Editing Al-Qaeda (section)

==According to Paul Williams' book Operation Gladio:== 
By 1992, al-Farooq mosque had become a haven for Arabian veterans from the great jihad in Afghanistan, who were granted special passports to enter the United States by the CIA. A feud erupted between the older African American members of the mosque and the Arab newcomers, which resulted in the murder of Mustafa Shalabi, the fiery imam of the mosque, on March 1, 1991. The crime has never been solved."

"A New High Thanks to the CIA, heroin production in Afghanistan rose from 400 tons in 1971 to 1,800 tons in 1979, and a network of laboratories was set up by the mujahideen along the Afghan-Pakistan border." The morphine base was transported by caravans of trucks from the Helmand Valley through northern Iran to the Anatolian plains of Turkey. Business was booming. In 1979, the "flood" of heroin from Afghanistan inundated the United States capturing over 60 percent of the market. 

In New York City alone, the mob sold two tons of smack, which registered a "dramatic increase in purity." Heroin addiction in the states climbed back to 450,000. Within a year, street sales increased by 22 percent and the addiction rate reached 500,000. It was an enormous development for the Rockefeller family. The cash from the drug trade flowed into CIA-controlled banks, including the Bank of Credit and Commerce, to America's most prestigious financial institutions, including Citibank, in which the Rockefeller family held controlling interest." 

The rise in heroin usage had enormous ramifications on the CIA Michel Chossudovsky, the noted Canadian economist, explains: The excessive accumulation of money wealth from the proceeds of the drug trade has transformed the CIA into a powerful financial entity. The latter cooperates through a web of corporate shells, banks, and financial institutions wielding tremendous power and influence. These CIA sponsored "corporations" have, over time, been meshed into the mainstay of the business and corporate establishment, not only in weapons production and the oil business, but also in banking and financial services, real estate, etc. 

In turn, billions of narco dollars are channeled-with the support of the CIA-into spheres of "legitimate" banking, where they are used to finance bona fide investments in a variety of economic activities. But all this came to a screeching halt on January 27, 2000, when Mullah Omar and the leaders of the Taliban announced their plans to ban poppy production within the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Thanks to the ban the opium poppy harvest fell from 4,600 tons in 1999 to 81 tons in 2001. The situation had to be addressed by the military/industrial complex in a forceful way. 

While heroin was one cause of the war on terrorism, oil was another The situation in Afghanistan had become worrisome to the House of Rockefeller, which had been instrumental in bringing the Taliban to power in 1996. Through the Union Oil Company of California (Unocal), the Rockefellers had arranged to provide the group with weapons and military instructors. This aid had enabled the Taliban to capture Kabul and to oust Afghan president Burhanuddin Rabbānī from office. The Unocal gifts of arms and advisors were given with the belief that the Taliban would provide assistance in the creation of a massive oil pipeline that would run from the oil wells of Turkmenistan through the mountains of Afghanistan to the port city of Karachi, Pakistan, on the Arabian Sea...Unocal also planned through its subsidiary Centgas to build another pipeline, this one for natural gas that would follow the same route..." Brzenzinski lays out the plan in The Grand Chessboard.

Condoleezza Rice worked for Chevron (the predecessor of Standard Oil of California, she also served as Geroge W. Bush's National Security Advisor (where Gladio is managed from).