Dear friends,
Below are key excerpts of important news articles which include revealing information on the protection of opium poppy crops in Afghanistan by the US military, the CIA’s use of LSD in a mind-control experiment on the population of a French town, the Pope hiding child sexual abuse cases, and more. Each excerpt is taken verbatim from the major media website listed at the link provided. If any link fails to function, click here. The most important sentences are highlighted for those with limited time. By choosing to educate ourselves and to spread the word, we can and will build a brighter future.
With best wishes,
Tod Fletcher and Fred Burks for PEERS and the WantToKnow.info Team
Special note: For those following Conspiracy of Silence and the huge child sex abuse rings, see important new information we’ve added in the section just below the links by clicking here. Jesse Ventura has been censored for his talk about 9/11 on the Huffington Post website. For more on this, click here. For a fun seven-minute video which gives a peek at life in the city of San Francisco in the year 1905, click here. For a new theory suggesting humanity may be ready to leap beyond the confines of linear time, click here. And for a fascinating 17-minute video on the Bonobo, a primate which uses tools and language in ways that are surprisingly human,click here.
U.S. Turns a Blind Eye to Opium in Afghan Town
March 21, 2010, New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/21/world/asia/21marja.html
The effort to win over Afghans on former Taliban turf in Marja has put American and NATO commanders in the unusual position of arguing against opium eradication. From Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal on down, the military’s position is clear: “U.S. forces no longer eradicate,” as one NATO official put it. Opium is the main livelihood of 60 to 70 percent of the farmers in Marja. American Marines occupying the area are under orders to leave the farmers’ fields alone. United Nations drug officials agree with the Americans. Pictures of NATO and other allied soldiers “walking next to the opium fields won’t go well with domestic audiences, but the approach of postponing eradicating in this particular case is a sensible one,” said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, who is in charge of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime here. Though the United States government’s official position is still to support opium crop eradication in general, some American civilian officials say that the internal debate over Marja is far from over within parts of the State Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration. A spokesman for the United States Embassy in Kabul, Brendan J. O’Brien, said officials would decline to comment while the matter was under review.
Note: For weeks the Pentagon and press claimed Marja is a city of 80,000 people, and proclaimed the “battle for Marja” as comparable to the attack on Falluja, Iraq. Then the news leaked out that Marja is not even a town, but an unincorporated agricultural area with a few villages. Now the “city” turns out to be a center of opium poppy production! Could protection of the lucrative poppy crops be the real reason for the selection of this area for the largest single military operation of the occupiers since the invasion in 2001? For more on this, click here.