NPR Do Love It Some CIA

NPR achieved quite a feat Thursday morning: without even mentioning the CIA, NPR aired two CIA-friendly stories. First, NPR featured rehabbed heroin addict, author, filmmaker, and macho-schmaltz purveyor Richard Farrell imagining that his son's going to Afghanistan as a soldier is directly related to his own heroin addiction in the 80's:

"I'm deeply troubled, wondering if my son will be trying to wipe out the crop that nearly killed me 22 years ago. Back then, I was an involuntary customer who helped create a demand for the drug. I was the last link in a system that produced and distributed heroin, the very system my son William will be trying to break."

What! is the US military leading a campaign against the CIA and its mujahadeen chums from the 80's? Though the Taliban is now profiting from the heroin trade, poor Farrell is very mixed up indeed, demonstrating a complete lack of awareness that heroin production was virtually zero under the Taliban, and only spiked dramatically under US occupation. As Alfred McCoy has documented, the CIA has been at the nexus of the Heroin trade for a long time. Farrell's ignorance may be genuine, but NPR's spotlighting of this mangled history is inexcusable.

For its second non-CIA, CIA story, NPR turned to "Vahid Brown...an FBI instructor at West Point's Combating Terrorism Center" who is on to "educate" us about the Haqqani Network and its relation to the Taliban. He describes how the Haqqani network extremely brutal, even more violent than the regular Taliban. He explains that what sets the Haqqani Network apart is its "willingness to use foreigners and to cooperate with international jihadists organizations in Afghanistan." What Brown and NPR purposely fail to mention is that the proud father of the Haqqani Network is the CIA. Anand Gopal of the Christian Science Monitor has reported on this sordid lineage. Brown also conveniently omits that fact that the CIA strategy in the 80s, like Haqqani's, was to issue an open invite to the most violent and ruthless international jihadists it could find.

Not bad for a non-CIA infiltrated (hee, hee!) news organization - not one, but two phony history features that cover-up CIA criminality in one morning news show.

The Haqqani story also had a real laugher embedded in it. Brown, explaining the Taliban's reluctance to accept foreigners states, "Mullah Omar and the Taliban are very careful to portray their movement as an Afghan nationalist movement." To which Montagne chimes in, "Because in fact Afghans in general don't like what they call foreigners, as in al-Qaeda foreigners." Hmmm, I wonder what other foreigners Afghans aren't so crazy about?

Criminal Reporting

Poor Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson couldn't do a decent report out of Afghanistan if someone else wrote it and handed it to her. On Tuesday's ATC she describes an assassination attempt against one of the sleazy Karzai brothers [this one - not this one] as follows:

"For now, provincial council members meet in the well-guarded home of council chair Ahmed Wali Karzai...the brother of Afghan President. He was himself the target of an assassination attempt outside Kabul last week when gunmen ambushed his convoy."

Given that Ahmed is widely believed to be a key drug lord in the thriving Afghan heroin trade you might expect that information to find its way into the story. Not a chance; the possibility that the assassination attempt was related to Ahmed's criminality doesn't fit NPR's narrow script of good guys (the US and any and all followers) v. bad guys/Taliban (any Afghan who takes up arms against the US-led occupation of Afghanistan). Introducing Nelson's report, Michele Norris reinforces the narrative with this bit of speculation:

"In Kandahar...just yesterday suspected Taliban militants tried unsuccessfully to assassinate the brother of President Hamid Karzai...head of the area's provincial council."

To add insult to injury, not only does Nelson stick with this interpretation but then she hands the microphone to this thug so he can lecture us about "the struggle" (I think it's called Enduring Freedom...hee, hee):

"This is a war for justice and for freedom and for democracy, and we're not going to just run away from it. So it's tough but we will continue with our struggle against the terrorists and al-Qaeda."

To cut her a bit of slack, perhaps Nelson featured this truth, justice and the American way cant because she was afraid of what freedom-lovin' Ahmed Karzai might do to her if she did any actual reporting on him...

Missing the Poppy Field for the Poppies

Barnett Rubin, on the Informed Comment Global Affairs blog, noted back on January 24, 2008, that

"Under the provocative title Poverty feeds Afghan drugs trade, Alastair Leithead of the BBC reports from Helmand and Balkh in southern and northern Afghanistan. His findings, like my arguments, contradict the claim by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (echoed of course by the US) that 'opium cultivation is no longer linked to poverty.'"

This is a crucial issue and is missing from Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson's report from Afghanistan on Saturday Weekend Edition. Her report notes the burgeoning opium harvests coming out of Afghanistan and how this benefits the Taliban. So far, so good. Sarhaddi Nelson mentions that "the UN report noted that eradication has had a neglible effect" but she fails to tell us the most significant fact of the eradication program - that this US directed program is not only failing to stem the growth of poppies and opium production, but is actually fueling the growth of the Taliban and the destabilization of Afghanistan! This is not a new observation: Green Left in Australia reported on this in October of 2006. In August of 2007, Adam Holloway of The Telegraph reported that "while the US wants mass eradication programmes, the Royal Marines believe that eradication fuels the insurgency...." Reason Online had similar news in September of 2007. And then this week a major report from the Center on International Cooperation of New York University (authored by Barnett Rubin) has detailed the stupidity of the US program in Afghanistan.

