Down the Rabbit Hole, Part 3

In Part 1 and Part 2 we looked at what was essentially the rise of the Albanian mafia to become a major player on the world scene. Hostilities between ethnic Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo, a province of Serbia now recognized by the United States and many other countries to be an independent nation, caused the Albanian diaspora to support Albanian "freedom fighters" defending against Serb "aggressions". To be sure, there were many excesses committed by ethnic Serbs in the Balkans during the 1990's, and many of the Albanians fighting against the Serbs were simply defending their people. But, another, more sinister situation had been developing beneath the surface.

We now begin by examining events in the United States.

For decades in the last century, ethnic Sicilian organized crime controlled a criminal empire. By the late 1970's, the people working for them included many ethnic Albanians. Heroin and cocaine was distributed through a network of pizzerias, which also helped launder the money received from sale of the drugs. In the mid-1980's, the Pizza Connection broke: the longest criminal trials in US federal court history began, with 35 defendents named in charges presented in court.

Excerpts from Gaetano Badalamenti and the Pizza Connection from July, 2004, describes the operation:

"Boston, May 2, 2004. Gaetano Badalamenti, once described by federal authorities as the 'boss of bosses' of the Sicilian mafia and ring leader of a billion-dollar drug smuggling operation, has died, a Justice Department spokesman said Friday. He was eighty. Mr. Badalamenti was sentenced in 1987 to 45 years in federal prison for being one of the ring leaders of the so-called Pizza Connection, a $1.65 billion heroin and cocaine operation that used pizzerias as fronts to distribute the drugs from 1975 to 1984. The trial of Mr. Badalamenti and nearly two dozen conspirators took seventeen months." (The Associated Press)

[snip]

"The nephews of Gaetano Badalamenti operated pizzerias — and distributed heroin — out of small mid-western towns. The Sicilians dominated the heroin trade, while the American mobsters received a cut for allowing the Sicilians to operate in their territory. Manufacturers of cheese, olive oil and tomatoes could also be useful export vehicles for smuggling drugs into the United States. Joe Pistone, an FBI agent who infiltrated the Bonanno family, quoted one Bonanno member: 'The zips are Sicilians brought into this country to distribute heroin. They set up pizza parlors, where they received and distributed heroin, laundered money. The zips were clannish and secretive... the meanest killers in the business.'" (A. Stille, 1995)

The trials resulted in four convictions in Italy, four convictions in Swizterland and twenty-one convictions in the US.

One Swiss prosecutor involved in the affair was Carla Del Ponte. She was working with Judge Giovanni Falcone; after discovering the link between the heroin trafficking and money laundering operations in Switzerland, Judge Falcone was killed by a bomb. Del Ponte herself was unsuccessfully targeted when a large amount of explosives was discovered under her home in Palermo. Remember her, because her name figures again in our story.

The extensive damage done to such a large criminal empire resulted in some repercussions. From Men of Purpose: The Growth of Albanian Criminal Activity by Gus Xhudo, Spring, 1996:

A not too well known consequence of the Pizza Connection Case, however, was that following the investigation and break-up of the pizzerias in New York many of them were sold to ethnic Albanians who continue to run them as pizzerias. Others have been converted to social clubs and cafes where organised elements meet to discuss operations. This is especially true in the Fordham section of the Bronx in New York (as it is in the Kosovor Albanian cafes in Brussels and Paris).

Back in the Balkans, trouble was brewing. By the early 1990's, the trouble was spreading to Kosovo. Many ethnic Albanian professionals were fired, police presence in Kosovo was increased, and Kosovo's status as an autonomous province was revoked; Kosovar authorities declared independence as the province came to be ruled by martial law directly from Belgrade. The result was active hostilities between Serb-dominated government forces and ethnic Albanian insurgents. As discussed previously in this series, ethnic Albanian organized crime cartels fielded some of the best-equipped forces to fight the Serbs. A dynamic synergy resulted in the Albanian cartels consolidating their military power on the ground in the Balkans, and their political power with the help of the Albanian diaspora in Europe in and North America.

But, why did the United States support the ethnic Albanians? To be sure, plenty of evidence was available indicating that Serb leaders were guilty of atrocious conduct, but the leaders of the Albanian insurgency, as we have seen, were also known to have been linked to extensive criminal activities.

It should be noted that the Albanians are generally Muslim.

Keeping that in mind, let us back up a few years to the Clinton Administration's activities in Bosnia-Herzegovina. From Clinton-Approved Iranian Arms Transfers Help Turn Bosnia into Militant Islamic Base, January 16, 1997:

In late 1995, President Bill Clinton dispatched some 20,000 U.S. troops to Bosnia-Hercegovina as part of a NATO-led "implementation force" (IFOR) to ensure that the warring Muslim, Serbian, and Croatian factions complied with provisions of the Dayton peace plan.

[snip]

Through statements by Administration spokesmen, notably Defense Secretary Perry and Joint Chiefs Chairman General Shalikashvili, the president firmly assured Congress and the American people that U.S. personnel would be out of Bosnia at the end of one year. Predictably, as soon as the November 1996 election was safely behind him, President Clinton announced that approximately 8,500 U.S. troops would be remaining for another 18 months as part of a restructured and scaled down contingent, the "stabilization force" (SFOR), officially established on December 20, 1996.

SFOR begins its mission in Bosnia under a serious cloud both as to the nature of its mission and the dangers it will face.

[snip]

The Iranian Connection

Perhaps most threatening to the SFOR mission -- and more importantly, to the safety of the American personnel serving in Bosnia -- is the unwillingness of the Clinton Administration to come clean with the Congress and with the American people about its complicity in the delivery of weapons from Iran to the Muslim government in Sarajevo. That policy, personally approved by Bill Clinton in April 1994 at the urging of CIA Director-designate (and then-NSC chief) Anthony Lake and the U.S. ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith, has, according to the Los Angeles Times (citing classified intelligence community sources), "played a central role in the dramatic increase in Iranian influence in Bosnia."

[snip]

1. The Clinton Green Light to Iranian Arms Shipments (page 3): In April 1994, President Clinton gave the government of Croatia what has been described by Congressional committees as a "green light" for shipments of weapons from Iran and other Muslim countries to the Muslim-led government of Bosnia. The policy was approved at the urging of NSC chief Anthony Lake and the U.S. ambassador to Croatia Peter Galbraith. The CIA and the Departments of State and Defense were kept in the dark until after the decision was made.

2. The Militant Islamic Network (page 5): Along with the weapons, Iranian Revolutionary Guards and VEVAK intelligence operatives entered Bosnia in large numbers, along with thousands of mujahedin ("holy warriors") from across the Muslim world. Also engaged in the effort were several other Muslim countries (including Brunei, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Turkey) and a number of radical Muslim organizations. For example, the role of one Sudan-based "humanitarian organization," called the Third World Relief Agency, has been well-documented. The Clinton Administration's "hands-on" involvement with the Islamic network's arms pipeline included inspections of missiles from Iran by U.S. government officials.

3. The Radical Islamic Character of the Sarajevo Regime (page 8): Underlying the Clinton Administration's misguided green light policy is a complete misreading of its main beneficiary, the Bosnian Muslim government of Alija Izetbegovic. Rather than being the tolerant, multiethnic democratic government it pretends to be, there is clear evidence that the ruling circle of Izetbegovic's party, the Party of Democratic Action (SDA), has long been guided by the principles of radical Islam. This Islamist orientation is illustrated by profiles of three important officials, including President Izetbegovic himself; the progressive Islamization of the Bosnian army, including creation of native Bosnian mujahedin units; credible claims that major atrocities against civilians in Sarajevo were staged for propaganda purposes by operatives of the Izetbegovic government; and suppression of enemies, both non-Muslim and Muslim.

[snip]

Not Just the Iranians

To understand how the Clinton green light would lead to this degree of Iranian influence, it is necessary to remember that the policy was adopted in the context of extensive and growing radical Islamic activity in Bosnia. That is, the Iranians and other Muslim militants had long been active in Bosnia; the American green light was an important political signal to both Sarajevo and the militants that the United States was unable or unwilling to present an obstacle to those activities -- and, to a certain extent, was willing to cooperate with them. In short, the Clinton Administration's policy of facilitating the delivery of arms to the Bosnian Muslims made it the de facto partner of an ongoing international network of governments and organizations pursuing their own agenda in Bosnia: the promotion of Islamic revolution in Europe. That network involves not only Iran but Brunei, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan (a key ally of Iran), and Turkey, together with front groups supposedly pursuing humanitarian and cultural activities.

For example, one such group about which details have come to light is the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA), a Sudan-based, phoney humanitarian organization which has been a major link in the arms pipeline to Bosnia. ["How Bosnia's Muslims Dodged Arms Embargo: Relief Agency Brokered Aid From Nations, Radical Groups," Washington Post, 9/22/96; see also "Saudis Funded Weapons For Bosnia, Official Says: $300 Million Program Had U.S. 'Stealth Cooperation'," Washington Post, 2/2/96] TWRA is believed to be connected with such fixtures of the Islamic terror network as Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman (the convicted mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) and Osama Binladen, a wealthy Saudi emigre believed to bankroll numerous militant groups. [WP, 9/22/96] (Sheik Rahman, a native of Egypt, is currently in prison in the United States; letter bombs addressed to targets in Washington and London, apparently from Alexandria, Egypt, are believed connected with his case. Binladen was a resident in Khartoum, Sudan, until last year; he is now believed to be in Afghanistan, "where he has issued statements calling for attacks on U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf." [WP, 9/22/96])

Bill Clinton was a "de facto partner" of the Iranians and of Osama bin Laden!

