Narco News Bulletin impresario and Phoenix contributor Al Giordano will speak at Boston University this coming Monday at a teach-in titled "War on Terrorism/War on Drugs: What Is to Be Done?" The event, sponsored by the Student Underground newspaper, is aimed at showing the links between the war on drugs in Latin America and the war against terrorism in Central Asia.

Giordano will be joined by Catherine Austin Fitts, an official in the first Bush administration whose three-part series "Narco Dollars for Dummies" recently appeared in Narco News.

For the past several years Giordano, a veteran anti-nuclear activist, friend of the late Abbie Hoffman, and former political reporter for the Phoenix, has reported on the drug war from an undisclosed location in Latin America — or "from somewhere in América," as he closes his missives. He is currently fighting a high-profile libel suit brought against him and a Mexican journalist by Mexican banker Roberto Hernández Ramírez, who objected to their characterization of him as a well-heeled narcotrafficker (see "Don’t Quote Me," News and Features, April 13).

Giordano’s talk at BU will be his first public appearance in Boston since 1996. Following a recent St. Louis teach-in, Giordano wrote, "I cleared the lump in my throat and began speaking about how the ‘war on terrorism’ looked increasingly like a carbon-copy of the so-called ‘war on drugs,’ and the ways in which both are being waged by the cynics in Power so as to be an eternal ‘war,’ never intended to be won.... The question, now as always in a democracy, is not where 9/11 takes us, but where we take ourselves. And if the young are prepared to lead America out of this quagmire, to think and act ‘outside the box’ of the media’s presently allowed discourse, well, then maybe the final chapter has not yet been written on the immediate history that began on September 11th."

Al Giordano and Catherine Fitts Austin will speak on Monday, November 19, at 7 p.m. in Boston University’s Morse Auditorium, 602 Comm Ave. For more information, go to the Narco News Bulletin’s Web site at www.narconews.com.

Issue Date: November 15 - 22, 2001

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