War on Drugs, Money Laundry and Plan (Destroy) Mexico

[StarmanSkye]

Legal exemptions and exceptions were made by top officials in the Pentagon and CIA and other agencies for over 50 years to 'protect and defend' the Republic and American values -- but the net effect has been to completely corrupt and pervert and radically change the nation so its no longer even recognizeable as a just nation founded on civil and human rights, social justice and rule-of-law, self-ruled by an informed citizen polity and where all officials are held accountable by Congress.

WTF were traitor-crooks like J Edgar Hoover, Allen & Foster Dulles, William Colby supposedly 'protecting' the nation from with their lies, frauds, deceptions and abuse-of-power authoritarian excesses, when their own treachery and deception had FAR worse consequences in damaging this nation and subverting it?

Did all those fake 'patriots' really think their serial excesses would have benign effects, that were necessary to preserve America's essential character? How is it possible for anyone to not see how mangled and subverted that character now is BECAUSE of the actions of those scoundrels?

Oh right, its because the mass media is controlled and deflects attention away towards incidentals, distractions and false 'enemies'

"If I were a criminal profiler, it wouldn't take much to identify a CIA pattern here [with Fast and Furious]: A wacko, barroom commando, illegal operation that makes no sense whatsoever, run outside the control of law enforcement."



This isn't front page news because
1. US doesn't have a free press dedicated to reporting official gov. misfeasance.
2. Agencies involved, ie. CIA, DEA, ICE, ATF, Justice Dept., have too much clout and are protected by powerful public & private interests that exert sufficient influence to inhibit embarrassing media attention.
3. US Is a corporatocracy that shields the Military/Security/Intel franchises which it is closely linked to and relies on.
4. US Gangster Capitalism depends on exploitation of crime, espionage, blackmail, betrayal, fraud, intrigue, murder, racketeering & corruption.
5. News censorship is vital to continue business-as-usual re: US elites perpetuate the drug-war fraud because of a lack of effective Congressional oversight, because its lucrative and because they can.
6. US Justice Dept acts to protect the biggest gov/MIC/corporate criminal conspiracies -- SOP since the Vietnam/SE Asian War.
7. Drugs and arms are among the most lucrative businesses -- Their commerce potential depends on maintaining a criminalized control-monopoly operating in a public media vacuum.
8. American hypocrisy is a key feature enabling New World Feudal-Fascism.
9. etc.
10. You/me/we get the idea.

[JackRiddler]

.

There was an item I missed posting here, about how the officials responsible for Fast and Furious were promoted! This is the vital impulse of a system at work. (I mean, this is why things are as they are: it's systemic, the hard ruthless corrupt ones are promoted and later promote more of their own type.) Hope someone points us at that item.

Now this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/26/world ... nted=print

August 25, 2011

U.S. Widens Role in Mexican Fight

By MARK MAZZETTI and GINGER THOMPSON


WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has expanded its role in Mexico’s fight against organized crime by allowing the Mexican police to stage cross-border drug raids from inside the United States, according to senior administration and military officials.

Mexican commandos have discreetly traveled to the United States, assembled at designated areas and dispatched helicopter missions back across the border aimed at suspected drug traffickers. The Drug Enforcement Administration provides logistical support on the American side of the border, officials said, arranging staging areas and sharing intelligence that helps guide Mexico’s decisions about targets and tactics.

Officials said these so-called boomerang operations were intended to evade the surveillance — and corrupting influences — of the criminal organizations that closely monitor the movements of security forces inside Mexico. And they said the efforts were meant to provide settings with tight security for American and Mexican law enforcement officers to collaborate in their pursuit of criminals who operate on both sides of the border.

Although the operations remain rare, they are part of a broadening American campaign aimed at blunting the power of Mexican cartels that have built criminal networks spanning the world and have started a wave of violence in Mexico that has left more than 35,000 people dead.

Many aspects of the campaign remain secret, because of legal and political sensitivities. But in recent months, details have begun to emerge, revealing efforts that would have been unthinkable five years ago. Mexico’s president, Felipe Calderón, who was elected in 2006, has broken with his country’s historic suspicion of the United States and has enlisted Washington’s help in defeating the cartels, a central priority for his government.

