Afghan Opium Output Up 61%

Data recently released by the United Nations shows a 61% increase in opium production in Afghanistan this year. This continues an upward trend ever since the US invasion in 2001, which also happened to be the year that the Taliban outlawed opium. The government crackdown that year resulted in a 185 ton yield. The harvest has since grown to 5,800 tons a year.

The UN figures make grim reading for those who backed the invasion of Afghanistan.
-PressTV

I can't help but notice that wherever the CIA goes, rising drug production seems to be a consistent theme.

Ironically, the Taliban had overseen a significant fall in heroin production in the months before the invasion. Their leader Mullah Mohammed Omar – collaborating with the UN – had decreed that growing poppies was un-Islamic, resulting in one of the world’s most successful anti-drug campaigns.
As a result of this ban, opium poppy cultivation was reduced by 91 per cent from the previous year’s estimate of 82,172 hectares.
The ban was so effective that Helmand Province, which had accounted for more than half of this production, recorded no poppy cultivation during the 2001 season.
However, with the overthrow of the Taliban opium fields returned, despite the destruction of crops by coalition forces and initiatives to persuade farmers to switch to other produce.
-Daily Mail

Mission Accomplished?

Oakland still ridin'

US District Judge Thelton Henderson, who last year threatened OPD with a federal takeover, has ordered the city of Oakland to address its noncompliance with 5 provisions of the historic 2003 Riders settlement.

* The rehiring in March of Officer Hector Jimenez, who was fired after he shot and killed two unarmed suspects within seven months of each other in 2007 and 2008, including a man shot in the back. Jimenez and his attorney fought the firing, and an arbitrator sided with him against the city, forcing the department to return Jimenez to work under the rules of its contract with the police union. He is currently assigned to maintaining the fleet of police vehicles and keeping in-car computers up to date.

* July's "Operation Summer Tune-Up," a four-day crime prevention effort in which police issued 28 parole violations, made 17 arrests and recovered seven guns. Henderson is likely concerned about the connotations of the term "tune-up," widely used as a euphemism for the beating of suspects by police.

* The finding by the internal affairs division that accusations of illegal public strip searches of suspects by police were unfounded, despite a federal judge agreeing with the case made by at least two suspects to whom she awarded more than $100,000 each.

* A special report in August by the federal monitoring team, charged with tracking the OPD's progress in the reforms, which found that in 28 percent of the instances when Oakland officers draw their guns and point them at someone, the person has demonstrated no threat to anyone. In some cases, the monitors said, the person wasn't even a suspect in a crime.

* The process by which the department hires outsiders to stand on boards that evaluate police use-of-force incidents. The details of this issue remained unclear Wednesday.
-Inside Bay Area

East Bay Park shooting Update

East Bay Regional Park District police were too scared to look for the marijuana farm in broad daylight too I guess, even though they publicly acknowledge that they believe that the gunmen are long gone.

MORAGA -- Authorities have suspended their search for a hidden pot farm they think gunmen were protecting when they opened fire on a parks officer Monday night, the East Bay Regional Park District police said Tuesday.

Park police Capt. Mark Ruppenthal cited the need for more planning and commitments of outside help before they scour the rugged landscape south of Moraga and Canyon.

"We need to be able to scout the area," Ruppenthal told media members at Rancho Laguna Park, a gateway to the fields and hills that extend south to the Upper San Leandro Reservoir. "You're talking about a large wooded area to search."

Ruppenthal acknowledged the people who shot at his officer with assault rifles probably left the area after eluding an intense manhunt Monday night that involved several police agencies and helicopters. He added that the authorities' main objective now is to shut down the marijuana-growing operation that sparked the gunfire.
-Mercury News"

Ok, maybe they realize that there are still several weeks until harvest, and therefore there is no rush to get in right now. Convenient excuse.
Their failure to act is really evidence of how increasingly underfunded government agencies are finding themselves increasingly unable to do their basic job functions adequately. Park rangers don't mow the lawns. They're supposed to prevent crime, like illegal marijuana farms.
People shot at a park ranger with automatic weapons, and the park police are not going in after them or their illegal operation, whatever it may have been. Maybe they'll go in closer to harvest, maybe they won't.

