The price you pay
In his ‘Ministers’ justification for the banning of an alleged terrorist group is based on propaganda and an outright untruth’ in The Guardian , 19 October 2005, former UK Uzbekistan ambassador Craig Murray, who seems bent on making serious trouble for HMG, gave an example of why the British state is willing to eat almost any amount of shit handed to them by the US.
‘The UK has no intelligence assets in central Asia. We are dependent on information given to us by the United States’ CIA and NSA.’
The British overseas lobby in Whitehall – like Tony Blair – still dreams of being a ‘world player’. But it doesn’t have the tax resources to match the UK’s (private) overseas investments. Which is essentially why the British state remains clinging to the coat-tails of America.
Afghanistan and opium
How often in the post WW2 period has the US supported regimes which tolerate or participate in the drug traffic? The last decade has seen two more, Afghanistan and Kosovo, in which the new wrinkle is that the drugs trade co-exists with Muslim Jihadists.
‘Afghanistan is now the world’s largest exporter of heroin, and the opium used to produce it, supplying 87 percent of the world market. And it is creating an infrastructure of crime and corruption that threatens the government of President Hamid Karzai. The heroin trade begins with fields of opium poppies grown in almost every province of Afghanistan. Last year, according to the U.S. State Department, 206,000 hectares were cultivated, a half a million acres, producing 4,000 tons of opium, most of which was converted into 400 tons of illegal morphine and heroin in laboratories around the country.’
No, this isn’t Peter Dale Scott but CBS’s Steve Kroft.
This might be read with Christopher Deliso’s `Europe’s New Terror Profile and the State of Play in the Balkans’ which looks at the Kosovo Liberation Army (the KLA), the role of Islamist jihadists and heroin trafficking in Kosovo and
…the confluence between terrorism and organized crime, and the increasingly fluid, almost transient nature of their organizational structures’.
Thomas Gambill, a former OSCE (Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe) security officer in Kosovo, from whom we may hear a great deal, is beginning to blow the whistle in this essay.