Read All About It in the Sunday Papers-Labor Day Weekend Edition

LEAD STORY-The (UK) Observer: Former Brazilian PM Urges End to ‘Disaster’,  AKA “The War On Drugs”

Seriously, does ANYone ANYwhere on the political spectrum agree that this unmitigated disaster makes sense? The human toll in many of the countries in Latin America and South America has been incalculable:

“After decades of overflights, interdictions, spraying and raids on jungle drug factories, Latin America remains the world’s largest exporter of cocaine and marijuana,” (former Brazilian President) Fernando Cardoso writes. “It is producing more and more opium and heroin. It is developing the capacity to mass produce synthetic drugs. Continuing the drugs war with more of the same is ludicrous.”

Which leads to the key question, also explored in today’s Observer: Is America Ready to Give Up Its 40-Year-Old War on Drugs (courtesy of Dick Nixon)?:

Is the “war on drugs” ending? The Argentinian ruling does not stand alone. Across Latin America and Mexico, there is a wave of drug law reform which constitutes a stark rebuff to the United States as it prepares to mark the 40th anniversary of a conflict officially declared by President Richard Nixon and fronted by his wife, Pat, in 1969.

That “war” has incarcerated an average of a million US citizens a year, as every stratum of American society demonstrates its insatiable need to get high. And it has also engulfed not only America, but the Americas.

At El Paso at the end of the month, experts from the US and Mexico will gather to take stock and thrash out alternatives.

Here is why there finally is real impetus for change:

Never have the war on drugs and its flipside, the drug wars, raged so furiously as on this anniversary. Yet Mexico’s is only the latest in a series of murderous conflicts that have scarred the pan-American war on drugs, starting with Operation Condor in the 1970s, whereby the US helped Mexico to obliterate poppy crops, only to give birth to the new cartels and institutionalised corruption.

Meanwhile, there have been catastrophic drug wars and narco-insurgency in Colombia, combining with political struggles to create the biggest internal displacement of people in the western hemisphere. Drug-related violence has blighted Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela and anywhere the Mexican and Colombian cocaine cartels sought their product. Latin America has also become a factory for synthetic drugs, much of it now under Mexican control.

All because Tricky Dick Nixon hated the idea of those hippies smoking pot and chanting derogatory things at him. It is indeed telling that Nixon’s first move in the War on Drugs was to spray Mexican cannibis with paraquat, driving up the price and driving people to more dangerous drugs.

Latin America is seeking a different route to that of outright interdiction as advocated – and for decades directed – by Washington. The new thinking is emblematic of a new era in South American politics and statehood, in which the lexicon demands partnership with the US, not the subjugation that hallmarked the presidencies of Nixon, Reagan, the Bushes and Clinton.

It is also time for one of the primary enablers of the War on Drugs, Vice President Joe Biden, who always wanted to prove that he could ‘out-tough’ the Rethugs on this issue, to demonstrate that he’s now willing to ‘out-think’ the remaining hardliners .

It’s official.   Democrats are a bunch of wusses. While nothin’s wrong with whackjobs carrying guns to town meetings and ‘Rethug leaders’ (wink, wink) hinting that it might not be a bad idea if that ‘ni–er in the White House’ went away, one of Obama’s most effective people has been forced to resign b/c:

Jones issued two public apologies in recent days, one for signing a petition that questioned whether Bush administration officials “may indeed have deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, perhaps as a pretext for war” and the other for using a crude term to describe Republicans in a speech he gave before joining the administration.

Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.) called on Jones to resign Friday, saying in a statement, “His extremist views and coarse rhetoric have no place in this administration or the public debate.”

 Senator Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.) urged Congress to investigate Jones’s “fitness” for the position, writing in an open letter, “Can the American people trust a senior White House official that is so cavalier in his association with such radical and repugnant sentiments?” On Saturday, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, wrote on his Twitter account, “Van Jones has to go.”

Never mind that extremist views and coarse rhetoric are all the Rethuglican Party has offered, along with subtle hints that anyone with a rifle who has Obama in their sights might just want to exercise their Second Amendment rights, but someone who is effective at creating green jobs should be run off.

What’s worse, the pathethic D’s, including the Obama Administration, just let it happen. Somewhere, Tom Carper is applauding this bipartisan gesture while sipping his morning latte.

The Obama Administration is thisclose to jumping the shark.

The slimeballs with no consciences have slithered out from under the rocks and are pursuing a new ‘exotic product’. The engine to fuel massive profits will be old people dying and dying soon. Kinda like a Wall Street Death panel:

The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and elderly people sell for cash — $400,000 for a $1 million policy, say, depending on the life expectancy of the insured person. Then they plan to “securitize” these policies, in Wall Street jargon, by packaging hundreds or thousands together into bonds. They will then resell those bonds to investors, like big pension funds, who will receive the payouts when people with the insurance die.

The earlier the policyholder dies, the bigger the return — though if people live longer than expected, investors could get poor returns or even lose money.

This ‘windfall’ for speculators will likely hurt one particular group–those people, families, and businesses purchasing insurance for themselves or their employees:

But if a policy is purchased and packaged into a security, investors will keep paying the premiums that might have been abandoned; as a result, more policies will stay in force, ensuring more payouts over time and less money for the insurance companies.

“When they set their premiums they were basing them on assumptions that were wrong,” said Neil A. Doherty, a professor at Wharton who has studied life settlements.

Indeed, Mr. Doherty says that in reaction to widespread securitization, insurers most likely would have to raise the premiums on new life policies.

Undeterred, Wall Street is racing ahead for a simple reason: With $26 trillion of life insurance policies in force in the United States, the market could be huge.

In this case, the winners and losers are clear. Guess it won’t surprise you to know that you’re being played for suckers once again.

McClatchy Papers: White House Visitor, Friend of Chalabi, Sent to U. S. Secret Prison Without Charges

The Gang That Shredded the Constitution sure threw a ‘curveball’ at this friend of a friend of Cheney’s. Locked him away in a secret prison without charges:

BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. authorities detained a top aide to former Iraqi exile leader and Bush administration ally Ahmad Chalabi last year and accused him of helping Iranian-backed militants kidnap and kill American and British soldiers and contractors.

The aide, Ali Feisal al Lami, said he was quizzed about Iranian agents, senior Shiite Muslim politicians and deadly bombings. Then, Lami said, he asked his American interrogator: Have you ever been to the White House?

“He said, ‘No,’ ” Lami told McClatchy. “I told him, ‘Well, I have.’ “

He was released without charges last month after a 352-day detention, a quarter of it spent in what he claimed was a secret U.S.-run prison in Iraq. American officials in Iraq confirmed that Lami was detained, but they declined to reveal where he was held before the detention facility at Camp Cropper in Baghdad, where the U.S. military holds high-value detainees.

Lami apparently fell out of favor with the Bushites when they finally realized that Chalabi was a bu(ll)shite artist, something that reading intelligence briefings could have told them years earlier:

After 38 days in the custody of his civilian jailers, Lami said, he was transferred to Camp Cropper. He received a medical checkup, he said, and finally was able to call his family. He said he was held for 22 days in solitary confinement at Cropper before he was allowed to mingle with other prisoners.

One of the first people he saw was Qais Khazali, his old friend who was the leader of the Iranian-backed Asa’ib Ahl al Haq militia. They hugged and exchanged traditional kisses on each cheek, Lami said. He said that before his release Aug. 14, he and Khazali had a long talk in Cropper.

“At the beginning, after the fall of the old regime, I chose the political path with Dr. Chalabi. They chose the path of resistance against the occupation,” Lami said. “I asked him, ‘So, Sheikh Qais, which is better: your military way or my political way?”

“He said, ‘It’s all the same. We’re both in prison,’ ” Lami said. “He was right and I was wrong.”

A really fascinating account by Hannah Allam of the flip-side of purported ‘grown-ups’ playing intelligence games the way they read about them in LeCarre novels.

The (UK) Independent: Did Tony Blair & the CIA Give Lockerbie Bomber Get-Out-Of-Jail Free Card–in 2003?

Eightball sez: Signs point to ‘yes’. Slick Willie ain’t got nothin’ on Teflon Tony Blair:

Tony Blair will be thrust into the controversy over the release of the Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi with questions in Parliament over a secret meeting the then Prime Minister orchestrated that brought Libya in from the cold.

At the time of the secret meeting in December 2003 at the private Travellers Club in Pall Mall, London – for decades the favourite haunt of spies – Libyan officials were pressing for negotiations on the status of Megrahi, who was nearly three years into his life sentence at a Scottish jail.

Two days after the meeting Mr Blair and Col Gaddafi held direct talks by telephone; and the next day, 19 December, the historic announcement about Libyan WMD was made by Mr Blair and President Bush.

The Iraq Survey Group had just reported it had found no biological or chemical weapons. Two months after the talks, Mr Blair travelled to the Libyan desert to extend the “hand of friendship” to Col Gaddafi in a Bedouin tent, calculating that the PR coup of Libya dismantling WMD programmes outweighed American outrage.

Of course, as it turns out, Libya never had WMD (sound familiar?), so Blair and Bush fell all over themselves welcoming Libya back into the league of friendly nations for nothing. Uh, unless it was oil. And, lest you think that tying Bush to Blair is a cheap shot, take a look at who else was at the table at the Travellers Club in December, 2003:

Nine top-level MI6, Foreign Office, CIA and Libyan officials were present for the negotiations at the Travellers Club. The revelation that two senior American officials were present risks causing embarrassment to the White House, as Washington has made clear its criticism of the release of Megrahi by the Scottish government last month.

For the Americans, Stephen Kappes, the CIA deputy director of operations, and Robert Joseph, counter-proliferation chief, led the talks. Britain was represented by William Ehrman, Foreign Office director general for defence and intelligence, and David Landsman, then the head of counter-proliferation at the Foreign Office. A CIA source said last night that a Lebanese businessman, while not at the meeting, was the key go-between, bringing together Libyan officials and British and US spies. The same businessman also put together a team of private investigators on Lockerbie to undermine the case against Megrahi.

No doubt the survivors of those who perished in the Lockerbie tragedy will at least be comforted in knowing that the Gang that Shredded the Constitution sold the memories of their loved ones to a Lebanese businessman who was concocting a nut-job theory to prove that the Lockerbie bomber wasn’t really the Lockerbie bomber. Or perhaps they won’t.

Lots to chew on this week, and lots to comment on. El Somnambulo will be disappointed should you choose not to do so. As he leaves for his Third Person Withdrawal Therapy, let El Somnambulo know that he is in your heart, or in your bile, by commenting. He will take great solace in that.