So, there's a curious story coming out of Afghanistan recently.
You see, back in the first two decades of this century, you might recall that
the country was under NATO occupation.
And during that time, Afghanistan set record after record for opium production.
But then in 2021, the U.S. hightailed it out of there, the Taliban took back
over, and wouldn't you know it, opium production in the country has fallen off a cliff.
Funny that, but don't think about that too much.
Heroin, that's yesterday's news. No, the new heroin is fentanyl,
and fentanyl is coming from, let me check my notes, Venezuela?
Yeah, haven't you heard? There's a new drug cartel in town, and the evil Venezuelan
mafiosi are protecting them, so the US has got to go in them,
love bomb them to smithereens.
Of course, there's only two problems with that story. One is that the cartel
in question, according to the Venezuelans, no longer exists.
And two, the historical precedent for that cartel was funded by the CIA.
Hmm, interesting. So here's the real question. Who really runs the global drug trade?
Well, I'll give you one guess and we'll find out if you're right. Let's go.
Report.
Welcome back, friends. Welcome back to another edition of The Corbett Report.
I'm your host, James Corbett of CorbettReport.com, coming to you,
as always, from the sunny climes of Western Japan here in late November of 2025.
With episode 487 of The Corbett Report podcast, podcast the CIA still ships in the drugs.
And if the idea of the CIA shipping drugs is news to you then you have some catching up to do.
But don't worry I have some resources to help you do just that.
If you type CIA drugs into the search bar on CorbettReport.com you'll find a
number of reports that I have filed about this documented phenomenon in the
past including perhaps most notably episode 19 of the Corporate Report podcast,
The CIA Ships in the Drugs, and a 2011 mini-documentary that I created on the CIA and the drug trade.
From its very inception, the CIA has been embroiled in the murky underworld of drug trafficking.
In the late 1940s, the CIA funneled arms and funds to the Corsican Mafia in
return for their assistance in breaking up widespread labor strikes in France
that were threatening to establish communist control over the old port of Marseille.
The Corsican Crime Syndicate, in turn, used the CIA support to set up the trafficking
network known as the French Connection, which saw heroin smuggled from Turkey
to France and shipped to the U.S., feeding an American heroin epidemic.
In Burma in 1950, the CIA regrouped the remnants of the Defeated Nationalist
Chinese Army, or KMT, to start an invasion of southern China and draw Chinese
troops away from the Korean front.
Easily beaten back by Mao's forces, the KMT instead turned their attention to
occupying Burma, imposing an opium tax on all farmers in the opium-rich Shan highlands.
Members of the Burmese military claimed that the KMT opium was flown out to
Thailand and Taiwan on the same unmarked C-47s that the CIA had used to supply
the group in the first place.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, the CIA recruited the Laotian Hmong tribe to fight
communist forces in the region.
The CIA encouraged the Hmong to
grow opium instead of rice to make them dependent on CIA airdrops of food.
The agency could then force their compliance by threatening to withdraw the food aid.
To make the deal even sweeter, They even located a heroin refinery at CIA headquarters
in northern Laos and used Air America, a passenger and cargo airline that was
covertly owned and operated by the CIA, to export the Laotian opium and heroin.
Much of it ended up in Vietnam, causing an epidemic of heroin addiction amongst U.S. soldiers.
In the 1980s the locus of opium production shifted
from the golden triangle where the cia was disengaging to
the golden crescent where it was engaging with the afghan mujahideen
in their cia funded struggle against the soviets once again that is just a small
sampling of my 2011 mini documentary on the cia and the drug trade and i would
wholeheartedly encourage you to go back and watch or re-watch that particular
video for its many nuggets,
including the Dateline report with the infamous, there are no conspiracies in
this country, quotation,
as well as a deep dive into the work of Gary Webb, but also an interview that
I conducted at that time with Peter Dale Scott,
deep politics pioneer Peter Dale Scott, on his work on oil.
Drugs, and war, the United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina.
And I also go on to document the phenomenon of all of these CIA drug planes
that keep crashing all over the place, specifically earlier in the early 2000s.
I talk, for example, about the 2004 incident involving a Beechcraft King Air 200,
which happened to be carrying 1,100 kilos of cocaine and was owned by a CIA
shell company with a tail number that was registered to a CIA aircraft.
