Narco Politics

The British alternative is what? More civilian deaths from air strikes?

British diplomat opposes legalized Afghan poppy crop

Britain’s top diplomat in Canada has dismissed a poll, commissioned by the international think-tank that is championing the legalization of Afghanistan’s contentious opium poppy crop, which shows that Canadians overwhelmingly support for the use of Afghan opium for medicinal purposes.

Cary was responding to the release of an Ipsos Reid survey of 1,000 Canadians, conducted on behalf of the Senlis Council, which found that nearly eight in 10 Canadians (79 per cent) want Prime Minister Stephen Harper to get behind an international pilot project that would help transform Afghanistan’s illicit opium cultivation into a legal source for codeine, morphine and other legitimate pain medications for the international market.

Oh so you could do it just that after six years you don't have the infrastructure.....right-o that's why Harper sent our troops into the Opium Fields. The effectiveness of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams can be measured in opium production.

Cary noted that while opium production has been licensed in such places as Thailand and Turkey, it took 15 years to achieve such a system. Afghanistan simply lacks the infrastructure and regulatory framework to cultivate opium legally and to keep it out of the hands of drug dealers, he said.

And for the British who created this problem in the 19th Century in order to expand their Empire to be telling us they oppose legalization, well that is a bit rich isn't it. They have a history of creating infrastructure and regulations for opium production.

It was not until the British Empire started organizing and commercializing opium production in the 19th century that the opium poppy became entrenched in the world economy. The opium produced in British India was the first drug to become integrated into the then emerging globalization.

Tea, which was then only grown in China, was bought by British merchants with silver extracted from South American mines.

This triangular trade went on at least until the British Empire, together with the East India Company it had set up, created a thriving opium market in China, first through illegal smuggling and then through forced imports.

The two so-called “opium wars” (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) waged by the British to impose their opium trade onto China resulted in “unfair treaties” that not only made Hong Kong a British colony but also provoked, in China, the biggest addiction ever to happen in world history.

Chickens, home, roost.

And after all this is a British problem, which they created back then and again today in Afghanistan.

Britain is stoned at home and sold out in Helmand

The vast increase in opium poppy farming in Afghanistan is indicative of an inability to grasp a basic law of economics

The British government for sure knows how to do one thing. It knows how to help farmers in need. Since it arrived in Afghanistan in 2001 and was put in charge of the staple poppy crop, ministers have spent hundreds of millions of pounds on promoting it. On Monday the United Nations announced the result. Poppy production in Afghanistan has soared since the invasion, this year alone by 34%. The harvest in the British-occupied protectorate of Helmand rose by 50% in 12 months. This is a dazzling triumph for agricultural intervention.

Ministers may deny this was their policy, but they cannot be that inept. They faced a heroin epidemic at home. Suddenly finding themselves charged with controlling almost all the world's opium production, they must have known what they were doing. By alienating farmers and forcing them into the arms of the Taliban, they would drive up illicit production and encourage oversupply. While that would increase heroin consumption in Britain in the short term, as it has done, oversupply would eventually cause prices to collapse. At that point, the British policy of "poppy substitution" with wheat and other crops would start to bite and supply would be stifled. What happened when that stifling drove prices back up again was someone else's concern.

I cannot think of any less daft explanation for a policy that otherwise defies every law of economics. Kim Howells, the Foreign Office minister responsible for flooding British streets with cheap heroin, may squabble with his American colleagues over whether poppy eradication is better than substitution, but one thing is certain. Since Nato arrived in Afghanistan, opium has become to the local economy what oil is to a Gulf state. It is roughly 60% of the domestic product and 90% of exports, with productivity per hectare rising by the year.

Those into conspiracy theories might be forgiven for thinking this might also be a policy of the CIA to destabilize Iran by increasing the number of heroin addicts in that country.

Despite US suspicions, Iran - which has one of the world's highest drug addiction rates - argues that it has legitimate interests in combating the influx of heroin and opiates from the poppy fields of Afghanistan. More than 3,000 Iranian police and security personnel have been killed in clashes with drug smugglers along the Afghan border since 1979.

Legalization would of course cure this problem by recognizing drug addiction as a medical problem, a curse of capitalism, rather than a crime.

