DEA Boss Asa Hutchinson Declares FARC Narco Terrorists
By Lloyd Hart

Monday, February 25, 2002:Today on NPR State Radio, the 10:00 a.m. version of the Diane Rehm Show was titled Drug Trade in Afghanistan in which Rehm put together a panel with Rand Beers, Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement, Martha Olcott, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Maureen Orth, special correspondent for Vanity Fair.

The panel talked about the drug control crisis created in Afghanistan as a result of the Taliban retreat and how poor Afghan farmers are now free to plant Afghanistan’s’ most successful cash crop, opium poppies.

But when Asa Hutchinson the newly anointed DEA boss phoned in, in the middle of the show, somehow the conversation shifted to Colombia and Hutchinson declared The FARC, the largest revolutionary armed force in Columbia, a legitimate peasant uprising, "Narco terrorists". Which fits neatly into the Bush administrations Narco Terrorist propaganda campaign kicked off during the super bowl. And now, of course the fact that Colombia’s President Andrés Pastrana left the peace talks on unproven acussations that the FARC had committed a kidnapping of a Colomlian Senator couldn’t be better timed. Pastrana declared war on the FARC and began dropping bombs on the demilitarized zone the next day. And of course Oxy Petroleum and Colombia's Paramilitary groups had nothing to do with this escalation into war.