Word: noorzai
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...York City, Noorzai says, he thought everything was going well--up until the point that he was arrested. He says he wasn't bothered that the U.S. agents had taken away his cell phone. Or that they had told his friend Babar, the former ISI colonel who accompanied him to Manhattan, that Noorzai was "not being cooperative." Noorzai thought it was curious that each day, when the interrogations began, the agents would read him his rights. He says he had no idea why his interrogators kept saying he had a right to counsel and the right to remain silent...
...could it be that senior officials in Washington were still debating whether Noorzai was an intelligence asset worth preserving? "It is conceivable," says a former intelligence analyst, "that he could have provided a stabilizing role in the south." Many questions remain unanswered about the conversations that took place among DEA, FBI and DIA officials who dealt with him. Two sources have hinted at tensions among the agencies but decline to explain when and how these were resolved. As a former senior DEA official put it, "It was a very, very sensitive case...
...Even if Noorzai wasn't fully reliable, it's fair to ask why his offer wasn't taken up. Washington may have scored a public victory in the war on drugs with his arrest. But some officials in Kabul and Washington now quietly wonder whether giving him a shot at what he said he could deliver--the allegiance of his tribe--might have been the smarter option. The government has not said that his arrest will diminish the heroin trade in Afghanistan. Indeed, the war against drugs and the war against the Taliban have to be seen as a single...
...Taliban's traditional stronghold in the south--where Noorzai's tribe lives--the radical Islamic group is actively encouraging poppy cultivation on a grand scale, a dramatic shift from its days in power when its puritanical tenets forbade drugs and drug trafficking. Why the change? As a Western diplomat in Kabul puts it, "It takes money to fund an insurgency." Of the $3 billion earned last year by Afghan narcotraffickers, roughly $800 million trickles down to the Afghan farmers who grow the crop. According to a senior Western official in Kabul, a small portion of that sum is "more than...
...willing, I look forward to my trial," Noorzai says in detention in New York City. He will have a lawyer with an imposing 6-ft. 5-in. frame and a high-profile list of legal contests, if not victories. Ivan Fisher made his name defending Jack Henry Abbott, a convicted killer whose gritty prison memoir, In the Belly of the Beast, was famously championed by Norman Mailer. Fisher is no stranger to bad guys. In the 1990s, Fisher defended Haji Ayub Afridi, a man widely believed to be one of Pakistan's major narcotraffickers, as well as someone...