The year 2009 will mark the centennial of the Shanghai Opium Conference, the first world-wide agreement on the reduction of opium use and production. China, then still an extremely poor feudal nation, was spending most of its foreign exchange on opium it imported through British traders. The British sold their cheap Indian Opium for pure silver to the Chinese, and had almost two centuries of opium fortune-making behind them. The fledgling United States of America tried to conquer a share of the profits in this lavish market, at a time when prohibitionist ideas about alcohol and opium control were expanding all over the globe. It was time for the American Disease to be born.

But don't expect support for that from Bush or Harper. They represent the traditional prohibitionist culture of social conservative Christians. The folks who oppose heroin legalization used to oppose the 'demon rum'.

In later analyses of the history of drug and alcohol controls other names for the American Disease have been coined. The most appropriate one, not tied to any nationality per se, is the 'Temperance Movement'. It was comprised of a collective of local movements prevalent in a group of nations. Later these nine nations would be identified as a special group, the nations where the temperance culture would endorse far reaching control policies in the attempt to regulate medical and recreational drugs. The global impact of these temperance cultures has varied from almost nothing to considerable.

Meanwhile it is telling that not only are Afhgani's the largest producers of opium they are also its victims.

Afghanistan is hooked on opium. The drugs trade has become the largest employer, its biggest export and the main source of income in a land devastated by decades of war. Opium is grown on 10 per cent of the farmland and employs 13 per cent of the population as labourers, guards and transport workers.

The ubiquity of the drug has now created the world's worst domestic drug problem, a crisis threatening to engulf any hope of economic revival. The first nationwide survey on drug use, by the Afghan Ministry of Counter-Narcotics and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, estimated that one million in this nation of 30 million were addicts, including 100,000 women and 60,000 children.

Defending the rights of Afghani women and children, the mantra of the Harpocrites used to justify their warmongering. And their war efforts have resulted in increased addictions amongst women and children. That surely is a measure of success of this mission.




SEE:

Two Canadians In Afghanistan

Say It Ain't So

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Opiate Of The Masses

Iran suffers from being the conduit for Afghanistan opium and heroin. It more than any other country is directly affected by the increased narcotic production in Afghanistan.

While the Canadian media hyped the latest UN Drug Report on the increased opium production in Afghanistan quoting the RCMP claim that we are getting more heroin from there than from the old Golden Triangle.

The Golden Triangle; Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, etc. was the result of the CIA's involvement with black ops there during the Viet Nam war as Afghanistan production is a result of CIA involvement during the anti-Soviet offensive. The fact remains that NATO and American operations against opium production in Afghanistan have been a failure because they have no real alternative to the value of this agricultural product a historic crop in the region. A product first used by British Imperialism to spread its power through out Asia in the 19th Century.

However, in Afghanistan as in other parts of the world, in Burma for example, opium has long been at stake in armed conflicts as its trade has allowed these conflicts to be prolonged. As the complex history of opium in Asia demonstrates, opium production and trade have been central to world politics and geopolitics for centuries and the role of the opium economy in Afghanistan does not represent a new trend. In many ways, history reinvents itself.

It was not until the British Empire started organizing and commercializing opium production in the 19th century that the opium poppy became entrenched in the world economy. The opium produced in British India was the first drug to become integrated into the then emerging globalization. Tea, which was then only grown in China, was bought by British merchants with silver extracted from South American mines. This triangular trade went on at least until the British Empire, together with the East India Company it had set up, created a thriving opium market in China, first through illegal smuggling and then through forced imports. The two so-called “opium wars” (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) waged by the British to impose their opium trade onto China resulted in “unfair treaties” that not only made Hong Kong a British colony but also provoked, in China, the biggest addiction ever to happen in world history. Eventually, opium consumption and addiction also spurred tremendous opium production in China. In response to the Chinese national consumption that drained its silver reserves, China became the world’s foremost opium producer.

This trend emerged first in Laos and in Burma, then in Afghanistan in what came to be known as the Golden Crescent. In both Southeast and Southwest Asia, the Central Intelligence Agency’s anti-Communist covert operations and secret wars benefited from the participation of some drug-related combat units or individual actors who, to finance their struggles, were directly involved in drug production and trade. To cite just two, the Hmong in Laos and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar in Afghanistan.

