Hugh Thompson: Reviled then honored for his actions in Viet Nam

By Nell Boyce

Reprinted from US News and World Report

Skimming over the Vietnamese village of My Lai in a helicopter with a bubble-shaped windshield, 24-year-old Hugh Thompson had a superb view of the ground below. But what the Army pilot saw didn’t make any sense: piles of Vietnamese bodies and dead water buffalo. He and his two younger crew mates, Lawrence Colburn and Glenn Andreotta, were flying low over the hamlet on March 16, 1968, trying to draw fire so that two gunships flying above could locate and destroy the enemy. On this morning, no one was shooting at them. And yet they saw bodies everywhere, and the wounded civilians they had earlier marked for medical aid were now all dead.

As the helicopter hovered a few feet over a paddy field, the team watched a group of Americans approach a wounded young woman lying on the ground. A captain nudged her with his foot, then shot her. The men in the helicopter recoiled in horror, shouting, “You son of a bitch!”

Thompson couldn’t believe it. His suspicions and fear began to grow as they flew over the eastern side of the village and saw dozens of bodies piled in an irrigation ditch. Soldiers were standing nearby, taking a cigarette break. Thompson racked his brains for an explanation. Maybe the civilians had fled to the ditch for cover? Maybe they’d been accidentally killed and the soldiers had made a mass grave? The Army warrant officer just couldn’t wrap his mind around the truth of My Lai.

Before My Lai, Americans always saw their boys in uniform as heroes. Their troops had brought war criminals, the Nazis, to justice. So when the massacre of some 500 unarmed Vietnamese civilians by U.S. soldiers became public a year and a half later, it shook the country to its core. Many Americans found it so unbelievable they perversely hailed Lt. William Calley, the officer who ordered his men to shoot civilians, as an unjustly accused hero. But My Lai did produce true heroes, says William Eckhardt, who served as chief prosecutor for the My Lai courts-martial. “When you have evil, sometimes, in the midst of it, you will have incredible, selfless good. And that’s Hugh Thompson.”

On that historic morning, Thompson set his helicopter down near the irrigation ditch full of bodies. He asked a sergeant if the soldiers could help the civilians, some of whom were still moving. The sergeant suggested putting them out of their misery. Stunned, Thompson turned to Lieutenant Calley, who told him to mind his own business. Thompson reluctantly got back in his helicopter and began to lift off. Just then Andreotta yelled, “My God, they’re firing into the ditch!”

Thompson finally faced the truth. He and his crew flew around for a few minutes, outraged, wondering what to do. Then they saw several elderly adults and children running for a shelter, chased by Americans. “We thought they had about 30 seconds before they’d die,” recalls Colburn. Thompson landed his chopper between the troops and the shelter, then jumped out and confronted the lieutenant in charge of the chase. He asked for assistance in escorting the civilians out of the bunker; the lieutenant said he’d get them out with a hand grenade. Furious, Thompson announced he was taking the civilians out. He went back to Colburn and Andreotta and told them if the Americans fired, to shoot them. “Glenn and I were staring at each other, dumbfounded,” says Colburn. He says he never pointed his gun at an American soldier, but he might have fired if they had first. The ground soldiers waited and watched.

Thompson coaxed the Vietnamese out of the shelter with hand gestures. They followed, wary. Thompson looked at his three-man helicopter and realized he had nowhere to put them. “There was no thinking about it,” he says now. “It was just something that had to be done, and it had to be done fast.” He got on the radio and begged the gunships to land and fly the four adults and five children to safety, which they did within minutes.

Before returning to base, the helicopter crew saw something moving in the irrigation ditch–a child, about 4 years old. Andreotta waded through bloody cadavers to pull him out. Thompson, who had a son, was overcome by emotion. He immediately flew the child to a nearby hospital.

Thompson wasted no time telling his superiors what had happened. “They said I was screaming quite loud. I was mad. I threatened never to fly again,” Thompson remembers. “I didn’t want to be a part of that. It wasn’t war.” An investigation followed, but it was cursory at best.

A month later, Andreotta died in combat. Thompson was shot down and returned home to teach helicopter piloting. Colburn served his tour of duty and left the military. The two figured those involved in the killing had been court-martialed. In fact, nothing had happened. But rumors of the massacre persisted. One soldier who heard of the atrocities, Ron Ridenhour, vowed to make them public. In the spring of 1969, he sent letters to government officials, which led to a real investigation and sickening revelations: murdered babies and old men, raped and mutilated women, in a village where U.S. soldiers mistakenly expected to find lots of Viet Cong.

