The American Conservative

This is the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica. Indignation about bombing civilians seems like such a historic relic.

Unfortunately, this atrocity seems to have been almost completely forgotten in the United States. Perhaps the last time that the most famous momento of that slaughter got any attention was when Colin Powell was shilling at the United Nations in 2003 to whip up support for bombing Iraq.

Here’s an outtake from Maureen Dowd’s excellent New York Times column (February 5, 2003) on that absurdity:

Powell Without Picasso
By MAUREEN DOWD
When Colin Powell goes to the United Nations today to make his
case for war with Saddam, the U.N. plans to throw a blue cover
over Picasso’s antiwar masterpiece, “Guernica.”

Too much of a mixed message, diplomats say. As final
preparations for the secretary’s presentation were being made
last night, a U.N. spokesman explained, “Tomorrow it will be
covered and we will put the Security Council flags in front of
it.”

Mr. Powell can’t very well seduce the world into bombing Iraq
surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated women, men,
children, bulls and horses.

Reporters and cameras will stake out the secretary of state at
the entrance of the U.N. Security Council, where the tapestry
reproduction of “Guernica,” contributed by Nelson Rockefeller,
hangs.

The U.N. began covering the tapestry last week after getting
nervous that Hans Blix’s head would end up on TV next to a
screaming horse head.
______

Geez, I wonder what they would do that painting if Obama was speaking in that venue.

Congratulations to Julian Heicklen for his heroic federal court victory on the right to notify on jury nullification. Julian, an 80-year-old retired chemistry professor, has been crusading on this issue for many years. He has braved numerous arrests and suffered a vast amount of abuse. Federal judge Kimba Woods ruled yesterday that the federal charges against Julian were “complete crap.” Okay, that wasn’t her exact quote – but that was the gist.

From the New York Times article on the court ruling:

Mr. Heicklen had repeatedly stood with a “Jury Info” sign and handed out brochures supporting nullification, the view that jurors who disagree with a law may ignore their oaths and vote to acquit a defendant accused of violating it.

Prosecutors said such advocacy, “directed as it is to jurors, would be both criminal and without constitutional protections no matter where it occurred.”

But the judge, Kimba M. Wood of Federal District Court, wrote that a person violated the jury tampering statute only when he or she knowingly tried to influence a juror’s decision through a written communication “made in relation to a specific case pending before that juror.”

Judge Wood added that she would not “stretch the interpretation” of the statute to cover speech that was “not meant to influence” a juror’s actions in a specific case.

Following is the email that Julian sent out last night after learning of the victory:

Today, I was notified by Sabrina Shroff, my federal defender stand-by counsel and by Ben Weiser, the federal court reporter for the New York Times that the jury tampering case against me in the U. S. District Court in Manhattan, NY Has been dismissed. This means that the jury has the right, actually the duty, to judge the law as well as the facts. I have not yet seen either the dismissal order nor the court opinion.

This is a great victory for the country and will keep me out of federal prison. However all the federal judges in the United States should be removed from office and tried for perjury with the intent to obstruct justice, since they all instruct the jury that it must uphold the law as they give it. This is a double lie. If the jury decides to uphold the law, it must be the law in the written statute. If the judge does not provide the jury with the written statute, the jury MUST find the defendant not guilty, because of reasonable doubt.

On Monday, April 23, 2012, I will be distributing jury nullification literature on the plaza in front of the U. S. Federal Courthouse at 500 Pearl Street, Manhattan, NY 10007, from 12:00 noon to 1:00 pm. You all are invited to join me. At 1:30 pm there will be a victory luncheon for everyone who wishes to attend at their own expense at one of the best Chinese restaurants in near-by China Town. Please send me your suggestion for which restaurant you prefer.

The luncheon will to thank Sabrina Shroff and Steven Statsinger, my federal defender stand-by counsels, for their invaluable work to bring the case to a successful solution. I hope to see as many of you as possible at either the distribution or the luncheon, or both. If you plan to attend the luncheon, let me know, so that I can notify the restaurant of how many of us there will be.

One small step for a shabby old man, but a giant leap for justice and our country. On to Orlando on Tuesday, May 8, 2012.

Yours in freedom and justice—Julian

_________________________

The whoring Secret Service agents made President Obama’s visit to Colombia even more embarrassing. Prior to the G-man stiffing a hooker for her fees, the big issue at the hemispheric summit was the revolt of Latin American governments against the U.S. drug war. Much of the American media coverage on this dispute looked like it could have been written by the White House – or the DEA.

However, the U.S. government has a long history of drug war hypocrisy in Colombia. Here’s a piece I did for Playboy in 2001 on one of the more ludicrous episodes.

Playboy March 2001

HEADLINE: Snowjob: a drug warrior lines his pocket; the Colonel’s smuggling wife

by James Bovard

You probably caught the 60 Minutes interview with the drug-fighting colonel and his drug-smuggling wife. The segment had all the emotional trappings of Jerry Springer, a made-for-TV movie or an episode of Law and Order: Women who abuse drugs and the men who love them.