Today, Afghanistan’s opium production is the direct outcome of Cold War rivalries and conflicts waged by proxies who helped develop a thriving narcotic economy in the country. Afghanistan has been the world’s leading opium-producing country for years now, with Burma and Laos ranking second and third respectively.

And NATO has not engaged the Iranians in controlling the border and transit points used by the opium producers in Afghanistan. And they will continue to fail until they engage the Iranians as allies in the fight against opium.

The Islamic Republic of Iran is a major transit route for opiates smuggled from Afghanistan and through Pakistan to the Persian Gulf, Turkey, Russia, and Europe. The largest single share of opiates leaving Afghanistan (perhaps 60 percent) passes through Iran to consumers in Iran itself, Russia and Europe. There is no evidence that narcotics transiting Iran reach the United States in an amount sufficient to have a significant effect. There are some indications that opium poppy cultivation is making a comeback in Iran, after a long period during which poppy cultivation was negligible. There are an estimated 3 million opiate abusers in Iran, with 60 percent reported as addicted to various opiates and 40 percent reported as casual users. With record levels of opium production right next door in Afghanistan, the latest opiate seizure statistics from Iran continue to suggest Iran is experiencing an epidemic of drug abuse, especially among its youth.

And contrary to the RCMP reports in the press, the United States government report above states that NO Afghani opium is getting into North America. Now do ya think the RCMP may be doing a bit of PR for their pal the PM to justify his war in Afghanistan?

NATO has relied upon American forces practicing large scale opium field eradication supported by air strikes which has led to large scale civilian deaths and friendly fire deaths to NATO forces.

Joanna Nathan
International Crisis Group analyst

Aerial eradication of poppies is not the solution. While some ground-based manual eradication is important as a stick, to discourage particularly new growers, it hits the poorest hardest. Aerial eradication can be too indiscriminate and would enrage a large sector of the population possibly driving them into the arms of the insurgents. On the other hand the proposal to license opium for medicinal use is unfeasible at this stage. Most of the drugs grown in Afghanistan are in Helmand which they haven't been able to stop when it is completely illegal. How would you then insert a massive licensing bureaucracy there and stop those who continue to grow for the black market? The price differentials would be so large there would be no incentive to grow for a licensed market.

The American war on opium production, like the rest of its Afghanistan mission, has been a failure, since it is America's allies in Helmand Province that turn out to be the opium producers themselves.

Eradication in Helmand

This season, the governor of Helmand asked the AEF to eradicate in Helmand. Despite making progress due to the AEF's heavy use of mechanized eradication, insecurity and waning political will hindered the AEF's efforts. Helmand will likely continue to be Afghanistan's largest opium cultivating province. Any future eradication strategy for Helmand needs to first account for security and political will.

It should be noted that 75% of the opium poppy cultivation in Helmand is new cultivation that did not exist two years ago. By definition, then, at least 75% of the poppy in Helmand is not being grown by poor farmers who lack licit economic alternatives-two years ago these farmers were doing something else.

In other words, the vast majority of the poppy in Helmand is not being grown by poor farmers who have been growing poppy for generations and lack economic alternatives. The reality is that cultivation has expanded rapidly in the past two years as opportunists have scrambled to exploit Helmand's lawlessness for profit. Many of Helmand's poppy growers are wealthy land-owners, corrupt officials, and other opportunists. Helmand's land is fertile; infrastructure and access to markets is good, and alternatives to poppy are available. Moreover, if Helmand were a country, it would be the fifth largest recipient of U.S. development aid in the world, having received over $270 million in USAID funds in recent years. Opium poppy grown by wealthy land-owners and corrupt officials funds the insurgency. There is no reason to avoid eradicating their poppy fields aggressively.

SEE:

Two Canadians In Afghanistan

Say It Ain't So

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Gonzo

With the exit of Karl Rove, Alberto Gonzales had no reason to stay on and impede investigations into Rove's alleged role the political firings of Justice Department attorneys.

Gonzales Quits After Months of Turmoil Over Firings

And with both of them gone their is no one left to talk to Congress.

``Alberto Gonzales was never the right man for this job. He lacked independence, he lacked judgment, and he lacked the spine to say no to Karl Rove. This resignation is not the end of the story. Congress must get to the bottom of this mess and follow the facts where they lead, into the White House.'' - Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev.