Interesting how that happens and how it happened again in 2007,
the 2007 Yucatan Gulfstream drug crash, in which a CIA-connected Gulfstream
2 crashed in the Mexican jungle, carrying,
was it 3 or 6.3, somewhere in there, tons of cocaine.
Again, interesting. Or the 2009 report of the Cessna 402C that was seized near
Carrepa, Colombia, that was
carrying 805 kilos of cocaine and you better believe was sporting a U.S.
Tail number and FAA registration history that connected it to a number of other
cocaine planes that have apparent links to covert U.S.
Intelligence operations focused at least in part on Venezuela and the government
of, at that time, Hugo Chavez. put a pin in that.
We'll come back to that in a little while, but let's continue this exploration.
If all of that isn't enough, you could, again, look at some of my other work on this subject.
For example, my 2013 report on Chile contra the CIA's Latin American scandal,
in which I document Craig Murray's 2012 report on how the CIA was using drug
money to fund the opposition to President Korea in Chile.
And you can also check out my 2017 edition of New World Next Week with James
Impalato of MediaMonarchy.com, in which we discussed the fact that Pablo Escobar's
son has gone out on the record alleging that his father worked for the CIA.
So make of all of that information what you will. But yes, suffice it to say,
there's a lot of history there.
But it isn't just history. As I talked about in the opening to this podcast,
yes, It turns out the Taliban has done it again.
Well, what have they done again? For the details on that, I will ask you to
consult one of my recent newsletters that I published earlier this month on
The Taliban Does It Again.
And of course, it is up at CorbettReport.com for subscribers who log in.
But if you are not a paid subscriber, you can get it, of course,
as always, for free from my sub stack, CorbettReport.substack.com.
And when and if you do, you'll find this story. The United Nations Office on
Drugs and Crime, UNODC, just came out with their latest survey of opium poppy
cultivation in Afghanistan, and you'll never guess what it says.
Oh wait, you totally will. It turns out the Taliban's ban on poppy cultivation
has been remarkably successful.
Specifically, the UNODC is estimating the total area in Afghanistan under opium
poppy cultivation to be 10,200 hectares, down 20% from last year's total of 12,800 hectares.
While the new total may still sound like a lot, it's a mere fraction of the
232,000 hectares that were estimated to be cultivated in the year before the U.S.
Military's spectacular pullout from the country in 2021.
In other words, the Taliban have somehow or other succeeded in doing what NATO
was unable to do in two decades of de facto occupation, namely decimate Afghanistan's
share of the global heroin trade.
And if you continue reading through this document, you will find all of the
various links to all of the sort of details of this story of the Afghan opium
poppy cultivation and the resulting heroin trade.
But the long story short really is contained in this handy dandy graph,
which comes from UNODC numbers, in which you can visibly see there were people fretting.
In fact, the UNODC issued a warning back in 1999 about the record opium cultivation
that was taking place at that time in the country. but it fell off a cliff in 2001.
Why specifically in 2001? Oh, that's right, because that is when the Taliban
eventually seized power in the war-torn, war-ravaged country.
Where did that war come from? Oh, that's right. Operation Cyclones,
big new Brzezinski will go in to give the Soviets their Vietnam,
all of that stuff, the billions of dollars in what was then at least the the
largest acknowledged covert CIA operation in CIA history to destabilize Afghanistan,
leading to decades of civil war and strife,
the resistance and the Taliban and all of these people fighting with each other.
Well, the Taliban seized power in the late 1990s, early 2000s,
and instituted the opium cultivation ban, resulting in a record low amount of cultivation in 2001.
Which then spiked immediately thereafter, not only exceeding the previous record
amounts of opium cultivation, but far exceeding, hitting record after record,
incredible amounts of opium being produced with estimates of upwards over 90%
of the global heroin supply in this time period coming from Afghanistan. Why?
What changed between 2001 and 2021?
Oh, that's right. Of course, the invasion and occupation.
In other words, NATO troops oversaw the cultivation of the opium in Afghanistan.
And again, this isn't conspiracy theory. No, there were primetime news reports about this.
Does anyone remember Geraldo Rivera interviewing U.S.
Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Brian Christmas in Afghanistan,
talking about how it grinds his gut,
but they've got to let these farmers do their do their farming
and they were here to look after them and make sure
the opium gets cultivated essentially they don't quite
say that but that is exactly what happened so why
is this well of course it's because it was never
about ending the drug trade that is not what the u.s or nato or the uh the empire's
allies have ever been about no they have been about facilitating that drug trade
case in point say the golden triangle and the years of what was the vietnam
more at least partially about what was really happening there.
Air America and all of that, of course, they were running the drugs.
And again, this is a well-documented phenomenon.
But the fact that this was not ever about ending the drug trade,
well, as I go on to say in this report,
perhaps no better demonstration of that fact that this was not about ending
the drug trade is to be found than the way in which the deep state's mockingbird
mouthpieces have reported on the joyous news that a major global supplier of
heroin has been removed from the equation.
So William Byrd of Lawfare Media Limits, the Taliban's drug ban,
remarkably successful in curbing opium poppy cultivation for three years in
a row, has devastated poor rural households that depended on opium to make ends meet.
Rupert Stone of Nikkei Asia, meanwhile, informs us that this successful poppy
crackdown in Afghanistan is actually expanding the narcotics trade somehow.
And not to be outdone, the crack journalists at the Washington Democracy Dies
in Darkness Post, the Bezos Post, have discovered the decline in poppy cultivation
might not be the doing of the Taliban after all.
So who was behind it? Well, if you follow that link, you'll find their story,
their super secret story from the super secret sources that they dug up that
actually there was this big elaborate CIA plot to ruin the opium poppy cultivation
in the country in from about 2004 to 2015, something in that time frame.
Exactly when it was hitting record high after record high.
Yeah, sure. Washington Post. Anyway, I refute that with some real facts,
like, of course, citing the seminal work on the subject Alfred W.
McCoy's The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, talking about how the CIA shipped in the drugs.
But all of that leads to an interesting phenomenon. Afghanistan,
opium, heroin, that is so last decade. Who cares? Whatever.
No, now, now it's all about fentanyl. And we know where the fentanyl is coming from, don't we, guys?
Tonight, the U.S. has formally marked Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro and
his government allies as members of a foreign terrorist organization,
accusing Cartel de los Soles of trafficking drugs into the states.
On social media, South Florida Representative Maria Salazar said the Cartel
of the Sons is officially recognized as a terrorist organization,
exactly what Venezuelans have known for years.
Adding, for too long, the Maduro regime has financed narco-terrorism and tyranny
in Venezuela and throughout our hemisphere.
Tonight, the Pentagon releasing this video of a deadly military airstrike on
what officials say, without providing evidence, was a drug boat attempting to
smuggle narcotics into the U.S.
The massive explosion, sending debris raining down in international waters just
off the coast of Venezuela, flames shooting from the vessel.
The U.S. says four people were killed. The president has directed these actions,
these strikes against Venezuelan drug cartels in these boats,
consistent with his responsibility to protect the United States' interests abroad.
Secretary Pete Hegseth saying our intelligence, without a doubt,
confirmed that this vessel was trafficking narcotics.
The people on board were narco-terrorists.
Today's strike is the fourth known U.S. attack on suspected Venezuelan drug
boats since early September.
We have proof. All you have to do is look at the cargo. There was like it spattered
all over the ocean, and big bags of cocaine and fentanyl all over the place.
Is it about stopping narcotics, or is this about getting rid of President Maduro?
No, this is about many things.
On Venezuela in particular, are Maduro's days as president numbered?
I would say, yeah, I think so, yeah.
Oh, that's right. Haven't you heard? Yes, Venezuela is the new Afghanistan,
i.e. the supplier of the world's deadliest chemical weapons, by which I mean drugs.
So let's see how we piece this puzzle together exactly. And let's take a look at the good old U.S.
Department of State website where we can get this press release from earlier
this month from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, terrorist designations of Cartel de los Soles.
The Department of State intends to designate Cartel de los Soles as a foreign
terrorist organization, an FTO, if you want to be up on the lingo,
effective November 24th, 2025.
Based in Venezuela, the Cartel de los Soles is headed by Nicolas Maduro and
other high-ranking individuals of the illegitimate Maduro regime,
to be named later, who have corrupted Venezuela's military, intelligence,
legislature, and judiciary.