American Predator and Global Hawk drones now fly deep over Mexico to capture video of drug production facilities and smuggling routes. Manned American aircraft fly over Mexican targets to eavesdrop on cellphone communications. And the D.E.A. has set up an intelligence outpost — staffed by Central Intelligence Agency operatives and retired American military personnel — on a Mexican military base.

“There has always been a willingness and desire on the part of the United States to play more of a role in Mexico’s efforts,” said Eric L. Olson, an expert on Mexico at the Woodrow Wilson Center. “But there have been some groundbreaking developments on the Mexican side where we’re seeing officials who are willing to take some risks, even political risks, by working closely with the United States to carry out very sensitive missions.”

Still, the cooperation remains a source of political tensions, especially in Mexico where the political classes have been leery of the United States dating from the Mexican-American War of 1846. Recent disclosures about the expanding United States’ role in the country’s main national security efforts have set off a storm of angry assertions that Mr. Calderón has put his own political interests ahead of Mexican sovereignty. Mr. Calderón’s political party faces an election next year that is viewed in part as a referendum on his decision to roll out this campaign against drug traffickers.

Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns walked into that storm during a visit to Mexico this month and strongly defended the partnership the two governments had developed.

“I’ll simply repeat that there are clear limits to our role,” Mr. Burns said. “Our role is not to conduct operations. It is not to engage in law enforcement activities. That is the role of the Mexican authorities. And that’s the way it should be.”

Officials said Mexico and the United States began discussing the possibility of cross-border missions two years ago, when Mexico’s crime wave hit the important industrial corridor between Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo. To avoid being detected, the Mexican police traveled to the United States in plain clothes on commercial flights, two military officials said. Later the officers were transported back to Mexico on Mexican aircraft, which dropped the agents at or near their targets.

“The cartels don’t expect Mexican police coming from the U.S.,” said one senior military official. None of the officials interviewed about the boomerang operations would speak publicly about them, and refused to provide details about where they were conducted or what criminal organizations had been singled out.

They said that the operations had been carried out only a couple of times in the last 18 months, and that they had not resulted in any significant arrests.

The officials insisted that the Pentagon is not involved in the cross-border operations, and that no Americans take part in drug raids on Mexican territory.

“These are not joint operations,” said one senior administration official. “They are self-contained Mexican operations where staging areas were provided by the United States.”

Former American law enforcement officials who were once posted in Mexico described the boomerang operations as a new take on an old strategy that was briefly used in the late 1990s, when the D.E.A. helped Mexico crack down on the Tijuana Cartel.

To avoid the risks of the cartel being tipped off to police movements by lookouts or police officials themselves, the former officers said, the D.E.A. arranged for specially vetted Mexican police to stage operations out of Camp Pendleton in San Diego. The Mexican officers were not given the names of the targets of their operations until they were securely sequestered on the base. And they were not given the logistical details of the mission until shortly before it was under way.

“They were a kind of rapid-reaction force,” said one former senior D.E.A. official. “It was an effective strategy at the time.”

Another former D.E.A. official said that the older operations resulted in the arrests of a handful of midlevel cartel leaders. But, he said, it was ended in 2000 when cartel leaders struck back by kidnapping, torturing and killing a counternarcotics official in the Mexican attorney general’s office, along with two fellow drug agents.

In recent months, Mexico agreed to post a team of D.E.A. agents, C.I.A. operatives and retired American military officials on a Mexican military base to help conduct intelligence operations, bolstering the work of a similar “fusion cell” already in Mexico City.

Meanwhile the Pentagon is steadily overhauling the parts of the military responsible for the drug fight, paying particular attention to some lessons of nearly a decade of counterterrorism operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. At Northern Command — the military’s Colorado Springs headquarters responsible for North American operations — several top officers with years of experience in fighting Al Qaeda and affiliated groups are poring over intelligence about Mexican drug networks.

One officer said, “The military is trying to take what it did in Afghanistan and do the same in Mexico.”

That’s exactly what some Mexicans are afraid of, said a Mexican political scientist, Denise Dresser, who is an expert on that country’s relations with the United States.

“I’m not necessarily opposed to greater American involvement,” Ms. Dresser said. “But if that’s the way the Mexican government wants to go, it needs to come clean about it. Just look at what we learned from Iraq. Secrecy led to malfeasance. It led to corrupt contracting. It led to torture. It led to instability. And who knows when those problems will be resolved.”

