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With McCoy it is not really necessary to read between the lines, but
his argument is a bit more nuanced. He says pretty much the same
thing as the original article I posted, except he doesn't put a figure
on it. But in terms of the website you are of course correct. The
webpage is not very credible. I read the article because a FB friend
had posted it. I did not even look at the website. My bad.
BUT, I posted this particular article because I was familiar with
McCoy's work, having read his books. I note you picked a paragraph
from the second article, the one by McCoy, and quoted it out of
context, to make it appear that McCoy is somehow agnostic on CIA
involvement in Afghan heroin trafficking The paragraph below, taken
from the same article, is much more damning:
"To defeat the Taliban in the aftermath of 9/11, the CIA successfully
mobilized former warlords long active in the heroin trade to seize
towns and cities across eastern Afghanistan. In other words, the
Agency and its local allies created ideal conditions for reversing the
Taliban's opium ban and reviving the drug traffic. Only weeks after
the collapse of the Taliban, officials were reporting an outburst of
poppy planting in the heroin-heartlands of Helmand and Nangarhar. At a
Tokyo international donors' conference in January 2002, Hamid Karzai,
the new Prime Minister put in place by the Bush administration, issued
a pro forma ban on opium growing -- without any means of enforcing it
against the power of these resurgent local warlords."
And of course it is not far-fetched to assume the CIA is involved in
transport, as McCoy states they were in Vietnam. So if you have read
his book on Vietnam, the CIA, heroin, and Air America, you would of
course find the article itself credible, which I did, and still do.
Greg
On Sun, Jan 9, 2011 at 5:50 PM, Jeff <meis...@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
> At 15:54 09/01/11 -0500, Mark Lause wrote:
>>
>>Please elaborate, Jeff. I agree with you down the line on your rationale
>>for making this point,
> Well my rationale with respect to the article itself is that it was
> unsourced, unsigned, and a bit far-fetched. But my judgement of the website
> was based on skimming the other articles posted on it. In that respect I
> would rather turn the question around: can you find a single article on
> that site with information that you know to be accurate? If not, then I
> don't think I'm hasty in judging this article as having no more credibility
> than the website's health/medical misinformation ("using sunscreen gives
> you cancer", "don't take aspirin to lower your fever", "Detoxifying benzene
> cures AIDS") or technology claims (government suppressed "invention which
> supplies free energy" and the "200 mpg car invented in 1933") and other
> familiar conspiracy theory material.
>
>> but I don't find this listed at snopes, urban legend
>>and the other sites identifying such fake news...
> Well maybe those sites have a suggestion box you could write to. But
> although this IS a conspiracy theory site, one funny thing about it: it is
> not a right-wing site at all. It seems sort of geared to appeal to leftists
> only, which IMO makes it yet more dangerous since it will just get people
> on OUR side making fools of ourselves
>
> Also:
>
> At 16:04 09/01/11 -0500, Greg McDonald wrote:
>>Perhaps Jeff will like this one better:
>>
>>http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175225/alfred_mccoy_afghanistan_as_a_drug_war
>
> Well yes, much better inasmuch as it's basically believable (though I'm not
> well enough informed on the subject to really judge its accuracy). For
> instance, it makes the point that:
>
> "In each of these conflicts, Washington has tolerated drug trafficking by
> its Afghan allies as the price of military success -- a policy of benign
> neglect that has helped make Afghanistan today the world's number one
> narco-state."
>
> That's seems a lot more believable than "85% of Afghan heroin shipped out
> by US aircraft," don't you think? Not as shocking, but I'd rather run with
> the truth than a much more shocking statistic that someone made up and
> wrote down for our misinformation.
>
> - Jeff
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