EDITORIAL: THE STRANGE DRUG WAR

Washington has a strange way of waging a war against drugs in Colombia.

On the one hand, Congress just voted $1.3 billion to send helicopters to the Colombian Army and to drop dangerous plant-killing fungi on farming areas in that country.

On the other, a federal court just let the U.S. officer who was in charge of anti-drug operations in Colombia off with a five-month sentence for his involvement in sending heroin back to the United States.

Col. James Hiett's wife, Laurie Anne Hiett, was convicted last May in Texas of smuggling some $700,000 worth of heroin to New York in May and June 1999, using the diplomatic postal service at the U.S. Embassy.

She was sentenced to five years in prison.

Hiett plead guilty to concealing his knowledge that his wife was laundering drug money. In doing so, he admitted she made two trips in April 1999 from Bogota to New York, returning with $25,000. Hiett said he never questioned her about it.

During his time in Colombia, Hiett commanded U.S. troops who trained security forces for so-called counter-drug operations and also protected radar bases used to track aircraft.

The prisons of New York and Texas are filled with tens of thousands of youths, mostly Latino and African American, who are serving a minimum of 15 years supposedly for possessing enough drugs to be considered a seller. Washington has put pressure on the Colombian government to extradite so-called "drug lords" and handed them life sentences in U.S. courts.

So this extremely small sentence for the U.S. drug cop gone bad has infuriated even the pro-U.S. officials of Colombia. The Colombian government's chief prosecutor, Alfonso Gomez, told reporters July 14, "This is a ridiculous sentence ... Seeing that they apply such low sentences to U.S. citizens in the United States, this would seem to vindicate those who say there's different treatment [for Colombians]."

More than anything else, it contradicts U.S. officials' claim that they are intervening in Colombia to stop the drug trade. Indeed, Hiett has shown they are part of the drug trade, just as they were in Central America in the 1980s and Southeast Asia in the 1970s.

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