Secuencias variopintas del genoma humano

A map of human genome variation from population-scale sequencing

• The 1000 Genomes Project Consortium

Aquí ofrezco alguna información acerca de un proyecto muy importante. Se trata del estudio del genoma humano a distintos niveles, a fin de reconocer las variaciones de secuencias y vincularlas con distintas funciones y fenotipos (la manera que se expresa una variación genética). Un estudio que puede compararse a la pesca en profundidad dentro del genoma humano. De momento ha arrojado 15 millones de polimorfismos de un nucleótido, un millón de inserciones cortas y hasta 20,000 variantes estructurales hasta ahora desconocidas.

• Affiliations
• Contributions
• Corresponding author

Nature 467,1061–1073

Abstract: 

Introduction

 

Data generation, alignment and variant discovery

 

Power to detect variants

Genotype accuracy

 

Putative functional variants

 

Application to association studies

Mutation, recombination and natural selection

 

Discussion

 

Methods

 

Change history

 

References

Acknowledgements

 

Author information

 

Supplementary information

 

Comments

The 1000 Genomes Project aims to provide a deep characterization of human genome sequence variation as a foundation for investigating the relationship between genotype and phenotype. Here we present results of the pilot phase of the project, designed to develop and compare different strategies for genome-wide sequencing with high-throughput platforms. We undertook three projects: low-coverage whole-genome sequencing of 179 individuals from four populations; high-coverage sequencing of two mother–father–child trios; and exon-targeted sequencing of 697 individuals from seven populations. We describe the location, allele frequency and local haplotype structure of approximately 15 million single nucleotide polymorphisms, 1 million short insertions and deletions, and 20,000 structural variants, most of which were previously undescribed. We show that, because we have catalogued the vast majority of common variation, over 95% of the currently accessible variants found in any individual are present in this data set. On average, each person is found to carry approximately 250 to 300 loss-of-function variants in annotated genes and 50 to 100 variants previously implicated in inherited disorders. We demonstrate how these results can be used to inform association and functional studies. From the two trios, we directly estimate the rate ofde novo germline base substitution mutations to be approximately 10⁻⁸ per base pair per generation. We explore the data with regard to signatures of natural selection, and identify a marked reduction of genetic variation in the neighbourhood of genes, due to selection at linked sites. These methods and public data will support the next phase of human genetic research.

Subject terms:

• Genetics and genomics

At a glance

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Introduction

Fertilidad a largo plazo: ¿realidad o mentira?

Reproductive biology: Fertile mind

Jonathan Tilly defied decades of dogma by suggesting that women can make new eggs throughout their lives. Now some of his critics are taking a second look.

• Trisha Gura

14 November 2012

¿Tienen los ovarios la capacidad de producir ovocitos de forma indefinida?. O lo que es igual: todo lo que se dice ahora  de que  los mamíferos  nacen dotados de un número fijo de óvulos que limita la capacidad reproductora hasta cierta edad, no se ajusta a la verdad. El médico Jonathan Tilly desafía aquí el dogma básico de la fisiología reproductiva femenina. En el presente artículo de "Nature" encontrarán sus argumentos y los de sus acérrimos críticos. Trisha Gura ofrece un excelente trabajo al alcance de todos.

SAM OGDEN

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Jonathan Tilly likes to gauge the significance of his work by the hair on the backs of his arms. “Look at it standing up,” he says, thrusting out his forearm on a mid-August afternoon. A reproductive biologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Tilly was explaining a procedure to retrieve stem cells from the ovaries of a sterile woman. This experiment, he hopes, will help to quell criticism of his most controversial claim: that ovaries have the potential to make eggs indefinitely. This defies the long-held dogma that female mammals are born with all the oocytes (precursors to eggs) they will ever produce, a population that dwindles with age and is exhausted at menopause.

Tilly first challenged that doctrine in 2004, in a paper¹ suggesting that the oocytes in mouse ovaries are being replenished by stem cells. If properly understood, such cells could be harnessed to generate fresh eggs for women with fertility problems, or even achieve a goal Tilly has been pursuing for 25 years: delaying or halting menopause. “The hairs are still up,” Tilly says. It “happens every time I think about that experiment”.