Eric Schmitt contributed reporting, and Barclay Walsh contributed research.


More in Americas (3 of 50 articles)
Trinidad and Tobago Declares Emergency Over Drug Crimes

Read More »
Close

[Freitag]

Informative news blog about the drug cartels: Blog del Narco

(En Espanol. Si usted no habla Espanol, vielleicht sollten Sie eine Fremdsprache lernen, lazy bastard.)

[82_28]

Jack, always on top of it. I noted the same shit.

And godammit, it is coming fast and furious.

And I wanna say, thank god for RI. On all of planet earth there is not one place that connects all of the disparate souls who listen, argue, swear, but most importantly investigate through multicontexts. Sure there's this site and that site. But Jeff and the others have maintained a fine ship.

The US has "declared" war on Mexico and they knowingly drew many Mexicans here via the economic prospects of free labor when the gettin' was good. Then they went on to racism mode in order to make it not be notable. Capitalism has declared war on all of us. The philosophy has come to claim what it thinks it is owed. It is an opportune time to do so. Capitalism, fucks everything the fuck up through a few centuries of terror and debauchery and then when it loses the very same game it created it goes on mass murder sprees, outsourced, independent and it crashes what the humans of planet Earth depend on, have believed in etc.

This is "WWIII". It is being fought with completely different weapons if in fact you look at Butler's statements to congress that war is a racket. Every motherfucker on Earth wants to get along, find solutions. But noooooo, we can't do that in the capitalist system. We must stay within the system.

[American Dream]

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebo ... d-drug-war

US-Trained Assassin Teams Now Deployed in Drug War

Posted by Bill Conroy - August 28, 2011

Former CIA Asset Who Revealed Presence of US Special Forces in Mexico Says Hit Squads Targeting Narco Splinter Groups




A small but growing proxy war is underway in Mexico pitting US-assisted assassin teams composed of elite Mexican special operations soldiers against the leadership of an emerging cadre of independent drug organizations that are far more ruthless than the old-guard Mexican “cartels” that gave birth to them.

These Mexican assassin teams now in the field for at least half a year, sources tell Narco News, are supported by a sophisticated US intelligence network composed of CIA and civilian US military operatives as well as covert special-forces soldiers under Pentagon command — which are helping to identify targets for the Mexican hit teams.

Evidence of this intelligence support network has surfaced recently even in mainstream media reports, in outlets such as the New York Times and the Mexican publication El Universal — the former reporting that "CIA operatives and American civilian military employees have been posted at a Mexican military base," and the latter reporting that elite US and Mexican troops engaged in joint training exercises in Colorado earlier this year.

But Narco News as far back as June of 2010 reported that a special forces US task force had “boots on the ground” in Mexico assisting the Mexican military in tracking down the top capos of Mexico’s major drug “cartels” – such as the Juarez, Beltran Leyva, Zetas and La Familia organizations.

(The Sinaloa organization’s top leadership, however, has been left largely untouched, and by design if you believe the recent US court pleadings of Vicente Zambada Niebla, a Sinaloa leader now imprisoned in Chicago who claims a quid pro quo deal has been struck between the Sinaloa drug syndicate and the US government.) [See link].

Narco News also reported in April of this year that a unit of a major US defense contractor was advertising in the mercenary community for “site leads” who can help oversee the company’s personnel in Mexico and also coordinate “with Mexican Army officials” at a dozen training sites, called “VMTCs [Virtual Military Training Centers],” located in Mexico.

The information in the job posting described the US military contractor’s training network in Mexico as being part of an effort called “Project Sparta,” which is designed “to train Mexican Army soldiers in basic and advanced urban warfare operations” with the ultimate goal of creating an “Urban Warfare Elite Force.”

The “new specialized reaction force” will support “federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in the war against organized crime and the drug cartels,” the help-wanted ad stated.

Now, an official with the company posting the want ad, L-3 MPRI, claimed that “we don’t have a contract [in Mexico] to do that kind of work.” The ad was subsequently removed from the company’s Web site.

Regardless, the fact that the ad was posted at all on the L-3 MPRI Web site seems to indicate that someone in Mexico was seeking the “urban warfare” training services, even if L-3 MPRI did not get the contract.

