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Award-winning Investigative Journalist Robert Parry (1949-2018)

Award-winning investigative journalist and founder/editor of ConsortiumNews.com, Robert Parry has passed away. His ground-breaking work uncovering Reagan-era dirty wars in Central America and many other illegal and immoral policies conducted by successive administrations and U.S. intelligence agencies, stands as an inspiration to all in journalists working in the public interest.

Robert had been a regular guest on our Between The Lines and Counterpoint radio shows -- and many other progressive outlets across the U.S. over four decades.

His penetrating analysis of U.S. foreign policy and international conflicts will be sorely missed, and not easily replaced. His son Nat Parry writes a tribute to his father: Robert Parry’s Legacy and the Future of Consortiumnews.



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The Resistance Starts Now!

Between The Lines' coverage and resource compilation of the Resistance Movement



SPECIAL REPORT: "The Resistance - Women's March 2018 - Hartford, Connecticut" Jan. 20, 2018

Selected speeches from the Women's March in Hartford, Connecticut 2018, recorded and produced by Scott Harris




SPECIAL REPORT: "No Fracking Waste in CT!" Jan. 14, 2018



SPECIAL REPORT: "Resistance Round Table: The Unraveling Continues..." Jan. 13, 2018




SPECIAL REPORT: "Capitalism to the ash heap?" Richard Wolff, Jan. 2, 2018




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SPECIAL REPORT: Nina Turner's address, Working Families Party Awards Banquet, Dec. 14, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Dec. 12, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Dec. 9, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: On Tyranny - one year later, Nov. 28, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Mic Check, Nov. 12, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Resistance Roundtable, Nov. 11, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017



SPECIAL REPORT: Rainy Day Radio, Nov. 7, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: Resisting U.S. JeJu Island military base in South Korea, Oct. 24, 2017




SPECIAL REPORT: John Allen, Out in New Haven



2017 Gandhi Peace Awards

Promoting Enduring Peace presented its Gandhi Peace Award jointly to renowned consumer advocate Ralph Nader and BDS founder Omar Barghouti on April 23, 2017.


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THANK YOU TO EVERYONE...

who helped make our 25th anniversary with Jeremy Scahill a success!

For those who missed the event, or were there and really wanted to fully absorb its import, here it is in video

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 1 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.

Jeremy Scahill keynote speech, part 2 from PROUDEYEMEDIA on Vimeo.


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Between The Lines Presentation at the Left Forum 2016

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"How Do We Build A Mass Movement to Reverse Runaway Inequality?" with Les Leopold, author of "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice,"May 22, 2016, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, 860 11th Ave. (Between 58th and 59th), New York City. Between The Lines' Scott Harris and Richard Hill moderated this workshop. Listen to the audio/slideshows and more from this workshop.





Listen to audio of the plenary sessions from the weekend.


JEREMY SCAHILL: Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker "Dirty Wars"

Listen to the full interview (30:33) with Jeremy Scahill, an award-winning investigative journalist with the Nation Magazine, correspondent for Democracy Now! and author of the bestselling book, "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army," about America's outsourcing of its military. In an exclusive interview with Counterpoint's Scott Harris on Sept. 16, 2013, Scahill talks about his latest book, "Dirty Wars, The World is a Battlefield," also made into a documentary film under the same title, and was nominated Dec. 5, 2013 for an Academy Award in the Best Documentary Feature category.

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Legalization, An Alternative to the Costly, Failed U.S. War on Drugs

Posted Feb. 2, 2011

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Interview with Terry Nelson, a retired U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent, conducted by Melinda Tuhus

drug In October 2009, the U.S. Border Patrol fired employee Bryan Gonzalez just before his two-year probationary period was up. He was terminated for the personal opinions he expressed several months earlier to a fellow officer. Gonzalez told his co-worker that the best way to reduce drug-related violence on the U.S.-Mexico border was by legalizing drugs. He also stated that as a Mexican-American, he understood why many Mexicans felt they had no choice but to try to enter the U.S. without documents in search of jobs. On Jan. 20 of this year, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico filed a lawsuit against the Border Patrol for firing Gonzalez on the basis of his personal beliefs expressed in a casual conversation, rather than his job performance.

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition or LEAP, is supporting Gonzalez. The group is made up of 30,000 -- mostly retired -- police, judges, prosecutors and others who believe the drug war the U.S. has been waging for the past 40 years is an expensive failure -- and that legalizing and taxing drugs would reduce violence.

Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus spoke with Terry Nelson, a retired U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent who spent 30 years fighting the drug war on the Mexican border, throughout Central America and parts of South America. He discusses the cost of the drug war in terms of lives ruined and tax dollars expended while offering an alternative vision for reform.

