This week on CounterSpin: The DEA made a high profile announcement of massive seizures of opium in Afghanistan, reminding us of the centrality of opium production to the country’s economy. But most stories on the occupation and on Afghan ‘hearts and minds’ include marginal mention of the narcotic. How would really understanding the role of opium shift our understanding of US policy in Afghanistan? We’ll hear from historian Alfred McCoy, author of the classic The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, now updated as The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade.
Also on CounterSpin today, it's not hard to show that Fox News host and radio talker Glenn Beck is a bit wacky– he spends several hours every day demonstrating as much. But the paranoid theories he's espousing have real consequences. So where do they come from? Richard Kim from the Nation tried to track one of Beck's favorite conspiracies, and he'll join us to tell us how the White House's political strategy is based on an article published in the Nation 40 years ago. It all makes perfect sense