The Assassinated Press

Gen. McChrystal, Staff Battling Heroin Addiction.
Commander of Afghan Forces Called To White House For Intervention.
CIA Station Chief In Kabul Supplied McChrystal and Aides With Smack, Magazine Reports.
Jokes of McChrystal Meth Common on Afghan and Pakistan Air Waves.

By EDITH DEYOUNG & SCOOTER BARNDORR
Assassinated Press Staff Writers
June 23, 2010

The firestorm sparked by the heroin addiction on public display by the general responsible for creating and implementing President Obama's Afghanistan scorched earth strategy has further set back U.S. prospects in a war that was already on shaky, poppy laden ground with a fucking trillion dollars in precious minerals below it. Combat delays, rising casualties and new reports of Afghan corruption largely attributable to a $5000.00 a day smack habit by Gen. McChrystal and his staff have led to growing skepticism in Congress and among the American public most of whom prefer crystal meth. The weakening, and possible firing, of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal over his drug abuse, defecating in public and disrespectful comments he made about Obama and his policy team has compounded the sense of peril.

Good Morning Vi-et-nam!!

McChrystal and his staff have become the butt of jokes over Afghani and Pakastani airwaves including Voice of America even as Afghanistan’s number of heroin addicts reaches 800,000 and that of Pakastan nearly 5,000,000.

Stan's Not Here.

It is not uncommon to hear the VOA play old Cheech and Chong and Firesign Theater albums with the hilarious claim that they are actually taped sessions between McChrystal and his top commanders and strategists.

However the McChrystal crisis ends, deeper addiction or recovery "much is backing up in our people's veins," a senior administration official said. "It's hard to brush past it without getting hooked" he added rolling up his sleeves to show needle tracks leading from his wrist to the base of his neck.

McChrystal's apparent disdain for his civilian colleagues and the Afghan people, a view shared by most Americans especially the ones who have no idea where Afghanistan is, and the facts on the ground in Afghanistan, have exposed the enduring fault lines in the devil’s pact Obama forged last fall among policymakers and military commanders and the CIA. In exchange for approving McChrystal's request for more troops and treasure, Obama imposed, and the military accepted, two deadlines sought by his political aides. In December, one year after the strategy was announced, the situation would be reviewed and necessary adjustments made. In July 2011, the troops would begin to come home.

From Deadline to Mainlining. Pressure Too Much for Brass.

But the stress of deadlines proved too much McChrystal and staff and their drug use increased exponentially aided by a ready supply from the local CIA station chief, George White, the only civilian in Afghanistan the general and his smack soaked staff in their current paranoid state trust.

Many senior military officials considered the withdrawal deadline a bad idea but this hardly explains the enormous increase in drug abuse among the military which began with the invasion of Afghanistan and the CIA setting up shop.

Senior military officials argued among themselves whether counterinsurgency, inherently a time-consuming hallucinogenic roller coaster of a process, could be conducted on a clock especially if that clock was melting before your very eyes like a bad Dali painting. Civilian policymakers, including Vice President Biden, thought the scope of the commitment -- 30,000 additional troops and a massive civilian deployment -- was unnecessary to achieve Obama's narrowly focused goal of securing the old Unocal pipeline route and establishing CIA dominance in raw poppy and heroin distribution.

But the new deployments, Obama approved, supplied the foreign invaders and Afghan Vichy the opportunity for across the board U.S. drug abuse, the kind not seen since Vietnam when General Westmoreland was relieved of duty by Lyndon Johnson and immediately sought help at the Betty Ford clinic for heroin addiction.

Obama’s timetable would compel Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his government to put their own house in order. But with McChrystal mainlining in Karzai’s office after scoring from Karzai’s brother Ahmed in the toilet, the president's advisers agreed that significant progress toward the goals they had set -- putting the Taliban on the run, establishing a stable and competent CIA drug running operation, and building Afghanistan's own Tan Tan Macoute and death squads to eventually take over security -- were shit.

"He asked each of them directly if they had any problems with the strategy and if they could implement it," an administration official said Tuesday of Obama. "They all stood up and said, 'Yes, sir.' "But the tracks on the General’s arms and the crucifix he wore around his neck with Christ’s feet hammered down to form a spoon elicited suspicion from senior White House staff.