Neither Maduro nor his cronies represent Venezuela's legitimate government,
because, as you know from the recent edition of Solutions Watch,
it always comes back down to the legitimacy, doesn't it?
But they're happy to delegitimate those particular governments that are in the
State Department's crosshairs.
And what better way to do so than by saying, hey, the leader and whoever else
we say is part of a drug ring. Trust us, guys.
Anyway, of course, it ends with the important part here. The United States will
continue using all available tools to protect our national security interests
and deny funding and resources to narco-terrorists.
So what is this? What on earth terrorist designation of Cartel de los Soles?
And what who is this? What does it mean?
Well, this is a story that the seeds of which were planted years ago,
although you may not have seen it.
Maybe you were paying attention. You saw, for example, the Miami Herald reporting
breathlessly on huge cyber leak offers new proof of how Maduro has turned Venezuela
into a narco state from back in 2023.
And you know how the hyperventilators of the Mockingbird media love to mock
and make fun of the conspiracy realists.
Oh, they're all a bunch of crazed tinfoil hatters with their crazy cork boards
filled with pictures of various people and bits of string connecting it all.
Oh, those crazy conspiracy theories. Well, this is the kind of conspiracy theory
that the mainstream loves.
Here we have a conspiracy theory about an enemy of the U.S.
State Department. So, of course, it's OK, exactly in the same way that any conspiracy
theory you wanted to come up with about, say, Assad in Syria back in the 2010s,
anything you wanted to say about what kind of crazy stuff he was doing,
of course, he's gassing and killing his own citizens wantonly.
Of course, he's doing that because he's a monster.
Whatever. In this case, well, of course, yes, there's this gigantic cartel that's
operating within the Venezuelan government as narco-terrorists.
And now we can designate them as narco-terrorists and put a big bullseye on their head, right?
Well, anyway, this comes from the Miami Herald reporting of 2023,
where they report on a leak of documents from the Colombian prosecutor's office. Okay.
Which, you know, bada bing, bada boom. The result, Venezuela is now a major
cocaine transport hub, shipping between 250 and 350 metric tons per year,
with a street value of between $6.25 billion and $8.75 billion,
much of it bound for the US.
And of course, you know, the trend in drug running from Venezuela has not gotten
unnoticed in Washington.
Wow, they're paying attention here. I wonder why.
Of course, it was unnoticed in Afghanistan for 20 years.
But boy, if it's Venezuela that may be running drugs, well, Washington's all
over that, like white on rice.
Three years ago, as in in the first Trump administration.
Remember, this is an article from 2023. So they're talking about 2020 under Trump one.
The Department of Justice filed charges against top Maduro regime officials,
accusing them of heading up the Cartel de los Soles, the Cartel of the Suns,
so named because of the Sun insignia worn by Venezuelan generals.
But some harbored suspicions that the charges, which have not led to arrests of those at the very top,
were done for political effect, especially given that the administration of
President Donald Trump had rejected Maduro's legitimacy, there's that word again,
instead recognizing opposition leader Juan Guaido.
And for people who don't remember the Juan Guaido nonsense, I will throw in
a link to the conversation that
I had with Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute way back at that time.
The absolute joke of a farce of this opposition leader who no one in Venezuela
took seriously, who was the real legitimate government according to the Trump administration.
Anyway, yeah, that story. So don't worry, guys, though, that this isn't a conspiracy theory.
This isn't some non-existent cartel. This is a real deal thing.
And these leaked documents from the Colombian prosecutor's office.
Apparently demonstrate that. Well, of course, the link will be here for you
to peruse that information at your leisure.
But fast forwarding back to 2025, what does Venezuela have to say about it?
Well, Venezuela says Trump has designated the non-existent drug cartel as a
terrorist organization and U.S. covert ops are believed imminent.
So this reports that Venezuela has hit back against these charges,
rejecting the label and going so far as to call the group, the cartel of the
sons as non-existent Venezuela categorically firmly and absolutely rejects the
new and ridiculous fabrication by the secretary of the U.S.
Department of State Marco Rubio which designates the non-existent cartel de
los soles as a terrorist organization said Venezuelan foreign minister Ivan
Gill on his telegram account Caracas is dismissing it as an absurd lie.
End quote. Well, of course, of course they would. What else would they say?
But it does raise the question, why now? And why in this way?
