Blee, and Blee took orders from Tenet, who, he has proven, took orders from Rumsfeld and Cheney.

FBI Special Agent Mark Rossini: “As previously stated, SA Douglas J Miller, wrote a draft CIR [Central Intelligence Report] on January 5, 2000, that would have transmitted the information to the FBI about the meeting in Malaysia. This draft CIR was based upon a CIA cable that had come in from Kuala Lumpur Station which contained all the details surrounding the people who met there; who was followed, how and why it came to pass, ie., their travel through Dubai; how they were stopped there and searched ‘routinely’ using the cooperation of the Dubai authorities; and how it was discovered that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi has visitors visas to enter the USA. Doug wrote specifically that al-Mihdhar would likely be traveling soon to ‘most likely New York City’ (this could only have been gleaned by the CIA if they had reviewed his visa application in Jeddah…He also wrote that photos of al-Mihdhar have been obtained and will be sent as well (meaning to the FBI). Doug’s CIR did not contain all the CIA protected operational information/details as [did] the KL [Kuala Lumpur] cable which identified the several foreign liaison services and CIA Case Officers involved [and therefor was not a violation of CIR security rules]. This CIR was never released to the FBI. Again, the issue and main question is to try and understand who made the decision not to release it and why?.... No one in my unit (Alec Station) was interviewed by the 9/11 Commission, not even the Chief of Alec Station, nor the person who told me keep silent about Doug’s memo. That person was sent out of the country on a long term assignment.”

“P.S.: Let’s not forget the murder of Muhammed Jamal Khalifa (Bin Laden’s college friend and brother-in-law) in Madagascar in January 2007, who was killed within an hour of his arrival there. The only thing stolen was his computer, not the nearly $30,000 in cash he had in his pocket. The computer is said to have contained his ledgers and the identities of donors from the Saudi Kingdom. Jamal had emailed me just prior to his death in January 2007 to wish me a Happy New Year. We had established contact in 2005 via phone, when author Lawrence Wright was in Jeddah interviewing Khalifa for his book ‘The Looming Tower’. Wright had told Khalifa about me, and they called my CIA issued cell phone using Khalifa’s cell phone. In our phone call, Khalifa asked for me to meet him in the Kingdom so he could ‘explain it all’, that he was ‘not a bad man’, and ‘not the person you think I am’. The FBI requested permission for me and another Special Agent to go meet him, but permission from the US and Saudi government’s was denied.” Was there an ISI mole in the CIA? Why wasn’t FBI Special Agent Mark Rossini allowed to interview Khalifa? 3

Mark Rossini; Tom Wilshire

Alec Station, under the orders of Chief Richard Blee and Deputy Chief Tom Wilshire, intentionally failed to Watchlist the participants in a pivotal 1/5-8/2000 al Qaeda summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, as required by its own operational guidelines. This was a once in a lifetime intelligence opportunity and the CIA knew it. The subject of that summit meeting was the 9/11 plot, although that was not clear at the time. The meeting was held in the swank golf club condo of biochemist Yazid Sufaat, a Maylaysian with an advanced degree from Cal State Sacramento, who tried to weaponize anthrax for Jemaah Islamiyah.

The meeting was chaired by the Pakistani Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, who had been on the U.S. target list since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the Bojinka plot to blow up multiple airliners simultaneously - broken up in the Philippines in 1995, and the 1998 Nairobi embassy bombing. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed financed, through wire transfers originating in Karachi, Pakistan and Dubai, the insertion of all 19 hijackers into the U.S. The Kuala Lumpur meeting also included Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and a key player in the attack on the USS Cole; the Indonesian Riduan Isamuddin, called ‘Hambali,’ operational head of Jemaah Islamiyah, perpetrators of the 2002 Bali bombings which killed more than 200; Ramzi bin al-Shibh of the Hamburg cell; Walid bin Attash, one of the perpetrators of the 1998 East Africa Embassy bombings and the USS Cole bombing; 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar; 9/11 hijacker Nawaf al-Hazmi, and his brother, 9/11 hijacker Salem al-Hazmi. At least five other attendees are suspected.

Despite zeroing in on the terrorist A-team, Alec Station protected them. Khalid al-Mihdhar, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Walid bin Attash, known al Qaeda Afghan veterans, were protected in 35 documented incidents before 9/11. That is not a mistake, that is a pattern. 9/11 Congressional Joint Inquiry co-chair Senator Bob Graham says, “Cover-up suggests a passive activity. What they’re doing now I call aggressive deception.” The CIA failed to track the summit participants after Kuala Lumpur, despite claims to the contrary in briefings by Blee. Alec Station chief Richard Blee actually told his superiors at CIA that surveillance of the terrorists was ongoing in Kuala Lumpur four days after all had left the city. The terrorists went from the Kuala Lumpur meeting to Bangkok, but on January 13, the Bangkok CIA station told Alec Station that it had lost track of the terrorists. Despite this, Blee told his superiors that the tracking in Bangkok was ongoing. But the 9/11 Commission could find “no evidence of any tracking efforts actually being undertaken by anyone” in Bangkok.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Riduan Isamuddin, ‘Hambali;’ Salem al-Hazmi

Not tracking the terrorist A-team they had been tracking for years only happens under orders. Richard Clarke: “There was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share that information.” Gov. Thomas Kean, co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission (National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States): “The idea that that information was left out of something that was so essential for the FBI, whose job it is to work within the United States and track these people ... you know, it’s one of the most troubling aspects of our entire report, that particular thing….it wasn’t careless oversight, it was purposeful. No question about that in my mind….”

The INS and the FBI were not flagged to look for these terrorists entering the U.S., which they did, unnoticed, in Los Angeles on January 15, 2000. The Bangkok station finally woke up on March 5, 2000, cabling Alec Station that the two terrorists, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, were now in the U.S., but the FBI still was not informed. That March cable just created a CYA paper trail.

Under questioning by Senator Levin on 10/17/2002, Tenet repeatedly lied under oath, insisting that “I know that nobody read that cable,” and that’s why the FBI wasn’t informed. Gov. Kean: “No, I don't think he misspoke, I think he misled.” The CIA Inspector General’s report, June 2005, stated that “numerous” officers had read the cable: “In the period January through March 2000, some 50 to 60 individuals read one or more of six Agency cables containing travel information related to these terrorists. These cables originated in four field locations and Headquarters. They were read by overseas officers and Headquarters personnel, operations officers and analysts, managers and junior employees, and CIA staff personnel as well as officers on rotation from NSA and FBI. Over an 18-month period, some of these officers had opportunities to review the information on multiple occasions, when they might have recognized its significance and shared it appropriately with other components and agencies.” 4

Only a few members of the FBI leadership were briefed verbally on the Kuala Lumpur summit as part of their Alec Station daily update at the time of the summit. No full written report was produced, called a TD or Telegraphic Dissemination, which would have produced the watchlisting, which, of course, would have alerted Customs and the FBI. This was a serious breach of protocol that could only have been intentional. Rather than acting unilaterally, the evidence indicates that Alec Station chief Richard Blee was following orders from DCIA George Tenet to not create a record. The convincing evidence of this is Tenet’s aggressive March 2000 action to shut down Able Danger, the DIA’s advanced data-mining operation that had independently uncovered the San Diego cell, including al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi, and their contacts.

Truthout: ‘Ex-Army Officer Accuses CIA of Obstructing Pre-9/11 Intelligence-Gathering,’ By Paul Church and Ray Nowosielski, 1/20/2013: “In the wake of the devastating African embassy bombings of 1998, which left more than 200 dead, US Special Operations Command (SOCOM) - responsible for the Pentagon's secret commando units - brought together specialists from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to begin mapping the al-Qaeda network. Based in the Information Dominance Center - also referred to as Land Information Warfare Activity, or LIWA - at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, the team's advanced data-mining software found connections between known terrorists and subjects with matching profiles. This highly classified project was code-named Able Danger…. Richard Clarke, NSC Counterterrorism Coordinator for both Presidents Clinton and Bush, had, in a filmed interview, accused the CIA of deliberately withholding information on two of the 9/11 conspirators, the same ones separately discovered by Able Danger [Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi]…. ‘We found two of the three cells which conducted the [9/11] attacks,’ says Shaffer…. His [Clarke’s] theory is given credence by five former FBI counter-terror officials who backed his assertion that Alec Station was deliberately withholding information about the future 9/11 hijackers.”

“‘It became clear that someone didn't want us looking at the data, and they gave an extraordinary direction.’ Army staff lawyers directed Capt. Eric Kleinsmith to destroy some 2.5 terabytes of publicly sourced data [from internet chat rooms, websites, financial records, news accounts, visa applications, mosque attendance, etc.]. In March or April 2000, the offices of Orion Scientific Systems, a private contractor employed by LIWA for the program, were stormed by armed federal agents. Much of the material produced for Able Danger was confiscated - and with it went the US military's best shot at unraveling the hijacking plot…. Congress established the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence in 1977, supposedly to oversee executive branch departments of the United States government. Whether it succeeds in its role is debatable, but in any case when the CIA took the step of complaining to the committee, it was evidently taken seriously. Tenet made the case that Able Danger was interfering with a parallel operation by the CIA, apparently being run from Alec Station. ‘George Tenet went to Congress and lied,’ Shaffer boldly stated.”

Like Secretary Rumsfeld, DCIA Gates and Tenet, Alec Station chief Richard Blee was a policy bully. One officer who sat in on a video teleconference (VTC) with Tenet and Blee’s boss, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, noted, “The VTCs I sat in on, I was just fucking amazed at how that guy treated people. He was just exceedingly combative in an unhelpful way.” As Coll reports, Blee’s CIA team compared him to the fictional Captain Queeg of The Caine Mutiny. But such behavior is useful if you are concerned to control the intelligence product and policy. To Blee’s great credit, he was a strong pre-9/11 advocate of independently supporting Massoud’s Northern Alliance. In this Blee had the support of Counterterrorist Center chief Cofer Black.

After 9/11, 12/9/2001, Blee became Kabul station chief, replacing Gary Berntsen, whose transfer to Kabul had interrupted Berntsen’s hot pursuit of bin Laden. Blee’s pre-9/11 support for Massoud, and Tenet’s destruction of the Able Danger program, leads me to believe that Blee’s blocking for the hijackers took place under orders from Tenet, who, in the run-up to Iraq, proved he was Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s creature. Left to his own devices, Blee was nothing short of prescient. CIA managers Richard Blee and Gary Schroen of the Near East division met Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Massoud in Paris just before his April 6, 2001 address to the European Parliament in Strasbourg. Massoud told them “that his own intelligence had learned of al-Qaeda’s intention to perform a terrorist act against the United States that would be vastly greater than the bombings of the American embassies in East Africa.” 6

In his support for Massoud, Blee was bucking the pro-fascist preferences of the Bush administration, that is, the pro-fascist preferences of the ISI and the Saudis, to whom the Bush II administration had offered themselves up as puppets, in exchange for all that patronage of the Carlyle Group, DynCorp, Boeing, Haliburton et al. But Blee was no bureaucratic nonconformist, despite his common sense regarding Massoud, whom Alec Station regarded as a key to getting bin Laden. As the wartime Kabul station chief, Blee, under Tenet’s and Rumsfeld’s orders, overrode the U.S. military and FBI Director Robert Mueller and insisted on rendition and torture when one of the first high-value targets, al Qaeda trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, was captured. As usual, Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld chose the Saudi option rather then the FBI’s far more productive psychological rapport techniques. These ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ were invented to elicit false confessions, such as the false idea that al Qaeda was related to Saddam’s Iraq. Al-Libi’s confessions under torture were used to confirm precisely that by Colin Powell at the U.N., to justify the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Al-Libi was tortured to death in Libya in 2009.

Arabic-speaking FBI agent Ali Soufan, New York Times, ‘My Tortured Decision,’ 4/22/2009:

“FOR seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified. But the release last week of four Justice Department memos on interrogations allows me to shed light on the story, and on some of the lessons to be learned.”

“One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.”

“It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several CIA officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.”

“We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.”

“There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.”

“One of the worst consequences of the use of these harsh techniques was that it reintroduced the so-called Chinese wall between the CIA and F.B.I., similar to the communications obstacles that prevented us from working together to stop the 9/11 attacks. Because the bureau would not employ these problematic techniques, our agents who knew the most about the terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague of mine who knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than anyone in the government was not allowed to speak to him.”

Soufan’s writings are full of examples of patient, non-violent psychological rapport, based on familiarity with the culture and the individual, turning grateful captured terrorists, expecting torture, into founts of actionable intelligence. Soufan also provides numerous examples of CIA violence and coercion shutting off the fountain. Simple acts of kindness, such as allowing Salim Hamdan to call his family, turned into volumes of actionable intelligence. “With bin Laden at the compound, and in the room with him during his final moments of life, was his Yemeni wife. It was the same wife whom Guantánamo detainee No. 37, the Yemeni al-Qaeda operative named al-Batar, knew well. He had helped facilitate her five-thousand-dollar dowry from bin Laden.”

“Salim Hamdan had advised al-Batar to cooperate with me, and he had agreed - on condition that, like Hamdan, he be allowed to phone his family to let them know he was okay. CITF and FBI commanders at Gitmo requested permission from General Miller, the head of the base, but he refused, saying he wouldn’t allow it without permission from Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld’s deputy secretary of defense. When that approval never came, we pleaded again for permission, telling him that bin Laden’s Yemeni wife could probably lead us to bin Laden. Our pleas were ignored.” That was nine years before we actually nailed the bastard in 2011. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were the same team that ordered the CIA not to share intelligence with the FBI, effectively blocking for the 9/11 hijackers being run by the Saudis and the ISI.

As Soufan told the Senate Judiciary Committee of coercion, “It produces at best compliance, but not cooperation, which is what you need for a successful and reliable interrogation.” Soufan proudly points out that Special Forces JAG officers are now routinely taught the “Ali Soufan Rule” - that intelligent interrogations, based on cultural sensitivity, are always more productive than coercive ones. “Every detainee is different, and for each interview you need to have a unique strategy—based on knowledge.” One detaineee was flipped by Soufan because he was angry that al Qaeda refused to pay for his wife’s Caesarean. Well, if you didn’t know about the Caesarian, you couldn’t flip him. Just inflicting pain will fill him with hate and make him want to withhold everything. Another detainee was a religious fundamentalist who was embarrassed to be caught lying, a sin in Islam, especially when facing a sympathetic Muslim interrogator who speaks Arabic. Of course, without fluent cultural and factual knowledge, the interrogator wouldn’t recognize a plausible lie in the first place. 8

Alec Station Chief Richard Blee’s truncated January 2000 verbal report to the FBI top brass omitted, apparently under orders from Tenet, the fact that both terrorists, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, had B1-B2 multiple-entry U.S. visitors visas, enabling them to come and go at will. This is a key fact, because that puts them within the FBI’s jurisdiction. Further, their tradecraft was poor. Few of the hijackers spoke good English, all roomed with other hijackers, banked at the same banks, used debit cards to pay for everything, obtained ID cards together and called each other frequently. Had the FBI been alerted, it would have been simple detective work to roll them up.

Dale Watson, the FBI SAC in Kansas City, later the assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism unit, the International Terrorism Operations Section (ITOS), was assigned as FBI liaison to the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC). But both Watson and Thomas Pickard, the FBI’s acting director, only learned of the January 2000 terrorist summit in July. One involved FBI official later complained bitterly to author James Bamford, “They refused to tell us because they didn’t want the FBI, they didn’t want John O’Neill in particular, muddying up their operation. They didn’t want the bureau meddling in their business - that’s why they didn’t tell the FBI. Alec Station worked for the CIA’s CTC. They purposely hid from the FBI, purposely refused to tell the bureau that they were following a man in Malaysia who had a visa to come to America. The thing was, they didn’t want John O’Neill and the FBI running over their case. And that’s why September 11 happened. That is why it happened.… They have blood on their hands. They have three thousand deaths on their hands.”

John O’Neill was the chief of the FBI’s ITOS. O’Neill and Ali Soufan led the FBI team that investigated the October 12, 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. These investigators encountered the same CIA refusal to share what it already knew about the perpetrators. First-rate detective that he was, O’Neill loudly insisted that our trust of the Saudi GID was suicidal. Mark Rossini and Doug Miller were O’Neill’s authorized FBI liaison officers in the CIA’s Alec Station, and they did indeed catch Alec Station chiefs Blee and Wilshire withholding information from FBI counterterrorism chief O’Neill. Both NSC Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke and ace FBI analyst Ali Soufan, shared O’Neill’s suspicion of the Saudi GID.

Clarke, due to years of frustration with a bureaucracy he couldn’t get to act on his intelligence, thought O’Neill should replace him at the NSC when he quit. But O’Neill found himself the object of a CIA smear campaign as payback for pressing the CIA to share intelligence, and took a high-paying job as head of security at the World Trade Center, three weeks before 9/11. He was last seen on 9/11 risking his life coordinating evacuation efforts on the 49th floor. Ali Soufan’s three refused requests to the CIA for further information about the Cole bombers was not mentioned once in the orchestrated performance known as The 9/11 Commission Report. The CIA answered Soufan, all three times over a period of months, from November 2000 to June 2001, that it had no information, despite the fact that it was tapping the perpetrators’ phones and tracking them, and knew that some were now based in the U.S.. 9

Omar al-Bayoumi; Khalid al-Mihdhar; Nawaf al-Hazmi

The two protected hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, who helped fly American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon, were provably financed by the Saudi GID. The GID payments went from, among others, the Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar’s wife, Princess Haifa’s account at Riggs Bank, to Saudi Omar al-Bayoumi or his wife, Manal Bajadr, near whom the hijackers were staying in San Diego. Bayoumi was listed before 9/11 in FBI files as a Saudi agent. An FBI memo, belatedly released by the National Archives in May of 2016, reports that as of June 6, 2003, the FBI “believes it is possible that he was an agent of the Saudi Government and that he may have been reporting on the local community to the Saudi Government officials. In addition, during its investigation, the FBI discovered that al-Bayoumi has ties to terrorist elements as well.”

Saudi Omar al-Bayoumi arrived in the U.S. in 1994, transferring from his job at the Saudi Ministry of Defense and Aviation, headed by Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the son of Saudi founder King Abdul Aziz Al Saud, in control of the Defense Ministry from 1963 to his death in 2011. Bayoumi transferred to a ‘work-study program’ paid for by the Saudi General Authority of Civil Aviation, part of Prince Sultan’s Defense Ministry. Bayoumi was paid a regular salary by the General Authority of Civil Aviation, but did absolutely no work for them, except, of course, to help the hijackers learn to fly.

Princess Haifa, daughter of King Faisal, sister of Saudi GID chief Prince Turki and wife of Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar, also made regular payments to the wife of al-Bayoumi’s close associate in San Diego, Osama Basnan. Basnan’s wife also often cashed checks addressed to Bayoumi, that is, Basnan and Bayoumi were professional associates. This was a cell. In 1992, the FBI investigated Basnan’s Eritrean Islamic Jihad connection to al Qaeda, and in 1993 the FBI investigated Basnan for hosting a party for the Blind Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, the terrorist who organized the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Basnan and Bayoumi functioned as the hijackers’ handlers – a necessity since the hijackers had very little English. Al-Bayoumi met the hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, in Los Angeles upon their arrival on January 15, 2000 and arranged for them to move to San Diego. He chose their apartment, the Parkwood Apartments complex in Clairemont Mesa, San Diego, which was across the street from his own apartment building, co-signed their lease, and paid the $1,500 deposit. Over the next few weeks, Bayoumi helped them open a bank account, get car insurance and Social Security cards, and called flight schools in Florida for them. Both hijackers began worshipping at the San Diego mosque of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Ribat Mosque in La Mesa. Anwar al-Awlaki was the famous American jihadi televangelist who got his program cancelled by a drone in Yemen on September 30, 2011. Princess Haifa, remitting to a charity she controlled which forwarded the cash, provided rent and expense money for the two hijackers, $73,000 in total over 4 months. The Baltimore Sun, 11/25/2002, in a story entitled “Saudis admit money trail leads to envoy,” demonstrates that the Riggs Bank money trail from Princess Haifa’s account to Basnan and Bayoumi goes back four years before 9/11, and totals $130,000. Basnan was deported on 11/17/2002. 10

Just before 9/11, Bayoumi made almost a hundred calls to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., more than 30 calls directly to Khaleid Sowailem of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, the ‘charity’ that finances Saudi Wahhabism worldwide, an arm of the Saudi GID. This is the same ‘charity’ that gave an obscure San Diego-based ‘charity,’ Western Somali Relief Agency, $370,000 in donations in the 3 years prior to 9/11, which then wired that money to an opaque money transfer service in Pakistan. None of this money was declared by the San Diego charity’s manager, Omar Abdi Mohamed, who was in fact a paid agent of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs. ICE deported Omar Abdi Mohamed for immigration fraud in 2006.

If Bayoumi was repeatedly calling the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, the financier, just prior to 9/11, it indicates that this was the coordinating component of the hijackers’ support system, just as 9/11 Congressional Joint Inquiry co-chair Senator Graham insists. It was another employee of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs, rabidly anti-American Fahad al-Thumairy, an Imam at the King Fahd mosque in Los Angeles and an official at the Saudi consulate, who was a coordinating component with Bayoumi in his management of the hijackers. The FBI concluded in 2012 that Mr. Thumairy “immediately assigned an individual [Bayoumi] to take care of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar during their time in the Los Angeles area.” According to the FBI, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar first met Bayoumi at a restaurant next to Thumairy’s mosque, after Bayoumi met with Thumairy inside the mosque. We have evidence of 21 phone calls from Thumairy to Bayoumi just prior to 9/11.

According to the Wall Street Journal’s 12/31/2004 discussion of the Justice Department’s investigation of the Riggs Bank for money laundering, ‘Riggs Bank Had Longstanding Link To the CIA,’ the bank “has had a longstanding relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency, according to people familiar with Riggs operations and U.S. government officials.” In late 2017, Riggs Bank, under federal presssure for non-reporting of suspicious activities, reported numerous Saudi Embassy transactions going back years, including large overseas wire transfers and cash deposits, in the millions, “made by Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan; his executive assistant, Ahmed A. Kattan; his chief military aide, Gen. Abdual Rahman Al-Noah, and other embassy officials.”

Most of this was legitimate business, but, as Michael Isikoff points out, “…other transactions raised eyebrows at the FBI. The Riggs accounts showed a number of checks to flight schools and flight-school students in the United States as well as 50 separate $1,000 American Express travelers checks issued by Bandar to Saudi employees between July 9, 2001 and Aug. 28, 2001 - including seven that were deposited that summer at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas. [Hani Hanjour, a 9/11 hijacker that piloted the jet into the Pentagon, was trained at an Arizona flight school.] Riggs also reported $19,200 in payments from the Saudi Embassy to Gulshair al-Shukrijumah, a Florida-based imam who once served as an interpreter for the ‘Blind Sheik’ Omar Abdul Rahman, convicted in 1996 of the plot to blow up New York City landmarks. Gulshair al-Shukrijumah's son, Adnan al-Shukrijumah, also known as ‘Jaffar the Pilot,’ is a suspected al Qaeda operative who is the subject of a worldwide FBI manhunt.” This pattern is consistent with official Saudi GID support, in 2001, of the ISI and all the jihadi heroin gangs the ISI was running, including al Qaeda, the Taliban, Haqqani and Hekmatyar. 11

So Princess Haifa’s Riggs Bank account is just a link in the chain. The Chicago-based Global Relief, the remittance tool of Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs, has been designated by the United States Treasury Department as a supporter of terrorism connected to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Omar Abdi Mohamed of the Western Somali Relief Agency quickly moved that $370,000 of Saudi cash from Global Relief to a Middle Eastern money transfer service called Dahabshiil, whose records are inaccessible to investigators. But the local Karachi, Pakistan office of Dahabshiil, run by one Mohamed Sulaiman Barre, did yield a wealth of confirmatory documents in the November 2001 raid of his office, including an address book with aliases and phone numbers for senior al Qaeda officials.

According to court documents filed against Omar Abdi Mohamed, he wrote 65 checks from 12/98 – 5/2001, some very large, to Dahabshiil money transfer service in Karachi. The total amount Mohamed remitted to Dahabshiil equals the amount he got from Global Relief, the same amount the 9/11 Commission estimates as the total cost of the plot. Add what Princess Haifa and her husband Prince Bandar kicked in and you get the FBI estimate of the total cost to pull off 9/11. This is the chain of remittances that Princess Haifa’s Zakat was supplementing. Remember, Haifa was remitting to al-Bayoumi, who was in regular touch with Khaleid Sowailem of the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs at the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C., the source of these funds, and with Los Angeles-based Saudi consular official Fahad al-Thumairy, the anti-American Imam at King Fahd mosque, another paid Saudi intelligence operative. Haifa was a buffer.

Given that bin Laden was, at this time, an integrated part of the ISI, it is perfectly possible that Princess Haifa may not have known the details of the ISI plot she was supporting, or even cared, since Saudi royal support of the ISI was pro forma, policy. All that was needed was a request for charity, called Zakat, to a member of the House of Saud from a Saudi national living abroad, which did come from al-Bayoumi. Such Zakat from a Saudi royal is common, and considered a religious duty. Sympathy for the ISI would not have been disqualifying, since most Saudi royals were sympathetic to the ISI and actively supported the ISI’s fascist drug gangs, including bin Laden’s al Qaeda, in the name of Islam. It is not implausible that the fabulously wealthy Princess Haifa, for whom $130K is lunch money, hardly knew these people her charity was financing. And, obviously, it would not have made any operational sense to share plot specifics, which she is unlikely to have known.

Of course, it is equally likely, given that her husband was paying for flight training for these maniacs and remitting to father-son jihadists Gulshair and Adnan al-Shukrijumah, that Princess Haifa was fully witting, since many of the actors in this plot were Saudi royals, diplomats and consular officials. Princess Haifa’s brother Prince Turki, the head of Saudi military intelligence, and her husband, Saudi Ambassador to the U.S. Prince Bandar, given their life-and-death Saudi legal power and the fact that the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs was an arm of Turki’s GID, were either witting or incompetent, and neither was incompetent. As Clair George, who ran the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, described Prince Turki, “He was deceitful.”

The Defense Department’s think tank, the Defense Policy Board, chaired by conservative Richard Perle, advocating U.S. military conquest of the entire Mideast, a military insanity, accurately told the Defense Department, 7/10/2002, that Saudi Arabia was “central to the self-destruction of the Arab world and the chief vector of the Arab crisis and its outwardly directed aggression. The Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheerleader…. Saudi Arabia supports our enemies and attacks our allies….[Saudi Arabia is] the kernel of evil, the prime mover, the most dangerous opponent.” Although Perle’s assessment of the Saudis was obviously true, the insanity of his concomitant military proposal was equally obvious. Perle actually advocated conquering Syria, Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia simultaneously. Saudi political and financial heft, thanks to the competent micromanagement of Prince Bandar, assured that this accurate assessment of Saudi support for global jihadi terrorism had no practical influence on American policy. There was, of course, an obvious middle ground between the abject surrender to the Saudis that the Republicans were then practicing, and total military conquest of the Middle East, but American bureaucratic prostitution assured that nothing was done to crawl out from under Saudi sodomy. 12

On March 28, 2002, heavily armed Pakistani commando units, accompanied by American Special Forces and FBI SWAT teams operating in Faisalabad, Pakistan, captured, among others, Abu Zubaydah, the thirty-year-old Palestinian field operations chief and trainer at Khalden camp who was known to be close to Osama bin Laden. Khalden camp, near Tora Bora, was a pre-al Qaeda Arab terrorist training camp. Zubaydah grew up in Saudi Arabia, where he became a follower of Abdullah Azzam, the influential Palestinian radical teaching at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah in the 1970s. To hear Zubaydah tell it, the al Qaeda deal with the House of Saud included unlimited operational support and a stipend for ISI operations led by bin Laden, as long as bin Laden protected Saudi Arabia from al Qaeda terrorism.

The badly wounded Zubaydah’s initial interrogation, in Afghanistan, according to Gerald Posner, included sodium pentothal surreptitiously added to his intravenous drip, and an Arabic-speaking FBI and CIA team masquerading as Saudis, as well as an FBI team. Because he thought they were Saudis, Zubaydah assumed they were on his side. One of the Arabic-speaking interrogators was famed FBI agent Ali Soufan, who had been the lead investigator of the USS Cole bombing in 2000. Soufan testified regarding the 2002 Zubaydah interrogation before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary on May 13, 2009, largely in protest of the Bush administration-approved torture.

Although there’s no way to confirm Gerald Posner’s assertion regarding the use of sodium pentothal, it fits perfectly with Soufan’s protest of CIA Enhanced Interrogation Techniques used on Zubaydah by the CIA team. The EIT protocols also specifically allow interrogators to pretend to be from countries, like Saudi Arabia, that routinely use EITs. It is provable, however, that Zubaydah provided much actionable intelligence, largely through the subtle FBI techniques of Soufan. Without torture, using what Soufan calls the Informed Interrogation Approach (“the combination of interpersonal, cognitive, and emotional interrogation strategies”), Zubaydah rattled off, from memory, three telephone numbers of high-ranking members of the House of Saud he insisted, to the ‘Saudi’ team, would exonerate him of any wrongdoing in Saudi eyes: Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, well-known in America for his thoroughbred racing; Prince Sultanbin Faisal bin Turki bin Abdullah al-Saud, a nephew of King Fahd, and Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, age 25. The horse racing Prince Ahmed was allowed to fly out of the United States on 9/16/2001 on one of the flights arranged by Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar when all other U.S. flights were grounded.

To the astonishment of the interrogators, all Zubaydah’s phone numbers turned out to be good. The FBI then approached the Saudi GID for clarification. They got not one word of clarification from the GID, but, shortly after they contacted the GID, in the last week of July, 2002, all three of the Saudi royals referred by Zubaydah were dead. Prince Sultan, 41, died in a car crash on July 23 as he was driving to Riyadh for the funeral of his cousin, Prince Ahmed, 43, who had died the previous day of heart failure during routine abdominal surgery. On July 31, the Qassim Province police chief announced that Prince Fahd and two companions died of thirst after getting lost in the desert.

Not one photo exists of the car crash that killed Prince Sultan despite the fact that he was world famous, and everybody in Saudi has a cell phone. And how does a healthy young athlete in his early 40s like Prince Ahmed die of heart failure from routine surgery? How does a Saudi prince with four companions, all of whom have cell phones, die in the desert 90 km. from Riyadh? Would a Saudi prince go for a picnic on the edge of the desert without enough water? Wouldn’t emergency services immediately send help to an al Saud? Why are there no names, including Prince Fahd’s four companions, two of whom survived, attached to the death in the desert story? Investigative journalism is not a Saudi strong suit. So much for following up on Zubaydah’s leads. Obviously all the Saudi royals were not on the same page regarding support for al Qaeda, or on revealing that support to the U.S.. 13

Since Alec Station had not flagged the FBI, although they were fully aware, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were allowed to function in the USA, and travel back and forth repeatedly to Saudi Arabia and Yemen to help other hijackers enter the country. Although they were tracked by the CIA, and had their phone calls intercepted by the NSA, they remained unimpeded for 18 months before they participated in 9/11, despite regularly travelling internationally to meet other jihadis. The Congressional Inquiry confirmed that some of the NSA taps met NSA reporting thresholds and were disseminated to other agencies. But just after Bush II took office in early 2001, Alec Station cut the FBI off from the NSA material. When al-Mihdhar was abroad, the CIA had him under surveillance during his travels in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Yemen, Malaysia and Afghanistan, always meeting with other jihadis, but this CIA intel was marked “Action Required – None,” in other words, “do not share.”

Al-Mihdhar was the son-in-law of Ahmed al-Hada, a renowned jihadi who fought with Abdullah Azzam in Afghanistan in the late 1990s. Al-Hada’s Yemeni phone number, in his Sana’a safe house, which he called frequently, served as the al Qaeda international message center. It was the phone number the captured Nairobi embassy bomber Mohamed al-‘Owhali called to confirm his successful bombing, and the number bin Laden called to hear the confirmation. This was a land line, but mobile phones, military satellite phones and pay phones were also involved. Bin Laden stopped using his satellite phone in September 1998 when the press revealed that the phone was compromised.

The DOD’s National Security Agency (NSA) had been tapping this link, called the ‘Yemen hub,’ with their advanced satellite equipment since 1996, but refused to share verbatim transcripts of these conversations, which used a primitive verbal code, with the CIA, which had to build its own separate, and not as powerful, tap in the Indian Ocean. This is another instance of what looks like asset protection. The NSA, which could clearly hear both sides of these conversations, heard extensive, specific discussions of the 1998 Africa embassy bombings and did absolutely nothing. The CIA’s Alec Station had been using their separate tap on this number to track Al-Mihdhar and the other jihadis, so if this intel had been shared with the FBI, those phone calls would have flagged the Cole bombing and other plots. below, Cheney with Saudi Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz, May 2007:

Ace researcher Kevin Fenton, in Disconnecting the Dots, can see no other plausible explanation for this pattern of protecting the two hijackers than that “the purpose of withholding the information had become to allow the attacks to go forward.” Even if there was a less insane intelligence rationale behind letting the terrorists operate unimpeded, it can’t be denied that 9/11 gave the Bush administration its long-sought, and long-prepared for, pretext to seize Iraqi oil and to militarize the national budget to the benefit of its defense contractor base. Nor does any ‘covert operation,’ even if not corrupt, mitigate the idiocy of our intelligence agencies assuming the slave role to the Safari Club’s Saudi master.

Finance cochair of Bush II’s 2000 presidential campaign, former Texas Republican congressman Tom Loeffler of Loeffler Jonas & Tuggey, was also on hefty Saudi retainer as the kingdom’s premier U.S. lobbyist. The Bush II administration’s compliance with Saudi wishes was so abject, that in June, 2001, the American embassy in Saudi Arabia announced its new Visa Express program allowing any Saudi to get a visa to the United States without even appearing in person for a security check. Explained the Bush Cheney State Department, “Saudi Arabia was one of the countries that did not fit the profile for terrorism or illegal immigration.” Khalid al-Mihdhar, Salem al-Hazmi and Abdulaziz al-Omari, 9/11 Saudi hijackers all, waltzed right into the U.S. without even waiting in line for an interview at the U.S. embassy in Riyadh. And none of these people actually qualified for a visa in the first place – so why were they let through? That goes for all 15 of the Saudi hijackers - not one actually qualified for a visa, yet they were all let in, contrary to the published visa rules. The order to systematically green-light them had to have come from the top.

When the first group of Afghan al Qaeda captives arrived at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, the FBI’s lead al Qaeda expert, Ali Soufan, identified the supervisor of Bin Laden’s bodyguard, Abu Assim al-Maghrebi, as the most important captive in the group, the one who had the most valuable information. But bin Laden’s Saudi juice was so strong, that as soon as Abu Assim was identified he was transferred by the Bush administration to Morocco, out of Soufan’s reach, and freed a few months later. Only the top of the CIA or DIA could have done that. 14

Immediately after 9/11, when all flights were grounded, the only flights specially cleared were those ten flights or so organized by Saudi Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador, to evacuate the Saudi royals and their close friends, the bin Ladens. Escape flights were arranged from Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Dallas, Houston, Cleveland, Orlando, Washington, D.C, Boston, Newark, and New York. No one was subjected to the inconvenience of an FBI interview, and all flights took off at a time when all other U.S. flights were officially grounded. All payments for the flights came via wire transfer from the Saudi embassy, meaning that the top of the U.S. government had hurriedly approved the flights to the State Department, the FBI, the FAA, Customs and the INS.

CIA officer Robert Baer, of both the Clinton and Bush II White House, just before and after 9/11/2001: “CIA directors had picked up long ago that the door to the Oval Office was always open to Saudi ambassador Bandar bin Sultan and not to them. While the country’s chief spymasters waited for months to get a face-to-face, all Bandar had to do to see the president was hit the speed dial….Saudi Arabia is completely unsupportive as of today…. The rank-and-file Saudi policeman is sympathetic to bin Laden. They’re not telling us who these people were on the planes…. If Bandar suspected the CIA was undermining the kingdom in any way, he would complain to the president, then let loose a pack of rabid K Street lobbyists on the agency…. As soon as the president put down the phone and recovered his hearing from Bandar’s screeching, there’d be a call from a lobbyist, maybe one of the president’s old political chums. ‘Mr. President,’ the lobbyist would purr into the phone. ‘We really must keep a better eye on those cowboys out at Langley. You know we have this big Boeing deal coming up, and if Bandar . . .’ Act Three opens twenty-four hours later with the young case officer on an airplane back to Washington to start his new job: handing out towels in the CIA’s basement gym. Cowed by the same unspoken fears, the CIA’s directorate of intelligence avoided writing National Intelligence Estimates on Saudi Arabia.” This means, of course, that Bandar was confident that his buddy President Bush Jr. would give the appropriate Saudi orders to the CIA. The CIA’s Vincent Cannistraro, the former chief of counterterrorism operations, said of the Saudis just after 9/11, “We’re getting zero cooperation now.”