Not all soldiers at My Lai participated in the carnage. Some men risked courtmartial or even death by defying Calley’s direct orders to shoot civilians. Eckhardt doesn’t think these men were heroes, because they didn’t try to stop the murderers. But Colburn thinks they did the best they could. “We could just fly away at the end of the day,” he notes. The ground troops had to live together for months.

The Pentagon’s investigation eventually suggested that nearly 80 soldiers had participated in the killing and coverup, although only Calley (who now works at a jewelry store in Columbus, Ga.) was convicted. The eyewitness testimony of Thompson and Colburn proved crucial. But instead of thanking them, America vilified them. Many saw Calley as a scapegoat for regrettable but inevitable civilian casualties. “Rallies for Calley” were held all over the country. Jimmy Carter, then governor of Georgia, urged citizens to leave car headlights on to show support for Calley. Thompson, who got nasty letters and death threats, remembers thinking: “Has everyone gone mad?” He feared a court-martial for his command to fire, if necessary, on U.S. soldiers.

Gradually the furor died down. Colburn and Thompson lived in relative anonymity until a 1989 television documentary on My Lai reclaimed them as forgotten heroes. David Egan, a Clemson University professor who had served in a French village where Nazis killed scores of innocents in World War II, was amazed by the story. He campaigned to have Thompson and his team awarded the coveted Soldier’s Medal. It wasn’t until March 6, 1998, after internal debate among Pentagon officials (who feared an award would reopen old wounds) and outside pressure from reporters, that Thompson and Colburn finally received medals in a ceremony at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.

But both say a far more gratifying reward was a trip back to My Lai this March to dedicate a school and a “peace park.” It was then they finally met a young man named Do Hoa, who they believe was the boy they rescued from that death-filled ditch. “Being reunited with the boy was just…I can’t even describe it,” says Colburn. And Thompson, also overwhelmed, doesn’t even try.

Gazette’s Fair Use Statement

The Pure Water Gazette Proudly Awards Its Celebrated and Much Coveted Hero Award To

the late Senator Wayne Morse (1900-1974) of Oregon.

Where is Wayne Morse Now that We Need Him?

Ever heard of Wayne Morse?  Probably most younger readers haven’t.  In the McCarthy era, he was a staunch opponent of the anti-Communist madness that took over our government.  He was an outspoken defender of civil liberties during his twenty-four years in the Senate.

Originally a liberal Republican, he abandoned his party affiliation  in protest of Eisenhower’s choice of Richard Nixon as his vice-presidential candidate.  For a time he sat  in the center aisle of the Senate as an independent before eventually becoming a Democrat. .  Morse made many enemies, and these included five presidents, since he usually voted his own mind and did not bow to party pressures.  It was after he had become a Democrat that he drew the ire of the Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson for refusing to toe the party line.

But for that story, you’ll have to read Norman Solomon’s excellent article about the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, and a subsequent Solomon article about the Iraqui crisis in July 2002.

Here is an excerpt from Mr. Solomon’s article about Senator Morse:

In early August 1964, Morse was one of only two senators to vote against the Tonkin Gulf resolution, which served as a green light for the Vietnam War. While reviled by much of the press in his home state of Oregon as well as nationwide, he persisted with fierce oratory for peace. It would have been much easier to acquiesce to the media’s war fever. But Morse was not the silent type, especially in matters of conscience.

On Feb. 27, 1968, I sat in a small room at the Capitol to watch a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Six members of the panel were seated around a long table. Most of all, I remember Morse’s voice, raspy and urgent.

“My views are no longer lonely,” he noted at one point, adding: “You have millions of people who are not going to support this tyranny that American boys are being killed in South Vietnam to maintain in power.”

Morse summed up his position on negotiations between the U.S. government and its Vietnamese adversaries: “Who are we to say there have to be two Vietnams? They are not going to do it and they shouldn’t do it. There isn’t any reason in the world why the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong should ever come to a negotiating table on the basis that there must be two Vietnams.”

Moments before the hearing adjourned, Morse said that he did not “intend to put the blood of this war on my hands.”

At the time, Oregon’s senior senator was remarkable because he challenged the morality — not just the “winability” — of the war. He passionately asserted that the United States had no right to impose its will on the world. In the process, he made enemies of many fellow Democrats, including President Lyndon Johnson.

Like most heretics, Morse suffered consequences. After 24 years in the Senate, he lost a race for re-election in November 1968. The winner was a slick politician named Robert Packwood, who denounced Morse’s antiwar fervor.

