Now grooms-to-be have a good excuse when their fiance finds out they've been duped by a cubic zirconia.

The right thing to do is to buy grossly inflated diamonds from DeBeers. DeBeers doesn't support terrorism, AND they keep the common diamond miner poor. A win-win situation.

There are certified fair-trade diamonds available.

Surely there must be some way to delineate which diamonds are terror-tainted...

"Wow her with the stunning 'orange-alert' diamond! Only for a limited time (or until it explodes)."

It seems that everything is connected to terrorism these days, Gasoline, Diamonds, Drugs. Maybe everyone should just go into a hole in the ground and curl up in the fetal poition and start sucking their thumb. It's important to try to make the world a better place but people often take it too far. For instance every time I drink a Dr. Pepper I am in a small way helping bomb innocent Iraqis and Afghanis (via the Carlyle Group) but is that going to stop me. NO. The fact that I like the sweet sweet taste of an ice cold Coca-Cola is what is going to stop me from buying a Dr. Pepper... That and the fact that I don't know why the hell it's named Dr. Pepper... To make a long story shorter those commercials that the DEA made were really dumb.

My problem with certified diamonds is that even though they are certified, they still support the industry (DeBeers) that artificially inflates the prices such that they are worth exploiting people for and causing them to bleed.

Compare this to illegal drugs. It's prohibition that causes the price of drugs to be so high. But when you buy drugs, you aren't really putting that money into the hands of the Drug Warriors who are responsible for that (well, you kinda are, but in a very indirect sense). And when you buy local, that money is put only into the local economy.

Without a verifiable "chain of custody", none of us really know who are being exploited to produce even a fast food burger (most of which contain foreign meat). "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" and we must all be vigilant in reporting the "dark underbelly" of commerce and global trade.

A respected and unbiased watchdog group should be certifying and so labelling everything imported. With enough market pressure, vendors would be forced to comply. All people of conscious could then make an informed choice where they shop and what products they buy.

Jake Conroy of rural Iowa