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At 19:04 09/01/11 -0500, Greg McDonald wrote:
>.... 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
No not at all, that's a misinterpretation. I just grabbed that paragraph as
a summary/conclusion of the article and contrasted it with the one from the
conspiracy site. I'm sure McCoys article about this is accurate as it was
in Vietnam. But the 85% claim was bullshit and you should have noted that
when you first read it: how would someone come to such a numerical estimate
anyway even if it were approximately true?
But thanks for the McCoy article!
- Jeff
>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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