And Marco terrorism, that seems like an odd angle to be taking on all of this.
Why? What is happening here? Oh, well, maybe so we have some idea of that when
we put it in this context.
President Maduro has lately compared the situation to the U.S.
Invasion of Iraq, well known to have been launched on false claims about weapons of mass destruction.
He accused Washington of crafting a bizarre narrative since it cannot accuse
Venezuela of hiding chemical or biological weapons.
But the U.S. has lately linked fentanyl trafficking with chemical weapons,
given the substances technically classified as a dangerous chemical substance.
Yeah, sure. Chemical weapon. Why not? Those words, as we know,
are the magic words to invade a country for free, exactly as happened in Iraq.
And yeah, WMD 2.0, exactly as in the lead up to the war in Iraq.
Isn't it funny to think back at that time in 2002, when Bush and Blair were
getting up and beginning their full court press to begin prepping the public
for the invasion of Iraq.
And of course, they were doing the spectacle of calling on Saddam to disarm,
disarm immediately, unless you completely and utterly disarm your weapons of
mass destruction, we are going to invade.
Giving all sorts of ultimatums along the way, which, of course,
they knew, and anyone who had their head screwed on straight knew,
but now everyone knows, was a total and utter farce, because what was Saddam supposed to disarm?
We now know he did not have those weapons of mass destruction,
so what exactly was he supposed to do in those months when Bush and Blair were
making their case for war in Iraq.
Of course, there was nothing he could do because the decision had already been
made, as we already know.
And we know about the Downing Street memo and all of that.
That sort of false flag op stuff that was floating around in the Washington
circles as they were trying to decide how best to get into Iraq.
Well, here it is again, WMD 2.0, disarm, divest yourself of all this cocaine
that we know is going on on these boats.
And how do we know? Well, you know, we blew them up. They must have been having cocaine.
All right. So is this even an existing organization? Well, it's not just the
Venezuelan government that is denying the existence of this cartel.
There are others, and even mainstream sources are citing some of these people
who are talking about this.
For example, a former senior U.S. government official, speaking obviously anonymously
here, said, Cartel de los Soles was a made-up name used to describe an ad hoc
group of Venezuelan officials involved in the trafficking of drugs through Venezuela.
It doesn't have the hierarchy or command and control structure of a traditional cartel.
Hmm. Sounds a lot like the Al-CiA that was invented in the New York courtroom
in order to prosecute bin Laden and his associates, right?
The official said the Trump administration's assertions are based on bad intel,
likely from the Defense Intelligence Agency or the Drug Enforcement Administration
that doesn't stand up to scrutiny before the greater intelligence community
or that it is purely political. Okay.
And there are others. Phil Gunson, a researcher with the International Crisis
Group, says the Cartel de los Soles per se doesn't exist.
It's a journalistic expression created to refer to the involvement of Venezuelan
authorities in drug trafficking. So it's getting vaguer and vaguer,
which kind of puts that initial press release into perspective, doesn't it?
Terrorist designation of Cartel de los Soles, which, you know,
doesn't actually exist. It's not really a thing.
It's just something we've kind of made up. It's a label we've applied.
But what was the time frame in which they're talking about this name,
this particular name emerging?
Oh, in the 1990s, after Venezuelan generals and commanders who wore sun insignias
on their epaulets, hence Cartel
of the Suns, were investigated for drug trafficking and related crimes.
And what did we find from those investigations? Oh, that's right.
Who was helping, actively aiding the Venezuela National Guard at that time in
the 1990s to traffic drugs?
Any guesses? Yeah, it was the CIA.
And don't take it from conspiracy realist James Corbett.
Take it from those wackadoodles over at 60 Minutes.
A ton of cocaine, pure cocaine worth hundreds of millions, is smuggled into the United States.
Sound familiar? Not the way this ton of cocaine got here.
According to what the former head of the Drug Enforcement Administration told
Mike Wallace, this drug shipment got here courtesy of what he calls drug trafficking
by the CIA in partnership with the Venezuelan National Guard.
And what reason did the CIA have for promoting this drug smuggling?
Well, the only rationale that's ever been offered is that this would lead to
some valuable drug intelligence about the Colombian cartels.
The CIA and the Guardia Nacional wanted to let cocaine go on into the traffic.
