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Radley Balko has posted the latest round-up of botched SWAT team raids online at Reason. Read 'em and scream in outrage...

Colombian narcs who haven't been killed yet are holding police training seminars in Afghanistan. From The International Herald Tribune:

It is a measure of Afghanistan's virulent opium trade, which has helped revive the Taliban while corroding the credibility of the government, that U.S. officials now hope that Afghanistan's drug problem will someday be only as bad as that of Colombia.
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"I wanted the Colombians to come here to give the Afghans something to aspire to," [DEA Kabul Chief Vincent] Balbo said. "To instill the fact that they have been doing this for years, and it has worked."

They're unearthing mass graves in Colombia. Cocaine is cheaper than ever. The president is embroiled in a massive corruption scandal. You can’t even grow bananas there without becoming a pawn in a paramilitary extortion scandal. Yet American drug warriors talk about Colombia like it's a shining beacon of justice and democracy.

Afghan narcs-in-training will learn what a joke this is when their Colombian instructors request asylum.

I am charged with two felonies. Meeting with a lawyer Thursday, and it's gonna cost at least $3500.00 for openers. The first two attorneys I talked to were already mentioning plea bargains before I got off the phone.

The old "drug users fund terrorism" canard is getting new play in Europe this week, where French and Spanish intelligence agencies reported that, as the Guardian (UK) put it, "Cannabis cash 'funds Islamist terrorism'". The report was the result of an investigation launched after the 2004 Madrid train bombings that found the bomb plotters bought their explosives from former miners and paid them in hashish. The intelligence agencies also claimed that the Al Qaeda-linked Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat is using hash sales as part of "a complex network" of financing its terrorist operations. I don't doubt that. People who need money for nefarious schemes typically resort to the black market economy, whether it is drugs, diamonds, oil, or whatever commodity. It is so screamingly obvious that I hesitate to point it out, but pot smokers don't fund terrorism—prohibition does. You don't hear of barley or grapevines or tobacco leaves funding terrorism because they are used to make non-prohibited psychoactive drugs that are integrated into the legal, aboveground economy. If you want to stop Islamic terrorists from using the black market profits from the hash trade to buy bombs, the solution is clear: End the prohibition regime that creates the black market.

Maryland's governor, Martin O'Malley, is set to make a decision regarding the drug sentencing reform bill passed by the state's General Assembly by Thursday -- he initially supported it but is now threatening a veto -- and press coverage has continued. Editorials criticizing his veto threat have run in the Baltimore Sun and the Washington Post. (I'm having trouble finding a link for the Post article -- please post one here if you have it.) Some quotes from the two pieces, first the Post:

"Its veto would raise the question of whether Mr. O'Malley is more interested in political posturing than in constructive reform of the state's criminal justice system."

and the Sun:

The Sun editorial read: "Mr. O'Malley shouldn't veto the bill... the solution is not to retreat from a modest sentencing change, it's to allocate more money for drug treatment."