Co-operation urged as way to combat drug war
It’s time for greater military co-operation in North America’s long war on drugs, Defence Minister Peter MacKay and his U.S. and Mexican counterparts said Tuesday.
The first trilateral meeting of defence ministers ended with a common front on the need for greater co-operation to assess common threats to the continent — foremost among which is the violent drug trade, they said.
A decade after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, drug cartels and the threat of natural disasters — and the demand for swift, co-ordinated military responses to both — appear to have elbowed terrorism off the front burner, judging by the assessments provided in a 45-minute news conference after the meeting.
“This is obviously one of the serious threats that is confronting North and Central and South America, is the drug cartels and the drug trafficking that is going on,” said Leon Panetta, the U.S. secretary of defence.
He was joined on the dais by MacKay, Gen. Guillermo Galvan Galvan, the secretary of national defence for Mexico, and Mexico’s navy secretary Adm. Francisco Saynez Mendoza.
“We are committed to doing everything possible so that ultimately we can not only weaken but end this threat to our people,” said Panetta.
I don’t care how the ONDCP sugar-coats it and claims to have ended the war on drugs, we’ve got the heads of defense for all of North America talking about how one of their biggest military priorities is this war.
The ONDCP and Kevin Sabet can go around talking about HOPE and treatment all they want, but we’re not going to let them ignore the the massive drug war that is killing people.
They would like the American people to believe that there is no war — that it’s just a kind and caring government whose head of drug control policy just goes around visiting treatment centers. But that’s clearly not the truth.
Update: Leon Panetta appears unclear whether it’s 50,000 dead in Mexico or 150,000.
Amid the who-said-what confusion, what’s interesting about this apparent lapse is:
1) It doesn’t seem to make much difference to the Sec. of Defense Panetta whether the number is 50,000 or 150,000. The sloppiness about the difference of 100,000 human beings could contribute to the way in which Mexican lives seem pawns to U.S. security strategy–a perception that is widespread here and of particular concern to many Mexicans, especially on the border;
2) The emphasis on the “bloody drug war†is being used to intensify the threat perception and support the need to regional-ize the response, under U.S. direction.
We must also step up the war,,more jury trials will counteract any increase in arrests,,the courts are already backlogged,,let’s jam them up and give jury nullification a chance.
With the word “truth” under “drug” on my screen, on first read I saw “…government whose head of truth control policy…”
Sometimes simple errors expose profound truths, eh?
Clearly the name of the drug war victims page, linked at left, needs to be changed. Perhaps it could be renamed the “Balanced Approach Victims Page”? And as far as the generals go, didn’t they get the memo?
“The ONDCP and Kevin Sabet can go around talking about HOPE and treatment all they want,”
Rehab is just a re-education camp for brainwashing people. It is no better than prison, arguably even worse, as prison only steals your liberty not your mind.
My first thought is that 150,00 is probably the correct number.
As much as the leaders of other nations calling for “rethinking” the drug war has drawn a lot of positive reactions from the blogosphere, at least part of me has suspected that much of this is political posturing and subtle threats aimed at increasing the flow of money from the US to “aid” these nations in the fight. It seems that my suspicions are being increasingly validated.
If you want to see where their priorities truly are, don’t listen to their speeches, look at their budgets. Just wait and look at the National Drug Control Strategy and the FY 2013 budgets when they come out. Oh, and the 2012 Strategy is going to be way late again this year. It’s supposed to be out in February, but we will probably see it in May. The Strategy will say what their priorities are, but the budget will show where the money is being spent and what ratio law enforcement to treatment is, not counting the military adventures in other countries.
The 2013 budget calls for 25 billion,and increase of 9 billion,,that was before GUA postured for more bucks because they cut funding to all SA and CA countries by as much as 60%,,now they are covering their overdraft.
And the 173 mill to GUA is a drop in the bucket of what it will take to keep the southern hemisphere in the prohibition game. And that was Biden’s offer,,we don’t know what the other guy asked for.
Again and again and again…this isn’t about drugs. Drugs are the excuse. This is about something a good deal bigger…and vastly more threatening. And the very fact that the biggest players like Panetta don’t really seem to give a damn how many Mex have died so far, since the justification itself is a fiction, is the giveaway.
I am wondering if big oil is working us up into a war for Mexico’s oil. I mean after all,they got some and we want it(manifest destiny).
Or perhaps it is still an effort to keep hemp off the open market.
Link not working
Fixed link.