Without doing anything. They wanted to let it come up to the United States,
no surveillance, no nothing.
In other words, you weren't going to stop them in Miami or Houston or wherever.
These drugs were simply going to go to the United States and then go into the
traffic and eventually reach the streets. That's what they wanted to do, yes.
And we had very, very lengthy discussions. I told them what the U.S.
Law was and the fact that we could not do this.
So here you got Jim Campbell chief of station who knows about this.
Mark McFarlane, CIA officer, knows about this and are stimulating this business
of sending what are uncontrolled deliveries of drugs, smuggling drugs into the
United States, right? Right.
Yes, exactly as that looked. That was indeed a 60 Minutes report from 1993,
and not just any 60 Minutes report, but one that was produced by Lowell Bergman,
of course, you know, of the insider fame portrayed by Russell Crowe. Am I getting that right?
And also a Peabody award-winning report on how the CIA was credibly accused,
shall we say, at the very least, of facilitating the drug running of the Venezuelan
National Guard in the 1990s.
If there was a cartel of the suns, or if there ever was, the CIA created it
or fostered it or actively facilitated it.
Now, I would wholeheartedly exhort you to go and watch that full report,
which has a lot more details on that operation and what the CIA says it was
doing and what the various accusers, including the former head of the DEA,
said the CIA was doing and all of the illegality and shenanigans.
But hopefully at this point in our exploration, you won't be too surprised to
learn, wow, the CIA actively aiding drug running?
Never. Well, actually, a lot. In fact, throughout their history,
as we have documented here today.
So again, people can go and follow that particular show note link in the show
notes at CorbettReport.com to the CIA's cocaine, that 1993 60 Minutes report,
which talked about this decades ago.
And here we are today where that that exact activity that the CIA was collaborating,
colluding, actively facilitating back in the 1990s is now being weaponized,
demonized so that it can be weaponized against a particular Venezuelan leader that the U.S.
State Department would like out of the way. And I think that is the insight
that we should probably be taking away from this, because what am I saying? What am I not saying?
For the heart of thinking, let's set some things out on the table here.
First of all, of course, what we have documented, what we have seen today does
not mean that there is absolutely no drug trafficking that has ever occurred
from Venezuela or anything of that sort.
I think that would, of course, be naive in the opposite direction.
But it also does not mean that.
Because CIA bad, therefore Maduro good. And he's a brave and valiant freedom
fighter on the side of free humanity or something.
No, generally speaking, everyone at those levels is dirty in one way or another.
So even if Maduro is not actively the leader of some mysterious cartel that may or may not exist,
well, he certainly has presided over the continued brutal enforcement of his
socialist regime on that country and inflicting his policies on Venezuela.
So I, as an anarchist, I am not in favor of Maduro, just in case that needs to be put on the record.
But again, we have to not fall into the easy binary trap of CIA bad,
therefore Maduro good or any other such silly binary.
But again, we should reflect on the fact that, yes, Venezuelan generals engaging
in drug running were actively facilitated by the CIA, exactly in line with so
many operations that we have seen in the past. And the question should be, well, why?
Why are they doing this? Now, if you do go and watch that full 60 Minutes report,
you'll see that the CIA was saying, well, we were allowing certain shipments
to get through so that we could gain the trust of the various dealers so that
we could go after Colombian drug runners.
And it was all part of this grander operation. And you will also see the dismissal
of one lower level, I believe, DEA agent in that particular report who was saying,
if that's what the CIA thinks that the DEA should be doing in these cases, they're wrong.
That is illegal. We should not be doing that. And senators and others coming
out against the CIA in making that argument.
But of course, I think that's the limited hangout argument. What is this really about?
Well, as has been shown by Alfred McCoy and Peter Dale Scott and pioneering
researchers like that in decades past, as well as researchers of today.
Well, one of the primary concerns of this drug running and facilitating the
drug trade, of course, is money.
Cash, of course, as is used in the drug trade, which is very handy for black
operations of various sorts.
And of course, we can go back to things like Iran-Contra and of course,
the drug running that we know that the CIA was involved in in that era because
of the pioneering work of people like Gary Webb,
may he rest in peace, who laid his life down for that reporting and who demonstrated,
yes, the CIA was, again, actively facilitating the drug runners in situations like that, because,
of course, it provides the money for the black ops, the cash that is laundered
that can be wielded around the globe as necessary, and, of course,
can fund contras of various sorts, i.e.
