Cyclone threatens CIA drug route?

5/08/08



On some talk show Sunday I saw Laura and the chimpster talking about Burma (Myanmar). I didn’t have my barf bucket handy so I couldn’t listen or look at the chimp too long. But Laura hasn’t been in the MSM slipstream much so I had a listen. She was talking about the need for the Burmese junta to open up, blah, blah as we've been hearing alot of lately; but it was Dubya that I was watching. He was real skiddish and even seemed to give Laura one of those “shut up” looks. Hmmmm, I thought, let’s see. He could be just jumpy cause he hasn’t had his coke fix, or maybe Laura was overdoing the open-up part. I turned off the tube and went about my business, but the whole thing seemed odd. Why was chimpy so jumpy?
Was Dubya using his wife to wax humanitarian hoping that the PR could boost his ratings, or did she come up with the idea? No answer there.
Then memories of research I had done long ago came back. It was Al McKoy’s book “The Politics of Heroin”. I dug up the book again and poked around. That puppy is dog-eared from my reading it over the years.

OH BOY! YEP! Here we go. Burma—to Bangkok heroin route is the largest in the world. The CIA has been involved in this drug route since WWII, but mostly since the Vietnam War. What happens if the outside world starts snooping around in Burma???

….Although it has become the world’s most important source of illicit opium, the Golden Triangle is landlocked, cut off from local and international markets by long distances and rugged terrain. In the early 1970’s, the Golden Triangle’s narcotics followed one of the two “corridors’ to reach the world’s markets---an air route from Vientiane, Laos, to Vietnam, which closed after the fall of Saigon in 1975 and an overland Burma-to-Bangkok route that remains the worlds major source of heroin. The most important route was the overland corridor that began as a maze of mule trails in the Shan hills of northeastern Burma and ended as a four-lane highway in downtown Bankok. Most of Burma’s and Thailand’s opium followed the overland route to Bangkok and from their found its way into interntional markets: Hong Kong, Europe, and America. ......

Since the highland drug farmers require credit and markets to finance each new crop a major expansion of drug production has three requirements—finance, logistics, and politics. Thus, sudden growth of Burma’s opium production in the 1950’s required CIA air logistics, Thai military protection, ;and Taiwanese capital. Similarly, the upsurge of opium production in Afghanistan during the 1980’s relied on the logistaical support of Pakistan’s Inter—Service Intelligence, the cover ofa CIA covert operation, and the services of Pakistani banks, just as the simultaneous expansion of the Colombian cocaine trade required capital from illicit financiers, the loos protection of the Covert Contra war, and the illegal services of banks based in the Caribbean free ports such as Panama City.

Wow…that also explains why they took out Noriega in Operation “Just Cause” (1989) after Noriega said about Bush: “I got him by the balls”. Noreiga was a man who knew way too much, he’s lucky he’s still alive in jail in Florida.

In the late sixties—70’s Nixon created the Drug enforcement agency (DEA) to assist and eventually replace the aging and, as McKoy says very corrupt Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). The DEA started to gum up the CIA’s drug operations. I think that in part this is why Nixon was allowed to go under.


…In this internecine bureaucratic struggle for the opium hills of Asia, the FBN’sand the DEA’ weak , distant attempts at interdiction of the heroin flow have often been overwhelmed by the CIA’s logistic and political support for the drug lords. Indeed, a brief survey of the international traffic over the past forty years shows that the CiA’s covert alliances have played a significant, albeit inadvertent, role in opening new opium zones for the global drug traffic. At two critical junctures after World War II, the late 1940’s and the late 1970’s, when America’s heroin supply and addict population seemed to ebb, the CIA’s covert action alliances generated a sudden surge of heroin that soon revived the U.S. drug trade....

…....In late 1969, the CIA’s various covert action clients opened a network of heroin laboratories in the Golden Triangle. In their first years of operation, these laboratories exported high-grade no. 4 heroin to U.S. troops fighting in Vietnam. After their withdrawal, the Golden Triangle laboratories exported directly to the United States, capturing one-third of the American heroin market.

Now a cyclone threatens to focus the world's attention on this little secret.

Ain't the wrath of God a bitch!

YEES Laura! I agree, let’s open this junta up and see just what it is they're hiding! :bounce: :rofl: :rofl: :rofl:


I posted another topic yesterday on Halliburton’s activities in Burma. Cheney has thwarted attempts to sanction the Burmese junta. Like Afghanistan (the largest producer of heroin in the world, Burma is now second) its all about drugs and oil—the CIA and Bushies mainstays. I’d like to see more on Halliburton’s involvement in the illegal drug trade.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3256708

to pick up some drugs?

Burma probably won't be in the news after a week or two. Maybe we'll never know. :hi:

And, we're looking for whatever we can find to tar the current Burmese regime(not that they make this hard, of course). What would be ideal for our War Preznit is if a new Washington-friendly regime could be installed and which could be played against China. See, for example, Bill Engdahl's article on the would-be Saffron Revolution in Burma last year: http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net./Geopolitics___Eurasia/Myanmar/myanmar.html

to be flying helicopters from the Essex battle group in the Bay of Thailand since the cyclone hit right into the opium route area. So it got me thinking. We know that many bridges have been washed out by the cyclone, floods etc. That means the dope isn't moving on those roads and must be ferried via air. McKoy points out that helicopters were used extensively back in the Vietnam Era to ferry the stuff.

