GUEST COLUMN

As the nation ponders its lost cause in Iraq, it's past time to
reconsider yet another misbegotten crusade: America's 35-year-old "War
on Drugs." Conceived by President Richard Nixon in 1971 partly as an
attack on the anti-Vietnam war "counterculture," like most
governmental efforts to abolish sin and folly, it's a complete
failure. For different reasons, Democrats and Republicans alike refuse
to acknowledge reality.

I yield to none in my contempt for the romance of narcotics. Like
alcoholism, illegal drugs have brought misery, sorrow and death to
millions. Few American families are untouched. Prohibition and
criminalization, however, have proven a miserable failure, making
traffic in illicit substances infinitely more profitable, enriching
organized crime, corrupting governments and police and turning drug
addiction into a contemporary plague. The United States now has a
higher percentage of jailed citizens than all but a few police states.
Yet heroin, cocaine and crystal meth are cheaper and more ubiquitous
than ever.

Meanwhile, the lovely city of Culiacan, Sinaloa, about the size of
Little Rock, had experienced 300 homicides in a four-month period.
Rival drug gangs fought pitched battles in the streets. Not long after
I left, Roberto Montenegro, a courageous Mexican reporter who'd helped
me and other American journalists, was machine-gunned to death on
Culiacan's main square leaving church one Sunday.

I thought of Montenegro after reading The Observer's astonishing
account of U.S. government collusion in mob killings in the Mexican
state of Chihuahua. According to the British newspaper, agents from
the U.S. Immigration and Customs Executive (ICE), a division of
Homeland Security, hired a corrupt Mexican cop named Guillermo Ramirez
Peyro, aka "Lalo," to infiltrate a drug cartel in Juarez, directly
across from El Paso, Texas. Things went wrong from the start. Early
on, the Mexican gangsters asked Lalo to prove his loyalty by helping
torture, execute and bury a Mexican lawyer named Fernando Reyes.

Possibly fearful of refusing, Lalo did so. Wearing a wire supplied by
ICE agents, he also recorded the entire grisly affair down to the last
scream. "They tried to choke him with an extension cord," he said in a
subsequent sworn statement "but this broke and I gave them a plastic
bag and they put it on his head and suffocated him." Unsure Reyes was
dead, Lalo watched an accomplice "hit him many times on the head" with
a shovel.

Mindful that its informant had committed first-degree murder, ICE
asked Justice Department lawyers what to do. Astonishingly, they were
advised to precede full speed ahead. The U.S. Attorney in charge of El
Paso is one Johnny Sutton, a close associate of Attorney General
Alberto Gonzalez. During President Bush's tenure as Texas governor,
Sutton served as his director of criminal-justice policy.

Alas, Lalo discovered an appetite for what his Mexican compatriots
dubbed "carne asadas" (barbecues). Over six months, claiming he often
warned ICE handlers in advance, Lalo participated in many more
killings, climaxing in the kidnapping and murder of Luis Padilla, a
husband and father of three from his home in El Paso, Texas -- a case
of mistaken identity. Mexican authorities eventually exhumed a dozen
bodies from a garden in a wealthy Juarez neighborhood.

But it wasn't until Lalo's accomplices bungled the kidnapping of an
undercover DEA agent in Juarez that the whole thing blew up in his
handlers' faces. Upon learning of the ICE operation, Sandy Gonzalez,
the head of the DEA's El Paso office, expressed outrage. "I have no
choice but to hold you responsible," he wrote his counterpart at
Homeland Security, for protecting an informant who'd become a
"homicidal maniac ... (T)his situation is so bizarre that, even as I'm
writing to you, it is difficult for me to believe it."

But Narco News, an online newsletter that did the original reporting,
was already sniffing around, and this was the Bush administration. So
you know what happened next. Gonzalez, the furious DEA agent, was
forced out of his job. Federal agents were sent to grill the Narco
News reporter in San Antonio about his sources' identities.

The final score? Thirteen dead vs. one plea-bargained drug-trafficking
conviction.

Could things possibly get any more upside-down?