Oliver North has a piece at Townhall: The Other War

WASHINGTON — It’s a war the so-called mainstream media apparently have decided to ignore. Though its death toll is higher than Iraq’s and Afghanistan’s combined, it evidently isn’t worth covering; and unless you’re reading this in the Southwest, you probably haven’t even heard about it.

The conflict, a full-blown narco-insurgency, has claimed the lives of more than 17,000 combatants and innocents, threatens to undo several democratically elected governments and poses a real and present danger to the United States. It’s not the one being fought in Afghanistan. It’s the war being waged from the Andean basin all the way north to the Rio Grande.

Yes, he’s discovered the drug war in Mexico. I’m not sure where he’s been, but I think there’s been a little bit of press of this one. I know it seems like I see a lot of coverage, but I’m particularly interested in the topic, so maybe I’m imagining it? Nope. According to Google News, there have been over 4,000 articles in the mainstream media in the past year with “Mexico” and “drug war” — the topic that the mainstream media has supposedly ignored.

Now, there probably should be even more coverage, but it’s not exactly flying under the radar.

North goes on to recount some of the violence that has gone on in Mexico – all old news to us. Of course, he acts like he has some special ability to talk about this subject since his “Fox News team accompanied DEA and Customs and Border Protection agents on patrols.”

And, of course, Oliver North knows what must be done. He’s got it all under control…

… pause … rewind …

Let’s take a moment and remember who we’re talking about. This is Oliver North. Lawbreaker extraordinaire. He didn’t break small laws, no, he broke laws set by Congress having to do with relations with other countries.

He broke the law and sold weapons — not to someone on the street, but to Iran (yes, the country that the Fox News crowd is so terribly afraid of) and then he used the money to fund the Contras — a revolutionary group in Nicaragua that mostly targeted civilians (isn’t that what we call terrorists?) and then destroyed records of what he had done. Because he was offered immunity to testify to Congress, he never had to pay for his crimes. Instead, he was richly rewarded.

Oh, and he was involved in drug trafficking, too. Sure, he denies it, but everyone that he used in Iran-Contra (including the CIA) was involved in drug trafficking, and his own notebooks had at least 15 “entries related to drug trafficking. An entry from July 12, 1985 states ‘$14 million to finance came from drugs’.”

North isn’t any run-of-the-mill lawbreaker. Oliver North, and most of the Iran-Contra gang, are neocons, with their own internationalist agenda — one that can’t be bothered with things like laws, Congress, or the Constitution.

And you can bet that his sudden concern for the violence in Mexico has more to do with how that can be used for his own agenda.

So, what is this criminal’s solution to the drug war in Mexico?

If the Obama administration is serious about stopping the violence threatening Americans from our southern border, it needs to initiate some urgent diplomacy to reinstitute our access to SWIFT data — and stop talking about “legalization.”

um…

What?

Now there’s something I’ve missed. Has the Obama administration been talking non-stop about “legalization” behind my back? If so, how the hell are they talking about “legalization” when it isn’t even in their vocabulary?

And why would North want that discussion to stop (assuming it was even happening)? He doesn’t give a single reason why legalization is a bad idea, and, of course, we know that it’s the only idea that will actually work. He just tosses it out as if it was self-evidently a bad idea.

Instead, he proposes that we infiltrate SWIFT. What’s that?

The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (“SWIFT”) operates a worldwide financial messaging network which exchanges messages between banks and other financial institutions.

A series of articles published on June 23, 2006, by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times revealed that the Treasury Department and the CIA, United States government agencies, had a program to access the SWIFT transaction database after the September 11th attacks called the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program.

After these publications SWIFT quickly came under pressure for scrutinizing data privacy of its customers by letting a foreign government agency access sensitive personal data. In September 2006, the Belgian government declared that the SWIFT dealings with U.S. government authorities were, in fact, a breach of Belgian and European privacy laws. Additionally, the U.S. government has submitted “useful” data to U.S. companies (manufacturer – customer relations, prices, etc.).

So North is going to attack the cartels’ finances by having the U.S. Government snoop on world-wide legitimate banking information systems (all, of course, done in the name of terrorism and the drug war, and not to be used for any other reasons… right).

I really don’t see how having inappropriate access to SWIFT is going to help find the bundles of cash hidden in the gas tank of the Honda Accord crossing the border, which is then used by the cartels to pay off police and buy their own banking officials. No, by the time SWIFT chatter could do any good, the money has already successfully created the cartels’ power.

The only real option is to stop the money before it heads to the cartels, and that requires legalization.

Oliver North should be writing a column for the federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass Prison Daily, not Townhall. He has no interest in solving the drug war in Mexico (his pathetic “ideas” in the column demonstrate that handily). All he sees is an opportunity to shoehorn his neocon agenda into an issue.

It’s a trait that is particularly dangerous about the neocons — they have absolutely no moral compass, and are willing to lie about anything if it can help their agenda (just listen to William Kristol any day of the week for examples). Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there that can be swayed by neocon lies and appeals to fear, and induced to act against their own interests and those of the American people.

So we have to fight back by pointing out the dishonesty whenever it appears.