A year after 9/11, Crown Prince Nayef bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud, King Fahd’s brother, the enormously powerful Minister of the Interior, the equivalent of our Director of the FBI, announced “Who committed the events of September 11 and who benefited from them?. . . I think [the Zionists] are behind these events. . . . It is impossible that nineteen youths, including fifteen Saudis, carried out the operation of September 11.” Not without support from the Saudi GID anyway. Crown Prince Nayef’s refusal to share intelligence was first noticed by the bulldog organizational genius John O’Neill, who led the FBI team of 60 agents who went to Saudi to investigate the 6/25/1996 Khobar Towers bombing, which killed 19 Americans working in the 4404th Airlift Wing and wounded 400 more. Crown Prince Nayef wouldn’t allow the agents to interview witnesses, question suspects or leave the bomb site.

Bob Baer: “Since September 11, not a single indictment or even a useful lead has come out of Saudi Arabia. So thorough has been the lockdown that the FBI has not been allowed to interview suspects, including the families of the fifteen Saudi hijackers. Long after September 11, Saudi Arabia refused to provide advance manifests for flights coming into the U.S., a basic and potentially fatal breach of security.” 15

Saudi royal jetliners have diplomatic immunity and are not searched upon landing in most countries, including the U.S. and France. In early June of 1999, Saudi Prince Nayef Al-Shaalan (Nayef bin Fawwaz Al Shaalan Al Ruwaily), married to a grandaughter of Saudi founder King Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, son-in-law to the Saudi deputy defence minister, using his diplomatic immunity, smuggled two tons of pure, uncut Colombian cocaine into Paris. This was the largest coke shipment ever landed in France. The cocaine had travelled from Colombia to Venezuela, where it was disguised in a potato shipment, then to Saudi Arabia for unpacking, and then on to Paris, arriving June 2, 1999. Since this was a protected operation of Saudi GID, there was no search problem with the Saudi stopover. The Prince’s diplomatic immunity protected the plane from search in Colombia, Venezuela and France. The French bust of the Paris safehouse a couple of weeks later, where the coke was being cut and distributed, led to the unravelling of the plot.

This was to be the beginning of a Europe-wide dealing structure that would be used to finance Saudi black ops, which require untraceable funds. If Prince Nayef hadn’t had top security clearance from the Saudi GID, he would have been subject to the death penalty, the standard penalty for drug smuggling under Saudi law, especially given the worldwide publicity this operation generated after the French bust. But Prince Nayef did not run afoul of the Saudi authorities. Prince Nayef, who inherited tens of millions as an al Saud, didn’t need the money personally. The purpose of the operation wasn’t the money, but the untraceability. This was a sanctioned Saudi intelligence operation designed to generate untraceable funds for black ops, and, as such, the Saudi government ignored all extradition and interview requests, even though the U.S. Justice Department had formally indicted Prince Nayef not only for the Paris smuggling, but for a previous drug operation involving planes in 1984, which had caused him to flee the U.S. and never return.

The DEA had jurisdiction because the coke connection had been arranged in Miami through Prince Nayef’s Colombian-American long-time girlfriend, Doris Mangeri, and her Colombian friend, Ivan Lopez. Mangeri and Lopez were convicted on May 3, 2005, each sentenced to more than 20 years. But since neither Mangeri nor Lopez owned the Prince’s plane nor paid for the drugs, but were only a connection to the drugs, their long sentences were overturned in August 2007. The French put Prince Nayef on trial in absentia in 2007 and sentenced him to 10 years. Since the Saudis have no extradition treaty with France or the U.S., the entrepreneurial Prince Nayef still enjoys his prosperous life in Saudi. This whole operation fits the ISI-Saudi pattern. The Saudis stonewall and get away with it completely because oil, defense and banking industry privateers, at the top of the U.S. government, are giving orders to our intelligence and law enforcement services. Untraceable drug money buys arms, at very profitable bank conversion rates. 16

Richard Clarke, the NSC’s Counterterrorism Coordinator [National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counter-terrorism], was astonished to find himself in the White House on 9/12/2001 at the National Security Council meeting, the morning after the most exhausting and traumatic day of their lives, being instructed to plan to hit Iraq: “I expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks could be, what our vulnerabilities were, what we could do about them in the short term. Instead, I walked into a series of discussions about Iraq. At first I was incredulous that we were talking about something other than getting al Qaeda. Then I realized with almost a sharp physical pain that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to try to take advantage of this national tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq. Since the beginning of the administration, indeed well before, they had been pressing for a war with Iraq….Later, on the evening of the 12th, I left the Video Conferencing Center and there, wandering alone around the Situation Room, was the President….He grabbed a few of us and closed the door to the conference room. ‘Look,’ he told us, ‘I know you have a lot to do and all…but I want you, as soon as you can, to go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this. See if he’s linked in any way…’ I was once again taken aback, incredulous, and it showed. ‘But, Mr. President, al Qaeda did this.’” 17

Counterterrorism Coordinator Clarke had been advocating hitting bin Laden since Khartoum in 1996. He knew precisely who did it, confirmed by airport security photos and the CIA, and that Saddam had absolutely nothing to do with it. The decision had already been made by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to grab Iraqi oil and strategic position in the Caspian basin. This was policy misdirection from the top, from the get-go, from the Safari Club.

This was also Saudi asset protection. Per Saudi instruction, using known jihadis, the CIA and MI6 organized protected jihadi recruitment worldwide, including at mosques in the USA such as the Al-Farook mosque in Brooklyn, the King Fahd mosque in Los Angeles, the Ribat mosque in San Diego, the Dar al Hijra mosque in Virginia and related Saudi-funded mosques throughout the USA and Britain. The State Department, per Clarke’s advice, was trying to support sane Afghan allies, such as Ahmad Shah Massoud of the Northern Alliance, but the State Department lacked the CIA’s operational reach. In Afghanistan, the CIA and the ISI were intentionally sabotaging the State Department and the DIA, literally helping bin Laden and Hekmatyar kill our own best allies in-country, such as Massoud and secular democrats like Abdul Haq and the supporters of Mohammed Daoud and Professor Syed Majrooh, not to mention, ultimately, Benazir Bhutto.

CIA and MI6 protection was afforded Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abdullah Azzam, two of the most murderous and effective jihadi leaders, as they traveled throughout the USA on their numerous fundraising trips during the 1980s and 90s. Their recruiting tool, founded with bin Laden, the Maktab al-Khidamat, the Services Bureau, had branches in mosques in 33 American cities, many of which were visited by Zawahiri and Azzam.

Zawahiri’s guide while in the USA was CIA and MI6-protected Ali Mohamed, al Qaeda’s chief trainer, a former Egyptian commando who fought with al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the mid-1980s. He was first recruited as an American agent when he was part of Sadat’s elite bodyguard – the bodyguard that let Sadat be assassinated. He was allowed to become a U.S. citizen in 1989, despite a long history of jihadi activity. Ali Mohamed was allowed to join the U.S. Army, and was stationed at the Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg from 1986 to 1989 as a sergeant in the U.S. Army Special Forces, where he taught classes in Arabic culture. He was a plausible double agent, a big, fit martial artist who was also charming and brilliant, possessed of fluent English, French, Hebrew and his native Arabic.

Ali Mohamed found himself in Canadian custody early in 1993, after asking Canadian customs at Vancouver Airport the whereabouts of Essam Hafez Marzouk, the al Qaeda terrorist Mohamed was scheduled to meet. After two days of interrogation by the RCMP, San Francisco-based John Zent, the FBI agent Mohamed referred to his interrogators, vouched for Mohamed and recommended his release. Agent Zent had duly filed his report of his May 1993 encounter with Mohamed, just before he was stopped at the airport, including his reasons for notifying DOD counterintelligence. Despite the fact that Mohamed’s sophisticated disinformation mentioned his true encounters with bin Laden in Afghanistan and Sudan, DOD counterintelligence made nothing of the interview and let him go. That clean DOD bill of health turned Zent into a character witness for Mohamed. Zent’s report of his original encounter with Mohamed, a few years later, disappeared from FBI files, which is probably just incompetence, since the FBI filing system in those days was still largely paper-based. Mohamed proceeded to Nairobi where he surveyed the U.S. embassy, giving all his targeting photos to bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, who used them in 1998 to bomb the embassy. Mohamed also arranged bin Laden’s security in the Sudan.

As U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald told the 9/11 Commission: “Ali Mohamed…trained most of al Quaeda’s top leadership including Bin Laden and Zawahiri – and most of al Qaeda’s top trainers.” This training included how to hijack an airplane using only box cutters. He lived in California, doing security work for defense contractors, from 1994 to 1998, when he was arrested for coordinating the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 254 people and wounding 5,000. Mohamed confessed at length to all charges, providing volumes of specific detail, obviously in an effort to avoid spending the rest of his life in solitary confinement. He is still talking to authorities from an undisclosed prison location and has yet to be finally sentenced. The explosives, more than a ton for each location, came from Pakistan, in an operation that required dozens of people and compartmentalized skills. It was, essentially, an ISI operation. Despite being on the terrorist watch list, he was afforded protected travel to Kenya, Tanzania, Somalia, Afghanistan, Sudan and many other countries, under what an FBI consultant called “a visa program controlled by the CIA.” 18

Ali Mohamed

Ali Mohamed and his trainees in Long Island in 1990 worked with the ‘Blind Sheik’ Omar Abdel Rahman in Brooklyn. It was Ali Mohamed who trained the assassins of right-wing Israeli-American extremist Meir Kahane. In the mid-1980s, the Blind Sheikh joined his former professor, al Qaeda co-founder Palestinian Abdullah Azzam, in Afghanistan, to help manage the ISI’s Maktab al-Khidamat (Services Bureau - MAK) along with Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. After Azzam’s 1989 murder, the Blind Sheikh Rahman assumed control of the international jihadist operations of the MAK/al Qaeda. As Jane’s Intelligence Review put it “MaK channeled several billion dollars’ worth of Western governmental, financial and material resources for the Afghan jihad. MaK worked closely with Pakistan, especially the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the Saudi government and Egyptian governments, and the vast [Saudi controlled] Muslim Brotherhood network.” 19

CIA officers in Khartoum, Sudan, posing as State Department officials, overrode the State Department terrorist watch list to admit the Blind Sheikh to the U.S. in July, 1990. From his CIA-protected Brooklyn base, the Al-Kifah Center at the Al-Farook mosque, he organized the murder of the vocal extremist Meir Kahane, the founder of the Jewish Defense League. In November 1990, El Sayyid Nosair, dressed as an orthodox Jew, shot Kahane in front of a largely orthodox Jewish audience he was addressing at the New York Marriott East Side. The shooter’s apartment yielded ammo, weapons, bomb formulas, NYC target maps, and manuals supplied by Ali Mohamed from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, marked ‘Top Secret for Training.’ That cache, and the talkative shooter himself, also connected Mahmoud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh, two other jihadists connected to the Al-Kifah Center, with the shooting. But the two would-be getaway cab drivers were briefly detained and then released. Those two would go on to engineeer the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. 20

This was all covered up at the time by the NYPD and FBI, pretending that the apartment cache, 47 boxes of documents, didn’t exist and the assassination was the work of one lone gunman. The FBI, probably influenced by the CIA protecting its assets, had stopped the NYPD, on national security grounds, from pursuing the evidence. Part of the FBI decision probably had to do with the fact that their nascent counterterrorism division had only one agent capable of reading Arabic, which is why, obviously, they should have let the NYPD Counterterrorism Bureau take over. The CIA would have had some rough idea of the fledgling al Qaeda network, but couldn’t decide whether they were friend or foe, given the Afghan war and their utility as oil industry shock troops.

Most of the evidence in those 47 boxes literally went unread for three years, including Nosair’s diary, handwritten in Arabic. The intelligence was a gold mine, once the FBI finally got to it. Manhattan District Attorney Robert M. Morgenthau, “The FBI lied to me. They’re supposed to untangle terrorist connections, but they can’t be trusted to do the job.”

As Clinton’s 1993 nominee for Attorney General, Janet Reno, put it, “Quickly, when I came into office, I learned that the FBI didn’t know what it had. The right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing.” FBI Director Louis Freeh finally, in the last year of his 8-year tenure, 2001, called in IBM’s network operations chief, Bob Dies, to design a new computer system for the FBI. Freeh’s delay in electronically linking FBI offices nationwide was nothing short of negligent. Although Freeh gets high marks from many accomplished agents who worked with him, including the anti-terrorist pioneer Ali Soufan, throughout most of Freeh’s long tenure, the FBI’s fifty-six field offices worked with computers from the 1970s. Many weren’t even online, let alone able to talk to and retrieve information from a secure central server.

As NSC Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke put it, “Freeh should have been spending his time fixing the mess the FBI had become, an organization of fifty-six princedoms without any modern information technology to support them. He might have spent more time hunting for terrorists in the United States, where al Qaeda and its affiliates had put down roots, where many terrorist organizations were illegally raising money….They all noted that the Attorney General’s Guidelines [in response to Hoover’s and Nixon’s excesses] made it impossible for them to do things without already knowing about a probable crime. They could not, without someone providing them an initial lead, attend services at mosques or sit in on meetings of student groups. They were prohibited from printing an organization’s Web pages unless they suspected a crime was in progress. In many cities the agents did not even have Internet access…. The lack of computer support, however, was a failure of the Bureau’s leadership. Local police departments throughout the country had far more advanced data systems than the FBI. In New York I saw piles of terrorism files on the floor of the JTTF. There was only one low-paid file clerk there, and he could not keep up with the volume of paper that was being generated. There was no way for one agent to know what information another agent had collected, even in the same office. Wiretap recordings lay around for weeks because there were too few Arabic or Farsi or Pashto translators. All translations were done in the city in which the conversations were recorded.”

Lawrence Wright: “Freeh was bored by technology. One of his first actions on taking office in 1993 was to jettison the computer on his desk. The bureau was technologically crippled even before Freeh arrived, but by the time he left not even church groups would accept the vintage FBI computers as donations.” The Director of the Secret Service, Lew Merletti, pointed out that while Freeh devoted dozens of agents to “investigating the foibles of the President and Monica, a number of senior al Qaeda operatives were traveling the United States.” FBI agent Robert Hanssen, whose spying for Russia, 1979-2001, was characterized by the Department of Justice as “possibly the worst intelligence disaster in U.S. history” told his debriefers, of the FBI’s computer system, “Any clerk in the Bureau could come up with stuff on that system….What I did is criminal, but it’s criminal negligence … what they’ve done on that system.” 22

On August 16, 2001, French citizen Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested in Minnesota by the INS when he aroused suspicion while taking flight training courses on an expired visa. Both the British MI5 and the French had been suspicious of Moussaoui since 1996. The French added him to their anti-terrorist watch list in 1999. But because this was a domestic U.S. intelligence arrest by the FBI, an FBI FISA warrant was needed to search Moussaoui’s belongings. Since May of 2001, Tom Wilshire, the CIA’s Alec Station deputy chief, had transferred, as a CIA liaison officer, to the FBI’s International Terrorism Operations Section (ITOS), where he assumed the same post he held at Alec Station, Deputy Chief, second in command. On August 24, 2001, Mike Maltbie, a supervisory special agent with the Radical Fundamentalist Unit (RFU) at FBI headquarters, part of ITOS, wrote to his supervisor, Wilshire, telling him that in his opinion “there is no indication that either of these two [Moussaoui and his associate Hussein al-Attas] had plans for nefarious activity.” However, the FBI’s field office in Minneapolis suspected Moussaoui was part of a wider plot to hijack airliners and Maltbie was aware of their concerns. Coleen Rowley, a lawyer in the FBI’s Minneapolis office, told Congress under oath on 6/7/2006, and told the FBI in writing at the time, that Maltbie “seemed to have been consistently, almost deliberately thwarting the Minneapolis FBI agents’ efforts.” Maltbie, that is, worked for Wilshire and Alec Station. Maltbie, and his two associates in the RFU, Rita Flack and Dave Frasca, delayed or stopped every necessary bureaucratic step to move the Moussaoui FISA warrant application forward. 23

Had the CIA bothered to share what it knew, there is no doubt that these sharp FBI agents would have discovered the 9/11 plot. They would have easily discovered, because Moussaoui had the information on him, that 9/11 organizer, the known terrorist Ramzi bin al-Shibh, was regularly sending him money. Moussaoui also carried a proof of employment from Infocus Tech, signed by Yazid Sufaat, the Maylaysian tech who tried to weaponize anthrax for al Qaeda and who hosted the Kuala Lumpur summit the previous year. But the CIA didn’t share the identity of Sufaat with the FBI.

On 8/17/2001, FBI Minneapolis Special Agent Harry Samit called Catherine Kiser, a veteran counterterrorism expert attached as FBI liaison to the new National Counterintelligence Center (CIC) at the CIA. Samit wanted to know if Kiser had made any progress in obtaining the warrant to search Moussaoui’s laptop computer. Despite the obvious nature of the evidence, and despite Agent Kiser’s best efforts, the only feedback Agent Samit could get was CYA boilerplate about needing further proof of an al Qaeda connection and nonsense about seeming “hysterical” and sounding like a “maniac” – no warrant. Despite specifically reporting through channels that Moussaoui was “preparing for a terrorist attack,” no authorization to search Moussaoui’s laptop came through. 24

Wilshire’s associate at FBI headquarters, Dina Corsi in the Bin Laden unit, played a critical role in insisting that the Moussaoui warrant be FISA, not criminal, although the Cole investigation, already open, was criminal and warrants had already been issued. Given that some of the same individuals were involved with Moussaoui, this investigation could have been opened as a related file. Insisting on a new and different FISA warrant was just another way of delaying the investigation. As a key headquarters agent supporting the Cole investigation, Corsi repeatedly failed to forward necessary and cleared information to the Cole investigators, such as photos of the attendees at the Kuala Lumpur summit, including the hijackers identities, and current location intelligence of the attendees. Corsi’s own email, 1/8/2000, is in fact, the first mention of al-Qaeda leader Walid bin Attash, called Khallad, the one-legged Afghan veteran who was a leader of the Cole bombing team. The email confirms that Attash attended the Kuala Lumpur terrorist summit also attended by 9/11 hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, as did the photos. But most of the surveillance photos were withheld from the FBI’s Cole team, and the Cole team were not allowed to keep the three photos they were allowed to see. Although Corsi (and her boss Wilshire) were aware that bin Attash was important to the Cole investigation, both Corsi and Wilshire failed to tell the FBI agents investigating the Cole bombing, who did not receive this information before 9/11.

They also failed to tell the FBI’s Cole investigators that the NSA had approved them for access to all NSA materials regarding their suspects. As the 9/11 Commission put it, “As NSA had approved the passage of its information to the criminal agent [FBI agent Steve Bongardt, leading the American side of the Cole investigation while Soufan led it from Yemen], he could have conducted a search using all available information.” In fact, Corsi even misrepresented the FISA legal ‘wall’ to the Cole investigators. Attorney Sherry Sabol of the FBI’s National Security Law Unit (NSLU) told the FBI, in answer to Corsi’s query prompted by Agent Bongardt’s protestations, that there was no bar to a criminal agent being present for an interview, or examination of evidence, of al-Mihdhar or any of the other Cole suspects. The 9/11 Commission adds, “‘Jane’ [Corsi] did not copy the attorney [Sabol] on her e-mail to the [Cole] agent, so the attorney did not have an opportunity to confirm or reject the advice ‘Jane’ was giving to the agent…. The NSLU attorney [Sabol] denies advising that the agent could not participate in an interview and notes that she would not have given such inaccurate advice.” Corsi emailed John Liguori, an FBI supervisor in New York, on 8/29/2001: “Per NSLU, if Almihdhar is located the interview must be conducted by an intel agent. A criminal agent CAN NOT be present at the interview.” Corsi had literally fabricated an FBI ‘legal opinion’ to justify their witholding of the Cole evidence. And in the case of Steve Bongardt, the whole issue was irrelevant, because Bongardt was, in fact, a designated intelligence agent.

This conversation started two days before, when Corsi accidentally cc’d Agent Bongardt in an email to Jack Cloonan, the acting head of her Bin Laden or Sunni terror unit, formally named the I-49 squad. In it she asked if al-Mihdhar was still in the United States. The accidental recipient, the infuriated FBI agent Bongardt, realized Corsi and the Bin Laden unit knew al-Mihdhar was in the U.S. and had been lying to him all along. Told in a conference call the next day with Corsi and a senior CIA official, probably Wilshire or Blee, to “stand down” because this was intelligence that couldn’t be shared with criminal agents, the enraged Bongardt replied “If this guy is in the country, it’s not because he’s going to fucking Disneyland!”

The next day, 8/29/2001, the frustrated Bongardt, still unaware that Corsi was lying to him about the actual NSLU interpretation of the wall, sent Corsi this famous email, “Where is the wall defined? Isn’t it dealing with FISA information? I think everyone is still confusing this issue … someday someone will die – and wall or not – the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems.’ Let’s hope the National Security Law Unit will stand by their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL [Usama bin Laden], is getting the most ‘protection.’”

This stonewalling was especially infuriating to the FBI’s Steve Bongardt because his team leader, Ali Soufan, was still risking his life facing serious death threats from known jihadis in Yemen while chasing leads. The net effect of Corsi’s and Wilshire’s ‘mistakes’ and ‘misunderstandings’ was to paralyze the Cole investigation, apparently because it would have led directly to the hijackers in San Diego. The Cole investigators weren’t even told that the hijackers had U.S. visas, and were, in fact, in and out of the U.S. for a year and a half after Wilshire and Corsi had that information.

When the lead FBI Cole investigator Ali Soufan, Bongardt’s senior partner, returned from Yemen in December, 2000, he said this to Fran Townsend, heading the Justice Department’s office of Intelligence Policy and Review: “Imagine an instance where one agent on a squad is handling intelligence, and another is handling the criminal investigation. It’s likely that one agent would have half of the plot, and the other would have the other half. And yet they won’t be allowed to piece it together. Imagine if someone wants to bomb the World Trade Center and our agents are unable to connect the dots since one half isn’t allowed to tell the other half what it knows.” Adds Soufan, “I said this not because I thought there was an attack coming, but because until 9/11, the previous major terrorist attack in the United States had been the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The delegates were sympathetic and understood our problem, but in government it is very difficult to change anything, and nothing happened.” 25

Once the cat had been let out of the bag, Corsi, apparently working for the CIA’s Wilshire, assigned the tracking of al-Mihdhar in the U.S. to the most inexperienced agent in the Bin Laden unit on his very first intelligence investigation. Corsi marked the priority level ‘routine,’ despite the fact that she knew these were al Qaeda terrorists connected to the Cole bombing that could leave the country at any moment, or, worse, pull off another terrorist attack, as indeed they did. The overworked rookie, Robert Fuller, with many other tasks on his plate, queried both the Bureau of Diplomatic Security at the State Department and the INS on 8/28/2001, but marked the query ‘routine,’ as instructed, and neglected to ask for the current address of the terrorists, so even this late opportunity was missed, yielding only the address information on the original entry forms. An ‘urgent’ designation would have caused a search on a much more extensive database system, and would probably have yielded current addresses, especially since these terrorists actually used their own names.

Al-Mihdhar was listed on 8/31/2001 in the INS and Customs database as “armed and dangerous,” subject to detention. On 9/4/2001, the State Department revoked his visa due to “participation in terrorist activities.” But the next day, on the pretext that he was a potential FBI witness, the State Department revoked the detention order! This enabled Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi to buy airline tickets for 9/11/2001 using their own names and credit cards. Rookie Agent Fuller, working under Dina Corsi, was found by investigators to have repeatedly lied about doing basic searches he did not do, for instance in the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC).

Al-Mihdhar had flown on Saudi Arabian Airlines back into the U.S. as recently as July, 2001, but Fuller testified under oath that on 9/5/2001, Dina Corsi instructed him not to query the airline about al-Mihdhar’s credit card info. Given that Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi had been living in the U.S. for the past twenty months using their own names on credit cards, apartments, hotels, phones, bank accounts, even a police report, Fuller’s and Corsi’s failure to find these guys is not remotely credible. Under the overall direction of their commanding officer, ITOS Deputy Chief, CIA agent Tom Wilshire, the Radical Fundamentalist Unit, under CIA command and control, was still blocking for these guys! 26

On 9/09/2001 Agent Harry Samit emailed Agent Catherine Kiser, “ITOS/RFU SSA Maltbie has determined that we do not have enough for either a criminal search warrant or a FISA search warrant of Moussaoui's computer. We did not pursue this further because they have directed that this is an INS matter and that the ‘FBI does not have a dog in this fight’. Of course, I strongly disagree.” On 9/10/2001, Agent Kiser replied, “God Help us all if the next terrorist incident involves the same type of plane.” It did – the next day.

On 8/27/2001, according to the Justice Department Inspector General, Special Agent Samit’s supervisor, Greg Jones, called Maltbie at the RFU to complain about the lack of a warrant to search Moussaoui’s computer, which, it turns out, contained enough information to prevent 9/11. An anonymous CIA officer, using Agent Jones’ notes of his conversation with Maltbie, repeated the conversation in an 8/30/2001 email to another CIA officer liaised to the FBI’s ITOS (probably Wilshire): “Please excuse my obvious frustration in this case. I am highly concerned that this is not paid the amount of attention it deserves. I do not want to be responsible when [Moussaoui and his associate Hussein al-Attas] surface again as members of a suicide terrorist op… I want an answer from a named FBI group chief for the record on these questions… several of which I have been asking since a week and a half ago. It is critical that the paper trail is established and clear. If this guy is let go, two years from now he will be talking to a control tower while aiming a 747 at the White House.”

Turns out it was two weeks, not two years. CIA liaison officer Tom Wilshire, Deputy Chief of the International Terrorism Operations Section (ITOS), and the Radical Fundamentalist Unit (RFU) it controlled, were slow-walking the warrant, literally blocking for the terrorists. This, of course, is exactly what Col. Fletcher Prouty called “the Dulles idea” - the FBI was no longer the FBI, but the CIA-FBI. Search historycommons.org for Tom Wilshire for all the original citations and ‘related entities.’

Agent Catherine Kiser, one of the most sophisticated and experienced counterterrorism agents in the FBI, said “those idiots at ITOS didn’t let anybody know.” Tom Wilshire, Deputy Chief of CIA’s Alec Station, had been transferred to ITOS as CIA liason in May of 2001. According to Tom Wilshire’s own sworn testimony before Congress on December 18, 2001, he held the integrated rank of Deputy Section Chief at ITOS, where he had a direct, managerial role in granting FISA warrants, that is, in giving instructions to the RFU, which handled the application process. Wilshire was second in command at ITOS, just as he was at Alec Station. He was the idiot at ITOS that “didn’t let anybody know.” ITOS Section Chief Michael Rolince was only peripherally involved in the case. This is the same Tom Wilshire, back in January of 2000, who had instructed FBI Alec Station liaison agent Doug Miller not to notify the FBI about the two jihadi hijackers, known terrorists, who had just entered the U.S., insisting that “This is not a matter for the FBI.”

It was this refusal to notify the FBI that prompted FBI Agent Mark Rossini, also liaised to the CIA’s Alec Station, to file a formal complaint on 1/5/2000 regarding Wilshire’s refusal to inform the FBI of what clearly was an essential FBI matter, terrorists within the U.S.. The 9/11 Commission Report noted, in its usual kid glove way, “Despite the US links evident in this traffic, ‘John’ [Tom Wilshire] made no effort to determine whether any of these individuals was in the United States. He did not raise the possibility with his FBI counterpart.” Wilshire already knew for a fact that the terrorists were in the U.S.. Wilshire’s refusal of the FISA search warrant for Moussaoui’s computer was just three weeks before 9/11. Was this guy an American CIA agent, or a Saudi GID agent, or both?

On 9/12/2001, with America in shock following 9/11, Ali Soufan, the FBI’s lead agent in the Cole investigation, again working from the American embassy in Yemen, was at the airport rushing his team back to New York to help: “Tom and I went to a quiet corner outside the [Sana'a] airport terminal, where our team’s communication technician mounted a portable dish and established a secure satellite line. The number belonged to Dina Corsi, the FBI analyst in headquarters who had clashed with Steve Bongardt during the June 11, 2001, meeting in New York. ‘Ali, there has been a change of plans,’ she said. ‘You and Bob McFadden need to stay in Yemen.’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘We have been attacked back home; we need to figure out who did this. Whatever is going on here can wait.’ ‘We do need to figure out what just happened, which is why we need you to stay in Yemen. It’s about what happened here. Quso is our best lead at the moment.’ ‘Quso? What does he have to do with this?’ ‘The [1 word redacted] has some intelligence for you to look over.’ ‘Okay, I’ll talk to Bob. We’ll stay.’”

“‘Let’s go to my office,’ the [1 word redacted] said. He and I were alone, and he closed the door. He took out a file and silently handed it me. Inside were three pictures of al-Qaeda operatives taken in Kuala Lumpur, [10 words redacted] and photos were all dated January 2000 and had been provided to the CIA by the Malaysian [6 words redacted] agency. For about a minute I stared at the pictures and the report, not quite believing what I had in my hands. We had asked the CIA repeatedly during the USS Cole investigation if they knew anything about why Khallad [Walid bin Attash, also called Tawfiq bin Attash] had been in Malaysia and if they recognized the number of the pay phone in Kuala Lumpur that we suspected he had used. Each time we had asked—in November 2000, April 2001, and July 2001—they had said that they knew nothing. But here in the file was a very different answer: they had in fact known since January 2000 that Khallad had met with other al-Qaeda operatives in Malaysia. They had pictures of them meeting and a detailed report of their comings and goings from Malaysian [1 word redacted]. As for the phone number, [2 words redacted] listed it as being assigned to a pay phone that the al-Qaeda operatives were using to communicate with colleagues everywhere. The phone booth was across from a condominium owned by an al-Qaeda sympathizer in Malaysia, which was where all the al-Qaeda members had stayed. Our deduction that Khallad had been using it was right.”

“None of it had been passed to us, despite our specifically having asked about Khallad and the phone number and its relevance to the Cole investigation and to national security. I later found out that the three photos [3 words redacted] that the [1 word redacted] gave me were the three photos shown, with no explanation, to Steve [Bongardt] and my Cole colleagues at the June 11, 2001, meeting in New York. The Cole team had asked about the photos—who the people were, why they were taken, and so on—but [1 word redacted], the CIA official present, said nothing. Also in the file [3 words redacted] that Khallad had flown first class to Bangkok with Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. We soon would learn that they were listed as passengers on American Airlines Flight 77, which had hit the Pentagon. Based upon the chronology in the report, it was clear that the day after Quso and Nibras had met Khallad and given him the $36,000, Mihdhar and Hazmi had bought first-class tickets to the United States. Was that $36,000 used to buy their tickets? And had the rest of the money been intended for their use in the United States? My gut told me yes. My hands started shaking. I didn’t know what to think. ‘They just sent these reports,’ the [1 word redacted] said, seeing my reaction. I walked out of the room, sprinted down the corridor to the bathroom, and fell to the floor next to a stall. There I threw up.”

“I went to the room where Tom Donlon, Bob McFadden, and Steve Corbett were working and dropped the file on the table. ‘The [1 word redacted] just gave this to me,’ I said. Bob looked up and saw the anger on my face. He didn’t say anything, just took the file. Bob knew me well enough to know that something was very wrong. He looked through the contents and then turned to me in outrage. ‘I can’t believe this.’ Those were his only words. Tom and Steve’s faces also dropped once they looked through the file; it was too much for any of us to take. ‘Now they want us to question Quso,’ Bob said, his voice rising in anger. ‘They should have given this to us eight months ago.’ FBI special agent Andre Khoury had been stationed elsewhere in the Middle East when the planes hit the twin towers. He was reassigned to join us in Yemen, and after he arrived and saw the file, he wanted to confront the [1 word redacted]. I held Andre back. ‘They knew! Why didn’t they tell us?!’ Andre said. ‘You’re right,’ I said, ‘and I’m just as angry. Believe me. But now is not the time to ask these questions. One day someone will ask the questions and find out, but right now we have to focus on the task at hand.’”

“Over the next few days, weeks, and months, information about what else the CIA had known before 9/11 and hadn’t told the FBI kept trickling out. In late 1999 the NSA had told the CIA that they had learned, from monitoring Ahmed al-Hada’s number, that several al-Qaeda members had made plans to travel to Kuala Lumpur in early January 2000. …After we had uncovered Hada’s switchboard during the 1998 investigation into the embassy bombings, we had made an operating agreement with the CIA under which they would monitor the number and share all intelligence with us. They hadn’t done that. We also learned that en route to Kuala Lumpur, Mihdhar had stopped off in Dubai….In his passport he had a multi-entry U.S. visa. The CIA had passed this information on to foreign intelligence agencies but had not told the FBI, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, or the State Department. Because no U.S. agency had been told, Mihdhar’s name had not been put on a terrorist watchlist. As a consequence, he had not been stopped from entering the United States, or even questioned. In March 2000 the CIA had learned that Nawaf al-Hazmi had also flown to Los Angeles International Airport on January 15, but, again they hadn’t told us, the State Department, or INS.” 27

The 9/11 Commission, after examining the Cole team’s extensive records and Soufan’s hours of sworn testimony, specifically confirmed everything Soufan had to say, as did, in fact, the CIA Inspector General’s report. And why did the FBI’s Intelink data system intentionally omit much that was on the CIA’s Hercules data system? The Hercules system contained much information that was not cleared for criminal investigators without prior NSA approval, but NSA approval was usually forthcoming in a day. Why wasn’t there some online mechanism for NSA approval? And why didn’t the FBI’s International Terrorism Operations Section (ITOS), composed mostly of designated intelligence agents who were cleared for CIA information, have access to the CIA’s Hercules system? Where was the advantage in crippling the FBI? The 9/11 Commission repeatedly noted that CIA agents in “information sharing and brainstorming sessions” consistently stonewalled the FBI. Alec Station kept the information it had about the presence of known terrorists al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi on U.S. soil from the FBI for over a year and a half before 9/11. 28

This suppression, mishandling and ignoring of evidence forms a pattern, and led to the success of the first World Trade Center bombing, and, ultimately, 9/11. This was CIA policy led by the Safari Club’s secret services operating independently of, leading, government. It is policy executed by intelligence pros who knew how to do that, policy led by Saudi Arabia. That’s why we get straight-arrow intelligence pros like Soufan, Bongardt, Samit, Kiser, Jones and so many others consistently sabotaged by their own superiors. That’s why we got hit by the GID and ISI from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan on 9/11, and went after Iraq.

The major NATO countries, per the Afghan war pattern, also helped these genocidal maniacs cross their borders. Lie down with dogs and you might not get up. Cui bono? Only those in the warfare business. The Blind Sheikh Rahman also recruited for al Qaeda and issued fatwas encouraging his followers in his Egyptian-based terrorist group Al-Jama'a al-Islamiyya (the Fighting Islamic Group) to kill the “descendants of apes and pigs who have been feeding from the dining tables of the Zionists, Communists, and colonialists….cut the transportation of their countries, tear it apart, destroy their economy, burn their companies, eliminate their interests, sink their ships, shoot down their planes, kill them on the sea, air, or land.”

At this time the Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman had a direct hand in numerous ghastly Egyptian and USA terrorist mass murders, including the first World Trade Center bombing in February 1993, killing 6, including Monica Rodriguez Smith, a pregnant secretary, and injuring a thousand with the shrapnel, smoke and shock wave that blew a hole in the World Trade Center six stories high. Had the 1,336 lb (606 kg) urea nitrate–hydrogen gas enhanced truck bomb parked against the south corner basement support beam succeeded in cracking the beam, it would have sent the North Tower crashing into the South Tower, bringing both towers down, killing tens of thousands.

This investigation finally led to the Blind Sheik’s June, 1993 arrest, along with nine of his followers, some of whom were battle-hardened al Qaeda and CIA-trained terrorists. At the time of his arrest, the government was able to show in this ‘Landmarks’ case that Rahman had active, practical plans underway to set off five massive bombs simultaneously to blow up the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the George Washington Bridge and the FBI’s New York office building at 26 Federal Plaza. And Rahman was leading a team of experienced guerrilla fighters who could do it. The bomb’s designer, the Afghanistan-trained al Qaeda veteran Ramzi Yousef, escaped to Pakistan.

Mahmud Abouhalima, Mohammed Salameh, Nidal A. Ayyad and Ahmed Ajaj were convicted in March of 1994. Ramzi Yousef and Eyad Ismoil were convicted in November of 1997. Yousef is serving his life sentences at ADX Florence in Colorado. The Blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman was convicted in October of 1995 and sentenced to life, dying in prison in February 2017. One convicted coconspirator, the American Rodney Hampton-El, testified that Saudi Prince Faisal personally gave Rahman thousands of dollars for this project. Mohammed al Khilewi, the famous Saudi diplomat who provided so much hard evidence of Saudi support for the ‘Muslim bomb,’ asserted that the Saudis also paid for Rahman’s defense.

The excellent 1998 film The Seige is an extrapolation of this nightmare ‘Landmarks’ script, first pitched by the insane CIA & MI6 tactic of supporting these Saudi-financed maniacs. Britain’s Home Secretary David Blunkett, who presided over the introduction of the 2001 Terrorism Act, hit the nail on the head when he said that “the intelligence world did take the view that we should soft-pedal on these radicals in London because of our interests in the Arab world.” The British and the Americans did have an interest in helping to recruit jihadis to operate against the Russian-backed Serbs in Bosnia, and the Russians themselves in Chechnya. More importantly, the Home Secretary was referencing Britain’s massive oil and arms business done with the Saudis, elemental to both the British and American economies. All OPEC oil sales are required to be denominated in dollars, and the bulk of Saudi international investment, hundreds of billions, reside in U.S. blue chips like Citibank and Warner Media.