Skipping down:

Stepping-Stone to Europe

The intended targets of the mujahedin network in Bosnia are not limited to that country but extend to Western Europe. For example, in August 1995, the conservative Paris daily Le Figaro reported that French security services believe that "Islamic fundamentalists from Algeria have set up a security network across Europe with fighters trained in Afghan guerrilla camps and [in] southern France while some have been tested in Bosnia." [(London) Daily Telegraph, 8/17/95] Also, in April 1996, Belgian security arrested a number of Islamic militants, including two native Bosnians, smuggling weapons to Algerian guerrillas active in France. [Intelligence Newsletter, Paris, 5/9/96 (No. 287)] Finally, also in April 1996, a meeting of radicals aligned with HizbAllah ("Party of God"), a pro-Iran group based in Lebanon, set plans for stepping up attacks on U.S. assets on all continents; among those participating was an Egyptian, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who "runs the Islamist terrorist operations in Bosnia-Herzegovina from a special headquarters in Sofia, Bulgaria. His forces are already deployed throughout Bosnia, ready to attack US and other I-FOR (NATO Implementation Force) targets." ["State-Sponsored Terrorism and The Rise of the HizbAllah International," Defense and Foreign Affairs and Strategic Policy, London, 8/31/96] Finally, in December 1996, French and Belgian security arrested several would-be terrorists trained at Iranian-run camps in Bosnia. ["Terrorism: The Bosnian Connection," (Paris) L'Express, 12/26/96]

All the major enemy players in the post-9/11 world had their fingers in the Bosnian pie. But, while the Repubicans warned of the threat to Western Europe, it appears the main goal was to consolidate power somewhere in the Balkans.

And it is worth keeping in mind that the Republicans in the Senate, whose policy committee authored this report, had access to classified briefings and information on these matters. They could not put classified information into their public report, but the classified information to which they had access helped cue their researchers what to look for when selecting background information for the content of the report.

But, in case you don't believe the Senate Republicans from the 1990's, let's check another source. United Nations Arms Embargoes: Their Impact on Arms Flows and Target Behaviour; Case study: Former Yugoslavia, 1991–96, by Mark Bromley, pgs 10-12 (superscripts are footnotes - see original):

Bosnian forces were disadvantaged by the physical location of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was bordered by Croatia and the FRY. To obtain certain key armaments, including most types of heavy weaponry, Bosnian forces were largely dependent on shipments from two sources—via the smuggling network created by the Third World Relief Agency (TWRA) or large-scale shipments from Iran.

The TWRA was founded in 1987 in Vienna as a humanitarian agency for Muslims. In 1992 it opened offices in Sarajevo and began to cooperate with the Bosnian Government, quickly becoming the main organizer of arms shipments to Bosnian forces. Between 1992 and 1995 around $350 million was deposited in a Viennese TWRA bank account, of which around half was used to purchase arms for Bosnian forces. Benefactors included Brunei, Iran, Malaysia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan.⁶³ The majority of weapons bound for Bosnian forces were sourced from former Soviet and Warsaw Pact states and were transported by air to Slovenia for onward shipment to Bosnia and Herzegovina, via Croatia. During August and September 1992 more than 120 tonnes of weapons were shipped along this route, including rifles, mortars, mines, and ammunition.⁶⁴ By late 1992 Croatian forces controlling the transport routes began to demand 50 to 70 per cent of the arms shipments that they permitted to transit Croatian territory.⁶⁵ Following the outbreak of fighting between Bosnian Croat and Bosnian forces in late 1992, arms had to be shipped by more dangerous air routes directly into Bosnia and Herzegovina. The TWRA is also reported to have purchased $15 million of light weapons with the involvement of Turkish and Malaysian peacekeeping troops; it is even claimed that they facilitated the purchase of arms and ammunition in Serbia.⁶⁶

TWRA activities began to decline in 1994, at which time Iran emerged as the main supplier of arms to Bosnian forces.⁶⁷ According to media reports, between 1994 and 1996 Iran shipped between $150 and $200 million worth of arms and ammunition into Bosnia and Herzegovina.⁶⁸ These shipments included large quantities of TNT, C4 plastic explosives along with fuses, 122-mm shell propellant and 120-mm and 130-mm shell cases.⁶⁹ Following the signing of the Washington Agreement in March 1994, Bosnian and Croat forces began to again cooperate against the Serbs and the supply of weapons improved.⁷⁰ Plane loads of Iranian arms began arriving at Zagreb airport, for onward shipment to Bosnia and Herzegovina.⁷¹ The number of flights ferrying arms and ammunition quickly reached an average of eight per month, with 30 per cent of the arms handed over to Croatia as payment for facilitating the deliveries.⁷² Iran also played a role in training Bosnian forces, with the CIA estimating that as many as 400 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps were dispatched to Bosnia and Herzegovina.⁷³

The role played by the USA in the shipment of arms to Bosnian forces has long been hotly debated. The US ambassador to Croatia, Peter Galbraith, is widely credited with playing a key role in forging the Bosnian–Croat Federation, partly as a means of reopening supply routes into Bosnia and Herzegovina. Following the signing of the deal, Croatian President Tudjman asked Ambassador Galbraith for the US position on Croatia acting as a conduit for arms shipments. Under instruction from Washington, Galbraith told Tudjman that the USA took no position, thereby signalling US approval.⁷⁴ The US Government later acknowledged that it had allowed deliveries to Bosnian and Croatian forces to take place, even though it knew that these violated the UN arms embargo.⁷⁵

More contentious is the allegation that the USA participated directly in the shipping of arms to Bosnia forces. Newspaper reports to this effect began to emerge in 1994,quoting UNPROFOR troops as well as French, British and other European officials.⁷⁶ The most detailed allegations relate to a series of arms deliveries during February and March 1995 involving C-130 cargo planes flying night-time air drops to Tuzla air base in East Bosnia, the so-called ‘Black flights to Tuzla’. Many eyewitnesses described the drops, with numerous sources claiming they were US arms deliveries, possibly made with the involvement of private US companies. Other sources claimed that the C-130 planes were Turkish but that the deliveries were made with an element of ‘logistical patronage’ by the USA. The US Government has always denied that it was directly engaged in arming Bosnian forces until after the UN arms embargo was lifted. ⁷⁷

Sudan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran... the list of countries who shipped weapons to the Bosnian Muslims reads like a "who's who" of states that sponsor jihad and terrorism. And then, on top of that, the United States allegedly started supplying arms directly, no longer even needing the charade of looking the other way while somebody else did it.

Like the Kosovo War a few years later, the Bosnian War was a dirty war. The Serbs, Croats and Bosnian Muslims fought; generally, the Croats and Muslims were on the same side against the Serbs, but at time, the Croats fought against the Muslims. Publicly, the allegations of atrocities painted the Serbs - allies of our recent Cold War enemy in Moscow - as the bad guys, but privately, everybody knew the Bosnian Muslims had help from international jihadists, and that these jihadists were committing some of the worst atrocities ever - just like they had when allied with Hitler in World War II.

Why did the Clinton Administration go to such lengths to ensure the Bosnian Muslims and their jihadist allies were painted as the victims and the good guys, and were equipped to come out on top in the war?

The Albanian mafia gained market share in US heroin distribution as a result of the take-down of key elements of the Sicilian mafia. A base for Muslim jihad in the Balkans would result in the Albanian mafia controlling the Balkan Route for heroin trafficking in Europe, as well. This would leave heroin production and trafficking - from the growing of poppies in South Asia, to the transit across Iran into Turkey, to the refining of heroin in Turkey, to the movement through the Balkans and the distribution in Western Europe and North America by the Albanian mafia - all under the control of Islamic organized crime cartels.

Since that time, this is exactly what has happened, except for one further development: heroin is now refined in Afghanistan, rather than having to move the raw material to Turkey for refining.

President Clinton received money into Democrat campaign coffers from the Communist Chinese for letting critical military technology be exported for them, and this helped him win re-election in 1996. Earlier, Clinton was heavily implicated in trafficking of cocaine through Arkansas by clandestine government operations that were funding the Contras in Nicaragua. Why not use his political power to help establish Islamic cartels as the premier heroin-traffickers in the world?

But, what impact does this all have on politics in the US during 2012?

Stay tuned.

Down the Rabbit Hole, Part 2

At the end of Part 1, I pointed out that the Clinton Administration's decision to support Islamic terrorists in the Balkans was not by chance. This is significant, because the same dynamic is in play right now during the 2012 Presidential election campaign.

According to a May, 2002, report by the Library of Congress Federal Research Division, entitled A Global Overview of Narcotics-Funded Terrorist and Other Extremist Groups, when the KLA converted to the KPC (see Part 1), many of the KLA's personnel and weapons went somewhere else. KLA criminals, now legitimized by their positions in the KPC, had additional power and opportunity to further criminal endeavors. However, others formed newer, smaller terrorist groups, receiving money from the KLA's support pipeline. These groups included the National Liberation Army (NLA), which tried to get ethnic Albanians from the southernmost regions of Serbia adjacent to Kosovo incorporated into Kosovo. A successor group, the Albanian National Army, known by its initials in Albanian AKSh, continued an insurgency on behalf of ethnic Albanians in Macedonia, where Albanians were one quarter of the population.

