Posted December 19, 2001
MarijuanaNews Analysis by Richard Cowan
Within a few days after 9-11 I was astonished to hear that con
artists had set up web sites to try to siphon off some of the charitable contributions
that were being given to the victims.

I thought that that was awful. Of course, they have nothing on
the appalling people who govern us and who are waging a war against cannabis users. They
are now involved in a very cynical and quite transparent effort to exploit the attacks of
September 11th to generate support for their war on cannabis users, especially
the sick and dying, as demonstrated by the DEA raid on the LA Cannabis resource center.

Indeed they are plumbing new depths.

Consider this excerpt from a Reuters story by Patricia Wilson on
December 14, 2001.

Citing narcotics trafficking as a source of funding for terrorism, President Bush
Friday called on Americans to join the Sept. 11 war effort by giving up illegal drugs.

“It’s so important for Americans to know that the traffic in drugs finances the work
of terror, sustaining terrorists, that terrorists use drug profits to fund their cells to
commit acts of murder,” Bush said. “If you quit drugs, you join the fight against terror
in America.
(MarijuanaNews note: This is simply absurd. “If you quit drugs??”

First, it is as pointless to talk as though all illegal drugs were the same in this
context as it is in any other.
See

HREF=”http://www.marijuananews.com/mom_dad_what_are_drugs.htm”>”Mom, Dad, What Are
Drugs?”

DEAland produces roughly half of the marijuana that it consumes, and the rest comes
from Mexico and a few other countries, and there is no connection to terrorism in the
production and distribution of the most widely used illegal drug.

Second, it must be said that there is a nexus between some drugs and some terrorist
organizations, but that nexus is created by prohibition, and is not intrinsic to the
“drugs”

themselves, so this is just one more – rather extreme — example of trying to
blame “drugs” for the adverse consequences of the drug war.

Third, it is bizarre even to think that people who are addicted to heroin, meth, etc.,
would be influenced by such an argument. If they were able to overcome their substance
abuse problems that easily, they would have been more influenced by the harm that it is
doing to themselves and their families. Of course, the real problem is that the
politicians and the police establishment and their drug war industry complex are addicted
to the power and graft that they get from prohibition. It would be easier to communicate
with a junkie in the gutter than with the prohibitionists in Congress.)

U.S. officials have accused Saudi-born fugitive Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda
network, blamed for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, as well as their hosts,
Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers, of supporting themselves with illicit drug profits.

“The Taliban were a drug trafficking government,” Steven Casteel, assistant
administrator for intelligence at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said earlier
this month. But he, and other experts, noted that the Northern
Alliance, which has led the effort on the ground to oust the Taliban, were also heavily
involved in the drug trade.

(MarijuanaNews note: Oops. A problem with the party line!

But how did this new party line evolve? Well, consider this from the
Partnership for A Drug Free America…)

Bin Laden to be poster boy in war on drugs
By JESSICA WEHRMAN
Scripps Howard News Service
December 04, 2001

- In the 1980s first lady Nancy Reagan led the government effort to get kids to
“just say no” to illegal drugs.

Today, government officials want to use Osama bin Laden as a poster boy in the war
against drugs.

The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the Partnership for a Drug-Free America and
other players in the drug war aim to link the terrorist mastermind and illicit drugs in a
campaign targeted at kids.

Federal drug investigators say that Afghanistan’s Taliban party relies on income from
the drug trade - particularly opium - to stay financially viable. And that strength,
investigators believe, enabled the Taliban to harbor bin Laden despite international
pressure to hand him over. Afghanistan produced more than 70 percent of the world’s supply
of illicit opium in 2000, according to the State Department.

The DEA has no direct evidence confirming that bin Laden himself is involved in the
drug trade.

The Partnership for a Drug-Free America released poll results
Tuesday indicating that if U.S. teens knew more about the link between illegal drugs and
terrorism, they would be less likely to use drugs.

Forty-six percent of youths between 12 and 17 polled in early November said they
believed that international terrorism is financed at least in part by the illegal drug
trade. Sixty-two percent said that knowing illegal drug use helps finance terrorism would
make them less likely to use drugs.

A separate poll in early October found that 77 percent of teens favored having
information about the link delivered through anti-drug television commercials.

While the partnership has yet to formulate the specifics of it campaign, Stephen
Pasierb, president of the partnership, said the war on terrorism presents an opportunity
to help parents educate their children about drugs.

“The ability to motivate the country is one we have not had in the past few
years,” Pasierb said.

(MarijuanaNews note: And the Partnership has never let the truth stand in the way of
prohibitionist propaganda.
See
The
Partnership Has A New Survey and The Media Lap It Up.
Multiple Sources.
and
“The
Partnership is comprised primarily of advertising professionals,who work for the very ad
firms that produce the alcohol advertising that the drug czar’s media campaign would
counterbalance, if it included alcohol counter-ads. The partnership was founded on
alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceutical money.”
and links

Now, consider this excerpt report from a December 4th Asia Times By Syed
Saleem Shahzad.)

US turns to drug baron to rally support

KARACHI - Pakistan and the United States have turned to a tried and trusted
“friend” in their efforts to exert control over events in Afghanistan -
convicted Pakistani drug baron and former parliamentarian, Ayub Afridi.

Without fanfare, Afridi was freed from prison in Karachi last Thursday after serving just
a few weeks of a seven-year sentence for the export of 6.5 tons of hashish, seized at
Antwerp, Belgium, in the 1980s.

(He had been in custody for over two years). He had also been fined 5 million rupees
(US$82,000). No reasons were given for Afridi’s release, or under which legislation he was
allowed to return to his home town in Khyber Agency in North Western Frontier Province.