In his lifetime, Morse became a media pariah. In the quarter-century since his death, political reporters have rarely mentioned his name.

“I don’t know why we think, just because we’re mighty, that we have the right to try to substitute might for right,” Morse said on national television in 1964. “And that’s the American policy in Southeast Asia — just as unsound when we do it as when Russia does it.”

Three years later, he declared: “We’re going to become guilty, in my judgment, of being the greatest threat to the peace of the world. It’s an ugly reality, and we Americans don’t like to face up to it. I hate to think of the chapter of American history that’s going to be written in the future in connection with our outlawry in Southeast Asia.”

Such heresy infuriated many powerful politicians — and journalists — while Wayne Morse did all he could to block a war train speeding to catastrophe.           

John Withee, the World’s Greatest Bean Collector

In the Pure Water Gazette’s article on seed patenting, My Secret Life as a Farmer by Gene Franks,   which appeared in our paper version in the spring of 1995,  John Withee was praised as one of the great heroes of our time because of his tireless efforts to save heirloom varieties of beans from extinction.  We were gratified to see that the Seed Savers Exchange, the oldest and most prestigious of the seed preservation societies,  has featured Withee and recognized his accomplishments in its 1999 Seeds of Change catalog. Much of the information in our article below comes from their article on Withee.

Seed patenting remains one of the most serious issues of our time, though few seem aware of the gravity of the war that multinational seed corporations are waging on heirloom seed varieties. John Withee recognized the seriousness of the seed dilemma early on and devoted his considerable energies to the preservation of heirloom varieties of beans.

Withee, who lived in Lynnfield, Massachusetts,  has been called “the world’s greatest bean collector.” He was born in Portland, Maine in 1910, son of a grocer who fed his family beans every day of the winter. John’s favorite bean from his youth was the Jacob’s Cattle, and it was his effort to locate that bean that got him started as a collector.  He is credited with the collection of about 1,200 separate strains of beans from the 1960s to the the 1980s.

He is best know for the founding of the very significant bean collectors society known as Wanigan Associates. Wanigan is an Indian name for boat-mounted  kitchens carried on river rafts that were floated down Maine’s rivers during the spring lumber drives. Huge quantities of beans were served to the Maine woodsmen from the floating cook shacks.

In 1981 Withee turned the extensive Wanigan Associates bean collection over to Kent Whealy’s Seed Savers Exchange for permanent maintenance. The photo below, from the Seed Savers Exchange Catalog, shows Withee displaying some 850 of his bean varieties in a case built by Kent Whealy. John’s bean case is now on display at the Peabody Museum in Salem, Massachusetts. Several of John Withee’s bean varieties, including his favorite, Jacob’s Cattle, are offered in the Seed Savers Exchange catalogs.

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Although canine creatures sometimes appear to be able to follow simple commands like “sit” and “shake,”  the more complex rules for living in our technological society fly right over their heads.  Teaching your mutt “roll over” is one thing, but you’re wasting your breath when you start talking to him about how he can take a dump on this side of the yard but not on the other or about how we get up early five days a week but barking isn’t allowed before 10:30 on Saturday.

That is why I, Tiger Tom, have cleverly devised my Canine Training Signage Kit  It is made up of skillfully drawn signs depicting 25 separate moral lessons for dogs in graphic terms that Bowser’s tiny brain can understand.  At left, for example, is one of the signs from the series.  Need I explain its meaning?  With copies of this sign strategically placed on your lawn and flower bed areas, Bruno now has no excuse for his lifelong habit of random and obnoxious defecation. And I, Tiger Tom, say that with warning signs in place, ignorance is no longer an excuse.  Being a soft-hearted tiger, I do not recommend first-offense capital punishment for sign-rule violation, but for serious offenses like random defecation it is certainly justifiable as a second-offense consequence.

Other morally uplifting sign-lessons from my Canine Training Signage Kit deal with issues like

• Do not lick your balls when the Pastor comes over for dinner.
• No digging on the carpet.
• Do not attack the UPS driver.
• Do not eat from the cat litter box.
• Random digging prohibited.
• It’s OK to lie down without turning around three times.
• No recreational barking.
• Do not blow your disgusting breath in my face.

Dog Signage Kits are only $99.50, plus $6 shipping.

Tiger Tom’s Deluxe Dog Feeder

If You Love Your Dog, Let Him Eat the Way Nature Intended

Tiger Tom’s Deluxe Dog Feeder, pictured at right, will give new meaning to your dog’s life and end feeding problems for good.

