We have been doing this the whole time.
And never you mind, amurkn shit-eater, that the CIA and its "Al-CIA-Duh" operatives are the largest beneficiaries of the renewed drug trade (surging since the U.S. invaded).
Funds their black-op, false-flags with black-op, invisible money!
Whadda country!!!!
Incident One: December 5, 2004
"Afghan Poppy Farmers Say Mystery Spraying Killed Crops" by CARLOTTA GALL
Farmers and tribal leaders in this picturesque farming village in eastern Afghanistan have confirmed statements by the Afghan government that unidentified planes have been spraying opium poppy fields with a toxic chemical.
More than a month ago, a dark plane rattled windows through the night as it flew back and forth, spraying a chemical on houses, orchards and fields, farmers and tribal elders said Friday. The poppy seedlings were now turning yellow. The crop would die, they said.
''People are surprised and unhappy,'' said Muhammad Hasham, 45, a village elder whose poppy fields began dying after the spraying.
His brother, Hajji Kamaluddin Popalzai, the village chief, said the government had told them to stop growing poppies, but they were expecting some assistance to grow alternative crops first. ''Just coming and spraying, that's unfair,'' he said.
The spraying is something of a mystery, apparently even to the Afghan government. This week, President Hamid Karzai called in the ambassadors of Britain and the United States, the two main donors involved in efforts to combat narcotics in Afghanistan, to explain the aerial spraying in several districts of Nangarhar Province.
Both countries have denied any involvement, according to Mr. Karzai's spokesman, Jawed Ludin. But an Afghan government delegation sent to investigate returned with samples of the tiny gray pellets, the size of grains of sugar, that were sprayed on the crops, as well as soil for analysis.
''We do not support aerial spraying as an instrument of eradication,'' Mr. Ludin said at a news briefing this week. ''We have never in the past, at present, and never will in the future authorize the use of poppy-spraying chemicals.''
''The government of Afghanistan has not authorized any foreign entity, any foreign government, any foreign company, or anyone else to carry out aerial spraying,'' he said.
Mr. Ludin said the Afghan government was not convinced that all other measures to combat narcotics had been exhausted, and it was also worried about the impact the chemicals might have on people and legitimate crops. But most important, he said, spraying without the government's authorization was an infringement of Afghanistan's sovereignty.
''This is a question of sovereignty, a question of being aware of what is going on in the country, and of course that is something that we need to take seriously,'' Mr. Ludin said.
The American military has denied any involvement or knowledge of the spraying, and on Wednesday the American ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, denied contracting the job to any company or agency.
''I can say categorically that the U.S. has not done it and the U.S. has not contracted or subcontracted anyone to do it,'' he said. He added that he did not know who had done the spraying.
Yet the topic has been under discussion for some months, and the Americans have argued for chemical eradication, Afghan and foreign officials involved in the counternarcotics program said.
The United States recently announced that it was providing $780 million to combat illicit drugs in Afghanistan, the world's leading source of opium, over the next year. Some of the money will go to the American security firm DynCorp to train and work alongside Afghanistan's new Central Planning and Eradication Force, a police force dedicated to eliminating poppy fields.
Afghan officials said they did not know who was responsible, but were quick to blame the United States.
''The Americans control the airspace of Afghanistan, and not even a bird can fly without them knowing,'' said Hajji Din Muhammad, the governor of Nangarhar, the province where the spraying has occurred. ''There was no need to spray chemicals, and we are not happy about that.''
In Nimla, villagers said they thought President Karzai probably knew about the plan.
''He is like a shepherd to his people and a shepherd always knows about his sheep,'' Mr. Hasham said. ''If he does not know, he should not be a shepherd.''
Like the other farmers here, Mr. Hasham said he was growing poppy because he could not survive if he used his small fields to grow wheat.
''I have two fields,'' he said. ''If I grow wheat I get 30 kilos of grain'' -- about 66 pounds -- ''which is not enough to feed my family. If I grow opium, I can buy enough grain, plus cooking oil and all the others things we need.''