Laurie Hiett had a long history of drug abuse. She had even done cocaine in front of her husband, a fact he did not report in 1998 when he was placed in charge of America’s antidrug crusade in Colombia. At first, Laurie had asked her husband if she and their two children could remain in Texas, but a taste of the good life in Colombia swayed her. “I had cars, I had security, I was going to these beautiful parties, beautiful places for dinner. I was like a queen,” she said.

On a whim, she asked her Bogota chauffeur (his salary paid by U.S. taxpayers) to get her some cocaine. He returned with a kilo brick. Hiett realized she could not snort the whole kilo, so she decided to share her stash with friends in New York. In 1999 she used a U.S. Embassy pouch to ship 15 pounds–$700,000 worth–of coke and heroin to contacts in New York. She then made several trips to New York to retrieve her share of the profits, approximately $25,000.

She gave the cash to her husband. Both the colonel and his wife maintain she never told him how she got the money, and apparently he never pressed the issue. He used it to pay bills. In June 1999 Army investigators told the colonel his wife was suspected of smuggling drugs. Hiett did not reveal his wife’s sudden influx of cash. Instead, he bought money orders and paid off more bills. The evidence simply disappeared–sent to a dentist and five credit card companies, among others.

After her arrest, Laurie Hiett confessed. In January 2000 a federal judge in Brooklyn sentenced her to five years in prison.

At first, the Army handled the colonel with kid gloves. News stories reported that the Army Criminal Investigation Division in Panama had cleared him, saying he had “no prior knowledge” of his wife’s crimes. The Army transferred Hiett to another post. The official response seemed to indicate he would be allowed to retire with his $50,000-a-year pension.

Federal prosecutors were slightly less benevolent. Eventually, Colonel Hiett agreed to admit to failing to report a felony. The prosecutors asked for probation, but in April 2000 a federal judge sentenced Hiett to five months in prison, to be followed by five months of home detention. The Army fired him, effectively revoking his pension.

Most reporters presented the story as a romantic tragedy, but a few Americans saw a different picture. The Hietts had been judged by a different standard. Both had received far more lenient treatment for their crimes than other Americans could hope to receive. Laurie Hiett, who had shipped 15 pounds of heroin and cocaine into the U.S. and reveled in the profits, received the same sentence a small-time dealer would get if he were caught with five grams of crack in his pocket. Colonel Hiett also fared well. Compare his sentence with any of the cases mentioned in “Who Goes Free?” (The Playboy Forum, December 2000). Colonel Hiett said, “The only thing I did, that I did consciously, was to try to protect my wife after the fact.” Actually, what Hiett did meets the definition of structuring, a subclass of money laundering. By breaking $25,000 into small amounts, he avoided triggering a Currency Transaction Report (mandatory for transactions of $10,000 or more).

Eric Sterling, president of the Criminal Justice Policy Foundation, noted the injustice of the situation: “If Colonel Hiett had been Mr. Hiett, he would have been charged with conspiracy to traffic in more than a kilogram of heroin, with a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years. He would possibly face life without parole. He would have been charged with possession of a firearm [his Army-issued weapons] in the furtherance of drug trafficking, with a mandatory five-year consecutive sentence. If his weapon were an assault weapon or an automatic weapon, he would face a mandatory 10 years–or up to 30 years–on top of the drug sentence. Mr. Hiett would have been charged with money laundering, facing up to 20 years. Mr. Hiett would, at a minimum, have been charged with aiding and abetting his wife’s money laundering, facing 20 years.”

Most drug warriors pretended either that the Hiett case had never happened–or that it mattered little. When drug czar Barry McCaffrey appeared on a radio talk show, a listener asked about the Hiett case. “How about starting with your own people instead of decimating a country?” he asked. McCaffrey replied: “They’re not my people. These are Americans and, you know, we’ve got a woman chronically addicted to cocaine, the wife of the military group commander down there. What a tragedy. But this is going on all over the country. There are 3.6 million chronic cocaine addicts in America and every one of them produces that kind of criminality and tragedy.”

But when any of those 3.6 million is caught, they don’t get coddled.

This weekend’s hemispheric summit in Colombia could spark an open revolt against the U.S. drug war. It is most encouraging to see Latin American leaders finally declaring their independence against this disastrous policy.

I have been barking at this particular moon for a long time. Below are a few pieces I did on the DEA’s ravages in Guatemala (1993) and in Colombia (1999 and 2000). Also included are the indignant responses from the DEA chief and from the Colombian ambassador.

Washington Times
January 25, 1993, Monday, Final Edition
HEADLINE: Poisonous fallout from the drug war
BYLINE: James Bovard
DATELINE: GUATEMALA CITY, GUATEMALA

BODY: GUATEMALA CITY, Guatemala – The Bush administration set in motion a major expansion and militarization of the U.S. drug war in Latin America.

Last June, plans were disclosed to send a dozen Black Hawk military helicopters to Guatemala, Jamaica and the Dominican Republic to support U.S. government efforts to destroy local farmers’ coca and marijuana crops. But, as Guatemala illustrates, U.S. anti-drug activities are wrecking the environment, terrorizing the people, and subverting the market economies that the United States loves to champion. Luckily, the Clinton administration has an excellent opportunity to end the abuses.