``The resignation of Alberto Gonzales had become inevitable. His situation was a distraction to the Department of Justice and its attempt to carry out its important duties.'' - Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M.

Under the Gonzales regime Sacco and Vanzetti may not have been hanged for political reasons but they would most certainly have ended up in Gitmo , incommunicado without habeas corpus, while their relatives phones would be tapped illegally.

Covering up for the White House political firings in his department was seen as unimportant, something to sweep under the carpet. And yet it became his petard.

``I don't think he would have ever had to resign until they were able to hang the U.S. attorneys' firings around his neck ... To me, it could all be written off to miscommunication and bad judgment and probably could have been forgiven until they made a conscious decision to be willing to throw some of the U.S. attorneys under the bus.'' - Fired Arkansas U.S. Attorney Bud Cummins.

Priceless.

Shortly afterward, Mr. Bush acknowledged the resignation and defended Gonzales as a man unfairly vilified by his critics.

"It is sad that we live in a time when a talented and honorable person is impeded from doing important work because his good name has been dragged through the mud for political reasons," said Bush.

But in the end President Bush may have been Gonzales's lone defender. The Attorney General's halting explanations to Congress of controversial actions, such as the mass firing of US attorneys last year, lost him the support of many lawmakers. Some accused him of outright lies. Even many in the GOP thought he seemed to be in over his head.

``I have said for a long time that I thought the president would be best served if the attorney general resigned so I think it's the right thing to do.'' - Sen. John McCain of Arizona, Republican presidential candidate.

SEE:

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Saddam and the CIA

Why George Bush applauded the murder of Saddam Hussein by his puppet regime in Baghdad. Dead men tell no tales.

Another very good example of a CIA-organized regime change was a coup in 1963 that employed political assassination, mass imprisonment, torture and murder. This was the military coup that first brought Saddam Hussein's beloved Ba'ath Party to power in Iraq. At the time, Richard Helms was Director for Plans at the CIA. That is the top CIA position responsible for covert actions, like organizing coups. Helms served in that capacity until 1966, when he was made Director.

In the quotations collected below, the name of the leader who was assassinated is spelled variously as Qasim, Qassim and Kassem. But, however you spell his name, when he took power in a popularly-backed coup in 1958, he certainly got recognized in Washington. He carried out such anti-American and anti-corporatist policies as starting the process of nationalizing foreign oil companies in Iraq, withdrawing Iraq from the US-initiated right-wing Baghdad Pact (which included another military-run, US-puppet state, i.e., Pakistan) and decriminalizing the Iraqi Communist Party. Despite these actions, and more likely because of them, he was Iraq's most popular leader. He had to go!

In 1959, there was a failed assassination attempt on Qasim. The failed assassin was none other than a young Saddam Hussein. In 1963, a CIA-organized coup did successfully assassinate Qasim and Saddam's Ba'ath Party came to power for the first time. Saddam returned from exile in Egypt and took up the key post as head of Iraq's secret service. The CIA then provided the new pliant, Iraqi regime with the names of thousands of communists, and other leftist activists and organizers. Thousands of these supporters of Qasim and his policies were soon dead in a rampage of mass murder carried out by the CIA's close friends in Iraq.

SEE:

CIA Conspiracies Are Real

Back In the USSA

State Sponsored Terrorism

The Fifth International

CIA,Conspiracy,Princess Di

Pinochet Admits He Did It.

Psychedelic Saskatchewan

Paranoia and the Security State

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Roswell Aliens

After last weeks confession that yes Virginia the CIA did engage in all those conspiracies, now we have an expose that yes Virginia you were right, there were aliens at Roswell.

last week came an astonishing new twist to the Roswell mystery.

Lieutenant Walter Haut was the public relations officer at the base in 1947 and was the man who issued the original and subsequent press releases after the crash on the orders of the base commander, Colonel William Blanchard.

Haut died last year but left a sworn affidavit to be opened only after his death.

Last week, the text was released and asserts that the weather balloon claim was a cover story and that the real object had been recovered by the military and stored in a hangar.

He described seeing not just the craft, but alien bodies.

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UFO News

Suffield Base Canada's Area 51

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CIA Spies In Canada

The Central Intelligence Agency spied on Canadians critical of the Vietnam War during the late 1960s and '70s in an operation code-named "MH Chaos," CBC News has learned. The declassified CIA documents did not show whether the Canadian government was aware the CIA was spying on Canadian campuses.

