Political Views,

By MWC Political Editor Dr Gideon Polya

 Bush-restored Afghan opium & 50,000 US drug deaths

Anglo-American corporate mainstream media have an entrenched culture of lying by omission. However decent people should stop getting mad – they should get even. In our search for truth we can turn this perversion to our advantage. Aarons and Loftus in “The Secret War Against the Jews” made the following acute observation: “The hidden parts of history, the covert sides, are more orderly and rational, but can be seen and understood only if you are told where to look. The holes in history are what makes sense of the thing”.  Thus resolute and dishonest NON-REPORTAGE by the mendacious mainstream media (MMM) about important matters (e.g. authoritative scepticism about the official 9/11 story and the horrendous death toll in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories) should actually instruct us where to go for the truth. 

The old joke about the Land of Lies illustrates this strategy. You encounter a Liar and a Truth-teller at a fork in the road and you want to take the road to the Land of Truth-tellers and not the road to the Land of Lies.  You are allowed one question of one of the people. Solution - you ask one: “If I were to ask the other person which way to the Land of the Truth-tellers, what would he say?” and then go the opposite way (because the Liar will falsely say that the answer from the Truth-teller will be to take the Lies road and the Truth-teller will truthfully say that the answer from the Liar will also be to take the Lies road).

Some dramatic examples of mendacious mainstream media (MMM) lying by omission or commission include the following:

• Saturation reportage of the official line that there was no warning of the Pearl Harbor attack (yet the evidence for UK and US intelligence and Government pre-warning is compelling; I recently asked a very senior Japanese academic whether his scholarly Japanese peers believed that the US knew of the impending attack – his immediate reply: “Of course!” ).
• Non-reportage of the  “forgotten” WW2 Bengal famine in British-ruled India has been deleted from most British histories (yet a recent history of Asia suggests that the 4 million Hindu and Muslim victims died because the British had a deliberate “scorched earth policy” of denying food to a possible Japanese invasion from Burma).
• Saturation reportage of the official story about 9/11 and un-scientific , hysterical, blanket condemnation of “conspiracy” alternatives (yet the evidence for at least US “passive complicity” is compelling and even some very conservative academics, namely Professor Morgan Reynolds and Professor David Ray Griffin, seriously suggest  from a wealth of evidence that the US was actually responsible).
• Saturation reportage of the assertions of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, Al Qaeda links, Niger uranium supplies, mobile germ warfare laboratories, complicity in 9/11 etc (all shown subsequently to be false).
• Notwithstanding the US-led “War on Terror”, non-reportage of US backing of state and non-state terrorism world-wide (yet there is a wealth of evidence for this, notably: support for Al Qaeda from about 1980 and  up to the middle 1990s in Kosovo; the School of the Americas training of 60,000 military and paramilitary human rights abusers; Honduras-based terrorists, the Contras, Latin American death squads; involvement in numerous coups, civil wars and repressive regimes; US covert terrorism from Ecuador to Iraq to Vietnam).

Of course there have been immense BENEFITS to Anglo-American power from all of these LIES of commission and omission (US entry into WW2 after Pearl Harbor and ultimate victory over German and Japanese militarism; non-invasion of Bengal by the Japanese and preservation of British “good name”; the “War on Terror” that has boosted the post-9/11profits of the US military-industrial complex by an EXTRA amount now approaching $1 TRILLION; US occupation of Iraq and the 20% of the World’s oil located there; US global hegemony).

CURRENTLY, Anglo-American mainstream media will simply NOT report the post-invasion avoidable mortality and under-5 infant mortality in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories that now total 2.1 million and 1.7 million, respectively.  This can be put down to entrenched Anglo-American racism and the benefits of the lie are clear, namely continued UK-US occupation and hegemony in the Middle East and Central Asia.

However UK-US mainstream media are NOT reporting the horrendous drug-related death toll in the UK and the US due to US restoration of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry.

