Coming back to the Robert Scheer column that everybody is probably already tired of. I reread it again today (the whole thing), and was wrong in dismissing it as fiction. It is true that the Taliban have been cracking down on opium poppy farmers in Afghanistan at the behest of both the UN and the United States (Scheer mentions only the US in his column). It is also true that the Taliban have attempted to justify the ban in religious terms, even though they were in the opium biz until they announced the ban in order to get Western drug dollars. Of course it’s true that the Taliban regime is brutal and repressive in just about every way you can imagine. The problem with the column is that there are some obvious, easily verifiable errors of fact that make it difficult not to dismiss the whole thing.