al Qaeda's Cocaine Cowboys, Death to Smoochy in Uganda

Paul Krugman
E J Dionne Jr
Jamsheed Choksy
Gregory Johnson

I thought I was joking when I said that al Qaeda was learning how to smuggle stuff onto planes from South American drug cartels. Turns out I was right, with the US now claiming that Columbian drug lords are using al Qaeda to help smuggle cocaine into Africa and throughout the Middle East, probably to help fuel the paranoid actions and ravings of the Iranian Ayatollahs. From there, the routes go to Europe and Russia: "So criminal organizations including the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, are going through Africa to access the European market. And they are doing it with the help of al-Qaeda and other groups branded terrorists by Washington, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.


"In the mid to late 1990s when the Europeans became better at maritime interdiction, off the coasts of Portugal and Spain for example, traffickers started moving their routes southward. So the next progression was to Western Africa," said Jay Bergman, DEA director for the Andean region of South America."

I wonder what will be next in the lucrative markets, where extremist and crime groups can get together and prey on their societies? Pornography in America was controlled by organized crime (with the most pornography consumed in the red states) and there is a lot of pornography made in Southeast Asia, with more recently being produced in the Middle East to satisfy the notions of our returning troops and the hypocritically large consumption in the most conservative of Muslim states. So will al Qaeda produce a Mohammed Wadd to ram certain truths into western wombs? Stay tuned...


Of the five African countries being singled out for extra security measures, Algeria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Nigeria, Nigeria is complaining the loudest: "Tougher screening of passengers wanting to fly to the US has been condemned as unfair by Nigeria - one of the nations singled out for special checks.
Information Minister Dora Akunyili said the rules, brought in after a Nigerian allegedly man tried to blow up a plane, discriminated against 150m Nigerians." Whoa, I didn't realize that we suspected 150 million of any country, or is the whole of Nigeria now trying to immigrate to the US? So that's what they did with the money they made from those Internet scams...

"He was not influenced in Nigeria, he was not recruited or trained in Nigeria, he was not supported whatsoever in Nigeria."

I understand that we are threatening to send over some evangelical preachers and Congressmen who are members of the Family over to Nigeria to sell them on the evils of homosexuality, maybe influence creating a law or two on the subject, like we did in Uganda. And in Uganda, where every American preacher is trying to cut off any influence they once had, is responding to pressure from the White House. They are now saying that homosexuality will not be punishable by death, they'll just give them life in prison instead. Now that's change I can believe in: "Donor countries, including the United States, are demanding that Uganda’s government drop the proposed law, saying it violates human rights, though Uganda’s minister of ethics and integrity (who previously tried to ban miniskirts) recently said, “Homosexuals can forget about human rights.”


The Ugandan government, facing the prospect of losing millions in foreign aid, is now indicating that it will back down, slightly, and change the death penalty provision to life in prison for some homosexuals. But the battle is far from over." I'm sure there will be more on this story on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow show, either tonight or tomorrow. All homosexuals in Uganda are now required to register with their local police department, supposedly if there is a sudden outbreak of HIV, they will turn to the gays as suspects first. HIV is still a major problem in Africa and Asia. At least they aren't in denial that AIDS is spreading throughout their countries like the governments were a few years ago...