Loretta Nall's Editorials

THUGS, ASSASINS AND ZEALOTS

IRAQ, US AND LATIN AMERICA

Our nation?s drug policies are designed to maximize the harm associated with drug use, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. It?s an old scam with a new twist. Many a politician has gotten himself elected through the simple process of identifying a previously unknown threat and then telling the public that they need to elect him so that he can protect them from this new threat. But the Drug Warriors take this old trick one step further in that they implement policies that actually make the situation worse. They intentionally manufacture the very thing that they claim to be protecting us from. The official US policy is to keep drug prices of some drugs high and to keep the purity of these drugs low. High prices ensure violence in an unregulated market and low purity ensures maximum harm to the health of consumers. They tell you that pot will ruin your life, and then if they catch you with some, sure enough, they proceed to ruin your life. This combination of propaganda and harm maximization gives the drug warriors unprecedented power over the American people, a power that the people would never have given them had they pursued it through an open and honest democratic process.

The ONDCP funds vicious propaganda campaigns that shamelessly promote a climate of fear and illegally interfere in State ballot initiatives. The General Accounting office of the US Congress has ruled that the information presented by the ONDCP does not have to be true. In other words, the ONDCP has official permission to take our tax money and use it to tell us lies. These lies are in direct support of an illegal and treasonous war that is being waged against the American people.

It?s important to note that the ONDCP is an office of the White House. It?s not a separate government agency, as our other agencies are. The budget for the ONDCP is listed right along with the White House maintenance expenses, such as the cost of maintaining the presidential toilet. So whether the drug czar is busy convincing us that pot smokers will blow up buildings and get our pre-teen daughters pregnant, or if he is busy illegally influencing the outcome of state ballot initiatives, remember this information is coming directly from the white house, and from a man that has official permission to tell lies.

How many Americans have voted for these politicians, placed their trust in these politicians who promised to protect our children from drugs, only to find their children targeted in the drug war, incarcerated, and turned over to violent criminals to be used as sex slaves in our glorious prison-industrial complex?

In the US it is illegal for a lobbying organization to receive government grant money, and then turn around and use that money to further lobby congress. But for every law, there is a way around that law, if you?ve got cash. So if you happen to be a lobbying organization such as, oh let?s just say for example, a Narcotics Officers Association, the plan is simple. All you have to do is hire a band of mercenaries, not your own group but a different one, a bunch of former military soldier-of-fortune types, then set them up as instructors who teach our local police to use military tactics while conducting home invasions against Americans suspected of smoking marijuana, and then sit back and watch the government grant money come rolling in.

How many of the people who support lengthy sentences for drug offenses would feel the same way if the sentences were carried out in public?

If we took that cage occupied by a person serving 20 years or life on marijuana charges, and we took that cage out of the prison and put it on the street corner where people had to walk by it every day, how long would it take people to realize the absurdity, the cruelty, the absolute inhumanity of the sentence?

Americans are tricked into supporting a policy of prohibition, a policy that actually produces most of the problems that it claims to solve. We are tricked into supporting a never-ending war on ourselves.

Our local police officers are given military training and equipment, told that they are soldiers in a war and that we are the enemy. Hysteria generated by the ONDCP drives the task forces into a dangerous and emotional vigilante mentality.

What we thought were our local police have now become federally funded, militarily trained, asset-forfeiture empowered, multi-jurisdictional narcotics task forces which specialize in conducting violent home invasions against American citizens suspected of smoking marijuana.

The US criminal justice system is notorious for targeting those who are least likely to be able to afford an effective defense, and for targeting those least likely to be believed in court, such as the poor, minorities and those who have been effectively marginalized and demonized by the governments relentless and illegal campaign of propaganda and harm maximization.

When the US has a deliberate policy of incarcerating one third of all young African American males, doesn?t this policy effectively serve as a program of eugenics, designed to remove minorities from the general population during their prime reproductive years?

The Drug War machinery is greased with pork.

