she doesn't read very carefully, reason very critically, type very accurately, or know much about anything . . . but I bet she's a real venerated elder of the Boalt Hall cocktail weenie circuit with her old fella on her arm telling all his highbrow SF lawyer buddies what a big fat nobody you are and how the paperBible (referencing Mediaite) only lists you as #10 which is why she spends 5 days a week in your comments section trying to edumacate all your dopey "followers" that what you say is only "opinion" and therefore not as relevant or important as the "fact filled real news" that appears in the pages of the paperBible as copied down by stenographic professionals like Mojo and little Tommy Friedman.

And by the by bernie you do know that even though the word "professional" has been wildly diluted to the point of being irrelevant it technically only applies to individuals with a doctoral level degree from a university i.e. lawyers, doctors, PhDs etc. . . . not jocks, or journalists generally or MBAs or plumbers or stay at home grandmas who don't think knowing how to type accurately is a valuable skill.

Not that this is a big scoop or indicative of where the site will go, but I found this clip entertaining.

http://www.mediaite.com/print/murdoch-frightens-fox-business-no-worries-mr-chairman/

Excellent marketing if you ask me. Only some batshit crazy foreigner wouldn't want to get in on a good deal like that and be Uncle Sam's long-term guest at Club Gitmo?

It's because they hate our freedoms.

You take my breath away.

Alas, if only Harry Reid felt the same way. Or at least Vivian Schiller over at NPR. Sadly, I imagine both of them would just think something like, "Hmm, handy — but a little long. Take out 'undocumented' and I could use it in my next speech..."

I've been wanting to ask you about something my RWA father sent me a short time ago. I wondered if you'd written it too? ;-}

It does not surprise me that the people at Snopes are California liberals. It's just like a bunch of left wing loonies to insist that there might be some absolute truth that is independent of what our side needs in order to win.

If there's one thing I hate about liberals more than their moral relativism, it's that.

tick tick tick tick

And, beware teeth.

See? That was June 2001. Then came 9/11, War on Afghanistan, blah blah blah, and now we've got a big heroin problem. Hell, one might even get a little skeptical about whether it's the Taliban this time around.

Afghans have been in the opium trade for ... a really, really long time. Nobody who says they're fundamentally, absolutely, forever against poppy growing really is. Those who say so, are, generally speaking, simply getting their money from somewhere else for the moment. (Or, historically, from trade, but the great trade routes don't run through Afghanistan these days.)

When there were Soviets to fight and American and Saudi cash to fight them with, there was no need for poppies. When the Americans lost interest and wandered off to cut their forearms or count sidewalk cracks or whatever they did after the ending of the Cold War freaked them out and left them to cope with a terrifying lack of terror however they could, the fundies kept getting money from the Saudis but the secularists had to go back to the old standby.

Of course the Taliban made a militant anti-opium stance part of their platform. They could afford to.

Now that al Qaeda proper has basically been wiped off the map, and the Taliban leadership has been crushed, the hard-line Islamic money has dried up too. Both the secular communities and the Taliban have been back into opium, and only recently have the Americans actually started attacking the (economic) root of the problem.

It's not hard to believe that the Taliban is increasingly the sole poppy-dependent segment of the Afghan political economy — even in an imperfect system Western money is not likely to end up in their hands in any great amount. If nothing else, were that to happen it would basically obviate their reason for being.

Who knows, the CIA could be completely manufacturing all opium, everywhere, even as we speak, secretly using their mind-controlled sleeper agents. But the simplest explanation is that times in Afghanistan are as they always have been. The claim that it's the Taliban this time around passes basic sanity checking.

(Which is more than can be said of many of the things that pass for conventional wisdom.)

Actually, no, you are talking the shit.

Ahmed Rashid's Descent into Chaos chapter 15 (Drugs and Thugs) details the Taliban relationship to opium and heroin starting in the 1980's when it was first begun in Pakistan -- by 1986, Pakistan was 70 percent of the world's heroin supply, having taken its market share from the Golden Triangle (Laos, Myanmar, Thailand). It was used to fund the Mujahedin "while the CIA-ISI turned a blind eye". Or not quite, the entire Quetta staff of the ISI was removed in 1983 for trafficking. The DEA identified 40 major heroin syndicates in Pakistan some with ties to government and ISI officials. After Soviet withdrawal, the DEA starts to win out and funds eradication in Pakistan, which becomes drug free by 1999 -- the ISI and heroin traders moved the production to Afghanistan, now under the Taliban. "Opium fueled the Afghan civil war in the 1990's, when warlords used drug money to pay soldiers' salaries and buy weapons and food....As the Taliban expanded north and west so did their control over illicit opium trade, and production rose from 1570 tons in 1990 to 2800 tons in 1997."

"In the 1990s the Taliban collected usher from farmers, an Islamic agricultural tax ranging from 10 to 20 percent of production, and also charged traffickers a zakat tax on shipments of heroin."

"The Taliban suddenly banned poppy cultivation in 2001. Harshly imposed on farmers, the ban was highly effective -- opium production that year slumped to 185 tons -- and was termed "the most effective drug control action of modern times." However, the Taliban did not prohibit trafficking in existing stocks, and it later became clear that the ban had been the result of overproduction and a slump in opium prices, which had collapsed from $600 a kilogram to just $30 a kilogram. The ban promptly pushed the price up to $650 a kilogram."

There's more, the Taliban teetered on the edge of power as a result of the ban, since farmers had become debt indentured by opium production and needed cash to pay those debts (to opium traffickers and warlords, principally). Production immediately resumed when they fell, but prices again plunged because the traffickers worried that the U.S. would target them.

Subsequently, the main traffickers in Helmand, the Akhunzadas, became powerful, and used the Taliban to move heroin through the Pakistani border from Lashkar Gah into Quetta. The Taliban used al Qaeda contacts in the Gulf States to move it from there, although the heroin producers in Helmand ran a good bit through to Iran directly, and more went via the warlords north from Mazar-e-Sharif into, eventually Russia.

By 2006 it was used to fund the Taliban insurgency which crossed over from Pakistan and began taking territory in the South. At that point, it was 93% of the world supply, and supplied the Taliban and al Qaeda with $3+ billion per year in funds. (all from Rashid, ch.15, pp. 317-337).

Gretchen Peters explains in her interview about her new book on NPR that the money is mostly made, and kept, in Pakistan. Her figure is 60-80% of the money goes to traffickers in Pakistan.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103957098

I haven't read her book yet, it is on order.

In Pakistan, heroin funds the operations of the Taliban (Quetta and Wana) and al Qaeda (elsewhere in FATA), who have resumed training camps for any and all who wish to train there and can pass screening at safe houses. They have until recently trained all of the ISI/military backed insurgents that Pakistan uses on its neighbors, according to Rashid and others.

I'm not sure since the Pakistan Army went into Swat whether that link is still there, but the drug routes most definitely still are, and they do include the Taliban and al Qaeda.

I don't think that a 7 month ban (the one your article points to) is an adequate basis for you to base your entire dismissal of what I said. And you didn't answer my question about their collateral damage, I notice. Sorry. No shit.

Go find the invasion, find the occupation, and find the mission and justification for the American troops in Afghanistan. It's a real eye opener. Your side is lying with just as much ignorance as the neocon side, and both shield the abuse of power and both render what's happening to the populace and the prisoners invisible.