He has since published a parade of headline-grabbing papers, culminating this year in a report² that he had isolated the elusive stem cells from human ovaries and coaxed them to develop into bona fide oocytes. But his work has been dogged by doubt. Some researchers question his methods and reasoning. Others have tried, and failed, to repeat his experiments. Tilly “always makes what I call ‘big satellites’, something tremendous in the sky,” says molecular biologist Kui Liu at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “He exaggerates,” Liu says, and produces a “big press release”. “A few years later, people realize, ‘Oh, not right’.”

Tilly says he has weathered a lot of attacks. “When I made the decision to pursue this, it was out of pure excitement that we found something that could revolutionize the field. It never even crossed my mind that it would be so negative and so nasty. And it really is negative and nasty.”

Nature Podcast

Trisha Gura discusses Jonathan Tilly’s controversial work.

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But now the stand-off of mistrust, and sometimes open contempt, has taken a strange twist. Two of Tilly’s most vociferous critics have become his collaborators: one serving on the board of advisers at his start-up company, OvaScience in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the other working directly with the stem cells that Tilly had isolated. “These cells are doing things in vitro that can really start to address scientific problems,” says Evelyn Telfer, a reproductive biologist at the University of Edinburgh,UK, who was doubtful of Tilly’s work in the past. “If we are really interested in the science ... then this is a great tool.”

A counting problem

The ‘no new eggs’ doctrine has a long history. In 1951, the influential anatomist Solly Zuckerman, at the University of Birmingham, UK, performed an in-depth analysis of evidence available at the time. He concluded that none of it effectively countered a proposal from the 1870s stating that female mammals stop producing oocytes after birth³.

For the first 15 years of his career, Tilly focused mainly on programmed cell death, or apoptosis, and he was struck by the fact that no one had ever quantified the loss of eggs due to ovulation and natural oocyte death over time. So beginning around 1999, Tilly commandeered a microscope and mouse ovarian tissue in order to count the follicles, the cellular compartments in which oocytes develop, in mice at different ages. He found a mathematical imbalance: the number of degenerated follicles was three times higher than expected on the basis of the starting pool. If the mice were losing oocytes at this rate, their eggs should be depleted far sooner than they actually were. Something had to be replacing them, he concluded: stem cells were the likely culprit.

Related stories

• Mouse stem cells lay eggs
• Egg-making stem cells found in adult ovaries
• Ageing: Much ado about ageing

More related stories

Few were willing to accept the idea. It took Tilly two years — and numerous rejections and revisions — to get the data published inNature, in 2004. Controversy ensued over his methods as well as his conclusions. One critique said, for example, that it was “alarming” that Tilly used the rate of follicle disappearance in one mouse strain to calculate loss for another⁴.

Tilly dropped most of his apoptosis work and steered his entire lab towards proving the existence and functionality of these stem cells. “You are sort of standing on the precipice wondering whether or not you should make the jump,” he says. “Getting the 2004 paper published was for me the jump, because there was no turning back at that point.”

A year later, Tilly reported that he had identified the source of these putative cells: bone marrow⁵. When he transplanted either marrow or blood from healthy mouse donors into sterile mice, the animals could produce cells that looked like oocytes. But he could not yet fertilize the resulting eggs and create embryos — the true test of an egg stem cell.

At least six groups challenged the bone-marrow finding. In one critique⁶, a group led by Telfer wrote that none of Tilly’s experiments had successfully been replicated, and that the results could be interpreted in other ways. Critics also asserted that Tilly was overreaching, particularly in media interviews.

“There are a lot of people struggling to understand how this can possibly work.”

In The Boston Globe in 2005, for example, Tilly is quoted as saying: “They’re your own cells; you don’t need anybody’s approval. They go right into your blood supply and go right to your ovaries, where they mature into eggs.” David Albertini, a reproductive biologist at the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, calls such claims outrageous: “A lot of us reproductive biologists feel that this is a frank travesty that has falsely raised the hopes of many women.”

