Today when I ran out for lunch, I heard most of a previous interview on the WBEZ Worldview. Jerome McDonnel was talking to a Prof. Alfred McCoy from the Univ Wisconsin about the heroin trade, and specifically how the CIA's actions to get warlord help in Laos during Vietnam helped set up the process whereby ~30% of the US soldiers ended up being hooked on heroin. He also spoke about how the same geopolitics in Afganistan (set up while the Russians were fighting the Taliban, and then after we started bombing in 2001- ) set it up so now they supply 90% of the world's supply- they have no other agricluture or cash crop.
FUBAR!! - The War against Drugs and War against Terror are at odds with each other it seems. The Prof was also advocating decriminalization of drugs to remove the higher-priced demand. That would change economics of the supply, and not make it so lucrative to grow drugs in the first place.
I did some googling and it he has also recently wrote a book on the History of CIA interrogation and torture practices. Here is a really interesting video interview with him from back in Feb 06 with DemocracyNow.Org. I wish I would have seen this earlier. I'm going to add his book to my reading list.
Extra reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Commissions_Act_of_2006
So now I'm not sure if the US Consitution guarantees habeus corpus or not?????
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