Eventually, a rivalry broke out between the AKSh and remaining elements of the NLA. Picking up with an excerpt from the report (pgs 82-83):

According to a February 2002 report in the Daily Telegraph and the Macedonian daily Nova Makedonija, Western police records and United Nations reports confirm that the leaders of the AKSh and the NLA are involved in large-scale smuggling of weapons, human beings, narcotics, and other goods. Money from those transactions is used to finance terrorist activities in Macedonia and Kosovo. Narcotics, reportedly the most important of the smuggled items, are moved through what is known as the Balkan Drug Route, which begins in Afghanistan and passes through Turkey, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania, and Italy to reach markets in Western Europe. An alternate route goes from Afghanistan into Western Europe via Turkey, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Slovenia. Primary locations for the exchange of drugs for guns are Kumanovo and Skopje (both in northern Macedonia), which are points along the Balkan route to which weapons are smuggled. From those cities, weapons move into Kosovo.²⁰¹

In September 2001, the Canadian Centre for Peace in the Balkans reported that Osama bin Laden was channeling profits from the sale of narcotics arriving in Western Europe via the Balkan Route to local governments and political parties, with the goal of gaining influence in Albania or Macedonia or both. The report theorized that Macedonia presents an ideal target because of its large Albanian minority (about one in three Macedonians is an ethnic Albanian) and its strategic position between east and west, along the new pipeline proposed between Burgas (Bulgaria) and Drac (Albania).²⁰²

In the same period, the Washington Times reported that bin Laden was the "biggest financial supporter" of the NLA, which has received $6 to $7 million from that source to supplement its narcotics income in supporting terrorist activities. In January 2001, the Stratfor intelligence organization reported that bin Laden had contributed and trained fighters for the KLA, citing the strategic importance of this link for the operation of his terrorist network in Europe. That report quoted the Albanian intelligence service as calling Albania the most important transit point for Islamic militants into Europe. In 1999 and 2000, Albania arrested ten individuals identified as Islamic terrorists.²⁰³

A February 2002 report in the Herald of Glasgow noted that al Qaeda had acted as a middleman in the movement of heroin from warehouses in Afghanistan via Chechen mafia conduits and into the Balkan narcotics pipeline. (The Taliban had prohibited the growing of poppies but had not confiscated the large stores of heroin already existing, and in fact profited from the heroin trade by taxing growers and dealers.) Al Qaeda took a percentage of the drug profits for this service.²⁰⁴ Between 1996 and 1998, the volume of drugs confiscated by Italian police from Albanian dealers in Italy rose from 5,500 kilograms to 23,000 kilograms.²⁰⁵

According to a February 2002 report, former KLA guerrillas and Albanian liberation extremists have used profits from their participation in Taliban-sponsored narcotics smuggling to re-arm themselves after the disarmaments that occurred from 1999 to 2001. The new arms, estimated to be worth about $4 million, include SA-18 and SA-7 surface-to-air missiles capable of bringing down Macedonian helicopters.²⁰⁶ According to a subsequent report, "the weapons were paid for by Albanian criminals with the proceeds of selling Afghan heroin on the streets of a dozen European capitals."²⁰⁷

There was a dynamic interplay between the rise of the KLA and the rise of the ethnic Albanian cartels based in Kosovo. From Heroin Heroes, from January/February of 2000:

The ascent of the Kosovar families to the top of the trafficking hierarchy coincided with the sudden appearance of the KLA as a fighting force in 1997. As Serbia unleashed its campaign of persecution against ethnic Albanians, the diaspora mobilized. Hundreds of thousands of expatriate Kosovars around the world funneled money to the insurrection. Nobody sent more than the Kosovar traffickers -- some of the wealthiest people of Kosovar extraction in Europe. According to news reports, Kosovar Albanian traffickers launder $1.5 billion in profits from drug and arms smuggling each year through a shadowy network of some 200 private banks and currency exchange offices. A congressional briefing paper obtained by Mother Jones indicates: "We would be remiss to dismiss allegations that between 30 and 50 percent of the KLA's money comes from drugs."

Elements of the KLA associated with criminal cartels - the so-called "15 families" - quickly became the best-equipped forces the KLA could field. In turn, they leveraged the KLA's ties with the West into increased business opportunities for the Albanian cartels. As the influence of the cartels increased, the KLA and its daughter organizations became better-funded and better-equipped.

In Congressional testimony on December 13, 2000, Frank Cilluffo had this to say (The Threat Posed from the Convergence of Organized Crime, Drug Trafficking, and Terrorism):

During the NATO campaign against the former Yugoslavia in the Spring of 1999, the Allies looked to the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) to assist in efforts to eject the Serbian army from Kosovo. What was largely hidden from public view was the fact that the KLA raise part of their funds from the sale of narcotics. Albania and Kosovo lie at the heart of the "Balkan Route" that links the "Golden Crescent" of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the drug markets of Europe. This route is worth an estimated $400 billion a year and handles 80 percent of heroin destined for Europe.

The ethnic Albanian cartels were sitting along the route of a drug trade worth $400 billion per year. On top of that, there was trafficking in arms and other commodities. Returning now to A Global Overview of Narcotics-Funded Terrorist and Other Extremist Groups (pgs 83-84):

Beginning in the 1990s, the "official" network of organized crime in Albania has grown and become more sophisticated. In a January 2001 report, British-based criminologist Vicenzo Ruggiero said, "joint ventures between southern Italian organized crime and groups operating in Albania are frequent, and such partnerships are imposed by local criminal entrepreneurs who expect to be given a percentage of the profits earned by their Albanian counterparts." According to Italian prosecutor Piero Luigi Vigna, Albanian groups have found a specific niche in the growing multinational organized crime network: "Albanian criminal groups fulfill the functions of a kind of service agency, establishing, for the management of clandestine immigration toward [sic] Italy, ties with the Chinese mafia and with its Turkish and Russian counterparts." Thus cooperative agreements and the development of specific roles appear to be replacing traditional bloody territorial rivalries between crime groups from various nations (most importantly for the Balkan and Adriatic regions, groups from Albania and Italy).²⁰⁸

Trafficking in human beings is an expanding activity for this international network. According to the International Organisation for Migration, the Balkans is a major route (and source) for trafficking in women and children for sexual exploitation. The organization characterizes such trafficking as "the fastest-growing crime in the Balkans."²⁰⁹ Albania's geographical position and its chaotic political situation mean that it plays an important role in such trade. One factor in the expansion of this commerce has been the presence in the Balkans of foreign soldiers, who in 2000 accounted for 80 percent of the profits of brothels in Kosovo and Bosnia.²¹⁰ Many women are moved across the Albanian border into the coastal tourist areas of Greece. Reportedly, the young women of entire villages in Albania, Bulgaria, Moldova, and Romania have been forcibly moved into this system, many with the promise of reaching Western Europe. Corrupt police in Albania have aided this practice, even escorting women through the country.²¹¹ The port of Vlore, characterized as "lawless" in 2001, has been the home port of a large fleet of boats that have smuggled hundreds of thousands of immigrants and tons of drugs across the Adriatic Sea into Italy, and thence into the rest of Western Europe.²¹²

By the end of the last century, the ethnic Albanian cartels were the quintessential middlemen: they had connections with Turkish cartels moving heroin, South Asian Islamic cartels producing heroin, Russian cartels, Chinese cartels... they had connections with ethnic Italian cartels in Europe and in the US, though the Albanian groups were taking market share, sometimes by contracting out for the Cosa Nostra, sometimes by simply muscling in.

One key are of expansion was the use of women for forced prostitution. Thousands of international peacekeepers in the region made for a captive audience with needs that the Albanian cartels would be happy to meet. Women did not remain in the Balkans; they got passed on to Italy, to the Middle East, to any place with a willing buyer. Better than narcotics, which were sold and then consumed, women were essentially "rented", then sold on to new buyers; the fact that a woman had been previously "rented" generally had only marginal impact on her value, so she could be bought, forced to work as a prostitute, then sold to another pimp, with nearly all her earnings as a prostitute being net profits.

Of course, whole people were not the only commodity; the Albanian cartels also trafficked in body parts. From leaked UNMIK documents dated 2003:

SUMMARY

Beginning in mid-1999 (and possibly earlier), between 100 and 300 people were abducted and taken by truck and van to detention facilities in or near the northern Albanian towns of Kukes and Tropoje. Most of these people were Serbian men from Kosovo taken captive between June and October 1999. Beginning in August 1999, some of these captives (24-100) were transferred from northern Albania to secondary detention facilities (private homes and rough industrial compounds) in central Albania, mainly near the town of BUrrel (or Burreli), about 110 kilometers southwest of Kukes. Captives were also moved to detention facilities near Peshkopi, about 50 kilometers east of Burrel.

The captives taken to central Albania were again moved, in small groups, to a private house south of Burrel that was set up as a makeshift clinic. There, medical equipment and personnel were used to extract body organs from the captives, who then died. Their remains were buried nearby. The organs were transported to Rinas airport near Tirana (approximately 75 kilometers southwest of Burrel) and flown abroad. Other captives taken to the house/clinic near Burrel included a smaller number of females from Kosovo, Albania and eastern Europe. The last delivery of captives to the house/clinic was reorted in spring or early summer of 2000.

