MCCAFFREY IS A PATZER

Words cannot express my disappointment at your decision to give Barry
McCaffrey's drug war screed a featured position in Chess Life.
General McCaffrey's has championed a vicious "War on Drugs" that has
done nothing except result in higher profits for drug traders and
increased availability of ever more potent drugs in the U.S. Zealots
like McCaffrey are the ultimate patzers -- once they decide on a
strategy, no amount of defeat is sufficient to make them reconsider
its wisdom.

McCaffrey has led the effort to make America -- once the Land of the
Free -- the country with the greatest percentage of its people
incarcerated. His bizarre and totally unsupported assertion that
drug tests are appropriate for tournament chess players would be
laughable were it not so consistent with his vision for a militarized
police-state society in which civil liberties are forgotten and men
like McCaffrey are "Czars" over us.

As a longtime Life Member I have long noted with dismay USCF's sad
rush to embrace the Drug War rhetoric and troll for dollars by
selling chess as a way to reduce drug abuse. ("Push pawns not drugs"
being only the lamest of the slogans invented to curry favor with the
McCaffreys of the world.) Since McCaffrey's office has received so
much attention lately for taxpayer dollars to control television
scripts, the question must be asked: Why did Chess Life let itself
be used by a non-chess-playing government propagandist without even
finding an opposing point of view from a chess player? In the
future, let us reserve Chess Life and the game of chess as a
sanctuary from politics, especially the politics of repression that
McCaffrey seeks to impose on all of us.

Sincerely,

John Gear,

East Lansing Michigan