Drugs, Guns and Nukes:
Iran as the New 'Dope, Incorporated'
By Tom Burghardt
Global Research, March 18, 2012
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=29839
How many memes does it take to stitch-up a war?
As Israel, the United States and their NATO allies set
their sights on the "prize," Iran's vast petrochemical wealth, multiple
themes have been floated by corporate media to make the case for war.
Since the 1980s, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and now, according to the Treasury Department, Iran's alleged links
to global narcotrafficking networks have all been evoked as clarion
calls for "regime change." It would serve us well however, to explore
the recent history of the secret state's reliance upon the illicit trade
and how such dalliances advance America's wider geopolitical goals.
Contras and Kosovars: CIA Shadow Wars
In the 1980s, it was the Sandinistas and
"Castro-Communism" who did nicely for the Reagan administration. As
money and weapons flowed to "our boys," the Contras, they repaid the
favor by massacring Nicaraguans by the tens of thousands for Uncle Sam
while generously providing cocaine by the ton, to party-happy Americans during that "go-go" decade.
Indeed, when Colombian drug lords Jorge Ochoa and Pablo
Escobar began their profitable partnership, they did so alongside
dope-dealing Bolivian fascists and Argentine neo-Nazi generals with
long-standing ties to the CIA. As Consortium News
revealed: "The putsch, which became known as the Cocaine Coup,
installed [Luis] García Meza and other drug-connected military officers
who promptly turned Bolivia into South America's first modern
narco-state. The secure supply of Bolivian cocaine was important to the
development of the Medellín cartel in the early 1980s."
In fact, it was Bolivian drug lord Roberto Suárez Goméz
who financed the coup. With close ties to Pinochet's regime in Chile and
Argentina's death squad generals, Suárez was a fixture amongst
far-right international circles who generously distributed funds to
South American affiliates of the Nazi-tainted World Anti-Communist
League (WACL).
When WACL was founded in 1966 in Taipei as the Asian
People's Anti-Communist League (APACL), it first functioned as a
wholly-owned subsidiary of the governments of Taiwan under dictator
Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist narcocracy and the Republic of Korea, then
under the iron rule of American ally, Park Chung Hee.
Amongst other notable members who founded WACL were Yoshio
Kodama and Ryiochi Sasakawa, Class-A Japanese war criminals and
fascists who were top leaders of post-war yakuza crime
syndicates. Both men were billionaires who's wealth derived from control
over Asian drug, gambling and prostitution rackets. Imprisoned in 1945
for war crimes Sasakawa, along with Kodama and future Japanese Prime
Minister Nobusuke Kishi, was saved from the gallows and released from
prison in 1948, a result of his OSS-CIA connections. He once proudly
stated: "I am the world's richest fascist." Both Kodama and Sasakawa
operated alongside old "China hands" such as Paul Helliwell, who created
CIA front companies linked to the drug traffic, Bangkok-based Sea
Supply Corporation and the Taiwanese airline Civil Air Transport.
Indeed, it was none other than Sasakawa, the power behind
the throne of Japan's Liberal Democratic Party, who provided major
funding for Reverend Sun Myung Moon's intelligence-connected Unification Church, and WACL, key actors in Bolivia's Cocaine Coup, facts you're not likely to read in the Moon-owned Washington Times.
As analyst Peter Dale Scott wrote for Variant
magazine, "In the post-war years, when the drug-financed China Lobby
was strong in Washington, and the U.S. shipped arms and Chinese
Nationalist troops into eastern Burma, opium production in that remote
region increased almost five-fold in fifteen years, from less than 80 to
300-400 tons a year. Production doubled again in the 1960s, the heyday
of the Kuomintang-CIA alliance in Southeast Asia." In his most recent
book, Scott noted:
The members of Helliwell's small OSS detachment in Kunming
(Helliwell, [E. Howard] Hunt, Ray Cline, Lucien Conein, and Mitchell
WerBell) cast a long shadow over both postwar intelligence-drug
triarchies and the WACL's history. In addition to Helliwell's support
for KMT drug traffickers in Burma and Hunt's contribution in Mexico,
APACL's formation is said to have owed a large debt to Ray Cline. In the
late 1970s John Singlaub, another veteran of Kunming, took over the
WACL. Lucien Conein became a case officer of the Vietnamese officials
overseeing anticommunist drug networks, first Ngo Dinh Nhu and later
police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan. Mitchell WerBell, who went on to develop
small arms for intelligence services like the [Mexican] DFS, was also
involved with WACL death squad patrons ... and was eventually indicted
himself on drug charges. (Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, Lanham, Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield, 2010, pp. 52-53)
Shortly after WACL's formation, the organization was
joined by representatives of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, an
unsavory cabal of war criminals and Nazi collaborators led by Yaroslav
Stetsko. When German armies invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stetsko,
then the leader of the collaborationist Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists proclaimed the founding of a Ukrainian quisling state
allied with the Third Reich. In the "Act of Proclamation of Ukrainian
Statehood," Stetsko declared that Ukraine "will closely cooperate with
the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its
leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the
world." After the war, Stetsko and his cohorts fled Europe along the
Vatican's infamous "ratlines" and took up the anticommunist cudgel for
the United States while working alongside European and Latin American
fascists connected to global drug networks.
As the corrupt García Meza regime consolidated power, they
butchered leftists, peasants and union organizers and were assisted by
Argentine "dirty war" specialists, CIA asset and escaped Nazi war
criminal, Klaus Barbie and a motley crew of far-right terrorists. It was
a thoroughly international affair. Fresh from fomenting bloodshed in
Italy, Stefano Delle Chiaie, the architect of the 1980 Bologna railway
station bombing which killed 85, a hard core Nazi with operational links
to both the CIA and NATO's Gladio network, put his unique "skills" to
use building up the global drug trade and exporting terror into Central
America. As left-wing researcher Stuart Christie documented:
One of the Delle Chiaie organisers in Latin America, West
German Joachim Fiebelkorn (born 1947), a Paladin and Kampfbund Deutscher
Soldaten veteran, as well as a Frankfurt pimp, who had worked with
Delle Chiaie in Bolivia, stated later to the West German police that
Delle Chiaie was the number one international middleman between the
Sicilian Mafia and the Latin American cocaine producers. Based in a
police barracks next to the West German Embassy in the capital, La Paz,
the Delle Chiaie men, Los Novios de la Muerte--'The Fiancés of
Death'--as they called themselves, were contracted as security guards
and enforcers for the multinational drug empire of Roberto Suárez,
described as the 'King of Coca,' overseeing the production,
transportation, distribution and marketing of cocaine. (Stuart Christie,
Stefano Delle Chiaie: Portrait of a Black Terrorist, London, Anarchy Magazine/Refract Publications, 1984)
Investigative journalists Marta Gurvich and Robert Parry
reported that "many of the Argentine intelligence officers who assisted
in the Cocaine Coup followed up their victory in Bolivia by moving
northward into Central America to train a ragtag force of Nicaraguan
contras." By "1981," Gurvich and Parry wrote, "President Reagan formally
authorized the CIA to collaborate with the Argentine intelligence
services in building up the contra army."
Under the stewardship of CIA Director William Casey, the
Company did more than just watch from the sidelines. With a
wink-and-a-nod from the Reagan White House, they concluded that the
Medellín Cartel, as they had earlier with Asian drug mafias, could be
used to help defeat communism in Latin America. Together with the
far-larger Cali Cartel, run by the enterprising Rodríguez Orejuela
brothers, they did just that. It was estimated at the time that the
CIA's underworld "friends" made up to $60 million per month; chump
change by today's standards, but with the Sandinistas out of power by
1990, relations with Pablo Escobar soured.
In fact, as the National Security Archive revealed in previously classified documents,
when Escobar was run to ground "key evidence" linked "the U.S.-Colombia
task force charged with tracking down [the] fugitive ... to one of
Colombia's most notorious paramilitary chiefs." According to the Archive,
"The affair sparked a special CIA investigation into whether U.S.
intelligence was shared with Colombian terrorists and narcotraffickers
every bit as dangerous as Escobar himself." They had; a pattern that
persists today as can readily be seen in the U.S. "war" against Mexico's
powerful Cartels.
As we now know, this great drug war "victory" in practice
favored one corrupt Colombian faction over another with no discernible
effects on the ground. Indeed, as Narco News reported, a leaked classified document
written by Department of Justice attorney Thomas M. Kent "claims that
federal agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration's office in
Bogotá, Colombia, are the corrupt players in the war on drugs."
"Kent's memorandum," journalist Bill Conroy disclosed,
"contains some of the most serious allegations ever raised against U.S.
antinarcotics officers: that DEA agents on the front lines of the drug
war in Colombia are on drug traffickers' payrolls, complicit in the
murders of informants who knew too much, and, most startlingly, directly
involved in helping Colombia's infamous rightwing paramilitary death
squads to launder drug money."
"The memo further claims that, rather than being simply a
few 'bad apples' who need to be reported to their superiors, these
allegedly dirty agents are being protected by an ongoing cover-up
orchestrated by 'watchdog' agencies within the Justice Department,"
Conroy wrote.
This was hardly an aberration but rather, emblematic of
the corrupt nature of official U.S. policies going back decades. As we
learned in the late 1990s, largely as a result of public outrage
generated by the late Gary Webb's Dark Alliance series, a secret Memorandum of Understanding
between Reagan's Justice Department and the Agency came to light. That
1982 memo legally freed the CIA from reporting drug smuggling and other
crimes committed by their assets; a point to keep in mind when we
explore U.S. allegations of corruption by top Iranian officials below.
Were these Cold War anomalies? Hardly.
When the "Great Triangulator" Bill Clinton took the helm
in 1993, it was Slobodan Milosević who reprised the role of the century
as Europe's "new Hitler." With the Cold War over, the Soviet "menace" a
fleeting image in the rearview mirror, and with neoliberal economic
"reforms" all the rage, America began its eastward expansion of NATO
into the former Eastern Bloc. Yugoslavia, deemed an historical
anachronism had to go, and so it did.
Never mind that before occupying the Oval Office, when he
was governor of Arkansas Clinton deep-sixed investigations into illicit
operations by legendary CIA drug pilot and DEA snitch Barry Seal.
Indeed, Seal and his cohorts, as well-documented, flew vast quantities
of drugs into Mena Airport for the Medellín Cartel in "protected" drug
operations that helped fund the Nicaraguan Contras, as investigative
journalist Daniel Hopsicker reported for The Washington Weekly back in 1997.
Recapitulating a modus operandi which the secret state has
relied upon since the end of World War Two, first in Asia and then
globally, far-right political and religious extremists and drug
trafficking organizations with ties to Western intelligence began
working their magic in the Balkans.
Across the Atlantic, while the media obsessed over stains
on Monica Lewinsky's infamous blue dress, the dismemberment of
Yugoslavia was in full-swing. America and Germany's close allies, the
secessionist Bosnian government under Alija Izetbegović, a darling of
Western "humanitarian interventionists," an Islamist fraudster who had
expressed sympathies for the 13th Waffen SS Handschar Division during
the war, which earned him a stint in a Yugoslav prison, provided
thousands of veteran Afghan-Arab fighters passports and guns to help
"liberate" Bosnia. As with NATO's current "regime change" ops in Libya
and Syria, Salafist jihadis aligned with a CIA shadow army which morphed
into Al Qaeda, the "database," poured into the region.
While Osama Bin Laden's minions wrecked havoc in Bosnia,
merrily butchering Jews, Roma and Serbs whilst establishing
Saudi-financed Wahhabist "charities," later in the decade they gained entrée
into Kosovo where they joined NATO's newest "best friends forever," the
Kosovo Liberation Army. Ruled with iron fists by gangsters Hashim
Thaçi, Agim Çeku and Ramush Haradinaj, the KLA, aligned with Italian
Mafiosi and Turkish crime bosses and ran highly-profitable heroin and
prostitution rackets across Europe.
In 1999, The Montreal Gazette
published an exposé reporting that "Kosovar Albanian rebels were linked
to drugs by narcotics experts in Europe as early as 1994, while U.S.
authorities warned in 1996 that Kosovars were smuggling large amounts of
weapons and drugs. Police in various Western nations also noted the
rising proportion of heroin being shipped to their countries through the
Balkans, and the rise in crime and overdose deaths that accompanied the
drug."
Michael Levine, a 25-year DEA veteran and whistleblower who currently co-hosts The Expert Witness Radio Show, told the Gazette there was "no question" that American secret state agencies knew about the KLA's drug ties.
"They (the CIA) protected them (the KLA) in every way they could," Levine said. "As long as the CIA is protecting the KLA, you've got major drug pipelines protected from any police investigation."
Writing for the Covert Action Quarterly,
analyst Michel Chossudovsky reported that "While KLA leaders were
shaking hands with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at
Rambouillet, Europol (the European Police Organization based in The
Hague) was 'preparing a report for European interior and justice
ministers on a connection between the KLA and Albanian drug gangs'."
"In order to thrive," Chossudovsky averred, "the criminal
syndicates involved in the Balkans narcotics trade need friends in high
places. Smuggling rings with alleged links to the Turkish State are said
to control the trafficking of heroin through the Balkans 'cooperating
closely with other groups with which they have political or religious
ties' including criminal groups in Albanian and Kosovo. In this new
global financial environment, powerful undercover political lobbies
connected to organized crime cultivate links to prominent political
figures and officials of the military and intelligence establishment."
Following NATO's 78-day bombing campaign, a template for
today's State Department-fomented "humanitarian interventions," the
former socialist Yugoslavia lay in ruins, the KLA had their narco-state
and the Pentagon had Camp Bondsteel. By 2000, Thaçi's "boys" had pushed
aside Turkish and Italian mobsters and took control of the lucrative Balkan heroin pipeline and harvested human organs for sale on the international black market.
It was a victory all around.
We should keep Chossudovsky's point in mind today, as
"undercover political lobbies" such as the terrorist Mojahedin e-Khalq
(MEK) and their various fronts such as the National Council of
Resistance of Iran (NCRI) "cultivate links to prominent political
figures and officials of the military and intelligence establishment,"
showering U.S. politicians and military elites with millions of dollars
in "speaking fees" from unknown sources as The Christian Science Monitor exposed.
The New 'Heroin Connection'
If the prospect of a "nuclear-armed" Iran isn't enough to
send red-blooded, God fearin' Americans into a tizzy, then consider this
zinger from RFE/RL: "U.S. Says Iranian General Instrumental In Afghan Drug Traffic."
That's right, the CIA's former propaganda mouthpiece Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty, smelling blood in the water and itching for a
fight, informed us last week that the Obama administration "has named a
general in Iran's elite Al-Quds force as a key figure in trafficking
heroin from Afghanistan."
According to the U.S. Treasury Department, "General
General Gholamreza Baghbani, who runs the Revolutionary Guards' Quds
Force office in Zahedan," has been designated a "narcotics kingpin."
We're told that Baghbani has been accused "of aiding
Afghan drug runners in moving opiates into and through Iran, as well
helping send weapons to the Taliban."
Guns in, drugs out; while it has a familiar ring to it, are we talking about Iran or NATO's Central Asian outpost, Afghanistan?
According to a 1998 timeline inserted into the Congressional Record during the mark-up for the 1999 Intelligence Authorization Act we read the following:
Soviet-backed coup in Afghanistan sets stage for explosive
growth in Southwest Asian heroin trade. New Marxist regime undertakes
vigorous anti-narcotics campaign aimed at suppressing poppy production,
triggering a revolt by semi-autonomous tribal groups that traditionally
raised opium for export. The CIA-supported rebel Mujahedeen begins
expanding production to finance their insurgency. Between 1982 and 1989,
during which time the CIA ships billions of dollars in weapons and
other aid to guerrilla forces, annual opium production in Afghanistan
increases to about 800 tons from 250 tons. By 1986, the State Department
admits that Afghanistan is 'probably the world's largest producer of
opium for export' and 'the poppy source for a majority of the Southwest
Asian heroin found in the United States.' U.S. officials, however, fail
to take action to curb production. Their silence not only serves to
maintain public support for the Mujahedeen, it also smooths relations
with Pakistan, whose leaders, deeply implicated in the heroin trade,
help channel CIA support to the Afghan rebels.
Since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion that pattern has been
repeated. Afghan opium and heroin production has skyrocketed, primarily
because NATO forces have aligned themselves, and propped up, those
responsible for the dramatic rise in poppy cultivation: Hamid Karzai's
warlord-infested narco-state. But rather than pointing a finger at the
source of what amount to protected drug rackets--the CIA and
NATO--RFE/RL and their media accomplices are stitching-up the Islamic
Republic for a fall. One more reason then, for launching a preemptive
war.
But Iranian officials have charged that opium and heroin
production in Afghanistan have had a severe impact inside Iran and, like
Russia, have accused the U.S. of turning a blind eye when it comes to
fighting opium production. Indeed, Sergei Blagov reported for ISN Security Watch that "Russia's top officials have described the situation as 'narco-aggression' against Russia and a new 'opium war'."
"The Russian press," Blagov wrote, "has been even less
diplomatic, claiming that US and NATO forces were directly involved in
the drug trade. Russian media outlets allege that the bulk of the drugs
produced in Afghanistan’s southern and western provinces are shipped
abroad on US planes."
Commenting on the "creative destruction" wrought by NATO, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, wrote in The Daily Mail
that the West's "economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond
the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer
exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our
international aid efforts urge every developing country to do.
Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and 'value-added' operations."
According to Murray, facts clearly established by multiple
law enforcement agencies, Afghanistan "now exports not opium, but
heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in
kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed
for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and
bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads,
improved by American aid, with Nato troops."
"How can this have happened, and on this scale?" Murray wonders. "The answer is simple. The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government--the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect."
But let's not let anything as inconvenient as facts get in the way of stopping Qom's "new Hitlers"!
Far from being complicit in the drug trade, as Reuters
reported, while Iran "is a main transit route for bringing heroin and
opium to Western markets from Asia ... the United Nations' top
anti-drugs official in Tehran praised the country for its efforts in
stopping traffickers and seizing narcotics."
"Definitely drug control is one of the positive stories
(from Iran)," said Roberto Arbitrio, representative of the United
Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)."
"This is the first country in the world in terms of opiate
seizures," he told the news agency in an interview, referring to opium,
morphine and heroin. "Last year it was 300 tons."
If ubiquitous facts on the ground speak volumes then, as Reuters
disclosed, "Iran's campaign was showing results with the country
seizing an estimated 20-40 percent of trafficked volumes, as compared to
5-10 percent in the United States and Europe;" a telling statistic not
likely to be repeated by war-hungry media in the West.
Indeed, UNODOC
reported last November that Iran, along with Afghanistan and Pakistan
have entered into an agreement "designed to strengthen drug control
among the three countries most seriously affected by Afghan opium. The
initiative promotes information exchange and intelligence-led operations
targeting the major transnational networks."
"All three parties," UNODOC's Executive Director Yury
Fedotov averred, have launched a "Triangular Initiative" that has
already boosted "their cross-border counter-narcotics capacities."
Tellingly, a "joint planning cell has been established in Tehran to enhance analytical and operational capacity and to launch joint operations." (emphasis added)
According to Fedotov, the planning and operational cell
"has notched up successes. Since 2009, 12 drug control operations
coordinated by the joint planning cell have resulted in the seizures of
several tons of illicit drugs and the arrest of many drug traffickers."
This is certainly not the message that war planners in
Washington care to hear. But what can we learn closer to home where the
Obama administration has the media's ear and can exert influence over
own America's benighted "War on Drugs"?