In addition to captives taken to Albania alive, an unknown number of bodies of Serbian civilians killed in Kosovo were transported to Albania and buried in remote locations.

This summary is based on interviews with at least eight sources, all ethnic Albanians from Kosovo or Montenegro who served in the Kosovo Liberation Army. Four sources directly participated in the transport of at least 90 ethnic Serbs and others to detention facilities in northern and central Albania. Of these, three sources delivered captives to the house/clinic south of Burrel, two sources claim to have participated in the disposal of human remains near the house and one source claims to have participated in the delivery of body parts and/or organs to Rinas airport near Tirana. None of the sources witnessed the medical operations.

According to all sources, the transports and surgical procedures were carried out with the knowledge and/or active involvement of mid-level and senior KLA officers as well as doctors from Kosovo and abroad. THe operation was supported by men with links to Albanian secret police operatives of the former government of Salih Berisha.

The report gives a specific location.

Google imagery of the area shows little of interest:

To be sure, not everyone associated with the KLA was involved in all of this, or even knew of it. Of the people who were involved with it, some did what they could to at least not participate, and a few later came forward to tell what they knew - hence, the reports to the international community.

Similarly, most of the people in the Albanian diaspora who contributed money to the cause felt, and with good reason, that they were helping ethnic Albanians defend themselves against Serb excesses. Some heard rumors of alleged illegal activities, but understandably dismissed these as hostile propaganda.

But, at the top, the key players knew what was going on: they controlled a criminal empire, with ties going from the poppy fields in South Asia to the streets of Western Europe and the United States. The value of the heroin trafficking alone was $400 billion, but add in the value of the arms, the women who were forced to work as prostitutes and then sold on to new pimps, and the other contraband, and this was a big criminal empire.

And, a big criminal empire needed political protection - protection which it could afford to buy.

This One Before, Part 4

We continue from Part 3 considering the connections between the US government and Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel.

This map, from Mexico's Drug-Related Violence, a report by June S. Beittel of the Congressional Research Service dated May 27, 2009, shows the geographic extent of the Sinaloa Cartel's activity as of 2009; notice that the Sinaloa Cartel had the greatest geographic area of activity.

Some recent news and analysis came out in an article entitled US Prosecutors Seeking to Prevent Dirty Secrets of Drug War From Surfacing in Cartel Leader's Case, from November 5, 2011; we quote the beginning:

US Government Using National Security to Conceal Evidence, Attorneys for Narco-Trafficker Zambada Niebla Claim

The criminal case of accused Sinaloa drug organization leader Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla is straying even further into the path of a cover-up under the guise of national security, if pleadings filed by his attorneys are to be believed.

Lawyers for the alleged Mexican narco-trafficker, son of one of the top figures in the Sinaloa "cartel," recently filed a motion asking the court to block U.S. prosecutors' efforts to exclude the defense from discussions with the judge over the treatment of evidence deemed classified material. Zambada Niebla's attorneys contend they must be part of those discussions since the supposed classified material goes to the heart of their client's claims in the case.

The information the US government is seeking to withhold from Zambada Niebla's attorneys, they believe, is likely related to a key figure in the case, an informant, Mexican attorney Humberto Loya Castro, who served as an intermediary between the Sinaloa Cartel leadership and US government agents seeking to obtain information on rival narco-trafficking organizations.

The analysis goes on, at one point quoting from an affidavit dated October 24, 2011, entitled DECLARATION OF FERNANDO X. GAXIOLA, and filed in the ongoing case UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. JESUS VICENTE ZAMBADA-NIEBLA, which the article addresses. Here I quote an excerpt from the same part of the affidavit quoted by the article:

9. Mr. Loya-Castro stated that agents told him that, in exchange for information about rival drug trafficking organizations, the United States government agreed to dismiss the prosecution of the pending case against Mr. Loya-Castro, not to interfere with his drug trafficking activities and those of the Sinaloa Cartel, to not actively prosecute him, Chapo, Mayo, and the leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel, and to not apprehend them. The agents stated that this arrangement had been approved by high-ranking officials and federal prosecutors. Mr. Loya-Castro told Chapo and Mayo about this arrangement, and they agreed and relied on this agreement by providing the requested information. Mr. Zambada-Niebla was told of this agreement and relied on this arrangement by providing the requested information to Mr. Loya-Castro, who would then pass along the information to the agents. The agents told Mr. Loya-Castro that, when he went to meet with Chapo, he should notify the agents in advance. The agents assured Mr. Loya-Castro that they would not follow him and would not interfere with the meetings so that he could be calm and obtain as much information as possible, and Mr. Loya-Castro informed Chapo that the agents would be aware that he was going to meet with him. The agents also told Mr. Loya-Castro to be careful when he spoke on the telephone with Chapo because they could be heard by Mexican authorities, and therefore he should not be explicit about the information that he gave Chapo over the telephone. The agents also allowed Mr. Loya-Castro to be present at confidential meetings where information about the Sinaloa Cartel was being discussed and allowed him to pass the information along to Chapo.

10. Mr. Loya-Castro stated that he gave the agents significant information that he relayed from Chapo, Mayo, and Mr. Zambada-Niebla, which resulted in numerous arrests of major figures in rival drug trafficking organizations. He said he was present when Chapo received a call from Mr. Zambada-Niebla in which Mr. Zambada-Niebla provided information about a major rival drug trafficker for the purpose of passing on to the DEA, which he did pass on and which helped lead to the apprehension of that individual. Mr. Loya-Castro stated that, under his agreement with the government, the charges against him were dismissed in 2008.

11. Mr. Loya-Castro stated that, in 2007, he asked his main handler, a DEA agent named "Manny," to help him obtain the same deal that he had received for Mr. Zambada-Niebla who had outstanding federal charges in the District of Columbia, in exchange for information. Thereafter, Mr. Loya-Castro negotiated the same deal for Mr. Zambada-Niebla. In 2009, Manny informed Loya-Castro that the federal prosecutor in Washington D.C. and the DEA had agreed that Mr. Zambada-Niebla's charges would also be dismissed and he would not be subject to prosecution in exchange for information. As a result, they arranged a meeting between the DEA agents and Mr. Zambada-Niebla in Mexico City so that the parties could establish a more personal relationship and so they could deal directly under the same arrangement that Mr. Loya-Castro had. Mr. Loya-Castro told Mr. Zambada-Nieble that he was immune from arrest and prosecution under the existing agreement and that the agents wanted to continue the same arrangement with him.

Basically, the DEA teamed up with the Sinaloa Cartel. The Sinaloa Cartel would help provide information that the DEA would use to take down the Sinaloa Cartel's rivals; in return, certain key Sinaloa Cartel figures would be immune from prosecution. This relations ship was going back several years.

Of course, the predictable outcome would be that the Sinaloa Cartel would come to dominate the drug-trafficking in Mexico.

Might this arrangement help explain the greater extent of geographic influence of the Sinaloa Cartel as opposed to the other cartels in Mexico?

We now consider excerpts from Mexico's Drug Cartels by the Congressional Research Service, updated February 25, 2008, from pages 13-15 (of 21) (I fixed some misspellings):

Enforcer Gangs

[snip]

Sinaloa Cartel

In response to the Zetas, the Sinaloa cartel established its own heavily-armed enforcer gangs, the Negros and Pelones. Both are less sophisticated than the Zetas, and focused on attacks against adversaries.³⁹ Edgar "La Barbie" Valdés Villarreal is alleged to be the head of the Negros. The Negros are believed to be "responsible for the recent rise in attacks against police officers in Nuevo Laredo, in an attempt to wrest control over the local police from the Zetas."⁴⁰

In recent turf wars in Tamaulipas, Guerrero, Michoacán, Nuevo León, and Tabasco, the Zetas have alleged that the Sinaloa cartel and Negros leader "La Barbie," enjoy police protection. The Mexican government dismissed these charges, noting that it has at varying times focused on prosecutions of different cartels, and each time the affected cartel charges that the government is working on behalf of a rival organization.⁴¹ In May 2006, "La Barbie" made similar allegations of police protection of the Zetas in a full-page ad in a Mexico City daily.⁴²

Police Corruption

Mexican cartels advance their operations, in part, by corrupting or intimidating law enforcement officials. For example, Nuevo Laredo municipal police have reportedly been involved in the kidnapping of Gulf cartel competitors to hand over to the Zetas. The Zetas then hold them for ransom or torture them for information about their drug operations.⁴³ The International Narcotics Control Board⁴⁴ (INCB) reports that although Mexico has made concerted efforts to reduce corruption in recent years, it remains "a serious problem."⁴⁵ Recent efforts to combat corruption include promoting professionalism in law enforcement agencies and inclusion of rule of law lessons in training. Nevertheless, the INCB recommends that Mexico continue to promote efforts to combat corruption.⁴⁶

Some agents of Mexico's Federal Investigative Agency (AFI) are believed to work as enforcers for the Sinaloa cartel, and the Attorney General's Office (PGR) reported in December 2005 that one-fifth of its officers are under investigation for criminal activity. The PGR reported in late 2005 that nearly 1,500 of AFI's 7,000 agents were under investigation for suspected criminal activity and 457 were facing charges. In November 2005, a video depicting the interrogation of four Zetas who revealed their methods of torture, ties to Mexican law enforcement agencies, and recruitment techniques, was given to the Dallas Morning News. The video ends with the murder of one of the Zetas. The Mexican government sent mixed signals about the involvement of AFI agents in the kidnapping of the Zetas, first announcing that eight agents were under investigation, and then announcing that AFI agents had no connection to the kidnapping and murder of the four Zetas.⁴⁷ However, a report from a non-governmental organization says that "subsequent U.S. and Mexican press reports based on Mexican court files have concluded that AFI agents probably kidnapped the Zetas in the resort city of Acapulco, then handed them over to members of the Sinaloa cartel to be interrogated and executed."⁴⁸

This might put into perspective a recent report entitled Neither Rights Nor Security: Killings, Torture, and Disappearances in Mexico's "War on Drugs". The report made a splash in some circles about rampant torture and other abuses by Mexican authorities during recent years.

