Pubdate: Wed, 29 Aug 2007
Source: AlterNet (US Web)
Copyright: 2007 Independent Media Institute
Contact:  http://www.alternet.org/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1451
Author: Scott Thill
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/ashcroft.htm (Ashcroft, John)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/pot.htm (Cannabis)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/walters.htm (Walters, John)

POT GROWERS ARE NEW TARGET IN "WAR ON TERROR"

Last time we checked in on the bizarro nexus between cannabis and 
terrorism, it was none other than actor/director Tommy Chong who was 
feeling the Bush administration's post-9/11 wrath. In fact, the 
stoner icon, whose fabled act was concurrently resuscitated for Fox's 
drugged and confused comedy hit That 70s Show, was being slapped by 
John Ashcroft with a nine-month prison bid, a $20,000 fine and over 
$100,000 in seized assets for selling bongs. The terrorism 
connection? He was sentenced on Sept. 11, 2003. And if you think 
that's a specious connection, it's only gotten worse since. In fact, 
over the last few years, "terrorist" has become an epithet for all seasons.

In 2003, Iraq occupation architect Richard Perle slapped 
investigative journalist Seymour Hersh with the term, saying, "Look, 
Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, 
frankly." As if filing a story about the doomed occupation of a 
sovereign state in the pages of the New Yorker was the same thing as 
flying a 747 into the World Trade Center.

In 2004, Secretary of Education Rod Paige called the National 
Education Association, the country's largest teachers union, "a 
terrorist organization" because of what Paige defined as the 
"obstructionist scare tactics" used by its lobbyists. Because we all 
know it's every educator's dream to buck the systemby blowing 
themselves up in front of their students.

And just this month, the Bush administration decided to employ the 
term to legally target the entire Iranian Revolutionary Guard, a 
sovereign nation's standing army numbering in the hundreds of 
thousands. When you want a war that badly, you'll pretty much do or 
say anything to get it.

So how does the Bush administration get away with crying terrorist at 
every opportunity? Say hello to the Military Commissions Act. Thanks 
to this 2006 piece of legislation, terrorism has become the basis of 
American foreign and domestic policy. Yes, the term has become 
equivalent to everything from ideologically driven violence to petty 
theft, and can be used to incarcerate, exterminate or character 
assassinate anything in sight.

It's no wonder then that federal officials are now revisiting their 
previously failed effort to link terrorism to cannabis, the only real 
cash cow in the government's so-called War on Drugs. Only difference 
is, this time, they don't have Tommy Chong as a scapegoat.

Unable or unwilling to solve the nation's crippling meth addiction or 
its hypocritical dependency on prescribed narcotics like oxycontin, 
the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) recently rang the 
terrorism alarm to nail pot growers in Redding's Shasta-Trinity 
National Forest in California. Along the way, ONDCP "czar" John 
Walters showed off not only the Bush administration's love of twisted 
terminology but also its subcultural savvy by coining a memorable 
phrase of his own.

"We have kind of a reefer blindness," Walters explained during a 
Redding press conference on the ONDCP's Operation Alesia, a 
cannabis-eradication program coordinated by the California National 
Guard's Counterdrug Taskforce and the Shasta County Sheriff's Office. 
Walters followed that clever turn of phrase with the reliable 
terrorist designation to describe the armed growers cultivating 
cannabis in Shasta County. "These people are armed; they're 
dangerous. [They're] violent criminal terrorists." He even went so 
far to argue that the "terrorists" growing weed in Shasta County, as 
the Redding Record Searchlight reported, "wouldn't hesitate to help 
other terrorists get into the country with the aim of causing mass casualties."

Except there seem to be a couple major problems with Walters' 
characterizations. For one, Walters declined to explain during the 
press conference what Operation Alesia's specific goals were. More 
importantly, he didn't offer up any concrete names of the terrorists 
or their ideological objectives. What legalization advocates and law 
enforcement authorities alike were left with was yet another hazy 
strategy based on loose terminology whose only purpose it seems is to 
confiscate as much pot as possible from Shasta County's public lands.

A noble pursuit to be sure, but counterterrorism? Hardly.

Especially when rural Shasta County's biggest problem is meth, not 
marijuana, addiction. Further, Walters' coded terminology, when 
unmasked, is not employed to raise awareness of al Qaeda's grand 
cannabis cultivation strategy to destabilize the American government, 
but rather to inflame regional biases against, you guessed it, 
Mexicans. Especially the undocumented variety, who are "the other 
terrorists" Walters mentioned looking to get into the country and, 
what again? I asked Mike Odle, public affairs and communications 
officer for Shasta-Trinity National Forest's Northern California 
Coordination Center to elaborate on what was behind the increase in 
cultivated cannabis on Shasta's public lands.

"Most of the increase can be attributed to the proliferation of 
foreign Drug Trafficking Organizations (DTOs), mostly Mexican in 
origin, which operate in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest and 
throughout California and much of the United States," Odle explained 
to me by email. "Frequently using illegal aliens residing outside the 
United States, or recently smuggled across the [sic] boarder, these 
Mexican criminal groups establish, maintain and protect an increasing 
number of clandestine operations."

Yet, predictably, Odle couldn't explain what made them terrorists.

"Some DTOs have been linked by law enforcement and investigations to 
terrorist organizations and pose a substantial and increasing threat 
to national security," he added in a subsequent email. "Our primary 
concern here on the Shasta-Trinity National Forest is the safety of 
our forest visitors and agency employees and the negative impacts 
marijuana has on the environment and natural resources, no matter 
what name is given to the DTOs that are illegally growing marijuana 
on America's public lands."

