Is terrorism really the biggest threat facing the United States? TomPaine.com recently commented on a report of the libertarian Cato Institute arguing that terrorism is really just not that big of a threat to the average person. For instance, about as many Americans have been killed by terrorists as have been…
According to freethinkers cited in this article from MSNBC, the old adage is a denial of our contributions," says Master Sgt. Kathleen Johnson, who founded the Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers and who will be deployed to Iraq this fall. "A lot of people manage to serve without having to…
In 1946 (In Politics and the English Language) George Orwell wrote the following: [P]olitical chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. In Huffpo, Arianna Huffington has written a good post regarding government/media double-speak. Here is the problem, according…
In the September, 2006 Harper's "Notebook," Lewis H. Lapham begins with this quote by Rainer Werner Fassbinder: In the last analysis, terrorism is an idea generated by capitalism to justify better defense measures to safeguard capitalism. Is there money to be made in Iraq? Lapham, who has wielded a sharp…
President Bush and Republican leaders in Washington have failed America by not stopping importation of heroin from Afghanistan which has become a “narco-state” in the aftermath of the toppling of the Taliban regime which had supported Osama bin Laden and global terror through sales of drugs. A resurgent Taliban uses drug sales as an instrument of terror and finances international terrorism. The warlords which grow and process the drugs are supported by the US in our continuing efforts to prop up the post-Taliban government of Hamid Karzi. The flow of more potent Afghan drugs into the US has caused carnage among users, some as young as 11.
In 2001, the Taliban had banned opium production in Afghanistan to increase the price of its stocks which it apparently used to supply funds to Osama bin Laden and other terrorists for their attacks upon the United States and others. Opium production in Afghanistan fell to just 74 metric tons. After the overthrow of the Taliban, opium production capacity skyrocketed to 1,278 metric tons in 2002, according to DEA statistics. Production more than doubled in 2003, and then nearly doubled again in the next year according to James Risen, in his book “State of War.” Risen also writes that “by 2004, Afghanistan was producing 87 percent of the world’s opium supply. In late 2004, the CIA estimated that 206,000 hectares were under poppy cultivation and that the new crop would generate $7 billion worth of heroin.”
Congress and the Bush administration were aware …