Of course, it could be that authorities on both sides of the border have been corrupted, with key officials allowing the trafficking of arms to the Sinaloa Cartel and obstructing justice on its behalf, and steering the conduct of counternarcotics operations to take down the Sinaloa Cartel's competitors.

That might also explain not just the... uh... aggressive law enforcement tactics... :) being used by Mexican authorities, but also the rise of some apparent vigilantes in some parts of Mexico. From Shadowy group says it targets cartel; some in Veracruz are glad, October 19, 2011, by Tracy Wilkinson:

Reporting from Veracruz, Mexico— The callers to the radio program were voicing their support for the Matazetas, the Zeta killers.

Better they fight among themselves. Let them kill each other. Anything to rid us of the thugs who long ago took control of our city and are slaughtering our people.

It is a sign of the desperation and deep outrage over surging drug-war violence that a shadowy group of vigilante killers is not only tolerated but welcomed by many here in Mexico's third-most populous state.

Yet it also comes with a disturbing question: Just who is behind the killings of Zetas — another drug gang? Agents acting on behalf of the government or military? An ad hoc group whose presence is being tolerated by authorities as well as the public?

Or, are these vigilantes that are fed up with the excessive crime and with the excessive government corruption? Skipping down:

Their sudden rise and the surgical precision with which the killers systematically picked off nearly 100 people in 17 days has led to conjecture among some people that they may be operating with implicit or direct support of the government or military. Some suggest that the June kidnapping, torture and killing of three marine cadets in Veracruz might have propelled the marine corps to begin acting outside the law. Officials dismiss such speculation, and others wonder why a group aspiring to be a clandestine death squad would post videos on YouTube.

The case against Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla - and several related cases - are being prosecuted in northern Illinois. In fact, according to a February 18, 2010, press release from the US Attorney's office in the Northern District of Illinois, several Chicago-area-based agencies were key in cooperating to bring Mr. Zambada's case to court:

The DEA led the investigation in Chicago, together with the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division and the Chicago Police Department. Also assisting in the overall investigation were DEA's National Drug Intelligence Center (NDIC), the High-Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA) task force, the U.S. Attorney's Office in Milwaukee and the Milwaukee Police Department; the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of Illinois; the Chicago and Peoria offices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; the Chicago offices of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Cook County Sheriff's Department, and other state and local law enforcement agencies. The investigation was coordinated by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Chicago, and with the assistance of agents and analysts of the Special Operations Division (SOD), and attorneys from the Criminal Division's Narcotic and Dangerous Drug Section (NDDS), which is prosecuting related cases.

It sure looks suspicious that the current President, under whose administration much of this gun-trafficking scandal has occurred, is from the same part of the country as key law enforcement agencies that helped put together this case against Zambada.

What might have happened that US authorities are now prosecuting a guy they supposedly had a deal with? And, what classified information might the government be trying to keep under wraps during the course of this prosecution?

Pearls of the Sun God, Part 2

We continue from Part 1 examining the events in Somalia, which have taken an interesting turn.

Anyone following the news from the Horn of Africa knows that the TFG, together with AMISOM, launched an offensive to clear Al Shabaab terrorists from Mogadishu and its environs.

From AMISOM PRESS RELEASE: TFG/AMISOM Commence Operations to Secure Final Sector of Mogadishu, October 10, 2011:

10 civilian deaths from continued Al Shabaab mortaring in Heliwa and Karaan Districts last week have prompted the Somali National Army, supported by AMISOM, to undertake operations in the North of the Mogadishu.

Operations are aimed at securing the former Arafat Hospital and the Pasta Factory on the Industrial Road, and driving the Al Qaeda linked extremists out of the city.

And, more recently, from AMISOM PRESS RELEASE: Control of Deynile Critical to Security of Mogadishu, October 21, 2011:

Mogadishu, 21 October, 2011; AMISOM Force Commander, Maj. Gen. Fred Mugisha, today undertook a tour of the frontline following the commencement yesterday of operations in support of the Somali National Army, aimed at pushing al-Qa'ida linked extremists from the strategic Deynile district on the outskirts of Mogadishu.

"Deynile is of vital strategic importance as it controls access to the Afgoye Corridor which links the capital to the terrorist-controlled areas of southern Somalia, allowing them to reinforce and resupply their fighters in Masla and Balaad in the far northeastern edges of the city," he said following his tour.

"The Afgoye Corridor is also home to hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons and securing it will allow humanitarian aid, which the extremists have so far been restricting, to finally reach them," he said. "The extremists have also been using the suburbs of Deynile as a base to assemble improvised explosive devices, including car and truck bombs such as those recently employed to target civilians in the capital."

He said that the success of this operation was critical for the security of Mogadishu. "As was to be expected, given Deynile's significance, the operation has encountered heavy resistance but steady progress is being made. In the face of this resistance, AMISOM has suffered casualties," he added.

The offensive has had some success - which generates new problems. As we previously pointed out, control of key economic areas in Mogadishu served as a source of income for Al Shabaab, as the organization "taxed" merchants and businesses.

Of course, we have also been told a big part of the problem in Somalia now is a famine.

But, then, the famine is starting to look a little suspicious.

We now consider an article entitled Somalia: Manufacturing a famine by Rasna Warah, October 19, 2011:

On July 18 this year, the United Nations Monitoring Group on Somalia and Eritrea tabled a report to the UN Security Council.

The report stated that United Nations agencies, international humanitarian aid organisations and local Somali non-governmental organisations had been forced to move their operations or cease them entirely in many parts of Somalia, mainly due to "an alarming void in international humanitarian aid and development assistance," and also because of "threats from elements of Al Shabaab," who control much of southern Somalia.

Two days later, the UN's World Food Programme — the largest distributor of food aid to Somalia — declared that Bakool and Lower Shebelle, two regions in southern Somalia, had been hit by the worst famine in 20 years.

The UN agency further claimed that 3.7 million people across the country — almost half the total Somali population – were in danger of starving, of which 2.8 million were in the south.

This declaration led to a massive multimillion-dollar fund-raising campaign by UN and international humanitarian agencies. Meanwhile, journalists began referring to the famine as a "biblical event." By September, Time magazine was reporting that the famine had expanded and that a full 12.4 million people in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia and Uganda were at risk from hunger.

The magazine also stated that in southern Somalia, 63 per cent of the population was either starving or at risk of it.

These figures did not convince many Somali analysts, including Ahmed Jama, a Nairobi-based agricultural economist and former consultant with the UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation.

"I was disturbed by the WFP announcement because Lower Shebelle is Somalia's breadbasket and had even experienced a bumper harvest last year," he told this writer.

Skipping down:

But was there really widespread famine, or were the famine figures exaggerated or misinterpreted? FSNAU's estimates for Somali populations "in crisis" in the period August-September 2011 were highest in the most fertile southern parts of Somalia, and were highest in those areas controlled by Al Shabaab.

Significantly, there were only 490,000 people (less than one-eighth of Nairobi's population) in Somalia who were experiencing what the IPC classifies as "famine" or a "humanitarian catastrophe."

In fact, about half of the nearly four million people that the WFP claims are starving are actually experiencing what is known as a "humanitarian emergency"; the rest are in an "acute food and livelihood crisis."

Therefore, I think the widely reported "famine" in Somalia is highly exaggerated. What Somalia is experiencing is generalised food insecurity, not widespread famine. Unfortunately, most media organisations have failed to mention or comprehend this fact.

Is it possible that the "famine" in Somalia was "manufactured" to raise funds? The sequence of events leading to the famine appeal certainly raises suspicions. According to Jama, the timing of the famine declaration in July was probably a response to the shortfall of funds that WFP has recently been experiencing and also to divert attention from the criticism that the UN agency was subjected to after the UN Monitoring Group on Somalia released its 2010 report in March last year.

Then, WFP was castigated by the UN Monitoring Group for colluding with corrupt Somali contractors who are known to sell or divert food aid. Sources interviewed by the Monitoring Group — an entity mandated by the UN Security Council to monitor arms embargo violations in Somalia — estimated that up to half of the food aid reaching Somalia was regularly diverted, not just by Somali transport contractors, but by WFP personnel and NGOs operating in Somalia. That 2010 report led some donors, notably the US, to withdraw funding to WFP’s operations in Somalia.

