AFGHAN POPPIES: What The Bush White House Should Really be Afraid Of
One of the most amusing things about the Washington Circus is how media feeding frenzies are almost always about phony irrelevant scandals, while truly serious scandals are ignored.
The press freaked out, for example, when Slick Willie got fellated by some dingbat girl, but not about his selling classified military technology to the Red Chinese in exchange for campaign donations to the Democratic Party.
The Democrats are desperate to hang something on President Bush, so they demand investigations and impeachment hearings over the flimsiest of allegations — the 16 words in the State of the Union speech about Saddam buying uranium in Africa, and now Bob Novak’s column “leaking” the name of a lady whom all kinds of folks in DC knew was a CIA analyst.
The mystery is why they don’t focus on something real — such as continuing CIA collusion regarding opium production in Afghanistan.
Perhaps the largest mistake Bush has made as president is retaining Clinton’s CIA Director, George Tenet. This is a guy responsible for the single greatest intelligence failure in US history (being unaware of 9-11), who sweet talked his way into Bush’s confidence and was able to keep his job because he named the CIA Headquarters after his father.
(Drive along the George Washington Parkway in McLean, Virginia, and you’ll see the exit for “The George Bush Center for Intelligence.” Bush the Elder was a caretaker CIA Director for less than a year, January 30, 1976-January 20, 1977. The Center of course should have been named for the Agency’s founder, Wild Bill Donovan.)
Here’s the scandal waiting to explode: Tenet has continued the tradition of CIA cooperation with Pakistan’s ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), the folks who run the opium smuggling business in Afghanistan.
The ISI ran the CIA with a ring through its nose during the 1980s war against Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, insisting most US arms and support be given to their Islamofascist boy Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. When Gulbuddin failed to take over the country after the Soviet collapse, the ISI put the Taliban in power. The Taliban and the ISI were partners in the opium business: the poppies were grown and harvested under Taliban control while the ISI handled their processing into heroin and distribution.
Before the US military overthrew the Taliban regime, Afghanistan was the largest producer of opium and heroin the world. You would think it would be different now. It is: Afghanistan is producing much more opium and heroin than ever before: over 75% of the world’s opium (UN report, June 2003). The CIA has done absolutely nothing to stop it.
A high-ranking government official recently provided to the Pentagon the exact GPS coordinates of two warehouses in Afghanistan each storing enormous amounts of processed opium. The CIA prevented their destruction.
This is not to accuse the CIA of being in the drug-smuggling business with its Pakistani counterpart. No it is not. Rather, the ISI is playing the CIA like a fiddle as always. It dribbles out info on Taliban activities in exchange for the CIA looking the other way regarding the billions the ISI makes running drugs — hundreds of millions of which are given to its Taliban and Al Qaeda buddies. With this money, the Taliban are making a resurgence, the security situation in Afghanistan is deteriorating, Osama remains at large (as does Gulbuddin — the CIA’s buddy now declared a terrorist).
There is a growing number of Republicans on Capitol Hill privy to all of this and are scared out of their minds. The scandal of the CIA’s winking at Afghan poppies which are financing the Taliban and Al Qaeda is a sword of Damocles suspended by a thread over the Bush Administration. It may not be long before the Democrat media forgets about Bob Novak columns and realizes where Bush and Tenet are really vulnerable.