My deluxe feeding barrels, the same heavy-duty barrels that are used by city parks departments, will give Spot a lifetime of dining pleasure.  In tests conducted here at the Gazette’s laboratories, we’ve established that dogs derive a full 66.83% more pleasure and 56.8% greater nutritional value from food served in my feeder as compared with food served in the usual stupid pet store-variety cutesy feeding bowl.

Let’s face it.  Most dogs are ashamed to eat from a a little plastic bowl with a picture of a puppy on it.  Eating from my dog feeder satisfies not only your canine’s physical hunger but also addresses his hunting instinct.  Food from an authentic city trash barrel satisfies his self esteem and gives him something to be proud of.

And, here’s the best part.  Your Tiger Tom Authentic Dog Feeder will quickly pay for itself in food savings.  If you’ve been enticing your pooch to eat with expensive food preparations,  you’ll find that with my feeding barrel Rover will eat even the most disgusting of throw-aways.  Even coffee grounds and rotting carrots, when dug from a feeding barrel, become coveted culinary delicacies.  And if you have more than one hound,  it’s even better, because my tests show that canine dining pleasure increases exponentially with competition.  When two dogs are fed from the same Tiger Tom Dog Feeder, they fight over morsels that they would not even sniff at if served in a conventional feeding bowl.  With dogs, digestion improves with rage.

Order today and begin saving on dog food right away. You’ll have a happier, healthier dog. 

Tiger Tom’s Unique Dog Feeder: $66. (Please call for volume pricing.)

Shipping in the Continental U.S.: $65.

For special lettering with the name of the Parks Department of your city: $35.50.

Please Specify Dark Blue or Sunshine Yellow.

Other Products–Coming Soon:

Home neutering kit.

Dog Yummies (cat excrement wrapped as candy.)

Mr. Ben T. Quisenberry (1887-1986)

The Gazette is honored to give its Hero Award posthumously to Mr. Ben T. Quisenberry, who died in 1986 at age 99. Mr. Quisenberry lived in and operated a tiny mail-order seed company called Big Tomato Gardens out of a small building that had been an old post office in Syracuse, Ohio. He printed his own seed packets, complete with mottoes, on an old printing press.

His passion was saving heirloom tomato varieties from extinction. Through his efforts, several tomato varieties, including Brandywine (his personal favorite), Golden Sunray, Czech’s Bush, Long Tom and Mortgage Lifter, survived the war on heirloom seeds waged by the large seed companies. (These can still be purchased from Seed Saver’s Exchange, whose current catalog contains a full page of Ben Quisenberry’s Tomatoes. Their address is below.)

In 1982, Mr. Quisenberry told an interviewer who asked the secret of his long, productive life:

Once a fellow from a television station asked me how I accounted for keeping active 95 years. I said to keep happy and to keep content, do something that’s worthwhile. If you have a hobby and you can make your hobby your business, you’re all the better off. Do something good…..l do marvel at myself sometimes, the way I keep going. Indeed I do. I marvel at myself. I’m surprised sometimes how I can keep going from 7 o’clock until dark. About dark, I’m like the chickens. I hunt for my roost. …..Aging in rural America, the elderly man is very fortunate if he is in a rural district. Out in Nature. Out where he can work. Out where he can fasten his hands onto the end of a hoe handle and make things grow. He’s with nature, and when he’s with nature, he’s close to God. God is nature and nature is God. So you’re in good company when you are out in a rural district.

For more information about Mr. Quisenberry’s heroic efforts in the cause of saving several varieties of seeds from extinction, and for an overview of the seed problem that has now grown critical, see the previous Gazette article “My Secret Life As A Farmer.”

To buy Mr. Quisenberry’s seeds, and to learn more about a truly outstanding organization, please contact:

Seed Savers Exchange
3076 North Winn Road
Decorah, IA 52101

(319) 382-5990

(Note: The photo Mr. Quisenberry is from the 1999 issue of The Seed Savers Exchange Catalog.)

Pat Roy Mooney

Pat Roy Mooney is one of a select group of heroes who devote their time and energy to the defense of plants. Plants are victims of a veritable holocaust being carried out by multi-national seed companies. This is a battle that affects us all, but few are even aware that plant biodiversity is a universal dilemma. (For background, see the  My Secret Life As a Farmer, which appeared in an earlier paper Gazette.)

The excellent article below appeared in the Dec. 16, 1998 Ottawa Citizen.

