Our Drug War & Unconnected Terror Dots

Our long-ago-lost war on drugs has been interfering with our national security and international relations for decades. The puritanical drive to eradicate the evil plants and substances that ensnare our innocent children would be comical if the costs weren’t so high. The reality is that the drugs and the junkies won. If we had taken the billions and billions of dollars we have spent hassling peasants and enriching tyrannical criminals, we could have given each junkie a body guard 24/7 to slap the pipe out of their hands every time they reached for it.

We now have reports that one of the planners of the slaughter in Mumbai, was a US DEA informant for a number of years prior to that. Hold on, that threw me for a loop too. Read this.

Federal officials acknowledged Saturday that David Coleman Headley, the U.S. businessman who confessed to being a terrorist scout in the 2008 Mumbai attacks, was working as a Drug Enforcement Administration informant while training with terrorists in Pakistan….After he was arrested in a 2005 domestic dispute in New York City, his wife told federal investigators about his long involvement with the terrorist group Lashkar-i-Taiba and his extensive training in its Pakistani camps. She also told them he had bragged about being a paid U.S. informant while undergoing terrorist training.

Gee no red flags there anyone could have reasonably foreseen. And it wasn’t just that time.

On Saturday, the New York Times reported that another of Headley’s wives – he apparently was married to three women at the same time – also had warned U.S. officials about his terrorism involvement. In December 2007, the Moroccan woman met with officials at the U.S. Embassy in Pakistan and told them about Headley’s friendship with Lashkar members, his hatred of India and her trips with him to the Taj Mahal Hotel, a prime target of the Mumbai attacks, the Times reported.

On Saturday, federal officials said the women’s tips lacked specificity.

Sorry we couldn’t get you the time and date folks, but maybe a little surveillance, some investigation, something?

Now we don’t have anything directly tying our boy Headley’s ties with DEA to the terrorists in any way. But maybe, just maybe if we could get all of our law enforcement, intelligence and operators fighting our real enemies, we wouldn’t be paying the bills for a guy who is fully on board with the other team. If we call off the drug crusade we don’t have to alienate large swaths of the population in places we are trying to make friends like, oh I don’t know Afghanistan!