Horses in midstream
I recall when the whole drugs fund terror commercials came out and everyone said, basically, it was bullshit. At the time, I knew those saying it was bullshit were wrong. Drugs make money quickly and easily, if you don’t get killed or arrested. It was only natural to assume terrorists figured that out too.
Any way, now it seems that anti-drug war crowd has realized it wasn’t bullshit too. And they’ve started using the idea to gain support for a serious look at the war on civil liberties err drugs:
On Saturday, Aug. 19, 2006, The Washington Post reported that there is dispute within the drug policy reform community over the veracity of a Drug Enforcement Administration traveling road show that connects the $ 322 annual world wide retail black market for illicit drugs and terrorism. The proliferation of stateless terrorist armies around the world, that are able to thrive and grow independent of national sponsorship in the past twenty years, should alone serve to confirm the connection. There is no other supply of untraceable capital in the world economy able to do this as efficiently as does the U.S. and U.N. imposed prohibition black market economy of the drug war. Drug-Terror Connection Disputed Washington Post.
Not only does the prohibition economy of the drug war fund terrorist armies including, I believe, alQaeda, but it provides underground logistical and tactical resources as well. International smuggling routes. Money laundering. Weapons. Heroin itself is reported to be an asymmetric weapon of bin Laden’s. Heroin that bin Laden has been flooding the west with since the mid 1990’s in order to destabilize what he perceives are decadent western societies.
There’s more. Read it.
August 21st, 2006 at 12:53 pm
Uncle:
I would not have scratched out ‘civil liberties’ in your post. The drug war is, first and foremost, the reimposition of Jim Crow in America by Richard Nixon in collusion with the Wallace southern wing of the 1970 Democrats. It was how they neutralized the new electoral empowerment effects of the Voting Rights Act. I believe.
Here is another anti Jim Crow perspective that I posted on LeftIndependent recently.
Drug Busts=Jim Crow by Ira Glasser
For the record. You are right that most drug policy reformers oppose connecting the drug war to terrorism. I know because I have been making the connection for several years to their great disappointment in me for not towing their party line.
Your right, it only makes sense that terrorist armies would recognize the many resources and opportunities that under the table operations like terrorism get from what is now a $ 322 billion a year world wide black market economy.
The scariest thing is that the U.S. government understands the economics of this and yet they insist on contining it. They even understand that their successful interdiction of heroin in South America will drive gangs there to go to Afghanistan for product to satisfy their U.S. customer base. Afghan opium crop increased by 40%, none too soon The successes of the drug war today will serve to create the super stateless terrorist armies of the future by bringing together groups supplied by FARC and Shining Path in South America to consort with gangs in Southwest Asia, Afghanistan, who sell Taliban and alQaeda heroin.
In 2001 the U.S./Canada border drug threat assessment said that there was then an 18 metric ton annual demand for heroin in the United States. Of that they said 25% came from Afghanistan and other Asian sources. 4.5 tons a year then. Today this number is threatening to explode if the South American gangs that control U.S. distribution are forced to go to Afghanistan to replace the supply they had been getting from FARC and Shining Path types.
That will result in a direct black market smuggling connection from al Qaeda to America.
The drug war policy is the greatest threat to American national security there is today.