British soldiers in Afghanistan face heroin smuggling investigation

UK military police are investigating claims that British troops may have been involved in smuggling heroin out of Afghanistan and into Britain, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed.

Officials said they were aware of "unsubstantiated" claims that troops were buying the illegal drug from dealers and using military aircraft to ship it out the country.

An inquiry has been launched focusing on British and Canadian service personnel at airports in Camp Bastion and Kandahar.

An MoD spokeswoman said: "We are aware of these allegations.

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170-Page Child Molestation Instruction Manual Surfaces

Orange County sheriff deputies say a 170-page manual is circulating around Central Florida. It shows people, step-by-step, how to molest children. It also includes where to find potential victims.

“I've never seen anything like it. It was pretty amazing when I first saw it just because how detailed it was,” said Detective Philip Graves with the Orange County Sheriff's Office (full interview) .

Deputies with the sheriff's sexual offender surveillance squad have been aware of the manual for the past six months. The sheriff's office received it through an email listserve.

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Many migrant workers in UK are modern-day slaves, say investigators

By Amelia Hill, The Guardian

Thousands of foreign domestic workers are living as slaves in Britain, being abused sexually, physically and psychologically by employers, according to an investigation to be screened tonight.

More than 15,000 migrant workers come to Britain every year to earn money to send back to their families. But according to a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation, many endure conditions that campaigners say amount to modern-day slavery.

Kalayaan, a charity based in west London that helps and advises migrant domestic workers, registers around 350 new workers each year.

About 20% report being physically abused or assaulted, including being burnt with irons, threatened with knives, and having boiling water thrown at them.

"Two-thirds of the domestic workers we see report being psychologically abused," said Jenny Moss, a community advocate for the charity. "That means they've been threatened and humiliated, shouted at constantly and called dog, donkey, stupid, illiterate."

A similar proportion say they were not allowed out alone and have never had a day off. Nearly three-quarters say they were paid less than £50 a week.

"The first thing to understand when we're talking about slavery is that we're not using a metaphor," said Aidan McQuade from Anti-Slavery International. "Many of the instances of domestic servitude we find in this country are forced labour – a classification that includes retention of passports and wages, threat of denunciation and restriction of movement and isolation."

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Probe Circles Globe to Find Dirty Money

Carrick Mollenkamp reports for the Wall Street Journal:

A black-market financial investigation spreading from Iran to Sudan, London and Cuba began in a cluttered fifth-floor cubicle in an old-school district attorney's office in Manhattan featuring dark corridors and frosted glass.

There, an intelligence analyst named Eitan Arusy began studying a slim lead. Suspicious money was flowing to and from an Iranian nonprofit operating in a Fifth Avenue office tower in Midtown Manhattan. Mr. Arusy's probe, later merged with a Justice Department inquiry, ultimately widened to some of Europe's vaunted banks, helping spark a global inquiry that found they actively evaded U.S. law in aiding sanctioned countries, banks or other enterprises move some $2 billion undetected.

Nine banks have been caught up in the probe, and some are in discussions to settle, according to a person familiar with the case. Three have already. Last month, Barclays PLC in London agreed to pay $298 million and admitted to allowing payments on behalf of clients in Cuba, Sudan and other countries. Lloyds Banking Group in London and Credit Suisse Group in Zurich—banks that operated extensive transfer systems for Iranian clients—have agreed to settlements totaling $350 million and $536 million, respectively.

These weren't rogue operations. The investigators discovered that the banks ran dedicated units to systematically aid the undetected transfer of money through the U.S. banking system. They did that by removing identifying coding on fund transfers so they could evade automated U.S. bank computer systems designed to spot money flowing from a sanctioned state.

The far-reaching inquiry started small. Mr. Arusy arrived at the district attorney's office in 2005 to help ferret out illegal financing tied to the Middle East. Though the office prosecutes everyday crime, it carved out a role infiltrating crimes tied to the city's financial markets and institutions. Its expertise dates to the 1990s, when it led the investigation of Bank of Credit & Commerce International, or BCCI, which collapsed in a fraud and money-laundering scandal.

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Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State

Author Garry Wills discusses how the atomic bomb has increased the power of the modern presidency and redefined the government as a national security state.

Pentagon Enlists Half-Billion-Dollar P.R. Apparatus to Sell Afghanistan War

General Petraeus' media blitz is only the tip of the iceberg in the Pentagon's effort to sell war to the American people. The Defense Department has a budget of more than $500 million for public relations efforts directed at U.S. citizens, a slice of a much larger information operations effort to influence public opinion. But no matter how much they spend on P.R. and information operations, the facts on the ground show that the Afghanistan War isn't making us safer, and it's not worth the costs.