One law enforcement source familiar with the situation in Mexico says training in urban warfare would be critical to any unit set up to wage an assault campaign on narco splinter groups.

What is key to all of these glimpses into US operations in Mexico is that they all seem to be focused on military strategies, not law enforcement. And the goal of the military, unlike law enforcement, is to neutralize the enemy on the battlefield — not bring that enemy to justice through the court system.

So it should be no surprise that information is now surfacing from reliable sources indicating that the US government is once again employing a long-running counter-insurgency strategy that has been pulled off the shelf and deployed in conflicts dating back to Vietnam in the 1960s, in Latin America in the 1980s and 1990s, and beyond, and in more recent conflicts, such as in Iraq.

From a 2005 report in the Sunday Times in the United Kingdom that reveals details about US plans to employ death squads in Iraq:

Under the so-called “El Salvador option”, Iraqi and American forces would be sent to kill or kidnap insurgency leaders, even in Syria, where some are thought to shelter.

The plans are reported in this week’s Newsweek magazine as part of Pentagon efforts to get US forces in Iraq on to the front foot against an enemy that is apparently getting the better of them.

Hit squads would be controversial and would probably be kept secret.

The experience of the so-called “death squads” in Central America remains raw for many even now and helped to sully the image of the United States in the region.

And the recognition by the Mexican and US governments, even though not admitted publicly, that the narco-trafficking business is “getting the better of them” is likely once again prompting the introduction of the death-squad strategy in Mexico, though adjusted for the unique conditions existing in that nation at this time, according to sources who spoke with Narco News.

Covert Military "Justice"

The US and Mexican government’s strategy of attacking the so-called "kingpins" of the narco-trafficking industry has failed to stem the tide of drugs flowing into the US nor has it reduced the number of players in the narco-trafficking business.

Instead, it has given rise to a slate of splinter narco-trafficking groups that have stepped into the power vacuums created when US or Mexican law enforcers and military have an occasional success and take out a top narco leader. Examples of those successes in recent years include the killing of Arturo Beltran Leyva of the Beltran Leyva organization, the capture of Jose de Jesus Mendez Vargas of La Familia, and more recently of Jose Antonio Acosta Hernandez of La Linea [The Line] -- the enforcement arm of the Juarez drug-trafficking organization.

Among the so-called splinter groups that have come onto the scene, many within the past year, include organizations whose names are not yet in the bright lights of the mainstream media: Mano con ojos, or Hands with Eyes; Mata Zetas, or Zeta Killers; Caballeros Templarios, or Knights Templar; Cartel de Pacifico Sur, or the South Pacific Cartel; Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion; and Cartel del Centro, to name but a few.

These so-called splinter groups tend to be extremely violent in their approach since they are competing more intensely against more organizations for a slice of turf in the drug-trafficking, arms-smuggling, contract-murder, kidnapping and extortion business, acting as criminal organizations in their own right. This “Hydra effect,” (whereby the elimination of one “narco-kingpin” gives rise to three or four more aspiring splinter-group kingpins) has become a big problem for both the US and Mexican governments and the veracity of their PR campaign in the drug war, which insists that the narco-traffickers are now on the run and the emergence of these splinter groups is an unimportant side note to be downplayed publicly.

The increasing violence sparked by these splinter groups, however, has translated into an overall escalating homicide rate in Mexico, where since late 2006 nearly 50,000 people, many innocent civilians and even children, have been cut down by the savagery and indiscriminate bloodshed of this drug war. Close to half of those murders have taken place in the last 18 months alone, marking the rise of the Hydra splinter groups — which are often enforcement cells, sometimes street gangs, that previously did contract work for captured or killed “narco-kingpins.”

The violent acts unleashed by these legion splinter groups, which are only now coming to light in the mainstream media (stories of victims tortured horrifically and hung from bridges alive before being shot to death, or of a face cut off and stitched to a soccer ball) have been noted behind the scenes for some time in the police reports and intelligence briefings of the law enforcers and military personnel now engaged in the drug war, sources tell Narco News.

And the response of the existing political and monied interests of the state to this threat, according to one of those sources, former CIA asset Tosh Plumlee, has been to take a page out of the “El Salvador solution," modify it for the current era, and go at these splinter groups directly but covertly — utilizing highly trained assassination units whose mission is to “neutralize” the leaders of the splinter groups before they can consolidate power.

Plumlee’s track record in getting it right on drug-war black ops has been established and is even now being recognized by mainstream media outlets like the UPI news service and Washington Times, both of which have quoted him recently as a source in relation to the drug war.

Narco News reported in June 2010 that a special-forces task force under Pentagon command was operating in Mexico. That report was based on information provided by Plumlee, who worked in the past as a CIA contract pilot in Latin America and still has deep connections in the intelligence world.

From the June 2010 Narco News story:

A special operations task force under the command of the Pentagon is currently in place south of the border providing advice and training to the Mexican Army in gathering intelligence, infiltrating and, as needed, taking direct action against narco-trafficking organizations, claims a former CIA asset who has a long history in the covert operations theater.

The U.S. unit, dubbed Task Force 7, since early 2009, according to the CIA operative, has helped to uncover a warehouse in Juarez packed with U.S. munitions and under the control of drug traffickers; provide critical intelligence that led to the raid of a Juarez sweatshop that was manufacturing phony Mexican military uniforms; worked with the Mexican military in uncovering a mass grave near Palomas, Mexico, just south of Columbus, New Mexico; and, behind the scenes, cooperated with the Mexican Navy in hunting down a major narco-trafficker, Arturo Beltran Leyva — who was killed by Mexican Navy special forces last December [in 2009] during a raid on a luxury apartment complex in Cuernavaca, Mexico.

That report was later supported by both a leaked Pentagon document that verified US special operations troops were active in Mexico as well as a State Department cable released by the whistleblower organization WikiLeaks. [Seelinkfor details.]

The cable released by WikiLeaks also verified that the Mexican Navy unit that conducted the operation against narco-capo Arturo Beltran Leyva (resulting in his death) “received extensive U.S. training” — which serves as further evidence supporting Narco News’ original reporting on the involvement of U.S. special forces in that operation.

The same cable also predicted that the killing of Beltran Leyva will, in the short-term (a period not defined precisely) result in a “spike” in narco-related violence “as inter- and intra-cartel battles [by splinter groups] are intensified by the sudden leadership gap in one of the country’s most powerful cartels.”

According to Plumlee, members of the same US special-forces task force that assisted in the takedown of Beltran Leyva are now providing intelligence support and ongoing training to the Mexican assassin teams set up to target the leaders of the proliferating narco splinter groups.

The mission of these specialized Mexican attack units, Plumlee contends, is to “neutralize” (kill) the targets. This is a new focus, since before the Mexican military was targeting the leadership of the major drug organizations for capture, if possible. But in this case, capture is not the goal, and the targets are the leaders of these hyper-violent, independent splinter groups that have sprung up in the wake of the shakeup, via capture or killing, in the leadership of the major cartels — with the Sinaloa organization, it seems, being protected from a fatal attack on its leadership.

Plumlee contends that the old-guard “cartels” also see these splinter groups as their enemies, given they are rivals threatening the stability of the existing business model, so in essence the Mexican assassin teams are also serving the interests of the dominate narco groups the drug war is suppose to be combating.

“Some of the intelligence on the splinter groups is actually being provided by members of the Zetas,” Plumlee claims.

There are supposedly at least three such Mexican hit teams operating now in Mexico (in the north, central and southern regions of the country).
These Mexican military death squads were supposedly trained by the US, though Plumlee does not know where. Also, Plumlee says the US task force personnel now working inside Mexico, as part of their intelligence support mission for the Mexican hit teams, are helping to identify and verify targets.

Truth Before the Narrative

Believe what you will, kind readers, but remember Plumlee has been proven right in the past on these matters, even though his assertions were ignored by the mainstream media and denied by US and Mexican bureaucrats. And now the reporting finally showing up in the “official” media, thanks to the perseverance of some remaining honest reporters, seems to demonstrate that the US intelligence community and military’s role in Mexico’s drug war is overshadowing any pretense of a purely criminal-justice approach to the continued enforcement of prohibition.

And there will be a price to pay should this shortsighted covert counter-insurgency strategy — one that employs among the oldest schemes in the US military playbook, death squads — continue to play out absent public scrutiny and accountability.

Former CIA case manager Leutrell Osbourne warned of that steep price in an interview he did with Narco News in 2009.

Osborne, who oversaw spies and assets for the CIA in more than 30 countries on three continents during his 27 years with the agency, says if he if he could tell President Barack Obama anything, it would be to focus the CIA and other U.S. intel agencies on counterintelligence and to do away completely with covert action, which is defined as anything involving dirty tricks — assassinations, state-sponsored terrorism, drug running, weapons trafficking, coups, psy-ops propaganda, etc.

“I’d like to get to Obama and help him, to let him know what he needs to cut out,” Osborne said.

The reason covert operational tactics need to be eliminated, Osborne explains, is because they are not effective and have been the source of most of the CIA’s problems over the years. He says the blowback against the United States from those covert operations is always more damaging than any benefit attained.

And for Mexico, that blowback can come, as it did in Central America, and Colombia, decades earlier, in the form of an institutionalizing of these death squads and a broadening of their targets to appease the paranoia and power aspirations of corrupt leadership and economic interests. The very soul of Mexico is at stake.

[StarmanSkye]

Isn't this the Vietnamization of Mexico?

Corporatized conflict ie. disaster capitalism, where people are the collateral damage to keep money moving through the system of feudal autocracy.

[IanEye]

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/bill-conroy/2011/08/us-trained-assassin-teams-now-deployed-drug-war

[b]US-Trained Assassin Teams Now Deployed in Drug War

Posted by Bill Conroy - August 28, 2011

[i]Among the so-called splinter groups that have come onto the scene, many within the past year, include organizations whose names are not yet in the bright lights of the mainstream media: Mano con ojos, or Hands with Eyes; Mata Zetas, or Zeta Killers; Caballeros Templarios, or Knights Templar; Cartel de Pacifico Sur, or the South Pacific Cartel; Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion; and Cartel del Centro, to name but a few.

These so-called splinter groups tend to be extremely violent in their approach since they are competing more intensely against more organizations for a slice of turf in the drug-trafficking, arms-smuggling, contract-murder, kidnapping and extortion business, acting as criminal organizations in their own right. This “Hydra effect,” (whereby the elimination of one “narco-kingpin” gives rise to three or four more aspiring splinter-group kingpins) has become a big problem for both the US and Mexican governments and the veracity of their PR campaign in the drug war, which insists that the narco-traffickers are now on the run and the emergence of these splinter groups is an unimportant side note to be downplayed publicly.
....

The very soul of Mexico is at stake.

there's a country - you don't live there
but one day you would like to
and if you show them what you're made of
then you might do

[Joe Hillshoist]

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/bill-conroy/2011/08/us-trained-assassin-teams-now-deployed-drug-war

US-Trained Assassin Teams Now Deployed in Drug War

Posted by Bill Conroy - August 28, 2011

Former CIA Asset Who Revealed Presence of US Special Forces in Mexico Says Hit Squads Targeting Narco Splinter Groups

Isn't this what started the problem in the first place?

[Saurian Tail]

The drug violence headlines coming out of Mexico are truly horrifying. WTF is going on with the human race?

Bag of Severed Heads Left Near Mexican School
By Greg Wilson | Wednesday, Sep 28, 2011

Five severed heads were left in a bag near a Mexican primary school, the latest example of the ruthless violence plaguing the country.

Police were not able to determine if the grisly find, in an Acapulco neighborhood, was connected to extortion threats against teachers. Some 140 schools have closed their doors in recent weeks due to frightened teachers going on strike, according to The Associated Press.

The men's heads were in a sack inside a wooden crate placed near the school, officers said. Messages threatening three aleged drug traffickers were also found in the bag.

Police had earlier discovered five headless bodies in another part of the city. Drug gangs have waged bloody battles for control of the Pacific Coast resort city. With the government cracking down on the drug trade, gangs are turning to extortion, according to the BBC. Last month, dozens of teachers in Acapulco said gangs had threatened them with violence if they did not hand over half their salaries.

It was unclear who was behind the killings or what the motive was.

[JackRiddler]

.

Below: Rick Perry opening the Overton Window through which the national security state is likely to creep (further) into Mexico next year (and beyond). A dichotomy has been set up by the drug warriors, wherein either the drug war will end (ha ha) or US troops will (openly) intervene in a Mexican civil war.

