Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

Terrorism and drugs

Terrorism is not a movement or an ideology. It is a tactic. 
And you cannot destroy a tactic.

The "war on terrorism" is nothing of the sort, as we know. An 
excuse to allow the US and its few allies to attack countries and 
governments for reasons having nothing to do with terrorism, and 
everything to do with markets, resources and global domination.

That the US of all countries would use "the threat of terrorism" 
as a cover for its aggressive plans has considerable irony that 
Guardian readers will readily recognise. What country has devoted 
more time and resources over the years to training terrorists 
than any other? Give you one guess.

Take the right-wing feudal Islamic fundamentalists, for example 
(these days invariably lumped together as "al Qaida" to give 
"terrorism" form and substance). The US sought out, armed and 
trained the feudals in Afghanistan to overthrow the revolutionary 
government there.

Former Canadian diplomat and Professor of English at the 
University of California Berkeley Campus, Peter Dale Scott, in a 
recent article points out that according to George Crile, in his 
book Charlie Wilson's War, "about the CIA's arming of Islamists 
during the Afghan War", the training provided by the US agency 
included "urban terror, with instruction in car bombings, bicycle 
bombings, camel bombings, and assassination".

Scott thinks some of that training is coming back to haunt the US 
now in Iraq.

The CIA also trained fundamentalists in Somalia (in the mid '70s, 
Somalia, remember, had a pro-Soviet government and a vibrant, 
left-wing people's movement). They too, later, used their US 
training to bring down US helicopters when Bush's father tried to 
assert US power in their country.

Scott again: "One trainer of the Somalis, Egyptian-born Ali 
Mohamed, was also a veteran of US Special Forces and the CIA. 
While allegedly still on the US payroll, Mohamed had been 
recruiting and training Arabs for the US-supported Afghan War, at 
the al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, New York. This served as the 
main US recruiting centre for the network that after the war 
became known as al Qaida.

"In 1993, ... Mohamed was picked up by the Royal Canadian Mounted 
Police (RCMP) in Canada in the company of an al Qaida terrorist. 
Almost certainly he would have been arrested; but Mohamed 
insisted that the RCMP put in a phone call to his FBI handler. 
The call quickly secured his release."

I'll bet it did! Scott's most recent book is Drugs, Oil and War: 
The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina 
(published in 2003 out of Lanham, Maryland, by US publisher 
Rowman and Littlefield). Here is a potent little extract from it:

"I have no evidence that the United States intervened militarily 
as a conscious means of maintaining control over the global drug 
traffic. However, conscious decisions were definitely made, time 
after time, to ally the United States with local drug proxies.

"... Furthermore, drugs from regions where the CIA has been 
active have tended to migrate through other countries of CIA 
penetration, and more importantly through and to agencies and 
groups that can be classified as CIA assets.

"In the 1950s opium from Indochina traveled through Iran and 
Lebanon to the Corsican Mafia in Marseilles and the Sicilian 
Mafia under Lucky Luciano. In the 1980s mujahedin heroin was 
reaching the Sicilian Mafia via the Turkish Gray Wolves, who 
worked in tandem with the Turkish Army's Counter-Guerrilla 
Organisation, which functioned as the Turkish branch of the CIA's 
multinational 'stay behind' program.

"The routes shifted with the politics of the times, but the CIA 
denominator remained constant."

The CIA's involvement with the Sicilian Mafia dates back to 
before the agency was even called the CIA, to when it was still 
the wartime Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Using mob 
connections on the New York waterfront (another denominator that 
has remained constant), the OSS/CIA organised for the Mafia in 
Sicily under Salvatore Giuliano and others to massacre members of 
the Communist anti-fascist Resistance, in advance of the US 
invasion of Sicily.

The "War on Drugs" is as phoney as the "War on Terror". Drug 
trafficking, and the money it generates, is an integral part of 
the global capitalist economy.

The huge amounts of cash generated by drug trafficking (and the 
profits from the laundering of that cash) provide "legitimate" 
businesses and capitalist entrepreneurs with plentiful funds for 
takeovers, funding of election campaigns, bribing officials and 
manipulating markets.

And it has been known for many years that this money is a major 
source of supplementary and unsupervised funding for the CIA and 
the National Security Agency (NSA).

This black money allows the CIA and the NSA to clandestinely 
carry out operations expressly forbidden by Congress, to foment 
civil strife including war, and to fund CIA activities in the USA 
where the agency is not supposed to operate at all.

Clearly, the best contribution George Bush could make to a real 
war on drugs would be to close down the CIA. Hardly likely!