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American War Machine

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Unprosecuted lynchings were the de facto enforcement of illegally segregated Jim Crow society in the American South. Land grabs in the American West were achieved with press-encouraged violence against native Americans, many of them nonviolent, who originally lived there.6 This cultural tolerance of violence and murder spilled over into other aspects of American life, notably union busting. (In the 1914 “Ludlow massacre,” during a mineworkers strike against the Rockefeller-owned Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, only one member of the strikebreakers was convicted, and he was given only a light reprimand. — location: 150 ^ref-63505

one who believes passionately in civilization and fears that by excessive denial our own civilization is indeed becoming threatened. — location: 160 ^ref-58366

Since 1959, most of America’s foreign wars have been wars 1) induced preemptively by the U.S. war machine and/or 2) disguised as responses to unprovoked enemy aggression, with disguises repeatedly engineered by deception deep events, involving in some way elements of the global drug connection. — location: 181 ^ref-26763

in Burma, Thailand, and Laos between the late 1940s and the 1970s. These countries also only became factors in the international drug traffic as a result of CIA assistance (after the French, in the case of Laos) to what would otherwise have been only local traffickers. — location: 187 ^ref-35110

In June 1971, Nixon had declared a War of Drugs, and Laos in that same September, under instructions from the U.S. embassy, had just made opium trafficking illegal. — location: 192 ^ref-2418

the entire template of unrecognized or deep power that maintains a violent status quo in our society, a template that embraces bureaucracies, intelligence agencies, business, and even media. — location: 268 ^ref-51904

the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, which in 1952 absorbed the OPC, has become accustomed to the routine breaking of foreign laws on a daily basis. — location: 289 ^ref-8412

many of the CIA funds intended for the Afghan mujahideen were instead siphoned off by ISI and redirected to Khan Research Laboratories (KRL) for the successful development of Pakistan’s atomic bomb. — location: 363 ^ref-42969

U.S. backdoor covert foreign policy has been the largest single cause of the illicit drugs flooding the world today. — location: 375 ^ref-18635

the de facto protection conferred on sectors of the opium trade by CIA involvement is clearly a major historical factor for the world crime scourge today. — location: 381 ^ref-19800

After 1979 Afghan opium and heroin entered the world market significantly for the first time and rose from roughly 0 to 60 percent of U.S. consumption by 1980.55 In Pakistan there were hardly any drug addicts in 1979; the number had risen to over 800,000 by 1992.56 — location: 388 ^ref-13244

(Three decades ago Pakistan and Afghanistan had almost no heroin addicts. Today there are an estimated 5 million addicts in Pakistan and 1 million in Afghanistan.) — location: 2657 ^ref-59927

President Evo Morales in Bolivia, where he adopted a new and militantly anti-CIA stance, denouncing the CIA as “absolute and universal evil.” — location: 4152 ^ref-38683

What is needed more than a change in Afghanistan or in Pakistan is a change in Washington itself, to cease subsidizing the predators who have been profiting from our discomfort and casualties abroad. It would be nice to think that understanding of this folly would lead to its termination. But what we are witnessing is precisely the progressive erosion of the power of the public state to control the myriad activities that are conducted, in its name, for private profit. Neither the president nor the Congress appears capable of reversing the tide of corruption that is overwhelming both them and us. — location: 4171 ^ref-56051

“drug money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis.” — location: 4898 ^ref-22526

recommendation for Afghan counterterrorism from the RAND Corporation: “Minimize the use of U.S. military force. In most operations against al Qa’ida, local military forces frequently have more legitimacy to operate and a better understanding of the operating environment than U.S. forces have. This means a light U.S. military footprint or none at all.”61 — location: 4908 ^ref-40552

“the presence of foreign troops is the most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban” — location: 4912 ^ref-51458

Through four decades we in America have become inured to the CIA’s alliances with drug traffickers (and their bankers) to sustain right-wing governments. — location: 5185 ^ref-64862

Muhammad Zia ul-Haq’s iron rule against the Pakistani people while using Pakistan as a surrogate in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. That decade turned our peaceful nation into a “Kalashnikov and heroin” society, a nation defined by guns and drugs. — location: 5190 ^ref-11423

The truth is that since World War II, the CIA, without establishment opposition, has become addicted to the use of assets who are drug traffickers, and there is no reason to assume that they have begun to break this addiction. — location: 5383 ^ref-35742

as history has shown, drugs sustain jihadi salafism, far more surely than jihadi salafism sustains drugs. — location: 5403 ^ref-13142