Tilly defended his comments and challenged his peers to go back to their labs and reproduce his experiments. Several did. In 2006, stem-cell biologist Amy Wagers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and her collaborators stitched together the circulatory systems of two mice⁷. One, the donor, expressed green fluorescent protein (GFP) in its cells. The other did not. The scientists found that although green, glowing, blood-borne cells could infiltrate the ovaries of the recipient mice, these cells acted like blood cells, not oocytes.

Tilly, in response, performed a similar experiment, showing that mice sterilized by chemotherapy could give birth after a bone-marrow transplant⁸. But the babies did not express GFP, indicating that the eggs from which they were derived came from the recipient, not the donor. Tilly argued that the bone marrow either protected existing oocytes or revived oocyte formation, but critics argued that the chemotherapy probably didn’t kill off all the recipient’s oocytes in the first place.

Shanghai surprise

With little independent replication of his work, Tilly was standing alone through much of the fray. Then, in 2009, Ji Wu at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China and her colleagues reported that they had isolated from mice what she called “female germline stem cells” — not from bone marrow, but from ovarian tissue⁹. When her team transplanted the cells into chemotherapy-treated female mice, they developed into mature oocytes, then fertilizable eggs and, the clincher, healthy pups.

Although previously sceptical of the prospect, Telfer says that when she read Wu’s paper in 2009 she paused, thinking “there must be something in this”. She had met Tilly at the bar during a scientific meeting the year before and they talked about their differences. After Wu’s paper, the two co-authored a commentary that articulated something like a truce¹⁰. “Although these findings do not establish that oogenesis occurs in adult females under physiological conditions,” Tilly and Telfer wrote, “they strongly support the existence of [germline stem cells] in adult mouse ovaries. If equivalent cells can be found in human ovaries, stem-cell-based rejuvenation of the oocyte reserve in ovaries on the verge of failure may one day be realized.”

Many set out to replicate Wu’s results, including Tilly. And in February, he reported the isolation of what he called “oogonial stem cells” from human ovaries². By injecting the cells into human ovarian tissue transplanted into mice, he was able to generate both follicles and what seemed to be mature oocytes (see Nature 483, 16; 2012).

“So now we have two different labs, using conceptually a similar protocol, and both groups got confirmatory data,” he says. “We felt at that point there should be no more debate.”

But there was. Critics soon began pointing out a problem shared by both the teams’ approaches. Each identify their respective stem cells using antibodies meant to bind a cell-surface protein, a common technique in cell biology. But the protein they target, called vasa, normally sits inside the cell, not on its surface. “There are a lot of people in the field struggling to understand how this can possibly work,” says Patricia Hunt, a reproductive biologist at Washington State University in Pullman.

Tilly says that although mature oocytes do not express vasa on their surface, his cells — which are a cross between embryonic precursors and full-blown oocytes — do. Vasa, he says, becomes non-detectable on the cell surface as the cells mature into eggs. But, he adds, “We don’t have any proof of that yet.”

Liu in Sweden says that he initially believed Wu’s paper when it came out. But his group could not repeat the technique. To bypass the cell-surface problem with vasa, Liu used an approach that tracks the protein inside the cells¹¹. He was able to extract ovarian, vasa-expressing cells, but none of them underwent division — a major criterion for stem cells.

Wu contends that her cell-isolation technique is not easy to perform and invites scientists to come to her lab to learn it. She adds that Liu’s group “didn’t use our protocol of isolating the cells. So how to compare?”

In fact, Tilly says that his lab had trouble repeating Wu’s protocol, too. Eventually, his team retrieved cells but “found consistent oocyte contamination”. He had to modify the protocol to retrieve the mouse and human oogonial stem cells, and they differed in size from those Wu had isolated. Wu says that her cells and Tilly’s are probably “subtypes” of each other and that there is still “a lot of work to do” to figure out exactly how they are related.