In November 1991, a group of Guatemalan beekeepers filed suit against the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), claiming that the spraying had destroyed half of their industry. Last February, the Peasant Unity Committee of Guatemala sued the DEA for damages in connection with the death of a child and extensive crop destruction caused by DEA spraying. The committee’s spokesman asserted that herbicides had contaminated local drinking water and that many residents had required hospitalization after exposure to the chemicals. Andres Giron, president of a Guatemalan human rights commission, declared in 1991 that herbicide spraying had destroyed so many farmers’ corn and bean crops that serious food shortages could result in the San Marcos region of the country.

The impact of the herbicides sprayed by drug warriors on crops may not show up for several days or longer. A manager of a large farm in Central Guatemala told me that many of his shipments of yucca cane to Europe have been rejected because his plants arrive in Rotterdam and are slowly dying as a result of DEA’s drug spraying.

One U.S. diplomatic official in Guatemala said the herbicide solution being sprayed – Round-Up – is not deadly: “Even if it were drunk straight, it could not kill achild.” The official asserted that Guatemalans’ complaints about the adverse impact of the spraying should be discounted because the complaints come from “illiterate Indians” and amounted to “drug war disinformation.” But, a Peace Corps volunteer, who had spent 18 months working with Guatemalan farmers, said the pilots are spraying much more toxic concentrations than the U.S. Embassy admits. U.S. Embassy denials of the adverse effects of foreign herbicide spraying carry ominous echoes of previous U.S. denials of adverse impacts – such as in Vietnam in the 1960s. (A leading Mexican paper asserted last year that the U.S. government was also spraying Paraquat – a highly toxic carcinogen – in Guatemala.)

Though Round-Up, manufactured by Monsanto, is widely perceived to be one of the less toxic herbicides, Japanese medical professionals reported in 1988 that inert ingredients in Round-Up may have been responsible for nine deaths in Japan and more than 40 other illnesses since 1984. According to environmental toxicologist David Monroe, runoff from Round-Up use “poses a substantial risk to the Salmon fisheries” in the Northwest United States.” According to Susan Cooper of the National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides, the National Park Service has banned the use of Round-Up in some areas because it poses reproductive hazards to people doing the spraying.

The United States is giving $65 million a year to the Guatemalan government, including more than $1 million for the military to aid its role in the anti-drug effort. But, giving the Guatemalan army more weapons to fight marijuana growers is like giving the Mafia bazookas to combat jaywalking in New York City.

Last April, the Latin American Institute at the University of New Mexico reported that “specially-trained brigades now comb regions where drug farms are concentrated to rip out the plants by hand and round up drug farmers in mass arrests.” It is likely that the Guatemalan anti-drug brigades, like many American police forces, are more interested in “body counts” – maximizing thenumber of suspects arrested – than in being fair to the accused. The specter of “mass arrests” is especially disturbing in a country where mass arrests have often been followed by “mass disappearances.”

DEA agents have often behaved acted as if the drug war gives them a right to impose martial law on foreign nations. In Bolivia, DEA agents have donned black masks and gone out and destroyed newly paved roads in the jungle in order to prevent drug traffickers form utilizing them. In Mexico, Guatemala, and elsewhere, DEA agents have kidnapped those accused of drug crimes and taken them to the United States. Guatemalan farmers’ exports to the United States are routinely destroyed during Customs Service searches for illicit drugs – and the Customs Service has refused to compensate any Guatemalans for the damage. The Customs Service apparently believes that, because some Guatemalans have smuggled drugs, the U.S. government has a right to mutilate any import from Guatemala.

The U.S.-financed attacks on Guatemalan farmers are especially hypocritical because U.S. agricultural policies have destroyed the profitability of other crops that Guatemalan farmers could grow. We poison their farms if they grow marijuana but, thanks to strict U.S. import quotas, refuse to allow them to sell us more than 55,972 tons of sugar per year. U.S. export subsidies have driven down the world prices for grains, poultry and other farm products, thereby making it much more difficult for Guatemalan farmers to compete in third markets against the United States.

Exporting our drug war to Guatemala and other Latin American nations is Yankee Imperialism at its worst. Rather than poison Guatemalan farmers’ crops, we should open our markets to their bounty.

James Bovard, the author of “The Fair Trade Fraud” (St. Martin’s Press, 1991), recently visited Guatemala.

++++
Washington Times
February 18, 1993, Thursday, Final Edition
SECTION: Part G; COMMENTARY; EDITORIAL; LETTERS; Pg. G2

HEADLINE: Columnist sprays tons of misinformation over your pages
BODY:
I read with great interest James Bovard’s Jan. 25 column, “Poisonous
fallout from the drug war,” concerning drug eradication efforts in Guatemala.
Unfortunately, the article had little basis in fact and contained many
inaccuracies. Let me correct the record.

