Dear Dirty America

Dave Lindorff gives us the dirty rundown:

…Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of Afghanistan’s stunningly corrupt President Hamid Karzai, a leading drug lord in the world’s major opium-producing nation, has for eight years been on the CIA payroll….

During the Vietnam War, the CIA, and its Air America airline front-company, were neck deep in the Southeast Asian heroin trade. At the time, it was Southeast Asia, not Afghanistan, that was the leading producer and exporter of opium, mostly to the US, where there was a heroin epidemic….

…in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration…the CIA was deeply involved in the development of and smuggling of cocaine into the US, which was soon engulfed in a crack cocaine epidemic—one that continues to destroy African American and other poor communities across the country.

And now we have Afghanistan, once a sleepy backwater of the world with little connection to drugs (the Taliban, before their overthrow by US forces in 20001, had, according to the UN, virtually eliminated opium production there), but now responsible for as much as 80 percent of the world’s opium production…

Read more about this:

Gary Webb, Dark Alliance 

Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press

(ps. I never buy from Amazon, as they are actively on a crusade to put down Indie presses)