Telfer, meanwhile, has begun to collaborate with Tilly. After going to Boston in 2011 to observe his human stem cells, she was impressed, and took a sample back to Scotland. Her team had worked out a culture system using mouse and cow tissues to grow egg precursor cells into fertilizable eggs entirely outside the body. With Tilly’s cells she needed to adapt the technique for use in humans. “The first experiments blew me away, just blew me away,” she says. Tilly’s cells, she found, grew rapidly into oocyte-like structures. “I spent the whole night trying to find another explanation other than new follicles had formed,” she says. “And I could not come up with one.”

Telfer has applied for permission from the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority to attempt to fertilize the cells; such experiments are forbidden using US federal funding. If successful, the technique to make fertilizable human eggs outside the body could eventually be disseminated to fertility clinics throughout the world.

Boundaries and backlash

The cells are also being used at OvaScience, which was founded in April 2011 and has secured US$48 million in venture capital. The company is exploiting Tilly’s cells in several ways. One aim is to rejuvenate egg cells from older women by adding fresh cytoplasm and mitochondria. The research builds on a controversial experimental fertility technique in which egg cells are injected with cytoplasm from another woman’s eggs. The OvaScience approach would use mitochondria extracted from the mother’s own oogonial stem cells, which Tilly says would be healthier than those from an ageing mother’s eggs, and should skirt some of the ethical and safety questions raised by using donor mitochondria. OvaScience plans to begin clinical trials this year in collaboration with two Boston-based fertility clinics.

Tilly’s oogonial stem cells will also serve as a screening tool for new drugs that might block or boost egg production. Such drugs might help reverse infertility or even help delay or halt menopause. Albertini still worries that such claims inflate hopes but, like Telfer, he is trying to keep an open mind. The prospect of new models for screening fertility drugs convinced him to join OvaScience’s scientific advisory board. “There are a lot of things that I know and I do that could be helpful to them,” he says.

The company is swiftly moving forward, steered by the team that guided Sirtris, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a biotech firm focused on anti-ageing therapies. In fact, it was a collaboration between Tilly and Sirtris’s founder, David Sinclair, at Harvard Medical School in Boston, that sparked the launch of OvaScience.

He and Tilly are “mutual admirers”, Sinclair says, explaining that they joined forces in 2009 to explore the idea that egg quality declines with age because older eggs lack enough energy to support fertilization. Sinclair offers his anti-ageing expertise and his experience of controversy; some of the initial results on which Sirtris was founded could not be replicated and have been a source of contention in the field (see Nature 464, 480–481; 2010).

“It is an interesting team that Jon and I make,” Sinclair says, “because the two of us push the boundaries of science. And both of us have encountered backlashes in doing so.”

Still, despite his characteristic gumption and ebullience, Tilly seems to be burdened by the continual sparring. Although he’s shifted much of his time to studying oogonial stem cells in the ovary, he still maintains that bone-marrow stem cells might also create new eggs. His critics disagree, and even if they accept the existence of oogonial stem cells, they still question whether such cells normally function to produce new eggs.

“The data provided so far don’t support this concept,” says Albertini. Tilly maintains that these stem cells must be doing something in the body. But in exasperation, he is willing to concede that it may not matter in the clinic. “If you could take these cells outside the body, and get them to make a functional egg that can make a normal healthy baby, what do you care about the physiology?”

Nature 491, 318–320 (15 November 2012)

 