TERRY NELSON: For example, we spent a little over $7 billion on Plan Colombia to eradicate the coca crop. At the end of the program, the vice president of Colombia announced that coca production was up 27 percent, so instead of lowering production, it actually raised it. And to add on that point, it doesn't really matter. So we get about 16 to 17 percent of the narcotics being shipped to us; we interdict that amount, the rest of it gets through. So let's say, for example, we got 50 percent of the narcotics coming through; all that would do is drive up the price on the remaining 50 percent and increase the violence, because the trade routes would be more lucrative. It's a hamster wheel; you can't get off that way.

So LEAP's position is that we need to trade our total strategy from one of interdiction and prohibition of the narcotics to legalization, whereas you have a chance to regulate and control the distribution of manufacture and who can buy it, who can sell it, and you take the criminal drug gangs and cartels out of the matrix. Now, we acknowledge that this doesn't fix our drug problem; this fixes the crime and violence problem and the 30,000 lives that have been lost in Mexico in the last 3.5 years. We do away with most of the violence; not all of it, but probably 80 percent of the violence we'll do away with.

It doesn't do anything for our drug problem, because it's a separate problem. Our drug problem is a social problem and a medical problem, best dealt with through education, and when you fall through the cracks and become addicted or you start abusing certain drugs, you need medical care to cure yourself of it. Putting a person in prison doesn't cure their addiction; it just postpones it 'til they get out, plus it also puts him in contact with true criminals that are in there for violent reasons. So we think it's a hamster wheel and the best way would be to change the whole approach: legalize it, regulate and control it, educate, and treat. And the places that have done it, i.e., Portugal just released a ten-year study where they decriminalized all drugs -- they didn't legalize them because of United Nations treaties that we have with the whole world -- but they have half the drug use in Portugal that surrounding countries in Europe do and half what we have in the U.S.

Ironically, the countries with the harshest penalties -- Britain and America -- have the highest drug use. So you see what we're basing our argument on. It would be more humane -- certainly more humane, because we put 2.2 million people in prison each year, and 1.8 million of those are non-violent drug offenders, of whom 800,000 are marijuana possession alone. And the government has no issue prosecuting you, convicting you and then sending you to a treatment center. Let's just do away with that conviction, because you can get over an addiction, you can never get over a conviction. It follows you the rest of your life. If you don't give them this felony sentence, you can treat 'em and make them well and they can go out and start paying taxes on a higher salary and they're no longer a drain on society, they then become a plus to society.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Just about every state and the federal government are facing huge budget holes. Even if we didn't legalize and therefore tax drugs, just ending the mass incarceration of non-violent drug offenders would save billions of dollars. Do you think the budget crisis will help your cause?

TERRY NELSON: Well, we've always believed there'd be a watershed event that really pushed our movement forward very rapidly, and collapse of the economy is one of them. But we spend about $70 billion a year prosecuting the drug war -- the people put in jail, the $30,000 a year to keep a person in jail, the court costs, the police costs, the overtime costs, all this stuff. So that's about $70 billion a year. And, the Harvard economics professor Jeffrey Miron, guestimated we could make probably $17 billion to $20 billion in tax revenue by taxing it. But the social savings alone would be phenomenal. I would recommend, if you tax it, using the revenue to treat those falling through the cracks. Of course, you know how that would work: They'd probably take the revenue and put it in the general fund and buy vehicles for the officials to drive around in.

BETWEEN THE LINES: Terry Nelson, there's a debate in some circles between those who support decriminalization but not legalization. Why does LEAP support legalization, which I guess is the most extreme of these options?

TERRY NELSON: Because decriminalization doesn't fix the core problem, which is the drug cartels and criminal street gangs that control the distribution. They're the violent ones, not the users. So decriminalizing, all you do is, you do help the lower end here, but you don't fix the problem. We're not for Band-aids, and we've got to think outside of America. It's not just America that has this; it's a global problem. In America, we have a very low death rate compared to other parts of the world; we have like 9 per 100,000 and Jamaica has 38, 39 per 100,000. We're very fortunate it hasn't hit us...and remember, 30,000 people have been killed in Mexico in the last 3.5 years, since Plan Merida went into effect. This is not just an American problem; this is a global problem. LEAP has members in 90 different countries in the world, by the way. So we have people on the streets telling us what's going on there. We understand the global effects of this drug war. So, for example, even if we could manage to control the intake here in America to some extent, it would just push it up in other parts of the world, so you haven't fixed the problem, you've put a Band-aid on this area, and believe me, once they start tightening down over there, the balloon effect will come into effect, and usage will come back here once you gear down a little bit. So you need to fix the problem.

Contact LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, by calling their Massachusetts office at (781) 393-6985 or visit their website at www.LEAP.cc

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