Who the F#&% Is William Brownfield?

By John Grant

Stop feeding the beast.
- Julieta Castellanos*
 

William Brownfield is a major architect in the current linkage between the failed Drug War and the War On Terror. He may succeed in making it an even greater failure in the future.

Brownfield has been Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement since January 20 of last year. Before that, he was the US ambassador to Colombia; and before that, he was the US ambassador to Venezuela, where he was notorious for taunting President Hugo Chavez.

Mr. Brownfield attended the National War College, and he speaks Spanish with a pronounced Texas accent. He reportedly considers himself a Texan -- though, like George W. Bush, he was not born in Texas and has lived much of his life elsewhere. It seems being a “Texan” is a state of mind, especially vis-à-vis Latin America which has been Brownfield’s area of interest. He’s now looking toexpand his war-making efforts into Africa.

It’s clear that Mr. Brownfield isn’t one of those striped pants diplomats from foggy bottom determined to keep tempers from reaching the boiling point. He doesn't seem burdened by doubt, and he seems comfortable strategizing for war.

Regardless of party affiliation, it's people like Brownfield who have turned the 40-year-old War On Drugs and The Global War On Terror into one all-encompassing, global war against “bad guys,” a category to be defined as the war moves "downrange." Like grand chefs, these strategists have put the two wars into a National Security State blender and come up with what is The War Without End. American citizens were never asked if they wanted this war. It wasn’t necessary to ask -- since Americans are encouraged to get lost in themselves and all the available bread and circus around them. We haven’t kept our eye on the ball and we now find ourselves the unwitting sustainers of an Orwellian state of constant war.

Wars are easy to start, and that was true of the War On Drugs, which was kicked off back in the days of NY Governor Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald & Nancy Reagan. Gee, there were all those horror stories of how desperately low humans can go when they fall prey to the abuse of certain drugs. Vietnam was over, so the culture needed a “war” and all the mobilization, demonization and de-humanization a war entails.

At the close of the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon had had a quite liberal drug policy. Why? One reason was all the strung-out soldiers coming back from Vietnam.

For the rest of this article by JOHN GRANT inThisCantBeHappening!. the new independent Project Censored Award-winning online alternative newspaper, please go to: www.thiscantbehappening.net/node/1251