Los chicos son coquetos

Asisto regularmente al gimnasio municipal, que si bien no es nada glamouroso, reune las condiciones mínimas para hacer lo que me gusta: practico ejercicios aeróbicos con la bici estática y la cinta para correr que la verdad me gusta bastante menos. Cuando me subo a la bici llevo un libro bueno y eso me asegura mayor rendimiento. Después hago mis cositas moderadas con las máquinas. Ese es el momento que aprovecho para espiar a los chicos/tíos. Si, me encanta espiarlos. Hay que ver las posturitas sexi, los gemidos, Dios mío, y las miradas prendidas de los espejos. Son muy pero que muy coquetos, narcisistas ellos. Y si escucharan las conversaciones: se dicen recetas de porquerías que toman "para quemar la grasa". Y no faltan los pobres flaquitos esmirriados que se dejan la piel con las mancuernas. Les puedo asegurar que lo de los musculitos es verdadero "trending topic". Hace mucho que la preocupación por lograr un cuerpazo 10 ha dejado de ser cuestión exclusiva de las pobres mujeres que se ven obligadas a combatir cualquier resto de grasa abdominal. Ellos ya han caído en la trampa de la imagen. Y aquí va la historia un poco científica procedente del NYT (ah por cierto el ultra famoso NYT escribió  que Cristiano Ronaldo era brasileño, manda huevos que no se enteren de algo tan crucial, vamos). Según un estudio dado a conocer el lunes en "Pediatrics", más del 40% de los estudiantes de enseñanza media y bachillerato consultados dijeron que hacían ejercicios regularmente a fin de incrementar su masa muscular. El 30% dijo consumir suplementos de proteinas y un 6% reconoció tomar esteroides. Un psiquiatra reporta un notable cambio de actitud respecto a la apariencia en los varones. Pues eso, lo que yo ya había constatado en el gimnasio está avalado por datos científicos.

"In a study to be published on Monday in the journal Pediatrics, more than 40 percent of boys in middle school and high school said they regularly exercised with the goal of increasing muscle mass. Thirty-eight percent said they used protein supplements, and nearly 6 percent said they had experimented with steroids.

Over all, 90 percent of the boys in the survey — who lived in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, but typify what doctors say is a national phenomenon — said they exercised at least occasionally to add muscle.

“There has been a striking change in attitudes toward male body image in the last 30 years,” said Dr. Harrison Pope, a psychiatry professor at Harvard who studies bodybuilding culture and was not involved in the study. The portrayal of men as fat-free and chiseled “is dramatically more prevalent in society than it was a generation ago,” he said.

While college-age men have long been interested in bodybuilding, pediatricians say they have been surprised to find that now even middle school boys are so absorbed with building muscles. And their youth adds an element of risk.

Just as girls who count every calorie in an effort to be thin may do themselves more harm than good, boys who chase an illusory image of manhood may end up stunting their development, doctors say, particularly when they turn to supplements — or, worse, steroids — to supercharge their results.

“The problem with supplements is they’re not regulated like drugs, so it’s very hard to know what’s in them,” said Dr. Shalender Bhasin, a professor of medicine at Boston. 

Los trapos sucios de la CIA

The Petraeus Affair vs. the CIA’s Long Criminal History
By Julie Lévesque


para Global Research, November 15, 2012


Url of this article:
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-petraeus-affair-vs-the-cias-long-criminal-history/5311818

Confieso que me he criado escuchando hablar de la famosa CIA. Cuando era una tierna infante en la Kuba de Fidel, resultaba algo así como el lobo de Caperucita o la reina malísima de Blanca Nieves. La culpa de todas las desgracias recaía en la CIA. La Compañía, nacida en 1947, era efectivamente, una enemiga acérrima del gobierno de Fidel. Para desgracia de los espías estadounidenses, por una mezcla de motivos los cuales intuyo que todavía no deben tener demasiado claros, fracasaron en todos y cada uno de los intentos, algunos muy imaginativos, para asesinar al Comandante barbudo. Por cierto, existe una colección de los medios usados por la Agencia de Langley (y sus corifeos kubanos) que se puede contemplar en un museo sui generis cito en la Quinta Avenida habanera. Bromitas aparte a costa de la Agencia tal vez menos lista del planeta, invito a las/los codondesastreros de pro que lean el artículo de Lévesque.