First, the spraying of herbicides to destroy drug-cultivation areas is
conducted by the government of Guatemala under a program sponsored by the
Department of State’s Bureau of International Narcotics Matters, not the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), as indicated in Mr. Bovard’s column. In
addition, the spraying of herbicides in Guatemala is primarily directed at
opium poppy crops from which heroin is derived, not at coca and marijuana
cultivation areas, as described by Mr. Bovard. In 1992, aerial spraying
eradicated 350 hectares (864.5 acres) of opium poppy in Guatemala.

The herbicide Round-Up, widely used in the United States and other countries
for agricultural and home-garden applications, has been studied extensively in
the United States. About 25 million pounds of Round-Up are sold in the U.S.
annually. Adverse human health and ecological effects are virtually nonexistent
if applications are carried out in the manner consistent with guidelines
approved by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the DEA. These
guidelines are strictly followed in Guatemala.

The EPA estimates that acute oral toxicity of Round-Up to humans to be 10
ounces per day for a 110-pound adult. The same quantity of table salt would be
more toxic. In other words, the herbicide is widely used in the United States
and other countries without ill effect to humans, animals or the environment.

In addition, the DEA is not facing lawsuits from individuals or groups in
Guatemala concerning the spraying program. Mr. Bovard’s assertions that
several lawsuits have been filed against the DEA, including one involving the
death of a child, are false.

The DEA, along with the government of Guatemala, is actively fighting drug
traffickers operating in that country. However, we certainly are not behaving
as if the “drug war gives us the right to impose martial law on foreign
nations,” as Mr. Bovard contends. The DEA and the rest of the U.S. Embassy
staff in Guatemala are working in concert with the government of Guatemala, at
its request, in order to alleviate drug production and trafficking.

Contrary to Mr. Bovard’s description of the DEA’s work in Guatemala, our
primary focus is on the use of Guatemala as a transshipment area for cocaine
bound for the United States and on the growing influence of the Columbian drug
cartels operating within the country. Counter-narcotics cooperation between the
U.S. and Guatemalan law-enforcement officers resulted in the seizure of about
15.5 metric tons of cocaine last year.

I suggest Mr. Bovard check his facts before setting himself up as an expert
on a subject as important as our relationship with other countries. When he
fails to check even basic information, he does a great disservice to your
readers.

ROBERT C. BONNER
The Washington Times, February 18, 1993
Administrator of Drug Enforcement
Drug Enforcement Administration
U.S. Department of Justice
Washington

++++++++++++++++++++

THE BALTIMORE SUN
June 1, 2000,
HEADLINE: U.S. stuck in Colombia
BYLINE: James Bovard

BODY:
THE SENATE will soon consider President Clinton’s proposed $1.6 billion
package to bankroll the government of Colombia’s war against leftist guerillas.

The aid windfall purports to help staunch the flow of drugs from Colombia.
But there is no reason to expect further U.S. anti-drug aid to be anymore
effective than past aid. Even worse, there is a growing danger that the United
States will be bumbling into a civil war.

The Clinton administration is hitting the panic buttons on the aid package;
one administration official whined to the Washington Post on Tuesday, “Every
week we are losing ground” in the fight against drugs.

While past U.S. aid has had little or no positive effect, Americans are
supposed to believe that any delay in new spending means catastrophic damage.

Colombia has received nearly $1 billion in anti-narcotics aid since 1990.
U.S. tax dollars are magnificent fertilizer: coca production is skyrocketing –
doubling since 1996 and forecast to increase another 50 percent in the next two
years. Colombia nowsupplies roughly three-quarters ofthe heroin and almost all
thecocaine consumed in the United States.

Most U.S. anti-drug aid has paid for chemical warfare: blanketing
coca-growing areas with herbicides from crop- duster planes and helicopter
gunships, a policy the Colombian minister of health strongly opposed in 1992.
Yet after continual escalation in the amount of spraying, the amount of land in
coca production is four times greater than what it was in 1994 and now exceeds
300 square miles.

“Close enough for government work” seems to be the motto of some anti-drug
pilots. The New York Times reported allegations on May 1 that U.S.-financed
planes repeatedly sprayed pesticides onto schoolchildren in a Colombian village.
Many children reportedly became ill; the spraying also killed crops, chickens
and 25,000 fish in fish farms.

The Clinton administration intensely pressured the Colombian government to
allow a much more toxic chemical (tebuthiuron, known as SPIKE 20) to be dumped
across the land, which would permit the planes to fly at much higher altitudes,
Kosovo-style.

Environmentalists warned that SPIKE 20 could poison ground water and
permanently ruin the land for agriculture. Even as the Clinton administration
decreed clean-air standards severely curtailing Americans’ exposure to chemicals
that pose little or no health threat, it sought to deluge a foreign land with a
toxic chemical in a way that would be forbidden in the United States.

The United States is foisting itself deeper into a civil war that has raged
in Colombia for decades. There are about 200 U.S. military advisers already on
site, and U.S. personnel are now actively training the Colombian military.

The Dallas Morning News recently noted reports that “tens of millions of
taxpayer dollars are going into covert operations across southern Colombia
employing, among others, U.S. Special Forces, former Green Berets, Gulf war
veterans and even a few figures from covert CIA-backed operations in Central
America during the 1980s.” The United States is providing key intelligence to
the Colombian military from U.S. intercepts of guerrilla radio messages.