Sorry, at work right now and they block sites the USG says are no-no’s. Have to do it again at home. But just google “SPP North American Union” and look for the link for Global Research (globalresearch.ca) and click on it. Mr. Chossudovsky’s people have done yeoman work on this subject and it’s well worth looking into.
They’re being pushed into a corner by public opinion and they’re “reacting.”
“How does it feel,
to be on your own,
with no direction home?”
Their answer? “Gotta go kill someone!”
EZ,actually, the smarter of them saw this coming long ago, and decided that when the public began to see what a huge waste the present LE tack was, they’d try to fool the public some more by adopting a less rhetorically ferocious stance in favor of a more publicly palatable one: ‘treatment’.
That they’d use their (meaning, OUR taxpayer funded) ‘bully pulpit’ to beat the drums (in violation of the Hatch At) in favor of something they could materially profit from (testing and treatment are Siamese Twins joined at the greed bone) is a given. And so they have, packing their corporate parachutes (like Kevin Sabet, for instance) and jumping from the burning plane while exhorting their ‘enlisted men’, their LE ‘allies’, to keep fighting the hopeless ‘good fight’.
Meanwhile, the ‘enlisted men’ have found out that they’ve been shafted by the (no pun intended) High Command, but are stuck holding the bag full of awakening wildcats in the form of changing public attitudes toward cannabis prohibition. In this one case, I can ascribe to the same ‘stabbed in the back’ zeitgeist prevalent in Weimar Republic Germany; the more intelligent pols knew from the get-go the task was hopeless, but they didn’t speak out over the hysterical din,and set things straight, but instead allowed this mess to happen.
The pols back then had the benefit of an education in the ‘classics’; they knew from history that all attempts at substance prohibition, no matter how Draconian the methods are, inevitably fail. They KNEW it was pointless, but instead of standing against ‘public opinion’ (which we know now was ginned up by Hearst and his ilk for the preservation of an outmoded technology and the power it granted them) the pols acceded to ignorance and prejudice…and condemned thousands of cops to unnecessarily die over a period of a century, sacrifices on an altar built of cynically told lies. Any wonder why some of the ‘foot soldiers’ were so pissed off that they founded LEAP? Accidental ‘friendly fire’ is one thing; being sent into the meatgrinder with your ‘superiors’ knowing its’ a pointless endeavor but sending you anyway, solely to score political points to remain in office, is quite another.
(Kind of like what Nixon did to Johnson, and caused the VN War to go on 4 more bloody years. Every grunt drafted after 1968 could quite possibly had sat their tour out in The World rather than wind up more names on that g-d-n Black Wall. Johnson knew it was hopeless. Nixon knew it was hopeless. But they both kept sending troops. And good men died…when they almost certainly didn’t have to. The same can be said of a lot of cops – and for exactly the same reason.)
No, this does not excuse bad behavior on the part of cops. But, having pol-planted knives sticking out of your back from the moment you were sworn in has got to be pretty damn uncomfortable.
NEW YORK – In a protest reminiscent of those surrounding the death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida, marchers in New York City held a demonstration to demand the arrest of a New York police officer for fatally shooting an unarmed teenager after chasing him into his family’s apartment.
Unarmed teen shot, killed by New York police
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/national/northeast/view.bg?articleid=1061121087&position=recent
Another one for the “balanced approach wall””!
.
.
Now that’s remarkable. It’s one thing to demand the arrest of a vigilante, but a protest demanding the arrest of a cop for killing a druggie? I admit I just woke up so help me out, can I recall anything similar? I don’t think even Katherine Johnston got a rally. The cops that murdered her did get sent to prison though.
America has a starring role in the drug war in Mexico in ‘Murder Capital of the World’
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/on-the-record/2012/03/31/america-has-starring-role-drug-war-mexico-murder-capital-world#ixzz1qiI0xhvN
“”GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS HOST: Now, we have been telling you about this almost every night for three years — Mexico, no one is safe, now even the police.
This week five policemen were gunned down at a party in Mexico. It happened in the city of Juarez right next door to El Paso, Texas.
And like we keep telling you, Mexico’s deadly drug cartel violence is spilling over the border into the United States. So is anyone paying attention?
Filmmaker Charlie Minn is. He just made a documentary called “Murder Capital of the World.””
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/on-air/on-the-record/2012/03/31/america-has-starring-role-drug-war-mexico-murder-capital-world#ixzz1qiI0xhvN
There are casualties in war…many civilians die in war…and these drug warriors have no problem with providing those casualties. 100,000 here….50,000 there, it doesnt matter to them as long as they ‘win the war’.