Summary: two pluses and a minus.
The first plus was in yesterday’s S.F. Examiner “Joseph Michel, also known as JoJo Koulibaly, was arrested in Aachen, Germany, for the 1997 murder of Robbie Small of Marin City, who was gunned down Jan. 9, 1997, at a birthday party in Marin City.”
In case you don’t know about police work, two years ago JoJo could have been arrested in Reno for bank robbery and the police would never have connected him to the 1997 homicide. The prompt international cooperation is 100% due to good work at Homeland Defense.
The second plus would have been more obvious if I weren’t so lazy and had posted this blog when I wrote it yesterday. I reported that 200 lbs of explosives had been stolen from a police/CHP/sherriff’s depot on Tuesday. I said that a perfect measure of Homeland Defense would be how quickly the explosives were recovered. They were recovered two days after they were stolen. A definite plus. FBI, ATF and local police obviously cooperated.
The minus comes from a report by John Perry Barlow that he was arrested in January at the San Francisco Airport for a checked bag that had three joints in it. He was held overnight and released after refusing to accept a misdemeanor charge of possession.
I definitely oppose using Homeland Defense in the Drug War. Drugs will always come into the U.S. and putting drug smugglers and drug users into a hostile category with terrorists will make life much easier for terrorists. It is a foolish and shortsighted policy.
Chances are, we will have to decriminalize drugs when we get serious about terrorism. Hopefully it won’t be too late.