The Petraeus Affair has demonstrated yet again how a sex scandal story can be fed into the U.S. media to serve both as a trigger for “political assassination” and as “the tree hiding the forest.” Even though what lies behind the salacious smoke screen is still the object of speculation, most of those speculations are more credible than a simple extramarital affair.
One of the possible explanations of Petraeus’ departure is his stance on Israel which he saw as a liability to US interests in the Middle East:
“The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in the AOR [Area of Operations]. Israeli-Palestinian tensions often flare into violence and large-scale armed confrontations. The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel. Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the AOR and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world. Meanwhile, al-Qaeda and other militant groups exploit that anger to mobilize support. The conflict also gives Iran influence in the Arab world through its clients, Lebanese Hizballah and Hamas.” (Ali Abunimah, When Former CIA Chief David Petraeus Enraged the Israel Lobby, Electronic Intifada, November 12, 2012.)
As Stephen Lendman observes, sex scandals don’t necessarily lead to resignations unless state secrets are at stake:
Forget resignation over extramarital sex nonsense unless state secrets were compromised. Lots of elected and appointed Washington officials had affairs. Many likely have current ones. Resignations don’t generally follow. Newt Gingrich survived sex and ethics scandals. He resigned as House Speaker after the Republicans faired poorly in 1998 off-year elections [...]
Overlooked are secret CIA Benghazi operations. Involved are heavy weapons sent to Syrian opposition fighters. Petraeus left days before his scheduled congressional testimony [...] The Benghazi operation is erroneously called a US consulate. It’s “a meeting place to coordinate aid for the rebel-led insurgencies in the Middle East.”
Tasks performed include “collaborating with Arab countries on the recruitment of fighters – including jihadists – to target Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria.”Consulate designation provides cover. Obama and Clinton call the post a “US mission.” The State Department lists no consulate in Benghazi. (Stephen Lendman, Petraeus: Resignation or Sacking?, Global Research, November 12, 2012.)
Knowing the CIA’s shadow history, the cover-up of a secret CIA operation supporting terrorists used as proxy warriors to overthrow a foreign government seems the most likely explanation for Petraeus’ departure as Washington’s Blog explains:
Whatever the scope of the CIA’s operation in Benghazi – and whatever the real reason for the resignation of the CIA chief – the key is our historical and ongoing foreign policy.
For decades, the U.S. has backed terrorists for geopolitical ends.
The U.S. government has been consistently planning regime change in Syria and Libya for 20 years, and dreamed of regime change – using false flag terror – for 50 years.
Obama has simply re-packaged Bush and the Neocons’ “war on terror” as a series of humanitarian wars.
And the U.S. and its allies will do anything to topple Iran ... and is systematically attempting to pull the legs out from Iran’s allies as a way to isolate and weaken that country. (Why Did CIA Director Petraeus Resign? Why Was the U.S. Ambassador to Libya Murdered?, Washington’s Blog, November 10, 2012.)
Regime change through terrorism is not the sole vocation of the CIA. Over the years it has proven to be very efficient in money laundering, arms and drug trafficking. Was the drug/arms trade called “The Enterprise” in the Iran-Contragate just an isolated misdeed? Several testimonies of former CIA, DEA and police officials, in addition to numerous books, articles and documentaries on the CIA indicate it was just business as usual.
At a very turbulent town hall meeting November 15, 1996 former LAPD Narcotics Detective Michael Ruppert told then CIA Director John Deutch quite bluntly: “I will tell you Director Deutch as a former Los Angeles Police Narcotics Detective that the Agency has dealt drugs throughout this country for a long time.” The crowd started cheering loudly. A crack cocaine epidemic had been ravaging LA’s poor neighbourhoods since the early 80’s and had devastating effects on the black community. (Watch the video: Former LA Police Officer Mike Ruppert Confronts CIA Director John Deutch on Drug Trafficking)
Michael Ruppert was recruited to protect the Agency’s drug operations in the US. He had the evidence to prove it. He got shot at and was kicked out of LAPD because of it.
Earlier that year, San Francisco Chronicle journalist Gary Webb published a series of articles about the L.A. crack explosion titled The Dark Alliance. The story behind the crack explosion:

For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found. This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the crack capital of the world. (The Dark Alliance. The story behind the crack explosion, San Jose Mercury News.)