Biodiversity ‘crackpot’ wins Pearson medal: Activist wages war against ‘life patents’

By Andrew Duffy

The Pearson Peace Medal was awarded yesterday to Pat Roy Mooney, an expert on plant genetics who has led an international campaign against patents on living organisms.

Mr. Mooney, 51, a legally blind high school dropout, used to be called a crackpot as he battled large seed companies determined to promote the use of their genetically altered plant varieties around the world. But yesterday, Gov. Gen. Romeo LeBlanc lauded him as a visionary who recognized the dangers of agricultural technology long before most of the world. “He raised the alarm and he created a higher public consciousness of the threats to biodiversity,” Mr. LeBlanc said. “His achievements show us the impact that one person can have when he cares deeply about an issue: He has raised the chances of the world having a secure supply of food and he has raised the chance for peace.”

It’s estimated that 75 per cent of genetic diversity in the world’s 20 key food crops have been lost. Most of that diversity — important to ensuring that crops survive in changing conditions — has been lost in the past 50 years as genetically altered, high-yield crops have been introduced around the world…

Mr. Mooney is now executive director of the Rural Advancement Foundation International, which has offices in Ottawa and Winnipeg…Mooney’s Rural Advancement Foundation has successfully fought against three patents taken out on human cell lines–copies of human cells reproduced in a lab–by the U.S. government.

The patents allowed the U.S. Department of Commerce to charge a $136 fee to anyone wanting to use the cells in an experiment. The cells came from the human tissue of indigenous people in Guaymi, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea. Mooney’s group has taken patent fights to the United Nations and to international courts. It’s his proudest achievement, he said, that the campaign has gone mainstream. “There are hundreds of groups out there doing this work now. And I can see a point down the road where we’re going to turn this stuff around: I think the momentum is building up so that the patenting of life will become a very hot topic around the world and we’re going to find companies back pedaling.”

Donald Rumsfeld: A Man of Constant Sorrow

by Hardly Waite

Written During the Dreary Early Days of the Bombing of Afghanistan

“Secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld, whose heart beats with the compassion of a crocodile, clings to his job by staging Florence Nightingale-like tableaux of hand-holding of the wounded while declaiming into the desert wind about ‘vicotory.'” — Sidney Blumenthal, Dec. 2004.

At a Pentagon press briefing, speaking of the “collateral damage” resulting from the American assault on Afghanistan, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said: “We mourn every civilian death.”

Now, if Professor Marc Herold,  who has with much labor counted the deaths of civilians in Afghanistan, is anywhere near right, American bombs and soldiers have killed 3,000 to 4,000 or so civilians. I did some numbers and decided that if Mr. Rumsfeld,  who tells us frequently that he is a man of his word, does, as he says, mourn every civilian death, he must be a very busy mourner.

I’m not sure how long it takes to mourn an Afghan civilian, but if Mr. Rumsfeld devotes only five minutes of mourning to each and there are, say, 3000 dead, he has had to mourn for some 250 hours. In other words, if he is able to devote eight hours a day to mourning, he has had to mourn for an entire month, including weekends and holidays. It makes you wonder how he has time to keep the bombs flying.

I have several explanations for this.

First, he may not feel it necessary to devote a full five minutes to a citizen of Afghanistan. Clearly, American citizens require considerably more than 5 minutes of mourning, but in Afghanistan life is cheap. Could be that just a part of a minute each is enough.

Another explanation is that since so many of the dead are women and children, he may be able to mourn less for them than he would have to for a man. An Afghan baby, one would think, could perhaps be mourned for in just a few seconds.

Or, here’s another view. If, say, he mourns them in groups, like when whole villages or  several members of the same family are killed by the same bomb,   he could save much time. He did not, after all, say that he mourns for them individually, just that he mourns for them. The picture is of a scene in which several family members, including a newly married couple, were killed by a bomb that hit their home.   But it  presents yet another problem.  In this unfortunate blast,  a boy of seven was blinded.  Does Mr. Rumsfeld mourn only for the dead, or does he devote at least a minute or so to the boy who will go through life without  eyes?  Having to mourn for the wounded as well as the dead would, of course, add considerably to his grieving duties.

The most likely scenario to explain the prodigious amount of mourning accomplished by Mr. Rumsfeld, though,  is to be found in a closer reading of his statement. Note that he says “we mourn.” Perhaps it is not an editorial “we.”  Perhaps he literally means that he has help in mourning. Let’s say, for example, if he delegates some mourning to  Paul Wolfowitz, Mike Myers,  Tommy Franks,  et al,  they could probably,  all grieving together,  knock out the day’s mourning fairly early in the day and still have plenty of time to plan more assaults.