No matter what name is given? Easy enough if you're the one doing the 
naming. If you're the one being flippantly tagged a terrorist? Not so much.

Plus, there are enough holes in the argument to plant your own 
cannabis seeds. To start with, cannabis may be many things, but it is 
far from an environmental negative. It has been used for medicinal 
purposes for thousands of years, can grow in almost any climate, and 
is a naturally occurring dioecious perennial. (In other words, it's 
not fossil fuel.) Further, Odle's claim that safety is Shasta's first 
concern is understandable, but he offered no examples of violent 
activity by any of the area growers to legitimize the ONDCP's 
inflammatory language. Sure, the fact that "some" DTOs have been 
linked to terrorist organizations is educational, but as with 
everything the ONDCP touches, specifics are elusive and 
generalizations are everywhere.

I pressed Odle for further clarification on the terrorism question. 
But instead of al Qaeda, all I got was more obfuscation. And more Mexicans.

"Do [sic] to ongoing investigations, I am limited in what I can 
share," Odle explained in another email. "When we do the 
investigations we try to get up as far as we can into the food chain. 
We work closely with the DEA, FBI, ICE and other law enforcement 
agencies that have the capabilities to identify who these folks are 
and what links they may or may not have."

Fair enough. It's out of his hands. Any concrete local examples?

"I can [sic] site an example in a case we are now finished 
investigating. The Forest Service was heavily involved with the 
eradication of marijuana gardens associated with the Magana drug 
cartel. The Magana drug cartel operation and investigation occurred 
throughout National Forests in California, Utah and Arkansas, with 
direct ties to Mexico. Investigators in the Magana case said cartel 
leaders brought in illegal workers from the Mexican states of 
Michoacan and Jalisco."

In short, terrorism isn't the real problem here, it's illegal 
immigration. Not convinced? When you get a chance, search Google for 
"Magana drug cartel" and let me know if you can find anything. Even 
better, try the ONDCP, and let me know if anything unrelated to 
cocaine shows up. Even if you give Walters, Odle and other so-called 
counterterrorism experts their due on the Magana drug cartel or other 
so-called terrorist organizations who the ONDCP cannot actually name 
(making sure to look up the definition of "cartel" in the process, if 
you want to be exhaustive about it), what you end up with are 
cannabis traffickers and cultivators operating illegally on public 
lands using undocumented immigrants.

Illegal activity? Fine. Terrorism? Are you high?

The Bush administration's hypocritical bait-and-switch between 
terrorism and immigration is clumsy for certain, but it is especially 
glaring in light of a recent Washington Times article criticizing 
none other than President Bush himself. According to the piece, a 
"2006 audit showed federal, state and local governments are among the 
biggest employers of the half-million persons in the U.S. illegally 
using 'non-work' Social Security numbers -- numbers issued legally, 
but with specific instructions that the holders are not authorized to 
work in the U.S." And that charge was leveled by Iowa Republican and 
ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee's immigration 
subcommittee Rep. Steve King, in a politically conservative 
publication founded by Rev. Sun Myung Moon, cult leader of the 
Unification Church.

Even the Moonies think that Bush needs to start throwing what the 
president's own drug czar would call terrorists out of his own White 
House, before he starts worrying about anyone else. After all, 
according to the audit, his own government is a much worse offender 
than the ragged Magana cartel growing cannabis in the forests of Redding.

By the time the ONDCP's talking points touched on other byproducts of 
commercially cultivated cannabis terrorism -- "fire violations, 
unsanitary conditions, littering, smoking, building unauthorized 
structures, unauthorized camping and cutting trees without a permit 
to name a few," in Odle's words -- I began to more fully understand 
the power of language. By capitalizing on a nationally manufactured 
fear and simply merging words into each other, the Bush 
administration has created from its hyperreal imagination a living 
policy that can have real-world ramifications for those trampled 
beneath its fluid terminology.

The good news is that the Democrats in Congress are at least trying 
to make up for their heinous complicity in the Military Commissions 
Act, whose passage helped enable this linguistic nightmare in the 
first place. As recently as July 2007, Committee on Oversight and 
Government Reform chairman Rep. Henry Waxman wrote Walters asking why 
American taxpayers have been footing the bill for ONDCP officials to 
travel around the country with Republican candidates stumping for 
election at the behest of Karl Rove. Striking hard at Bush 
administration politicization of the ONDCP is a good start, but 
stopping their ability to label anyone anything they want would go 
much farther to restoring sensible policy, on drugs and everything 
else, for the rest of our new millennium.

We're going to need help soon, if the recent white papers on drug 
abuse from the ONDCP are any indication. Because they've enlisted God 
for help in beating back the devil weed, as their fact sheet 
"Marijuana and Kids: Faith" explains: "Religion and religiosity 
repeatedly correlate with lower teen and adult marijuana and 
substance use rates and buffer the impact of life stress which can 
lead to marijuana and substance use. ... Other studies show that 
teens who don't view faith as important are up to four times more 
likely to use marijuana."

In other words, smoke up, heretical terrorist! You're not only 
fueling al Qaeda's mass murder by purchasing weed cultivated by 
illegal Mexicans in the rural public lands of the world, but you're 
also turning your back on God in the process. As well as replacing 
the Bush administration's real world with your selfish virtual 
reality in which cannabis is a relatively harmless, naturally 
occurring plant that can chill you out as much as it can fill you 
out. A massive, multiplayer simulation where pot is a viable 
medicinal alternative to synthesized painkillers like oxycontin, 
which ease your agony by killing you off altogether.

According to the Bush administration and its politicized ONDCP, you 
need to unplug from that moonbat matrix and start praying. Fast. Or else.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman