Sounds very Mike Ruppert!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4t3pl5Wxgyg

don't forget them . .

...if you've been following the 'drug wars' even a little you knew the CIA was making cash off the war and of course the banks, with their see no evil hear no evil attitude would take drug money. If this government was truly in it to rid our country of illegal drugs, they should have to do what the late great George Carlin said, "kill the bankers that launder the drug money...you kill one white republican banker a week, you're gonna see the drugs go away pretty fucking quick"

The link you provide is:

Rajeev Syal, The Observer in the Guardian here

Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.

This will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis.

International crime is much larger than illegal drugs. The amount talked about in the article is $352 billion

I would and continue to make the case the US banks in the more than $2 trillion in subprime loans they originated and marketed in the form of fraudulently rated complex investment vehicles after 2002 amounts to a criminal enterprise.

$352 billion is a lot of dough, the war on drugs is a sham, the money laundering isn't, but we should have a perspective on the the size of things when it comes to the international crooks.

The Banksters are leading the way.

HAAAhahahahahahahahahaaaa!

(snort)

I'll bet they're just absolutely trembling in their Gucci's.

"if they found out what was going on"

That's assuming they don't already know darn well what is going on.

The black market economy of pure cash is mega-huge.

Rich folks are always looking for places to avoid taxes and governmental oversight - they are not above using whatsoever is available to them.

The CIA, DEA and others know darn well what is going on and they are into it, they love it, they make big bucks on it.

It's just business after all, eh?

Of course Manuel Noriega was pretty much a glorified drug lord that we went to the trouble to remove.

Of course I understand he went to the School of the Americas (Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation).

I wouldn't be surprised if the CIA helped Fidel Castro overthrow Fulgencio Batista, because he was awfully chummy with the Mafia who were opening nightclubs in Havana. Who knows if they were also using the island as a debarkation point for narcotics heading for the US?

Of course Castro worked so well for us, we named a street after him in San Francisco.

Air-America? The U.S. government has been the biggest importer of illegal drugs to the U.S. than anybody else in the world. The illegal drug money is the only thing that has kept the U.S. afloat.
Take not that the Taliban, yes they are a bunch of ass-holes, destroyed most of the poppy crop in Afghanistan. The U.S. comes along and destroys the Taliban and not so mysteriously, the poppy crops have exploded across the land. From what I understand. the U.S. supplied poppy seeds to the farmes in Afghanistan.
Funny that Afghanistan growns almost all of the heroin that supplies the world. I know the U.S. wants to spread democracy over there right? No,no. The U.S. wants to get those responsible for 9/11 that are hiding in Afghanistan.
No,no. They are gone from Afghanistan. The generals and the politicians told us that the taliban and AlQaeda were totally defeated in Afghanistan. So it must be nation building, right?
No,no. The U.S. is trying to corner the market on heroin in an attempt to prop up our economy.
Am I wrong?

The war on drugs is a trillion dollar war. It's not just money laundering. We fund jails to keep the victims in, police to arrest the victims, companies to sell the police more and more war-like equipment to arrest the victims with, hospitals and doctors to treat the victims when they overdose or get sick from drug use etc. The list of beneficiaries to the drug war goes on and on.

The biggest fortunes in America come from drug traffic. Some Congress members are heavy deep into it. Make drugs legal will never happen. It will cut heavily in the Republican investments.
It's a twofold winners proposition. They get rich. The buyer, the poor,
gets addicted and will eventually die. That's where health care get expensive and they hate that.

And vice versa.

Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago.

Shocked !!

To discover Money Laundering in our banks!!

Just plain SHOCKED !!

A few years after the Taliban came to power, they began a campaign to eradicate Afghanistan's opium crops, and the success of Afghanistan's 2000 drug eradication program under the Taliban government was recognized by the United Nations as a monumental feat, in that "no other country was able to implement a comparable program". In October of 2001 the UN acknowledged that the Taliban reduced opium production in Afghanistan from 3300 tons in 2000 to 185 tons in 2001. So Wall Street then lost billions of drug money. Could this be one of the real reasons for the invasion of Afghanistan? The Bush Administration did not even try to get Bin Laden. Instead the US installed the corrupt Hamid Karzai, brother of Ahmed Wali Karzai, the head of the Afghan drug mafia. Immediately following the October 2001 invasion, opium production increased dramatically. Opium production rate has now soared to 6900 tons in Afghanistan, 92 percent of the world's opium. Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis. So Bush kept 'us' save after all...

How Washington Funded the Taliban
by Ted Galen Carpenter

Ted Galen Carpenter is vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute and is the author or editor of 14 books on international affairs including the forthcoming "Bad Neighbor Policy: Washington's Futile War on Drugs in Latin America" (Palgrave/ St. Martin's).

Added to cato.org on August 2, 2002

This article appeared on cato.org on August 2, 2002.

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The United States has made common cause with an assortment of dubious regimes around the world to wage the war on drugs. Perhaps the most shocking example was Washington's decision in May 2001 to financially reward Afghanistan's infamous Taliban government for its edict ordering a halt to the cultivation of opium poppies.

When the Taliban implemented a ban on opium cultivation in early 2001, U.S. officials were most complimentary. James P. Callahan, director of Asian Affairs for the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, uncritically relayed the alleged accounts of Afghan farmers that "the Taliban used a system of consensus-building" to develop and carry out the edict. That characterization was more than a little suspect because the Taliban was not known for pursuing consensus in other aspects of its rule. Columnist Robert Scheer was justifiably scathing in his criticism of the U.S. response. "That a totalitarian country can effectively crack down on its farmers is not surprising," Sheer noted, but he considered it "grotesque" for a U.S. official to describe the drug-crop crackdown in such benign terms.

Yet the Bush administration did more than praise the Taliban's proclaimed ban of opium cultivation. In mid-May, 2001, Secretary of State Colin Powell announced a $43 million grant to Afghanistan in addition to the humanitarian aid the United States had long been providing to agencies assisting Afghan refugees. Given Callahan's comment, there was little doubt that the new stipend was a reward for Kabul's anti-drug efforts. That $43 million grant needs to be placed in context. Afghanistan's estimated gross domestic product was a mere $2 billion. The equivalent financial impact on the U.S. economy would have required an infusion of $215 billion. In other words, $43 million was very serious money to Afghanistan's theocratic masters
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