Increased U.S. aid will not enable the Colombian government to win a
decisive victory over the guerrillas anytime soon. The Colombian military is
renown for losing almost all of the major engagements it fights with the
guerrillas.

Rep. Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, recently warned that if Clinton’s
$1.6 billion aid plan is approved, the United States will be locked into “a
five- to 10-year commitment, which will cost U.S. taxpayers in excess of $5
billion.”

And even if the guerrillas are defeated, it’s ludicrous to pretend that
Colombians will no longer have an incentive to grow coca, as long as U.S. laws
make that crop 20 times more profitable than any other.

American-funded drug suppression efforts have resulted in a “push down, pop
up” effect: the harder the United States works to repress coca production in one
area, the more likely production is to start up in another. It is time to
recognize the futility of trying to micromanage what foreign farmers grow.

James Bovard is the author of “Freedom in Chains,” (St. Martin’s Press,
1999). This article is adapted from an essay published by the Future of Freedom
Foundation, a think tank in Fairfax, Va.
++++

The Baltimore Sun
June 17, 2000 Saturday FINAL EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL, Pg. 9A SATURDAY MAILBOX

BODY:
Aid to Colombia helps stop drugs

James Bovard’s column “U.S. stuck in Colombia” (Opinion Commentary, June
1) mis-represented several important issues in the debate over U.S. assistance
to Colombia’s fight against narco- trafficking.

First, U.S. assistance to Colombia will not go to combat guerrilla
organizations, but for specific anti-narcotics activities such as military
equipment and training for Colombia’s armed forces and police to destroy the
infrastructure of illegal drug organizations.
And our balanced strategy will also support alternative development
programs, strengthen law enforcement institutions and help protect human rights.
Second, the increase in cocaine and heroin production in Colombia in recent
years is due in part to the success of similar U.S.-sponsored programs including
fumigation of coca and poppy crops in neighboring Bolivia and Peru.
Since 1992, Colombia has allowed the controlled aerial spraying of illicit
crops with gliphosate. Its application has been monitored and strictly
controlled and no secondary effects to the population or to the environment have
been reported.
Third, by providing assistance to Colombia, the United States is not
“bumbling into a civil war.”
Colombia is not engaged in a civil war. Guerrilla organizations account for
about 25,000 people in a nation of more than 40 million.
They are not waging an ideological argument with the government or Colombian
society, but are criminals who are engaged in violence, kidnapping, human rights
violations and drug trafficking.
The vast majority of Colombians are neither guerrillas nor drug traffickers.
We are, however, a nation that needs America’s help, not only to give us the
tools necessary to win the war against drugs we are waging in our country but to
reduce the demand for these drugs in your country.
Every shipment of illegal drugs we stop in Colombia is one that does not
reach Baltimore’s streets, neighborhoods and schools. Every month we delay the
approval of the aid package gives enormous advantage to the drug traffickers and
costs both societies thousands of human lives and tremendous lost opportunities.

Luis Alberto Moreno

Washington

The writer is Colombia’s ambassador to the United States.
++++++

Las Vegas Review-Journal (Las Vegas, NV)

October 8, 1999

HEADLINE: Military aid only fuels Colombia’s busy coke ovens

BYLINE: James Bovard
Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service