Well duh. Of course they were. As it was reported in the Ubyssey in 1967;

The Canadian Union of Students is among 25 organizations
identified as receiving contributions from foundations connected
with the U .S . Central Intelligence Agency.

Since the RCMP, and now CSIS ,to this day have a joint information sharing agreement with U.S. intelligence and police forces.. And the RCMP was doing the same thing.

Spying 101: The RCMP’s Secret Activities at Canadian Universities, 1917-1997. By Steve Hewitt. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. 295 pages.

If you were expecting a book about a course in basic espionage, look elsewhere. Spying 101 is predominantly a study of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s involvement on Canadian university campuses for eight decades monitoring radicals and subversive activities inspired by communists and Quebec separatists. Historian Steve Hewitt sees this period less as one of “monitoring,” than as one of infiltration, subversion, and spying. But, however one characterizes it, when the radical targets and their supporters found out that the government was watching and listening, they were furious and still are. Hewitt admits there was indeed plotting against the State, but suggests that it was, for the most part, nothing serious. He contends that the RCMP, with the concurrence of its political masters, intentionally exaggerated the threats to secure an inflated budget and arouse public antipathy.

The relationship between the CIA and the RCMP began back in WWII with its forerunner the SOE.

In the 1960's as the cold war raged, the CIA began to interfere in Canada's internal politics. Rumour has it that the CIA was only too happy to help defeat the Diefenbaker government.

CIA Fingerprints in Canada

  In 1962, the U.S. Ambassador to Canada, Livingston Merchant, and his Second
Secretary Charles Kisselyak, fuelled a plot among the Canadian Air Forces,
Canadian journalists and others to dispose of Prime Minister Diefenbaker.
Kennedy hated Dief largely for his anti-nuclear stance.  Merchant and
other U.S. embassy officers with espionage backgrounds, met at
Kisselyak's home in Ottawa to feed journalists with spaghetti, beer and
anti-Diefenbaker/pronuclear propaganda.

Among the many participants in these off-the-record briefings was Charles Lynch
of Southam News. Diefenbaker later denounced these reporters as "traitors" and
"foreign  agents."  He lashed out against Lynch on a TV program saying,
"You were given briefings as to how the Canadian government could be
attacked on the  subject of nuclear weapons and the failure of the
Canadian government to do that which the U.S. dictated."

The Liberals used information provided by the RCMP to bring down the Diefenbaker government.

The Munsinger Affair was Canada's first national political sex scandal. It focused on Gerda Munsinger, an East German prostitute and Soviet spy living in Ottawa who had slept with a number of cabinet ministers in John Diefenbaker's government.

Most noted amongst these was the Associate Minister of National Defence, Pierre Sévigny, who had seen her since 1958 and had even signed Munsinger's application for Canadian citizenship. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) discovered her background, however, and informed Justice Minister E. Davie Fulton of her activities. She was deported to East Germany in 1961. The matter was dealt with behind closed doors and Sévigny resigned in 1963.

Traditionally in Canada, the personal lives of politicians are not discussed in parliament or in the media, but in 1966 the Liberal government was under attack for an unrelated security breach. On March 4, an angry Justice Minister Lucien Cardin rebutted the Tories by bringing up the Munsinger Affair in the House of Commons. The story dominated the media for weeks and was followed with rapt attention across the country. It became a massive distraction and all but shut down all other parliamentary activity for some weeks.

And thus the long political relationship with the RCMP as 'their' secret police began.

Conventional wisdom holds that police forces in democratic societies face a dilemma whenever the use of unlawful methods appears warranted to enforce the law. This dilemma is of greatest concern in consensus theories. In conflict theories, an "ideological dilemma" emerges: police must maintain legitimacy by appearing to uphold the law equally for all, while acting preferentially to serve the powerful. A small sample of secret RCMP Security Service communications is examined as: (a) an indication of awareness of the ideological dilemma; (b) evidence of "editing processes" to produce "bureaucratic propaganda"; (c) examples of "official deviance." The ability of the RCMP to resist labelling for official deviance, and maintain legitimacy, is considered in terms of organizational advantages not common in similar security services.

