Poor Mojo's Newswire

Checking out a published report, Erik Magraken contacted former New Mexico state senator Duncan Scott and found that it was true, the lawmaker had indeed introduced a legislative amendment in 1995 providing that: When a psychologist or psychiatrist testifies during a defendant’s competency hearing, the psychologist or psychiatrist shall wear a cone-shaped hat that is not less than two feet tall. The surface of the hat shall be imprinted with stars and lightning bolts. Additionally, a psychologist or psychiatrist shall be required to don a white beard that is not less than 18 inches in length, and shall punctuate crucial elements of his testimony by stabbing the air with a wand. Whenever a psychologist or psychiatrist provides expert testimony regarding a defendant’s competency, the bailiff shall contemporaneously dim the courtroom lights and administer two strikes to a Chinese gong…

Omar Mohammed hunts terrorists in Baghdad. Hunts them and kills them. A few months ago, he killed two big guys in Al Qaeda — Abu Ayyub al-Masri and Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, the two most-wanted terrorists in all of Iraq. But when you hunt Al Qaeda, they also hunt you. The more you kill them, the more they want to kill you. They've shot Omar, blown him up, and killed dozens of his men. Omar is a senior officer in the Iraqi Counterterrorism Unit. He was doing police work when the Americans invaded in 2003, and he volunteered his services to the occupiers as the insurgent war overwhelmed the American presence, enveloping them in a kind of warfare for which they were not prepared. To America's military and to many intelligence operatives in Washington and in Iraq, Omar is the best terrorist hunter alive. His photo has never been published. His face doesn't exist in any database linked to his real name. It's a broad, handsome face, and he's thick as a bull across the neck and shoulders. At this precise moment he's not in Iraq, though; he's in a red canoe on a river in Virginia, heading fast toward a waterfall. . . .

When it was discovered by law-enforcement agents in February 2011, the vessel was perched in an improvised shipyard, hidden amid the coastal woodlands of western Colombia. Twenty-one metres long and constructed mainly of fibreglass, the craft had room for a six-member crew and 6,435 litres of diesel fuel. It was equipped with bunk beds, a ballast mechanism, a global positioning system, a 346-horsepower diesel engine, “scrubbing” devices to clean the air, a conning tower and a periscope with a night-vision camera. One estimate put the cost of constructing such a sophisticated device in the remote backwoods of South America at about $5 million. But that’s pocket change when measured against the anticipated value of the vehicle’s intended cargo — up to eight tons of pure cocaine, worth about $160 million wholesale in Dallas, Texas. “These submarines are such an innovation,” says Bruce Michael Bagley, chair of international studies at the University of Miami, who follows the drug trade closely. “They can go up to 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometres).” And, repeatedly, they do. Welcome aboard the Cocaine Express, a seemingly perpetual smuggling machine that starts in a forest clearing somewhere in South America and ends on a street corner somewhere near you — that is, if it ends at all. What follows is a chronicle of the serpentine trek that a kilogram of cocaine might take on its northbound passage from Colombia to Canada. . . .