Virtually every federal agency gets a piece of the drug war pie.

Every Congressman gets a piece to fund projects in his state.

Multitudes of private contractors provide everything from urine tests for children to military training for cops to privately owned for-profit prisons to faith-based rehabilitation. They?re all frauds and con-artists.

The executive branch of our government employs private contractors in order to avoid congressional oversight and to avoid accountability.

Examples: Contractors in war on Columbia (get numbers), contractors not included in official US death toll in Iraq.

Latin America has been used like a practice dummy to test out militaristic forms of policing. (death squads) We saw their lives as cheap, and so our lives have also become cheap. Actually it is only our liberties which have become cheap, our lives remain valuable as they represent a potential profit to the private contractors who deal in living bodies.

It is the public tolerance of US-inflicted human rights abuses in Latin America, which has allowed this style of policing to grow like a cancer and spread to our hometowns here in the US. The lessons learned from the harsh military oppression of Central and South American cultures served as models for similar oppression within the continental US. This oppression is now here in the form of multi-jurisdictional narcotics task forces.

Whether it is soldiers abusing citizens in Iraq, drug warriors and prison guards abusing citizens in the US, or School of the Americas graduates slaughtering citizens with chainsaws in Columbia, whenever a particularly egregious example of abuse comes to light, the explanation is always the same: These acts were committed by a few bad apples. Accountability is avoided. Deniability is maintained. The acts of torture, terror and murder continue unabated, with their true perpetrators remaining unscathed by the controversy.

Blurring of police and military:

Question: If many of our local police are also members of the national guard, do they have a separate police rank and military rank? What if an officer finds himself outranking his superior while they are at guard drill? Is task force membership a fast-track to promotion? Will the government eventually decide to issue these people just one combination paycheck?

It is always those who most need to stand together who end up turned against each other.

When will our working class blacks and whites realize they are in the same boat?

The population of America?s great prison system is divided along racial lines. The inmates take their aggression out on each other instead of on the guards. The population of America?s working class is divided along racial lines. The people turn their aggression on each other instead of on the ruling class.

Why did they pick that particular MP unit to be the guards at Abu Graib?

The elite picked them to do this work because they considered them hillbillies who wouldn?t know any better.

Dumb White trash to do the government?s dirty work.

This shows that the ruling class looks down on poor whites just like they look down on any other minority, be it in Iraq or the US. We?re all the same to them. Divide and conquer is their policy and it continues to be a highly successful one.

Task forces vs. Death squads

?The cost is public, the profits are private.?

The soldiers trained in the School of Americas are not being trained to defend the borders of their countries. They are being trained to make war on their own people. The military training provided to our local police in the US is not intended to help these officers defend our country. It is designed to teach them to wage war on their own people, most often in the form of paramilitary raids conducted against American citizens in their own homes. The death squads in Latin America targeted political dissenters. Just as the narcotics task force raided my home because I dared express a dissenting political opinion.

The question of prohibition is a political question, and so the prisoners of the drug war should be considered political prisoners. With our government?s policy of propaganda backed up with harm maximization, these people are not incarcerated as a result of laws arrived at by a legitimate democratic process. They are incarcerated as the result of a corrupt drug war run amuck. They are political prisoners rounded up by a militarized police force. And yet they are denied even the dignity of their true status as political prisoners. After all, America wouldn?t jail citizens for the crime of expressing a dissenting political opinion, would it? That would be beneath the dignity of a nation founded on the principles of liberty, justice and the right of the citizen to advocate for change.

True, the narcotics task forces which patrol us often kill US citizens in their own homes, but this is generally considered to be a mistake, because here in the US, a live body is more valuable than a dead one. While Dyncorp may realize an extremely high profit on every dead body it produces in Columbia, US entrepreneurs understand that a live body offers opportunities for profit and exploitation, opportunities that a dead body generally fails to exhibit.

We have ambitious entrepreneurs lining up to offer all sorts of exciting opportunities having to do with how to generate cash from a live body. Waste not, want not.