In 2002, New Jersey State Police started investigating the Saudi-financed Blind Sheikh’s Jersey City storefront Masjid Al-Salam Mosque, and its communications arm next door, the Sphinx Trading Company, owned by Waleed Abouel Nour. The FBI itself designated Nour as a terrorist, and both Ali Mohamed and Waleed Abouel Nour were

unindicted coconspirators in the Landmarks case, but the FBI shut this independent investigation down on national security grounds. That is very high-level protection. 29

On November 17, 1997, Al-Jama'a al-Islamiyya executed the Luxor massacre, killing 62 innocent people, all but four tourists on holiday. Among the dead were four Japanese couples on honeymoon and a five-year-old British girl, some of the victims slowly disemboweled with butcher knives. A pamphlet found stuffed into the body of an eviscerated elderly Japanese man said, “No to tourists in Egypt.” It was signed “Omar Abdul Rahman’s Squadron of Havoc and Destruction—the Gama‘a al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Group.” This is what the CIA had been backing in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s – against the wishes of our own State Department and Afghan allies, in support of the Saudis and their Republican privateer banking partners.

Clinton did not steer a very different course then the Bushes. Under Clinton, the Pentagon pushed for and got the “Foreign Affairs Agencies Consolidation Act of 1998,” dissolving two very important State Department tools, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and the United States Information Service. The USIS was the one tool the State Department could use to conduct strategic global communication, such as communicating the idea that the U.S. was not at war with Islam. The Agency for International Development was also badly underfunded.

The Clinton administration also permitted the Pentagon to dominate the analysis of satellite imagery from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, replacing the CIA’s Directorate of Intelligence. The practical effect of that was that the ‘analysis’ always militated in favor of increased spending on the newest weapons system, whether any new intelligence existed or not. In 1999 the Pentagon concluded that we faced an increased likelihood of missile attack, despite the fact that no new evidence existed. This conclusion meant that we had to proceed with the new national missile defense system. The bankrupt State Department was forced to replace State Department employees with DOD employees, thus further militarizing U.S. policy. 30

This ongoing Pentagon and CIA override of our own State Department policies left drug-money-fueled jihadis with a worldwide reach calling the shots for U.S. policy. Pakistani PM Benazir Bhutto told former DCIA President George H.W. Bush in 1989, “The extremists so emboldened by the United States during the eighties are now exporting their terrorism to other parts of the world to the extent that they use heroin trafficking to pay for their exploits….You are creating a Frankenstein!” As former CIA Director James Woolsey puts it, “This is the only war we’ve ever fought, besides the civil war, where we pay for both sides.” 31

Afghanistan Never Ending

General Franks, under orders from Secretary Rumsfeld, who had already prioritized oil-rich Iraq over Afghanistan, refused CIA commando leader Gary Berntsen’s request for enough troops to trap bin Laden on Tora Bora in December of 2001. Franks refused, despite the fact that he had a thousand troops from the Tenth Mountain Division deployed in Uzbekistan with nothing to do, and another thousand troops sitting in Camp Rhino near Kandahar with nothing to do. The logistics in high mountains, at over 10,000 feet, would give any field general pause, as did the fear of provoking the nearby Pashtun tribes into open revolt. But the tribes were disorganized and ragtag, and could not have reacted quickly. Perhaps the skittish American high command had visions of the slaughter of Elphinstone’s entire British army in that neighborhood in 1842, not to mention the recent Russian debacle. The American military command, paralyzed by the corrupt privateers running it, who were already planning for Iraq, allowed the Saudi-ISI agent bin Laden to walk out of the White Mountains unmolested to hook up with Haqqani in Pakistan’s neighboring Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA).

As the focused and aggressive commando Gary Berntsen pointed out to his command at the time, by all accounts very rudely, the high command was just as uncoordinated, addled and clueless as it was in Vietnam. The Bush II administration actually proposed massive aerial spraying of herbicide to Karzai (DynCorp!), literally turning Afghanistan into another Vietnam. President Bush strongly favored anti-poppy spraying, his model being ‘Plan Colombia,’ built on the Vietnam archetype. But Bush wisely would not proceed without Karzai’s approval. Karzai, understanding that his people were “totally dependent” on subsistence farming, recognized that what was being proposed was mass starvation, genocide, that, like ‘Plan Colombia,’ would simply have the effect of strengthening the enemy, so Karzai absolutely refused to allow it. The Pentagon, the CIA, US ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad, finance minister Ashraf Ghani and our British allies agreed with Karzai, understanding that aerial spraying would be seen on the ground as Russian-style chemical warfare, and would lose us what Afghan support we had. 1

Bin Laden escaped Tora Bora with the help of the Haqqani network. Jalaluddin’s son Sirajuddin, who has a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head, now runs the Haqqani operation. The Haqqanis are thought, by Ahmed Rashid, Peter Bergin and others, to have engineered the tragic 12/30/2009 Camp Chapman attack, so vividly portrayed in Zero Dark Thirty, that killed nine people, including five CIA officers and two contractors. The Haqqani network operates in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Northern Pakistan, near the northeastern border of Afghanistan. They finance themselves with opium and extortion.

Taliban leader Hibatullah Akhundzada; Jalaluddin Haqqani; Sirajuddin Haqqani

In 2012, the United States designated the Haqqani network, heavily integrated with the Taliban, as a terrorist organization, and in 2015, upon U.S. insistence, Pakistan did the same, but the Haqqani opium and extortion business, run by Pakistan’s ISI, is as healthy as ever. In January of 2018, when a U.S. drone killed three Haqqani operatives in the FATA, “Pakistan’s foreign ministry condemned the ‘unilateral action,’ which it said was carried out by Nato’s US-led Resolute Support mission in Afghanistan and targeted an Afghan refugee camp….Pakistan has repeatedly said drone strikes on its soil are a violation of its sovereignty and detrimental to cooperation with the US.” (HindustanTimes:1/24/2018)

In February of 2003, the U.S. designated Haqqani ally Hekmatyar a ‘global terrorist,’ but continued to fund the Pakistani ISI, that is, Hekmatyar. This pattern of ISI-protection of its terrorist partners in the lucrative opium and heroin business has pertained since the early days of U.S. involvement. The U.S. military, though badly wounded by these terrorists, has always been complicit with the ISI in their support, because of the artificial value our Prohibition gives their opium. Protection of the opium and heroin income of our military allies has always been regarded as militarily necessary, even if that also meant financing our enemies. Wrote Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, “the Pentagon had a list of twenty-five or more drug labs and warehouses in Afghanistan but refused to bomb them because some belonged to the CIA’s new NA [Northern Alliance] allies.” As long as Hekmatyar and Haqqani were opposing the Soviets, or, later, were omitted by the ISI from its target lists, their drug labs didn’t get bombed either. Obviously, decriminalization is the only way around that military conundrum. Without billions in drug profits, the Taliban, al Qaeda, Hekmatyar and the Haqqanis dwindle into insignificance, because they won’t be able to buy arms. 2

Hekmatyar and his base

Ahmed Rashid: “By the summer of 2003, U.S. commanders in Afghanistan were becoming deeply frustrated. ‘Pakistani border troops have been given orders to allow extremists to cross into Afghanistan and then help them return home by giving them covering fire,’ a U.S. military officer told me in Bagram. Maj.-Gen. Franklin Hagenbeck, the deputy commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, warned, ‘Hot pursuit would probably be my last resort.’ Karzai was frustrated with the Americans because no senior U.S. official was criticizing Islamabad for allowing the Taliban to operate out of Pakistan.” 3

But the Karzai government, with very little independent state income, was, from the ISI’s perspective, not only pro-Indian, but a rival drug gang. Karzai’s half brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, Chairman of the Kandahar Provincial Council, was a major opium and heroin producer, political fixer for the Karzai administration and death squad chief in Helmand and Kandahar, while on the CIA payroll. The Karzai administration ran like Chicago City Council during Prohibition. Gretchen Peters: “A European envoy who dined with Ahmed Wali at the splendid Kandahar mansion he calls home once asked him, ‘Where did the money come for this incredible house?’ Ahmed Wali smiled and said, ‘Everything you see here was paid for with drugs.’” 4

Writes Ahmed Rashid, complaining of international inattention to the nascent Afghan national police, “The Ministry of Interior, which ran the police after 9/11, became a center for drug trafficking, with police posts in opium-growing regions being auctioned to the highest bidder - sometimes for as much as a hundred thousand dollars for a job that had a salary of seventy dollars a month….the State Department subcontracted police training in Afghanistan to DynCorp International, a private corporation that hired retired American police officers with no knowledge of Afghanistan to train Afghan police. (DynCorp had earlier been contracted to provide American bodyguards to protect President Karzai.).” 5

With anthropological and pharmacological ignoramuses like the privateer Gen. Barry McCaffrey running DynCorp, trying to shove DynCorp’s American prohibitionist idea of opium smoking down the throat of opium smoking Afghan warriors, “the results were almost totally useless. DynCorp was training the police to fight an insurgency rather than win hearts and minds in their localities. The trained Afghan policemen returned home and continued acting in the same rapacious ways as before.” 6

Dealing in bootleg opium was as halal to these tough warriors as dealing in bootleg wine was kosher to my grandmother, who brewed it in the kitchen in five gallon jugs. DynCorp was actually organizing ‘eradication teams,’ using both tractors and sticks, poppy field by poppy field, like old-time Prohibition agents. These fields were almost always the survival rations of subsistence farmers, so the hatred DynCorp left in its wake enabled a resurgent Taliban to claim it was feeding the people. Apparently the phrase ‘price support’ is not in the DynCorp crop eradication manual. As DOD official Michael Waltz put it, in the June 2018 Special Inspector General’s report, “The U.S. strategy may have been holistic in design, but in execution one pillar quickly became the primary focus: eradication.”

DOD photo from the 2018 Inspector General’s Report, by Cpl. Dustin D. March

Gretchen Peters, in the fascinating Seeds of Terror, references a video survey of forty-two Taliban foot soldiers in Kandahar in 2007 conducted by the Toronto Globe and Mail, called ‘Talking to the Taliban,’ published 3/22/2008. Almost all were subsistence opium farmers. Half explained that they joined the Taliban after their fields had been targeted for eradication by the government and ISAF. “The US training program [for the police] under DynCorp is an appalling joke . . . a complete shambles,” warned Richard Holbrooke, engineer of the 1995 Dayton Peace Accords, President Clinton’s U.N. ambassador, and Secretary of State Clinton’s point man on Afghanistan. As the 2018 Inspector General’s Report puts it, “The sum of all opium seizures from 2008 through March 2018 was about 5 percent of the opium produced in 2017 alone.” 7

Counter Narcotics Police of Afghanistan (CNPA) destroyed approximately 25 tons of narcotics and precursor chemicals during a “drug burn” hosted by the Deputy Interior Minister for Counter Narcotics. (U.S. State Department photo); Afghan police use sticks to eradicate a poppy field near the city of Qalat, Zabul Province, Resolute Support photo by 1st Lt. Brian Wagner

CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman: “Active-duty and retired general officers now command nearly all of the major institutions of the intelligence community, although my eighteen years on the faculty of the National War College [plus 24 years as one of the CIA’s lead Soviet analysts before that] confirmed my impression that military officers are not distinguished in the fields of strategic intelligence or geopolitical problem solving….The military has too much budgetary and management authority over the collection agencies such as NSA, NRO, and NGA, which gives the Pentagon great influence over intelligence collection. Military control of intelligence collection leads to serious neglect of nonmilitary priorities such as arms control and disarmament and ethnic politics and violence. The Pentagon has too much clout in the production of intelligence analysis as well; only the State Department’s INR [Bureau of Intelligence and Research] appears to demonstrate the required integrity and independence needed to tell truth to power.… In an era when the major intelligence concern is the problem of terrorism, the military simply lacks the skill-set for understanding the cultural and political roots of terrorist organizations, let alone their intentions and capabilities.” 8

Native Afghans don’t buy our Army-promulgated prohibitionist BS about opium. In fact, coercive American prohibitionism enrages Afghan warriors, many of whom love opium sap and don’t confuse it with the artificial chemical compound heroin. The Taliban officially makes this distinction, prohibiting heroin use, but tolerating the traditional use of whole opium sap.

Some Muslim conservatives say opium is ‘unIslamic,’ because the Holy Quran prohibits alcohol, and opium can be equated with alcohol. But the Holy Quran is not uniformly negative about alcohol, and there is no specific mention of opium sap at all in the Holy Quran. Medicinal herbs are in fact specifically permitted, and opium sap has always been among the premier medicines of Afghanistan. Verse 16:67, written by the Prophet as a young man, says: “And from the fruits of the palm trees and grapevines you take intoxicant and good provision. Indeed in that is a sign for a people who reason.” Verse 5:91, written by the Prophet as an old man, is more negative: “Satan only wants to cause between you animosity and hatred through intoxicants and gambling and to avert you from the remembrance of Allah and from prayer. So will you not desist?” The young Prophet was clearly a lot more fun.

Pakistan Daily Times, 1/21/2005: “Mufti Munir Shakir, a renowned religious scholar, has declared the trade of opium ‘halal,’ legitimate, in the light of Islamic teachings during his routine sermon on an unlicensed FM radio station operating in Bara tehsil of Khyber Agency the other day….”

Opium was part of Afghan tribal culture long before Islam arrived, and has always been considered halal, kosher, which, of course, it is. Mindless American opposition to smoking opium, which cannot be used hypodermically, and its legal equation with heroin, is a major Taliban recruiter, the perfect expression of American conquistador disdain for traditional tribal culture, exactly on a par with what we do to Incan culture and their sacred coca leaf. The whole coca leaf was legally equated with the refined concentrate only to protect nascent organized medicine’s new prescription monopoly. Previously, coca leaf and opium sap had been available over the counter without a prescription (See Vol. I). We criminalize their culture with the transparent legal lie that whole herbs are the same thing as refined concentrates, treating opium, anciently sacred in this culture, like heroin, and then ask why these warriors are up in arms. Likewise the American-induced criminalization of charas, hashish, cannabis sap, which is traditionally combined in the pipe with opium.

Small amounts of opium are a body-lightening, pain-killing battlefield stimulant, and a traditional factor in the formidable battlefield presence of Afghan warriors, who move as if they were 30 pounds lighter than they are. I have smoked opium. I did indeed feel 30 pounds lighter and rather ecstatic. And no, I didn’t become mesmerized and have never been an addict. I didn’t like being slowed down by the day-after hangover. Maybe I smoked too much. I liked it, but was not captivated by it, although it did make me feel physical and energetic. Opium is no more addictive than alcohol, and has, in cultures where it is acculturated, the same rate of addiction, less than 10%, according to Dr. Marie Nyswander, the popularizer of methodaone maintenance. Cigarettes have a 50% addition rate.

As I mentioned in the ‘White Hope’ chapter of Volume I, the Opium Royal Commission in 1895 reported the testimony of many living in the Punjab, Pakistan and northern India, that regular opium use “seems to interfere neither with their longevity nor with their health.” Reporting more than a century later, Steve Coll noted, “One of Sergeant Josh Strickland’s soldiers made a bong out of an apple and got his whole squad stoned before battle, a practice inspired by routine prebattle smoking by their Afghan counterparts. (‘When I smoke hashish, I fight and I’m brave,’ one Afghan soldier explained to Hopper….)”A British Afghan National Army trainer, amazed at the frontline courage of his illiterate trainees, most of whom had more combat experience than he did, noted that “They smoked strong hashish and mild opium. They couldn’t map read…. I couldn’t train them at all.” 9 10

A U.S. Army analyst, researching the hostility causing Afghan National Army (ANA) troops to kill their American trainers, found that the Afghan hostility originated in the trigger-happy American willingness to kill Afghan civilians, the American inability to distinguish between Taliban and civilians, and American disrespect, as they saw it, for Afghan women, such as bursting into a home at night catching women in their bedclothes, or taking their picture uninvited. They also found American colloquial vulgarity, with which their training instructions were punctuated, condescending and disrespectful of their pious manhood. Afghan warriors, with only a literal understanding of English, don’t take lightly to being called ‘motherfucker.’ Taking a leak against the wall of an Afghan house in front of women was regarded as deeply disrespectful of both the house and the women.

Development Coordinator Robin Raphel, Richard Holbrooke, Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton meet with Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gillani, 10/28/2009

American trainers, explaining their disrespect and mistrust of their Aghan trainees, made comments like, “They are stoned all the time.” “We can’t leave anything out; they steal it.” “I wouldn’t trust the ANA with anything, never mind my life.” ANA trainees have repeatedly murdered their American trainers and fled, with their American weapons, to the Taliban. The Army analyst studying this, Major Jeffrey T. Bordin, a renowned Ph.D. sociologist, concluded from his interviews with almost a thousand Afghan and American troops, that we had, as he titled his 2010 paper, “A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility.” Bordin was fired by General Petraeus and his work ‘classified’ for provably pointing out that we faced an unbridgeable cultural divide. On his way home Bordin commented, “A lot of people are going to get killed unnecessarily.”

Another Army research team built on Bordin’s report, which, despite its classified status, gained traction. They pointed out that the cultural hostility exacerbated pro-Taliban sentiments which were there to begin with, and that group identification with Muslims, with Afghans, with opium smokers and with the Taliban, was the primary motivating factor in most of these ‘green on blue’ killings. 11

The cultural divide begins with our prohibitionist snooker that opium causes heroin addiction. That is as stupid as saying that traditional coca use in Santa Cruz de la Sierra causes cocaine use in Los Angeles, therefore we have to bomb rural Bolivia with herbicides to cure the ‘crack epidemic’ in LA. This, by the way, has been the actual position taken by the U.S. government. The ‘crack epidemic’ in LA was caused by structural poverty and hopelessness – any cheap, pleasant, painkilling euphoriant will be popular. The problem is the pain, not the painkiller. The real problem is structural poverty and the lack of an urban policy, including sweat-equity institutions designed to foster upward mobility. The old Prohibitionist legal trick of equating traditional whole herbs with their refined concentrates simply enables the simultaneous criminalization of both Angelinos and Campesinos.

Rural Afghanistan’s most lucrative cottage industry, making heroin with bags of morphine base

Our transparent colonialist BS seemed insane to many ANA commanders, especially to those involved as either buyers or sellers of opium sap. Most Afghans who use heroin are poor urbanites, not warriors in the field. They are substituting for the unavailability of good gum opium, and a job, and, thanks to our unrelenting drug propaganda, they equate cheap heroin with opium sap, which of course popularizes heroin. As the official USPHS study conducted by Kolb and Du Mez in 1924 demonstrated, and as current research confirms, the criminalization of the safe sap automatically popularizes the refined concentrate. Prior to 1914 gum opium was favored by regular users, after 1914 the bulky and aromatic gum had disappeared from the market, almost totally replaced by heroin and morphine. It is no more possible to stop the use of an herb traditional in human culture than it is to stop the use of a food traditional in human culture, or to stop the pure physics of supply and demand. Criminalize the herb and you automatically popularize the refined concentrate. 12

Asia, 1/1931

Afghanistan was ancient to Alexander the Great in 330 BC. And opium was sacred in Alexander’s ancient Greek culture. Opium sap was basic to both Greek and Afghan culture and medicine long before the arrival of Islam in Afghanistan nine centuries after Alexander, and millennia before the 1803 invention of refined morphine, or the 1874 invention of heroin. There is no pre-colonialist history of opium being a problem in Afghanistan, Greece, India, or China, quite the contrary, it was the premier medicine and social inebriant of those cultures. The purpose of demonizing the premier herb of a culture is to criminalize the culture, for purposes of colonialist conquest. The colonialist Americans arrived in Afghanistan literally expecting the Afghans to stop being Afghans. Afghans smoke opium the way Italians and French drink wine.

Demeter Holding Opium Poppies under the sacred Double Axe, Gold Signet Seal, Crete, c. 1500 BC; Greek Sacramental Vase, c.350 BC

Karzai’s Helmand governor, Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, of the powerful Akhundzada family that headed the province’s dominant Alizai tribe, was caught by U.S. forces with more than nine tons of opium sap in his office in 2005. Sher Mohammed was the nephew of Mohammed Nasim Akhundzada, the Helmand warlord assassinated by Hekmatyar’s ISI-supported operation in 1990. Caught with his political pants down, Sher Mohammed simply moved, with Karzai’s blessing, to the Afghan senate, Karzai replacing Sher Mohammed with his younger brother as deputy governor in Helmand. Three years later, Sher Mohammed moved back to Helmand to partner up again with Ahmed Wali Karzai. Afghan warrior Hamid Karzai wasn’t nearly as offended by opium growing as his American and British allies thought he should be. It was, of course, that drug money alone that bought Karzai’s only independent military capacity, as it did all the other competing Afghan warlords on the CIA payroll, ultimately producing yet another warlord civil war, ongoing to this day.

As Karzai put it to State Department visitors, “The question is, why do we have Taliban controlling those areas now, when two years ago I had control of Helmand? When Sher Mohammed was governor there, we had girls in schools and only 160 foreign troops. The international community pushed me to remove him and now look where we are.” Karzai thought we had fallen for the ISI snooker, chasing the McGuffin opium, deploying tens of thousands of Marines to Helmand, instead of to the Taliban base in Pakistan’s Quetta, neighboring Afghanistan’s Helmand, and to the Taliban bases in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Instead of chasing the enemy, we were chasing what Hitchcock called the ‘McGuffin,’ the shiny misdirection. As Richard Clarke pointed out, many of our best CIA analysts agreed, as did our Afghan Ambassador Eikenberry and new Vice President Biden. 13

Karzai’s younger half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai’s brother in law was Arif Noorzai, Karzai’s minister of tribal affairs, whose power base was, guess what - the opium trade. Upon this shocking revelation the Americans and the Brits forced Arif Noorzai out of Karzai’s government. But the politically popular Noorzai, whose opium growing was not offensive to Afghans, was promptly elected to parliament to become the deputy speaker of the lower house, one of the most powerful politicians in the country.

During the Taliban offensive of 2006, Karzai turned to Sher Mohammed Akhundzada to lead his guerrillas in Helmand. Rumsfeld’s minimalist ‘warlord strategy’ left the Karzai government in Kabul no stronger than any other regional warlord, and militarily dependent on the artificial value our Prohibition gives their opium. Nothing else the U.S. was doing guaranteed an income to Afghan subsistence farmers. This Prohibitionist mindlessness about the cultural attitudes and basic macroeconomics of the situation laid the foundation for the Taliban resurgence, as the U.S. shifted resources to Iraq.

Ahmed Rashid: “Drug money was everywhere – fuelling the insurgency, subverting and corrupting the government, the police and the judicial system. And since President Karzai made no attempt to stop the wholesale involvement of senior politicians and warlords in the drug trade, drugs undermined formal work by development agencies, for the opium trade provided the better jobs, income and security that the state was unable to give.” 14

Eight years after bin Laden’s Tora Bora escape, in the summer of 2009, Major General Michael Flynn, General Stanley McChrystal’s intelligence chief, leading the new Afghan war command for the Obama administration, reported this summary of his situation review: “Eight years into the war in Afghanistan, the U.S. intelligence community is only marginally relevant to the overall strategy…. Ignorant of local economics and landowners, hazy about who the powerbrokers are and how they might be influenced, incurious about the correlations between various development projects and the levels of cooperation among villagers . . . U.S. intelligence officers and analysts can do little but shrug in response to high level decision-makers seeking the knowledge, analysis, and information they need to wage a successful counterinsurgency.” Kicking down civilian doors, in lieu of actually dealing with them, just recruited for the Taliban. Flynn’s boss, General McChrystal, put it even more bluntly, “We’re going to lose this fucking war if we don’t stop killing civilians.” 15 16

And, given that the Bush administration, run by the engineers of the Vietnam war, had engineered government by dope dealer, exactly as in Vietnam, there was no reliable Afghan government to which to turn over territory wrested from the Tailban, which meant that, literally, Afghanistan had become another Vietnam. The Viet Minh, of course, were politically popular, highly disciplined and completely sane. The fragmented drug gangs composing the Taliban and al Qaeda were not, although the opium business did turn them into, well, businesses. Covert elements within the ISI would support cooperating jihadi groups, even as other elements within the ISI were under orders hostile to particular jihadi groups. And those in the ISI under orders hostile to this or that jihadi group could be trusted to be as corrupt as any other Pakistani dope dealer. As Pakistan well understood, it created a monster in the FATA, and in its own ISI, that it could no longer control.

Jihadist coup d’etat in Pakistan became a real fear in the ISI, which could trust neither the U.S. government nor its own component parts. Just as in Vietnam, there was no sane center that we hadn’t already subverted. Active ISI support for the jihadi dopers in the Waziristan FATA, Quetta and Karachi was an established independent fact, thanks to the pure physics of supply and demand. As in Mexico, thanks to the artificial value our Prohibition gives drug crops, the dopers had taken over the country. The United States was left contemplating the possibility of jihadi crazies, some of whom it was financing through the ISI, in control of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, an arsenal that the U.S. had helped to build.

UNODC Afghanistan Opium Survey 2010

Karzai’s pro-U.S. dope-dealer government, of course, although not terrorist, was also hopelessly corrupt, from the management of the Kabul Bank, from which hundreds of American millions disappeared, to the traffic cop in Kabul demanding a bribe. General Petraeus’ anti-corruption investigators found themselves indicting important paid CIA assets. Karzai, for all his erudition and guts, had an Afghan tribalist’s transactional idea of governance, and no patience at all for our prohibitionism, which aimed directly at Karzai’s only source of independent power.

General McChrystal, with no reliable Afghan National Army to build on, asked new President Obama in 2009 for another 80,000 troops, a figure so high it left Obama’s entire high command in shock. The Obama administration ultimately did accede to some of McChrystal’s request, launching successive ‘surges’ of U.S. troops in Helmand, poppy central, through 2011. After all, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, JCS Admiral Mike Mullen and Afghan force leader General Stanley McChrystal had promised, during Obama’s October, 2009 Afghan policy review, that victory was just around the corner. But McChrystal’s Standard Operating Procedure counterinsurgency tactics, with its troop surges, contractors, clandestine operators and infrastructure construction just had the effect, in the real world, of sharpening the Taliban’s teeth. McChrystal was simply repeating the 2008 U.S. and British offensive in Helmand, involving nearly 30,000 troops, which failed to dent Taliban control of the province, given our inability to hit their supply lines in Pakistan, their artificially valuable global heroin income, which our Prohibition creates, and their native savvy and popularity.

The next year, virtually no Taliban came over to our side, contrary to McChrystal’s SOP counterinsurgency pipe dream. And ‘building infrastructure’ did nothing at all, given that Afghanistan and Pakistan are two of the most corrupt and ungovernable nations on earth, with 70% rural, mostly illiterate populations that have never been governed. Most of the ‘infrastructure’ money we gave to Pakistan was directed by the ISI to finance the Taliban in Afghanistan, and to American contractors building demonstration projects and providing political kickbacks. And infrastructure money spent with Karzai’s dope dealer government was likewise good money after bad, building nothing but dope dealer and contractor bank accounts, and stoned Afghan Army trainees who couldn’t even be taught to maintain their own equipment, or even want to. Both Pakistan and Afghanistan had their own independent nation building project, poppy fields.

A Marine with 3rd Battalion, 4th Regiment shares a friendly greeting with a kid working his family’s opium poppy field in Helmand, 5/8/2011

Ultimately, U.S. troops numbered 100,000. But just as in Vietnam, with no reliable holding force and no political center, territory wrested from the Taliban in 2004 had to be retaken in 2007, and then again in 2009. Obama had inherited yet another disaster as severe as Bush Jr.’s near collapse of the American economy. By 2010 McChrystal had publicly turned his frustration on Obama, in Rolling Stone no less, forcing a command change to General David Petraeus, who did no better. By 2011 we were down to 23,000 troops and, following Biden’s sage advice, all would be out by 2014. Both leaders had been driven to Gorbachev’s conclusion that Afghanistan was a fool’s errand, and the money was better spent at home. Without the ability to challenge opium’s artificial Prohibition-created value - and that would require a domestic political revolution - we were beaten. Obama’s military high command admitted that, yes, we were waist-deep in the big muddy, but we really should push on, for the sake of military appropriations.

Coll quotes a July 10, 2007 State Department cable from the U.S. Embassy in Kabul: “…strong indications that some district leaders and Chiefs of Police are engaged in supporting the trafficking of narcotics…These same officials have extracted bribes from farmers to keep them off the list of fields to be targeted under the governor-led eradication program.” There were also “strong indications” that Abdul Raziq, the local ruler and prized American ally in Spin Boldak, Afghanistan, the key border town connecting the Pakistani Chaman crossing to Quetta, Pakistan, the ISI-sanctioned Taliban base, “controls large-scale narcotics trafficking.” 17

These dope dealer local governments, even while they exchanged hostilities, did massive smuggling business with each other as well, and not just in opium and heroin, but in every other conceivable commodity – electronics, cars, sugar, fruit, flour, weapons - avoiding both Afghan and Pakistani customs duties and sales taxes, helping to bankrupt both governments. As the law enforcement bureaucracy in both counties went up for sale, organized crime in both countries skyrocketed. Cars, by the thousands, were jacked in Pakistan for shipment to Afghanistan. The outdoor market just outside Hyderabad in southern Pakistan sold stolen duty-free brand-name items, thus radically underselling legitimate shopkeepers and manufacturers throughout Pakistan. Rashid calls this the ‘Afghan Transit Trade’ and the ‘Taliban Transport Mafia.’ Iranian Border Guards traded in stolen fuel with Pakistan and Afghanistan as easily as they traded in opium and heroin, undercutting the economy of both countries. The Pakistani and Afghan ministers overseeing duty collection were in on the take. With no law and order, both countries became a bad investment. In the end, the entire Obama administration, and its field generals, became hopelessly disheartened. 18

Presidents Obama and Karzai at the Presidential Palace in Kabul, March 28, 2010

Having rescued the economy after Bush collapsed it with his corrupt and incompetent overuse of unilateral military power and deficit spending, Obama, fearing the quicksand he encountered everywhere in the Muslim world, became militarily paralyzed. He refused to enforce his own August 20, 2012 ‘red line’ when Assad used chemical weapons to commit mass murder in rebel-controlled Ghouta a year later. We could have destroyed Assad’s entire air force in one day when he crossed the ‘red line,’ and then grounded all those barrel-bomb helicopters with a no-fly zone. We already had thousands of Syrian boots on the ground, many committed to representative democracy. We also had powerful regional allies, like the Turks and the Kurds, begging for our involvement. To be fair, the Turks and the Kurds were at each other’s throats, and we also had enormous jihadi power in the Syrian opposition to Assad, which we would have had to confront, threatening a quagmire. The jihadi crazies, many of whom Assad covertly assisted, were Assad’s best argument against the resistance to his regime, and a convenient way to weaken the democratic resistance.

Our inadequate military support for the many pro-democratic groups weakened them so badly that the jihadis took control of the resistance. We then used that jihadi control of the resistance to justify continuing to do almost nothing, as Assad slowly crushed the uncoordinated rebel groups with massive professional Russian and Iranian support. This allowed the Russians, in the absence of U.S. air power, to take control of Syrian airspace in support of Assad’s barrel-bomb genocide. The situation was indeed a Gordian Knot, but Obama had a sword that could have cut it. He might as well have been working for the Russians, passively ceding the entire region to them.

As my father’s friends, who fought WWII, always used to say, “the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.” We could have stopped Hitler in Spain, as the “premature anti-fascists,” both rightwing like Churchill and De Gaulle, and leftwing like the Lincoln Brigade and the International Brigades, wanted to do. We had the Versailles Treaty as legal justification, both the British and French armies, and Hitler was weak enough to stop in 1936. Roosevelt came to bitterly regret allowing himself to be bullied by American isolationists into not supporting the Spanish Republicans. He ended up needing them. In fact the CIA’s Bill Colby, whose 1939 senior year vacation in France was interrupted by the start of WWII, insisted that if the U.S. had backed the Austrians and the Czechs in 1938 we could have stopped the Nazis then. The savings in human life and treasure would have been incalculable. But Baldwin, Chamberlain and Daladier possessed neither Churchill’s brains nor guts, leaving France conquered and Britain facing imminent conquest, indeed, its darkest hour.

Obama was right to get us out of Iraq, to try to get us out of Afghanistan, and to follow the Brtis and the French in Libya, not lead. But military conservatism sometimes requires the judicious use of military power. We should have intervened in Libya far more than we did after the death of Gaddafi, knocking rebel heads together to form a workable unity government. And there was nothing smart nor decent about Clinton’s refusal to intervene in Rwanda in 1994. Three battalions of U.S. Marines could have handled the fifth-rate Hutu army as a training exercise. Doing nothing is often as bad as doing the wrong thing.

Clinton did see al Qaeda coming and gets high marks from the likes of Richard Clarke, head of the NSC’s Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG), for putting interagency structures in place to deal with the threat. But his legalistic cabinet, and his military high command, wouldn’t pull the trigger. And the incoming Bush administration saw the entire conflict from the Saudi Safari Club perspective, abdicating American autonomy in favor of the Saudis.

Bush’s National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, seeing Richard Clarke’s CSG as having too much autonomous interagency power, removed it from the National Security Council and broke it up, moving Clarke to the new second-level Cyberspace Security unit. It was Clarke’s CSG that had been insisting that al Qaeda, in the wake of the African embassy and Cole bombings, was a clear and present danger about to attack. The new Bush administration was preoccupied with old Cold War issues having to do with privateer missile production and finding pretexts for grabbing Iraqi oil. If al Qaeda wasn’t on the front burner for the Saudis, then it wasn’t on the front burner for the Bushies.

As Craig Unger put it, “In all, at least $1.476 billion had made its way from the Saudis to the House of Bush and its allied companies and institutions. It could safely be said that never before in history had a presidential candidate -- much less a presidential candidate and his father, a former president -- been so closely tied financially and personally to the ruling family of another foreign power. Never before had a president’s personal fortunes and public policies been so deeply entwined with another nation.”

NSC Counterterrorism Security Group Director Richard Clarke: “On September 4, 2001, the Principals Committee meeting on al Qaeda that I had called for ‘urgently’ on January 25 finally met. In preparation for that meeting I urged Condi Rice to see the issue cleanly; the Administration could decide that al Qaeda was just a nuisance…Or it could decide that the al Qaeda terrorist group and its affiliates posed an existential threat to the American way of life, in which case we should do everything that might be required to eliminate the threat. There was no in-between….The Principals meeting, when it finally took place, was largely a nonevent. Tenet and I spoke passionately about the urgency and seriousness of the al Qaeda threat. No one disagreed. Powell laid out an aggressive strategy for putting pressure on Pakistan to side with us against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Money might be needed, he noted, but there was no plan to find the funds. Rumsfeld, who looked distracted throughout the session, took the Wolfowitz line that there were other terrorist concerns, like Iraq, and whatever we did on this al Qaeda business, we had to deal with the other sources of terrorism…. Rice ended the discussion without a solution.”

“I had just become the Special Adviser to the President for Cyberspace Security and was going to spend two weeks getting to know the leaders of the high-tech industry in California….In Palo Alto, as in most of America, life was going on. The people trusted, as I did, that the mechanisms of government, now awakened, would deal with the terrorist threat completely and systematically. We were wrong. Replacing me as the senior NSC counterterrorism official was Wayne Downing, the retired four-star Army general who had led Special Operations Command. Wayne and I had first met twenty-eight years earlier when he was a young Major and I was an even younger Pentagon analyst, thrown together to share a windowless office in the bowels of the Pentagon. As soon as the terrorist attack on Khobar Towers had occurred in 1995, I asked Wayne to lead an investigation of whether there had been lax U.S. security at that Air Force facility. There had been and he said so, much to the Pentagon’s chagrin. He was a no-nonsense kind of general, the perfect man for the job of coordinating the post–September 11 response. Within months of replacing me, Wayne Downing quit the White House in frustration at the Administration’s continued bureaucratic response to the threat.”

“Wayne was replaced by two people, John Gordon and Randy Beers. As with Downing, I had known Beers and Gordon for a long time, having started working with them in 1979 and 1981, respectively….Beers had enormous experience working on intelligence policy and operations, terrorism, foreign military operations, and law enforcement. He was the perfect man for the job. Beers called from the White House months later and asked if he could stop by my house for a drink and some advice….When Beers sat down next to me his first words were, “I think I have to quit….They still don’t get it. Insteada goin’ all out against al Qaeda and eliminating our vulnerabilities at home, they wanna fuckin’ invade Iraq again. We have a token U.S. military force in Afghanistan, the Taliban are regrouping, we haven’t caught bin Laden, or his deputy, or the head of the Taliban. And they aren’t going to send more troops to Afghanistan to catch them or to help the government in Kabul secure the country. No, they’re holding back, waiting to invade Iraq. Do you know how much it will strengthen al Qaeda and groups like that if we occupy Iraq? There’s no threat to us now from Iraq, but 70 percent of the American people think Iraq attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. You wanna know why? Because that’s what the Administration wants them to think!’”