Call it a hunch but I think that these US air operations could be used, in part, to ferry the drugs. We know how dependent the CIA is on dope and this is the most heavily used dope route in the world. In Vietnam the helis would fly in rice and other neccessities and fly out the dope.

What do you know about Chevron in Myanmar

I'm attacking a link of your thread to mine. :hi:
Add

here's your OP


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=3260432&mesg_id=3260432

Fueling the military junta that has ruled for decades are Burma’s natural gas reserves, controlled by the Burmese regime in partnership with the U.S. multinational oil giant Chevron, the French oil company Total and a Thai oil firm. Offshore natural gas facilities deliver their extracted gas to Thailand through Burma’s Yadana pipeline. The pipeline was built with slave labor, forced into servitude by the Burmese military.

The original pipeline partner, Unocal, was sued by EarthRights International for the use of slave labor. As soon as the suit was settled out of court, Chevron bought Unocal.

Chevron’s role in propping up the brutal regime in Burma is clear. According to Marco Simons, U.S. legal director at EarthRights International: “Sanctions haven’t worked because gas is the lifeline of the regime. Before Yadana went online, Burma’s regime was facing severe shortages of currency. It’s really Yadana and gas projects that kept the military regime afloat to buy arms and ammunition and pay its soldiers.


http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20071002_chevrons_pipeline_is_the_burmese_regimes_lifeline/


Did you know that Chevron has a ship named the "Condoleeza"--she worked for Chevron. That put's Cheney, Condi and the CIA in the game.



http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/04/05/MN222557.DTL

The White House, already criticized for its connections to Big Oil, now is facing renewed questions over Chevron's decision to name an oil tanker for national security adviser Condoleezza Rice.

The double-hulled giant, Condoleezza Rice, is part of the international tanker fleet of the San Francisco-based multinational oil firm, named several years ago in honor of Rice when she was a Chevron board member and stockholder.

Rice, the former Stanford University provost, served on Chevron's board from 1991 until Jan. 15, when she resigned after President Bush named her to the national security post.

By the way that was supposed to be attaching the link not attacking it. :rofl:


The West would love to control Myanmar for one more reason - that Chinese border.

I hate the bastards in charge there, but let the aid agencies and the UN deal with this disaster.

No regime that would not let fellow Americans take water to citizens in NOLA and would not let Cuban doctors in to help them can be trusted. Damn Bushco tried to stop Al Gore from going there. There's always something sinister with these war criminals.

shiftiness be that the Taleban will become even more flush with money now that a competitor out of the market? I am going to guess this will make it even harder for the US to try and get the farmers in Afghanistan to switch crops form opium to anything else.

will be losing some dollars if the drug route is crimped to bad. :hi:

Is there any place these fuckers don't have their grubby hands? Thanks for the link and the info on the book. I just requested it to be sent to my local library branch.

the international drug trade way back to the 1500's. His research is some of the best I've ever seen. Mckoy does point out in "Politics" that he was threatened by CIA types while he was researching he book.

I'm glad to see such interest. :hi:

:rofl: :crazy:

The Golden Triangle is one of Asia's two main illicit opium-producing areas. It is an area of around 350,000 square kilometres that overlaps the mountains of four countries of Southeast Asia: Myanmar (Burma), Laos, Vietnam, and Thailand. (Other interpretations of the Golden Triangle also include a section of Yunnan Province, China.) Along with Afghanistan in the Golden Crescent (together with Iran and Pakistan), it has been one of the most extensive opium-producing areas of Asia and of the world since the 1950s. The Golden Triangle also designates the confluence of the Ruak River and the Mekong river, since the term has been appropriated by the Thai tourist industry to describe the nearby junction of Thailand, Laos, and Myanmar.

Opium and morphine base produced in northeastern Burma are transported by horse and donkey caravans to refineries along the Thailand-Burma border for conversion to heroin and heroin base. Most of the finished products are shipped across the border into various towns in North Thailand and down to Bangkok for further distribution to international markets. In the past major Thai Chinese and Burmese Chinese traffickers in Bangkok have controlled much of the foreign sales and movement of Southeast Asian heroin from Thailand, but a combination of law enforcement pressure, publicity and a regional drought has significantly reduced their role. As a consequence, many less-predominant traffickers in Bangkok and other parts of Thailand now control smaller quantities of the heroin going to international markets.

Heroin from Southeast Asia is most frequently brought to the United States by couriers, typically Thai and U.S. nationals and Hong Kong Chinese, travelling on commercial airlines. California and Hawaii are the primary U.S. entry points for Golden Triangle heroin, but small percentages of the drug are trafficked into New York City and Washington D.C. While Southeast Asian groups have had success in trafficking heroin to the United States, they initially had difficulty arranging street level distribution. However, with the incarceration of Asian traffickers in American prisons during the 1970s, contacts between Asian and American prisoners developed. These contacts have allowed Southeast Asian traffickers access to individuals and organizations distributing heroin at the retail level.<1>

In recent years, the production has shifted to Ya Baa and other forms of methamphetamine, including for export to the United States.

Local names:

Burmese:
Lao:
Thai: สามเหลี่ยมทองคำ
Vietnamese: Tam giác Vàng

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Triangle_(Southeast_Asia)