It was not a good summer for the U.S. drug war in Colombia. On July 23, five
American officers died when their high-tech spy plane went down in southern
Colombia.
The Pentagon trotted out the usual explanation: out-of-date maps. Those Andes
mountains grow awfully quickly. Other observers speculate that the plane was
shot or forced down by Marxist guerrillas.
The prestige of the administration’s policy suffered another setback when the
wife of the commander of U.S. military anti-drug operations in Colombia was
indicted last month for shipping kilos of cocaine via embassy mail to contacts
in New York. They don’t make military wives like they used to.
Colombia has received almost a billion dollars of anti-narcotics aid since 1990.
U.S. tax dollars are magnificent fertilizer: coca production is skyrocketing _
doubling since 1996 and forecast to increase another 50 percent in the next two
years.
Colombia now supplies roughly three-quarters of the heroin and almost all the
cocaine consumed in the United States.
For the Clinton administration, the obvious solution to this problem is more
U.S. tax dollars. On July 16, Drug Czar Barry McCaffrey proposed an emergency
billion-dollar anti-drug package for the Andean nations, including $ 600 million
for Colombia.
The Clinton administration subsequently indicated the aid package might go even
higher.
The United States is foisting itself deeper into a civil war that has raged in
Colombia for decades. There are approximately 200 U.S. military advisers already
on site, and U.S. personnel are now actively training the Colombia military.
The Dallas Morning News recently noted reports that “tens of millions of
taxpayer dollars are going into covert operations across southern Colombia
employing, among others, U.S. Special Forces, former Green Berets, Gulf War
veterans and even a few figures from covert CIA-backed operations in Central
America during the 1980′s.”
The United States is providing key intelligence to the Colombian military from
U.S. intercepts of guerrilla radio messages.
Congress in 1996 prohibited any U.S. foreign aid to military organizations with
a penchant for atrocities. The Colombian army has a frightful human rights
record, but few in Congress seem to care about the administration’s open
flouting of the law.
Most U.S. anti-drug aid has paid for chemical warfare: blanketing coca-growing
areas with herbicides from crop-duster planes and helicopter gun ships. Yet
after continual escalation in the amount of spraying, the amount of land in coca
production is four times greater than what it was in 1994, and now exceeds 300
square miles.
Many farmers raising non-coca crops have been devastated by herbicides dropped
indiscriminately on their fields. The Colombian minister of health strongly
opposed the initiation of spraying in 1992.
Coca farmers have responded to the attacks in part by going deeper into the
jungles and hacking out new land for planting; environmentalists complain that
herbicide attacks are a major cause of deforestation.
Colombian environmental minister Juan Mayr publicly declared last year that the
crop spraying program has been a failure and warned, “We can’t permanently
fumigate the country.”
The Clinton administration has intensely pressured the Colombian government to
allow a much more toxic chemical (tebuthiuron, known as SPIKE 20) to be dumped
across the land, which would permit the planes to fly at much higher altitudes,
Kosovo-style.
Environmentalists warned that SPIKE 20 could poison ground water and permanently
ruin the land for agriculture. Even as the Clinton administration decreed clean
air standards strictly controlling Americans’ exposure to chemicals that pose
little or no health threat, it sought to deluge a foreign land with a toxic
chemical in a way that would be forbidden in the U.S.
Increased U.S. aid will not enable the Colombian government to win a decisive
victory over the guerrillas any time soon. The Colombian military is renown for
losing almost all the major engagements it fights with the guerrillas.
Even if the guerrillas are defeated, it’s ludicrous to pretend that Colombians
will no longer have an incentive to grow coca _ as long as U.S. laws make that
crop 20 times more profitable than any other.
American-funded drug suppression efforts have resulted in a “push down, pop up”
effect: The harder the U.S. works to repress coca production in one area, the
more likely production is to start up in another.
Ten years ago, President George Bush warned Colombian drug dealers that they
were “no match for an angry America.”
It is time to admit that, regardless of how many temper tantrums U.S.
politicians throw, the laws of supply and demand will trump posturing every
time. The war on drugs is as unwinnable in Colombia as it is in the hills of
Kentucky, where natives continue growing marijuana despite endless raids by
police and the National Guard.

James Bovard is an independent journalist and the author of “Freedom in
Chains” (St. Martin’s Press, 1999). This piece is adapted from a piece in the
current American Spectator.
+++++++

Yesterday was the 95th anniversary of President Wilson’s address to Congress calling for a declaration of war against Germany. The U.S. entry into the war opened a Pandora’s Box that still plagues America and much of the world. One of the war’s clearest lessons: Lies are lies, regardless of whether the liar promises to save humanity. The best book I have seen on this folly is Thomas Fleming’s The Illusion of Victory. Following is a piece that Fleming’s book spurred in 2003.

Freedom Daily October 2003

Wilson’s Crusade and Bush’s Crusade
by James Bovard

George Bush’s promise to “rid the world of evil” — which he made in the opening weeks of his war on terrorism — is reminiscent of the 1917 promises of President Woodrow Wilson to “make the world safe for democracy.” Wilson, like Bush, was leading the nation into war and sought to push the hot buttons in Americans’ idealism. Unfortunately, for both Bush and Wilson, the loftier their promises soared, the deeper the hooey became. Wilson portrayed World War I as a moral absolute. And because the United States was involved in a crusade to do absolute good, any criticism or opposition to government policies quickly became perceived as evil.

In his superb new book, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I, historian Thomas Fleming recreates the political and moral atmosphere of the period when America entered World War I. The parallels to the current war on terrorism are breathtaking. Fleming concludes, “Worst of all was Wilson’s tendency to utopianism — the truly fatal flaw in his dream of flexing America’s idealized muscles in the name of peace.”

Wilson twisted the facts to portray a U.S. war against Germany as a battle of good versus evil. In the same way that Bush portrays terrorists as the worst and most implacable enemies of freedom, Wilson denounced the German government as “the natural foe to liberty.” Wilson portrayed submarine warfare as a crime against humanity — similar to Bush’s portrayal of Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction. Yet, the U.S. government soon changed its tune on submarines, relying on them as a key weapon against Japan in the Second World War. Wilson stirred anti-German sentiment by denouncing Germans as “imperialists.” Fleming notes, “One is almost boggled by the way Wilson fastened this term of opprobrium on Germany, while England and France between them had several hundred million people in their colonial grip.”

Wilson was correct that Germany had imperial ambitions — as did the United States. Many Americans had been harshly critical of abuses committed by U.S. forces after the United States seized the Phillippines. Indeed, “John White, an Ohio farmer, received 21 months in the penitentiary for declaring that the murder of women and children by German soldiers [in Belgium] was no worse than the crimes that American soldiers committed in the Philippines during the 1900–1902 insurrection there.”