“Randy continued. ‘Worse yet, they’re using the War on Terror politically. You know that document from Karl Rove’s office that someone found in the park? Remember how it said the Republicans should run for election on the war issue? Well, they did. They are doing ‘Wag the Dog’!’ … Beers had lost hearing in one ear in Vietnam, where he had served two tours as a Marine. ‘I can’t work for these people, I’m sorry I just can’t.’ Beers resigned. He was right about Karl Rove’s strategy against not just Max Cleland, but against all Democrats. From within the White House, a decision had been made that in the 2002 congressional elections and in the 2004 reelection, the Republicans would wrap themselves in the flag, saying a vote for them was a vote against the terrorists. ‘Run on the war’ was the direction in 2002. Then Rove meant the War on Terror, but they also had in mind another war that they would gin up…. Nothing America could have done would have provided al Qaeda and its new generation of cloned groups a better recruitment device than our unprovoked invasion of an oil-rich Arab country. Nothing else could have so well negated all our other positive acts and so closed Muslim eyes and ears to our subsequent calls for reform in their region. It was as if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush chanting ‘invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.’” 19

The U.S. put the Taliban on the spot with Operation Enduring Freedom on 10/7/2001. Unfortunately, Bush II, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Rove were in charge. As Clarke put it, “we treated the war as a regime change rather than a search-and-destroy against terrorists…. More than a month after the U.S. opened the military operation, the Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, still alive and well, ordered his forces to pull out of Kabul and move to the mountains. No U.S. troops gave chase…. The late-November operation did not include any effort by U.S. forces to seal the border with Pakistan, snatch the al Qaeda leadership, or cut off the al Qaeda escape.” 20

In July of 2002, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, as dishonest, arrogant and incompetent a faux war fighter as ever led the U.S. military, refused to back Afghanistan’s Karzai when he called out Pakistan’s Musharraf on Pakistan’s support of the Taliban in Kandahar, Afghanistan, from their nearby base in Quetta, Pakistan. Rumsfeld even refused extra troops to the U.S. commander in Bagram, Afghanistan, who complained to journalist Ahmed Rashid that Hekmatyar and the Taliban were offering very large cash bounties for dead American troops. Said cash, of course, coming from the opium trade: “There are large numbers of Taliban coming back into southern Afghanistan from the` Quetta region [in Pakistan]. There are three groups of between twenty-five and one hundred Taliban operating in Helmand province facilitating the drugs trade.” 211

In February 2002, Rumsfeld and Cheney, following the Saudi policy lead, with their privateer eye on Iraqi oil, actually turned down the proposal of Secretrary of State Powell to accept NATO’s offer of an additional 30,000 International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops to expand Karzai’s power beyond the Afghan capital, Kabul. Former NSC Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke: “In fact, of the combined U.S. forces fighting the ‘war on terrorism’ in the Afghan and Iraqi theaters, only about 5 percent were in Afghanistan…. The goal the Pentagon approved was only a 4,800-man Afghan national army by 2004. Some regional warlords count their strength at ten thousand men under arms. The initial units of the new force were trained by the U.S., but we soon stopped support and supervision. Many of the new recruits departed the force, taking their equipment with them. Meanwhile, Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, was still at large and reorganizing his forces on both sides of the Pakistani border…. Afghanistan was supposed to be an example of Rumsfeld’s theories that small amounts of special forces and airpower could combine to do what large Army units had been called on to do in the past….Instead, the larger force was held back for Iraq. Because of a lack of attention and resources, Afghanistan is still a potential sanctuary for terrorists.” 22

Secretary of State Powell, a professional field general, was famous for the Powell Doctrine, which advises overwhelming force. Rumsfeld, who never commanded troops in battle, was out to demonstrate his ‘minimalist’ strategy which relied on the privateer technology his Safari Club was invested in. Rumsfeld and Franks actually imposed “force caps.” Thomas Ricks: “This cap caused much angst among commanders, because it required them to leave behind parts of their units, which in turn forced them to violate the U.S. military maxim of fighting as you train, especially fighting alongside those with whom you train. This became controversial at the battle of the Shahikot Valley in March 2002 when the Army, executing Operation Anaconda, lacked artillery pieces to hit al Qaeda forces who had heavy machine guns dug in under overhanging cliffs, cleverly creating positions that couldn’t be struck from the air. Even with that experience, the emphasis on keeping a ceiling on the number of ground forces would become a key aspect of the planning for the invasion of Iraq. ‘There was always pressure from OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] - could we do it smaller?’ recalled Col. Agoglia, the Central Command planner.” 23

Rumsfeld famously broke with General Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff, when, on 2/25/2003, Shinseki told the Senate Armed Services Committee that “several hundred thousand soldiers” would be needed in Iraq when post-hostilities control was taken into account. Shinseki was just quoting CENTCOM’s sophisticated Iraq war plan, which had been continuously updated since the first Gulf War of 1990. The plan called for a force of about 400,000. This was, of course, Shinseki’s way of warning that Bush and Rumsfeld were committing the ‘Kaiser’s mistake’ – unnecessarily fighting a two-front war, which, as with the Kaiser, gave us defeat and bankruptcy. Shinseki, a Vietnam vet determined to avoid another hopeless quagmire, was speaking for many of the military’s key staff officers.

Former NSC Counterterrorism Coordinator Richard Clarke: “Franks approved of a plan for Iraq that actually had the forces needed for postinvasion stability explicitly removed. Central Command, under General Tommy Franks, did not insist on the standard operating procedure for a major operational war plan; he did not include a detailed plan for postcombat operations. Troops arriving in Baghdad and elsewhere had no instructions as to what to do once they had taken over…. The result was the disorder in Baghdad that immediately followed the arrival of U.S. forces, the absence of U.S. security for Iraqi weapons dumps, and the United States’ inability to secure supply roads against improvised explosive devices. Thousands of U.S. troops died as a direct result of the original war plan’s being abandoned by General Franks.…The Joint Chiefs, CENTCOM, and the commander in Iraq were aware of those predictions, but did not initiate plans for a counterinsurgency effort. One reason given for this omission is that the Secretary of Defense did not want anyone to use the word ‘insurgency.’”

“Beyond Rumsfeld’s apparent ability to intimidate the military, there was a more substantive reason that the military did not commence counterinsurgency operation as soon as it became apparent that there would be armed opposition. No one had a counterinsurgency (COIN) game plan…. Not wanting to fight another insurgency because they believed the U.S. Army had no advantage in such wars and indeed was disadvantaged by an impatient U.S. public, the Army leaders developed no counterinsurgency doctrine, trained few forces in counterinsurgency tactics, and procured little of the equipment needed to fight an insurgency. It was the generals’ way of saying ‘no more Vietnams.’…. It is one thing not to prepare for counterinsurgency in the hope that America will never have to fight one. It is quite another thing not to tell the President that you have little or no counterinsurgency capability when he directs you to conduct a war where an insurgency is likely.”

A mid-December 2002 think tank conference of experts at the Army War College warned: “The possibility of the United States winning the war and losing the peace is real and serious….Thinking about the war now and the occupation later is not an acceptable solution…. In a highly diverse and fragmented society like Iraq, the military…is one of the few national institutions that stresses national unity as an important principle. To tear apart the army in the war’s aftermath could lead to the destruction of one of the only forces for unity within the society.” The Army War College experts were ignored.

The ‘cakewalk’ school of military planning led by Bush Jr., Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith prevailed. Rumsfeld was experimenting, playing it by ear, out to prove how cheaply he could do it. Retired Army Col. Prof. Andrew Bacevich: “Here may be the clearest manifestation of OSD’s contempt for the accumulated wisdom of the military profession and of the assumption among forward thinkers that technology - above all information technology - has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionally governing the preparation and conduct of war.” Vietnam vet and CENTCOM Chief, General Anthony Zinni: “The more I saw, the more I thought that this was the product of the neocons who didn’t understand the region and were going to create havoc there. These were dilettantes from Washington think tanks who never had an idea that worked on the ground.” 24

Thanks to Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s amateurish ‘minimalist’ theory of warfare, Afghanistan became part and parcel of the debacle in Iraq. With too few troops on the ground, how were we supposed to maintain civil order in Iraq, or guard Saddam’s huge conventional weapons dumps? How was the mail to be delivered if we dismissed the mailman because he was a member of the Baath party? How was Karzai supposed to reject the opium business, his only source of independent power, if we gave him no troops? Wrote journalist Ahmed Rashid, a very close friend of Karzai who met with him daily, “Ryan Crocker, the first U.S. ambassador in Kabul later said, ‘We [the State Department] were asking how can central authority be established? Who was going to set up the police, army, carry out nation building and disarm the militias? The Pentagon’s view was our job is done and let’s get out of here. We got rid of the evil [Taliban] and we should not get stuck.’” 25

As Senator Joe Biden warned at the time, that left the U.S. entirely dependent on the warlords, whose major business was the opium and heroin trade. And the Taliban were still being fully supported by the ISI, whom we were financing, so we didn’t actually “get rid of” the Taliban, who remained one of the ISI’s most important heroin gangs. But, of course, mentioning our structural support for the gigantic global heroin trade was a good way to get yourself fired, like Shinseki, even though collapsing the value of heroin with legalization and medicalization was the only way to stop the Taliban. Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, the ultimate privateer, had very good use for that covert drug money, which supported the ISI covert arms transfers to the likes of Hekmatyar, Haqqani, bin Laden and the Taliban, and helped Pakistan pay for U.S. weapons. Prohibition kept the Black Ops black. Rumsfeld sniffily replied to Karzai, Crocker and Biden that warlord opinion was just as important as “interim government” opinion.

Ahmed Rashid: “The State Department and the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) had been completely cut out of policymaking…. Moreover, in many areas, USAID humanitarian food deliveries and development projects were being taken over by the joint CIA-SOF [Special Operations Forces] teams. Credible Afghan tribal leaders who had been identified by the Afghan government or the UN as ‘positive agents of change,’ capable of fostering stability at the community level, were bypassed in favor of the commanders and warlords preferred by the CIA. Afghan civil society was being strangled even as it emerged, and the Afghan government was made to look incompetent and powerless. Afghan policy was now in the hands of covert CIA-SOF operatives…” 26

Operatives, that is, employing Rumsfeld’s minimalist ‘warlord strategy,’ intentionally making the ISI’s opium and heroin business the basis of power in Afghanistan, per Saudi instruction. All available military supply and personnel contracts were given to the ISI-connected warlords. “Gravel needed to repair the Kandahar runway costing eight dollars a truckload was sold to the base for one hundred dollars—and some three hundred truckloads a day were being delivered.” VP Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, of course, didn’t call them “warlords,” they called them “regional leaders,” and publicly visited them as if they were heads of state.

Pakistan itself turned into an ISI-run fascist police state, with the army receiving 25% of the national budget, and the police receiving 1%. Public education got almost nothing, despite an abysmal adult literacy rate of 40%. Privately and publicly funded madrassas, most parroting Saudi-style medieval slave-state fundamentalism and jihadism, proliferated. “In 2001 the government had approved a plan that would for the first time register madrassas, halt their funding from abroad, and modify their curricula to teach modern subjects such as math, history, and science. The Islamic parties protested the new law, and the government promptly shelved it.” 27

Pakistani President and Army Chief of Staff Musharraf took power by coup d'etat on October 13, 1999. In May of 1999 Musharraf invaded the Kargil district of the contested Jammu and Kashmir, attempting to unite Indian-controlled Kashmir with Pakistani-controlled Kashmir (Azad Kashmir). This almost started yet another full-scale war with India, the previous three of which Pakistan decisively lost, as it lost the Kargil War. PM Nawaz Sharif had approved Musharraf’s plan, although he later insisted, in the face of an outraged Bill Clinton, that this war was started by the Army without his authorization, and so found himself in a dogfight with Musharraf for control of Pakistan. The Army and the ISI pushed Sharif aside. The commander of the Kargil raid, General Mahmoud Ahmed, became the new head of the ISI. He is the probable chief engineer of 9/11, certainly the direct source of most of the hijackers’ financing.

The ISI saw its mission as the unification of Kashmir, and supported Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Righteous), Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (Islamic Jihad Movement) and other radical jihadist groups to that end. These ISI and Saudi-supported groups kept themselves together by dealing heroin through the same international networks that delivered their arms, trading the one for the other. A recently declassified 1996 CIA report stated that the ISI was funding Harkat-ul-Ansar (HUA - Movement of the Helpers of Mohammed) to the tune of $30–60,000 a month. It described the HUA as an “Islamic extremist organization that Pakistan supports in its proxy war against Indian forces in Kashmir… increasingly… using terrorist tactics against Westerners and random attacks on civilians.” Although designated as a terrorist organization with strong links to al Qaeda by the United Nations, the United Kingdom and the United States, nonetheless, the CIA and MI6 continued to fund the ISI. 28

Musharraf gave a grandstanding ‘anti-terrorist’ speech on January 12, 2002, arresting 3000 militants, all of whom were quietly released out the back door. Not one single charge of terrorism was brought against any militant, but the speech did keep the American aid flowing. The same pro-al Qaeda jihadist terror groups supported by operations in Kashmir and Afghanistan, executed a wave of terrorist murders, hundreds of people, in Pakistan itself, targeting Shia political liberals and professionals, many in Karachi. When four Shia doctors were gunned down on the street within one 5-day period in March, 2002, their colleagues shut down all Karachi hospitals. The frustrated Karachi police publicly complained of the lack of resources and ISI support, especially for the terrorist murder of Karachi police. By 2007, 1,500 Pakistani soldiers and police had been killed by al Qaeda nihilists in Pakistan.

Musharraf’s government sent ISI officers to the home of any potential opposition political candidate, armed with a complete personal dossier, threatening to charge the would-be candidates with ‘corruption’ or ‘living beyond their means.’ Most chose not to run. Anyone without a university degree was ineligible to run for office, but madrassa graduation certificates were accepted as university degrees. Among the national political parties left standing were Musharraf’s incarnation of the many splinters of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-Q); the fundamentalist pro-al Qaeda alliance, Muttahida Majlis–e–Amal, (MMA), United Council of Action; Bhutto’s centrist Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP), the fundamentalist Jamiat e Ulama e Islam, (JUI), Assembly of Islamic Clerics, with strong ISI connections; and charismatic cricketeer Imran Khan’s new centrist Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, (PTI), Pakistan Movement for Justice. The fixed October 2002 election, which blocked leading contenders Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif from participation, gave Musharraf’s Pakistan Muslim League-Q a parliamentary plurality, with the help of the fundamentalist MMA. The fundamentalist MMA actually took political control of the North-West Frontier Province. School boys were ordered to abandon modern dress in favor of traditional dress, and older girls were ordered to put a cloth bag over their head. Many Pakistanis said that MMA stood for Mullah-Military Alliance.

When, in April of 2002, President Bush under Secretary of State Colin Powell’s influence, asked for a ‘Marshall Plan’ for Afghanistan, understanding that unless we tilted toward civil power in Afghanistan and Pakistan we would have the endless war we now have, Rumsfeld and Cheney completely ignored the president. They continued to turn all foreign policy over to military officers under their direct control. The underfunded State Department didn’t have the wherewithal to resist. Bush never mentioned a Marshall Plan for Pakistan again, calling Musharraf “a visionary and courageous leader.” The Pentagon’s own Defense Science Board, practicing actual defense science, recommended that “the Secretary of Defense should designate stabilization and reconstruction operations as core military tasks.” The privateer Rumsfeld responded by shutting down the U.S. military’s only training institute for stabilization and reconstruction operations, the Peacekeeping & Stability Operations Institute of the US Army War College at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania. 29

USAID was, in effect, destroyed as an independent agency with its own funding. Gone were the USAID Disaster Assistance Response Teams that could operate independently in-country coordinating international NGOs to provide effective long-term structural projects in tandem with the local government ministry. USAID was reduced to a contractor for Christian fundamentalist NGOs and CIA-directed quick impact projects, such as digging a well, that simply boosted the prestige of the local CIA-supported warlord, as well as the bottom line of the Washington-based Republican contractor. Letting Afghan school construction contracts to Washington-based contractors with no regional experience created jobs in Washington, not Afghanistan, at inflated costs with designs, materials and equipment appropriate for, and often sourced in, American suburbs, not Afghanistan.

That left the opium and heroin trade, and profound political influence, for any gang that would defend the crop. Ahmed Rashid: “The Taliban resurgence, al Qaeda’s reorganization, and the restarting of its training camps for international terrorist groups after the U.S. invasion would have been impossible without the explosion in heroin production…. After 9/11, growing opium was a matter of prudent judgment for farmers. Jalaluddin Khan, a farmer in Helmand province, cultivated poppy so he could feed his extended family of thirty, including four brothers and their families. In 2003 he planted poppies on his eighteen-acre farm - something he had done six times in the past ten years to make ends meet…. The flowers bloomed like a sea of red until their petals fell away to reveal a hardened capsule, which was lanced with thin homemade blades. Khan squeezed each capsule with his fingers until a milky white viscous substance oozed out. The liquid solidified into a brown gum, which was scraped off with a trowel. This operation would be repeated every few days until the plant stopped yielding gum. The crop had taken just four months to mature and needed no excessive water or care. The raw opium would be slapped into a cake and kept wet in plastic bags until the local drug dealer arrived. It would then be sent to makeshift laboratories in the mountains where, with the help of a few readily available precursor chemicals, the dark brown paste would be turned into a fine white powder - heroin.”

“Ten kilograms of opium paste produces one kilogram of heroin [either ‘brown sugar,’ morphine base, heroin #3, smoking heroin, or injectable white heroin #4 (diacetylmorphine), which requires an extra step, the sophisticated use of acetic anhydride to achieve the diacetylation of morphine]. For Khan it was the cheapest and fastest cash crop to grow, giving a good return, and could be stored for several years if prices dropped. The crop provided a support system for farmers that the state could not match. Since the early 1990s, farmers could mortgage their crop to dealers for a cash loan while dealers provided protection, agricultural extension services, technical assistance in the shape of better seeds, and even the skilled labor needed when harvesting began…. More than two million Afghan farmers like Khan were growing poppy as their primary cash crop by 2005…. Farmers earned an estimated $13,000 from a hectare of land under poppy versus $400 from a hectare under wheat.” 30

Thanks only to the artificial value our Prohibition gives their opium. Decriminalize opium internationally, as recommended by Raymond Kendall, Secretary General of Interpol from 1985 to 2000, and the Taliban collapses. The great Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, who was on the ground in Helmand watching this happen, pointed out that farm workers earned ten dollars a day collecting opium resin – five times their daily average wage. “The opium economy was now [2004] worth $2.8 billion, equal to 60 percent of the country’s legal economy, which was calculated at $4.5 billion. Over 80 percent of Afghan opium was now refined into heroin inside the country, rather than being exported as raw opium paste.”

According to the UNODC, opium trafficking became institutionalized and stratified, with approximately 30 senior traffickers running 200 or more dealers, who ran 500 or more local purchasers. By 2007, not one dealer or trafficker had been jailed. The U.S. Institute of Peace concluded that, by 2008, the Taliban had 50 heroin labs in its territory and controlled 98 percent of the country’s poppy fields. The Taliban had become so rich they could pay young guerrillas $300 a month, big money for a farm boy in rural Afghanistan. 31 32

Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who led the Reagan administration around like a dog on a leash, built Pakistan’s jihadist gangs in Afghanistan using the heroin business, understanding, as Dulles and Casey did, that he had “a completely self-funding, off-the-shelf operation,” to quote Casey. Following the August 1988 death of President Zia in a plane crash, a democratic window opened up. The deeply ingrained cultural legacy of Pakistan’s revered founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, had been parliamentary democracy and tolerance, not political fascism, and Zia himself had been leaning in that direction. Bhutto’s secular Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) took power as the flustered military lost almost its entire high command in that plane crash.

Benazir Bhutto’s PPP emphasized civilian oversight of the military and opposition to growing Islamist, that is, anti-democratic violence. Bhutto dismissed the head of the ISI, General Hamid Gul, who, along with his predecessor General Akhtar Abdur Rahman, who died with Zia in the plane crash, was a godfather of jihadist terrorism. Both had been close to Saudi military intelligence led by Prince Turki bin Faisal Al Saud. Turki and Zia had been careful to expand the cultural substructure of terrorism, the Saudi Wahhabii and Pakistani Deobandi madrassas, from less than a thousand in 1971 to more than 30,000 in 1988. Gul had been General Zia’s head of Military Intelligence when he overthrew Bhutto’s father, Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, in 1977. Zia kept Ali Bhutto in prison until he hanged him in 1979.

In attempting to control Pakistani military intelligence, Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto sacked quite a few old Zia allies. In July of 1989, Bhutto arrested General Fazle Haq the former governor of the Northwest Frontier, another seminal ISI terrorist organizer. CIA asset Haq, despite being listed by Interpol as a major international drug dealer in the mid-80s, was publicly lauded by CIA Director William Casey and Vice President George H.W. Bush on their visits to Pakistan as an important anti-Soviet ally. Haq managed the distribution of CIA arms to the anti-Soviet mujahideen, using the ISI-Saudi moneywash BCCI to convert Pakistan’s heroin dollars into armaments. As a BCCI informant told U.S. authorities, General Haq was “heavily engaged in narcotics trafficking and moving the heroin money through the bank.” BCCI clients included Saddam Hussein, Abu Nidal, Manuel Noriega and the Medellin Cartel, basic cocaine wholesalers supplying the Contras through Ilopango in El Salvador, Vice President Bush’s operation. Bhutto arrested Haq on murder charges. His personal fortune was estimated at several billion dollars. 33

Bhutto campaigning; General Fazle Haq; Bhutto’s assassination. 12/27/2007

Bhutto, who, with her husband, future Pakistan president Asif Ali Zardari, played the dark money game as well as anyone, was nonetheless a committed secular democrat. She was also rare electoral dynamite, a self-assured, beautiful, eloquent, mature Pakistani woman who mesmerized this patriarchal nation. Bhutto was in power for two terms, 1988-90, and 1993-96. She knew the ISI had engineered the rigging of the upcoming 2008 election. Ahmed Rashid: “She spoke of this rigging both to the crowd who assembled to hear her final speech and to Afghan president Hamid Karzai, who met with her that morning. ‘She was very frank to me about the ISI and the role they were playing in undermining her,’ Karzai later told me. ‘She was a brave, brave unafraid woman who wanted the best for her country. The sad thing about her death is that she predicted it, and she was proved right.’ There is little doubt that Bhutto and Karzai, working together, would have formed a team committed to combat extremism.” 34

Between 9/11/2001 and 9/11/2015, the U.S. has provided Pakistan with $11 billion in economic assistance, $13 billion in Coalition Support Funds, and $8 billion in security assistance (on the books), none of it, per Rumsfeld, Cheney and their Saudi financiers, contingent on democratization or infrastructure progress. And we allowed Pakistan’s ISI to buy all the advanced U.S. weaponry it could afford with its opium and heroin profits. Before 9/11, in search of Caspian region military bases, and military bases only, we attached no insistence on economic or political justice to the billions we pumped into Islam Karimov’s ruthless kleptocracy in Uzbekistan, just north of Afghanistan, thereby producing yet more angry subsistence farmers who automatically associate America with a murderous kleptocracy.

Our Karshi-Khanabad Special Forces base in southeastern Uzbekistan, in search of control of Caspian region oil, was already in operation in 1999. Most of the peoples of the ‘Stan’ countries of the former southern Soviet Union are Turkic Muslims, except for the Persian-related Kurds. Obviously Pan-Turkish Islamism is far more controllable in the hands of a Karimov, or his 2016 post-death replacement Shavkat Mirziyoyev, than in the hands of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). ‘Nationalist’ Karimov, with his confiscatory taxation, mismanagement of the economy, rampant unemployment and summary execution of dissidents, was a great recruiter of Uzbeks for the IMU. The IMU fought Uzbek president Islam Karimov alongside the Taliban, and are now cooperating with Pakistan in the opium and heroin business from the Pakistani FATA and northern Afghanistan, bordering Uzbekistan. The IMU, guerrilla fighters descended from Genghis Khan’s Mongols, now have ‘strategic depth’ from Pakistan to Uzbekistan, and, thanks to the artificial value of heroin, enough money to buy all the weapons they want.

Steve Coll: “Bin Laden provided the Uzbek radicals with funding, weapons, and access to training camps. The Taliban provided them with bases and housing in Kabul and farther north. Uzbek terrorist units began to sneak across the border to mount operations against Karimov’s government. By 1999, bin Laden and the Taliban leadership saw these Uzbek Islamists as important allies. The IMU fought as committed shock troops in the Taliban’s war against Massoud’s forces in northern Afghanistan.”

Rumsfeld in Uzbekistan with Uzbek Defense Minister Kadyr Gulyamov and Ambassador Purnell, 2/24/2004

Ahmed Rashid: “Much of the I.M.U.’s financing came from the lucrative opium trade through Afghanistan. Ralf Mutschke, the assistant director of Interpol’s Criminal Intelligence Directorate, estimated that sixty per cent of Afghan opium exports were moving through Central Asia and that the ‘I.M.U. may be responsible for seventy per cent of the total amount of heroin and opium transiting through the area.’” 35

Gretchen Peters: “With Mullah Omar’s approval, bin Laden hijacked the state-run Ariana Airlines, turning it into a narco-terror charter service ferrying Islamic militants, timber, weapons, cash, and heroin to the Emirates and Pakistan, according to former U.S. and Afghan officials…. Another former Ariana employee, Hayat Zalmay, who worked out of Jalalabad, described packing crystal heroin into hollowed-out logs. ‘I remember going to the place where they packed it up and everyone had all the right equipment— special saws and drills,’ he said. ‘There was never any worry about getting caught because everyone at the top was involved.’….The IMU’s drug money and their ties with local smugglers have proved essential to their staying power, according to western diplomats and local sources…; Locals in the troubled district say Uzbeks organize courier services, moving drug shipments through the tribal areas to Iran and also up through Afghanistan to Central Asia. One U.S. intelligence report seen by the author described a smuggling route snaking up through Afghanistan’s northwest provinces of Baghdis, Faryab, and Jowzjan and into Turkmenistan. It was being used as of mid-2004 by ‘extremists associated with the Taliban, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan and al Qaeda,’ the report said. Traffickers would move ‘both heroin and extremists’ along the route and ‘then onwards into other countries in Central Asia,’ the CIA document said.” 36

That is also what the British government told Parliament in 2001: “Usama Bin Laden and Al Qaida have … a network of operations throughout the world. The network includes …. substantial exploitation of the illegal drugs trade from Afghanistan.” Fearing ‘mission creep,’ and the antagonism of the drug-smuggling warlords on the CIA payroll, Rumsfeld refused Colin Powell’s request that U.S. troops be allowed to interdict opium convoys. Even after a major G8 conference in London in June of 2005 highlighted the dependence of the Taliban on opium, Rumsfeld paid only lip service to drug interdiction, still refusing to actually task the U.S. military. When NATO entered the fray in the south in 2006, every single NATO country followed Rumsfeld’s example. Gen. James Jones, overall commander of NATO in Europe, May 2006: “Afghanistan is teetering on becoming a narco-state, but you will not see NATO soldiers burning poppy fields. This is not our mandate.” 37

Interdiction of opium convoys, of course, would have been nothing but an impotent price support in any case. I don’t think the heroic Pat Tillman had support of the international heroin trade in mind when he left his lucrative superstar football career to volunteer for service in Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11. He was killed by friendly fire politically as well as literally. Until we confront the artificial value our Prohibition gives their opium, until we stop pretending in law that we can criminalize the pure physics of supply and demand, we are financing the spread of militant Islam throughout the region, because virtually every crazy Islamist gang throughout the Central Asian Republics is a heroin gang.

Uzbek President Islam Karimov with Secretary Rumsfeld, 2002; Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoyev with Secretary Pompeo, 2018

Driving this strategic insanity is the artificial prohibition-created value of opium and heroin to the oil companies who use the drug gangs as covert shock troops, and to the arms manufacturers and money laundering banks who are actually running this covert protection of the drug gangs. As the U.S. Energy Information Administration points out, “The Caspian Sea region, which includes Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Iran, is one of the oldest oil-producing areas in the world and is an increasingly important source of global energy production. The area has significant oil and natural gas reserves from both offshore deposits in the Caspian Sea itself and onshore fields in the region. Traditionally an oil-producing area, the Caspian area’s importance as a natural gas producer is growing quickly.”

Control of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan, and pipeline access to the Black Sea or the Persian Gulf, depends on the regional street fight financed by oil and drug money, as did the street fight in Vietnam. But the value of oil is not artificial, as is the value of opium, which, if we had the political will, we could collapse. How is a bank with liquidity problems supposed to refuse a cash deposit of $50 million? Endless war is profitable to the military privateers in the warfare business. They would rather finance the Taliban and the IMU, creating the endless war, the Reichstag Fire, than collapse the price of opium with legalization of the sap and medicalization of the concentrate, despite the fact that the world’s macroeconomic, law enforcement and addiction experts have been begging for just that for decades.

The Guardian: “Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN adviser,” by Rajeev Syal, 12/12/2009:

“Drugs and crime chief says $352bn in criminal proceeds was effectively laundered by financial institutions

“Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations’ drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.”

“Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.”

The London Daily Telegraph, 11/19/2001, “Gangster's Paradise Across the Atlantic,” by Michael Becket, listed the world’s top drug money laundering jurisdictions as Mauritius, Vatican City, Macao, Nauru, Luxembourg, South Africa, the British islands of Jersey, Guernsey and Sark, and the Cayman Islands, where it is actually a criminal offence to breach bank secrecy. That is to say, despite the Banco Ambrosiano revelations, the Vatican Bank, still inaccessible to global financial authorities, remains among the world’s top drug money laundries.

Kabul’s suburbs have turned into the Hollywood Hills, as traffickers wash their drug money through real estate. Asad Ismi of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives estimates that U.S. banks launder $100 billion in drug money annually. The November, 1999 Senate Staff Report on Private Money Laundering and Banking estimated $500 billion to $1 trillion in drug money laundered globally annually, with half that through U.S. banks. 38

In 2016, Hekmatyar signed a peace deal with the new Ashraf Ghani Afghan government, allowing his public return to Afghanistan after almost 20 years producing heroin for the ISI in Balochistan, rural Pakistan bordering Iran and Afghanistan, and in Afghanistan’s northeastern Kunar and Nuristan provinces, bordering Pakistan. The superb film Lone Survivor, based on Marcus Luttrell’s book, recounts the search for a Hekmatyar commander in Kunar province, Ahmad Shah. That gruesome mission cost 19 SEAL lives. In April 2008, Shah was killed during a shootout with Pakistani police in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. But as of 2019 Shah’s commander, Hekmatyar, is still a major Afghan opium and heroin producer and a major regional power broker. Yet I never hear any American military spokesperson, asked to explain the resurgence of the Taliban and the endless war, ever mention the artificial value our Prohibition gives their opium. You can’t finance your enemy and beat your enemy.

Until international drug law changes, it will not be possible for any power to operate in that part of the world without supporting the international opium trade. Interpol’s Raymond Kendall needs to be heeded, we must decriminalize or legalize opium, and medicalize heroin, thereby collapsing opium’s value. As Dr. Marie Nyswander, the innovator of methadone maintenance points out, opium sap is not magically addictive. Like whiskey, most people find it nauseating, and it is not a problem where its use is acculturated. The demonization of opium is colonialist propaganda, one more way to criminalize the natives. The industrial slaver legal equation of whole opium sap with heroin is as inane as equating kitchen matches with grenades. It is a fact, however, that the demonization of opium sap automatically popularizes heroin, which, because of blanket global Prohibition, has become more valuable than gold.

Despite the fact that they are now the world’s leading heroin producers, not one single Taliban leader was handed over to the Americans by the Pakistanis. The Americans saw only a few of the Arab crazies of al Qaeda extradicted, like Abu Zubaydah, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, because in December, 2003, the al Qaeda crazies in South Waziristan and their local Pashtun allies were stupid enough to try to assassinate Musharraf himself. Nonetheless, it was strongly suspected in the Pakistani military that when it attacked those al Qaeda bases in South Waziristan in March of 2004 in response to the assassination attempts, the ISI withheld strategic intelligence from its own military, producing a defeat against the 2,000 well entrenched al Qaeda and Taliban jihadis. Musharraf, afraid of alienating his own high command, visited no repercussions on the ISI for betraying its own military in battle.

The Pakistani military signed a peace agreement with the al Qaeda and Taliban crazies, further ‘Talibanizing’ the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Waziristan. This part of the FATA was actually renamed the ‘Islamic Emirate of Waziristan’ by the Waziristan Accord, 9/5/2006, as Taliban-ruled Afghanistan had been known as the ‘Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.’ The Taliban in the FATA was allowed to implement their brutal code of behavior, achieving an iron grip on the population through assassination and intimidation. They banned television, music and the internet, required men to grow beards, pray regularly and carry prayer beads, and the women to wear full burqas. In 2005, the Taliban assassinated 60 recalcitrant Waziri tribal and religious leaders, hanging their beheaded bodies on lampposts. In total, over the next two years, the Taliban executed over 300 Waziri tribal leaders. There was no further political dissent in Waziristan. The Waziristan FATA became an ISI-serviced Taliban base, that is, a protected heroin production zone.

Musharraf played the befuddled and overwhelmed George W. Bush like a fiddle. The ISI represented this renaming of Waziristan as a ‘development plan’ to the privateer-run Bush administration, which saw the chance to funnel yet more public money to its Republican-supporting contractors. Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney swallowed the scam, hook, line and sinker. Ahmed Rashid: “The State Department drew up its own plan, which echoed what Pakistan had already outlined, and said in March 2007 that the United States would give $750 million, or $150 million a year for five years, to the plan [jobs, health, water, roads]. The Bush administration had no expertise in FATA—no anthropologists, social scientists, or aid workers who spoke Pushtu and knew the tribes—and it did not bother to hire any.” 39

Senator Joe Lieberman was really referring to Bush’s entire military establishment when he said of the Department of Homeland Security in The Washington Post, 10/17/2007, “Homeland Security's Use of Contractors Is Questioned,” by Spencer S. Hsu: “Plainly put, we need to know who is in charge at DHS - its managers and workers, or the contractors. This heavy reliance on contractors raises the risk that DHS is not creating the institutional knowledge needed to be able to judge whether contractors are performing as they should, and at a fair price.” Continued the article’s author, “Independent analysts have increasingly warned in recent years that the government's growing reliance on private firms threatens to undermine agencies' decision-making, a risk the audit found was heightened in DHS's case by its complex 2003 start-up and the rapid expansion of its workload.”

The Bush administration, obviously in a state of Rumsfeld-inspired spin ecstasy, declared the Waziristan FATA a ‘reconstruction opportunity zone,’ qualifying goods manufactured in FATA for duty-free access to the USA. Rumsfeld doesn’t seem to have noticed that nothing has ever been manufactured in the Waziristan FATA, except heroin. Wasn’t it the glib twit Rumsfeld himself who said “But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones.” Rumsfeld hilariously titled his autobiography Known and Unknown. The result was that the Bush administration, with no spending review process in place, literally financed the Taliban it was fighting, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, as it trickled the American economy down to complete disaster, exploding defense spending while radically cutting corporate taxes. This colonialist reliance on our rented warlords and the corporate profiteers supplying them earned the utmost disdain from the Pakistanis. This convinced the ISI that all Pakistan need do was play a waiting game to reinstitute Taliban rule in Afghanistan, as it is now doing.

Ahmed Rashid: “By November [2006], Lieutenant-General Eikenberry, the head of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, was telling me that the number of Taliban attacks emanating out of North Waziristan had gone up three times since the September agreement was signed. Eikenberry was clear that Pakistan’s aim was to stop attacks on its own soldiers while doing little to stop the Taliban from attacking U.S. forces. By the end of December the State Department agreed with his analysis, saying the deal had failed. ‘The Taliban have been able to use these areas [FATA] for sanctuary and for command and control and for regrouping and supply,’ said the U.S. assistant secretary of state, Richard Boucher, on December 26. With the population terrorized and under the influence of the Taliban, FATA was now out of the army’s control. More than 120 tribal elders who opposed the Taliban were executed by them in 2006.... Almost all latter-day al Qaeda terrorist plots around the world had a FATA connection.” 40

The FATA terrorist culture relies on drug smuggling. As Rashid puts it, “The Taliban traveled to Iraq via Iran and Turkmenistan, often in the company of drug smugglers.” It was from this FATA base that Ayman al-Zawahiri supported Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al Qaeda in Iraq and the godfather of ISIS. It was Zawahiri who first suggested to Zarqawi the goal of a ‘caliphate’ in Iraq. In November 2006 Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the Director-General of Britain’s MI5, said that most of the 1600 Pakistani Brits under surveillance by MI5 for active plots had links to the jihadis in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Waziristan.

