Yet the case of Col. James Hiett, former commander of U.S. Army anti-drug advisors in Colombia, due to be sentenced in mid-July for covering up his wife's drug smuggling, has everything to do with the passage last week of more than $1 billion in military aid to Colombia. Hiett's case offers dark hints of what the United States is in for by turning the Colombian drug-war theater into a large-scale American military enterprise -- and it reveals, too, some of the costs of the drug war on America's own streets.

The Hiett scandal is already an international embarrassment to the United States, and its outlines have been widely reported. In the mid-1990s, while Hiett was still stationed in the United States, his wife Laurie Ann Hiett was treated in an Army hospital for drug addiction. Later Hiett was named by the Army to head the 200-strong battalion of military advisors in Bogotá. The couple went -- even though Laurie had lapsed back into addiction, snorting cocaine in front of her husband.

Soon she was buying cocaine through her Army-employed Colombian driver. By 1998 she was under investigation by the Army, not only for using drugs, but for shipping $700,000 worth of coke, wrapped in brown paper, to the United States in diplomatic mail. She handed some of the cash proceeds, collected on trips to New York, to her husband -- who proceeded to carefully spend the wad on household bills, to "dissipate," in his own word, the money trail. In May Laurie Hiett pleaded guilty to smuggling and was sentenced to five years in federal prison.

That much was reported, in detail, on "60 Minutes" and elsewhere. Less well known, but revealed in her sentencing hearing last May, is how the Army worked to protect her husband. First, Army investigators tipped him off about their investigation, in particular their pursuit of a $25,000 roll of cash Laurie had handed him. Then, after his wife was arrested, those same Army investigators quickly cleared Hiett of any wrongdoing. It was only U.S. Customs Service director Ray Kelly who insisted on pushing the investigation further after his agents became convinced of the officer's complicity in his wife's actions.

You might think that an Army coverup of a minor-league scandal like an officer's drug-smuggling wife would worry a Congress about to plunge the American military far deeper into corruption-mired Colombia. But the issue never came up.

Of course, defenders of the Colombia aid package would argue that Hiett was an aberration. But they're wrong on two counts. First, what makes the Colombia mess such a quagmire is the utter corruption on all sides. Every faction -- left-wing guerrillas, right-wing death squads, corrupt Colombian military elements and, under Hiett at least, the U.S. Army -- has some involvement in the drug trade.

And Hiett's corruption itself is not necessarily that unusual. As former U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador and Paraguay Robert White told Salon's Jeff Stein: "There's always been a fear of this by sensible people in the Pentagon. The legend is that the United States military is incorruptible, but that has proven not to be the case. There are quite a few instances of this corruption."

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