Open Thread

“bullet” Jacob Hornberger says that Lou Dobbs should take responsibility for the death of a border agent.

What Dobbs fails to comprehend, however, is that he himself, along with other supporters of the war on drugs, are morally responsible for the death of that Border Patrol agent. That is, Dobbs and other drug-war supporters cannot escape moral responsibility for the agent‰s death by simply pointing to the legal (and moral) responsibility of the drug dealers who killed him.
“Dobbs and his drug-war cohorts just cannot let go of their beloved war, not even when it has gone on for more than three decades, with nothing but death, destruction, corruption, and failure to show for it.”
If the drug war had been ended years ago, as libertarians have long advocated, there would be no more drug gangs and drug lords. Those types of people survive and prosper only in black markets, not regular markets. If drugs were legalized, the people selling drugs would be pharmacies and other normally operating businesses, just as they were before U.S. officials made the sale and distribution of drugs illegal.

“bullet” Interesting article from the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, which puts Walters’ recent outburst against Chavez in some additional perspective:
Colombia: The Blitz is On

A prime weapon in the U.S. inventory to reduce Ch½vez to size and build up Colombia‰s President Uribe is a recent government-funded report produced by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), which claims that the South American nation, Colombia, is safely ‹back from the brink of crisis.Š But in terms of its conceptualization and implementation, the contracted document and the campaign surrounding its publication raises serious questions. These include the conservative organization‰s objectivity due to its longtime advocacy of Plan Colombia, and its vigorous support of the pending free trade pact with Bogot½.
The CSIS Colombia project is more about being part of a well-timed public relations campaign than about bona fide research.

“bullet” Richard Holbrooke, former ambassador says we’re Still Wrong in Afghanistan

“I’m a spray man myself,” President Bush told government leaders and American counter-narcotics officials during his 2006 trip to Afghanistan.æ He said it again when President Hamid Karzai visited Camp David in August.æ Bush meant, of course, that he favors aerial eradication of poppy fields in Afghanistan, which supplies over 90 percent of the world’s heroin.æ His remarks — which, despite their flippant nature, were definitely not meant as a joke — are part of the story behind the spectacularly unsuccessful U.S.æ counter-narcotics program in Afghanistan.

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“bullet” A student newspaper at Arizona State University goes a little deeper into the drug trade than most I’ve read.
“bullet” “drcnet”