At the time the U.S. government entered World War I, the Wilson administration possessed paltry information on the war’s realities. The British government had deluged the United States with a propaganda campaign and also managed to censor almost all the news coming from Europe (including Germany) to America. As a result, Americans assumed that France, Britain, and Russia were likely to win the war and that the Germans were struggling badly. Many Americans expected that it would not even be necessary to send an American army to Europe after declaring war. In reality, by April 1917 Russia was on the verge of being completely knocked out of the war and the French army was mutinying, as soldiers had lost all patience after years of being sacrificed by half-wit generals who still could not grasp the importance of the machine gun in modern warfare. Wilson, like Bush, saw nearly boundless executive power as a key to winning the war. Fleming notes that in early 1918

Wilson sent the Senate a bill that gave him the power to reorganize the entire government; he wanted to be able to create, merge or abolish agencies and bureaus without so much as a by-your-leave from Congress, and generally operate as the autocrat to end all autocrats. One senator said the bill would make Wilson a king; all he needed to do was claim to rule by divine right and he and the kaiser would be twins.

This is similar to the response that Sen. Robert Byrd (D–W. Va.) had to Bush’s Homeland Security Department bill. Similarly, some of the military and other appropriations bills that the Bush administration sent Congress aimed to greatly reduce legislative control and oversight of how the executive branch spends tax dollars. Dissent, and civil liberties Fleming drives home how the war hysteria and hatred of Germans that Wilson and his team whipped up quickly led to the suppression of free speech:

A Philadelphia socialist was sentenced to six months in jail for possession of an antiwar pamphlet, “Long Live the Constitution of the United States.” The U.S. Supreme Court eventually upheld the sentence; liberal Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes affirmed the legality of the Espionage Act under the doctrine that in time of war, antigovernment critics can be “a clear and present danger” to victory.

The fans of Justice Holmes — who like to portray him as a hero of civil liberties — usually choose to ignore his role in sanctifying the Wilson administration’s crushing of dissent. Vice President Marshall said every American “‘not heartily of the government’ should have his citizenship revoked and his property confiscated,” Fleming notes. The Bush administration has not gone so far as to urge boundless government power over anyone who dissents. However, some conservatives these days are openly portraying any opposition to the war on terrorism as traitorous. Wilson massively exploited the war to throttle his political opponents. On May 27, 1918, in the prelude to the congressional elections later that year, he announced, “Politics is adjourned. The elections will go to those who think least of it; to those who go to their constituents without explanations or excuses, with a plain record of duty faithfully and disinterestedly performed.”

Yet, shortly before the November elections, “Wilson released a public letter … crushing the enemy with the accusation of disloyalty in wartime.” The Germany army largely collapsed in October 1918. Wilson’s Democratic Party very likely expected to receive huge rewards at the polling booths from voters for this achievement. However, the year and a half of war fever — of demagoguery — of repression — of economic dislocation — thwarted Wilson’s ambitions. The Republican Party picked up the vast majority of competitive House seats and also scored major gains in the Senate. Thus, just when Wilson thought military victories would make him invincible, he lost control of Congress. The war to end all wars At the start of the war, Wilson sought to assure Americans (including millions of German-Americans), “We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling towards them but one of sympathy and friendship.”

But such warm feelings quickly dissipated as the war dragged on — and as Wilson became terrified at the prospect of a German victory in 1918. After the Armistice on November 11, 1918, the British perpetuated a naval blockade on Germany that starved tens of thousands of Germans. One justification Wilson offered for U.S. entry into World War I was that it would ensure that the United States would have a “seat at the peace table” and could thereby play a key role in reshaping the world. Yet the fighting had barely stopped before a series of new wars broke out throughout central and eastern Europe. Fleming notes,

The French, still obsessed by their fear of Germany, were unilaterally turning the states born of the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires into military satellites on Germany’s borders. French officers and weaponry poured into Poland, Czechoslovakia and Rumania. Poland had raised an army of 600,000 and the Czechs 250,000; the Rumanians were industriously imitating them. All these armies began shooting at each other over disputed slices of territory. Ray Stannard Baker, Wilson’s press secretary, glumly informed the president that there were no less than 14 small wars in progress in supposedly pacified Europe.

Wilson saw the League of Nations as his legacy to America and humanity. During the 1920 presidential election, Wilson urged voters to judge every candidate by one simple standard: “Shall we or shall we not redeem the great moral obligations of the United States?” After all the bogus moralizing of the war years, Americans rejected Wilson’s scheme for world salvation. The League of Nations also went down to defeat because of all the tawdry deals that preceded the final signing. While Wilson constantly portrayed American sacrifices as key to making the world safe for democracy, the British and French exploited the war to forcibly expand their empires and place millions more people under their thumbs. Henry White, one of Wilson’s aides at the Paris peace talks, bemoaned, “We had such high hopes of this adventure; we believed God called us and now we are doing hell’s dirtiest work.”

