NP? Chomsky on drugs

[Doug Millison]

http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2002-02/21chomsky.cfm

"  [...] WOL: The cocaine trade is the primary given reason for US
intervention in Colombia's civil war. In your opinion, to what degree is
the drug angle a pretext? And a pretext for what?

Chomsky: Colombia has had the worst human rights record in the hemisphere
in the last decade while it has been the leading recipient of US arms and
training for the Western Hemisphere and now ranks behind only Israel and
Egypt worldwide.

There exists a very close correlation that holds over a long period of time
between human rights violations and US military aid and training. It's not
that the US likes to torture people; it's that it basically doesn't care.
For the US government, human rights violations are a secondary consequence.

In Colombia, as elsewhere, human rights violations tend to increase as the
state tries to violently repress opposition to inequality, oppression,
corruption, and other state crimes for which there is no political outlet.
The state turns to terror -- that's what's been happening in Colombia for a
long time, since before there was a Colombian drug trade.

Counterinsurgency has been going on there for 40 years; President Kennedy
sent a special forces mission to Colombia in the early 1960s. Their
proposal to the Colombian government was recently declassified, and it
called for "paramilitary terror" -- those are their words -- against what
it called known communist proponents. In Colombia, that meant labor
leaders, priests, human rights activists, and so on. Colombian military
manuals in the 1960s began to reflect this advice. In the last 15 years, as
the US has become more deeply involved, human rights violations are up
considerably.

On a more serious point, suppose that the drug pretext were legitimate.
Suppose that the US really is trying to get rid of drugs in Colombia. Does
Colombia then have the right to fumigate tobacco farms in Kentucky? They
are producing a lethal substance far more dangerous than cocaine. More
Colombians die from tobacco-related illnesses than Americans die from
cocaine. Of course, Colombia has no right to do that. [...] "