Stop me if you've heard this one before

The NY Times has a new report about the CIA-led mission in Afghanistan, and (Surprise!) they are directly leading torturers, murderers, and drug lords.

But the units have also operated unconstrained by battlefield rules designed to protect civilians, conducting night raids, torture and killings with near impunity, in a covert campaign that some Afghan and American officials say is undermining the wider American effort to strengthen Afghan institutions.

Those abuses are actively pushing people toward the Taliban, the officials say. And with only a relatively small American troop contingent left — and that perhaps set to drop further on President Trump’s orders — the strike forces are increasingly the way that a large number of rural Afghans experience the American presence.

Many of the strike forces were officially put under the control of Afghan intelligence starting in 2012. But senior Afghan and international officials say that the two most effective and ruthless forces, in Khost and Nangarhar Provinces, are still sponsored mainly by the C.I.A.
... One former senior Afghan security official bluntly accused the strike forces of war crimes.

I know what you are thinking. "This can't be possible. The CIA would never do something like murdering innocent civilians. Oh, wait. I meant the opposite. This is not just predictable, but inevitable."
Nine years ago the NY Times reported this.

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

That Afghan paramilitary force is what you are reading about today.

poppies.jpg

The CDC reported back in 2015 that “heroin use in the United States increased 63% from 2002 through 2013.”
Meanwhile, the CIA was running a country that increased its opium production 20 times over during that exact same timeframe, becoming the source for 90% of the planet's opium.
Coincidence? Maybe not.

The CIA is also overjoyed because its black-ops budget - which is tied to the exponential growth of opium production in Afghanistan - is now secured possibly for another 20-50 years, claims Mike Raddie, co-editor of online site BSNews.

Believe it or not, there are rumors that the CIA is directly involved with smuggling opium from Afghanistan to the U.S.
I know! Crazy, huh?
Where is Gary Webb when you need him?

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detroitmechworks's picture

Because that is the current truth.

It will only become truth that they did something when all the participants are safely outside the statute of limitations and a corporation discovers a way to profit from the mess that was created by apparently nobody.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRvk9dkubLc]

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I do not pretend I know what I do not know.

snoopydawg's picture

Smile

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

@snoopydawg
somebody else's picture of the Clinton family to make your point instead of buying a copy of your own--although I understand they are being sold at a significant discount over the original retail price.

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@snoopydawg I actually went to Hillary twitter feed

that was posted there. Unless the whole thing is a hack, but it looks real

the site, can't assume that she is writing it, has many tweets about new candidates who won, young voters, more young voters, a couple of orgs I have never heard of, except indivisible, and she shows the areas that have extended the sign up time for obama care

as I recall in 2016 she did not connect with youth

she points out that there are many new faces in congress

maybe she is hinting that they need an old hand like her?

i sure hope that she is no where near the 2020 election. The DLC , third way, etc are doing what they can to keep the neo liberal establishment dems in the game

look at what has happened to the Green New Deal

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dervish's picture

and they've always been thus. Just as the Crips or Bloods ruin a neighborhood when they take over, the CIA is destroying our country and its institutions.

We have no greater enemy.

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"Obama promised transparency, but Assange is the one who brought it."

A little discussion on another thread (thank you, lotlizard) makes me wonder about surveillance via googletube, and g@@gle in general.

Lotlizard said that embedded tubes on a web page feed your info to G for profiling, even if you don't click and run the video. I wouldn't be surprised.

I use Noscript a lot, which allows me to look at the embedded scripts in web pages. Almost every web page runs several G scripts designed to analyze traffic, pinpoint your location, etc. G has close ties with the mil and the seeing-eye A. It's hard to imagine just how much the Internet functions as surveillance. Self-financed, gleefully cooperating surveillance. How much service do we offer what some call a deep state by embedding tubes? Notice that I never embed tubes; at most I copy links. Sure, it adds a lot of fun to a page by embedding lots of tubes, but should we be exposing readers to that much surveillance, without an opt-out option? Most of the time I have Noscript turned on, which takes some gloss away from the page, but I feel safer. I still see links, but not embedded stuff which require scripts.

What little I think I know is incomplete and probably wrong. It would be great if someone with knowledge about safe sex, er, browsing, would write an essay on the topic. VPN, Tor, Noscript, profile thinning, etc. It would be useful to archive the essay and keep a link to it on the front page. Maybe we can reduce the spread of Holographic Information Virus, and put the Yenisei on a diet.

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