I wonder how many of you have ever heard the term secret wars? According to some people there are secret wars raging at any given time. By secret war, I mean large groups or even countries fighting with other large groups or countries, but the common person doesn't even realize that the war is going on. A simple example of this may be two large drug cartels, each one trying to become dominant at the expense of the other. Everyone knows that the U.S. is at war with the Mexican drug cartels, but how many people know that the cartels are now fighting each other in a Mexican Border town. You may wonder why they would be doing this and it would be a sensible question to ask? Nuevo Laredo is a Mexican border town and is right across from the Rio Grande. Make no mistake this is a war, so far over 200 people have been killed this year, if you think that this is a lot, last year saw more than 3,000. All this is taking place because each drug cartel wants to control the routes into the U.S. When you think of a war, you usually think of two sides fighting, but what makes this war even stranger is the fact that several cartels are fighting each other. Mexico is not alone in having these types of wars.

Some people are saying that the U.S. is involved in a drug war with Al Qaeda. We know that we are fighting terrorism, but I had not heard of a drug war with these people. It was intimated that this has been going on since 9/11 or even earlier, no one knows for sure, or if they do, they are not talking. It does seem to make sense as this would be a source of funds for them. Others are saying that this is not true. They blame the administration and claim that this is just a ploy to strengthen drug laws and increase punishment. Certainly some drug interceptions were claimed to involve terrorists, but there is no way to know for sure if this is true.

Secret wars are nothing new. In 1803 Capt. William Eaton was sent into Libya to destabilize the country. The U.S. congress was unaware of this. He was given money and guns and was supposed to raise an army for this purpose. The army was recruited by him in Egypt. The orders had come secretly directly from the President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. Eaton failed and most of history forgot about this event.

John Stockwell is listed in Wikipedia as a former CIA officer who became a critic of U.S. government policies. He claims that secret CIA wars have claimed the lives of over 6 million people in the third world and that we have created a huge drug trade. Many people will be furious at some of his remarks while others will be saddened. In a lecture in 1987 he claims that he testified before congress that we were involved in South Africa and were supplying arms by plane. To view a short video of Stockwell go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDV9QiCztKY Just copy the address and past it into your browser address bar. Beware even the short video contains shocking statements. A second clip on Iran discusses secret wars. Cut and paste this address into your browsers address bar, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz5AdRVjSIE&mode=related&search=

When some people complained about the secret wars going on under President Reagan's administration he said, if you knew what I know about the situation in Central America, you would understand why it's necessary for us to intervene.' It is very hard for anyone to refute this type of argument since we can never know what is going on when we are kept out of the loop. This is also very easy for a president to say when he wants to stop the criticism. I don't know how many people have thought of this, but we haven't declared war since 1941, yet we have been involved many secret wars and some not so secret such as Korea, Vietnam, Iraq twice, Afghanistan, Panama and others. Doesn't it seem that we are avoiding having to declare war because that would mean that Congress would be allowed to dissent and everything would become public and the people might challenge the party asking for war?

Right now there is a secret war going on between hackers, those are the guys and gals that try and steal info from your computer or give you a virus, and the government. It is said that some countries have trained thousands of people to disrupt us on the internet and break into secret government sites. This war is being fought with hardware and software and there have been some victories on both sides. There is also another war going on and it is with crooks and is directed at us. The crooks are doing everything imaginable to steal our personal info and our own companies and government are doing everything to help them with their carelessness. It seems that our info is not very important to those that have charge of it. One has just to look at the amount of laptop computers that have been lost that contain people's personal information. The VA alone lost over 20,000,000 people's data. Banks are constantly losing millions upon millions of peoples records. If I were to add up just the amount of data that I heard was lost in this country, it would come to about data for 1 in 4 of the population. This doesn't take into account the data that was lost that I never heard about. Every time you get an email asking you to update some bank account you are probably being attacked by a thief who wants your data.

We are even fighting secret wars with our allies. Every time a spy is caught that is an indication that the war is raging. One of our strongest allies, Israel, was involved in a scandal when Jonathan Pollard was caught spying on the U.S. Another ally, France, in the past, has charged Britain with spying for the U.S. The U.S. has been accused of spying on the U.N. of all places. China was caught spying on the U.S. Russians were accused of spying on Georgia, the country not the state. Russians have also been accused of spying on the U.S. In Britain, it is said that the government wants British Muslims to spy on other Muslims. A British newspaper wrote that in 1999 the CIA spied on the British. Wow, doesn't anyone trust anyone? Here comes the worst of it. The British are positioning their satellites so that every vehicle in Britain can be seen and cameras are being installed everywhere so that every person can be tracked. In the U.S. every cell phone will contain a gps chip and this chip allows the location of each phone to be known. Yes, even we will be spied on.

The bottom line of all this is that the world has changed and not for the better. More decisions are being made by the few and our constitution has been weakened considerably. The truth is that we don't even know who is really making the decisions to enter into these secret wars or the decisions for anything else for that matter. Maybe it is time for a revision to the constitution that states that not only wars must be declared by congress but also the sending of our troops into any foreign country must be approved by congress..