U.S. Tax Dollars Buy Death in Colombia

The American government plans on sending about $1 billion in aid to Colombia to help that nation fight a war on drugs. Critics complain that the money will largely end up in the hands of the Colombian military, which has a long history of human rights violations and a see and hear no evil policy toward right wing militias within that country. Oh no, counter supporters in the Clinton administration — the aid and weapons won’t be used for anything but fight narcotics traffickers.

Unfortunately an FBI report sent to Colombia in May but only recently seen by the U.S. press, implicates U.S. military hardware in a December 1998 attack on Colombia civilians. While the Colombian military was fighting with Leftist rebels nearby, an explosion in the village of Santo Domingo killed 16 people, including 6 children. The army claimed that the explosion was caused by a truck bomb set off by the guerillas.

The FBI report begs to differ. Its analysis of the damage and debris fingers a US-made AN-M41 bomb dropped on the village as the likeliest cause of the explosion. Shrapnel found at the scene was “consistent” with the use of the 20-pound bomb. The United States shipped the Colombian air force numerous such bombs over the years as part of previous aid packages.

The Colombian air force, meanwhile, sticks to its explanation of a truck bomb and now adds that the bomb fragments were planted at the scene by the Leftist guerillas. The only problem with that conspiracy theory is that a separate report by Colombia’s Medical Forensic Institute found that shrapnel taken from the bodies of victims was inconsistent with a truck or car bomb (the military also dismissed that report).

This is the sort of corrupt military that the Clinton administration wants to get in bed with — one whose basic approach is that killing the right civilians is largely the same thing as killing Leftist guerillas. Not that the guerillas are much better, but it is insanity to subsidize such murder with $1 billion in aid. Let the Colombian government and the guerillas kill on their own dime — there’s no reason to taint U.S. taxpayers with the blood of Colombian civilians.

Source:

FBI report points to cover-up in 1998 Colombian village bombing. The Associated Press, September 26, 2000.

LA’s Other Gang Problem

They sell drugs to kids and say its us
And when the cops are crooks who can you trust?
– Ice-T

       Several years ago, rapper Ice-T
achieved widespread notoriety for recording a hard core rock song called
“Cop Killer.” Over speeding guitars, Ice-T shouted out lyrics promising
to get back at the Los Angeles Police Department’s harassment, brutality
and other assorted wrong doings. Conservative activists William Bennett
and Charleton Heston blasted Time Warner, which distributed Ice-T’s music,
and soon afterward “Cop Killer” was pulled off the shelves and Time Warner
and Ice-T ended their business relationship. Now at the beginning of the
21st century, what should have been long apparent is now splashed all
over the news — it turns out that indeed significant numbers of LAPD
officers were no better than the gangs they were supposedly protecting
the public from. In fact in many ways the LAPD officers were worse since
they acted under cover of the state.

       The latest LAPD scandal started
when corrupt officer Rafael Perez was charged with stealing cocaine from
a police evidence locker. Not wanting to spend years in jail, Perez cut
a deal with prosecutors to tell all he knew about police corruption. What
Perez has told so far will probably eliminate whatever remaining trust
people may have had in the LAPD.

       Perez’s crimes alone would
be shocking. He recounted how he and a fellow officer shot an unarmed
man, planted a gun on the man, and then testified that the man had attacked
them. On the basis of the planted gun and the officer’s testimony,
the man was sentenced to 23 years in jail.

       But that’s just the type of
the iceberg. Up to 3,000 convictions involving LAPD officers are now considered
suspect and that number keeps rising as more revelations come out. So
far LA District Attorney Gil Garcetti has gone to court to have 22 convictions
overturned and says he’ll be back in a few weeks to seek to have another
30-4 convictions overturned. LAPD officers engaged in everything from
unprovoked shootings, beatings, drug dealing evidence planting, false
arrests, witness intimidation and perjury. A total of 20 officers have
already been suspended, fired or resigned because of the corruption revelation
sand that number is certain to rise.

       To his credit Garcetti hasn’t
attempted to minimize the disastrous situation unfolding in Los Angeles.
“If you cannot have faith and trust in your police officer — either as
a citizen or as a juror or as a judge, as defense lawyers, as a district
attorney — then we do not have an acceptable, a viable criminal justice
system,” Garcetti said.

       On the other hand, it’s not
like Garcetti or anyone should be shocked to find broad corruption in
the LAPD. Over the years Los Angeles has had to pay out millions of dollars
to the victims of police brutality while rarely firing the officers involved
in such cases (although to be fair, police unions do a lot to protect
corrupt officers in their midst). More importantly, though, the LAPD is
on a front line of a war on drugs that actively encourages and provides
incentives for police to bend the rules and see civilians as the “enemy”.

       Asset forfeiture, where tens
of thousands of dollars in property can be seized without a criminal conviction,
the widespread use of no-knock searches, the reliance on convicted criminals
as “informants,” and the paramilitary gear and training which is now widespread
at even smaller police departments encourages police to literally wage
war against a civilian population and see niceties such as Constitutional
protections as needless impediments to getting the job done. The United
States has simply done in a roundabout way what nations such as Colombia
have already done explicitly — militarized police actions against drug
dealers.