One surprise in Fleming’s book is the role of Irish-Americans in the political destruction of Woodrow Wilson and his League of Nations. The Irish were bitter over brutal British repressions in their homeland. The Irish immigrants in America strongly opposed provisions in the League of Nations that would have sanctified the existing power structure around the world — thereby helping perpetuate British colonial rule in Ireland, India, and many other places. Wilson largely scorned Irish-Americans as troublesome low-lifes. They paid him back with massive rallies, superbly organized information campaigns, and other efforts to whip up opposition. Many Americans feared that, if the U.S. Senate ratified Wilson’s League of Nations without amendments, the U.S. army could be forced to fight abroad in defense of the British colonial empire.

World War I also resulted in the rise of an American Taliban on the home front. Prohibition probably never could have been put on the statute books or in the Constitution if not for the exploitation of war fever. Banning alcohol was portrayed as a means to protect troops and to avoid wasting grain and other ingredients for alcohol. Destroying freedom on the home front thus supposedly became vital to helping create freedom abroad.

One of the gravest lessons of World War I is that “idealism is not synonymous with sainthood or virtue. It only sounds that way,” as Fleming notes. We should not judge politicians’ intentions by the breadth and dazzle of their promises. Lies are lies, regardless of whether the liar promises to save humanity.

James Bovard is author of Lost Rights (1994) and Terrorism and Tyranny: How Bush’s Crusade is Sabotaging Peace, Justice, and Freedom (Palgrave-Macmillan, September 2003) and serves as a policy advisor for The Future of Freedom Foundation.

On Twitter – twitter@jimbovard

As so many politicians and pundits try to whip up enthusiasm for attacking Iran, we’d be wise to recall the ravages of war on those who actually have to fight and bleed.

I’ve long enjoyed the Old Crow Medicine Show song, “Big Time in the Jungle.” I came across this YouTube video that makes its antiwar message far more potent.

[[I thought I could embed it in this blog but apparently not.  Click  Big Time in Jungle for the video.]]

Hopefully the next decade will not see piercing folk songs about the plight of American soldiers fighting in Iran’s Zagros or Elburz Mountains or cutting their way from the Caspian Sea to Strait of Hormuz.

Old Crow Medicine Show also has a powerful rendition of the song, “Ruby Ridge.”

New Washington Post polling data reveal that liberals strongly approve of Obama’s drone assassination policy – even when it is used to kill American citizens. Overall, 83% of Americans approve of Obama’s drone killing policy.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is raising hell about the administration’s secrecy – demanding that they at least release the confidential memo that explains why the President has the right to order secret killings. But the Obama administration is stonewalling in the best Dick Cheney fashion. ‘

The following poster – entitled Liberty Drones – beautifully captures the depravity of Obama’s policy. (The artist, Tom Blanton, has a bunch of great art work at the PoliCulture page of his Flickr photos. Tom is also the mastermind of the Project for the New American Revolution).

It is sad when the battlelines for the defense of liberty have retreated so far that it is necessary to argue that it is imprudent to permit Presidents to secretly kill one’s fellow citizens.

As someone who was born in Iowa, I’m pleased to see many Iowans flocking to support Ron Paul.

The Washington Post has a tut-tutting front-page story today complaining that Paul’s 45-minute stump speech “outlines a view of the world so bleak it would make Chicken Little sound like an optimist.”

It is not surprising that a Washington reporter would be aghast at someone who spoke honestly about U.S. government policy. But hopefully Iowa voters will be far more realistic than Washington Post editorial writers. It is encouraging to see so many people enthusiastic about a politician who is not promising them handouts.

Ron Paul’s support is a gauge of how many Americans have caught onto to the prevailing doggerel from Washington. Many, if not most, of these folks will never “return to the fold” to docilely support whoever the Republican Party coronates as a presidential candidate later this year. Ron Paul is toppling political idols – and many Americans will never bow to those idols again.

The New York Times had an excellent piece last week on Republican candidates’ views on executive power. Ron Paul was the only candidate who declared that the President does not have a right to order the killing of American citizens on his own authority. The other Republican candidates sounded like Obama – who signed a bill on Saturday that gives the federal government dire new powers. The superb poster below features Obama – but it could just as well have included the Republican presidential candidates – except for Ron Paul.

[If anyone knows the author of this poster, shoot me an email and I will credit the creator.]

All this hoopla over the alleged Iranian plot to use Mexican drug lords to carry out an assassination of a Saudi at a fictitious DC restaurant – I knew there was something very strange about this…

And then I read that the linchpin of the case is a paid Drug Enforcement Administration informant who recently faced drug charges and had “cooperated” with authorities to avoid going to prison himself.

Geez, doesn’t anybody in the mainstream media have a BS radar any more?

DEA informants are notorious for being even more dishonest than congressmen. Here is a link to an NPR story last year on one slippery DEA informant that blew up a major case. The DEA knew that its most successful informant from the mid-1980s through 1999 was a brazen liar who routinely committed perjury in federal court. But the feds had no problem with using someone who subverted justice and made a mockery of the judicial system.

Given the nature of US drug laws, the DEA relies on perpetual deceit to justify its own existence.

And we are supposed to rely on a DEA informant to rev up the case for going to war with Iran?

Just when I think that DC could not be fuller of ****, the Obama administration proves me wrong again.

timely cartoon from the new issue of the New Yorker