When two planes filled with nearly ten tons of coke
were seized in Mexico, in commercial jets tricked-out to resemble those
flown by the Department of Homeland Security (see Daniel Hopsicker's
eye-opening archive on the story) or when the fourth largest U.S. bank, Wachovia,
pled guilty to laundering $378.4 billion in drug money for Mexican drug
cartels and got off with a slap on the wrist, or when the Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms let guns "walk" across the border, right
into the hands of the CIA's favorite narcotrafficking gang, the Sinaloa
Cartel as Bill Conroy over at Narco News exposed (see the archive here), corporate media responded with a collective yawn.
In fact, Narco News
revealed in December that in an upcoming trial in Chicago of one of the
Sinaloa cartel's top leaders, Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, federal
prosecutors are seeking to bar defense evidence that U.S. government
agencies, including the CIA and the DEA, had "entered into a pact with
the leadership of the Mexican Sinaloa narco-trafficking organization
that supposedly provide its chief narcos with immunity in exchange for
them providing US authorities with information that could be used to
target other narco-trafficking organizations."
Conroy disclosed that "US prosecutors do confirm in court
filings that another high-level Sinaloa 'Cartel' member, Mexican
attorney Loya Castro, has worked as a DEA cooperating source for some 10
years (and as recently as this year) while also working for the Sinaloa
organization."
"Loya Castro, Narco News revealed, "acted as the
intermediary representing the Sinaloa organization in its quid pro quo
arrangement with the US government, Zambada Niebla's court pleadings
allege." Indeed, to protect their dirty deals with Mexico's largest drug
gang, a multibillion dollar enterprise whose tentacles stretch across
the Americas, the "US government, in court pleadings filed in September,
lodged a motion in the case seeking to invoke the Classified
Information Procedures Act, or CIPA, a measure designed to assure
national security information does not become public during court
proceedings."
What might threaten America's "national security," pray tell?
As Daniel Hopsicker disclosed
last summer, when "embattled" acting ATF director Kenneth Melson
testified before Congress he refused "to go down for a program [Fast and
Furious] which he had little or nothing to do with originating."
Pointing a finger at U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder,
Melson told congressional grifters that "the evidence we have gathered
raises the disturbing possibility that the Justice Department not only
allowed criminals to smuggle weapons but that taxpayer dollars from
other agencies may have financed those engaging in such activities."
As Hopsicker pointed out, those "shadowy other government agencies" is "the very definition of the CIA."
Hopsicker asked: "If the CIA is arming Mexican drug
cartels, might they not also have been behind the otherwise-puzzling
effort to supply these same drug lords with top-quality
American-registered airplanes and jets?"
"Were the two now-infamous American-registered planes
busted in Mexico's Yucatan carrying almost ten tons of cocaine part of
this same so-far unnamed Operation behind the ATF's Operation
Gunwalker?"
As we now know, at least one of the drug planes, "a Gulfstream business jet (N987SA)" Hopsicker revealed, were part of a fleet of fifty planes purchased through money laundered by Wachovia Bank as both Bloomberg Markets Magazine and The Observer reported, at least one of which were used to transport kidnapped "terrorist" suspects on CIA "ghost flights."
But that's all the past, we should "look forward, not
backward." Why bother with "ancient history" when there's a new war to
gin-up?
According to the Treasury Department press release,
"The U.S. Department of the Treasury today designated Iranian Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force (IRGC-QF) General Gholamreza
Baghbani as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker pursuant to the
Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act (Kingpin Act). This is the
first use of the Kingpin Act against an Iranian official."
"Today's action exposes IRGC-QF involvement in trafficking
narcotics, made doubly reprehensible here because it is done as part of
a broader scheme to support terrorism. Treasury will continue exposing
narcotics traffickers and terrorist supporters wherever they operate,"
said Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S.
Cohen.
If Treasury Department allegations can be believed, and
given Cohen's role as Obama's point-man for enforcing Iran sanctions the
charges reek to high-heaven. "General Baghbani," we're told, "allowed
Afghan narcotics traffickers to smuggle opiates through Iran in return
for assistance. For example, Afghan narcotics traffickers moved weapons
to the Taliban on behalf of Baghbani. In return, General Baghbani has
helped facilitate the smuggling of heroin precursor chemicals through
the Iranian border. He also helped facilitate shipments of opium into
Iran."