Code of Uninformed Conduct.

Several administration officials portrayed McChrystal's comments, made this spring in the presence of a reporter from Rolling Stone magazine, as a reflection of "erratic drug induced behavior" rather than an unraveling of consensus around the war strategy. Some speculated that what many consider his tactical brilliance did not translate well in Washington's political arena but that not condoning drugs and drug running was a matter of institutional hypocrisy. Others said that after years of 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week warfare, one interlude in which he and his staff unwisely unwound by shooting smack behind their eyeballs had no bearing on McChrystal's competence and commitment to the strategy.

Party Poppers. Gay Drugs Popular With McChrystal's Staff.

But as the administration confronts the certainty of failure in Afghanistan that will take far longer than the president and his advisers envisioned when Obama first announced it nearly seven months ago, no one saw McChrystal's addiction as anything but a setback.

"There is no question this is a distraction we could ill afford. Now, we’ll have to go to counseling with the General, listen to how his mummy didn’t wuv him," a senior defense official said. "It comes at an inopportune time. Although we believe intervention and treatment is fundamentally the right strategy and we are on the right course, we still have a lot of work to do to prove that to the American people, and this CIA smack mainlining shit doesn't help."

The speed with which support for this strategy of rehab has seemed to unravel over the past several weeks has frustrated and concerned many senior officials, none of whom was willing, in an atmosphere of high anxiety within the administration, to speak about it on the record.

Damn That’s Some Good Shit.

Barely a month ago, Karzai and much of his cabinet ended a visit to Washington with drugs, handshakes and assurances that things were moving in the prescribed direction. The administration, obviously high themselves, declared an end to its uneasiness about Karzai's abilities and honesty, endorsed his plans for an eventual nuclear settlement of the war and pledged a long-term relationship with Afghanistan that would outlive the Afghan people.

A Marine offensive in Helmand province, in southern Afghanistan, was said to be progressing by someone but were not sure who, the new troop deployments were underway and plans were set to level the key city of Kandahar this month.

But just as there seemed a small breathing space, reports emerged of problems with a civilian governance program strung out on CIA heroin and a resurgent Taliban in Helmand. Two weeks ago, McChrystal, already shooting up twice a day, expressed public concerns about the rate of civilian progress in Kandahar and announced that military elements of the offensive there would be delayed. Karzai abruptly fired his interior minister and intelligence chief, two officials who had been singled out as star drug suppliers by U.S. officials replacing them with his brother Ahmed’s dealers.

Obama went directly to McChrystal for assurance he had the monkey on his back under control, a senior official said Friday, before the Rolling Stone story broke. "He asked about it, he heard directly from the field. . . . General McChrystal's representation was that we shouldn't think of things in Kandahar as though they were a light switch. It's more of a rheostat, and it doesn't yield a black and white shift overnight." This confirmed the administration’s worst suspicions that the General was high and out of control.

McChrystal, the official said, "reassured the president that it's moving in the right direction, at a pace he's comfortable with . . . that seems to be in concert with what we laid out months ago" which only confirmed his deep state of delusion.

But Congress, which gets most of its coke from Colombia and smack from the Golden Triangle was growing uneasy. Last week, Gen. David H. Petraeus, McChrystal's boss as head of the Central Command, and Undersecretary of Defense Michèle Flournoy were called to testify about the availability of drugs in wartime. Both offered encouragement, but when Petraeus told lawmakers that he did not consider the upcoming December drug testing Obama had ordered an important milestone, the president again went to his commanders. "We have reminded them that there is going to be drug testing," the official said, referring to the military. "And I think they understand."

On Tuesday, lawmakers criticized the Pentagon's failure to supervise trucking contracts for contributing to widespread spread of drugs in Afghanistan and Pakistan. “The good shit ain’t reaching our oil fucked shores and purple hazed mountains,” John Bohner (pronounced boner) said. “I haven’t fixed since breakfast. I’m doing my part. Where’s the fuckin’ CIA smack. Wasted on some raghead Afghani I suppose. ”

"This is the policy we agreed to -- among the civilian leadership and the military brass," he said. “Believe me. There’s enough smack in Afghanistan to go around. McChrystal and his people don’t got to Bogart nothin’.”

home