...if only our elected officials will learn it:
AP IMPACT: Cartel arrests did not curb drug trade
On a sleepy boulevard of motels and fast-food joints near the Mexican border, police stopped a car with a broken tail light. In the trunk, he found a trash bag containing 48 pounds of narcotics, and in the driver's pocket, scraps of paper scrawled with phone numbers.
Almost four years later, a grave Eric Holder called his first news conference as attorney general and announced where those phone numbers had led — to a sweeping investigation called Operation Xcellerator, which produced the largest-ever federal crackdown on Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel, with 761 people arrested and 23 tons of narcotics seized.
Standing with Holder that day in 2009 was acting Drug Enforcement Administration chief Michele Leonhart, who declared: "Today we have dealt the Sinaloa drug cartel a crushing blow."
But just how crushing was it? An Associated Press investigation casts doubt on whether the crackdown caused any significant setback for the cartel.
Now, as you know, a lot of those on the left contend terrorists should be fought in the courts and on the streets with police and lawyers as opposed to on the battlefield with soldiers. One could say that the drug cartels are every bit as powerful as international terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda. If the law-enforcement approach works so dismally with the drug cartels, what makes liberals think it's going to work with terrorism?
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