From Sarhaddi Nelson all you learn is that the poppy fields are thriving and that "farmers there were expressing frustration....they want things like crop subsidies and helping get their goods to market, but all those things are just not moving fast enough for them." Frankly that's just misleading. It's not that they're not moving fast enough; it's that the US policy is - shall we say - ass backwards. All this makes me wonder just where on earth Sarhaddi Nelson gets her information, and just who is she working for anyway?

Snorting Venezuela

Juan Forero is back in action. He's on the Venezuela beat; talking about how cocaine trafficking is becoming a scourge in Venezuela. May be true as far as I can tell, but here's the kicker. He makes the Chavez government seem like the bad guys for not wanting help from Uncle Sam!

"Washington has pumped billions of dollars into Colombia's battle against narcotics trafficking, but the country hasn't won such cooperation from Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez....He stopped American anti-drug flights over Venezuelan air space long ago. He also ended cooperation with the Drug Enforcement Administration, accusing its agents of spying."

A little historical context would have been helpful. Justin, a blogger at Americana has an excellent write up on the history of the US "drug war" in Latin America. Further history is available from the National Security Archives and from Z Magazine.

Reading the history, one can only conclude that Chavez would be a fool to accept "help" from the US.

Blowing Smoke

First, a tip of the hat to NPR for hosting an interview with Ethan Nadelmann, founder and executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance on yesterday's ATC. A visit to the DPA website is well worth your time, as they take issue with the whole concept of the "war on drugs;" it is also a great resource for young people wanting serious information on illegal drugs and their dangers. It's too bad NPR also didn't contact one of their usual think tanks, the libertarian CATO Institute, which also challenges the "war on drugs."

Sadly, though, this interview is lost in the general smoke screen of John Burnett's whole series which accepts the basic premises of the "war on drugs." On the same ATC, Burnett has a piece that is critical of John Walters, the current "Drug Czar" - what a title! The main thrust of the piece is that the current "Drug Czar" is not pursuing the "war on drugs" with adequate vigor. From Burnett we learn that "Walters has also had rocky relations on Capital Hill; four members of Congress, all prominent drug warriors..." - prominent drug warriors, give me a break. And lest we as a nation slack off in this glorious drug war Burnett has these pearls of wisdom for us:

• "...what troubles people who’ve dedicated their lives to fighting drugs, is our short memory."
• "Antidrug activists say this is precisely the time not to back off."
• "If there’s anything 38 years of the drug war has taught us, it’s that we forget it at our peril."

Over the top boys...and on to VICTORY!

What Was I Smoking

Here's a little quiz. Guess the source of this quote:

"...it is our judgment that the war on drugs has failed, that it is diverting intelligent energy away from how to deal with the problem of addiction, that it is wasting our resources, and that it is encouraging civil, judicial, and penal procedures associated with police states. We all agree on movement toward legalization..."

THE NATIONAL REVIEW! For God's sake, even The National Review can surprise--but not NPR. What was I smoking when I saw that NPR was doing a series on "the war on drugs" and wondered if they might actually question the whole premise of the war on drugs. Not a chance, just as they never dare question the premise of the similar farce called "the war on terror."

You might hope that any serious coverage of "the war on drugs" would look back at the anti-Hispanic roots of anti-drug laws (particularly anti-marijuana laws). Any thinking person (and apparently there are some even at The National Review) would have to ask oneself what is the purpose of the war on drugs if it isn't just to make the police powers of the state more robust and to criminalize certain sectors of the population (ahem...Black folks!) To get a sense of this it is worth doing a Google search of "war on drugs" and "black codes" (here are the first three results--one, two, and three.)

So it was that Mondays ATC piece looks only at the failure of the "war on drugs" to stop all drugs coming in to the US and today's piece is a bit of hogwash from Juan "Plan Colombia" Forero where we get to here how Plan Colombia has helped "reduce the violence" in Colombia--wow!

The Real Thing

"Colombia has been one of the largest recipients of US military aid for well over a decade and the largest in the western hemisphere....Yet torture, massacres, 'disappearances' and killings of non-combatants are widespread and collusion between the armed forces and paramilitary groups continues to this day." - Amnesty International USA

"But once Plan Colombia was being fully implemented in 2002 and 2003, the situation in Colombia improved dramatically.....Plan Colombia did not magically save Colombia, but it did provide vital support to Bogota at a critical and lonely time in its war against narco-terrorists and drug traffickers....And all of this has been accomplished without sacrificing adherence to human rights principles, as happened at times during the Cold War." - Russell Crandall

This morning NPR had two stories on Colombia and neither dealt with the documented truth that the US policy in Colombia has created a human rights hell there. NPR's first piece featured the slippery Juan Forero telling us how Uribe, the current President of Colombia, "came into office in this country at a time when the government was teetering...buffeted by violence, drugs, by Marxist guerrillas..." He conveniently leaves out that the Colombian government itself was the major perpetrator of violence and that its paramilitaries were heavily involved in the drug trade.

The second story involves an interview with Russell Crandall, a scholar who is a participant for one of sides in the armed struggle in Colombia! Imagine if a university professor was a paid consultant for the FARC in Colombia and was brought on as a scholar and expert...and yet this tool of the Pentagon is trotted out for our edification.

Needless to say NPR doesn't even touch the ugly story of the US government support for drug trafficking, the irony of "anti-drug" Bush returning to the likely source of his alleged coke dabblings, or the sordid business of that other Coke in Colombia. That would be just a little to much of the real thing and we all know what happens to journalists who go down that road.