Another farmer, Lala Gul, was busy plowing up his dying poppy seedlings and sowing wheat instead, but said he would take a loss.
''Since the Americans came to this country, I have not made any money from my land,'' he said.
The poorer farmers and landless laborers are now facing ruin, Mr. Hasham said.
''I will have to sell my land,'' said Ghulam Sayed, a 65-year-old farmer and the father of eight. He said he borrowed money to plant poppies on his one terraced plot and would have to repay the debt at the next harvest with two kilograms of opium, derived from the plants.
''They destroyed my crop and now I will grow wheat, but I will not be able to repay the debt,'' he said. ''I already owe someone 10,000 Afghanis'' -- about $200 -- ''from last year when they also sprayed.''
Incident Two: February 27, 2005
Please enlarge the image and look at the beautiful and wonderful Mr. Muhammad and his father, Khaurialladad -- the PEOPLE WHOSE LIVESTOCK and CROPS we POISONED and KILLED or MADE SICK!!!
You proud of allowing your government to commit WAR CRIMES, Amurkns?
Then KEEP EATING from that BOWL of SHIT!!!
"Afghans Accuse U.S. of Secret Spraying to Kill Poppies" by CARLOTTA GALL
ANAI, Afghanistan - Abdullah, a black-turbaned shepherd, said he was watching over his sheep one night in early February when he heard a plane pass low overhead three times. By morning his eyes were so swollen he could not open them and the sheep around him were dying in convulsions.
Although farmers had noticed a white powder on their crops, they cut grass and clover for their animals and picked spinach to eat anyway. Within hours the animals were severely ill, people here said, and the villagers complained of fevers, skin rashes and bloody diarrhea. The children were particularly affected. A week later, the crops - wheat, vegetables and poppies - were dying, and a dozen dead animals, including newborn lambs, lay tossed in a heap.
The incident on Feb. 3 has left the herders of sheep and goats in this remote mountain area in Helmand Province deeply angered and suspicious. They are convinced that someone is surreptitiously spraying their lands or dusting them with chemicals, presumably in a clandestine effort to eradicate Afghanistan's bumper poppy crop, the world's leading source of opium.
The incident in Kanai was not the first time that Afghan villagers - or Afghan government officials - had complained of what they suspected was nighttime spraying. In November, villagers in Nimla, in Nangarhar Province, said their fields, too, had been laced with chemicals when a plane passed overhead several times during the night.
Afterward, Afghan and foreign officials who investigated returned with samples of tiny gray granules that they said provided evidence that spraying had occurred. Two Western embassies sent samples abroad for analysis but have not yet received the results.
At that time, President Hamid Karzai publicly condemned the spraying. Though it was never clear who was responsible, members of his staff said they suspected the United States or Britain, which together have been leading the struggle to rein in Afghan poppy cultivation, which has reached record levels. Both countries finance outside security firms to train Afghan counternarcotics forces.
President Karzai said his government was not spraying fields and had no knowledge of such activity, and he called in the American and British ambassadors for an explanation. Then, as now, the American and British Embassies denied any involvement.
"There is no credible evidence that aerial spraying has taken place in Helmand," the American Embassy said in a statement this time. "No agency, personnel or contractors associated with the United States government have conducted or been involved in any such activity in Helmand or any other province of Afghanistan."
An Afghan government delegation sent to investigate the latest incident said it found no evidence of aerial spraying. Rather, "a naturally occurring disease" had killed the crops and animals, Lt. Gen. Muhammad Daoud, deputy interior minister for counternarcotics, said in a statement.
Agriculture Ministry officials said the extremely cold weather could have affected the crops. They added, however, that the ministry lacked the technical capacity to analyze samples for chemicals.
But the people in Kanai, neighboring Tanai and at least two other villages are incredulous. For them, there is no doubt that someone sprayed their lands and, despite official denials, they blame the United States, which still controls the skies in Afghanistan.