       The damage done by this process
is incalculable. Along with the actual crimes committed by the LAPD and
officers in other corrupt police departments such as Philadelphia or the
shooting of an unarmed man in New York recently, the drug war and its
attendant corruption divert valuable law enforcement resources away from
genuine criminal acts of violence and fraud. In a free society it is simply
impossible to tolerate the sort of broad corruption that the drug war
has introduced in America’s police forces. Prosecute the cops, yes, but
also get them out of the futile job of trying to control the drug trade.
As the recent scandal confirms, the only losers in the war on drugs are
the innocent bystanders. Haven’t we had enough collateral damage? (Discuss
this article
)

 

LAPD Corruption Scandal: Up to 30,000 Cases Need to be Reviewed

    Los Angeles taxpayers are going to be paying the price for years to come for their city’s tolerance of corrupt cops. After initially suggesting that only a few thousand cases would need to be reviewed, the Los Angeles County Public Defender’s Office recently admitted that it would have to re-examine upwards of 30,000 cases that the corrupt officers were involved with over the last 5 to 10 years.

    Michael Judge, who heads the public defender’s office, told CNN that his office is already employing 20 lawyers at a cost of $4.5 million a year to re-examine cases and it will take “many years” for his staff to go through them. Add to that the wave of civil lawsuits against the city, and the ultimate price tag for the scandal could be staggering.

    Of course the very same community victimized by an out of control LAPD will then be expected to turn around and compensate itself, though at one point there was talk of setting aside part of California’s stake in the tobacco settlement to cover some of the costs of the scandal.

    Unfortunately this is certainly not the last corruption scandal that will hit L.A. (or other major cities, where cop corruption always flares up every few years). When you have police required to go into communities and treat everyone as suspects thanks to the war on drugs, this sort of widespread corruption is all but inevitable. It’s about time to declared the U.S. a demilitarized zone and cease hostilities in the war on drugs before nobody has any respect left for police.

Source:

Public defender: Up to 30,000 cases need review in light of LAPD scandal. CNN, August 10, 2000.

Legalize Drugs

“Prohibition…goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts
to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things
that are not crimes…A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles
upon which our government was founded.”
       -Abraham Lincoln

       Legalize drugs.

       Two words strong enough to send
most conservatives into hallucinations of the crumbling of Western civilization
as we know it. The pin-striped prohibitionists dedicate their days to
telling you and I what we can and cannot put into our bodies.

       This particular group of conservatives
is trapped by their own ideological inconsistencies. Mention gun control
and they go off about the danger of government encroachment into private
lives. Argue in favor of protecting wetlands, and you receive a lecture
on the glories of the marketplace. But drugs? All of a sudden the answer
is more government, more government, more government. The war on drugs
is nothing but a welfare program for police and government bureaucrats.

       At the heart of the arguments
against drug legalization lies a paralyzing paternalism. Drugs are allegedly
bad for people, so the government will just take them away from the little
children citizens and put them on a shelf where they can’t reach them.
And if they do manage to get them, send ’em to their room for life.

       Drugs are dangerous. So what!!!

       A lot of things in life are
dangerous; the most intimate decisions individuals make are about acceptable
risks. Two of the most dangerous drugs known to humankind, tobacco and
alcohol, are permitted to compete in the marketplace even though the number
of documented deaths from the two puts crack and heroin into the minor
leagues.

       Society also permits individuals
to participate in a wide range of rather risky behaviors. People are allowed
to drive, own guns, eat high cholesterol foods, and listen to Michael
Bolton albums. In fact there is an inherent risk in just about every human
activity.

       One major distinguishing feature
of a democracy is that individuals are allowed to decide for themselves
the amount of risk they are willing to accept. I consider hang gliding
a very high risk sport, for example, but realize that other people consider
it low-risk or are willing to put up with the high risk because of the
potential outcomes (when it comes down to it, we bet our lives against
positive outcomes all of the time).

       The point is it’s your life
and your decision. If you are willing to accept the risks and consequences
of snorting cocaine, go for it.

       It is not the government’s
role to act as surrogate parents protecting rational adults from the risks
of living.

       A few caveats to the above
scenario are necessary.

       First, the right of an individual
to determine acceptable risks ends at the point where another individual’s
rights begin. Snorting cocaine and then driving, for example, would not
be a morally defensible action. Unfortunately in the anti-drug hysteria
an attempt has been made to expand what it means to infringe upon the
rights of other individuals.

       Harm here must be construed
narrowly. If someone gets high and then assaults another person, that
is a direct, tangible harm. If someone starts to ignore or even leaves
a spouse because of drug abuse, however, that is not a direct harm. An
intrinsic part of our social relations is that they are contingent and
subject to a variety of risks. The same individual might ignore his or
her spouse, for example, by becoming a compulsive overworker. Yet we don’t
have any laws which prevent someone from spending too many hours at the
office.

       And though this is a decidedly
non-consequentialist analysis of drug use, it is most certainly not evident
that drug use and/or crime would increase with legalization. As Doug Bandow,
senior fellow at the Cato Institute, notes, drugs were legal in the United
States until 1914. At that time the United States had fewer drug users
per capita than it does now, and the crime rate was significantly lower.

       As Bandow wrote in the New
York Times
, “The Government should focus its enforcement efforts
on protecting minors, while restricting only adult drug use that directly
endangers others. We should rely on education and social pressure to discourage
drug use. Indeed, they are bringing down alcohol and tobacco use without
a war, and it is education and social pressure that have done the most
to reduce illicit drug use.”

       This column original appeared
in the Western Herald.