While he was working for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Michael Levine witnessed how the CIA AND the State Department were protecting the drug trade:

The Chang Mai factory the CIA prevented me from destroying was the source of massive amounts of heroin being smuggled into the US in the bodies and body bags of GIs killed in Vietnam. (p. 165)

My unit, the Hard Narcotics Smuggling Squad, was charged with investigating all heroin and cocaine smuggling through the Port of New York. My unit became involved in investigating every major smuggling operation known to law enforcement. We could not avoid witnessing the CIA protecting major drug dealers. Not a single important source in Southeast Asia was ever indicted by US law enforcement. This was no accident. Case after case was killed by CIA and State Department intervention and there wasn’t a damned thing we could do about it. CIA-owned airlines like Air America were being used to ferry drugs throughout Southeast Asia, allegedly to support our “allies.” CIA banking operations were used to launder drug money. (pp. 165, 166) (Michael Levine, America’s “War on Drugs”: CIA- Recruited Mercenaries and Drug-Traffickers, wanttoknow.info, January 13, 2011.)

The Jamaican Shower Posse is another criminal organization which thrived with the help of the CIA and the American governement:

With the recent violence in Jamaica and the controversy over alleged drug lord, Christopher “Dudus” Coke, many people are talking about the infamous Jamaican Shower Posse and the neighborhood of Tivoli Gardens, where they have their base. What is being ignored largely by the media, is the role that the American government and the CIA had in training, arming and giving power to the Shower Posse.

It is interesting that the USA is indicting Christopher “Dudus” Coke, the current leader of the Shower Posse for drug and gun trafficking, given that the CIA was accused of smuggling guns into Jamaica and facilitating the cocaine trade from Jamaica to America in the 70s and 80s. In many ways Dudus was only carrying on a tradition of political corruption, drug running, guns and violence that was started with the help of the CIA [...]

Former CIA agent, Philip Agee, said “the CIA was using the JLP as its instrument in the campaign against the Michael Manley government, I’d say most of the violence was coming from the JLP, and behind them was the CIA in terms of getting weapons in and getting money in.” Casey Gane-McCalla, Jamaica’s Shower Posse: How The CIA Created “The Most Notorious Criminal Organization” Newsone, June 3, 2010.)

Back in 1995, Philip Agee (Nota de edición: Agee era/es un  agente "arrepentido" que publicó un libro, por cierto, bastante malo, con sus experiencias en misiones para la CIA) also warned:

[O]ther targets which are coming up all the time in terms of the intelligence community are the rogue states – the so-called rogue states: Iraq, Libya, Iran, North Korea and, for some, Syria. (Video: Philip Agee – Inside the CIA (the Intelligence Community)(1995)(1-9)(MODERN GOVERNMENT series))

Iraq and Libya have been dealt with. Syria is the current victim and Iran and North Korea are being threatened regularly by the US. Forget WMDs, and the Arab Spring. Those, just as the Petraeus Affair, are only smoke screens and mirrors.

And most of all, forget the “War on Terror” and the “War on Drugs”.

Afghanistan’s opium production, which had been virtually eradicated under the Taliban, has been booming under US occupation and US troops admitted they were protecting poppy fields. (Washington’s Blog, Are American Troops Protecting Afghan Opium?, October 28, 2012.)

The CIA, the US military as well as other governmental agencies are allegedly linked to the Mexican drug war and their goal is said to be far from their stated objective:

A high-ranking Mexican drug cartel operative [Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla] currently in U.S. custody is making startling allegations that the failed federal gun-walking operation known as “Fast and Furious” isn’t what you think it is.

It wasn’t about tracking guns, it was about supplying them — all part of an elaborate agreement between the U.S. government and Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa Cartel to take down rival cartels [...]

Zambada-Niebla claims that under a “divide and conquer” strategy, the U.S. helped finance and arm the Sinaloa Cartel through Operation Fast and Furious in exchange for information that allowed the DEA, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agencies to take down rival drug cartels. The Sinaloa Cartel was allegedly permitted to traffic massive amounts of drugs across the U.S. border from 2004 to 2009 — during both Fast and Furious and Bush-era gunrunning operations — as long as the intel kept coming. (Jason Howerton, Mexican Drug Cartel was working alongside the US Government, The Blaze 9 August 2012.)

Compared to all these crimes, an extramarital affair is quite insignificant.

CIA At-A-Glance: En el portal oficial de la CIA se puede encontrar información actualizada de sus misiones y estructura.

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