Narco-terror gangs that can be used as convenient pieces on the chessboard to
overthrow the various...
Governments that the State Department once targeted. So exactly,
for example, as I cited earlier, I did that report on Chilean Contra back in
2012 when they wanted to get rid of Rafael Correa from Chile.
Well, of course, you can use drug money and drug facilitation for that purpose.
A secondary effect of drug running, why the CIA might be involved in it,
exactly as we are seeing playing out today with WMD 2.0.
The new chemical weapon threat is not nuclear or biological or whatever kind
of made up terror that they're going to throw at Maduro.
No, it's chemical weapons as in fentanyl, which is now a chemical weapon that
must be attacked with the US military.
So it's a way of building up the very thing that they can later go,
see, look, they've got drugs.
So we've got to go after them, which is a convenient way to once you've rounded
up the whatever your particular piece of that is, then you can throw them,
the other perpetrators out to dry and use that actually as a type of weaponized
accusation that can then justify, in the minds of the public anyway, military action.
And of course, the third effect and one that should not be discounted is the
general destabilization of society.
This is going back to the opium wars of way back when and the century of humiliation
that China talks about that it went through as a result of having been essentially
hooked on opium by the British East India Company and the various drug runners,
including, of course, the progenitors of Skull and Bones.
Those families that founded Skull and Bones were rich from the opium trade.
That's how they made their fortune.
And of course, what was the effect of that was to utterly destabilize Chinese
society and make this once proud empire into a shadow of its former self that
was basically the world's kicking boy for a number of,
well, for a century of humiliation. So,
So China and various East Asian countries have learned that lesson and have
been very, very, very unbelievably strict on the drug trade since then because
they've learned that lesson.
And of course, that is what we are now expected to believe. Well,
that's why China is engaging in this fentanyl war against the United States
to destabilize society.
Well, as it turns out, actually, the CIA was there way before China.
And that, of course, was a part of the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s that
was facilitated by that CIA drug run, or at least CIA facilitated cocaine into the U.S.
In the 1980s that became the crack epidemic in Freeway, Ricky Ross,
and all of that story that, again, Gary Webb and others have talked about and
I've covered on this podcast before.
So ultimately, if you want to destabilize and demoralize a society,
you get it hooked on heroin, opium, fentanyl, whatever the drug of choice for the era is.
And a country that is opiate, opiate, opiated is one that is easily conquered.
So I think we should keep that in mind.
Anyway, these are some things that we should at least have in mind when we hear
about stories like what is these Venezuelan drug boats.
We should be putting it in this context and reflecting on, say,
oh, the fact that NATO was really trying to end the drug trade for decades there
in Afghanistan. They just couldn't do it.
But hey, here comes the Taliban and they did it pretty much overnight. I wonder how that works.
It's because, of course, they're not trying to end the drug trade.
They were trying to facilitate it.
Of course, they like to keep it criminalized so that that way they can control
it and, of course, profit from it.
That is part of the way this system functions.
And until we learn that lesson, well, we'll continue seeing things play out
like we are seeing currently in Venezuela.
And so now as the world waits with bated breath for whatever military action
may or may not come, hey, who knows, maybe Trump will do a deal with Maduro
and suddenly they'll be best best pals or however that works.
But surely there are black operations
and deep state machinations that are taking place, even as we speak.
We'll see how that plays out geopolitically. But at the very least,
we shouldn't be wide awake and aware of who is really behind and facilitating
the international drug trade.
And it could be stopped if there was an actual impetus to stop it.
But there is not because there is money to be made for various bad actors.
There's a lot of information in today's episode and a lot of links to further
reports that will have much more
information on each and every one of the things I've touched on today.
So I hope you will avail yourself of the show notes at CorbettReport.com for that info.
But that's going to do it for today's exploration. I am James Corbett of CorbettReport.com,
thanking you for investing your time in this exploration and inviting you to
join me again in the near future.
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The idea that would-be rulers would cynically use the lunatic cudgel against
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Don't give me the conspiracy bulls**t, come on. You're a more intelligent man
than that. Come on, come on. I mean, come on.
There has never been a conspiracy in this country.