I just remember the never-ending line of cop cars racing to Oakland from Contra Costa County desperately wanting to get in some stick time on protestors (who were all kids, none of whom fired any weapon at any cop) the night of the Johannes Mehserle sham verdict. Interesting that those same tough guys are all too scared to hike through the woods (with the backup of an armored truck and a helicopter) to bust a multi-thousand (at least) dollar drug operation....priorities I guess.... :-/

Gunmen fire on park ranger in East Bay Hills

MORAGA -- An East Bay Regional Park District police officer had to be rescued Monday after he was shot at by multiple people while on patrol in a rugged area of park lands near Moraga and Canyon, police said.

The officer called dispatch about 7 p.m. asking for help after he said he was fired upon by assailants with automatic rifles. Police said he returned fire but it was unclear whether he struck anyone.

Officers from Moraga, Lafayette and the Contra Costa County Sheriff's Office were summoned to safely retrieve the officer and search for the gunmen.
-Inside Bay Area

The cops had an armored car and a helicopter, so they were able to retrieve the officer, but were unable to find the gunmen, and called off the search at nightfall.
The area is relatively remote, but not to the point where law enforcement can't go in and find a sizeable marijuana grow, especially since they have helicopters. However, it is interesting to note that they are afraid of going in. Perhaps budget cuts have made it impossible for them to effectively combat an organized grow operation (and by "organized," I mean more than one armed person living in tents, watching weeds grow)?
In any event, I find a little bit of humor in the fact that all those uber-rich white people who tried their hardest to be as far away from the flatlands of Oakland as they could possibly get still have to deal with violent crime in their neighborhood.
Guess they need to find a bigger mountain now...

ATF agents ordered to let guns walk

"I believe that these firearms will continue to turn up at crimes scenes on both sides of the border for years to come."
-ATF agent Peter Forcelli

Today, 3 federal agents testified before Congress that they were repeatedly ordered to stand down while high-powered assault rifles and other firearms were being purchased in the US by Mexican drug cartels.
Under Operation "Fast and Furious," the 3 ATF agents were supposed to surveil small time gun buyers in Arizona who served as straw men for other major weapons traffickers on both sides of the border.

At a hearing before the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which (California Rep. Darrell) Issa chairs, Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley said hundreds of weapons destined for cartels in Mexico were bought in Arizona gun shops. One agent, John Dodson, who took his complaints to Grassley's office, estimated that 1,800 guns in Fast and Furious were unaccounted for, and about two-thirds are probably in Mexico.

Another of the three investigators, Peter Forcelli, said that "based upon my conversations with agents who assisted in this case, surveillance on individuals who had acquired weapons was often terminated far from the Mexican border." Forcelli said that while case agents believed that weapons were destined for Mexico, "the potential exists that many were sent with cartel drugs to other points within the United States."

"I can't tell you the why" the surveillances were called off, Dodson testified. "Hopefully ... this committee can find out." But the committee did not ask that question of any of the nonagent witnesses Wednesday.
-MSNBC

Of course they didn't.
It is already known that the founders of the Zetas, the most brutal cartel, were trained by the US Military at Fort Bragg. Now, here is news that "someone" is protecting the supply lines for high powered weaponry to fuel the bloody drug war. And Congress isn't interested in who called off the the ATF agents.

Agent Dodson testified that "although my instincts made me want to intervene and interdict these weapons, my supervisors directed me and my colleagues not to make any stop or arrest, but rather, to keep the straw purchaser under surveillance while allowing the guns to walk."

"Allowing loads of weapons that we knew to be destined for criminals — this was the plan," said Dodson. "It was so mandated."

In one case, Dodson said, he watched a suspect receive a bag filled with cash from a third party, then proceed to a gun dealer and buy weapons with that cash and deliver them to the same unidentified third party. In that and other circumstances, his instructions were to do nothing.

"Surveillance operations like this were the rule, not the exception," said Dodson. "This was not a matter of weapons getting away from us, or allowing a few to walk so as to follow them to a much larger or more significant target."

The third ATF agent, Olindo James Casa, said that "on several occasions I personally requested to interdict or seize firearms, but I was always ordered to stand down and not to seize the firearms."

Casa said that "the surveillance team followed straw purchasers to Phoenix area firearms dealers and would observe the straw purchasers buy and then depart with numerous firearms in hand. On many of those occasions, the surveillance team would then follow the straw purchasers either to a residence, a public location or until the surveillance team was spotted by the straw purchasers.