Aside from the FATA in Waziristan, the Taliban was regrouping unmolested in Quetta, the provincial capital of Pakistani Balochistan. The Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, was protected by the ISI in his regular commute between Quetta in Pakistan and nearby Kandahar in Afghanistan. The ISI ran the local Quetta government through the JUI party, the ‘Assembly of Islamic Clerics,’ which got legal control of much of the North-West Frontier FATA and Balochistan provinces through ISI-fixed elections, much to the chagrin of the now-outnumbered secular Baloch nationalists. Musharraf could easily have compromised with the Baloch Liberation Army, granting greater provincial autonomy, additional gas royalties and public works projects providing jobs, but he chose brutal military repression instead, blaming the Baloch insurgency on India and Afghanistan. Secular Baloch control would have interfered with the ISI’s Balochistan-based support of the Taliban. JUI party leaders, controlling vast areas of border territory, met regularly with the ISI to coordinate and finance their support of the thousands of Pashtun Taliban fighters, many recruited from the dozens of JUI-run madrassas in Balochistan. The joint logistical effort included regular transport of hundreds of motorbikes, trucks, satellite phones, walkie-talkies, arms and ammunition. 41

As Steve Coll points out, the disheartened Obama administration had no more success coordinating ‘stovepiped’ Pentagon, CIA, Central Command, DIA, State Department and DEA policies in Afghanistan than the Bush administration did. The U.S. ended military operations in Afghanistan in the autumn of 2014, keeping only 12 of its 715 bases. The rest were either dismantled or turned over to the Afghan National Army and police. The thirteen terrorist groups in Afghanistan and seven in Pakistan comprise 20% of all the terrorist groups in the world. And as Gretchen Peters documents in fascinating detail, these groups are all sophisticated international heroin gangs, expert at the massive export of heroin and import of arms, fed by an unlimited pipeline of ‘Islamic’ morphine base. They have powerful international allies throughout the Gulf region that help them organize smuggling routes, buy protection, and launder vast sums of cash. Her book, Seeds of Terror, is as complex a catalog of international opium and heroin dealing structures and methods as any catalog of bootleg structures and methods during Prohibition. Without that financing these terrorist groups don’t exist.

As law enforcement field generals have been saying for decades, and as they said during Prohibition, controlled international legalization or decriminalization is the only way to collapse the power of these gangs. Any other tactic – interdiction, crop-destruction, management of gang fights, pursuit of ‘kingpins,’ declaration of yet another ‘epidemic’ – is simply a justification for endlessly financing the military-industrial piggies feeding at the public trough. Taliban commanders are, almost uniformly, money-motivated drug-gang leaders, who get into the same kind of territorial gangfights that Al Capone and Bugs Moran did. And they consistently do business with their supposed political enemies, the shared regional ideology being greed and thuggery, not religion.

Having inherited a lost war, President Trunp, in late January of 2018, heeding his frustrated Pentagon, announced the cutoff of military aid to Pakistan, listing Pakistan with the G-7-founded intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF) as a financial supporter of terrorism, threatening Pakistan’s access to international banking systems. Britain, France, Germany, China, and the Gulf Cooperation Council backed the U.S. move, but real consequences for Pakistan were not in the offing. The FATF simply required Pakistan to submit an Action Plan in May in order to be removed from the June list of sanctioned nations. Just a little bureaucratic reshuffling and Pakistan will be once again removed from the ‘grey list,’ as it was in 2015. Pakistan continues to occupy a strategic position in American regional planning. The United States is the second-largest supplier of military equipment to Pakistan after China, and continues to be one of Pakistan's largest donors of foreign assistance. “Lies and deceit” was just more empty Trump BS.

And as Peters points out, the informal traditional money transfer system known as hawala leaves no bank records, and can handle billions with ease, leaving investigators unable to trace systematic payoffs to the Afghan and Pakistani military, security and border officials. There is no system in this part of the world to trace cash-for-commodities transactions, since hawaladars keep no formal records, and banks in the UAE are equally opaque. For the cost of a 10% or 20% commission, a hawaladar in Quetta, Pakistan, can transfer $200,000 to Dubai, in the UAE, instantly, with a coded text message. Even with some rudimentary oversight, $50,000 of drug money can be hidden in a cash transfer of $200,000 for commodities actually priced at $150,000. Shell companies and real estate transactions are also largely unscrutinized in this part of the world. Another fascinating fact alluded to by Peters is that more than $120 billion flowed through the unregulated and corrupt Karachi Stock Exchange in 2006, in a year when the country’s entire economy totaled only $130 billion. When Tariq Hassan, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission of Pakistan launched an investigation in 2005, he was promptly fired by the Islamabad government. He was replaced by a former employee of Aqeel Karim Dhedhi, Pakistan’s most powerful stockbroker. “Once cash has been traded through a stock market, it comes out clean.” 42

A few months before the proposed Financial Action Task Force listing, in August 2017, Trump, demonstrating his customary strategic consistency, heeding other generals, announced a commitment to more American troops to Afghanistan. Without Pakistan, we won’t be able to supply those new troops. If our cooperation with the ISI ever actually is terminated, the cutoff will only strand our own troops, tilting the field toward China, Russia, the EU, UAE, UK, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan’s other trading partners. With its vast opium and heroin income intact, Pakistan doesn’t need us.

Pakistan's defense minister Khurram Dastgir Khan immediately responded to Trump’s accurate assessment that the Pakistanis “have given us nothing but lies and deceit,” saying “The fact that we have recalibrated our way towards better relations with Russia, deepening our relationship with China, is a response to what the Americans have been doing.” For once, Trump was appropriately rude. But Trump also peddles the drug propaganda, big league, in favor of his doubling down on domestic mass imprisonment and the militarization of American culture (opioid epidemic!, opioid epidemic!, Polly wanna cracker?), so his rude move means absolutely nothing, since he continues to support the price of opium, and the ISI’s allies in central Asia, just north of Afghanistan. The Chinese, Russians, Japanese, Germans and Saudis are just as happy to wash Pakistani and Afghan drug money with their arms sales as we are. Military contractors and their bankers run their governments also. 43

Without Pakistani bases and supply lines, said former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan Richard Olson, the U.S. military in Afghanistan would become “a beached whale.” The Pakistani port of Karachi is virtually our only way to supply our forces in landlocked southern Afghanistan. The nearby port of Bandar Abbas in Iran is hardly an option. Pakistan’s arch rival India is a basing option, but, absent Pakistan’s permission to cross, all Indian-based supplies would have to be flown in to Afghanistan, a very expensive option dependent on permission to use Pakistani airspace. The Pakistani dopers know this, and so continue to give us the finger. 44

As of 2019, with the ISI-supported Taliban in control of much of the country, Kabul wracked by massive regular Taliban terrorism, opium-dealing warlords in control of much of the rest of the country, and NATO allies finding this black hole an increasingly hard sell back home, Afghanistan is a strategic disaster with no end in sight. Like every other foreign invader in Afghanistan’s history, we have been defeated, and that defeat was engineered by our reliance on the ISI drug gangs, on the artificial value our Prohibition gives their opium, and our pretense that we can overcome the pure physics of supply and demand with police state tactics. BBC, 1/31/2018: “Taliban fighters, whom US-led forces spent billions of dollars trying to defeat, are now openly active in 70% of Afghanistan, a BBC study has found.”

On Jan. 30, 2018, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) released his quarterly progress report to Congress. The effort to reform Afghan politics and commercial development, from SIGAR’s viewpoint, was sincere and sophisticated. The SIGAR report goes on at length, in fascinating detail, about the potential for Afghan mineral development. The U.S. Geological Survey of 2009-2011 identified plenty of wealth that could easily be exploited: lapis lazuli, rubies, emeralds, copper, gold, lead, zinc, mercury, tin, magnesium, talc, tungsten, rare metals, uranium, oil and gas. But, complained the Inspector General, to any media outlet that would listen, the Pentagon continued to withhold basic facts he needs to make a realistic progress assessment, such as the number of Afghan troops that have died and the number of the Afghan forces that have received training. At NPR's request prior to the report’s release, the Department of Defense did release district political control information, showing that between November 2015 and October 2017, government district control fell from 72% to 56%. Even the Pentagon’s rosy statistics admit complete defeat.

You can’t engineer commercial development in areas controlled by the Taliban, and, thanks to the artificial value our prohibition gives their opium, the Taliban have billions with which to buy weapons, and the full logistical support of Pakistan, which can certainly count on us to maintain our opium price support. Adds Sopko, speaking to NPR (4/25/18), of the multi-billion dollar Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund administered by the World Bank, “Once the U.S. or any other donor provides its contributions to the fund, neither the World Bank nor USAID can account for how those funds are specifically spent.” Adds NPR, “The funds from the trust fund are used to pay salaries of Afghan government workers, SIGAR says, but the World Bank does not require a third-party monitor to physically verify that those government workers actually exist.” The Afghanistan Reconstruction Trust Fund, in other words, is being overseen only by the corrupt dope peddlers running the Afghan government. NBC News, 5/24/18: “Overall assessment is that despite some heroic efforts to stabilize insecure and contested areas in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2017, the program mostly failed,” said John Sopko, head of SIGAR….”

VOA News, 4/19/2018: TALIBAN BLOCK CELLPHONE SERVICE IN S. AFGHANISTAN:

“Taliban insurgents recently forcibly shut down the services of private telecommunications companies in areas under their control in Afghanistan's southern Helmand province.”

“In a note to all communication companies, Taliban warned them to “stop their operations," Zaheer added.”

“The insurgents reportedly forcibly shut down at least 120 communications towers, perhaps in a bid to disrupt Afghan military operations in the province.”

“Helmand is not the only place that the Taliban shut down telecommunications services. Local officials said the insurgent group pressured communications companies to cut operations to just a few hours a day in parts of southern Uruzgan and Zabul provinces.”

“Radmanesh of the Afghan defense ministry did not rule out opium harvest season as a possible motive behind the Taliban's move against communication services. He said the insurgents want to prevent locals from tipping off security forces about Taliban presence in poppy fields.”

“Taliban insurgents get close to 60 percent of their revenue from narcotics activities, including smuggling and taxing local growers.”

“According to a report by the U.N. Office on Drug and Crime, the total area under opium poppy cultivation in Afghanistan was estimated at 328,000 hectares (1,266 square miles) in 2017, a 63 percent increase compared with 2016.”

“‘In Helmand province alone, cultivation increased by 63,700 hectares (+79%), which accounted for about half of the total national increase,’ the U.N. report said.”

“A new air campaign against Taliban financial streams began in November 2017 under President Donald Trump's new Afghan war strategy, which has destroyed hundreds of Taliban's drug-processing labs in different parts of the country, including in southern Helmand province.”

The New York Times, ‘Afghan Government Control Over Country Falters, U.S. Report Says,’ by Rod Nordland, 1/31/2019: “KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan government’s control of its country declined late last year, in terms of both territory and population, according to a United States government report released Thursday.”

“The report, by the agency of the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, said that as of Oct. 31, the Afghan government controlled territory on which 63.5 percent of its population lived, a decrease of 1.7 percent from the previous quarter, while gains by the Taliban insurgency gave it control over territory that is home to 10.8 percent of the population.”

“The agency’s statistics are based on data provided by the American military under a mandate to report to Congress quarterly.”

Meaning that the Taliban are stronger now, in 2019, than they were in 2002. U.S. Special Representative for Afghan Peace and Reconciliation Zalmay Khalilzad, told Afghan president Ashraf Ghani at the presidential palace in Kabul, 1/28/2019, that the Taliban may agree to abandon their protection of al Qaeda in exchange for complete U.S. withdrawal. In other words, Taliban joint control, with the ISI and the Afghan government, of much of the world’s heroin business would be institutionalized in the peace plan, quite like the cocaine business in the Colombia peace plan.

The Bonn Agreement of December 2001 set out NATO goals for the coming democratic Afghan state. Karzai, in battle, addressed the group via satellite phone from his U.S. Special Forces base north of Kandahar. Many of the most powerful Afghan warlords, that is, opium growers and heroin dealers, gathered in Bonn, Germany to coordinate with the nascent NATO International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Apparently the dope dealers brought some primo Afghan hash with them to enhance the pipe dream.

By 2003 NATO and the U.S. began talking about managing the U.S. Afghan troop draw-down in service of the March 2003 Iraq invasion, dividing ‘drug interdiction,’ ‘eradication,’ ‘security maintenance,’ and ‘reconstruction’ duties between different poorly coordinated and underfunded country-based NATO commands, British, Dutch, Canadian, German, Italian, Polish and other NATO countries. With each country having its own separate rules of engagement, some, like the Germans, the Spanish and the Italians forbidden to go on the offensive, and each in an area they knew nothing about, NATO command and control literally took on the tone of the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, trying to solve riddles that made no sense on the ground.

In 2006, U.S. military intelligence told the British, who deployed the first of a planned 5700 troops to Helmand province, that the Taliban commander, the famously murderous one-legged Mullah Dadullah, could muster, at most, 2,000 troops. Of course, the CIA, per ISI request, had no sustained satellite coverage of southern Afghanistan, so it was only guessing, but the CIA didn’t bother to mention that to the Brits. A few weeks after the 25-strong British Pathfinder Platoon set up a small ‘platoon house’ in Musa Qala, in Helmand province, taking over a building in the center of town, they fell under heavy siege, at which point they got a few dozen reinforcements.

The battle of Musa Qala (‘the fortress of Moses’) lasted from July 17 to September 12, 2006. After two months of grueling daily combat in 120 degree heat, the overstretched 140 Danish troopers and 38 Royal Irish Rangers, for all their airpower and province-wide coordination, and their regional ‘platoon house’ strategy, found themselves immersed in constant heavy combat, and this situation applied at every forward base throughout the province. Every relief and support convoy was badly mauled on the way to Musa Qala, each convoy turning into an isolated full-scale battle requiring air support. The troops, baking in the platoon house at Musa Qala, were pinned down for weeks of ferocious daily combat, leaving all but the platoon house itself under Taliban control. Casualty evacuation helicopters were repeatedly forced to turn back. During a period of 40 days, they had repelled over 100 attacks, but only six resupply flights got in.

The troops trapped in Musa Qala were forced to negotiate a complete withdrawal with the Taliban-connected local villagers after suffering heavy losses. The British had to reassess that Mullah Dadullah was a very considerable field general possessed of advanced weaponry with at least 10,000 fierce troops under his command, and unlimited resupply from Quetta, just across the border in Pakistan. The British left livid with rage not only at Pakistani battlefield support of the Taliban, but with the British and American governments’ refusal to take Pakistan to task. Afghan military intelligence felt exactly the same. On May 13, 2007, British special forces shot Mullah Dadullah dead in Helmand. Mullah Dadullah, by the way, was the war criminal who blew up the 1500-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas in 2001, as an expression of Taliban disrespect for ‘idolatrous’ Hazara culture. 45

In 2006, the Taliban burned down 187 schools, killed 85 teachers and more than 600 policemen. Speaking of the 137 Taliban suicide bombings in Afghanistan in 2007, Amrullah Saleh, the head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, told Ahmed Rashid: “Every single bomber we arrest is linked to Pakistan in some way. The training, provisions, explosives, technical equipment, are all being manufactured in Pakistan, and the CIA knows this.”

A June 2007 combined U.S., NATO and Afghan intelligence report concluded that all five Taliban command centers throughout Afghanistan had active ISI support, including the Hekmatyar and Haqqani groups. The Helmand debacle, and the unnecessary Iraq war, left the overstretched Brits and Americans with nothing much but air power, a clumsy tool that kills more civilians than combat troops, further alienating the locals. 46

By December, 2008, an elite team of Pentagon analysts concluded that, under Pakistani tutelage and supply, al Qaeda and Taliban forces opposing American and British troops in Afghanistan were “demonstrating more sophisticated infantry, communications and command and control techniques. Their marksmanship is more precise, and their explosives more lethal than in previous years.” As a measure of the delusional lunatic fascism within the ISI they were supporting, the National Intelligence Estimate authored by this elite Pentagon team concluded, “Pakistan believes the Taliban will prevail in the long term…[Pakistan] continues to define India as the number one threat…. [Pakistan believes] that if militant groups were not attacking in Afghanistan, they would seek out Pakistani targets.” 47

As indeed they did. Pakistan had empowered the Islamist terrorists for so long, in fear of an Afghanistan aligned with India, that a civil war, in Pakistan, over Islamist power threatened to split the Pakistani army. By April, 2009, the Taliban-connected ‘Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law,’ (Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammedi, TNSM) along with al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Islam, the Army of Islam, had taken complete military control of the entire Pakistani province of Swat, a few miles north of Islamabad, forcing President Zardari to accept Taliban-allied control of administration, schools and local law – instituting the Taliban’s idea of Sharia law. This was real blowback for the Pakistanis, karma. More than 2.5 million Pakistanis fled the province. The Pakistani army was forced to mount a huge expedition to retake Swat, but the entire Swat Taliban leadership escaped, and are now, in 2019, running a ruthless terror campaign, poisoning Pakistan’s civil life, aiming their murders specifically at the government. This is the civil war Musharraf engineered and America financed. According to NPR, 4/13/2019, the Taliban now control half of Afghanistan.

The American analysts, after 2010, came up with numerous practical policy recommendations – more troops, unified chain of command combining American and NATO operations, more and better Afghan forces – but this one stumped them, how to starve the Taliban of its opium income without alienating Afghan farmers, the political and military backbone of this rural country. Of course, that riddle has no answer, Alice, but international legalization or decriminalization, which is not in the military toolkit. Either we stop running opium’s price support, stop pretending, in law, that opium is the same thing as heroin, or we lose. As of 2019, most of Helmand is now controlled by the Taliban, however many brave Americans, Brits and Danes fell there. The Taliban learned the lesson of operational independence the CIA itself taught them. As DCIA William Casey put it, in relation to the Contra-Cocaine operation he engineered, guerrilla war rooted in the drug business was “a completely self-funding, off-the-shelf operation.”

The resurgent Taliban gives us a headline like this literally every day: Mon April 30, 2018: EIGHT JOURNALISTS AMONG 29 KILLED IN TWIN AFGHANISTAN BLASTS, By Euan McKirdy and Ehsan Popalzai, CNN

“Kabul, Afghanistan - A number of journalists, including a senior AFP photographer, have died in a suicide attack in Kabul as a bomber disguised as a fellow cameraman detonated a second bomb at the site of an earlier explosion.”

“At least 29 people died in the two explosions on Monday morning in the Afghan capital Kabul, according to government officials.”

As The Guardian put it the next day, May 1, 2018: THE US AND AFGHANISTAN: CAN’T WIN THE WAR, CAN’T STOP IT, CAN’T LEAVE

“LATEST ATTACKS FOCUS ATTENTION ON CONTINUING FAILURE OF TRUMP’S EFFORTS TO STABILISE THE COUNTRY

“The latest, dreadful suicide bombings in Kabul and Kandahar, which killed more than 50 people on Monday, have again focused attention on the continuing failure of American-led efforts to stabilise the country. After 16 years of conflict, critics say, the US is in a triple bind: it cannot win the war, it cannot halt the war, and it cannot leave.”

“Last week, the Taliban launched their 2018 spring offensive, threatening ever greater mayhem. According to US estimates, government forces control less than 60% of Afghanistan, with the remainder either contested or under the control of the insurgents.”

“Another problem is the terrorists are now specifically targeting Afghanistan’s fragile, fledgling democracy. Hence the repeated attacks on government ministries, organisers of October’s parliamentary and district elections, and journalists working for independent local and western media.”

The resurgent Taliban gives us a headline like this literally every day: Mon April 30, 2018: EIGHT JOURNALISTS AMONG 29 KILLED IN TWIN AFGHANISTAN BLASTS, By Euan McKirdy and Ehsan Popalzai, CNN

“At least 29 people died in the two explosions on Monday morning in the Afghan capital Kabul, according to government officials.”

As The Guardian put it the next day, May 1, 2018:

“Every new act of mass murder in a high-profile public location weakens the authority, at home and abroad, of Ashraf Ghani, Afghanistan’s besieged president. Ghani unveiled an ambitious peace plan in February, offering an immediate ceasefire and unconditional talks. The only reply he has received so far is a wave of bloodshed. Ghani is not alone in his impotence. Last August, Donald Trump unveiled a “fight to win” strategy, reversing his previous hands-off stance. Trump deployed an additional 3,000 troops, increased the scope and autonomy of counterterrorism operations, and asked NATO allies to do more to help.”

“Trump’s initiative has proved almost as ineffective as his decision, a year ago last month, to drop the ‘mother of all bombs’ (officially, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast or MOAB) on a supposed Isis cave and tunnel complex in eastern Afghanistan. Trump boasted of a big victory, lending new meaning to the word ‘bombastic.’”

“Rather than curb the violence and enforce the peace, Trump’s green light for greater use of armed drones, quick-fire US air force strikes and special forces counter-terror ops appears to have had the opposite effect.”

U.S. Department of State, Office of the Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Fact Sheet

January 24, 2017: “The United States welcomed Pakistan’s pledge to deny any militant group safe haven or the use of Pakistani soil to launch terrorist attacks. Pakistan continues to conduct significant military operations in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and other areas of the country to counter domestic terrorism….U.S. security assistance to Pakistan is focused on strengthening the counterterrorism (CT) and counterinsurgency (COIN) capabilities of the Pakistan security forces [the ISI], and promoting closer security ties and interoperability with the United States. U.S. security assistance has directly supported Pakistan’s CT operations in the FATA.”

That is, in the name of counterterrorism and counternarcotics, we parrot the same old disconnected boilerplate propaganda justifying our continued cooperation with Pakistan’s ISI, and its regional allies, which has turned Afghanistan into the source of 90% of the world’s heroin. So instead of a ‘crack epidemic’ we now have an ‘opioid epidemic’ – justifying, guess what, more domestic police funding, more mass-imprisonment, and yet more funding for the regional militaries actually dealing the heroin.

“But it’s funny,” an Afridi chief told a reporter from the Financial Times in 1989, “that the CIA are using the very people that the State Department are trying to stop. All these Western aid projects have helped opium poppy production in Afghanistan and the Americans have produced a new incentive - offering bribes to those who destroy their crops. They don’t learn. They tried that in Pakistan and production went up.” The Afridi chief himself ran numerous heroin refineries. The on-again-off-again civil war now raging throughout Afghanistan and Tajikistan, which has destroyed herds, orchards and snow-melt irrigation systems, devastating traditional agricultural production, has left artificially valuable opium as one of the few commodities farmers can rely on to feed their families. 48

Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, 2016 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (INCSR), Report: “Tajikistan is located on one of the highest volume illicit drug trafficking routes in the world, between Afghanistan’s opium harvests on its southern border and the illicit drug markets of the Russian Federation and Eastern Europe to the north. The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimated in 2011 that 75-80 metric tons (MT) of Afghan heroin and 35-40 MT of opium flowed through Tajikistan on its way north, but the country seizes only a small fraction of those amounts. The Tajik government’s high level of commitment to drug control did not result in an equivalent increase in drug seizures in 2015, possibly due to smugglers changing techniques or routes. As in past years, there were few major traffickers arrested and imprisoned. Nevertheless, Tajikistan was able to seize higher volumes of opiates than any other country in Central Asia….In 2015, the United States provided $8 million to help improve the professionalism, effectiveness, and operational capabilities of Tajikistan’s law enforcement agencies.” Which agencies are, of course, dealing the drugs. Same script over the decades, word for word.

U.S. Department of State, 2014 Narcotics Control Strategy Report: “Drug trafficking has reinforced corruption throughout all levels of the Tajik government…. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) estimates that annually about 25 percent of the heroin and 15 percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan is smuggled through Central Asia, with 85 percent of that amount passing through Tajikistan, totaling between 75 and 80 metric tons per year of heroin and between 30 and 35 metric tons of opium. Based on these estimates, Tajik law-enforcement agencies were on pace to seize just over one percent of the opiates trafficked through the country in 2013. Unofficial estimates of the percentage of the country’s economy linked to drug trafficking range from 20 to 30 percent.” The 1% is, of course, the price support.

Eurasianet, Jan. 11, 2018: “US Planned Big Boost in Military Aid to Tajikistan: Documents show that the US planned to train 1,200 special forces troops from Tajikistan.” President Emomali Rahmon has ruled Tajikistan with an iron hand since 1994. The internet is blocked, no media criticism of the regime is tolerated and all direct protest is severely punished. Despite the fact that our own State Department publishes the fact that this fascist is a world-class heroin dealer, our military privateers finance him, through the Defense Department, attaching no political conditions to our training of Rahmon’s troops. This means, of course, that our military contractors are, as they have always been, in the heroin business. It also means that our Defense Department is unilaterally making policy without input from the State Department. It also means that Trump’s ‘cutoff’ of military aid to Paklistan was simply Trump’s usual meaningless verbal diarrhea, Diarrhea Don – somebody ought to start a hashtag. The U.S. continues to aid Pakistan, as well as the ISI’s regional business partners in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan.

DEA agents burning hashish in Operation Albatross in Afghanistan, 2008

DEA agents, that is heavily armed commandos, destroyed tons of hashish in Afghanistan in Operation Albatross in 2008, publicly burning it in Kandahar. The cultural hostility this created, and the political legitimacy it gave the likes of the Taliban, Haqqani and Hekmatyar, cannot be exaggerated. Opium and hashish production is as traditional and ancient in Afghanistan and Tajikistan as grape growing is in southern Europe. Opium production in the Golden Crescent of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran goes back before Alexander the Great in 330 BC. Opium was socially and medically basic to this part of the world throughout the Middle Ages. It is alcohol that is viewed with opprobrium, not opium or hashish, the raw ingredients of primo charas.

Former CIA Director Richard Helms was Ambassador to Iran in 1975, arranging international military sales with the Shah’s army and secret police, the SAVAK. Helms accurately reported that “In some educated, high society circles, it [opium] is smoked socially after dinner.” We really do have something to learn from Iran. 49

Our aggressive military globalization of Prohibition is a colonialist snooker that has backfired, blowing our colonialist terrorism back at us. Prohibition, because of the artificial value it gives drug crops, creates drug gangs out of whole cloth, destabilizing civil society, almost always putting the police in the drug business. German Nazis and Italian Fascists embraced drug prohibition, while simultaneously going into the drug business. Prohibition is the fascist colonialist tactic that has destabilized the Central American countries that are now hemorrhaging a flood of terrified refugees. But we continue to finance those hoodlum governments. It’s like insisting that the Aymara of Quillabamba in highland Peru are cocaine-dealing ‘hostiles’ because they shoot back when Fujimori and Montesinos steal their coca-growing land at gunpoint. The DEA retorted that the Aymara are mass-producing and distributing cocaine globally, and that’s why it’s necessary to help Fujimori and Montesinos, and their successors, the actual cocaine industrialists – Boy Scout Barry’s line. We have to incinerate Aymara villages with napalm, “for the children.”

Likewise Operation Somalia Express in 2006, which destroyed tons of imported khat by burning it in public. As part of this operation, the DEA broke into numerous Somali-American homes in Seattle, New York, Minneapolis and St. Paul, in the middle of the night, terrifying innocent families, violently rousting observant Muslim women in their nightshirts, for using an herb that is as commonplace as orange pekoe tea in the Horn of Africa. Khat is both legal and sacred in Somalia, Djibouti, Kenya, Uganda, Ethiopia, Yemen and Israel. Israel sees no need to mindlessly pound its large population of Beta Israel Ethiopians for chewing khat, which simply makes them energetic and cheerful.

Dividing khat into portions for a social evening of chewing, tea and conversation with neighbors, Mogadishu, Somalia, 1990; Enjoying fresh khat, Sanaa, Yemen, 1/15/2009

Reported the Seattle Times, August 17, 2009, of those attacked and humiliated in the middle of the night in their own homes by heavily armed DEA agents, “Some have turned up fighting for a radical Islamic group in Somalia called Al-Shabaab, which U.S. intelligence sources have tied to al Qaeda.” And then the Keystone Cops look straight into the camera and innocently ask why they hate us. Opium and hashish are cultural touchstones in Afghanistan, surrounded by ancient group ritual, revered, as is khat in Somalia, coca in Peru, and wine in France. Instead of naming it ‘Operation Somalia Express,’ they should have called it ‘Operation Al-Shabaab Recruitment.’ The transparent racism of this behavior is obvious.

Khat Market, Harar, Ethiopia, 10/25/2007

The Cure

As Nobel laureate in economics Milton Friedman put it in a 1991 interview, “The case for prohibiting drugs is exactly as strong and as weak as the case for prohibiting people from overeating.” Friedman warned, 50 years ago, that we were institutionalizing global organized crime by pretending in law that the pure physics of supply and demand could be overcome with legislation. Most other major macroeconomic thinkers since have issued the same warning.

Friedman responded to journalist Randy Paige’s question: “Let us deal first with the issue of legalization of drugs. How do you see America changing for the better under that system?” “I see America with half the number of prisons, half the number of prisoners, ten thousand fewer homicides a year, inner cities in which there’s a chance for these poor people to live without being afraid for their lives, citizens who might be respectable who are now addicts not being subject to becoming criminals in order to get their drug, being able to get drugs for which they’re sure of the quality. You know, the same thing happened under prohibition of alcohol as is happening now….Under prohibition of alcohol, deaths from alcohol poisoning, from poisoning by things that were mixed in with the bootleg alcohol, went up sharply. Similarly, under drug prohibition, deaths from overdose, from adulterations, from adulterated substances have gone up.”

Raymond Kendall, Secretary General of Interpol from 1985 to 2000, the world’s top cop, called for international drug decriminalization as the keynote speaker at the annual congress of his 176-nation International Police Organization meeting in Beijing in October of 1995. A former fighter pilot and Scotland Yard Special Branch officer, from 1971 to 1985 Kendall was Interpol’s Assistant Director of Drugs: “If you look at the real threat to our societies today, what you have is a combination of organized crime and drug trafficking.’’ Decriminalization, since it would collapse the commodities’ value, would bankrupt the traffickers. This tactic is necessary because “we’re pretty overwhelmed.” Traffickers “have the ability to corrupt our institutions at the highest level. If they can do that, then it means our democracies are in real danger.’’ 1

The problem is structural, and much bigger than Afghanistan, Mexico or Colombia. The trade is global, and you just can’t enforce laws that are lies. As I said at the beginning of Vol. I of this book, the standing legal precedents of today’s prohibition laws are a tissue of overt empirical lies written into law between 1906 and 1918 by the same racist killers who wrote ‘separate but equal’ into law, and for the same reasons. The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, The Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914, and the 1918 18th Amendment, Prohibition, are a tissue of overt empirical lies. In 1920, Prohibition was the number one political platform of the KKK. As I have shown in Volume I, the original Prohibitionist argument in the contemporary media was one long scapegoating racist diatribe, interspersed with organized medicine’s self-aggrandizing pharmacological sophistry, confusing the newly-invented refined concentrates with the traditional whole herbs, so as to restrict the whole herbs, over-the-counter favorites, to the same prescription system as the refined concentrates.

The drug war is a snooker, designed, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to turn the world into a banana republic, that, like all banana republics, criminalizes human tribal culture for the purpose of industrial enslavement, that is, criminalizes normal human herbalism. Prohibition is a Reichstag Fire designed to justify sucking as much of the public purse as possible into the military industrial-police-prison-treatment complex, by doing what slavers have always done, criminalize normal human behavior for profit.

By artificially exploding street violence, by inducing a street fight over dealing territory for prohibited pain killers and euphoriants, drug prohibition effectively diverts the culture’s eye, and wealth, from the real problems, structural poverty, industrial ecocide, industrial oligarchy and confiscatory taxation of working folks. Instead the industrial slavers have the local police chasing poor folks for medicating their pain. The problem is the pain, not the painkillers. We are born hardwired omnivores. ‘Demand’ is human herbalism, instinctive oral behavior related to eating. It cannot be ‘reduced.’ Human herbal ingestion, in response to pain, is as unconscious as sucking on your mother’s breast when you’re born.

America’s drug prohibition laws are built on these legally institutionalized slaver lies:

1. that human herbalism is abnormal,

2. that human herbalism causes crime,

3. that whole herbs are the same as refined concentrates,

4. that pharmacological evidence is irrelevant in drug cases,

5. that the pure physics of supply and demand can be overcome with legislation.

If you want to understand the unconscious persistence of racism in American culture, understand that we are living with the legal slaver definition of all people as industrial machinery, that is, with the slaver demonization of human tribal culture, human instinct, for which the ethnic scapegoat is the unconscious symbol. Jews, with their historical experience and consequent theological rejection of human enslavement, and their theological centrality to slaver Christianity, became that tribal symbol in the Roman slave state, as did African Americans in America. Ethnically specific racism may have been repealed in American law, but the legal substrate of that racism, hostility to tribal culture, the inquisitorial neurosis, has not.

The same racist killers who wrote ‘separate but equal’ into law wrote all of the standing legal precedents of today’s drug laws. As one of the authors of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, today’s update of those precedents, Nixon’s Domestic Affairs Advisor John Ehrlichman, put it: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

But Ehrlichman’s lies are still current law, and have helped to produce another Nixon, Trump. What are “the Mexicans” doing? “Bringing drugs.” The Drug War is the Vietnam War in slow motion, a completely unnecessary self-inflicted global strategic disaster. There is no such thing as ‘drug-caused crime’ – it’s all Prohibition caused crime, hoodlum fights over possession or dealing territory caused by the artificial value Prohibition gives these demanded commodities. It is that artificial value alone that creates the drug gangs – without Prohibition they don’t exist. There is no drug threat, there is a Prohibition threat.

That’s what Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, now called the Law Enforcement Action Partnership (LEAP), with over 100,000 members in 190 countries, has to say. That’s what most professional narcotics cops will tell you – they are policing fights over the artificial value of these commodities, not fights caused by inebriation. Former Tonawanda, NY police Captain Peter Christ, a co-founder of LEAP, explained to Vice News, Jun 9 2013, “By the time I was on the job four years, it became very evident to me that no matter how vigorously I or my brother and sister officers worked, it didn’t make any difference. We would have a series of burglaries or rapes in our community, somebody would arrest the burglar or the rapist, and for a while we wouldn’t have any more of those crimes. But no matter how many drug arrests we made, it didn’t make any difference. Because those people weren’t victims, they were willing participants in an economic transfer. It’s called business…. There will never be a drug-free America. Drugs are always going to be a part of our culture. So, the question becomes: Who do you want to control the marketplace - gangsters, thugs, and terrorists, or licensed businesspeople with regulation and control? That’s the only discussion we can have, and it’s the one we’re not having.”

In 2014, LEAP drafted its “Proposed Amendment of United Nations Drug Treaties,” a comprehensive amendment that would replace the tissue of overt empirical lies foisted on the world by the United States, China and other industrial powers in three global U.N. treaties between 1961 and 1988. These treaties, by legally pretending that whole herbs are the same as refined concentrates, effectively criminalize human tribal culture worldwide, turning the world into one great factory floor. The LEAP replacement would allow countries to act independently, rather than following the one-size-fits-all blanket criminalization mandated by the treaties. Don’t expect China or the U.S. to get on board anytime soon.

Today the fascist cancer, rationalized by the constant media pounding, has metastasized into massive arbitrary imprisonment and seizure of private property. Warned Fletcher Prouty: “We have been subjected to so many anti-American and pro-Communist notions all in the name of anti-Communism, that words and facts almost elude us.” For “communism” read “terrorism,” “McGuffin,” “McCaffrey,” “drug.” 2

“Imagine,” Barry McCaffrey told the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime, 10/1/97, speaking of the medical marijuana initiatives, “a ballot initiative to change the rules by which the Federal Aeronautics and Aviation Air Traffic Control System manages commercial aircraft in California. It is disturbing to think that well-funded activists in one state could establish different procedures from the rest of the country on a matter that clearly affects the well-being of all of us.”

McCaffrey literally equated, as do the federal laws, the intensely personal doctor-patient relationship with interstate commercial aviation, as if our own bodies were public carriers on which we must buy tickets. That, as Fletcher Prouty would say, is communist - the very essence of the bureaucratic rape of the individual. In fact, in February of 1999, Al Gore and Barry McCaffrey literally announced another five year plan to cut drug use by 50% by 2005. A five year plan! Today, in 2019, too many Democrats still parrot the DEA ‘opioid epidemic’ propaganda, though most do support legalization of pot, and medicalization of treatment, rather than criminalization.

McCaffrey is answered by the lawyer who drafted much of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act for Congress, Eric Sterling, Counsel to the House Judiciary Committee from 1979 to 89. Sterling is now Executive Director of The Criminal Justice Policy Foundation. Sterling saw the sharp distinction he drew between street-level quantities and dealer-level quantities destroyed in committee by grandstanding hardliners, so that kids caught on the street are now routinely facing mandatory sentences designed for big-time wholesalers. A $20 sale of cocaine on the street brings the same sentence as attempted murder. Sterling was so shocked by the cruelty that he has become one of the most effective legalization advocates in the country:

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution are reserved to the people. Where is the power in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution that allows Congress to say, ‘We declare that your brain is off limits to you. You cannot use those cells in your brain that opium can affect, or that marijuana stimulates. Your brain is not really yours to control. The space between your ears - that’s not really yours to control. We’re the Congress. That’s our space. You are prohibited from using your brain in unapproved ways.’ Is this a power that Congress has? If so, where did it get it and when?….is your brain interstate commerce? Is your bedroom interstate commerce?”

“Essentially the legal basis for the war on drugs depends on the assumption of total power by the Congress and the Federal government to regulate the most intimate aspects of our lives, the very dreams that we have. And the propaganda arm of the war on drugs has been successful in persuading us to unwittingly surrender this vital power over ourselves to the Federal government. Indeed the propaganda of the urgency of the war on drugs has been so successful, many of our fellow citizens consciously believe we must surrender ourselves for the good of the state.”