Rasna then goes on to explain how the European Union has invested a considerable amount of money - 175 million Euros over the past 15 years - to develop the agricultural infrastructure of the Shabelle region of Somalia - "Somalia's breadbasket" - and the question presents itself as to how a famine could occur in a "breadbasket" whose infrastructure has been built up with so much investment over more than a decade. Later on, Rasna points out that the EU funds this through the UN, and relies on UN reports to assess the effectiveness of the program - without any independent or EU audits.

An opportunity for someone? To divert and profit from control of international aid? And, perhaps more... after all, there is international traffic of ships, aircraft, and trucks moving that international aid, from developed countries to Somalia, and then the ships, aircraft and trucks go back... I wonder if they are empty when they go back.

The interesting turn, though, is a Kenyan armed invervention, prompted - supposedly - by lawlessness that spilled over from Somalia into Kenya.

From Kibaki gambles on regional war with Al Shabaab, October 21, 2011 (also available here):

Panic in Lamu

Some witnesses say the kidnappings along Kenya's coast were carried out by groups linked to the Somali pirates whose operations have come under pressure from heavier international maritime policing in the region. The kidnappings generated panic. The resort town of Lamu, favoured by (relatively) wealthy European tourists, emptied within days and this at the start of the tourist high season, which this year was forecast to generate a record US$1 billion in revenue.

Those abductions were further aggravated by the kidnapping of two Spanish aid workers in the sprawling Dadaab refugee camp. This was the shot that sent Kenya's armed forces into south-central Somalia. Invoking Article 61 of the United Nations charter on territorial integrity, some 1,600 Kenyan troops launched their first cross-border military offensive, Operation Linda Nchi (Protect the Nation), since the end of the Shifta War in 1967. Derided in the region for their lack of fighting experience, the Kenyan armed forces have deployed mechanised infantry with aerial cover from fighter aircraft and helicopter gunships. We hear that Somali TFG troops will be joining them in the battle for Afmadow.

The real prize, though, is the port city of Kismayo. Both Kenya's military and its Amisom counterparts believe that the capture of Kismayo, from which Al Shabaab now derives much of its revenue, will choke off the militants.

Kismayo... in Part 1 we discussed how Al Shabaab taxes, among other things, the charcoal industry, which exports charcoal to the Arabian Peninsula. But, a port town is important for moving other commodities, as well.

By the way: the Kenyan attack seems to be supported by US drone activity which has resulted in losses of some of our drones.

Either way, Kismayo is important to Al Shabaab, and Al Shabaab is preparing to defend it. From Kenya-Somalia: A risky intervention, October 20, 2011:

On the move

"Many people have been leaving in the last three days. No-one wants to get caught up in the fighting, I have sent my family to the villages," said a resident of Afmadow, a town 140km north of Kenya's border.

Describing the intervention as a "joint Kenya-Somali operation", the commander of Somalia's Transitional Federal Government (TFG) forces in the border area, Gen. Yusuf Hussein Dhumal, told IRIN from his base in Tabta, 65km north of the Kenyan border, that his forces were in control of Qoqani, 50km south of Afmadow town.

"We are being delayed by heavy rains. Our aim was to be in Afmadow by now but the rains have made that impossible. We will push until we chase them [Al-Shabab] from Kismayo."

Mohamed Ahmed Ilkase, a reporter for Somali national TV travelling with the Somali forces, told IRIN Al-Shabab was reportedly regrouping in Afmadow.

A resident of the port city of Kismayo, 500km south of the Somali capital, Mogadishu, said Al-Shabab had been reinforcing its positions in the city and conscripting people "to fight the enemy. They have been bringing many militias since Monday [17 October] and have been calling on residents to register to fight."

He said families had started leaving the city. "Some are going south [towards Kenya], while many others are going north to Mogadishu."

Al Shabaab has time to dig in to defend Kismayo, conscripting local people to fight. The time is available because heavy rains are slowing the movement of the military forces trying to seize the town... heavy rains in a region that has a famine caused by drought.

Of course, it is not uncommon for an area devastated by drought to have heavy rain, which still does not make up for an extended time of below-average rainfall. And, it is not uncommon in arid regions of the world for sudden heavy rain to bring vehicular movement to a standstill.

We consider an excerpt from an article entitled Taliban Heroin Flooding Kenya on its Way To Europe and The Americas from December 14, 2009 (the post appears to be a copy of an article from The Standard (Kenya), to which I link in the sidebar, but I have (curiously) not been able to find the article there; italics, boldface and other formatting are in the original):

Kenya is fast becoming a key hub for trafficking of drugs from Afghanistan to the rest of the world.

According to reports by the United Nations, "30 to 35 metric tonnes" of Afghan heroin pass through East Africa each year.

This is two-thirds the volume going through West Africa. The largest ever drug haul in Kenya, in December 2004, was 1.1 metric tonnes with a street value of over Sh13 billion.

The proceeds from the drugs are used to finance terrorism activities in Northern Africa and some other sub-Saharan states. It is also suspected that the illicit drug trade supports the unending conflict in neighbouring Somalia.

The Taliban, among whom the world's most notorious terrorist Osama bin Laden hides, are reported to earn $100 million (Sh8 billion) a year from protecting the drug trade. Drug barons are rumoured to sit in Afghan government positions raking in billions more. The UN puts the potential export value of Afghan narcotics at about $3.4 billion (Sh270 billion) a year. So much is grown that destroying it all is impossible: With stockpiles of 10,000 metric tonnes awaiting export, the UN this year proposed creating a "flood of drugs" in the country to destroy the value of opium.

This last comment is interesting; if the Afghan opium fields were suddendly destroyed, for example, by spraying herbicide on or by burning the opium plants, there is still enough Afghan heroin in the "pipeline" to supply the world until another harvest - and, perhaps, for longer. This stuff has been getting stockpiled under the watch of US-led international forces in Afghanistan.

Skipping down:

On November 24, a ministerial declaration supporting UN efforts against drugs and organised crime was signed in Kenya. Dated December 8, the report quotes Antonio Maria Costa, the Executive Director on the UN Office on Drug and Crime (UNODC) as saying: "Drugs are enriching not only organized crime but also terrorists and other anti-Government forces,"

He describes the situation as a worrisome development.

"In East Africa... 30 to 35 tonnes of Afghan heroin [are] trafficked each year causing a dramatic increase in heroin addiction and spreading of HIV and Aids in the slums of Nairobi and Mombasa."

The official said the rise is also connected to state failure in Somalia.

"Mainly because of the drastic situation in Somalia, he said, East Africa was becoming a free economic zone for all sorts of trafficking — drugs, migrants, guns, hazardous wastes and natural resources."

West Africa has traditionally been associated with the international drug trade but Kenya now leads states in East Africa that have emerged as favourites for drug traffickers.

Obviously, this development of Kenya becoming a hub for drug-trafficking is not something that happened over night. For example, drug-trafficking through Kenya was addressed in an article entitled Traffickers' drugs haven in Kenya by Karen Allen, May 9, 2006

Mules

It is something that worries Titus Naikuni, chief executive of Kenya Airways.

His airline crews have been amongst those used as drug mules.

Five of his staff have been arrested over the past year, trying to bring narcotics into Europe.

With extra security measures now in place, he says his employees are aware that international drug cartels are now targeting them.

The travel industry is used to move drugs from Kenya to Europe.

It is interesting that the previously-described "panic in Lamu" is resulting in a dramatically-decreased number of tourists coming in from Europe to Kenya. Decreased business might have an impact on the travel industry... at a minimum, fewer tourists means that honest customs and immigration officials (assuming some can be found) have more time to examine aircraft, passengers and cargo, and thus to detect drug shipments.

We now consider an excerpt from a recent report, Termites at Work: Transnational Organized Crime and State Erosion in Kenya by Peter Gastrow, September, 2011:

While to the onlooker Kenya appears to be in a relatively healthy state, it is in fact weakening due to a process of internal decay. Endemic corruption and powerful transnational criminal networks are “white-anting” state institutions and public confidence in them. Termites are at work, hollowing out state institutions from the inside. As a result, development is being hampered, governance undermined, public trust in institutions destroyed, and international confidence in Kenya’s future constantly tested.

The country is perceived as one of the most corrupt in the world, ranked far down at 154th on a list of 178 countries that feature in the 2010 Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index.⁵ Close to 90 percent of Kenyans surveyed rated their country as being between corrupt and extremely corrupt, while only 8.5 percent regarded it as slightly corrupt.⁶ Bribery has become a normal part of life. In 2010, 58.6 percent of persons who sought the services of the Nairobi City Council paid bribes, 54.4 percent of those who sought the services of the police did the same, and 47.8 percent who sought the services of the judiciary also resorted to bribes.⁷ It is this corruption- ridden environment that enables criminal networks to thrive. They can buy protection, information, and power.

I wonder if the corruption includes collaborating with transnational cartels that traffic in Afghan heroin (and Latin American cocaine)?

Kenya's intervention in Somalia is not about stabilizing Somalia, a neighbor which has been in chaos for decades. The intervention is about control of a route for moving heroin from Afghanistan where it is produced, via Iran and Pakistan, to the Somali port of Kismayo, from which heroin is trafficked through the lawless areas of southern Somalia and across the border into Kenya, and from there smuggled to lucrative markets in Europe and elsewhere.

