www.thefinalphase.com/DouglassDrugs.htm
Additionally, we cannot wage a real war on terrorism without waging a real war on illegal drugs, because the two are closely coupled. Drug trafficking is a significant source of terrorist financing. The root of several terrorist groups is narcotics trafficking, and vice versa. The few drug traffickers who are not terrorists depend on terrorists for protection and enforcement services that are usually paid for in drugs. This is just the start of the hidden side of the war on terrorism. Its conclusions were more frightening than the 9-11 attacks. Just the money-laundering part of international organized crime revenues was estimated to be at least $900 billion, possibly exceeding $2 trillion, a year. Other studies place their gross annual revenues at $2+ trillion. Drug trafficking, with annual revenues at $500+ billion, is one of the major components of organized crime. Another component is the sale of illegal goods and arms, most of which go to terrorists and terrorist regimes. A third component is organized crime's role as an intermediary in helping terrorist groups and rogue nations acquire weapons of mass destruction. The money dimension of organized crime - its use for buying favors, corruption and compromise - is probably of greatest concern. Only a few statements from the interagency report, "International Crime Threat Assessment" (December 2000), are needed to tell the story. One Big Happy Family It is not just that terrorism feeds off drug trafficking. Rather, terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime are one big happy family. Originally, these were independent operations that emerged in different regions and grew in an evolutionary manner. This is because in the latter half of the last century, various states (mainly Communist states that were inherently criminal and terrorist in nature) recognized the potential of these operations as revolutionary weapons. Thus they proceeded to build narcotics trafficking, organized crime and terrorism into major state intelligence operations. The three operations - trafficking, terrorism and crime - are different but complementary. They work together while striving to appear independent of each other. They do not compete with each other, but cooperate synergistically. The three have become so intertwined that war on any one of the three means war on all. In reality, this is what needs to be done - to wage war on all three. They are all unacceptable, they are all covert state intelligence attack operations, each can have dire consequences, and all need to be eradicated. The most damaging are drug trafficking and organized crime, not terrorism. Terrorism is the least damaging of the three because its main product is physical damage, in contrast to organized crime and drugs, which attack the moral basis of society and corrupt its leadership and institutions. However, because of the built-in publicity that goes along with terrorism, it is terrorism that gets the lion's share of the attention. Actually, far greater damage is done each year by organized crime and drug trafficking in terms of deaths, casualties, corruption and economic costs. Its main targets are political parties, top government officials, judges, top law firms, financial institutions, news media, investigatory/police agencies and intelligence services. As pointed out in the "International Crime Threat Assessment," the corruption and compromise achieved staggers the mind. This is a global phenomenon including corruption, compromise and complicity in the United States and in our allies as well as in the usual Middle East suspects. This phenomenon and its implications need to be understood. Our war-on-terrorism objective is to destroy terrorism around the world, in the process drawing no distinction between the terrorists and those who harbor or support them. Terrorism is critically dependent on the financial, logistic, material supply and political corruption networks that involve or overlap those of organized crime and state intelligence services. We cannot cut the terrorists' principal financial support without invading the heart and soul of organized crime: finance and money laundering. Further, organized crime has 10 times more lawyers and finance specialists than our Justice Department and FBI, and they are all much better paid, better connected and more committed. This is where the war-on-terrorism rabbit hole takes us and the end is still not in sight. Involvement of Russia and China Another critical yet overlooked facet of the terrorism problem was raised briefly during the recent Senate Intelligence Committee National Security Threat hearings. It is well known that China has been one of the biggest supporters of Middle East terrorists and rogue regimes seeking to acquire long-range missiles and weapons of mass destruction. In its former incarnation as the Soviet Union, Russia is the granddaddy of international terrorism. Today's international terrorism is fundamentally the product of Russia's military intelligence, the GRU, and to a lesser extent its civilian intelligence, the KGB. Both the KGB and GRU are alive, well and more powerful today than they were under Communism. Thus, the possible involvement of Russia and China should have been under intense CIA covert scrutiny for many years, and Sen. Consider Director Tenet's answer: "Well, sir, I would say that, first of all - and it's all separate. And at times we have distinctions between government and entities. Bayh's question, we need to go back 50 years, to the origins of today's international terrorism, narcotics trafficking and organized crime. This is not an easy subject to address because of the efforts within academia, political circles, the news media and policy centers for 80 years to keep silent about the crimes of Communism, as eloquently explained in the recent study "The Black Book of Communism" (Harvard University Press, 1999). Because of this silence, data on Communist crimes come as a shock to most people and, hence, is hard to believe. This "silence" is the cornerstone of the political protection that is largely responsible for the unprecedented growth of organized crime, drug trafficking and international terrorism over the past 50 years. This is the hardest lesson of all, and it has not been learned. That organized crime, drug trafficking and terrorism are Russian (and Chinese) STATE operations is hard for people to accept and even harder to incorporate into their thinking and planning because of the long history of political, news, and academic leadership silence respecting these crimes of Communism. How can these be state operations when our own leaders are silent about them? The implications of this question are equally troublesome. Origins of Today's Terrorism The origins of today's terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime were experienced first-hand by the former top-level Czech Communist official, Gen. He was chief of staff to the minister of defense and was on the inside of the planning and execution of all three operations by various Communist state intelligence services, most notably the Soviet Union and its East European satellites. When Khrushchev came to power in 1954, he set about renovating the Soviet Union's global revolutionary war movement, which had stagnated under Stalin. Under Khrushchev's direction, the Soviets quickly dropped the "revolutionary war" moniker and henceforth referred to the activity as wars of "national liberation" to reflect a new deception, that these were only national liberation movements and not internationally stimulated revolutionary war operations, which is what they really were. Concurrent with this change, three new strategic intelligence operations (that is, ones of strategic importance) were adopted: international narcotics trafficking (to undermine the society and weaken its leaders), international organized crime (to corrupt the politicians and financial institutions) and international terrorism (to destabilize the countries and create revolutionary situations). Terrorism and drug trafficking were run mainly out of the GRU and organized crime was run mainly out of the KGB. The Soviets alre...
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