But when one deals with an autonomous paramilitary organization like the RCMP one has to be careful as they have their own political agenda, which may not be the same as their Masters.

Plummer a secret Agent man

Set almost entirely in an interrogation suite in a Montreal hotel in 1964, Agent of Influence stars Plummer, 72, as John Watkins, the former Canadian ambassador to Moscow who died in 1964 in RCMP custody.

A close friend of former prime minister Lester B. Pearson, Watkins was suspected of being a communist spy by the CIA.

Days after the interrogation, he was found dead.

"The reality of the story is, did Watkins die in police custody? Yes. Did the RCMP cover it up? Yes," says Ian Adams, who authored the novel upon which the movie is based and co-wrote the screenplay.

"Has there been any evidence produced of Watkins' guilt? No."

'BLOODLESS COUP'

Instead, what Adams uncovered was evidence of an attempted "bloodless coup" by the CIA to depose Pearson in part by accusing the former ambassador of spying.

The Americans theorized the KGB had blackmailed Watkins over his homosexuality.

But Adams believes it was the RCMP buckling under the pressure of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA head of counter espionage, that doomed Watkins, along with his homosexuality -- which was illegal in Canada until 1968.
Two decades after Watkins' death, and only after an inquest and autopsy, did the RCMP admit the diplomat had never succumbed to Soviet blackmail, says Adams.

"There is not one shred of evidence he was guilty."

The author sees Agent of Influence as a cautionary tale following the events of Sept. 11.

"(Intelligence agencies) are now operating with enormous freedom which they have historically abused."

The CIA also attempted to destabilize the NDP Government in B.C. under David Barrett after its success in doing the same in Chile.

At the same time the CIA was using Cuban Mafia connections in Canada to attack the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa, a series of bombings. Which conveniently never resulted in any arrests by the RCMP. In a bombing in Cuba a Canadian was killed. The bombing was orchestrated by Luis Posada Carriles, who is wanted by Venezuela as a terrorist and is being protected by the U.S. government.

As we mentioned earlier, Canada was not spared from the decades-long campaign of violence against Fidel Castro's Cuba.

In the 1960s and 70s anti-Castro groups targeted the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa and the Cuban Trade Commission office in Montreal. Sergio Perez Castillo, a Cuban security guard was killed in the second attack.

And years later -- on September 4th, 1997 -- Fabio Di Celmo, a Montreal resident vacationing in Cuba, died in a bombing at the Copacabana Hotel in Havana. Luis Posada Carriles confessed to that attack, but later recanted.

And of course there was the Canadian governments complicity with CIA brainwashing experiments in Canada known as MKULTRA.

Early in 1957, Dr. D. Ewen Cameron, Director of the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal, formally applied for funding from the "Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology," a CIA front at Corn-ell University Medical School, New York City.

In the 1980s, the CIA and State Department launched a public counterattack on the Canadian government for questioning the propriety of CIA activities. The CIA effectively converted the Canadian government into an active and hostile opponent.

In press briefings, interviews and Court pleadings, the CIA hammered away at one theme - Canada funded Cameron too. Legally, this was irrelevant, but politically, it was devastating. As one U.S. Attorney said, "We're going to wrap the Canadian Government financing of Cameron right around their necks."

CIA brainwashing victims seek Canada court action

In a case that sounds like science fiction, a Montreal court is deciding whether a class action lawsuit can be brought against the Canadian government on behalf of more than 250 psychiatric patients who were unwittingly subjected to radical experiments in the 1950s.

The so-called MK-ULTRA tests were part of a secret mind-control programme funded by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Canadian government in the 1950s.

The Cold-War-era experiments, carried out by a Scottish doctor in Montreal, included forced isolation, induced-comas, electro-shock therapy and the use of hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD and paralysis-inducing narcotics.

Lawyers for Janine Huard, a 78-year-old great-grandmother, told a Montreal court last week that their client suffered for years as a result of Dr. Ewan Cameron's experiments at the Allan Memorial Institute, a psychiatric hospital based at Montreal's McGill University.

As to all those Fox News claims that Canada is harboring 'terrorists', they happen to be CIA trained, FBI informants and protected by the U.S. while using Canada as a safe haven.