“Seen in this light, the war on drugs is the corner stone of an as yet unbuilt edifice of totalitarianism. Challenging the war on drugs is the most important issue facing civil liberties and the preservation of the Bill of Rights.” 3

Through Interpol, the CIA-FBI-DEA has recently popularized, and legalized, property forfeiture, entrapment, informer payoffs and wiretapping among European police. Some of Europe’s more charming traditions, such as warrantless searches, limitation of the exclusionary rule, limiting the right to counsel and lengthening uncharged detention time, have been legalized in the U.S. through DEA efforts. 4

Since the Rehnquist court had severely limited the exclusion of illegally obtained evidence, cops have very little incentive to worry about the legality of their searches. It is the innocent, of course, against whom charges are never brought, who suffer most from illegal searches.

Like so many others, former Kansas City and San José police chief Joseph McNamara sees us sinking into “incremental totalitarianism...putting hundreds of thousands of people in jail using illegal police methods. In 1995, state and local police made roughly one million arrests for possession of drugs. Such arrests should require a search warrant, yet very few warrants were used. In hundreds of thousands of cases, otherwise honest police feel justified in illegally searching people and then lying about it under oath. They call it ‘testilying’ or ‘white perjury.’ In cities all across the country, thugs with badges have planted evidence, sold drugs, and committed other drug-related crimes that are often protected by a police code of silence... In the minds of many law-enforcement officers, the enemy is automatically guilty and must be destroyed.” 5

According to Buffalo police, only 10 people were charged with drug law violations in 1989 in over 600 stops at the airport. At Denver’s Stapleton Airport it took 2000 stops to make 49 small-scale possession busts. Because of the “drug exception to the Bill of rights,” many of those 2000 innocent people had to submit to strip searches and confiscation of their cash, and were devoid of any practical legal recourse. The DEA’s own records prove that only 17% of forfeitures involve big-ticket items over $50,000. 6

Since 1984 property forfeiture requires virtually no evidence at all, only ‘probable cause,’ that is, the same vague suspicion that can be used to justify a search warrant. ‘Probable cause’ can include hearsay, an anonymous tip or the opinion of a dog. By arbitrarily defining the matter as ‘civil,’ not ‘criminal,’ no legal proceedings whatever are required. And in civil forfeiture cases, the burden of proof is on the property owner to prove that the property had not been used illegally. The inanimate property is legally guilty until proven innocent. The courts have even held that property illegally seized may be forfeited anyway if the police can show ‘probable cause’ at the forfeiture hearing. 7 8

Thousands of cars, boats and planes have been seized because they were the vehicle for unauthorized personal consumption. The Scripps Oceanographic Institute had a very expensive research vessel confiscated because a crew member left the remains of a single joint on board. That is straight out of the Codex Theodosianus, 438 CE, the ancient Graeco-Roman inquisitorial code, which, apparently, is canonical to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Codex, via Justinian’s Code, became the basic civil confiscation law of the medieval Inquisition. 9

Another classic inquisitorial device legally employed by today’s narks is the seizure of all money needed to hire a lawyer before indictment. Defense lawyers often have all their financial records subpoenaed, forcing them to become witnesses against their own clients and withdraw from the case. As of 1986, should a defense lawyer accept more than $10,000 from an accused drug dealer, specifically for the purpose of legal defense, the lawyer can be charged with money laundering and drug trafficking. These tactics has been used to keep the best lawyers out of court. 10

Worse yet, in 80% of all “drug-related” seizures the owner is never charged with any crime! The “drug-relationship” is pure fiction! As former New York City Police Chief Patrick Murphy puts it, “The large monetary value of forfeitures…has created a great temptation for state and local police departments to target assets rather than criminal activity.” 11 12

In 2017, California passed sweeping civil forfeiture reform that removed the financial incentives for law enforcement to seize property. Florida, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wyoming have taken similar action. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) introduced the Fifth Amendment Integrity Restoration (FAIR) Act of 2017, which would, if passed, eliminate the Department of Justice’s Equitable Sharing Program which encouraged the local cops to hunt Donald Scott for the value of his 200-acre Malibu ranch. The 2015 version of their bill was defeated by their own rightwing, and the 2017 version faces the same fate. 13

Before the cops shot Donald Scott to death on his 200-acre Malibu ranch in their October 2, 1992 dawn raid, they had his valuable property appraised ($5 million). Scott had previously refused to sell his ranch to the National Park Service, which ran a large recreational area bordering Scott’s ranch. This refusal was apparently a factor in the L. A. County Sheriff Department’s formation of an investigative team composed of agents from the LAPD, the Park Service, the DEA, the Forest Service, the California National Guard and the California Bureau of Narcotics Enforcement.

Had their SWAT troops found a few pot plants, they could have seized the whole ranch. But they found nothing. Scott didn’t smoke pot. Ventura County DA Michael Bradbury concluded that the police lied to obtain the warrant, that there never had been any pot grown on the Scott ranch, and that the raid was motivated by the desire to seize the property. He called Scott’s death a homicide, as did the death certificate. Scott’s heartbroken widow got $5 million from the cops for wrongful death. This story is famous because it is typical of thousands. The only thing unusual is Scott’s wealth, and the settlement.

In a precedent-setting 1971 case, the Pearson Yacht Leasing Company had one of its yachts stolen by the police because a renter smoked a joint on board. The Supreme Court acknowledged that the owner couldn’t have known, but insisted that “statutory forfeiture schemes are not rendered unconstitutional because of their applicability to the property interests of innocents.” Inquisitorial doubletalk straight out of the Codex Theodosianus. 14

That is, the need of the police “to deter” takes precedence over the Fifth Amendment. That is precisely what the Founding Fathers were trying to avoid when they wrote the Fifth Amendment in the first place. “…nor shall [any person] be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Warned Thomas Jefferson: “A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither.”

An informant can plant some pot or opium poppy in a remote corner of a 300-acre farm, report it to the police, and receive as much as 25% of the value of the farm on its seizure. That’s the same percentage that “denouncers” got under Theodosius. The farmer can’t claim ignorance because the mere presence of the pot is presumptive evidence of “willful blindness” or “negligence.” Although the 1988 Anti-Drug Abuse Act provides for an “innocent owner” defense, the courts have generally interpreted this to mean that the farmer can claim to be an “innocent owner” only if he regularly scoured his land and uprooted the pot before the police got to it, that is, if he did all that “reasonably could be expected to prevent the proscribed use of the property.” That catch-22 can first be found, no kidding, in the Codex Theodosianus. 15 16

Eighty year-old Bradshaw Bowman had his scenic 160 acres in southern Utah, and his home, seized because a convicted drug-dealer showed police a few pot plants growing on a hiking trail well out of sight of the old man’s house, plants the dealer himself could easily have planted. Solely on the word of small time hoods out for cash, police have repeatedly filed forfeiture proceedings against expensive real estate, because they too stand to profit. What was done to that old man is unspeakable, and it is being done by police in this country all the time. Statewide pot legalization has not slowed federal property seizure at all. 17

As the Washington Post Wonkblog by Christopher Ingraham puts it, 3/29/2017, “Since 2007, the DEA has taken $3.2 billion in cash from people not charged with a crime.” Ingraham’s figures come straight from the DEA Inspection Division’s own March, 2017 review of cash seizures and asset forfeitures. That total does not include the dollar value of other seized assets, like cars, homes, electronics and clothing. Homes!

Why is self-medication a crime? What’s wrong with taking pain killers if you’re in pain? Why aren’t safe pharmakons available? Whose body is it, anyway? When did the lilies of the field cease to be my birthright? Many of America’s best law enforcement officials and public health workers are asking the same questions. A Hoover Institute poll of over 500 law-enforcement leaders conducted at the 9th International Conference on Drug Policy Reform, Santa Monica, 10/19/95, by former Kansas City and San José police chief Joseph McNamara, found that 95% thought the war on drugs was lost and 98% thought drug use wasn’t primarily a police problem. And that was 25 years ago. Today, 2019, Pew, Gallup and Rasmussen show that more than 65% of Americans are ready to end this inquisition. 18 19

Chief McNamara points out that there isn’t a major urban police force in the country that isn’t thoroughly infiltrated by drug money. Hundreds of narks are indicted for extortion, murder or drug-dealing every year. And the newspaper stories of police brutality during drug raids could fill a 600-page book annually. “And when we allowed our politicians to push cops into a war that they’ll never win, they can’t win, and let them begin to think of themselves as soldiers, the mentality comes that anything goes.” 20

Because of the lies we have written into law, great dealing structures, like the Gangster Disciples, can use their army of wholesalers to front an ambitious 12-year-old a “sixty-pack” of ten-dollar crack vials. An outgoing hustler can sell-out in an hour. The kid keeps a hundred, turns $500 over to the wholesaler, and gets another sixty-pack. The kid can make $500 in a day, a mind-bending fortune to a 12-year-old, and the wholesaler, running an army of little hustlers, makes many times that. The cops end up at war with the whole neighborhood, and the competition between gangs for dealing territory turns violent.

It wasn’t alcohol that drove the Prohibition gangs - they were hoods, not drunks. In 1918 Wayne Wheeler, the head of the Anti-Saloon League, insisted that the “contagious disease of alcoholism” would be stopped by a $5 million appropriation to the Prohibition Unit. By 1927 the beleaguered sixth Commissioner of Prohibition told Congress $300 million couldn’t do it. God knows how many hundreds of billions in today’s money we incinerate every year. Prison spending alone was up to $40 billion in 1994, a 1000% increase in 20 years. In 2017, it rose to $80 billion. 21 22

20% of all federal prisoners are in jail for nonviolent drug offenses, and half of them are first-time offenders, kids. 19 year-old Keith Edwards was asked by a nark to score a little crack on the street for him. The trusting kid made a few bucks and was asked to do it four more times. The nark accumulated enough weight to charge the kid with felony dealing, earning him a ten year sentence without the possibility of parole, ruining his life. The nark got a commendation for a felony bust. 23 24

In 1990, 17 year-old Nicole Richardson, a high school senior in Mobile, Alabama, was called by a young dealer working with her boyfriend Jeff. The dealer had been entrapped by a DEA agent while selling Jeff’s ever-popular LSD to his fellow psychonauts. Nicole, who knew Jeff needed the money the dealer owed him, told the dealer, in the tape-recorded conversation, where Jeff might be found.

Since Nicole, unlike Jeff, wasn’t a dealer herself or even a user, she had no information of use to the DEA. She was therefore unable to trade information for a lesser charge. Nicole completed her ten years without the possibility of parole for that one unsolicited telephone conversation she had with a friend of her boyfriend. Judge Alex Howard, who had no sentencing option, complained that “this case presents to me the top example of a miscarriage of justice…” That young woman was tortured.

28 year-old Tonya Drake, a mother of four with no criminal record, was offered $47 to mail a package by a casual old acquaintance. She didn’t open the package, which contained 8 ounces of crack cocaine. She was sentenced to 10 years in prison, devastating her four little children. These stories number in the thousands. In 1992 the average murderer doing time in state prison was released after serving 5.9 years, so as to make room for nonviolent drug offenders. 25

Judge Robert Sweet: “My contribution, if I have one, I think must come as a result of my experience as a trial judge, although some of my days as deputy mayor [of New York] might be relevant. The problem that was facing me in this present job [as U.S. district judge] is the sentencing of an eighteeen-year-old with no criminal record to a mandatory ten years because he sought to make $200 working as a security guard in a drugstore. Of course, it was the wrong kind of drugstore, and it was in the South Bronx, and there was a bust. That problem made me really focus on our present policy....”

“For me certain facts establish that the policy we have is a failure: An unregulated industry estimated to be at 150 billion dollars. Profit margins up to 5000 percent, federal expenditures of 11 billion dollars, an addict population of 5 to 6 million, and the greatest jail population in our history. Looking at those facts persuaded me that money is the root of this particular evil and that the elimination of illegality would eliminate the money and the crime and that the money spent on balloons and interdiction would be better spent on treatment and education.” 26 27

Dr. Jerome Miller, author of Search and Destroy: African-American Males and the Criminal Justice System: “The war on drugs is causing far more destruction than the use of illicit drugs ever could. The widespread use of stiff sentences to force drug users and minor dealers to inform on others has helped escalate the violence. Gang-related murders have become the way young men are expected to establish membership in the group and convince fellow gang members that they’re not snitches who will ever rat on them.” The radical rise in the popularity of guns is directly attributable to the “search and destroy” behavior of the police. The reaction of a tough kid to police violence, and to the gang-up economics of Prohibition, is violence, not submission.

“Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and improve law enforcement. It is hard to conceive of any other single measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order.” Prof. Milton Friedman, a Nobel Prize-winning macroeconomic thinker, estimates that controlled drug legalization would free up 400,000 police officers, who could then get serious about serial, violent and organized crime. Of course, getting serious about organized crime has a political dimension that will appeal only to the truly antifascist. 28

The popularity of cigarettes, alcohol and synthetic opioids is directly related to the unavailability of the safer and more calming herbal inebriants, like marijuana leaf and flower, coca leaf or opium sap. In 2015, cardiovascular disease killed 832,000 people in the U.S. All drugs, legal and illegal, killed 52,000 people in a U.S. population of 321 million. Netherlands registered 198 drug deaths for 17 million people the same year, which is 3762 drug deaths adjusted for American population numbers. Of American street drug deaths, a third were probably caused by combination with alcohol, and another third by poisonous adulterants. That’s 3700:52000, an even higher ratio than all the other Dutch:U.S. crime and addiction figures. There has been ZERO cannabis deaths in the U.S.. Taking a shower, according to the CDC, is considerably more dangerous than smoking pot or hash, which, I suppose, makes water a “substance.”

In Holland, the Department of Alcohol, Drugs and Tobacco is part of the federal Ministry of Welfare, Health and Cultural Affairs. The Netherlands’ top nark, isn’t: “The Dutch do not rely heavily on criminal law and law enforcement in general. They prefer a policy of social control, adaptation, and integration to a policy of social exclusion through criminalization, punishment, and stigmatization,” says Eddy Engelsman.

“I refer, for instance, to problems of highly priced drugs causing drug-related crimes, of prostitution and social ostracism, and of increased health risks such as AIDS. The effects of heroin and cocaine use are too often confused with the effects of their illegality.” 29

This anti-inquisitorial mentality has produced 15 to 20% of our addiction and crime rates, an efficient and humane criminal justice system that is neither overloaded nor corrupt, and the complete elimination of intravenous hepatitis and AIDS transmission. The Dutch, in other words, with almost exactly the opposite policies advocated by American prohibitionists, have achieved most of the strategic goals the prohibitionists say they want to achieve. 30

Possession of pot, in quantities of less than an ounce, has been de facto legal in Holland since 1975, although technically punishable by 30 days in the slammer. Many Amsterdam coffee shops openly sell marijuana as a regular item on the menu. Kids, over 16, are intentionally allowed to rock out without incurring the hostility of the police. They are made to understand that this tolerance is conditional on their respect for their neighbors. 31

Personal cocaine, heroin, amphetamine and mushroom use is also legally tolerated, although technically punishable by up to a year in jail. Importation and large-scale dealing are severely punished, by Dutch standards: 12 years for isolates, 4 for pot, maximum. The spectacular result, according to the Dutch Ministry of Welfare, Health and Cultural Affairs, is “virtually no young people under 20 using heroin or cocaine.” Why is the U.S. rate of per capita heroin use six times higher than the Dutch? Why aren’t we falling all over ourselves to adopt their policies?

Since the Netherlands’ few addicts don’t fear public health workers, they can be weaned from alkaloids or stabilized with love and understanding, the only medicine that works. People addicted to pain killers are in pain, and people who insist on ecstatic use of concentrated compounds will continue to insist. The Ministry of Health actually finances “junkie unions” that encourages them to coalesce around newsletters advertising health and prevention related activities. 75% of Holland’s heroin users are reached by government outpatient clinics, and most of those are on ‘methadone maintenance,’ a substitute palliative. ‘Heroin maintenance’ works just as well, and is in use elsewhere in Europe. The lack of legal opprobrium allows the users to “live relatively normal lives,” according to the Dutch Ministry of Health - that is, not to drive everyone crazy with their criminality seeking money to buy illegal drugs. The clinics also offer free needle exchange, psychotherapy, group therapy and job placement. More stable older addicts are often simply seen along with their physician’s other patients, and fill their methadone prescriptions at the local pharmacy.

Many cities throughout Western Europe have adopted this strategy with either methadone or heroin, thus bankrupting the local black market and eliminating crime. British policy has been leaning toward the use of formal cautions for drug users, rather than indictment, referring them to treatment instead of court. These policies, in place since the late 60s, resulted in a 1994 HIV positivity rate near zero in Liverpool addicts. At this time the rate of HIV positivity in New York City addicts was 60%. In 2019, NYC, using a combination of PrEP, “pre-exposure prophylaxis,” TasP, “treatment as prevention,” social outreach, needle exchange and free STD clinics have dropped the rate of new HIV transmission to near zero. 32

Portugal, following its 2001 decriminalization of all consumer drug possession, has had resounding success. Portugal has the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana, heroin and cocaine use in either the E.U. or the U.S.. The number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction rose after decriminalization, and the money saved on enforcement funded the treatment. Drug-related deaths in Portugal are now the third-lowest in the European Union, and drug-related crime has virtually disappeared. As of 2017, just 6 people per million die of overdoses in Portugal, compared with the U.S. with 185 deaths per million, and the EU average of 21.3 per million. The same figures hold true for the many other countries around the world who have decided to stop institutionalizing drug gangs, by pulling the financial rug out from under them with legalization or decriminalization. Since there is no artificially valuable dealing territory in Portugal, thanks to decriminalization, the U.S. has 105 times more murders per capita than Portugal. 33

In 1989, Sweden, debating the recommendation of the Council of Europe’s Ministers Committee that needle exchange programs be adopted throughout Europe, decided to make free needles experimentally available only in Malmo and Lund, and unavailable throughout the rest of Sweden. The extraordinary result was a 60% rate of HIV positivity among Stockholm’s addicts, and a 1% rate in Malmo and Lund, almost exactly the same difference as between New York and Liverpool. In Hong Kong, where needles are legal and cheap, there is no heroin-related AIDS at all.

Dutch addicts can actually exchange dirty needles for clean at the local police station. By not making addicts hysterical, Dutch police don’t waste time chasing hysterical addicts. Since Dutch policy doesn’t drive addicts to theft or start turf wars, Holland, in 1989, had 175 murders in the entire country, which would translate to less than 3,000 murders for U.S. population. The 1989 U.S. figure was 20,000. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Holland, in 2015, had 104 murders per 100,000 people. The United States, in 2015, had 15,696 murders per 100,000 people, a completely unnecessary, self-inflicted wartime ratio. 34 35

In the DEA’s latest propaganda barrage, we now hear, ad nauseam, that we have an ‘opioid epidemic.’ ‘Epidemic’ is an archetypal inquisitorial word. Asking ‘How can we stop the opioid epidemic?’ is as inane as asking, back in 1965, ‘How can we stop the Vietcong?’ The answer, of course, was to stop trying to conquer Vietnam. The DEA PR campaign gives us triage physician after triage physician describing in gory detail the effects of hard drug addiction, thus guaranteeing yet more police, prison, ‘treatment’ and DEA funding, yet more hysterical excuse to double down on the same old worse-than-useless policies. The ‘opioid epidemic’ also throws a blanket of snow over the DEA’s ongoing refusal to reschedule marijuana, which continues to be federally unprescribable as a schedule 1 drug. In September, 2018, in response to the legalizing states and the Hemp Farming Act of 2018, the DEA has moved some cannabis-based extracts into the prescribable schedule 5, but the whole herb, thc-rich pot, which is not a drug but an herb, is still federally illegal.

The real public policy question isn’t what to do about the ‘opioid epidemic,’ it’s “why doesn’t Holland have an opioid epidemic?” The public policy question is not what to do with someone after they are hurt in a car crash, that’s the medical question. The policy question is how to avoid the car crash in the first place. It’s not triage medical experts that we need to hear from, it’s sociological addiction scientists. An ounce of prevention really is worth a pound of cure. Holland has 15% to 20% of our per capita opioid use rate, depending on the reporting agency. If opioids really did act like a bacterium or a virus, and cause an ‘epidemic,’ that difference wouldn’t be possible. As Freud, the inventor of modern psychopharmacology, pointed out more than a century ago, the neurotic abuse of an inebriant is not driven by the inebriant, it’s driven by the neurosis. People abuse methamphetamine, gambling, sex and eating for exactly the same reasons they abuse heroin. As the sociologists say, “proscription fails, prescription succeeds.”

By not pretending, in law, that human herbalism is abnormal, the Dutch continue to make safe whole herbs available, and so don’t popularize the profitable to smuggle, and dangerous to use, refined concentrates. The Dutch, who practice scientific method in lawmaking, haven’t turned their economy into a cash cow for the drug gangs. The Dutch can actually answer the question, “why doesn’t Holland have an opioid epidemic?” Criminalizing the safe whole herbs actually popularizes the refined concentrates, which are profitable to deal globally solely because of Prohibition.

Young adults don’t just discover sex naturally, they also discover herbalism naturally, an instinctive aspect of human omnivorousness. Shamanic herbalism and sexual reproduction are equally deep, biologically related pleasure-based mammalian behaviors triggered by puberty. Eating is just as basic, just as unconscious an instinct as reproducing, and the pleasure produced by the behavior travels through the same neural pathway. The seminal neuroscientist Dr. Solomon Snyder, Director of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins from 1980 to 2006, explains that “while each drug acts on different receptors, all seem to funnel through one common reward pathway in the brain, ...neural circuitry leading from lower brain regions to the nucleus accumbens in the forebrain. It seems to play a role in normal satisfaction-seeking behaviors involving food and sex but gets exaggerated in addiction...” That is, inebriative herbalism is an instinctive oral behavior, physiologically, evolutionarily, related to eating and sex.

That the parental ostracism of partying teenagers drives them to rebellion and criminality was painfully obvious to the Dutch, who don’t force pot-seeking kids into the hands of hard drug dealers. Holland’s decades long decriminalization of pot and other traditional herbs, and medicalization of hard drugs, has produced a lower pot use rate than the U.S. has with total federal criminalization - and a fraction of the hard drug use and street crime rate.

Since it prefers to finance physicians rather than drug gangs, Holland has radically reduced Prohibition-related crime. The USA has the highest imprisonment rate in the world, 743 per 100,000. Netherlands ranks 148th, with 94 per 100,000. That’s 8:1. That is, the pragmatic Dutch, who have always punched above their weight, spend 85% less per capita on crime than we do. That would translate to a savings of hundreds of billions of dollars annually for the United States.

So, if strategic success in the drug war can be so easily demonstrated, why aren’t we simply copying the successful model? Why can’t rationality rule? Because the inquisitorial neurosis, the slaver definition of human nature, the slaver-inculcated hostility to tribal culture, upon which the fascist drug propaganda is based, is unconscious. Neurosis, emotional compulsion ruling conscious behavior, isn’t susceptible to rationality.

There is hardly an old Vietnam-era war-hawk today who wouldn’t agree that we could have bought the Viet Minh for a tenth of the price we paid to lose to them, because 20-20 hindsight is empirical, rational, unemotional. It’s not hard to see now that buying them, or just withdrawing, would have achieved the hawk goals as well as the dove. The Viet Minh weren’t doing anything to us, or to any of their neighbors. They were just insisting on Vietnamese rule of Vietnam, an end to foreign domination. Normal diplomacy could easily have given us a base and a friend, as we now have. But to make that suggestion in 1967, when American troops were dying in the mud by the thousands, was to risk getting your head busted - despite the fact that simple withdrawal would have saved thousands of American lives. Instead, in the name of Mom and Apple Pie, we “searched and destroyed” our way to complete defeat - destroying millions of lives in the process, as we financed one corrupt South Vietnamese regime after another with Vang Pao’s heroin.

The extraordinary, ecstatic 60s threw the fascist power structures into their present inquisitorial mania. The drug war is a propaganda-fed neurotic repeat of the medieval Inquisition. I don’t mean that metaphorically. The most common evidentiary bust of the medieval Inquisition was “the possession of prohibited substances.” In fact, the legal phrase “prohibited substance” can be found in the Malleus Maleficarum of 1487 in relation to the “witches medicines” of the midwives, the last of Europe’s tribal shamans. “Possession,” one of the premier indicia of “witchcraft,” was the most common evidentiary bust of the Inquisition. Today’s propaganda barrage is a technologically-updated duplicate of that propaganda.

The seminal technical expert on “witches medicines” was Dr. Albert Hofmann, the Sandoz chemist who made ergonovine basic to obstetrics by refining the method of its synthesis. Ergonovine, also called ergometrine, is on the World Health Organization's List of Essential Medicines, the most effective and safe medicines needed in a health system. Properly used, it induces contractions after birth that reduce heavy vaginal hemorrhaging, a lethal threat to the mother. Medieval midwives, of course, didn’t have Hofmann’s refined ergonovine, they had ergot, which, aside from reducing vaginal bleeding after birth, sent the mother on an ecstatic trip.

Hofmann synthesized LSD in the same series of experiments. He used the naturally occurring lysergic acid radical, the common nucleus of all ergot alkaloids, as the major component of the molecule. As Hofmann was fully aware, the grain fungus ergot (the microscopic mushroom Claviceps purpurea) had a long cultural history as both medicine and entheogen. Ergot was famously basic to medieval European midwifery, the number one ‘witches’ medicine.’ These experiments, conducted over a period of years in the 1930s and 40s, also yielded hydergine, essential today in the improvement of cerebral circulation in geriatric patients, and dihydroergotamine, an important blood pressure stabilizer.

Naturally occurring lysergic acid derivatives include the human neurotransmitter serotonin and the mushroom alkaloid psilocybin, also first synthesized by this seminal chemist. The human neurotransmitter and the plant alkaloids are closely related. That is, exactly as ancient Greek midwives used to say when they administered their ergot-based “mixture,” “the mother of your mother will help you to become a mother.”

It was such ancient cultural hints that led the erudite Hofmann to refine the synthesis of ergonovine, one of the most important tools of modern obstetrics. The “mixture” (kykeon) used by the ancient Greek midwives was similar to the brew that was drunk at Eleusis, the central sacrament of Classical Greece. Sacramental Mayan morning glories, beautifully depicted on the body of Xochipilli at the ancient Mayan temple-palace complex at Teotihuacán, dating to about 500 CE, also contain ergot-based entheogens. 36 37

But, aware of the artificial potency of his synthetic ergot concentration, Dr. Hofmann was against the general use of d-lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate-25: “...the very deep effects of LSD are not at all just pleasurable. There is always a confrontation with our deepest ego....It turns out that my fear was well-founded because so many people were not conscious enough to use it well. They did not have the respect which the Indians in Mexico had. The Indians believe you should only take the mushrooms if you have prepared by praying and fasting and so forth, because the mushrooms bring you in contact with the Gods. And if you are not prepared they believe it can make you crazy and even kill you. That’s their belief based on thousands of years of experience...” 38

Sacred and psychoactive plants represented on the ecstatic Xochipilli’s body include mushrooms (Psilocybe aztecorum), tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum), Ololiúqui (Turbina corymbosa), sinicuichi (Heimia salicifolia), and possibly cacahuaxochitl (Quararibea funebris),

In a culture that is careful to raise pharmacological ignoramuses, shamanic incompetence came as no surprise to Dr. Hofmann. LSD, invaluable for many psychiatric purposes, is thousands of times more potent than the traditional herbal mixtures. In fact, it is thousands of times more potent than the milder of the entheogenic isolates. It is effective at doses of as little as ten-millionths of a gram, which makes it 5000 times more potent than mescaline. It should not be taken without training or supervision.

Propaganda, in its simplest form, is accusing the other guy of doing what you are doing. Allen Dulles, at the Princeton Graduate Council conference in Hot Springs, Virginia, on April 10, 1953, warned that the human mind was a “malleable tool,” and the the “brain perversion techniques” of the Reds were “so subtle and so abhorrent” that “the brain…becomes a phonograph playing a disc put on its spindle by an outside genius over which it has no control.” Dulles, of course, was that genius. Six days before warning of these techniques, on April 4, he approved Richard Helms’ Operation MKULTRA to perfect them. That was the same day Dulles signed the order to overthrow the Iranian government.

Dulles was extrapolating on pioneering mind-control experiments done by the CIA’s 1951 Operation Artichoke, based on the work of Nazi doctors at Dachau, and on the late-40s Cold War experimentation done by Dulles’ good friend, the Nazi war criminal Reinhard Gehlen, with cooperating CIA and ex-Nazi doctors at Camp King, near Frankfurt, and related units in Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Philippines. Richard Helms, as soon as he became CIA director in 1966, authorized the destruction of all MKULTRA records. 39

Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA’s expert on lethal poisons, headed up the operation as chief of the Chemical Division of the Technical Services Staff. Former U.S. Army Special Forces Capt. John McCarthy, who ran the CIA’s Saigon-based Operation Cherry, aimed at assassinating Cambodia’s neutralist Prince Sihanouk, says that MKULTRA stands for “Manufacturing Killers Utilizing Lethal Tradecraft Requiring Assassination.” By late 1953 the CIA, dreaming of assembly line production of Manchurian candidates, was funding just about every qualified LSD researcher it could find. This produced lots of good science, including that of Dr. Timothy Leary, but also a sickening series of Nazi-like experiments on vulnerable people who had been heavily dosed without their knowledge or consent. 40

Dr. Harris Isbell at the U.S. Public Health Service Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky used his captive drug users to test over 800 new drugs for drug companies and the CIA, including LSD. Isbell rewarded his human guinea pigs with heroin or morphine, the stuff he was supposed to be weaning them from.

“I have had seven patients who have now been taking the drug for more than 42 days,” Isbell wrote in the middle of a test which kept his captives on LSD for 77 days straight. He called their reactions “the most amazing demonstration of drug tolerance I have ever seen.” Trying to “break through this tolerance,” Herr Doktor administered triple and quadruple doses of LSD to his unwitting subjects. Isbell, a member of the FDA’s Advisory Committee on the Abuse of Depressant and Stimulant Drugs, was the voice of paternalistic sobriety in the fifties, a perfect example of the compulsive hypocrisy induced by Prohibition. 41 42

Dr. Paul Hoch, the developer of the “model psychosis” model of LSD inebriation, performed even more Nazi-like experiments for the CIA at his New York State Psychiatric Institute. He gave uninformed patients large intraspinal doses of LSD and mescaline, simply to observe the “immediate, massive, and almost shocklike” effects.

In 1953 Hoch and Dr. James Cattell gave intravenous injections of an experimental chemical warfare agent to tennis pro Harold Blauer, causing his death. Blauer had come to their New York Psychiatric Institute in late 1952 for help with his post-divorce depression. The Institute had a classified agreement with the Army Chemical Corps to use unwitting patients as guinea pigs. Blauer, without his knowledge, was given a heavy intravenous dose of an experimental analogue of MDMA, which killed him. Cattell later told Army investigators that “We didn’t know whether it was dog piss or what it was we were giving him.” Blauer’s estate was awarded $700,000 by the U.S. District Court in 1987, after finding that the CIA and the involved government agencies had falsified records and covered this up for 22 years. Hoch actually gave LSD to mental patients without their knowledge and then lobotomized them to compare the effects of LSD before and after “psychosurgery.” “It is possible that a certain amount of brain damage is of therapeutic value.” This gorilla became New York State Commissioner for Mental Hygiene. 43 44

McGill University's Allan Memorial Institute was the professional home of Dr. Wilder Penfield and Dr. Donald Cameron. In exchange for generous CIA funding, Dr. Cameron contracted with the CIA to do experimental mind control research on his unwitting patients. He used massive insulin doses, electroshock, and enormous doses of LSD and other powerful psychoactive concentrates, simultaneously, to put his subjects, who had come to him for standard psychiatric help, into a coma, at which point he subjected them to “psychic driving” by playing taped messages into their unconscious ears for as much as 20 hours per day, sometimes for as many as 90 days straight.

Most unsuspecting patients survived this ‘treatment’ much sicker than when it began. One woman, Val Orlikow, the wife of a Canadian MP, went to Allan Memorial seeking help for her postpartum depression. She left so badly damaged that she could not remember her husband or their children, and literally could no longer use the toilet by herself. As these facts came out in the 1970s, the CIA was forced to pay $750,000 in damages to nine families. There were many more families, but prying restricted case files and taking the CIA to court is time consuming and expensive. 45

On November 19, 1953, Dr. Frank Olson, along with other scientists working on the CIA’s MKULTRA at Fort Detrick in Frederick, MD, was heavily dosed with LSD without his knowledge at a division retreat at Deep Creek Lake, three hours drive from Camp Detrick. A week later Dr. Olson told his supervisor Dr. Vincent Ruwet, chief of the division, that he wanted out of the chemical warfare business. Before the initial dosing with LSD at the lake, Olson had returned from CIA research sites in Norway, France, West Germany and Britain, deeply shaken by the use of drugs he had helped develop in extreme interrogations he had witnessed, some of which ended in death. He had threatened to go public with what he knew, at which point he was drugged and kidnapped by the CIA and sent to their hack in NYC, an allergist named Dr. Harold Abramson.

On November 28, 1953, Olson was pushed out of a tenth-floor hotel room at the Hotel Statler in Manhattan. The 1975 Rockefeller Commission unearthed enough evidence to force a Ford administration and CIA public apology and a $750,000 settlement. The CIA story was that Olson had gone berserk in his hotel room and jumped out of the window. The 1994 second autopsy performed by a crack team of pathologists at George Washington University showed that Olson had suffered blunt force trauma to the head prior to pavement impact, which was, they concluded, “rankly and starkly suggestive of homicide.” In July of 2013, Washington DC U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg concluded the compensatory damages suit of Olson’s two sons by saying, “"While the court must limit its analysis to the four corners of the complaint, the skeptical reader may wish to know that the public record supports many of the [suit’s] allegations, farfetched as they may sound.” 46 47

Dr. Harris Isbell examines barbiturates at the U.S.Narcotic Farm in April 1950; Dr. Paul Hoch; Dr. Frank Olson

The CIA was distressed to be told, by Dr. Nick Bercel in the early fifties, that a central water supply couldn’t be poisoned with LSD, because the chlorine neutralized the LSD. This drawback was immediately overcome. The CIA had visions of a battleship rendered useless by a stoned crew, chlorine or no chlorine. In 1959 the CIA-Army researchers discovered BZ, a toxic synthetic that literally short-circuits the brain, producing real schizophrenia for about three days, ten times longer than LSD. BZ came to be considered militarily superior to the far less incapacitating LSD. 48

Pursuant to MKULTRA, Helms’ Clandestine Services asked Harry Anslinger for one of his toughest narks, George White. White was involved in 1943 OSS experiments with THC, using it as a “Truth Drug” on unsuspecting mafiosi cooperating in the Sicilian invasion. It was White who pretended that the Burmese Kuomintang heroin he busted in 1959 was really Red Chinese heroin, thus leaving the KMT free to continue dealing.

Consistent with his moral imperative, Agent White proceeded to open up a whorehouse in San Francisco. Sitting behind a two-way mirror, the alcoholic White, who had no scientific training, observed, pen in hand, the dosed Johns engage in psychedelic sex. White sat behind his two-way mirror from 1955 to 1963, often taking time out in the evenings to commit random acts of violence against San Francisco’s pot-smoking beatnics. There were several of these setups, often used for blackmail, in various American cities, including New York and Chicago. 49

The flamboyant Captain Al Hubbard, also an OSS and CIA agent, was famous for his flair and enormous good humor. He himself continually took LSD and shared it with as many people as possible. If Hubbard, who displayed complete freedom of action, had an assignment from the Agency, it was to turn on as many people as possible. Of course, there is no one “Agency,” that’s just a general term for an alphabet soup of cooperating or competing centers of power, any number of which Hubbard was associated with.

In 1956 Hubbard, an erudite electronics engineer, interested Dr. Humphrey Osmond in giving LSD to the alcoholics he was treating at Weyburn Hospital in Saskatchewan. Of 1000 confirmed alcoholics treated, the recovery rate was an incredible 50%, the highest ever recorded for any therapy. Osmond’s team continued these controlled experiments for thirteen years, formally publishing their findings, which confirmed the initial results. That LSD was chemically similar to the kykeon entheogens Hippokrates used to induce his curative incubation in ancient Greece was not lost on Osmond. 50

It was Osmond, understanding that the plant world is literally the physiological mother of the animal world, who first pointed out the structural similarity between endogenous human neurochemicals and the isolates of the traditional sacred plants. It was also he who coined the word psychedelic, which means “mind-manifesting,” sort of the opposite of “psychosis-inducing.”