Since 2001 there have been about 0.4 million global drug deaths linked to US Coalition re-establishment of globally-dominant Afghan opium production (destroyed by the Taliban in 2000-2001 but 76% and 86% of global production in 2002 and 2004, respectively, after US Coalition invasion and conquest) (see: here). 2,000 of the post-2001, US Coalition-complicit, opioid-related deaths have been Australian, 3,000 Canadian, 3,200 British and 50,000 American. The Coalition leaders are clearly complicit in continuation of the Afghan opium industry (currently approaching 90% global market share) and consequent huge opioid drug-related deaths in their own countries. The BENEFITS to the US from this immense crime are reasonably clear – continued support from opium-based Afghan war-lords; destabilization of Central Asia, the CIS and Eastern Europe; and facilitation of  global US-backed state and non-state terrorism.   

A detailed report about US Coalition-linked global drug deaths (see below) has been sent urgently to  virtually ALL Federal Australian parliamentarians, numerous State parliamentarians, media and humanitarians in the national interest before such transmission is potentially prohibited by paranoid, partisan or malevolent interpretation of soon to be extended, draconian, dishonest, disproportionate and operationally racist, Muslim-targetting anti-terror laws that already grossly violate the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights (noting that there have been ZERO deaths from terrorism within Australia over the last quarter century).

The Australian Leader of the Opposition, Mr Kim Beazley, had good reason to describe the terrorist bombers responsible for the 7/7 London bombings (54 deaths) as “subhuman filth who must be captured and eliminated”. How then should we address those of the US Coalition complicit in post-9/11 opioid-related deaths that now total 0.4 million? The Coalition leaders and associates complicit in criminal mass murder must be dealt with by the normal democratic and legal processes of exposure, arraignment, trial and punishment.

0.4 million global opioid drug deaths due to US restoration of Afghan opium industry

About 7 million people die annually in the World from the effects of tobacco smoking, alcohol or illicit drugs, the breakdown being about 5 million, 1.8 million and 0.2 million, respectively. The annual opioid-related World death toll is about 0.1 million (noting that multiple chemical agents are typically involved in such deaths and that deaths from injection-derived infections such as HIV are not included here). Unfortunately the First World is not taking action against tobacco or alcohol – indeed First World countries such as the US and the UK are major producers. While the ruling Taliban had effectively destroyed the massive Afghan opium industry by 2001 (from 79% of the global market in 1999), the invasion and conquest of Afghanistan by the US and its allies (notably the UK and Australia) in 2001 resulted in the rapid re-establishment of the Afghan opium industry to 76% global share by 2002 and 86% global share in 2004.

The Taliban are condemned for draconian human rights abuses deriving from intolerant and violent interpretations of Islamic law (particularly over the treatment of women and apostates) but they did take proper action against tobacco, alcohol and illicit drugs - agents that kill 7 million people annually throughout the World and which are all prohibited by broadly accepted interpretations of Islam.  Alcohol was of course prohibited in Taliban-ruled Muslim Afghanistan. In 1997 the Taliban expelled all cigarette smokers from military and other government employment. However opium production was a major component of the Afghan economy and in 1999 Afghanistan produced 79% of the World’s opium. Nevertheless, in 2000 the Taliban decided to destroy Afghan opium production and subsequently largely wiped out opium poppy cultivation (which fell from 42% of the total World acreage in 1999 to only 3% in 2001).

In 2001, shortly after 9/11, the US and its allies (notably the UK and Australia) invaded Afghanistan and ousted the Taliban government as the first campaign in a so-called War on Terror that subsequently involved the illegal and dishonestly-promoted invasion of Iraq.  The War on Terror in Iraq and Afghanistan has so far cost the US about US$252 billion and is expected to cost about US$1,400 billion if it lasts another 5 years (the Australian cost is expected to total about US$1 billion). There have been about 2,800 Coalition military deaths so far. However the post-invasion avoidable mortality (excess mortality) and under-5 infant mortality in the Occupied Iraqi and Afghan Territories now total 2.1 million and 1.7 million, respectively, and constitute passive genocide in gross violation of the Geneva Conventions because of the manifest failure of the Coalition occupiers to supply life-sustaining requisites e.g. the annual per capita medical expenditure in these conquered lands is less than 1% of that in metropolitan USA.