"They are the ones with the planes," said Abdul Ahmad, brother of the shepherd, Abdullah. Between them, the brothers had lost 200 animals from symptoms that suggested poisoning, he said.
"They went mad, their eyes went blue and they could not eat," he said of their sheep and goats. "Water was coming from their mouths, they were trying to eat their droppings and they were shivering," he said. The animals appeared completely healthy the day before, he said.
"We gave our vote to Karzai so he would bring us help and now he is killing our animals," he said angrily.
While the mystery lingers around who may be responsible for a secret aerial eradication campaign here - or even whether one is actually being carried out - there is no doubt that Afghanistan's booming poppy crop has been an intensifying concern to United States, British and other international officials.
In November, a United Nations report found that more than 300,000 acres in Afghanistan had been planted with poppies and expressed concern that the country was degenerating into a narcostate. American and other officials said they feared the drug trade had insinuated itself into virtually every corner of the Afghan economy and was financing rebels.
Some American officials, particularly those in international narcotics and law enforcement, have for months advocated aerial spraying to gain control of the problem.
Diplomats and other foreign officials involved in agriculture programs and counternarcotics efforts here said there was a discussion in 2004 between American officials and other donors over whether to use aerial eradication to stem poppy cultivation, which expanded 64 percent last year.
In December, the Bush administration presented to Congress a budget request for $152 million for aerial spraying as part of a $776 million aid package for counternarcotics operations in Afghanistan for 2005. In January, it dropped the budget line for aerial spraying because of President Karzai's clear opposition, an American official in Kabul said.
Word of the budget request prompted 31 nonprofit groups, led by CARE International, to sign an open letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Jan. 31 expressing concern over what they considered the excessive emphasis on eradication in the United States administration's counternarcotics strategy in Afghanistan.
"Widespread eradication in 2005 could undermine the economy and devastate already poor families without giving rural development projects sufficient time to provide alternative sources of income," the agencies warned. They called for concentration on interdiction of traffickers and support for farmers instead.
Yet American officials have not ruled out the possible need for aerial eradication and financing, which was included in a supplemental request in February for $82 billion by the Bush administration for Iraq and Afghanistan, an American counternarcotics official in Kabul said.
One option considered by American officials last year was to rent civilian planes and spray the general weed killer Roundup over the provinces of Helmand and Badakhshan, two of the largest producers of poppies in the country, according to one official familiar with the plan.
American military officials in Afghanistan and those with the United States Agency for International Development are also against aerial spraying, foreign officials in Kabul say. Development officials argue that spraying will affect all agriculture and especially the poorest farmers; instead, they advocate alternative livelihood programs for farmers to dissuade them from growing poppies.
The military fears that spraying will turn the population against the government and the American presence in Afghanistan and increase support for insurgents, who remain active in southern Afghanistan.
In fact, the belief that they have been sprayed has angered villagers all the more because the local police came here only 40 days before and destroyed their poppy fields on government orders, a fact that the district police chief, Abdul Hakim Karezwal, confirmed.
The farmers said they had instead planted wheat, which was now yellow and rotting along with the clover, spinach and greens they had also planted. Some farmers kept growing small patches of poppies inside high garden walls, but most of the fields in the village showed shoots of young wheat.
"Karzai lied to us," one farmer, Ahmadullah, said. "He said, 'We will give you assistance,' and he didn't. So we grew poppy to be able to feed our families. Then the president ordered it destroyed and so we destroyed it. And now he is destroying our wheat. What will be left of our lives? They destroyed everything. We will have to abandon the village."
Incident Three: October 8, 2007 (today)
"U.S. Renews Bid to Destroy Opium Poppies in Afghanistan by KIRK SEMPLE and TIM GOLDEN
KABUL, Afghanistan, Oct. 7 — After the biggest opium harvest in Afghanistan’s history, American officials have renewed efforts to persuade the government here to begin spraying herbicide on opium poppies, and they have found some supporters within President Hamid Karzai’s administration, officials of both countries said.