In the al-Qaida camps, he was known as Abu Mohamed al Amriki -- "Father Mohamed the American." And, until he was finally arrested and convicted in 2000 -- after two decades of high profile terrorism, including helping to plan attacks on American troops in Somalia and U.S. embassies in Africa -- Ali Mohamed roamed free and even protected.

He was so untouchable, he was taken from quick-thinking Canadian officials, who suspected he may have been a threat.

Mohamed was a U.S. Army sergeant, FBI operative and possible CIA asset, who, on the side, was a friend to Osama bin Laden, trained the leader's bodyguards, was instrumental in killing Americans and was the middle-man in an historic and vile union between bin Laden's forces and the Lebanese Hezbollah. His fingerprints can be traced to those who assassinated Jewish militant Meir Kahane and blew up the first truck bomb to hit the World Trade Centre.

Mohamed himself had come to the FBI's attention in 1989, when the agency's Special Operations Group photographed a cell of his trainees firing AK-47s at a Long Island shooting range. The bureau would drop that investigation -- as it would in many other cases involving the terror spy.

It would also keep him safe. Even in Canada. Lance connects all the dots, including how Mohamed came, in 1993, to be questioned by suspicious RCMP officers in Vancouver. Lance says he was set free after handing the RCMP a phone number that connected them with his FBI handler.

"The Canadians placed the call," Lance writes. "Whatever (the special FBI agent) said, caused the Mounties to let Mohamed go... . Al-Qaida's master spy was free."

Canada has been used by the CIA to dump off its undercover operatives, to keep them out of harms way.

Age of Secrets - The Conspiracy that Toppled Richard Nixon and the Hidden Death of Howard Hughes by Gerald Bellett

John Herbert Meier

• was responsible for Richard Nixon's downfall, which is always missing from books on the subject.
• was Howard Hughes' most trusted courtier from 1966 to 1970.
• was forced to flee the U.S.
• His many businesses & companies were stripped from him.
• Since 1972 was chased out of England, Japan, Australia, and Tonga by the CIA. Was helped by the British and Cuban intelligence sevices.
• has been falsely charged with tax evasion, fraud, obstruction of justice, forgery and murder. Life threatened, and family stalked for kidnapping.

Meier was still under CIA surveillance. The RCMP Security Service gave Meier a cover: they pretended Meier was working with CLEU (British Columbia's Coordinated Law Enforcement Unit).

From a CIA contact, Meier obtained documents that he gave to Canada's Security and Intelligence Branch, and later to Canada's Liberal politicians. Contained info on:

• Canadian politicians, including Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and members of his cabinet.
• the Canadian military, and defense systems and defense industries.
• leading CIA agents in Canada, Cleveland Cram and Stacey Husle

Of course once exposed for using Canada as a fly over/stop over location for its illegal rendition operations, the CIA gets an endorsement from our own PM.

"Twenty different planes for the CIA have arrived in Canada over the last four years," said Serge Ménard, a member of Parliament from Quebec. "Italy is prosecuting people from the CIA" allegedly involved in renditions. "Why doesn't the prime minister do likewise?"

Prime Minister Stephen Harper responded in the House of Commons on Wednesday, saying that an investigation into the CIA plane landings revealed "no indication there were any illegal activities."

Good old Stevie boy, he took the word of the CIA that they were not doing anything illegal. LOL.

In the panic after 9/11, Canada enacted anti-terrorism legislation that curtailed civil liberties in favour of national security. Faced with American pressure, is the Harper government poised to go even further?

h/t to buckdog.

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CIA Conspiracies Are Real

After decades of denial the CIA finally is forced to out itself. Of course we knew of many of these things thanks to the work of those who were often labeled 'conspiracy theorists' like Jack Anderson and later Mae Brussel.As this editorial points out there is no difference between the CIA of the past transgressions and the CIA of today.

Editorial: CIA abuses aren't history

The CIA calls them "the family jewels," which make the documents sound like something precious. On the contrary, they are a shameful record of decades of embarrassing missteps and outrageous abuses of power by America's spies.

The documents, released this week, provide new details on CIA activities in the 1960s and 1970s, many of them previously uncovered. They tell of assassination plots, both successful and not, of domestic wiretapping operations, the infiltration of antiwar groups and mind control experiments.