But the end result was always the same: the surveillance was terminated" by others up the chain of command.
-MSNBC

Founders of Mexico's most violent drug cartel were trained by US

The Zetas have a fearsome reputation, but the real surprise comes not in their ruthless use of violence, but in the origins of where they learned the tricks of their bloody trade.
Some of the cartel's initial members were elite Mexican troops, trained in the early 1990s by America’s 7th Special Forces Group or "snake eaters" at Ft. Bragg, North Carolina.
-Al Jazeera

Plan Sudamerica

Latin America
“A critical sub-region of our hemisphere where security and stability is under constant threat from... anti-US governments".
-USAF proposal for FY2010 military construction program



Scary stuff goin on in the Western Hemisphere, from a recent article in the The Independent:

The United States is massively building up its potential for nuclear and non-nuclear strikes in Latin America and the Caribbean by acquiring unprecedented freedom of action in seven new military, naval and air bases in Colombia. The development – and the reaction of Latin American leaders to it – is further exacerbating America's already fractured relationship with much of the continent.

The new US push is part of an effort to counter the loss of influence it has suffered recently at the hands of a new generation of Latin American leaders no longer willing to accept Washington's political and economic tutelage.

The fact that the US gets half its oil from Latin America was one of the reasons the US Fourth Fleet was re-established in the region's waters in 2008. The fleet's vessels can include Polaris nuclear-armed submarines – a deployment seen by some experts as a violation of the 1967 Tlatelolco Treaty, which bans nuclear weapons from the continent.

Consider that prior to 9-11, investigative journalists Mike Ruppert and Peter Dale Scott were calling Colombia and Venezuela
“The Next Vietnam.”:

Indicators of the imminence of conflict are not to be found in whether the Senate or the House chops or adds a few dollars or helicopters which can all be restored without fanfare to the Foreign Aid Bill in Conference Committee at the last minute. They are to be found in the movements and actions of money, the U.S. military and some CIA/DoD connected corporations, possibly using "sheep-dipped" CIA and military personnel disguised as employees of private companies in roles that can only expand the conflict.

Colombia has oil, but not nearly as much as Venezuela, which has replaced Cuba as US public enemy #1 in the region. It's pretty obvious what is really going on, right?

Earlier this year, Foreign Policy in Focus wrote this report on developments in the region:

Two of the bases are clustered near each other on the Caribbean coast, not far from existing U.S. military sites in Aruba and Curaçao – and closer to Venezuela than to the Pacific Ocean. Why are U.S. negotiators apparently forgoing Pacific air sites, if the drug war remains part of the U.S. military mission? What missions "beyond Colombia's borders" are U.S. planners contemplating?

Still wondering what US interests in the region might be?


Even if you take these developments at face value, and actually believe that the US is merely interested in counter-insurgency training in its own hemisphere, please note that counter-insurgency/counter-narcotics/counter-terror operations all result in the same thing:

The history of U.S. anti-drug aid in Latin America…has primarily been one where "anti-drug" training, advisers and equipment get used to kill civilians opposing military dictatorships instead.
-From The Wilderness

For a little background on the Clinton-era "Plan Colombia/Andean Initiative" check out more of Ruppert's writing on the subject from several years ago.

With bases in place for 10 years and more, and the secrecy that accompanies such installations, the proposed agreement would constitute an end-run around the struggles to make U.S. policy in Colombia and the region less militarized.

Colombia has been the hemisphere's largest recipient of U.S. military aid since 2000, under Plan Colombia — more than $5 billion to date. Purportedly designed to halve the cocaine trade and subsequently refashioned to include fighting terrorism, the results of counter-drug programs have been a complete waste. There's been no overall decline in land planted with coca, nor in the amount of cocaine available in the United States. "Street prices" have held steady or dipped lower than when Plan Colombia began during the Clinton administration.

Actually, business has been booming.

After 10 years of eradication efforts, Colombia now has more than 575,750 acres of coca-plant cultivation -- a 25 percent increase! The United Nations reports that cultivation increased by 27 percent over the last year, and Colombia still produces 90 percent of the world's cocaine.
-Joel Brinkley, Cleveland Plain Dealer Op-ed, March 2009

Oh yeah, and here is another reason why US military occupation is bad:

Another sticky point is judicial immunity for U.S. soldiers and contractors, sought by Washington. In October 2007, two U.S. soldiers reportedly raped a 12-year-old Colombian girl at a U.S. facility inside a Colombian base, and were whisked away from Colombia rather than face trial there. But Foreign Minister Jaime Bermudez says U.S. soldiers will continue to enjoy such immunity under the accord.
-Foreign Policy in Focus