And, the US is actively supporting this intervention, just like the US occupies Afghanistan, where the heroin is now comfortably produced and even stockpiled.

This One Before, Part 3

In Part 1 we began to examine an incident in which US government agents were ambushed in Mexico, and reviewed how most of the weapons the Mexican drug cartels use are in fact military-grade weapons that cannot have come from gunshops and gunshows on the US side of the border. In Part 2 we considered the attack more in-depth, and saw how it must have been a deliberate attack targeting US agents, and how those agents were likely sold out by US authorities.

In a related series, we saw in Take A Long Holiday, Part 1 how the Palestinian Authority's key leaders have been involved in trafficking heroin for decades, and we saw some of the impact this has on Palestinians in the West Bank. In Take A Long Holiday, Part 2, we considered the movement of drugs through western Africa, looking at cocaine moving from Latin America to Europe, and connections from Islamic terrorist groups leading the other way through Latin America, all the way to the US border.

There have been a great many very predictable developments since then. In fact, I have not blogged about this because it is playing out pretty much the way I had anticipated. I do feel, though, that it is time for an update.

We now consider in its entirety an article entitled Mexico unlikely base for terrorism, from October 14, 2011:

MEXICO CITY –The alleged Iranian plot to assassinate Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United States has cast Mexico into the news as a potential staging area for a terrorist operation.

But experts say the likelihood of such a plot going undetected in Mexico by U.S. authorities is low and that Mexico's drug cartels would be unlikely to become involved in such a plot.

U.S. officials alleged Tuesday that an Iranian-American and a member of Iran's Quds Force sought to enlist a Mexican drug cartel in a plot to kill Saudi Ambassador Adel Al-Jubeir in Washington, perhaps by bombing a restaurant he was known to frequent.

One of the men, Manssor Arbabsiar, 56, a naturalized U.S. citizen holding Iranian and U.S. passports, was said to have met in the Mexican border city of Reynosa with a Drug Enforcement Administration informant who he thought was a member of a violent drug cartel.

The barrage of 251,287 unredacted U.S. diplomatic cables that WikiLeaks released more than a month ago suggest that American diplomats maintain a steady focus on Iran's activities in Latin America. In Mexico, that meant keeping an eye on a mosque in Torreon, watching the impact of Iran's "dynamic" new ambassador, gauging public attitudes toward Iran and coaching agents at Mexico's National Security and Investigation Center – CISEN in its Spanish initials – the domestic intelligence agency.

Strategic Forecasting Inc., an Austin, Texas, global intelligence firm commonly called Stratfor, on Wednesday described as unlikely any use of Mexico as a staging ground for a terrorist attack emanating from the Middle East.

It noted that while the U.S.-Mexico border is porous and prone to security breaches, the U.S. government has "extremely active intelligence capabilities" embedded in Mexico. It added that Mexico is generally hostile to enemies of the United States, not wanting to risk possible intervention by U.S. forces should its territory be used in any attack.

The cartels have pragmatic interests in maintaining their core business of narcotics smuggling without greater interference, it added.

"Any plan to use Mexican drug cartels to carry out attacks against the U.S. would threaten the very existence of the cartel," a Stratfor analysis said.

"Mexican drug cartels are already facing challenges – struggling with one another and with the Mexican government for control over transportation routes that will allow them to transit cocaine from South America to the U.S. Any foray into international terrorism would be bad for business," Stratfor said.

So, the experts feel that Mexican drug cartels are not getting in bed with terrorists from the Middle East and Southwest Asia - at least not to the point of being willing to commit terrorist attacks on their behalf.

Of course, this opens up a whole line of questions regarding what could result in the Persian Gulf based on the allegations of this plot, and that, in turn, opens the door to speculation about who might be telling how much of the truth and who might benefit from the lies. But, this series does not deal with the Persian Gulf.

Then there is the question about illegal activities in the Western Hemisphere: drug trafficking, trafficking of weapons and other contraband, bribery and corruption... all these things go hand-in-hand. And, terrorism is financed through these activities. Terrorist organizations are big into trafficking drugs to fund their activities - so much so that they often lose sight of their political agenda, and focus on their profit motive - and into trafficking arms, which they use for terrorist attacks and for security for their other illegal activities.

It is increasingly difficult to separate terrorism from other illegal activities.

For an overview of what is publicly known about the "Fast and Furious" scandal, we consider excerpts from NRA's LaPierre: 'Fast and Furious' Was Plot Against Second Amendment, dated October 14, 2011:

The government-sanctioned gunrunning operation Fast and Furious was a plot to undermine Second Amendment rights in the United States, National Rifle Association officerWayne LaPierre charged on Friday in an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV.

"It's the only thing that makes any sense," LaPierre said. "Over a period of two or three years they were running thousands and thousands of guns to the most evil people on earth. At the same time they were yelling '90 per cent... of the guns the Mexican drug cartels are using come from the United States.'

That was a phony figure from the very start. Even the Wikileaks cables from our own State Department prove they are coming from Central America, they are not coming from the U.S. Every police officer will tell you that they're coming from Russia, they're coming from China, most of them are coming from Central America and a lot of them are coming from defections from the Mexican Army," said LaPierre, the NRA's executive vice president and CEO.

But LaPierre said that President Barack Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were determined to make it appear that most weapons used by the Mexicans came from north of the border, "so they could stick more gun legislation on honest American gun owners of the United States."

LaPierre insisted that the whole Fast and Furious scandal, in which he said "thousands and thousands" of weapons were allowed to cross into Mexico, would never have come to light at all if it hadn't been for the murder of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry in Arizona in December.

"We wouldn't know about this at all if [Terry] had not been killed and some of the good, honest, decent federal agents down the line had enough of the stench coming out of Washington and started to use the Whistleblower Act to go public and call the Justice Department out on this whole rotten, stinking scheme.

"Otherwise thousands of guns would still be going over the border into the Mexican drug cartels and the president and the attorney general and the secretary of state would all be running around going '90 percent of the guns come from America' in an attempt to seek political advantage and in an attempt to enact more gun control laws on honest American citizens and use this whole issue politically against the Second Amendment of the United States."

LaPierre summarizes the scandal nicely:

"Look at what has happened," he said. "We had our Department of Justice under the Obama administration running thousands and thousands of guns over the border and watching them go directly into the hands of some of the most evil people on earth, the Mexican drug cartels.

"At the same time they were letting the reputation of good, honest, decent Americans, law-abiding American gun dealers, be ruined.

"They ordered these sales to be made, they even overrode the InstaCheck system and ordered the dealers to make the sales. Then, when it all starts coming out, there's a massive cover-up."!

LaPierre compares the activities of the Obama Administration with those of a Latin American dictatorship, then offers an excellent assessment:

"What has happened in Fast and Furious is the equivalent of our Justice Department becoming willing co-conspirators with the Mexican drug cartels in their crimes."

Our Justice Department has become willing co-conspirators with the Mexican drug cartels.

Keep that in mind.

The claim that 90% of the arms used in the drugs wars come from the US has documentation that seems to support the claim, until one parses the supporting passages.

For example, in an excerpt from FIREARMS TRAFFICKING: U.S. Efforts to Combat Arms Trafficking to Mexico Face Planning and Coordination Challenges, dated June, 2009, pages 14-16 (pgs 19-21 of 83 in the pdf):

According to U.S. and Mexican government and law enforcement officials and data from ATF on firearms seized in Mexico and traced from fiscal year 2004 to fiscal year 2008, a large portion of the firearms fueling the Mexican drug trade originated in the United States, including a growing number of increasingly lethal weapons. As is inherently the case with various types of illegal trafficking, such as drug trafficking, the extent of firearms trafficking to Mexico is unknown;¹⁰ however, according to ATF, a large number of guns are seized from criminals by the military and law enforcement in Mexico, and information on many of these guns is submitted to ATF for the purposes of tracing their origins and uncovering how the guns arrived in Mexico.¹¹ ATF maintains data on the firearms that are seized in Mexico and submitted for a trace, and, from these firearms trace requests, ATF officials told us, they are often able to detect suspicious patterns and trends that can help identify and disrupt arms trafficking networks on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border.

Using ATF's eTrace data, which currently serves as the best data we found available for analyzing the source and nature of firearms trafficked and seized in Mexico, we determined over 20,000, or 87 percent, of firearms seized by Mexican authorities and traced from fiscal year 2004 to fiscal year 2008 originated in the United States. Figure 3 shows the percentages of firearms seized in Mexico and traced from fiscal year 2004 to fiscal year 2008 that originated in the United States. Over 90 percent of the firearms seized in Mexico and traced over the last 3 years have come from the United States.

Around 68 percent of these firearms were manufactured in the United States, while around 19 percent were manufactured in third countries and imported into the United States before being trafficked into Mexico. ATF could not determine whether the remaining 13 percent foreign sourced arms had been trafficked into Mexico through the United States, due to incomplete information.

While the eTrace data only represents data from gun trace requests submitted from seizures in Mexico and not all the guns seized, it is currently the only systematic data available, and the conclusions from its use that the majority of firearms seized and traced originated in the United States were consistent with conclusions reached by U.S. and Mexican government and law enforcement officials involved personally in combating arms trafficking to Mexico. In 2008, of the almost 30,000 firearms that the Mexican Attorney General’s office said were seized, only around 7,200, or approximately a quarter, were submitted to ATF for tracing.

