Well, that’s odd
After all, we all know that those drugs support terrorism commercials were a bunch of evil Republican nonsense designed to scare children:
A U.S. Navy ship operating in the Persian Gulf has captured millions of dollars worth of illegal drugs aboard a smuggling boat that authorities said was linked to the al Qaeda terrorist network of Osama bin Laden.
A boarding team from the USS Decatur, a guided-missile destroyer, discovered nearly two tons of narcotics with a street value of $8 million to $10 million aboard a 40-foot dhow that was intercepted Monday, the U.S. Central Command announced today.
December 20th, 2003 at 1:42 am
I think you’re misrepresenting the argument of the people criticizing the ads. It’s not so much that they deny that terror groups are profiting from drug traffic, but that its disingenuous to blame individual users for it, since the illegal drug trade only exists due to the blackmarket created by government drug bans, not drug use in and of itself.
December 20th, 2003 at 1:25 pm
Indeed.
I don’t know why you’d choose to paint this bit of news as a partisan issue, but since you did, I would hazard a guess that the non-Republicans that find those ads repulsive (of which I am one), find them repulsive because they are simply one tool in the vast array of failed tools in the failed “war on drugs”.
Who argues that drug money doesn’t end up in the hands of illicit traders? I sure don’t.
But the ads are merely scare tactics and moral browbeating that attempt to treat the symptoms rather than addressing the disease, which is the devestatingly addictive nature of drugs, and the arbitrary and heavy-handed criminalization of their use.
December 20th, 2003 at 4:48 pm
I agree on the drug war part but people have stated that there was no truth to the drugs fund terror bit. They are wrong.
December 20th, 2003 at 5:04 pm
Funny thing is since we “cleaned up” Afghanistan by removing the Taliban its drug production has skyrocketed. One is justified in asking how serious we are in fighting either war there.
December 20th, 2003 at 8:27 pm
SU..does this mean that you are now in favour of the war on drugs? I would point out that Clinton and other Democrat administrations have done equally ridiculous things in the name of the war on drugs.
I don’t think that there is any doubt that illegal drugs fund a lot of unsavoury activity. Both sides of the Afghanistan civil war used profits from drug production to fund their activities. The Taliban outlawed drug production several months before 9/11, but the Northern Alliance kept producing.
December 21st, 2003 at 8:51 am
No, i’ve never been for the war on drugs (or the war on civil liberties).
December 22nd, 2003 at 12:08 pm
I kind of liked the “SUVs Fund Terror” commercials that the liberal “Detroit Project” was putting out a while ago.
There is truth to those ads also: Drug money does indeed fund terror, but it’s a drop in the bucket compared to oil money.