Hubbard in 1920; Hubbard in the 50s

It wasn’t about LSD, but about his experience on mescaline, professionally administered by Dr. Osmond in Aldous Huxley ’s West Hollywood home, that Huxley wrote his seminal 1954 The Doors of Perception. Mescaline is the predominant alkaloid of Peyote, San Pedro and Peruvian Torch cacti, all legendary shamanic herbs. Huxley, the visionary author of Brave New World, was a shaman with an intensely personal vision of history: “I continued to look at the flowers, and in their living light I seemed to detect the qualitative equivalent of breathing - but of a breathing without returns to a starting point, with no recurrent ebbs but only a repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like ‘grace’ and ‘transfiguration’ came to my mind…” Obviously, this ain’t the CIA talking, and, given Huxley’s incredible intellectual power, vision and compassion, we’re not talking about a “model psychosis” either. 51

Giving someone mescaline while they’re being tortured to death at Dachau, or lobotomized, or electrified, is going to tell you more about torture than mescaline. Noted Huxley, “Those idiots want to be Pavlovians; Pavlov never saw an animal in its natural state, only under duress. The ‘scientific’ LSD boys do the same with their subjects. No wonder they report psychotics.” 52 53

The CIA didn’t want to bomb its enemies with beatitude, but that’s exactly what happened to Huxley and his children, the “sixties generation.” Jim Morrison led The Doors [of Perception]. The point about the sixties is, in a sense, embodied in Leary’s rebellious rejection of his institutional funders. He remembered the divinatory shamanism, the ecstatic creativity, of his tribal ancestors, and said so. But traditional shamanic herbalism was herbalism, not alkaloidism. Overenthusiastic revolutionaries like Leary failed to stress that, although the technically competent Leary clearly understood the concentrated potency of LSD, carefully stressing mind-set, setting and dosage in the wonderful book he wrote with Ralph Metzner and Richard Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience, which I used to great advantage at the Berkeley Poetry Conference of 1964. Although I was just a wide-eyed kid, the carefully measured pharmaceutical grade LSD and the step-by-step guide did indeed produce an amazing, enlightening, unforgettable and pleasant trip.

But The Psychedelic Experience was based on an ancient shamanic manual, The Tibetan Book of the Dead, that referred to an herbal brew that was far less concentrated than LSD, and insisted on yogic discipline as an inherent part of the process. Amazonian shamanism, for instance, an invaluable source of knowledge and power, uses whole herbs like the ayahuasca (yage) mixture, mushrooms, San Pedro cactus and coca leaf, not their refined alkaloids, and spiritual technique is taught as an inherent part of the process. Lower alkaloid doses - and that’s what herbal mixtures deliver - require a yoga to utilize the weaker dose.

Dr. Osmond, right, reported on his peyote experiences as a guest of the Native American Church in 1961.Saskatoon Star-Phoenix in Psychedelic Review #9, 1967

For young adults who are surrounded by friends and lovers, small doses of LSD are relatively safe. Dosage, however, is a learned art, and LSD was the most highly concentrated psychoactive substance known. Overdoses produce very bad trips, something young people tolerate very poorly. The inquisitors, using their fascist violence in concert with the rank ignorance and emotional instability of many LSD users, had found their “devil drug,” replete with tragic horror stories of bone-lonely young people quite unprepared for such an artificially powerful entheogen. Taking LSD alone is very, very dangerous. It was also well within Company rules to sell LSD laced with strychnine so as to create usable horror stories. Dr. Hofmann himself chemically confirmed the presence of pure strychnine in street samples of ‘LSD.’ That could only have come from the Department of Dirty Tricks. 54

That jive phrase “the drug culture” was born, as if the sixties had been a uniquely contemporary mania and not, in large part, a remarkable exercise in genuine mnemosyne. “Flower power” had seen a creative explosion that included the politically potent insertion of true poetry into pop music, the transformation of visual art, the birth of the ecology and women’s liberation movements, and the communal enhancement of racial integration. The powerful flower was the ancient shamanic herb marijuana, not the refined concentrate LSD. As Arthur Koestler told Leary the day after his first trip, “This is wonderful, no doubt, but it’s fake, ersatz, instant mysticism….There’s no wisdom there. I solved the secret of the universe last night, but this morning I forgot what it was.” 55

LSD gave me a lot, but Soma, the ancient sacred mushroom, far less potent and more difficult to reach, gave me much more. In order to reach Soma I needed music and discipline, both of which continue to induce creative ekstasis, even without the Soma. As William Burroughs put it, “Remember, anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways. You don’t need drugs to get high, but drugs do serve as a useful shortcut at certain stages of training.” 56

What was exciting about LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, ecstacy and pot, of course, was that they revived, instantly, the ancient mnemosyne that the inquisitors had worked so many centuries to crush. Instinctive vision and versification came automatically alive. The cultural contrast to the conformist fifties couldn’t have been more profound, or more shocking to the power structure, which was fixated on manipulation and conquest, not the exact opposite, automatic creativity. The ecstatic Leary was most dangerous to the power structure when he waxed poetic about using proprioceptive creativity to break free of the manipulative fascist imagery and inculcated psychological conditioning.

Reprising ancient Greek incubation, MDMA, known as ecstacy, derived from the shamanic herb sassafras, is now official in Israel for PTSD and depression, and will be approved shortly by the USFDA, working with the Veterans Administration, despite it being illegal for recreational use. In controlled FDA experiments, MDMA has been shown to be a highly effective and curative suicide preventative, something, unfortunately, the VA has to contend with, as indeed do the Israelis. The seriousness of the issue has forced a prohibitionist retreat, helped mightily by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, maps.org.

As WebMD puts it: “MDMA, also known as ecstasy, has shown promise in studies of combat veterans. Psilocybin, the compound in ‘magic mushrooms’ that gets you high, has been tested as a potential boost for people struggling to quit smoking. Researchers in Europe are conducting a survey of how ‘microdoses’ of LSD or other drugs affect mental activity without altering perception. And the American Psychological Association held a symposium in early August on the potential uses of psychedelics.” LSD-assisted psychotherapy has been shown, in double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment, to be of profound psychotherapeutic use, as has Ibogaine therapy for drug addiction. In other words, despite the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, Nixon’s fascist masterpiece, every single shamanic herb listed in the legally unprescribable Schedule I, so far from having “no currently accepted medical use,” has profound and important medical uses. Addressing clinical depression and preventing suicide couldn’t possibly be more medically important.

Pot is still listed in Schedule I. The states rebelled against Nixon’s reefer madness medical BS because state lawmakers couldn’t look themselves in the mirror every morning while continuing to prevent people suffering from multiple sclerosis spasticity disorder from getting the one medicine shown to be effective, whole marijuana herb. One of the reasons pot is so popular around the world is that it is a mild euphoriant, gently delivering self-medicating mood-elevation recreationally. Is eating a good meal not nutritious because it’s fun? Was Marvin Gaye wrong, is good sex not healing? Do I need a physician’s prescription to have sex, eat a good meal? The shamanic herbs are universally considered sacred foods in their cultures of origin.

The eloquent Allen Ginsberg, probably the most influential public speaker of the 1960s (see Allen Verbatim), was not only charismatically iconoclastic, but brilliantly empirical. It was he who pointed out to me that the derogatory word ‘drug’ was inserted into the language by inquisitors as a replacement for the traditional shamanic word pharmakon – φάρμακον. Messing with the language was the specific mission of the 1635 Academie francaise, an arm of the Inquisition chartered by the slaver Cardinal Richelieu “to render it [the language] pure.” The derogatory French word drogue originally meant any ingredient used in chemistry or pharmacy, and evolved to mean ‘commodity no longer in demand and therefore valueless.’ The Congregatio de propaganda fide, “Congregation for propagating the faith,” founded by Pope Gregory XV in 1622, gave us the word ‘propaganda.’ See my book Shamanism and the Drug Propaganda.

The first time I heard the word ‘proprioception,’ ‘self-sensing,’ was as a sophomore at the University of Buffalo in 1964, when Charles Olson was teaching there. The poet and mythologist was first turned on to psilocybin, apparently both the refined alkaloid and the mushrooms, by Leary. As his first trip was wearing off, he turned to Leary and said, “When they come after you, you can hide at my house.” 57

The whole point about hippie dress was that it was Native American, a conscious rebirth of tribal shamanism. As Olson understood, Col. Custer was still running the constabulary, which still violently disapproved of all herbal shamanism. Each generation must be conquered anew - industrial indoctrination as the destruction of the archaic techniques of proprioception. Marijuana continues to be sacramental to millions of Americans. The pipe is a portable altar: to smoke is to commune with the Holy Spirit, as so many of our greatest healers, scientists, musicians, artists, writers and filmmakers continue to insist.

Consistent with its policy of confusing the ancient shamanic herbs with extremely dangerous artificial compounds, thereby destroying real mnemosyne in the culture, military intelligence pumped numerous chemical poisons, masquerading as “psychedelics,” into the market. The formula for STP, a mind-altering amphetamine originally developed as an incapacitating agent for the Army in 1964 at Dow (the maker of napalm), was published by Dow in 1967. It was then immediately pumped into the market by the Department of Dirty Tricks, using its Mafia dealers. This potent synthetic put many unsuspecting kids on a three-day trip, and sent many, hysterical with anxiety, to the emergency room. That, of course, was the purpose of its distribution. 58

The Army tested Angel Dust (PCP) on GIs in the late fifties at Edgewood Arsenal. It was also tested by Operation MKULTRA at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal. The Army then stockpiled PCP as a “nonlethal incapacitant.” Higher doses, however, according to the CIA, could “lead to convulsion and death.” PCP was soon flooding the streets. This was, and is, a COINTELPRO - this is how the distribution of mild, pharmaceutical-grade psychedelics can be demonized. Teach the kids that there is no difference between safe whole herbs and refined concentrates, write that into law, make the best of the traditional herbs and the milder of the pharmaceutical-grade natural isolates unavailable, and then flood the streets with artificial poisons, calling them ‘psychedelics.’ Angel Dust continues to be a great Prohibitionist argument. 59

These fascist tactics were learned from the Nazis, and were, I guess, appropriate for use against them. But the COINTELPROS were aimed by the CIA/FBI against its own people. Every American Indian Movement or Black Panther community event or political demonstration was turned into an armed confrontation by the simple device of physically attacking it. A good example of a typical FBI COINTELPRO was FBI Counterintelligence chief William Sullivan’s rigging of the 1974 elections for Oglala tribal president at Pine Ridge. Although the Commission on Civil Rights concluded that the election had been fixed and that AIM leader Russell Means was the real winner, FBI goon Dick Wilson was installed, literally at the point of a gun. Wilson’s FBI-run death-squads then proceeded to murder more than 60 AIM activists. Means himself was shot repeatedly, surviving at least three separate assassination attempts. The Sioux were dangerous, of course, because they remembered shamanic Sioux culture. 60

Allen Ginsberg, Peggy Hitchcock, ,owner of the Millbrook estate where Leary set up shop, Timothy Leary, and the influential poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti, San Francisco, 1963 (Courtesy Allen Ginsberg Collection/Stanford University)

“Since the use of marijuana and other narcotics is widespread among members of the New Left, you should be on the alert to opportunities to have them arrested on drug charges,” Hoover informed his agents. The list of political drug arrests, and murders, is, of course, endless. Warned the prescient William Burroughs, at the beginning of Nova Express in 1964: “Throw back their ersatz immortality…. Flush their drug kicks down the drain - They are poisoning and monopolizing the hallucinogenic drugs - learn to make it without any chemical corn.” 61

History - the psychology of contemporary politics - moves much more slowly than technology. The despicable Partnership For A Drug-Free America, now called The Partnership for Drug-Free Kids, founded by the American Association of Advertising Agencies and financed by heavy-advertising Big Tobacco and Alcohol, assures us that “This is not the 60s. There is no such thing as a safe drug,” and that “60% of all rape victims are under the age of 18.” We are then shown two teenage girls, dressed up as hippies, laughingly sharing a joint - amidst the libidinous stares of menacing bikers in the seediest part of town. And if the bikers don’t get you, then the narks will, in loco parentis. The rape threat is an exact repeat of medieval inquisitorial propaganda, the medieval Devil wielding a joint even bigger than that of a hulking Biker. Their classic 1987 ad is the witty frying egg, ‘Your Brain on Drugs.’

The fixation on “sobriety” is as sick and manipulative as the fixation on celibacy or witchcraft, producing, as the sociologists have long-since demonstrated, higher rates of alcoholism and drug addiction. Holland has less than 20% of our opioid use rate, with legalized pot and no propaganda campaign. The sociologists invented the maxim “proscription fails, prescription succeeds” when they noticed, in the 1940s, that New York City public hospitals, which then kept records by ethnicity, showed 25% of all alcohol-related admissions were of Irish descent, and only ½ of 1% were of Jewish descent. Harshly proscriptive conservative Irish-American culture produced 50 times more alcoholism per capita than prescriptive liberal Jewish-American culture, which does not chop Junior’s head off if he takes a glass of wine.

By “witchcraft” the medievals usually meant shamanism, the spiritual spontaneity of pre-industrial cultures, that is, the traditional herbalism of almost all our ancestors. The exact phrase in the Malleus Maleficarum, ‘Addicted to Witchcraft,’ could have been writtten by the The Partnership for Drug-Free Kids. ‘Shamanism’ can be defined as archaic techniques of ecstasy designed to foster healing and automatic creativity. Shamanic techniques include herbalism, music, walkabout and ordeal. Tribal cultures have always valued occasional spiritual intercourse with the “parental hermaphrodite,” as the Greek Gnostics put it, that’s why they called it “sacred marriage.” When one is “in the spirit” in church, one is “drunk on God,” not sober. Because of the social support, there is nothing dangerous about this state, but one would be insane to get behind the wheel of a car. Not everything we do is an industrial activity, Bismark to the contrary notwithstanding.

The Gnostic Blood of Christ was the Blood of Dionysos, the ancient Cretan flower wine - spiked with entheogenic herbs. Mary, as Christian Gnostics have insisted since the dawn of Christianity, is Demeter. But, of course, the early Greek Gnostics were heretical to the Church of Constantine the Slaver. By exterminating all traditional cultural knowledge of herbal shamanism, the traditional wisdom regarding its dangers is obliterated right along with the evolved wisdom regarding its correct usage. Nonetheless, thanks to its Greek roots, Christianity can’t help but remember the herbal sacramentalism at the heart of its mystery.

But Constantine’s slaver Christianity substituted cheap crackers for sacramental herbs (not even good matzo), and conformity for spirituality - ‘submission,’ ‘surrender,’ ‘obedience’ ‘compliance,’ ‘dogma,’ ‘doctrine,’ ‘blind faith,’ ‘wrote learning’ for automatic creativity. This infantilization leads to a political culture of conformist parrots, who assume they are being spiritual while parroting. Obsessive fear of spiritual inebriation leads to an infantilized adult population that can’t consciously contact its own inner being, its own automatic creativity, it’s dream-genius. The traditional sacramental herbs are essential to social vision, since non-pharmacological methods of achieving deep subjectivity - musical, artistic, intellectual, athletic, therapeutic, karmic, religious - usually require an enormous amount of time and energy most people can’t invest.

Such contact, however achieved, releases a torrent of healing creativity. That’s why Plato, in the Laws, would have made Eleusis’ “fear-inducing potion” mandatory for Senators, and why Jung advocated “making contact with the psyche,” which included not only psychoanalysis, but sophisticated psychopharmacology.

There is no conception of a male supreme deity in human culture prior to the invention of chattel slavery. We have been homo sapiens for 200,000 years. Chattel slavery was invented just 7,000 years ago. The inquisitorial neurosis, hostility to tribal culture, the drug war, is rooted in the enslavement process, the demonization of the culture of the objects of enslavement. The inquisitorial neurosis, hostility to pre-industrial tribal culture, is inherently misogynistic, since tribal culture is inherently matriarchal. It is no coincidence that the first federal drug law in American history, the Comstock law, was aimed at midwives, the shamanic herbalists. All preindustrial cultures are matriarchal and shamanic. Tribal shamans make terrible slaves. Marijuana became illegal, as Rasta shamans still insist, precisely because it induces a proprioceptive, self-sensing, state. The ancient Herb is a true sacrament capable of helping to call up the archetypal tribal consciousness. It is a connection to, real magic of, Holy Mother Earth - biological magic, the archetypal mind-body memory of self-definition slavers want forgotten. That’s why slavers pretend that the world began with their favorite Iron Age male shaman. Well, I Remember Mama.

The Greek Iasius or Iasion, the Healer, arising from Demeter’s sacramental cauldron. Iasius is cognate with iatros, physician. The Latin for Iasius or Iasion is Jesus or Jason. The Healer arises amidst floating mushrooms and vines; from a Greek sacramental vase, c.500 BC; Cook. Another name for Iasius was pharmakos, sacred or sacrificial king, cognate with pharmakon, drug. The Roman slavers had a vested interest in redefining Greek shamanism. What was not traditionally Jewish about the Israeli gnostics led by Jesus was their Greek herbal shamanism. The Greeks called their alcoholic infusion of shamanic herbs oinos. Jesus called himself oinos. The healer as the sacramental ram, the pharmakos, the ingested contents of the cauldron, from a Greek sacramental vase, c. 500 BC; Hill

The plant world is literally the physiological mother of the animal world. Human biochemistry is plant biochemistry. Tribal cultures have always understood this – that’s why sacred plants were called ‘the milk of the Holy Mother.’ But it simply is not legal anymore to be an Mbuti from the Ituri forest. It is no longer permissible to be part of the ecstatic forest, because that militates against industrial values, against the legal definition of human beings as farm animals or industrial machinery. The forest, we are told, is no longer our awesome Holy Mother, but just so many board-feet of lumber, and the Mbuti, well, they can be made to haul the lumber. Slaver law - assembly line law - Suharto law - prevails.

It is perfectly reasonable for any employer to demand sobriety and concentration on the work at hand, especially if honest wages are being paid. Both the employment contract and the dignity of labor demand sobriety on the job. But to insist that the employee’s free time belongs to the employer, that sobriety off the job is a condition of employment, is to outlaw traditional herbal shamanism. People need socially-sanctioned methods of achieving deep subjectivity, just as they need love, and the social sanction itself prevents their widespread abuse.

As alcohol Prohibition abundantly proved, Prohibition causes alienated inebriative behaviors. It also, unquestionably, institutionalizes organized crime, colonialist military fascism, the driving engine of both the medieval Inquisition and today’s Drug War. To allow the likes of the BIA, the WCTU, Wiley, Hobson, the fascist Dulles brothers, Hoover, Anslinger, Bennett, Califano and McCaffrey to dictate medical and pharmakon law to our culture is precisely the equivalent of allowing the sadistic Kramer and Sprenger, authors of the Malleus Maleficarum, to control medical and pharmakon law in sixteenth-century Germany. It was done, but it triggered endemic bloodletting that drove the culture mad.

Aside from industrial ecocide, the Drug War it is the single most important structural problem American political culture faces. The Drug War, the slaver criminalization of normal human herbalism, is the premier political and economic engine driving the resurgence of fascism globally, the conversion of country after country into militarized police states. Prohibition is the number one fascist technique used to effect that conversion, enabling mass imprisonment while simultaneously funding covert drug-dealing death squads. It’s easy to imprison the political opposition if everybody is preemptively criminalized. Trump, Putin, Orbahn, Duterte, Erdogan and Bolsonaro are ecocidal industrial prostitutes who are doing everything in their power to throw coal on the fire of global warming. The Drug Propaganda has been so successful that, to date, it has been political suicide for any major American leader to address the Drug War holistically. Instead, we get the most grotesque racist pig in American history, Trump, telling us that ‘the Mexicans are bringing drugs.’ He promulgates 19th century racist cartoons about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets, despite the fact that the Republican governor of Ohio insists that most Haitian immigrants are law-abiding hardworking people. He has popularized the Nazi idea of mass expulsion while making it nearly impossible for immigrants to find a path to citizenship.

An Attic sacramental vase, c.450 BC, depicting Dionysos as the tree from which the priestesses brew the entheogenic potion they ladle from the vase; Naples’ Museo Archeologico; Persephone and Demeter adore the Sacred Mushroom, from the temple wall at Eleusis, c. 450 BC. Opium was also a sacred symbol carved into the temple walls at Eleusis, a probable ingredient of the entheogenic “mixture” (kykeon) that was the central sacrament of Classical Greece, and sacred to Joshua’s Iassai.

Iasius, ‘The Healer,’ Jesus, (cognate with the Greek iatros, physician) didn’t say he was the eidolon; he said he was the pharmakon, oinos, what the Essenes, the Iassai, the ‘Jesuses,’ on Dead Sea Scrolls we have, called “the plants of truth.” (Thanksgiving Hymn). The Thanksgiving Hymn didn’t survive the final Pauline edit to make it into the canonical Greek New Testament, but, thanks to an archeological miracle, we found the original at Qumran, the home of Jesus’ actual synagogue. Everything Jesus says in the New Testament we have in the original Hebrew, dating to decades before the birth of Jesus. The Dead Sea Scrolls, dating from 150 BCE to 70 CE, are the oldest genuine biblical texts in existence.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are beautifully inscribed on leather to last, preserved in sealed heavy jars, and hidden from Roman depradation in remote arid caves. They are largely variations of the sayings of Hillel the Elder, the teacher of the rebellious Galilean rabbis of Joshua’s generation. “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” That’s both Hillel and Jesus. “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation; go and learn.” That’s Hillel. The Dead Sea Scrolls, Proverbs: “He who oppresses the poor shows contempt for his Maker, but he who is kind to the needy honors him.”

Buzz-word disinformation - constant, effective association of the archetypal herbal imagery with social chaos and stress - can manipulate a culture like a puppet on a string. That is, sacramental herbal imagery is instinctive. Like animal imagery, plant imagery comes up automatically in dreams.

Inlay from the Soundbox Harp of Ur, c.3000 BC: “On meeting Gilgamesh as he searched for the land of the magical fruit trees, the scorpion-man says to his wife, ‘The body of him who has come to us is flesh of the gods.’"; Theban sacramental vase, c. 700 BC; Harrison:1

The archetypal mammalian imagery is understood emotionally, unconsciously, leaving its recipients susceptible to authoritarian suggestion. Hitler used the wheel of life, the swastika, and the Star of David, both ancient shamanic symbols, to great effect with this technique. The swastika is mesmeric because it is an archetype of the collective unconscious, a natural product of the human mind, a pre-alphabetic symbol that appears in the Neolithic levels of all human cultures. It is a Native American pictograph. It was found by Evans on the Neolithic levels of Knossos in Crete. In the most ancient Buddhist tradition the swastika represents the footprints of the Buddha, and is found in the most ancient levels of Indian, Japanese and Chinese culture. We have a 12,000 year old swastika from Mezine, Ukraine, carved into an ivory mammoth tusk shaped to resemble a bird, archetypal symbol of the soul. The swastika is one of the ancient Adinkra symbols of the Akan peoples of Ghana. It is the ancient Byzantine gammadion cross. The Hindu Sanskrit etymology means ‘make good’ or ‘marker of goodness.’ It was used on the doorposts of Hindu homes the same way the mezuzah is used on Jewish homes. The Theban sacramental vase above dates to 700 BC. The swastikas have nothing to do with Hitler, but everything to do with the sacramental contents of the vase. If Christ is the Fish, then He is in the right place. That is a flower out of which His Mother arises.

As Carl Jung puts it, “The conscious psyche is certainly of a personal nature, but it is by no means the whole of the psyche. The foundation of consciousness, the psyche per se, is unconscious, and its structure, like that of the body, is common to all, its individual features being only insignificant variants.” 64

The body, and its automatic imagery, are the sea we swim in. In a climate of legal industrial terrorism, the prohibitionist argument that sacramental herbs must be equated with social chaos makes perfect emotional sense because the target assumes that the planted axioms, rooted in its own dream imagery, are its own. It is the dream imagery that is sacred, not its demonization.

Social chaos, conducive to the militarization of culture, is also created by the legal equation of the ancient sacramental herbs with amateurishly produced street concentrates and poisons (Califano’s major trick) - sort of like legally equating Judaism with treason and pedophilia, a classic technique Hitler got from the medieval slavers, used to rebuff Jewish anti-slavery theology. The Nazis called this the “Zionist/Bolshevik element of society,” a threat to the Nazi slave state.

We have the politically sanctioned symbolic pharmakos, the eidolon Jesus Invictus, and its demonized pharmakon, any ancient sacramental herb, especially marijuana, the most gentle and accessible of the shamanic herbs. Explained the legendary peyotist Quanah: “The White man goes into his church and talks about Jesus; the Indian goes into his tepee and talks to Jesus.” As the Gnostic Gospel of Philip, found at Nag Hammadi, put it, 1600 years before Quanah: “You saw the spirit, you became spirit. You saw Christ, you became Christ....For this person is no longer a Christian, but a Christ” - or a Persephone, or a Miriam, as some Nag Hammadi texts have it. 65

Engraved Bone, France, c. 13,000 BC; Mainage; An ecstatic Greek priestess holding the sacred herb carrier, the thyrsos, and the jaguar, symbol of her ferocity. She wears the magical snake in her hair - not a bringer of evil fruit, but symbol of her vegetal power to heal and enlighten. Don’t believe any con artist trying to sell you original sin, that’s a slaver subjugation technique, an insult to your Holy Mother. This is the imagery that became the Caduceus, the healing snakes curled around the thyrsos, the symbol of the AMA. The Brygos painter, c.490 BC.

To become the pharmakos, Quanah ate the pharmakon, not the eidolon. The pharmakon breaks Lucifer’s spell; the eidolon is Lucifer’s spell. That’s what Iasius, the pharmakon, had to say. Like any powerful rabbi, he would have been nauseated to have been turned into a Roman eidolon: “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. You know the commandments...” He was teaching yoga, not posing for sculpture. Jesus specifically called himself the pharmakon, oinos, even in the politicized Latin and Greek mistranslations of the original Hebrew, Coptic or Greek. 66

An ecstatic mind, in a state of blissful conscious harmony with its own unconscious, is hard to lie to and hard to sell, because it is the inventor of symbology and language, not its recipient. It is drawing directly from the universal font. It sees the future in terms of its evolutionary memory, its flesh-and-bone connection to the plants, animals and stars. It achieves the sacred marriage between mammalian instinct and the conscious mind, leaving it in control of numinous powers, what the Greeks called mnemosyne. Those powers reside in the Earth, the mother of our evolution, the pillow on which we dream. 67

The stag above, and the floating-eyed shaman who carved him into bone, lived in France, 15,000 years ago. Should the Inquisition end, values other than industrial will pervade the culture. The thoughts of the animals will once again become visible. Nektar will again flow from the breast. Flowers will again reveal the respiration of the Earth. The ‘demographics,’ as they did in the 60s, will go haywire for the promulgators of the Official Industrial Faith. That’s the peril the Bismark heads see in sophisticated adult shamanism. The assembly line would cease to be the official state religion. Mother Earth would be remembered.

By refusing to accept its animal nature, the culture can’t rise above it. By not finding a place for Thoth, the ecstatic baboon, in heaven, the culture has condemned itself to hell, forever rolling the stone, on which it once rode in ecstasy, up Moloch’s mountain.

Preparing the Sacramental Kava, Samoa, 1922; Asia

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2:The Roman World:Oxford University Press,1989

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2:The Egyptian Book Of The Dead:Dover Publications,1967

3:Egyptian Magic:Dover Publications,1971

4:The Divine Origin Of The Craft Of The Herbalist:Culpeper House,1928

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1:1:Prolegomena and Prehistory

1:2:Early History of the Middle East

2:1:The Middle East and the Aegean Region, c.1800-1380 BC

2:2:The Middle East and the Aegean Region, c.1380-1000 BC

3:1:The Prehistory of the Balkans, The Middle East and the Aegean

3:3:The Expansion of the Greek World, Eighth to Sixth Centuries BC

4:The Persian Empire and the West

5:Athens: 478-401 BC

6:Macedon: 401-301 BC

7:1:The Hellenistic World

8:Rome and the Mediterranean, 218-133 BC

9:The Roman Republic, 133-44 BC

10:The Augustan Empire, 44 BC-AD 70

11:The Imperial Peace, AD 70-192

12:The Imperial Crisis and Recovery, AD 193-324

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2: Rethinking Camelot:South End Press,1993

3: Deterring Democracy:South End Press,1991

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2:Martyrdom and Persecution in the Early Church:NewYork University Press,1967

3:Religion Popular and Unpopular in the Early Christian Centuries:Variorum Reprints, 1976

4:The Early Church:Fortress Press,1982

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2:The Language Of The Goddess:Harper Collins Publishers,1989

3:The Civilization Of The Goddess:Harper Collins Publishers,1991

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Goodman,Melvin A.:2: National Insecurity::City Lights Books,2013, Kindle Edition

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2:Ugarit And Minoan Crete:W.W.Norton,1966

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2:The White Goddess:Vintage Books,1959

3:Apuleius’ The Golden Ass:Farrar,Strauss & Giroux,1951

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2:& Bakalar,James B.:Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered:Basic Books,1979

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2:Embryogenesis:North Atlantic Books,1986

Guignebert,Charles:The Jewish World in the Time of Jesus:University Books,1965

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2:Foraging for Edible Wild Mushrooms:Cloudburst Press,1974

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3:The Way of the Shaman:Bantam Books,1986

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2:High Times Encyclopedia:Stonehill Publishing Company,1978

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The Holy Bible:King James Version:Tyndale House Publishers,1979

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2:The Odyssey,Robert Fitzgerald,tr.,Doubleday and Company,1963

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2:The Jewish War:Penguin Books,1967

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5:Symbols Of Transformation

10:Civilization In Transition

11:Psychology And Religion:West And East

12:Psychology And Alchemy

13:Alchemical Studies

14:Mysterium Coniunctionis

15:The Spirit In Man,Art,And Literature

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Kick,Russ,ed.:You Are Still Being Lied To:Disinformation Books,2009

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2:Sumerian Mythology:Harper & Row,1961

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Leary,Timothy, Metzner,Ralph, & Alpert,Richard:The Psychedelic Experience:University Books,1964

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2:The Sacred Executioner:Thames and Hudson,1982

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2:The Archaic Revival:Harper Collins Publishers,1991

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2:The Politics of Heroin:Lawrence Hill Books,1991

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2:Apollonius of Tyana:University Books,1966

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2:Earliest Civilizations of the Near East:McGraw-Hill Book Company,1965

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2:The Hoffa Wars:Paddington Press,1978

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2:The Witch-Cult in Western Europe:Oxford University Press,1971

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National Formulary XIV:American Pharmaceutical Association,1975

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2:The Splendid Wayfaring:University of Nebraska Press,1970

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2:The Dionysiac Mysteries Of The Hellenistic And Roman Age:Arno Press,1975

3:Imperial Rome:Schocken Books,1967
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2:Pharmacophilia: Jonathan Ott Books

3:Pharmacotheon: Jonathan Ott Books

4:The Age of Entheogens:Jonathan Ott Books

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2:Conscious Conception:Freestone Publishing Co.

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2:A Selection of His Letters:Clarence Greig,tr.,Cambridge University Press,1978

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The Revised English Bible:Oxford and Cambridge University Presses,1989

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Robbins,Rosell Hope:The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology:Crown Publishers,1959

Rodriguez,Felix I. & Weisman,John:Shadow Warrior:Simon & Schuster,1989

Roe,Derek:Prehistory:University of California Press,1970

Rorabaugh,W.J.:The Alcoholic Republic:Oxford University Press,1979

Rose,Jeanne:Herbs & Things:Grosset & Dunlap,1975

Rosenthal,Franz:The Herb:E.J.Brill,1971

Rotella,Sebastian:Twilight on the Line:W.W. Norton & Company,1998

Rothenberg,Jerome,ed.:1:Shaking the Pumpkin:Doubleday & Company,1972

2:& Quasha,George:America a Prophesy:Random House,1974

3:Technicians of the Sacred:Doubleday & Company,1969

Rowland,Beryl:Medieval Woman’s Guide To Health:The Kent State University Press,1981

Ruck:2:See Wasson:2

3:See Wasson:3

Ruspoli,Mario:The Cave of Lascaux:Harry N.Abrams,Inc.,1983

Sandoz,Mari:Crazy Horse:University of Nebraska Press,1961

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Sauer,Carl O.:1:Seeds,Spades,Hearths and Herds:The MIT Press,1969

2:Northern Mists,Turtle Island Foundation,1968

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2:The Age of Jackson:Little,Brown & Company,1946

Schlesinger,Stephen & Kinzer,Stephen:Bitter Fruit:Doubleday & Company,1982

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Schultes,Richard Evans & Hofmann,Albert:1:The Botany and Chemistry of

Hallucinogens:Charles C Thomas,1980

2:Plants of the Gods:Healing Arts Press,1992

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Slotkin,J.S.:The Peyote Religion:Farrar,Strauss and Giroux,1975

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2:Jesus the Jew:Fortress Press,1981

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2:with Ruck,Carl A.P. & Hofmann,Albert:The Road To Eleusis:Harcourt

Brace Jovanovich, 1978

3:with Kramrisch,Stella, Ott,Jonathan & Ruck,Carl A.P.:Persephone’s Quest:Yale University Press,1986

4:The Wondrous Mushroom:McGraw-Hill Book Company,1980

Watts,Alan W.:The Joyous Cosmology:Random House,1963

Webb,Gary:Dark Alliance:Seven Stories Press,1998

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Weil,Andrew:The Natural Mind:Houghton Mifflin Company:1972

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2:Cretan Cults And Festivals:Barnes & Noble,1962

Williams,Paul L.:Operation Gladio:Prometheus Books,2015,Kindle Edition

Williams,Selma R.:Riding The Nightmare:Atheneum,1978

Williams,Terry:The Cocaine Kids:Addison-Wesley Publishing Company,1989

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Woods, Randall B.:Shadow Warrior: Basic Books,2013

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2:Ur of the Chaldees:W.W.Norton & Company,1965

Wright, Lawrence: The Looming Tower:Vintage,2006, Kindle edition

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Zimmer,Lynn:Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts:The Open Center Institute,1997

Many Journals, pamphlets, reports, plays, magazines, newspaper articles and web sites mentioned in the text or the notes have been listed in the text only.