Musical Innerlube: Drowning Dog - Class War

Beats by Malatesta. Video produced by Isaac Ontiveros for Workday Media 2007. (Entartete Kunst S.F.)

'The Global Drug Trade and the CIA'

From The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda. The CIA’s Drug-Running Terrorists and the “Arc of Crisis” (Part 1) by Andrew Gavin Marshall, Global Research:

As a central facet of the covert financing and training of the Afghan Mujahideen, the role of the drug trade became invaluable. The global drug trade has long been used by empires for fuelling and financing conflict with the aim of facilitating imperial domination.

In 1773, the British colonial governor in Bengal “established a colonial monopoly on the sale of opium.” As Alfred W. McCoy explained in his masterful book, The Politics of Heroin:

As the East India Company expanded production, opium became India’s main export. [. . . ] Over the next 130 years, Britain actively promoted the export of Indian opium to China, defying Chinese drug laws and fighting two wars to open China’s opium market for its merchants. Using its military and mercantile power, Britain played a central role in making China a vast drug market and in accelerating opium cultivation throughout China. By 1900 China had 13.5 million addicts consuming 39,000 tons of opium.[51]

In Indochina in the 1940s and 50s, the French intelligence services “enabled the opium trade to survive government suppression efforts,” and subsequently, “CIA activities in Burma helped transform the Shan states from a relatively minor poppy-cultivating area into the largest opium-growing region in the world.”[52] The CIA did this by supporting the Kuomintang (KMT) army in Burma for an invasion of China, and facilitated its monopolization and expansion of the opium trade, allowing the KMT to remain in Burma until a coup in 1961, when they were driven into Laos and Thailand.[53] The CIA subsequently played a very large role in the facilitation of the drugs trade in Laos and Vietnam throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s.[54]

It was during the 1980s that “the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan transformed Central Asia from a self-contained opium zone into a major supplier of heroin for the world market,” as:

Until the late 1970s, tribal farmers in the highlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan grew limited quantities of opium and sold it to merchant caravans bound west for Iran and east to India. In its decade of covert warfare against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the CIA’s operations provided the political protection and logistics linkages that joined Afghanistan’s poppy fields to heroin markets in Europe and America.[55]

In 1977, General Zia Ul Haq in Pakistan launched a military coup, “imposed a harsh martial-law regime,” and executed former President Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto (father to Benazir Bhutto). When Zia came to power, the Pakistani ISI was a “minor military intelligence unit,” but, under the “advice and assistance of the CIA,” General Zia transformed the ISI “into a powerful covert unit and made it the strong arm of his martial-law regime.”[56]

The CIA and Saudi money flowed not only to weapons and training for the Mujahideen, but also into the drug trade. Pakistani President Zia-ul-Haq appointed General Fazle Haq as the military governor of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), who would “consult with Brzezinski on developing an Afghan resistance program,” and who became a CIA asset. When CIA Director Casey or Vice President George H.W. Bush reviewed the CIA Afghan operation, they went to see Haq; who by 1982, was considered by Interpol to be an international narcotics trafficker. Haq moved much of the narcotics money through the BCCI.[57]

In May of 1979, prior to the December invasion of the Soviet Union into Afghanistan, a CIA envoy met with Afghan resistance leaders in a meeting organized by the ISI. The ISI “offered the CIA envoy an alliance with its own Afghan client, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar,” who led a small guerilla group. The CIA accepted, and over the following decade, half of the CIA’s aid went to Hekmatyar’s guerillas.[58] Hekmatyar became Afghanistan’s leading mujahideen drug lord, and developed a “complex of six heroin labs in an ISI-controlled area of Baluchistan (Pakistan).”[59]

The US subsequently, through the 1980s, in conjunction with Saudi Arabia, gave Hekmatyar more than $1 billion in armaments. Immediately, heroin began flowing from Afghanistan to America. By 1980, drug-related deaths in New York City rose 77% since 1979.[60] By 1981, the drug lords in Pakistan and Afghanistan supplied 60% of America’s heroin. Trucks going into Afghanistan with CIA arms from Pakistan would return with heroin “protected by ISI papers from police search.”[61]

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Empire, Energy and Al-Qaeda: The Anglo-American Terror Network
The Imperial Anatomy of al-Qaeda, Part II

9/11 ANALYSIS: 9/11 and America’s Secret Terror Campaign
The Imperial Anatomy of Al-Qaeda, Part III

Support your local shoe throwers!

Baghdad-based artist Laith al-Amari built a fibreglass-and-copper monument in honor Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at Bush during a news conference. (Jan. 29)