Unwelcome Guests

Unwelcome Guests "since 2000, for love not money." More than 700 episodes available at: http://www.unwelcomeguests.net/

Episode #691

Having focused in the past on the US deep state, we look instead at its manifestation in the middle East and Asia, focusing this time on centers of production (Afghanistan) and trafficking (Turkey). We begin with the center of the world's opium production, Afghanistan, which the US revealingly chose to attack in the immediate wake of 9/11, in spite of a lack of clear evidence that the country was involved. Beginning with a review of post WW2 covert CIA wars in the region, McCoy looks at US covert operations in the area of Afghanistan, and notes how possible alternatives to opium production have been destroyed by consistently "unsuccessful" policies which are repeatedly employed, leaving local little option but large scale drug production. McCoy recommends crop substitution, replanting orchards and providing alternate employment, suggesting that pacifying a narco-state is impossible.

Next, James Corbett interviews Sibel Edmonds, who as the only translator for the FBI who worked with some Turkic languages testifies that this position gave her an overview which the people for whom she was translating lacked. They might have been deliberately isolated, in order not to understand the deeper purposes of their work: "The most important thing for people to get is we're not even looking at one big investigation, all these agents working together. They were chopped up and divided, but because I worked in the central place... other agents were sending their material to me... I was in this position to see all the dots being connected... These agents, while I was there, because I was the central person, they started connecting the dots." — Sibel Edmonds, describing FBI (Anti-)Terror operations.