How The White House Defines Security; Where's the Brave GOP?

The Administration has now declared the global spread of AIDS "a threat to U.S. national security that could topple foreign governments, touch off ethnic wars and undo decades of work in building free-market democracies abroad," the Washington Post reported. "The National Security Council, which has never before been involved in combating an infectious disease, is directing a rapid reassessment of the government's efforts," including, of course, new levels of "interagency" bureaucracy and increased funding. The administration cites dubious-sounding statistics and studies ("...the authors said the social consequences of AIDS appear to have 'a particularly strong correlation with the likelihood of state failure in partial democracies'") to justify what appears to us to be little more than an open expansion of U.S. intelligence activities in Africa, Asia and Russia. How much this curious arrangement will actually do in the way of health care is a wide-open question.

Then there was a small item in Saturday's Washington Post, "Waco Siege Investigator Found Dead In His Home," reporting that "Carlos Ghigliotti, who had been retained by a U.S. House committee to help investigate the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Tex., was found dead in Laurel under unexplained circumstances yesterday." The corpse "was badly decomposed," but "There were no signs of a break-in or a struggle at the home." Ghigliotti was a thermal-imaging expert who's testified that "his analysis of tapes at Waco indicated that an FBI agent fired shots at the compound," which is "disputed by the FBI."

Where's the Brave GOP? According to an article in the May 1 New York Times, American-sponsored planes sent into Colombia's farmlands to spray heroin poppies with pesticides are, in the process, destroying food crops, killing farm animals and poisoning residents, who have complained of nausea, muscle pain and other symptoms.

The Times report is remarkable enough for its illustration of the United States' capacity for arrogant violence. That we should sponsor harassment of Colombian farmers is as outrageous as if a foreign power sponsored missions to eradicate dangerous American products?our media culture or our Clintonite foreign policy (see above), for instance, both of which are as noxious as the heroin Colombia produces for the delectation of Americans.

Even more remarkable, though, is the story's timing?a week after the Clintonites' illegal Elian Gonzalez raid. That event, as we wrote here last week, brought out the worst in some of the GOP. Rudy Giuliani, Tom DeLay and Trent Lott mendaciously appropriated a New Left vocabulary to impugn the actions of the same lawmen they'd defend had the brutes busted down the door of a harmless pot farmer.

Which brings us back to the Times report, and the war on drugs. We'll be scanning the news for indications that Giuliani, DeLay, Lott and other GOP politicians who've expressed outrage over the government's use of force in the Elian raid prove as indignant when that force victimizes Colombian subsistence farmers. But we won't be holding our breath.