I don’t know how Mr. Rumsfeld manages it, but they say he is a remarkable man.

See also, “Palestinians and the Proper Way to Grieve Dead Children.”

Why the War Against Pot? 

by Hardly Waite, Gazette Senior Editor

Have you ever wondered why the United States spends vast piles of money and squanders immeasurable amounts of human talent and natural resources in the effort to combat a benign substance like marijuana?

Have you wondered why the US is now the only industrialized country to criminalize a substance that is obviously far less harmful than the majority of legally sold pharmaceuticals?

Kate Silver, writing in the Nov. 13, 2001 Las Vegas Weekly, has some answers.

In case you haven’t guessed, like everything else in the USA, it has to do with money. It has a lot to do with the end of the Cold War, Silver says.  When the Cold War ended, ” enormous needs for certain technology and personnel were eradicated. Once America declared its infamous War on Drugs, those needs were refilled.” It provided a new “enemy” and thus created a vast number of new government jobs and a major new source of technological endeavors to be managed by government bureaucrats. It turned the Cold War inward and allowed us to wage war on our own people at a tidy profit. Silver also points out that as a very nice side-effect,  “many powerful Political Action Committees donate money to campaigns to push their own agenda, keeping marijuana illegal.”

The toll of this war is, of course, enormous in terms of  “jobs, relationships, money and time lost for the crime of smoking a joint.”  Marijuana arrests take a lot of manpower and a lot of time. “In 2000, police arrested 734,498 people for marijuana violations–the highest ever recorded by the FBI. Of those, 88 percent were for possession. The remaining 88,456 were charged with sale/manufacture.”

You probably have noticed that government officials long ago gave up trying to justify the War on Dope with anything resembling logic.  Pot has just been added to the ever-growing list of “enemies” we’re expected to fight without asking why.

Silver concludes: “Las Vegas Weekly contacted a police source in hopes of getting an argument against legalization, and providing a semblance of balance. Sadly enough, the only reasoning the source could give for pot being illegal is, well, because it’s illegal.”

Pesticides and the Foods We Consume

by Hardly Waite

According to Dr. Laura Thompson of the Southern California Institute of Clinical Nutrition:

The EPA determines risk by estimating how much of various foods people eat in a year–since the more you eat the more pesticides you get. However, EPA believes that Americans eat less than 1/2 pound per year of the following foods: almonds, avocados, blackberries, boysenberries, eggplant, figs, honeydew melons, leeks, mushrooms, summer squash, Swiss chard, tangelos, tangerines, walnuts, winter squash.

Does this make you suspect there might be something slightly wrong with the government’s system of estimating the safety levels of pesticides in the environment?

Stop Terrorism Legalize Drugs

by James W. Harris

–The Drug War, in practice, is a massive government subsidy to terrorists.

The U.S. government is busily investigating numerous ways to cut off the funds of terrorist organizations around the world.

Here’s one method guaranteed to immediately gut the biggest single source for terrorist dollars end America’s War on Drugs.

The Drug War has created a massive illegal drug market that terrorist organizations — including bin Laden’s organization — have long used to fund their horrific activities. As Interpol’s chief drugs officer, Iqbal Hussain Rizvi, noted in 1994 “Drugs have taken over as the chief means of financing terrorism.”

Drug money helped fund the September 11 terrorist attacks. It has long been known that bin Laden was taking advantage of the opportunities created by the Drug War to fund his activities. CBS News observed on May 31, 2000 “For the first time, there is…evidence that Afghanistan’s heroin producing poppy fields are funding bin Laden’s organization, Al-Qaeda, as well as the Taliban.”

Similarly, a few days after the September 11 attacks, House Speaker Dennis Hastert

 said “The illegal drug trade is the financial engine that fuels many terrorist organizations around the world, including Osama bin Laden.”

Indeed, an estimated 75% of the world’s heroin is currently produced in Afghanistan, according to the Wall Street Journal (October 2, 2001).

Remember, it is not drugs per se, but rather drug *prohibition* that makes it possible for terrorists to earn millions of dollars from producing and selling drugs — just as alcohol Prohibition made thugs like Al Capone rich in the 1920s.

The Drug War, in practice, is a massive government subsidy to terrorists. End it, and we will end the chief source of terrorism funding around the world — as well as curing a whole host of other prohibition-related evils.