Since early this year, Mr. Karzai has repeatedly declared his opposition to spraying the poppy fields, whether by crop-dusting airplanes or by eradication teams on the ground.
But Afghan officials said the Karzai administration is now re-evaluating that stance. Some proponents within the government are pushing a trial program of ground spraying that could begin before the harvest next spring.
The issue has created sharp divisions within the Afghan government, among its Western allies and even American officials of different agencies. The matter is fraught with political danger for Mr. Karzai, whose hold on power is weak.
Many spraying advocates, including officials at the White House and the State Department, view herbicides as critical to curbing Afghanistan’s poppy crop, officials said. That crop and the opium and heroin it produces have become a major source of revenue for the Taliban insurgency.
But officials said the skeptics — who include American military and intelligence officials and European diplomats in Afghanistan — fear that any spraying of American-made chemicals over Afghan farms would be a boon to Taliban propagandists. Some of those officials say that the political cost could be especially high if the herbicide destroys food crops that farmers often plant alongside their poppies.
“There has always been a need to balance the obvious greater effectiveness of spray against the potential for losing hearts and minds,” Thomas A. Schweich, the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics issues, said in an interview last week in Washington. “The question is whether that’s manageable. I think that it is.”
Bush administration officials say they will respect whatever decision the Afghan government makes. Crop-eradication efforts, they insist, are only part of a new counternarcotics strategy that will include increased efforts against traffickers, more aid for legal agriculture and development, and greater military support for the drug fight.
Behind the scenes, however, Bush administration officials have been pressing the Afghan government to at least allow the trial spray of glyphosate, a commonly used weed-killer, current and former American officials said. Ground spraying would likely bring only a modest improvement over the manual destruction of poppy plants, but officials who support the strategy hope it would reassure Afghans about the safety of the herbicide and make eradication possible.
Aerial spraying, they add, may be the only way to make a serious impact on opium production while the Taliban continues to dominate parts of southern Afghanistan.
On Sunday, officials said, a State Department crop-eradication expert briefed key members of Mr. Karzai’s cabinet about the effectiveness and safety of glyphosate. The expert, Charles S. Helling, a senior scientific adviser to the department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, met with, among others, the ministers of public health and agriculture, both of whom have opposed the use of herbicides, an Afghan official said.
For all the controversy over herbicide use, there is no debate that Afghanistan’s drug problem is out of control. The country now produces 93 percent of the world’s opiates, according to United Nations estimates. Its traffickers are also processing more opium into heroin base there, a shift that has helped to increase Afghanistan’s drug revenues exponentially since the American-led invasion in 2001.
A United Nations report in August documented a 17 percent rise in poppy cultivation from 2006 to 2007, and a 34 percent rise in opium production. Perhaps more important for the effort to stabilize Afghanistan, officials said, the Taliban has been reaping a windfall from taxes on the growers and traffickers.
The problem is most acute in the southern province of Helmand, a Taliban stronghold. It produced nearly 4,400 metric tons of opium this year, almost half the country’s total output, United Nations statistics show.
Moreover, as Afghanistan’s opium production has soared, the government’s eradication efforts have faltered. Federal and provincial eradication teams — using sticks, sickles and animal-drawn plows — cut down about 47,000 acres of poppy fields this year, 24 percent more than last year but still less than 9 percent of the country’s total poppy crop.
And even that effort had to be negotiated plot by plot with growers. Powerful and politically connected landowners were able to protect their crops while smaller, weaker farmers were made the targets. The eradication program was so spotty that it did little to discourage farmers from cultivating the crop, American and European officials said.
“The eradication process over the past five years has not worked,” Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, said in an interview. “This year, it was a farce.”
The Americans have been pushing the Afghan government to eradicate with glyphosate for at least two years. According to current and former American officials, the subject has been raised with President Karzai by President Bush; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser; and John P. Walters, the director of national drug-control policy.