Jumping feet first into the fray, the right-wing Long War Journal,
charge that "Al Qaeda is also known to facilitate travel for its
operatives moving into Afghanistan from Mashad. Al Qaeda additionally
uses the eastern [Iranian] cities of Tayyebat and Zahedan to funnel its
operatives into Afghanistan."
We're told that "several [unnamed] Taliban commanders
based in western Afghanistan have stated that they have received
weapons, cash, and training from Iranian forces. Taliban commanders and
units train inside Iran to conduct attacks against NATO and Afghan
forces. In addition, al Qaeda operatives are also known to receive
support from the Ansar Corps; Mashad is a transit point for al Qaeda
operatives en route to Afghanistan."
LWJ's "proof"? Why none other than a 2010 statement
from disgraced ISAF commander General Stanley McCrystal, who said that
"Iran is training Taliban fighters and providing them with weapons"!
Case closed, right?
But as with last year's discredited Iranian "Qods Force"
plot to assassinate Saudi ambassador Adel al-Jubeir in an upscale
Washington restaurant, evidence has since emerged that a key figure
named in the conspiracy by failed Texas used-car salesman, Manssor
Arbabsiar, alleged Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer Gholam Shakuri,
has been fingered by Iranian officials and Interpol as a member of the
Mojahedin e-Khalq (MEK), according to Tehran Times.
Mehr News Agency
reported that "Interpol has found new evidence showing that the number
two suspect in connection with the alleged Iranian government's
involvement in a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington
is a key member of the terrorist Mojahedin Khalq Organization (MKO)."
According to Mehr, "Gholam Shakuri was last seen in Washington and Camp Ashraf in Iraq where MKO members are based."
Citing an Interpol report, the news agency alleged that
"the person in question has been travelling to different countries under
the names of Ali Shakuri/Gholam Shakuri/Gholam-Hossein Shakuri by using
fake passports including forged Iranian passports. One passport used by
the person was issued on 30/11/2006 in Washington. The passport number
was K10295631."
As with the now-discredited plot to assassinate the Saudi
ambassador, allegedly to be carried out in cahoots with a member of
Mexico's violence-prone Zetas Cartel, who turned out to be a DEA
informant, Treasury Department charges against General Gholamreza
Baghbani should be taken with a grain of salt.
As journalist Gareth Porter noted
in his investigation of the Arbabsiar plot, "the allegations that the
Iranian-American used car salesman wanted to 'attack' the Saudi embassy
and other targets rest entirely upon the testimony of the DEA informant
with whom he was meeting. The informant is a drug dealer who had been
indicted for a narcotics violation in a US state but had the charges
dropped 'in exchange for cooperation in various drug investigations,'
according to the FBI account. The informant is not an independent source
of information, but someone paid to help pursue FBI objectives."
Coming just days before the Society for Worldwide
Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), bowing to U.S. pressure,
cut off 30 Iranian financial institutions, including its Central Bank,
from its network in a bid to cripple Iran economically, the allegations
against Baghbani should be viewed as another psychological component of
America's shadow war.
With lurid tales of Iranian involvement with the Taliban
and the drug trade front and center, expect a new round of alarmist
reports from Western media while the same punditocracy do their best to
bury evidence of U.S. secret state complicity in the global drug
scourge.
And why not? As Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime told The Observer
in 2009, "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."
After all, $352 billion buys a lot of omertà.
Tom Burghardt is a researcher and activist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In addition to publishing in Covert Action Quarterly and Global Research, he is a Contributing Editor with Cyrano's Journal Today. His articles can be read on Dissident Voice, Pacific Free Press, Uncommon Thought Journal, and the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks. He is the editor of Police State America: U.S. Military "Civil Disturbance" Planning, distributed by AK Press and has contributed to the new book from Global Research, The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century.