Afridi was a key player in the Afghan war of resistance against the Soviet Union’s
occupying troops in the decade up to 1989.

It is a matter of record that top US Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA) officials believed in the early 1980s that they would never be able to justify a
multibillion-dollar budget from the government to provide support to the mujahideen in the
fight against the Red Army.
See
If The Media
Cannot Report On the Well-Known CIA Role in the Iran/Contra Cocaine Business,
How Can They Begin To Tell The Story of Marijuana Prohibition?
and
CIA Finally
Admits That It Protected Cocaine Traffickers
While Reagan, Bush And Clinton Suppressed Marijuana
and
The New York
Times Reports That The CIA Admits
It Worked With “Suspected Drug Traffickers” But…
and
Timothy
McVeigh Letters to Family Before Bombing
Say That Army Wanted Him To Smuggle Drugs for CIA

As a result, they decided to generate funds through the poppy-rich Afghan soil and
heroin production and smuggling to finance the Afghan war. Afridi was the kingpin of this
plan. All of the major Afghan warlords, except for the Northern Alliance’s late Ahmed Shah
Masoud, who had his own opium fiefdom in northern Afghanistan, were a part of Afridi’s
coalition of drug traders in the CIA-sponsored holy war against the Soviets.

Sources say that Afridi’s constituencies in eastern and southern Afghan provinces have
been revived following the withdrawal of the Taliban, and with them the drugs trade.

Commanders such as Haji Abdul Qadeer, Haji Mohammed Zaman and Hazrat Ali are once again
ruling the roost in these areas. These commanders used to be the biggest heroin and opium
mafia in Afghanistan’s Pashtun belt.

The saga of Afridi is a good illustration of the troubling links between traffickers and
politicians in Pakistan, as well as the shady deals made by the United States with both
sides.

Afridi, Pakistan’s most wanted drug baron, returned to Pakistan on August 25, 1999, after
serving a three-and-a-half year sentence in a US prison and paying a $50,000 fine. His
imprisonment is said to have been a face-saving gesture. From his refuge inside
Afghanistan, and with an Afghan passport, Afridi voluntarily traveled to Dubai in the
United Arab Emirates, where he “negotiated” with American authorities and from
where he boarded a cargo flight to the US in December 1995 to hand himself over as a drug
baron.

At the time there was much hue and cry in the international media about Afridi’s unholy
nexus with drug lords, who happened also to be the leading Afghan warlords. He served his
full term before being released by US authorities and returning to Pakistan.

Hardly had his feet touched Pakistani soil, though, when the Anti-Narcotics Force arrested
him and detained him, for the first six weeks at a secret location. But it was not until
two weeks ago that he was formally sentenced.

A warrant for the police to bring Afridi before the courts was first issued in 1983
following the discovery of 17 tons of hashish in a warehouse in Balochistan. Three years
later, he was the subject of a wanted notice issued after a smuggler arrested in Belgium
denounced him as his supplier.

(MarijuanaNews note: Of course, there is hardly anything new about this. Consider the
following from my old friend, Al Giordano of www.narconews.com

December 15, 2001

Colleagues,

I went to the jungle to get the proof that Casimiro Huanca, the Bolivian labor leader
killed Dec. 6th, was assassinated in cold blood by the military. That story is nailed and
coming out shortly on Narco News. But something else most interesting has happened…

I’ve stumbled upon documentation of a massive CIA run cocaine
laboratory in 1986-87 in the Bolivian jungle; the missing link of Iran-Contra.
(MarijuanaNews note: This could have the potential to
embarrass the Bush administration.
See
The Narking of America: The Bush Team for
Total War, or Just to Keep the Lid On.

Finally, for the ultimate in cynicism it is hard to beat DARE.
See
Even The Prohibitionists Are Attacking
DARE. What Is the Definition of Fraud? Analysis By Richard Cowan

Its web site, DARE.org now has a hustle urging exploiting September 11 in a new way. You
are urge to buy a cheesy lapel pin of the Twin towers and the American flag to support a
program that will “help America’s schoolchildren
understand and cope with the 9/11 tragedy.

Your tax-deductible donation will fund programs allowing
D.A.R.E. to help America’s schoolchildren understand and cope with the 9/11 tragedy.

Donate $20.00 (plus $5.00 S/H) and receive a commemorative pin.”
COLOR=”#008000″>

Like the con artists that I mentioned in the beginning, the con artists at DARE have a
hustle for a few bucks, but this really is penny-ante. The Big Boys have their own rackets
and the scale of these operations is vast. But even worse, is the cynicism that uses the
tragedy of September 11th as an excuse to find another way of lying to the
people of DEAland, especially the children.

The Partnership poll was an extreme example of this. Consider the poll results that
purport to show that “Forty-six percent of youths between 12 and 17…..
believed that international terrorism is financed at least in part by the illegal drug
trade.”

How would kids between 12 and 17 have any real knowledge that “international
terrorism is financed at least in part by the illegal drug trade.”

Have they been making field trips to Afghanistan? “Mr. Bin Laden, I am from the
Springfield High student newspaper. Do you sell drugs to finance terrorism?”

Obviously this is a planted idea that the kids have been fed by the prohibitionist
propaganda in the media, who then ask them for their opinions.

“A separate poll in early October found that 77 percent of teens favored having
information about the link delivered through anti-drug television commercials.”

Well, of course they would. If that were true, then why object to having it in ads?

Sixty-two percent said that knowing illegal drug use helps finance terrorism would make
them less likely to use drugs.

Yes, but what are they going to think when they find out that they have been lied to
again??

Silly me, that doesn’t matter at all! What is important is what the
prohibitionists in Congress and the Administration think. They must love being lied to,
almost as much as they enjoying lying to the people.)

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