Notes

Notes are keyed to the Bibliogaphy

Cocaine Coup

1 Prouty:2:233;Cockburn,A:175

2 Hinckle:310

3 Cockburn:98

4 Hinckle:293;Cockburn,A:294

5 Williams,Paul L.:loc.1794

6 Trento:2:78,88; unredacted.com/2015/12/22/pinochets-secret-envoy-to-kissinger-contreras/:Peter Korbluh,12/22/2015

6a Anderson & Anderson:145; Cockburn,A:180

7 Scott & Marshall:35

8 Scott & Marshall:171;Webb:207

9 McCoy & Block:199;Mills:1157

10 Anderson & Anderson:74ff

11 Shannon:202

12 Anderson & Anderson:138

13 Mills:344

14 Shannon:187;Mills:102

15 Time:3/17/88;Shannon:186;Scott & Marshall:40

16 Shannon:179

17 Brewton:304

18 Kruger:8;Scott & Marshall:42

19 Linklater:210;Cockburn,A:183

20 Anderson & Anderson:101

21 Kruger:10

22 Hinckle:320

23 Hinckle:324

24 Kruger:14

25 Levine:81

26 Levine:4

27 Kruger:165; Levine: loc. 660

28 Kruger:113; Levine: loc. 9113

29 Scott & Marshall:44

30 Léons:10;Cockburn,A:181

31 Levine:54

33/32 Serendipity.li: ‘Congress Attacks the CIA,’by Ralph McGehee, 7/1997: http://www.serendipity.li/cia/ciabase/ciabase_report_4.htm

Grey Wolves

1 The Washington Post:1/23/97:”Turkey Blasts German Court’s Drug Claim”

2 Goodman: 117-124, 261, 316

3 Covert Action Quarterly: ‘Turkey:Trapped in a Web of Covert Killers,’Ertugrul Kurkcu, Summer 1997; Williams,Paul L.: loc. 3405-3559; Middle East Institute: ‘Turkey's "Deep-State" and the Ergenekon Conundrum,’ By H. Akin Ünver, 4/1/2009; The New York Times: The Gates Hearings, 10/3/1991; Le Monde diplomatique: ‘Les liaisons dangereuses de la police turque,’ by Martin A. Lee, 3/1997; Le Monde diplomatique: ‘Turkey’s pivotal role in the international drug trade,’ by by Kendal Nezan, 7/1998; www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a333139.pdf: West Europe Report, No. 2131, ‘Case Study of Agca Activities,’ 4/22/1983; www.hurriyet.com: search ‘Uğur Mumcu’; Newsbud: ‘The Court Case Against Generals Behind Turkey’s 1980 Coup,’ 3/19/2011: www.newsbud.com/2011/04/19/the-court-case-against-generals-behind-turkey%E2%80%99s-1980-coup/

Reagan’s Hoods

1 Moldea:83;Rappleye:119

2 Rappleye:48

3 Rappleye:54

4 Rappleye:70

5 Rappleye:72

6 Theoharis:255

7 Moldea:141

8 Moldea:116

9 Moldea:342

10 Moldea:290

11 Moldea:299

12 Time:8/8/77;Moldea:2:320

13 Kwitny:154;Moldea:2:417

14 Moldea:321

15 Kwitny:252;288ff

16 Kwitny:175

17 Kwitny:152

18 Moldea:319

19 Moldea:302

20 Moldea:331

21 Brewton:198

22 Brewton:45;393

23 Brewton

24 From The Wilderness:2:3:5/21/99@www.copvcia.com

25 Fitts:Solari Memorandum Re:Welfare & Housing Reform:7/20/99:To Michael J.McManus,Esq. @www.solari.com

26 Rolling Stone:5/14/98:p37

27 Szasz:1:113

28 Duke & Gross:198; NYT:10/4/90:B6

29 McCoy & Block:7

30 Peterson in Krauss:274; Baum:256

31 drugtext.com:2/26/96

32 Cockburn,A:77

33 Baum:250;Cockburn,A:77

34 Bureau of Justice Statistics: ”Prisoners in 1994,” 1995

35 Duke & Gross:170;Dr.Jerome Miller in U.S. Catholic:6/96; Bureau of Justice Statistics; Prison Policy Initiative: ‘Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2019,’ By Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, 3/19/2019: www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/pie2019.html

Contra Cocaine

1 Webb:299

2 Moldea:294

3 Butler:1

4 Chomsky:320

5 Kinzer:2:172; The New York Times: ‘C.I.A. Aide Says He Gave Anti‐Allende Plan to I.T.T.,’ By Eileen Shanahan, 3/29/1973: www.nytimes.com/1973/03/29/archives/cia-aide-says-he-gave-antiallende-plan-to-itt-substantial-fund.html ; Corn: 251-252

5a New York Times Magazine:4/28/85

6 Z Magazine:3/90:”The Decline of the Democratic Ideal”:Chomsky: Note 21
7 Goodman: 317

8 Hinckle:15

9 Trento: 370

11 Williams,Paul L.:loc.1530; Wikispooks: Gianadelio Maletti; The Guardian: “US 'supported anti-left terror in Italy'”by Philip Willan,6/23/2000

12 Williams,Paul L.:loc.1721; Global Research: ‘Operation Gladio: CIA Network of “Stay Behind” Secret Armies’,By Andrew Gavin Marshall,7/17/2008; www.mega.nu/ampp/gladio.html; The Guardian:

‘Infiltrators blamed for murder of Italian PM’ by Philip Willan,4/9/1999; The Telegraph, ‘Licio Gelli, financier – obituary,’ 12/16/2015

13 Anderson & Anderson:176

14 Anderson & Anderson:175

15 Jonas:198

16 Chomsky:365

17 Jonas:149

18Congressional Record:5/7/98: H2970-H2978;Webb:482

19 Weiner:loc.6691

20 Jonas:150

21 Anderson & Anderson:197

22 Anderson & Anderson:194

23 Anderson & Anderson:201

24 Scott & Marshall:48

25 Scott:1:111

26 Webb:48

27 Cockburn:7

28 Gutman:267

29 Cockburn:111

30 Cockburn:71

31 AP:7/15/93:”U.S. Officials Misleading On ’81 Massacre In El Salvador”

32 Chomsky:328

33 Gutman:277

34 Gutman:178

35 Gutman:312

36 Gutman:309

37 The Senate Committee Report on Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, United States Senate,1989, S. Prt. 100-165; Senator John F. Kerry; McCoy & Block:205

38 Shannon:61;Mills:1150; Valentine: 311

39 Scott & Marshall:55
40 Webb:52;159

41 Gutman:46

42 Scott & Marshall:55

43 Webb:70;165

44 Webb:120;197

45 Anderson & Anderson:228

46 McCoy & Block:128

47 Scott & Marshall:28

48 Levine:123;Cockburn,A:283

49 The Senate Committee Report on Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, United States Senate,1989, S. Prt. 100-165; Senator John F. Kerry; Brewton:301;Scott & Marshall:56

50 Scott & Marshall:59

51 Brewton:6

52 New York Times:11/2/84

53 Scott & Marshall:62; Webb:346;Cockburn,A:293

54 Scott & Marshall:61

55 The Nation :”Contras, Crack, the C.I.A.”:10/21/96

56Brewton:159;Shannon:152; Webb:262ff;469;Cockburn,A:318

57 Penthouse Magazine:7/95:”The Crimes of Mena”

58 Gutman:338

59 The Washington Weekly:8/18/97; Reed:252

60 The Washington Weekly:8/18/97

61 Reed:309; Amara.org: ‘Mike Ruppert - CIA and Drug Running (1997):’ amara.org/en/videos/7UNECBsJLwp7/en/861056/1621870/

62 Reed:102;124

63 Kinser:2:246-247;Rolling Stone: ‘The Dirty Secrets of George Bush,’ By Howard Kohn & Vicki Monks, 11/3/1988; ConsortiumNews.com: ‘Missing the Real Noriega Story,’By Jonathan Marshall,6/1/2017

64 The Times of Israel: ‘Israeli counterterror chief’s son blames US for his 1988 assassination,’ 5/31/2014; Portland Free Press:1-2/97; The Nation:2/24/92; Cockburn, A:330

65 Goodman:2:97-99

66 Reed:428ff

67 Secord v.Cockburn:Civ. A. No. 88-0727-GHR.United States District Court,District of Columbia:8/27/90

68 Washington Post:12/7/87;in Scott & Marshall:63; From The Wilderness:1:9:11/25/98,@www.copvcia.com

69 McCoy & Block:128

70 Esquire:3/91:136

71 McCoy & Block:129;Webb:117

72 Levine:123

73 Cockburn:126

74 Cockburn:162

75 Webb:241-243

76 McCoy & Block:147; UPI: ‘Justice Department suspected North before scandal,’ By Neil Roland, Brian Barger, 2/17/88: www.upi.com/Archives/1988/02/17/Justice-Department-suspected-North-before-scandal/8372572072400/

77 McCoy & Block:141

78 Cockburn:178

79 Brewton:118

80 Associated Press:7/22/89;Costa Rican Legislative Assembly:Special Commission on Drug Trafficking:7/10/89, in Webb:210

81 McCoy & Block:154;Webb:253ff

82 Castillo:70

83 Castillo: 102-104

84 Permission to reprint from Celerino Castillo and Michael C. Ruppert, From the Wilderness@www.copvcia.com; Castillo:151

85 Response by Celerino Castillo III, Ex-DEA Special Agent in

Guatemala, To The Intelligence Oversight Board Report on Guatemala of 6/28/96

86 Castillo:208;124;132

87 Webb:259;256; Castillo:166

88 Robert Parry at Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting:3/28/93

89 Cockburn:225;Cockburn:2:256; Webb:267

90 Final Report:8/93:V. I,p.xxi

91 Permission to reprint from Celerino Castillo and Michael C.

Ruppert, From the Wilderness@ www.copvcia.com

92 Response by Celerino Castillo III, Ex-DEA Special Agent in Guatemala, To The Intelligence Oversight Board Report on Guatemala of 6/28/96; Written Statement of Celerino Castillo III (D.E.A. Retired) for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, April 27, 1998

93 Cerigua Weekly Briefs:8/24/95

Privateers

1 Shorrock:loc.121, 300, 337; Goodman: 369, 374

2 Rashid:Introduction:location 409

3 Mills:270-272

4 Washington Post, ‘The Big Squeeze’ by Al Gore, 9/12/1993; The 9/11 Commission Report, p.90; Shorrock: loc. 1974

5 Scott:3:178, quoting Toledano:League of Bushes; Baer: loc. 997-1022; www.salon.com/2004/03/12/unger_2/

6 Shorrock:loc.4554; Ricks: 199

7 Goodman: 236-239

8 Shorrock:loc.681

9 Clarke: 125

10 Shorrock:loc.2386

11 Federal Autopsy of Michael Brown: 10/31/2014: documents.latimes.com/federal-autopsy-michael-brown/ ; American Prospect: ‘Race and the Tragedy of Quota-Based Policing,” by Shaun Ossei-Owusu, 11/3/2016, prospect.org/article/race-and-tragedy-quota-based-policing-0 ; Lohud: ‘Survey says most of Yonkers pleased with police,’ by Ernie Garcia, 11/3/2017, www.lohud.com/story/news/local/westchester/yonkers/2017/11/03/yonkers-police-survey/829369001/

Boy Scout Barry

1 New York Times:11/20/93;AP Wire:1/14/97:”Venezuela Pol Faces Drug Charge”;Cockburn,A:95

2 The Shadow:April/June 1994: “Haiti’s Nightmare”;Los Angeles Times:3/8/97:A:9; Cockburn,A:109

3 Christian Science Monitor:1/29/95

4 Christian Science Monitor:4/8/97

5 McCoy & Block:330

6 Reed:375

7 Weiner:loc.6602

8 Scott:1:306; Hinckle:342

9 TIME:8/12/96: “Good Guys Gone Bad?”

10 Associated Press:2/19/97:”Mexico Drug Czar Arrested”

11 Chicago Tribune:1/28/96

12 Newsweek:3/10/97

13 Susan E. Reed in The New Republic: 3/17/97

14 McCoy & Block:192; Valentine: 219

15 Cockburn, A:357

17 Newsweek:3/3/97:”A Defector in the Drug War”; Susan E. Reed in The New Republic: 3/17/97;Cockburn,A:375

19 Rotella:135

20 New York Times:4/23/98; C-span: ‘Mexican Drug Cartels,’ 2/13/2009: www.c-span.org/video/?284038-1/mexican-drug-cartels

21 New York Times:12/24/97

22 New York Times:2/27/98

23 Henman, Anthony Richard:”Coca: an Alternative to Cocaine?”Drug Policy 1989-1990: A Reformer’s Catalogue:164-176

24 La Vanguardia:11/05/92

25 Covert Action Quarterly:Summer 1994:”The Betrayal of Peru’s Deomcracy” by Gustavo Gorriti

26 New York Review of Books:5/25/92

27 Covert Action Quarterly:2/97

28 Miami Herald:5/30/92

29 El País:5/22/92; Reuters:12/12/92

30 Newsweek:5/10/93;Scott & Marshall:191;Time:8/7/95

31 El País(Spain):5/22/92

32 The Christian Science Monitor:5/18/93

33 www.blythe.org/peru-pcp

34 The Geopolitical Drug Dispatch:#39: 1/95. “Peru: Soldiers Against the Army”

35 Andes@www.calyx.com:2/26/96

36 New York Times:11/25/96:”American Drug Aid Goes South”

37 Gestion:10/25/96

38 High Times:6/96

39 Levine:462

40 Rolling Stone:10/30/97,p.44; Chicago Tribune: ‘Drug Czar's Study Supports Uses For Medical Marijuana,’ by V. Dion Haynes, 3/18/1999: www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1999-03-18-9903180126-story.html

41 JAMA:V.271#21:6/1/94:1647

42 Grinspoon in Krauss:379

43 Grinspoon in Krauss:382; JAMA:6/21/95;V.273,N.23

44 Szasz:1:125

45 PDR:1989:1571

46 U.S. Dispensatory:26:296;Kaplan & Sadock:Synopsis of Psychiatry:6th Ed.; AMA:113

47 Grinspoon in Krauss:381

48 DEA Docket No. 86-22:pp 57-59; Duke & Gross:184

49 APHA Public Policy Statements:Resolution #7014

50 Scott:1:167; Valentine: 310

The Safari Club

1 Chomsky:3:Chapter 4:note 17

2 Mills:1146

3 Cockburn:2:264;Shannon:141

4 Robin Lloyd “Caught in the Crossfire:Women are Taking a Stand in Colombia’s Struggle Between Corruption and Justice.” The Drug Policy Letter #35, Winter 1998

5 New York Times:2/28/98

6 New York Times:2/28/98

7 Susan E. Reed in The New Republic:3/17/97; National Public Radio: ‘Colombia Is Growing Record Amounts Of Coca,’ by John Otis, 10/22/2018: www.npr.org/2018/10/22/658547337/colombia-is-growing-record-amounts-of-coca-the-key-ingredient-in-cocaine

8 Christian Science Monitor:6/17/97

9 Zeese in Krauss:259

10New York Times:2/28/98; OIG DHS: “DHS Drug Interdiction Efforts Need Improvement,’ 11/8/2016: www.oig.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/assets/2017/OIG-17-09-Nov16.pdf

11 Anderson & Anderson:260; Cockburn:2:232

12 Gutman:309; Trento:2:118

13 Goodman: 65-67, 254

14 Weiner:loc.6377; Goodman: 158, 255, 258; Trento: 437; Editor & Publisher: ‘Plame Speaking: Another Outed CIA Agent Hits Media, White House,’ by Allan Wolper, 1/1/2006: www.editorandpublisher.com/news/plame-speaking-another-outed-cia-agent-hits-media-white-house/ ; Corn: 344

15 Trento:2:200-202,209

16 Woods: 400-439; National Security Archive: ‘The CIA's Family Jewels:’ nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/ ; Rockefeller Commission Report: history-matters.com/archive/contents/church/contents_church_reports_rockcomm.htm ; The National Security Archive: ‘The CIA’s Family Jewels:’ https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB222/ ; Central Intelligence Agency: ‘OSS Operations in Norway: Skis and Daggers,’ by William E. Colby: www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/winter99-00/art5.html

17 Trento:2:98; Woods: 110, 340, 344

18 Williams,Paul L.:loc.2937, loc.3548; ReserachGate: ‘Western Balkans, Organized Crime and the Euro Crisis: Myths and Realities on the road to Accession’ by Sotiris Serbos, 3/2013; Center for the Study of Democracy: ‘Smuggling In Southeast Europe,’ By Marko Hajdinjak, 2002; Executive Intelligence Review: ‘KLA and Drugs,’ by Umberto Pascali, 6/22/2001

19 Trento:2:146-147

20 Trento:2:351; United States District Court, Southern District of Texas,: United States of American vs Edwin Paul Wilson Criminal Case H-82-139, fas.org/sgp/jud/wilson102703.pdf

21 Trento:2:251

22 Shorrock:loc.2192

23Trento:2:139; The New York Times, Ex-C.I.A. Agent's Associates Run Arms Export Concerns, By Philip Taubman,9/6/1981

24 Trento:2:61

25 Clarke:2:52

26 Trento:2:102

27 Baer: loc. 2984-3017; The Atlantic: ‘The Fall of the House of Saud’ by Robert Baer, May 2003:’ www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2003/05/the-fall-of-the-house-of-saud/304215/

28 Unger:loc.2822, 2874,2900; Baer: loc.900-913, 965

29 Scott:4:loc.3748; Baer: loc. 862; Corn: 17

30 Weiner:loc.7073

31 Gutman:320

32 Goodman: 124-129, 289,293

33 McCoy & Block:329

34 Clarke:2:41-42

35 Truthout:11/26/2013

36 Scott:3:93

37 Trento:2:210

38 Goodman: 133

39 Trento:2:318

40 The New Yorker: Seymour M. Hersh, “The Cold Test”, 1/27/2003, p.42; New York Times, “Defector Says Saudis Sought Nuclear Arms”, Paul Lewis,8/7/1994; The Washington Post: “Saudi Aid To Iraqi A-Bomb Effort Alleged”, Steve Coll and John Mintz,7/25/1994

41 Palast:101

42 The Guardian: ‘Libya's Black Market Deals Shock Nuclear Inspectors’, 1/16/2004;Washington Post: ‘Malaysia Arrests Nuclear Network Suspect’, Alan Sipress and Ellen Nakashima, May 29, 2004

43 Trento:2:345

44 Seattle PI: ‘Uprising in Iraq may be slow because of U.S. inaction in 1991’, Jason Embry,4/4/2003; Clarke:2:65-66

45 Seattle PI: ‘Uprising in Iraq may be slow because of U.S. inaction in 1991’, Jason Embry,4/4/2003; Clarke:2:65-66

46 Mother Jones:11/12/93:”A Gift For George”

Afghanistan

1 Curtis:10

2 Curtis:12

3 Coll:loc.1139, loc. 1233

4 Coll:loc.568

5 Goodman: 107, 161, 260, 310-311

6 Wiener:loc.7486;loc.7494; The Washington Post: ‘Documents Detail U.S. Intelligence Insights, Mistakes,’ by Robert G. Kaiser, 3/11/2001: www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/03/11/documents-detail-us-intelligence-insights-mistakes/7bc98d3a-ae40-4f9c-a633-c58008005da8/?utm_term=.0295a0eb79d5

7 Goodman: 161, 172, 200, 4, 201, 208, 270, 283

8 Fenton:loc.8167

9 Kinzer:2:269; Coll:loc.3559, loc. 3783; The Washington Post: ‘U.S. Envoy Reassigned In Afghan Policy Clash,’ By Steve Coll, 8/10/1989

10 Trento:2:339

11 Wiener:loc.7494

12 Goodman: 89, 105; Coll: loc.3282

13 Scott:3:115

14 Soufan: 345

15 McCoy & Block:332;The Nation:11/14/88;McCoy:2:450;Cockburn,A:264

17 Washington Post: 5/13/1990; McCoy & Block:340

18 McCoy:2:454

19 Scott:3:126

20 Coll: loc. 1712, loc. 3048; The New Yorker: ‘The Man Behind Bin Laden,’ by Lawrence Wright: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/09/16/the-man-behind-bin-laden

21 Baer: loc. 2194

22 Soufan:2:111

23 Wright:106; The Guardian: ‘Saudi Arabia criticised for 48 beheadings in four months of 2018,’ by Agence France-Presse in Dubai, 4/26/2018: www.theguardian.com/world/2018/apr/26/saudi-arabia-criticised-over-executions-for-drug-offences ; NBC News: ‘Saudi Arabia seeks 'unprecedented' beheading for woman activist,’ by F. Brinley Bruton, 8/22/2018: www.nbcnews.com/news/world/saudi-arabia-seeks-unprecedented-death-penalty-woman-activist-n902771 ; nakarajan.blogspot.com/2018/07/royal-murder-against-love-in-saudi.html

24 ‘2000 Camp David Summit’ by David Shyovitz: www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/background-and-overview-of-2000-camp-david-summit ;’ Update on Yasser Arafat and the Grand Mufti,’by Baron Bodissey,1/31/2008, gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/2008/01/update-on-yasser-arafat-and-grand-mufti.html ;The Washington Times, ‘Yasser Arafat: Nazi trained,’ 8/9/2002, www.washingtontimes.com/news/2002/aug/9/20020809-035905-1668r/ ; The Washngton Institute: ‘The Aftermath of Camp David 2000,’ by Dennis Ross, 4/21/2002, www.washingtoninstitute.org/policy-analysis/view/the-aftermath-of-camp-david-2000 ; ‘Yasser Arafat,’ by Daniel Pipes. 9/7/2009, www.albatrus.org/english/lien_of_oz/islam/yasser_arafat.htm

26 MilitantIslam Monitor.org: ‘The Nazi Roots of Modern Radical Islam,’ By Tom Knowlton, 11/17/2006, www.militantislammonitor.org/article/id/2543

27 Haaretz: ‘The Coming Civil War,’by Ari Shavit, 8/20/2004

28 Haaretz: ‘Palestinians Should ‘Shut Up’ or Make Peace, Saudi Crown Prince Told Jewish Leaders.’ 5/1/2018; www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/palestinians-should-shut-up-or-make-peace-said-saudi-crown-prince-1.6036624 ; en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amin_al-Husseini ; Haaretz: ‘the Coming Civil War,’ by Ari Shavit, 8/20.2004

29 Berntsen: loc, 3301

30 McCoy & Block:334; Los Angeles Times:2/13/1988

31 Curtis:148

32 Rashid:208

33 Coll:loc.4606, loc. 8581

34 Scott:3:pp: 163-165; ppia.wikia.com/wiki/Mega_Oil; Curtis:197

35 Baer: loc. 1054-1139; Scott:3:164; Chicago Tribune: ‘Oil Firms Find New Wild West, In Azerbaijan,’ 6/21/1992; The Washington Post: ‘Azerbaijan Throws Raw Recruits Into Battle,’ By Steve LeVine,4/21/1994, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1994/04/21/azerbaijan-throws-raw-recruits-into-battle/87811ca1-5c98-4b29-9273-f7186c5786d0/?utm_term=.43515e746338

36 Rashid:2:119

37 Berntsen: loc.2037, loc. 2134

38 Aljazeera:’Taliban Oil’:10/8/2016; Huffington Post:’Taliban Oil’:10/13/2016; Rashid:2:45

39 Wall Street Journal, 5/20/97:Hugh Pope:‘Afghan Mutiny Boosts Islamist Fighters, Chances for Western-Built Oil Pipelines’

40 Curtis:177; www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=international_islamic_relief_organization

41 Wright:190

42 Baer: loc.597; www.iraqtimeline.com/1996/ciareport.html

43 Unger:loc.1772-1792

44 Scott:4:loc.2343

45 Coll:loc.9422; www.cia.gov/news-information/speeches-testimony/2000/dci_speech_020200.html ; Clarke:2:140; Wright:215-222; The New Yorker: ‘The Man Behind Bin Laden,’ by Lawrence Wright: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/09/16/the-man-behind-bin-laden ; Berntsen: loc. 1556

46 Clarke:2:145 ; Clarke: 38; Coll: loc. 9609, loc. 10050

47 Clarke: 198; Hodes and Sedra: Chap.3, “The Opium Trade”

48 Coll: loc. 10105; Pulitzer Center: ‘Interview with George P. Shultz,’ By Mattathias Schwartz, 7/29/2014

49 Coll: loc. 8858, loc. 8946

50 Berntsen: loc. 8023-8032

Iraq

1 Berntsen: loc. 7645-8023; Fenton:loc.2657; Ricks: 33

2 Goodman: 134

3 New York Times: ‘In Bahrain, Worries Grow of Violent Shiite-Sunni Confrontation,’ By Souad Mekhennet, 1/25/2012: www.nytimes.com/2012/01/26/world/middleeast/26iht-m26-bahrain-conflict.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all ; New York Times: ‘Powell Calls His U.N. Speech a Lasting Blot on His Record,’ By Steven R. Weisman, 9/9/2005: www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/politics/powell-calls-his-un-speech-a-lasting-blot-on-his-record.html ; Huffpost: ‘The Reporting Team That Got Iraq Right,’ By Max Follmer, 5/25/2011: www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/03/17/the-reporting-team-that-g_n_91981.html

4 Ricks: 96

5 Goodman: 135, 236-237, 257; Goodman:2:257-259; Ricks: 95-101; Washington Post: ‘For Vietnam Vet Anthony Zinni, Another War on Shaky Territory,’ By Thomas E. Ricks, 12/23/2003, www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2003/12/23/for-vietnam-vet-anthony-zinni-another-war-on-shaky-territory/1fc22c89-4f9f-4a35-b759-4fdda8158e92/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6ea1f262c7b4

6 Goodman: 2: 161; Clarke: 52; New York Times, ‘In Bahrain, Worries Grow of Violent Shiite-Sunni

Confrontation,’ by Souad Mekhennet, 1/25/2012

7 Soufan:350

8 Ricks: 21; Reuters: “Iran seen to need 3-8 yrs to produce bomb,” by Jon Boyle, 10/22/2007,

www.reuters.com/article/us-nuclear-iran-elbaradei/iran-seen-to-need-3-8-yrs-to-produce-bomb-idUSL2214711120071022

9 The Daily Star: “The rocky ascent of Condoleezza Rice,” Joseph Lelyveld, 1/14/2012; Goodman:2: 164; Ricks: 46,53

10 Chandrasekaran: 38, 101-104

11 Ricks: 157-163, 180, 203, 226, 238; Chandrasekaran: 79-85, 129-131; Counterpunch: ‘The Battle for Iraq’s Oil Wealth,’ by Nicola Nasser, www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/20/the-battle-for-iraqs-oil-wealth/ ; The New Yorker: ‘Plan B.’ By Seymour M. Hersh, 6/28/2004: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/06/28/plan-b-2

12 Ricks: 319-320

13 Ricks:2: loc 1706

14 Independent: ‘Former US military adviser David Kilcullen says there would be no Isis without Iraq invasion,’ by Lizzie Dearden,3/4/2016: www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iraq-war-invasion-caused-isis-islamic-state-daesh-saysus-military-adviser-david-kilcullen-a6912236.html ; Huffington Post: “Rice Adviser: Iraq Invasion Was ‘F*cking Stupid,’” by Jason Linkins, 8/5/2008: www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/28/rice-adviser-iraq-invasio_n_115398.html

15 CBS News: ‘Much of $60B from U.S. to rebuild Iraq wasted, special auditor's final report to Congress shows,’ 3/6/2013: www.cbsnews.com/news/much-of-60b-from-us-to-rebuild-iraq-wasted-special-auditors-final-report-to-congress-shows/ ; CBS News: ‘Empty Iraq Prison A "Monument" To Waste,’ 7/28/2008: www.cbsnews.com/news/empty-iraq-prison-a-monument-to-waste/ ; Chandrasekaran: 145-146, 157

16 Intelligence and National Security,Vol. 25, No. 1, 76–85, February 2010, ‘US Blunders in Iraq: DeBaathification and Disbanding the Army,’by James P. Pfiffner; Ricks:319-345; Ricks:2: loc. 597, 846

17 Goodman: 2: 167-169; International Policy digest: “The Shameless Defense of the Iraq War,” by Louis Dubose, 5/20/2015: intpolicydigest.org/2015/05/20/the-shameless-defense-of-the-iraq-war/ ; The American Prospect: ‘The Pentagon Muzzles the CIA,’ by Robert Dreyfuss: web.archive.org/web/20030416015313/http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/V13/22/dreyfuss-r.html

18 Goodman: 2: 151-152 , 173-175

19 Weiner:loc.8422; New York Times: ‘A Closer Look at Cheney and Halliburton,’ by David E. Rosenbaum, 9/28/2004; Scott:4:loc.2602; Unger:loc.3580

20 Clarke:2:loc.182

9/11 Is On Us

1 Wright: 268-269

2 Clarke: 165

3 Mark Rossini, www.thecipherbrief.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Regarding911.pdf ; US Congress, 7/24/2003, pp. 135 pdf file; 9/11 Commission, 7/24/2004, pp. 502

4 https://fas.org/irp/cia/product/oig-911.pdf ; Salon: ‘Insiders voice doubts about CIA's 9/11 story,’by Rory O'connor • Ray Nowosielski, 10/14/2011: www.salon.com/2011/10/14/insiders_voice_doubts_cia_911/

6 Wright:337; www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=ahmed_shah_massoud ; Ricks:2: loc. 4577; Voltairenet: ‘The CIA, 9/11, Afghanistan, and Central Asia,’ by Peter Dale Scott, 9/24/2012: www.voltairenet.org/article175984.html

8 Soufan: 528-536

9 Bamford:224; Weiner:2:387-388; The New Yorker: ‘The Agent, Did the C.I.A. stop an F.B.I. detective from preventing 9/11?,’ By Lawrence Wright,7/10/206; www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/saudi-arabia-911-lawyer-214996

10 KPBS: ‘Islamic Cleric Raised Red Flags While in San Diego,’ by Amita Sharma, 6/10/2010, www.kpbs.org/news/2010/jun/10/islamic-cleric-raised-red-flags-while-san-diego/

11 Newsweek: ‘Terror Watch: Tangled Ties,’ by Michael Isikoff, 4/6/2004, www.newsweek.com/terror-watch-tangled-ties-125287

12 Baer: loc. 1267; History Commons: ‘Context of 'July 10, 2002: Defense Policy Board: ‘Saudis Are Active at Every Level of the Terror Chain’, www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a071002saudisinvolved ; Coll: loc. 1558

13 Unger:loc.4196-4277;Dawn: ‘Saudi prince found dead in desert,’7/31/2002; www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/04/saudi-arabia-911-lawyer-214996 ; The Guardian, ‘Declassified documents detail 9/11 commission's inquiry into Saudi Arabia,’by Philip Shenon,1/13/2016; The New York Times, ‘A Saudi Imam, 2 Hijackers and Lingering 9/11 Mystery,’ By Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane,6/17/2016; Soufan: 404; WND: ‘9/11: 3,000 Americans for 3 Saudi princes,’ by Walid Shoebat,9/10/2012, www.wnd.com/2012/09/911-3000-americans-for-3-saudi-princes/

14 Soufan:441-443; Coll: loc. 9414

15 Baer: loc.578-795

16 Trento:2:352; Scott:4:loc.2707;Fenton:loc.8195; www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=tom_wilshire_1 ;Scott:4:loc.3772;Unger:loc.3702,4149; Fenton:loc.3393; Baer: loc 539-577,788-801; The Dossier: ‘Princely Trafficking,’ www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyHcPzr5aiA, 12/6/2012; The Guardian, ‘Drug charge for Saudi prince,’7/18/2002

17 Goodman:2:146; New York Times: ‘4 in 9/11 Plot Are Called Tied To Qaeda in '00,’ By Douglas Jehl,8/9/2005: www.nytimes.com/2005/08/09/us/front%20page/4-in-911-plot-are-called-tied-to-qaeda-in-00.html ; Clarke:2:29-32

18 Scott:3:153; Scott:4:loc.832,loc.1744; Wright:182

19 Scott:3:140;Jane’s Intelligence Review:8/1/2001:Hirschkorn et al:’Osama Bin Laden and the al Qaeda Group’

20 New York Times: ‘C.I.A. Officers Played Role In Sheik Visas,’ By Douglas Jehl, 7/22/1993, www.nytimes.com/1993/07/22/nyregion/cia-officers-played-role-in-sheik-visas.html

22 Weiner:2:378,393-394,415; Clarke:2:116, 216; Wright:237

23 Fenton: loc.1067-1074;ABC NEWS: ‘FBI Agent Transferred to Cleveland,’1/7/2006; Newsweek: ‘The Inside Information That Could Have Stopped 9/11,’by Jeff Stein,1/14/15

24 Wright: 351

25 Soufan:208,250

26 Fenton:loc.7274-7637; erenow.com/ww/the-black-banners-9-11/13.php ; ShadowProof: ‘NYT: Soufan Book Adds To Charges Cia Kept 9/11 Terrorist Info From Fbi,’ shadowproof.com/2011/09/12/nyt-soufan-book-adds-to-charges-cia-kept-911-terrorist-info-from-fbi/

27 Soufan:286-290

28 Weiner:2:416-417; Fenton: loc.5111, 6517; https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/FBI_eMails_concerning_Moussaoui

29 Curtis:262;Scott:4:2743;New York Times:’Spector of Terror,’ by Mary Tabor,6/27/1993

30 Goodman:2:137; ; Wright:257

31 AP:8/23/1998; Newsweek:10/1/2001:’War on Terror’;Unger:loc.1772; Clarke:264

Afghanistan Never Ending

1 Coll:2:275

2 Rashid:427

3 Rashid:229

4 Peters:location 2121

5 Rashid:204

6 International Crisis Group, “Reforming Afghan Police,” Brussels, August 30, 2007, in Rashid:205

7 Associated Press, “Unpopularity of Karzai Government Threatens Afghanistan War Effort, Holbrooke Warns,” Brussels, April 28, 2007, in Rashid:205; Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction: ‘Counternarcotics: Lessons from the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan:’ www.sigar.mil/pdf/lessonslearned/SIGAR-18-52-LL.pdf#page=62

8 Goodman:2:272

9 Coll:2:491

10 Coll:2:597

11 Coll:2:592

12 CBS News;3/1/2017;The Lancet:Vol 2,Issue 10:10/2014;The Guardian:11/16/2017; Taylor,Arnold:126

13 Coll:2:277

14 Rashid:2:227

15 Coll:2:391

16 Coll:2:395

17 Coll:2:302

18 Rashid:2:193

19 Clarke:2:237-258;Salon.com: ‘Did the Saudis buy a president?,’ by Craig Unger, 3/13/2004 www.salon.com/2004/03/12/unger_2/

20 Clarke:2:275-278

21 Rashid:246

22 Clarke:2:275-278

23 Ricks: 41

24 Clarke:52-57; Ricks: 72-75, 87

25 Rashid:134:Interview with Ryan Crocker, Islamabad, February 7, 2006

26 Rashid:136; Globalecco.org: ‘Cutting The Link Between Illegal Drugs And Terrorists,’by LTC Kashif J. Khan, Pakistan Air Force and Police Chief Inspector Olcay Er, Turkish National Police, 8/2013, globalecco.org/cutting-the-link-between-illegal-drugs-and-terrorists

27 Rashid:235

28 Curtis:190

29 “Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communication,” Department of Defense, Washington, D.C., September 2004:in Rashid:173

30 Rashid:317

31 Rashid:325

32 The Nation:”The Drug That Makes the Taliban Possible,”Alfred McCoy:2/22/2016; Mark Shaw, “Drug Trafficking and the Development of Organized Crime in Post-Taliban Afghanistan,” in UNODC, “Afghanistan’s Drug Industry.”

33 Scott:3:73

34 Rashid:374

35 Scott:4:loc.2042; Coll: loc. 8826

36 Peters:loc.1453,2056;Scott:4:loc.2053

37 International Herald Tribune, May 22, 2006:Judy Dempsey, “General Calls Drugs Biggest Test for Afghans”

38 U.S. Congress, Senate, Minority Staff Report for Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations Hearing on Private Banking and Money Laundering: A Case Study of Opportunities and Vulnerabilities, November 9, 1999, in Scott:2:chapter: The United States and the Global Drug Traffic in 2010

39 Rashid:273

40 Rashid:278

41 Rashid:281,242

42 Peters:location 2649; The Economic Times: ‘Pakistan risks losing $10 billion annually following FATF 'Grey List,' By Dipanjan Roy Chaudhury, 4/3/2019: economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international/world-news/pakistan-risks-losing-10-billion-annually-following-fatf-grey-list/articleshow/68697831.cms

43 Newsweek:Pakistan Wants To Buy Military Supplies From Russia And China After U.S. Funding Freeze:1/28/2018

44 Washington Post:1/25/2018

45 Rashid:359-360; The Times:6/10/2010; Rashid:2:228

46 Rashid:366; Rashid:2:229

47 Coll:2:336

48 McCoy & Block:347

49 McCoy:2:444

The Cure

1 Reuters:10/4/95

2 Prouty:418;425

3 1990 Address to the Colorado Bar Association, “Is The Bill of Rights A Casualty of the Drug War?”

4 Nadelmann:193;196;Baum:178-205

5 Harper’s Magazine:7/96

6 Schneider & Flaherty in The Pittsburgh Press,1991

7 Duke & Gross:136

8 Duke & Gross:136

9 Duke & Gross:138

10 Duke & Gross:129;Baum: 293

11 Duke & Gross:136

12 Schneider & Flaherty in The Pittsburgh Press:1991

13 DrugPolicy.org: ‘Asset Forfeiture Reform:’ www.drugpolicy.org/issues/asset-forfeiture-reform

14 Szasz:1:23

15 Codex Theod:16:1:2;16:8:1;16:8:7; 16:8:19; 16:10:3;Code:1;12;16;48;54; Peters: 1:45;Linder:81;258

16 Duke & Gross:140

17 The NORML Leaflet:6/91;9/91

18 Glasser in Krauss:275;McNamara in Krauss:293

19 San Francisco Examiner:4/9/95

20 McCoy & Block:56

21 Ratification Handbook;Merz:83

22 Califano:111; McCoy & Block:59

23 Rolling Stone:5/5/94:33;Bureau of Prisons testimony:6/93

24 Rolling Stone:5/5/94:33

25 Rolling Stone:5/5/94:33

26 Sweet in Krauss:356

27 Duke & Gross:179

28 Friedman in Krauss:57

29 Engelsman in Krauss:170

30 Duke & Gross:199

31 Amsterdam Drug Policy:City of Amsterdam,1996

32 Morgan in Krauss:409; NBCNews: “Meet the 'radical gay doctor' behind NYC's falling HIV rate,’ By Tim Fitzsimons, 12/1/2018: www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/meet-radical-gay-doctor-behind-nyc-s-falling-hiv-rate-n938596

33 AEIdeas:Mark Perry:’Chart of the Day’:7/9/2017;Mic.com:’14 Years After’: Zeesham Aleem:2/11/2015;Time: ‘Drugs in Portugal: Did Decriminalization Work?’:Maia Szalavitz:4/26/2009

34 Engelsman in Krauss:173

35 Zeese in Krauss:260

36 Wasson:2

37 Schultes & Hofmann:1:19;25

38 High Times:1:167

39 Lee & Schlain:27

40 Corson:440

41 Marks:Ch.4

42 Lee & Schlain:24;Cockburn,A:200

43 Marks:Ch.4

44 Lee & Schlain:38

45 Talbot:309

46 Talbot:296

47 Bloomberg News:Tom Schoenberg:CIA Cover-Up Suit:7/17/2013

48 Lee & Schlain:21

49 Lee & Schlain:32;Cockburn,A:207; Valentine: 16

50 Lee & Schlain:50

51 Huxley:18

52 Tomorrow:Spring 1961:”Peyote Night”

53 Lee & Schlain:64; Malleus:2:1:16

54 Hofmann:ch.5

55 Lee & Schlain:81

56 Lee & Schlain:82

57 Lee & Schlain:80; WebMD: ‘Psychedelic Drugs to Treat Depression, PTSD?,’ by Matt Smith, 9/18/2018: www.webmd.com/mental-health/news/20180918/psychedlic-drugs-to-treat-depression-ptsd

58 Lee & Schlain:240

59 Lee & Schlain:188

60 Chuchill:189

61 Lee & Schlain:225

62 Jung:11:197

63 Jung:14:361 ; St. Augustine, The City of God, 19:15

64 Jung:13:347

65 NHL:147

66 Mark:10:18;Luke:18:18

67 Jung:13:185

The Sycamore of Nuit Feeds the Newly Dead

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