No problem, Greenie. Sorry about all the joking around in the last few posts with David (sorry, David) but it is sort of a sad topic and that makes me want to kid around a bit.

I had some real good stuff that I read a while back...it was around the time that they caught some people trying to smuggle bomb materials across the Canadian border on their way to a supposed terrorist attack on LA...that detailed how our CIA working with elements in Afghanistan, Turkey, and Iran had helped create the safe route to transport the product out of Afghanistan to the United States. The route took the drugs from Afghanistan to Uzbekistan and Turkey and from there the drugs that went to the US would go primarily to Belgium and then on to Canada, of course from Canada into the US. This guy that was discussing all this had worked for years as an operative in our "War on Drugs" and his primary area of expertise was Afghanistan but he found that not only did we know all about where the drugs were and how they got here, we also created the route to get them here...and we did nothing about it because there were basically all sorts of active operations that one entity in our intel community was not supposed to discuss with another and all this stuff was off limits. Of course he detailed that the safe routes that got the drugs to the US could be used to transport anything and that the "War on Drugs" was the "War on Terror" but you could not get anybody to acknowledge that. Also he clearly stated that we did not want to "win" the "War on Drugs" in the same way we don't want to "win" the "War on Terror"...but they are nice slogans that make it sound as if we're doing something and being in Iraq makes it look like we're doing something but we're not doing any of the things it would really take to fight a war on terror or a war on drugs.

He specifically stated in the paper he wrote (which was an intergovernmental paper-that you could at that point find on a .gov site on the net) that bomb materials could be transported to the US using these drug routes undetected as well. Then, of course, the bomb materials show up at the Canadian border. The paper came out prior to this happening so it did not make any specific claims that these specific bomb materials traveled one of these routes.

Anyway, the point being that the drug war and terror war are the same thing and sadly elements in our government have known this all along and have known exactly what they would need to do have a huge impact on terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda...you could shut down the flow of more than 40 billion dollars of revenue that they draw from just by destroying Afghani poppy fields.

Yet, Bushco never attempted this...wonder why? Could it be that going back to the Iran-Contra affair (which was in the time frame that we were telling the Iranians that there was huge money to be made from poppy production to fund all sorts of terrorist cells which we hoped to manipulate) there were elements in our own government drawing from these funds as well...hey, those funds are not subject to congressional oversight! Could it be...and this is not even a joke...that Turkish drug lords actually refer to Dennis Hastert as "Denny Boy"...it's pathetic but true...to bring the whole thing back to David's original post title.

I could go on and on here but I don't have time right now but go ahead and dig around Green...it's amazing what's out there.