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Thursday, November 07, 2002
Trading heroin for weapons... is nothing new in the Middle East. Instapundit links to a Fox News piece about al Qaeda's heroin-for-weapons ring in San Diego, and also raps our attorney general for trying to braid the war on terror in with the war on drugs. Drugs and terror are of course related. But the war on drugs not just a massive failure but also a front for the easy flow of narcotics around the world. This book review points out, in the last long paragraph, that the CIA's point man in Pakistan during the 1980s, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar -- who supported the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviets -- was running opium from the Helmand Valley. A chapter in Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair's book Whiteout tells the same story. Drug money is how covert operations stay alive. A sane drug policy in the U.S. would therefore dry up a lot of terrorist funding; but after this week's big Republican sweep we aren't likely to get any sane talk about drugs.
posted by Michael Scott Moore |
8:18 PM
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