American officials thought they had the Karzai administration’s support late last year to begin a small-scale pilot program for ground spraying in several provinces. But that plan was derailed in January after an American-educated deputy minister of public health presented health and environmental concerns about glyphosate at a meeting of the Karzai cabinet, Afghan and American officials said.
Since then, Mr. Karzai has said he opposes spraying of any kind.
“President Karzai has categorically rejected that spraying will happen,” Farooq Wardak, Afghanistan’s minister of state for parliamentary affairs, said in a recent interview. “The collateral damage of that will be huge.”
Yet in the weeks since the latest United Nations drug report, the Bush administration’s lobbying appears to have made new headway. It has already won the backing of several members of Mr. Karzai’s government and the spray advocates here are now trying to swing other key Afghan officials and Mr. Karzai himself, one high-level Afghan official said
“We are working to convince the key ministers and President Karzai to accept this strategy,” said the official, who supports spraying but asked not to be identified because of the issue’s political delicacy. “We want to convince them to show some power. The government has to show its power in the remote provinces.”
General Khodaidad, Afghanistan’s acting minister of counternarcotics (who, like many Afghans, goes by only one name), said in an interview last week that ground spraying is under careful consideration by the Afghan government. A high-level official of the Karzai administration said he believed some spraying might take place during this growing season, which begins in several weeks.
The American government contends that glyphosate is one of the world’s safest herbicides — “less toxic than common salt, aspirin, caffeine, nicotine and even vitamin A,” according to a State Department fact sheet.
One well known supporter of glyphosate as a counternarcotics tool is the American ambassador in Kabul, William B. Wood, who arrived in April after a four-year posting as ambassador to Colombia. There, Mr. Wood oversaw the American-financed counternarcotics program, Plan Colombia, which relies heavily on the aerial spraying of coca, the raw material for cocaine.
Mr. Wood has even offered to have himself sprayed with glyphosate, as one of his predecessors in Colombia once did, to prove its safety, a United States Embassy official in Kabul said.
But among European diplomats here, a far greater concern than any environmental or health dangers of chemical eradication is the potential for political fallout that could lead to more violence and instability.
Those diplomats worry particularly that aerial spraying would kill food crops that some farmers plant with their poppies. European officials add that any form of spraying could be cast by the Taliban as American chemical warfare against the Afghan peasantry.
The British have been so concerned that on the eve of Mr. Karzai’s trip to Camp David in August, Prime Minister Gordon Brown called President Bush and asked him not to pressure the Afghan premier to use herbicides, according to several diplomats here.
In something of a reversal of traditional roles, officials at the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency have also challenged the White House and State Department support for spraying, raising concerns about its potential to destabilize the Karzai government, current and former American officials said.
American officials who support herbicide use do not dismiss such concerns. They say an extensive public-information campaign would have to be carried out in conjunction with any spraying effort to dispel fears about the chemical’s impacts.
Mr. Schweich, the assistant secretary of state, emphasized that a new American counter-narcotics strategy for Afghanistan, introduced in August, went far beyond eradication. He noted that it would increase punishments and rewards, including large amounts of development aid, to move farmers away from poppy cultivation. It also calls for more forceful eradication, interdiction and law enforcement efforts, and closer coordination of counternarcotics and counterinsurgency efforts, which until now have been pursued separately.
“We will do what the Afghan government wants to do,” Mr. Schweich said, referring to the use of herbicides. The Bush administration, he added, simply wants to ensure that the Afghans “have all the facts on the table.”
I really am SICK of NON-CONTEXTUAL LIES, readers!!!!!
Really TIRED OF IT from the DOGSHIT PRESS!!!!!!!
Those are WONDERFUL, BEAUTIFUL, INNOCENT PEOPLE that my crap hole, mass-murdering government wants to DROP CHEMICALS ON.
Just like in Fallujah!!!!!!
God Damn you, George W. Bush, and damn this fucking sniveling, supine Congress while you are at it.
Thank you!
