If we cast our minds back to those heady days of the Afghanistan invasion, we might recall how Condoleezza Rice informed us that the Taliban were financing their Muslim War Against the West with heroin production, which was being used to destroy the lives of our young.

This message echoed earlier dire warnings about the flood of heroin unleashed by the communists in the Golden Triangle. Because cocaine was more the fashionable abuse of the rich and famous, we heard little about the scourge from Colombia, but there were dark hints of Latino communism and socialist rebels who wished to undermine American-style democracy.

Meanwhile, in the Hollywood-enhanced background, lurked shadowy Asian/Latino demons who smuggled drugs to attack the wonderful American Way of Life. Movies featured the shining knights of CIA, DEA and FBI in their eternal vigilance against evil.

Perhaps the time has come to reload the palette and present a more realistic albeit equally colourful cameo of the real drug trade.

To quote former Australian journalist, Dennis Ross BA (AIA): During the French war in Indochina (1948-54) French intelligence operations were funded by the opium trade, with sales operated by a secret society of river pirates, the Binh Xuyen. After the French defeat and withdrawal in 1954, America took up the torch in South Vietnam to fight communism.  The Americans also took over the French intelligence system and its method of funding, the opium trade; in collaboration with the Binh Xuyen.

The CIA established the Phoenix Operation… the torture and death of some 30,000 Vietnamese civilians suspected of being nationalist sympathisers; men, women and children. Congress funding for such blatant war-crimes would have been unobtainable so the drug trade financed what became ever-expanding Black Operations.

To facilitate control, and in breach of the 1953 Geneva Convention demanding free democratic elections in Vietnam, the US set up South Vietnam’s puppet government under President Ngo Dinh Diem, previously a resident of America for 16 years.

In l955, his brother, Ngo Dinh Nhu, now Interior Minister took over security and secret police, as well as the former French intelligence opium funding operation in conjunction with the French Union Corse, a secret gangster society, and the Chinese Green Gang. With the two brothers’ assassinations, Air Marshal Nguyen Cao Ky, who happened to control the transport aircraft that flew opium from its source in Laos into Vietnam, assumed control of South Vietnam.

The source of opium was the fields in Laos, Northern Burma, and Northern Thailand; the so-called Golden Triangle. Meanwhile, in an earlier event, the leader of the Green Gang, “Big Ears” Du, had adopted Chiang Kai Shek as a son. Their political entity, the Kuomintang, which ruled China until driven out by the Communists in 1949, established links with the then newly-formed CIA in Taiwan, and with the Golden Triangle operation.

From Taiwan, the CIA funded an airline, Air America, and simultaneously contracted work to a Chinese counterpart airline, Air Asia, owned by a group of Chinese, most prominent of whom was Mrs Anna Chennault, the wife of US General Claire Chennault who led the famous “Flying Tigers” fighter pilots against the Japanese Air Force in China during World War II. Anna Chennault was related to Chiang Kai Shek through his wife, and was a daughter of the tycoon T.V. Soong, whose other daughters had married Sun Yat Sen, former leader of the Republic of China.

The centre of the drug trade in South East Asia was the Green Gang whose contacts spread to Japan’s former military commanders, and through them to the Yamaguchi-Gumi (Japan’s underworld), and to the West coast of the USA with its large Chinese and Nisei Japanese populations.

The Green Gang had developed contacts with the Japanese military during World War II and these former Japanese commanders, many of whom were Class A war criminals released from death sentence and from prison by US General Willoughby, were encouraged to form an anti-communist political party – the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) which still holds government in Japan today. (This was and is the main obstacle to enabling victims of the Japanese Army in World War II getting compensation, or even an apology, for what they suffered). These are the same Japanese war criminal politicians with whom Australian Prime Minister John Howard signed a treaty in March 2007… a treaty which permits armed Japanese troops to march through Australian city streets.

Significantly, in l960, John F Kennedy was elected as President of the USA, helped to power by his dad’s Mafia friend, Sam Giacana. After l960, the opium grown in South East Asia was refined into morphine and further, into heroin, for distribution in the Western world. In Thailand, where the military and police controlled the drug trade, heroin was exported through the CIA-owned and operated Tiger Airlines, destined for Saigon, America, Europe and Australia.

Cocaine is another drug trade run by the CIA, a production and distribution franchise whose Colombia manager, Noriega, unsuccessfully tried to take over and has been incarcerated in Florida as punishment ever since.

The third most important source of Black Ops funding has been Afghanistan, whose poppy fields funded the arming and training of the Afghan resistance against the Russian Invasion; the most significant product of which was al Qaida.

Disastrously for CIA funding, opium/heroin is forbidden by the Quran and the Taliban eliminated all the poppy fields in their geographical area of control. This happened at the same time as the Thais successfully repressed Golden Triangle production.

Threatened with economic extinction, the CIA initiated the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and this region now supplies 93% of the global heroin market. Although the Taliban and Pakistanis offered to hand over al Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden, on the condition he be tried by the UN’s International Criminal Court, the White House turned this down; this being the continued pretext for occupation of Afghanistan.

Thus, CIA control of the global drug industry has sustained its own illicit funding requirements, which have enabled the CIA to undermine democratic or popular governments; to assassinate or vilify individuals or organisations who threaten its power base; or who otherwise promote democratic government. Control is not limited to US organisations, but is extended to all susceptible government departments in all countries.

In Australia, in 1979, it was pointed out to the Northern Territory Drug Squad that the practice of hounding users and local distributors of heroin was futile and that a more effective method would be to put together a team of expert small business accountants whose knowledge-bases were comprehensive; and to have them examine enterprises whose noticeable profits or expansion did not match negative market conditions.

An example offered was a Western Australian cray-fisherman who bought large blocks of Darwin units following one of the poorest cray seasons on record. Three decades later it was finally learned that the smuggler was indeed caught but this successful strategy has never been taken up by police units in Australia. Elsewhere, the War on Drugs is widely considered by cynics to be but a culling exercise to protect the official market.

There is no proof, but insiders claim that Australian soldiers, wary of Defense Department abandonment when they are injured or killed, have established their own pension schemes based on Afghanistan’s most successful export.

If the War on Drugs were to be renamed the War on Truth, it would be regarded as more successful.

Nevertheless, as the main beneficiary of the drug trade is the US Security Intelligence network, which is predominantly controlled by Wall Street lobbies such as the Endowment for Democracy, the Council on Foreign Relations, USAID (which has nothing to do with aid), and the Trilateral Commission, then it becomes apparent that the War on Drugs is actually (to borrow the parlance of the Occupy Movement) the 1% War against the 99%.

Or, more simply, the War Against Us.