From this distance documents can seem comical, but nonetheless disturbing. The CIA partnered with the mafia in repeated attempts to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro, and the mafia expected favors in return. Thus, we had CIA agents bugging the hotel room of comedian Dan Rowan to determine if the "Laugh-in" star was sleeping with a mob boss's girlfriend. As John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy - who approved the attempts on Castro's life - and the nation soon learned, assassination is no laughing matter.

The CIA released the documents - which remain heavily censored, indicating there are still some sins officials don't want to confess - in an attempt to score points for candor. "I firmly believe that the improved system of intelligence oversight that came out of the 1970s gives the CIA a far stronger place in our democratic system," CIA director Michael Hayden said in releasing the documents.

He should tell that to a judge in Italy, where 25 CIA agents are being tried in absentia, charged with kidnapping an Egyptian cleric. The trial, now recessed until October pending the appeal of a ruling, is a test of the agency's "extraordinary rendition program." He should ask the more than 100 terror suspects held since 2002 in the CIA's secret prisons overseas, subjected to interrogation techniques often described as torture.

- Romanian lawmakers have pulled out of the Council of Europe's Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) to protest against a Swiss investigator's report that said Bucharest hosted CIA secret prisons.

CIA Remains Secretive About Current Acts

While the CIA is lauded for releasing 700 pages documenting some of its most egregious 1950-1970 abuses, critics say the US spy agency remains secretive about its current controversial activities. "We don't know everything that's going on today. But it seems to me there's already enough evidence to conclude that things are not so different today," said David Barrett, political scientist at Villanova University, author of a 2005 book on the CIA and Congress in the 1940s and 1950s, speaking to the New York Times. -Capital Hill Blue

Documents show 30-year-old skeletons in CIA closet

Little-known documents made public Thursday detail illegal and scandalous activities by the CIA more than 30 years ago - wiretappings of journalists, kidnappings, warrantless searches and more.

Much of the decades-old activities have been known for years. But Tom Blanton, head of the National Security Archive, said the 1975 summary memo prepared by Justice Department lawyers had never been publicly released. It sheds light on meetings in the top echelon of government that were little known by the public, he said.

Blanton pointed to more recent concerns, such as post-Sept. 11, 2001 programs that included warrantless wiretapping.

"The resonance with today's controversies is just uncanny," he said.

On the Net:

The documents can be found at: http://www.nsarchive.org

CIA Document Dump Just Confirms Kissinger's Dark Rep

The recent release by the CIA of documents concerning the agency's illegal surveillance of Americans and involvement in the assassinations of Ngo Dinh Diem of South Vietnam, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, Salvador Allende of Chile, and Patrice Lumumba of Congo, as well as assassinations plots against Fidel Castro, prove what authors and scholars have already concluded about the agency. Most noteworthy is the involvement of Henry Kissinger in giving the green light to Turkey's invasion of Cyprus.

The links between Kissinger and Turkey formed a long lasting relationship between Kissinger and the Israeli Lobby in the United States, particularly the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Turks, particularly the links between AIPAC and the American Turkish Council and individuals like Richard Perle, Marc Grossman, and Douglas Feith. That relationship was exposed with revelations stemming from information divulged as a result of the FBI's firing of Turkish translator Sibel Edmonds and the concentration of the Brewster Jennings & Associates CIA front company on weapons of mass destruction and the Turkish nexus to nuclear materials trafficking from the former Soviet Central Asian states.

ACLU Sues for Patriot Act Documents from CIA and Pentagon

Of course the CIA has still not revealed what it knows about the JFK Assassination.

More than 40 years after he was fatally shot in Dallas, researchers have added fresh fuel to the speculation over who was involved in the assassination of President John F Kennedy by claiming the original bullet analysis was flawed and cannot rule out that a second gunman was involved.

Using new scientific techniques not available to previous researchers and analysing bullets from the same batch purportedly used by Lee Harvey Oswald, the team has argued that it cannot be assumed that Oswald was the only assassin involved. While they do not claim evidence to prove a second gunman participated, they say the original fragments of the bullets recovered from the scene of the shooting should be re-examined.

And they also didn't reveal what they know about UFO's.

Because that would lead to disturbing questions about the Weaponization of Space.


SEE:

The Misuse of Acid

Psychedelic Saskatchewan

Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out

Irans Nuclear Program Is A CIA Oops

CIA Secret Flights in Canada

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