The report goes on to explain difficulties in how the system operates, and how those difficulties prevent a greater number of weapons from being traced. Furthermore, the report then indicates that experience of law enforcement personnel on both sides of the border supports this conclusion that 90% of the firearms come from the US.

However, look at what the report actually says. For 2008, 30,000 firearms were seized. Only 7,200 were submitted for tracing. Only 90% of those - about 6,480 firearms - were traced back to the US. That leaves over 23,000 firearms - 78% of the total seized - unaccounted-for regarding origins, and it means only a little over 20% of the firearms are actually traced back to the US.

Footnote 10 from the above passage is educational:

¹⁰While there is no data on the total number of firearms trafficked to Mexico, the Government of Mexico maintains data on the number of firearms seized in Mexico. Information, such as serial numbers, on many of these seized firearms is submitted to ATF's National Tracing Center for tracing. ATF's National Tracing Center attempts to trace the firearms using the information submitted. Between fiscal years 2004-2008, around 52 percent of trace requests from Mexico that were submitted to ATF's National Tracing Center identified the first retail dealer. Furthermore, according to ATF, the identification of the country of manufacturing origin of a firearm does not depend on identifying the first retail dealer but rather on the initial description of the firearm.

Again, there are no statistics on the total number of weapons trafficked to Mexico. There are only statistics from the US side of the border regarding what has been submitted to US authorities for tracing, and in this case, the number that came up was 52% of the trace requests identified a retailer, presumably in the US.

Let's go with the higher 90% figure, which is really 90% of 24% - because only 24% of the weapons seized in Mexico are submitted to US authorities for tracing.

That still leaves over three-quarters of the weapons seized in Mexico coming from somewhere else.

In other words, the Obama Administration is misleading everyone.

The political reason is obvious. As LaPierre points out (and as we knew), the political agenda is to generate propaganda that can be used to destroy our right to keep and bear arms. And, when all the dust settles, this is what the Obamanistas will plead guilty to.

But what is really going on?

LaPierre mentions - as have I, previously - that the cartels are mainly getting their weapons from Russia, China, and Central America, in addition to through defections from the Mexican Army.

Of course, this trend was noticed years ago. We consider an excerpt from Globalization and Transnational Organized Crime: The Russian Mafia in Latin America and the Caribbean by Bruce Michael Bagley, dated November 15, 2002, pages 9-10:

The third prong of the Russian mafia's strategy of expansion abroad over the 1990s focused on penetration of the Western Hemisphere, initially the United States and Canada. By the mid-1990s, frustrated by the disappointing results of their Asian strategy, Russian organized crime groups became increasingly interested in and focused on new opportunities for criminal activity in Latin America and the Caribbean. Specifically, they realized that the region offered open markets for Russian and Soviet bloc arms in exchange for drugs to be smuggled back to Europe and Russia and easy access to global financial networks for money laundering purposes. Moreover, the region's relatively weak states and deeply imbedded "culture of corruption" provided a familiar environment reminiscent of the one in post-Soviet Russia in which Russian criminal organizations had originally arisen and flourished. In effect, the Russian mafia adapted the previous Soviet-era tactics of forging ties in the Americas via attractive offers of cheap weapons and "technical assistance." This time around, however, the technical assistance proffered was in the realm of money laundering rather than in the use of sophisticated Soviet weaponry.

These arms-trafficking ties go back for years.

Military-grade weapons move one way, drugs move back the other way.

As I have stated, criminals get firearms the way they get drugs - illegally. If a plane, boat or truck goes one way carrying drugs, why can't it go back the other way carrying firearms. This is what they would have us believe regarding the US - drugs come north, weapons move south.

But, the drug trade is not confined to the US/Mexican border.

As I have repeatedly pointed out - and as anyone should know - the drug trade is global. Particularly, I have repeatedly pointed out how cocaine moves from Latin America through Africa to Europe, and how heroin moves from South Asia through the Balkans to Europe, and now through Africa to Europe and the Americas. Military-grade weapons move through Africa, too; Islamic terrorist organizations use them for jihad in Africa and against Israel, but some of the weapons make it to the Americas where they equip drug cartels.

So, why don't we hear about all this - the drugs moving through Africa, the ties that Islamic terrorists have with Latin America, the weapons-trafficking to Mexico of Russian and Chinese arms...? Sure, when it was politically convenient, we hear about an alleged Iranian plot, though there are questions that are raised regarding that, which are outside the scope of this series. But, Hezbollah - an Iranian proxy - has been active in Latin America for many years. Why don't we hear about that?

It is a question of money.

"What has happened in Fast and Furious is the equivalent of our Justice Department becoming willing co-conspirators with the Mexican drug cartels in their crimes."

From US Prosecutors Confirm Classified Information Colors Zambada Niebla's Case, dated October 4, 2011:

Prosecutors in the Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla case on Monday, Oct. 3, filed a motion in federal court in Chicago rebutting the accused Mexican narco-trafficker's argument that he has been denied access to critical evidence in preparing his defense due to a tardy call by the prosecution for national-security procedures to be invoked in his case.

In their pleadings, prosecutors again affirm the government's position that there was no immunity deal offered to the accused narco-trafficker or to the leadership of the Sinaloa drug-trafficking organization.

The pleadings filed by the prosecution do not address directly why the government is seeking to invoke national-security procedures for Zambada Niebla's case.

However, the government's motion does confirm that "classified materials" related to the case do exist, but also insists those classified materials do not support Zambada Niebla's immunity claims.

To date, no U.S. media outlet, other than Narco News, has reported on the US government's effort to invoke national security in the Zambada Niebla case.

Monday's filing by prosecutors confirms that Zambada Niebla's case does raise national security issues that require, according to those prosecutors, that special procedures be established by the court — under a 30-year-old law known as the Classified Information Procedures Act — to assure that classified materials do not become public during the court proceedings.

Zambada Niebla, son of one of the leaders of the Sinaloa "Cartel," arguably the most powerful international narco-trafficking organization on the planet, argues in his criminal case that he and the other leadership of Mexico's Sinaloa drug-trafficking organization, were, in effect, working for the U.S. government for years by providing US agents with intelligence about rival drug organizations.

The Sinaloa Cartel is in bed with the US government.

From Court Pleadings Point to CIA Role in Alleged "Cartel" Immunity Deal, September 11, 2011:

The fingerprints of the CIA have surfaced in a controversial federal criminal case pending in Chicago against Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, an alleged kingpin in the Sinaloa "drug cartel."

US government prosecutors filed pleadings in the case late last week seeking to invoke the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), a measure designed to assure national security information does not surface in public court proceedings.

[snip]

"That is a very reasonable conclusion [that the CIA is likely involved in this case in some way]," says a former federal agent familiar with national security procedures. "Seeking CIPA protection, yup, there is hot stuff to hide."

Does this look like something we have seen before?

From Cracking the Case: An Interview With Sibel Edmonds by Scott Horton, August 22, 2005:

SH: Okay, and you mention when you talk about criminal activity, drug-running, money-laundering, weapons-smuggling...

SE: And these activities overlap. It's not like okay, you have certain criminal entities that are involved in nuclear black market, and then you have certain entities bringing narcotics from the East. You have the same players when you look into these activities at high-levels you come across the same players, they are the same people.

SH: Well, when we're talking about those kind of levels of liquid cash money we probably also have to include major banks too, right?

SE: Financial institutions, yes.

And, from 'The Stakes Are Too High for Us to Stop Fighting Now' An interview with FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds by Christopher Deliso August 15, 2005:

SE: The fact that there are no investigations -- I will give you an analogy, okay? Say if we decided to have a "war on drugs," but said in the beginning, "right, we're only going to go after the young black guys on the street level." Hey, we already have tens of thousands of them in our jails anyway, why not a few more? But we decided never to go after the middle levels, let alone the top levels...

It's like this with the so-called war on terror. We go for the Attas and Hamdis -- but never touch the guys on the top.

CD: You think they [the government] know who they are, the top guys, and where?

SE: Oh yeah, they know.

CD: So why don't they get them?

SE: It's like I told you before -- this would upset "certain foreign relations." But it would also expose certain of our elected officials, who have significant connections with high-level drugs- and weapons-smuggling -- and thus with the criminal underground, even with the terrorists themselves.

The analogy with the "war on drugs" is right on the money, because it is really the same war these days.

Here is what is going on: the drug cartels are paying off the Obama Administration at the highest levels. The Obamanistas are assisting one cartel in eliminating its rivals. The Sinaloa Cartel passes intelligence to the US on the other cartels; US and Mexican authorities eliminate these rivals. Agencies get drug busts, and politicians get paid to steer government operations against some cartels and away from another. And, the Obamanistas help arm one cartel in its fight against the others, in addition to taking direct action against the other cartels. In return, the Obamanistas get an opportunity to disarm the American people, and this becomes the cover story if they get caught.

I wonder... how much foreign drug-trafficking money is being laundered to the Democrats to accomplish this? And, I wonder how many Republicans are involved? Maybe there are no Republicans involved in this scandal, and that is why it is not being hushed up... unlike the Sibel Edmonds case, which involved corruption on both sides of the aisle, and was effectively silenced under Bush-43, despite Democrats who promised to follow up on it.