But first, a very good analysis in Counterpunch.

But even firster, some thoughts:

Mexico is turning into Colombia. Thirty-five people identified as Zetas, a dozen of them women and several minors, were somehow captured, tortured and killed, and their bound bodies, clad only in underwear were stacked in two trucks. The trucks were driven on to a highway at morning rush hour in the downtown of a city in Veracruz and parked right in the middle, blocking traffic. Many of the bodies were taken out of the trucks and spread out as though for display on the asphalt. A banner was unfurled accusing the dead of having terrorized local citizens for protection money. The trucks were left on the highway as the perpetrators drove away in another vehicle. All of this went "unseen." No one's been arrested for this. It is impossible to imagine this kind of action without cover from military, police or governmental authorities, if it's not just outright military death squads at work. Meanwhile, several journalists have been killed by drug gangs (or so it is said) over the last couple of weeks: for publishing, for blogging. Given the long history of fraud in Mexican elections, the obvious stealing and long civil battle after the 2006 election, it's hard to imagine next year's election, under the circumstances of the drug war, won't have an unprecedented level of violence and assassination. The Stateside hysteria about the Mexican violence spilling over the border (a staple in the series "Breaking Bad," though it hasn't actually happened), the Fast and Furious story, the presence of US special forces "advisers" in Mexico, the insistence on continuing the drug war in the US, and Perry's trial balloon about sending the troops in all indicate an escalation in US direct involvement. It's hard not to imagine US drone strikes on drug lords, with Mexican government approval, using the same rationalizations as with Awlaki.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/30/ ... -war/print

Weekend Edition, September 31-32, 2011

An Assessment of Defeat
Big Government Breaks Bad in Drug War

by TOM BARRY

Rick Perry and the other Republican presidential candidates are right. Americans are fed up, as Perry writes in his book Fed Up!, with “old guard politicians” dedicated to protecting the “establishment” and the federal government’s “culture of waste.”

That description of big government is right on target with respect to the Obama administration’s continuing support for the wasteful drug-war bureaucracy.

The Obama administration and the Democratic Party have been stalwart supporters of drug-war agencies such as the National Drug Intelligence Center and the White House’s own Office for National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP). At first glance, these agencies, which have monumentally failed at their founding mission to create a “drug-free America” might well be regarded as poster children for the Republican critique of wasteful federal spending and misguided big government.

Although the Obama administration announced during its year that it would no longer use the “war on drugs” terminology, it did not initially request any reduction in the drug war budget – keeping the requested budgets at more than $15 billion for fiscal years 2010 and 2011.

In early September the National Drug Intelligence Center released its annual “National Drug Threat Assessment,” which warns:

The illicit trafficking and abuse of drugs present a challenging, dynamic threat to the United States. Overall demand is rising, largely supplied by illicit drugs smuggled to U.S. markets by major transnational criminal organizations (TCOs).

Forty years after President Richard Nixon launched the “war on drugs,” the Obama administration now warns that illegal drugs continue to constitute a threat to our national security.

What is more, according to this new intelligence assessment, the expanding U.S. demand for illegal drugs is being readily met by a new array of TCOs based in Mexico. These TCOs have emerged to meet the rising demand for illegal drugs in the United States — this despite the new drug war aid to Mexico and the dramatic increases in U.S. border security operations, including an major expansion of border counternarcotics operations of the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, and Defense.

Nowhere in this new threat assessment – or that can be found anywhere else in the federal drug war bureaucracy — is there any hint of any admission of failure or any recommendation that drug prohibition policies be reexamined.

Despite the proclamations of the leading Republican presidential candidates about balancing the budget and shrinking federal government, it is highly unlikely that a Republican administration would act any differently. Support for the drug war and drug prohibition is strongly bipartisan.

Drug War as a National Security Imperative

Rick Perry says he would exempt the quarter of the federal budget dedicated to national security from any budget slashing.

The federal government’s “war on drugs” is firmly embedded in the country’s ever-expanding security apparatus, spanning the Department of Defense, the drug war agencies of the Justice and Homeland Security departments, and the “intelligence community.”

Like the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, the National Drug Intelligence Center emerged as part of the new drug-war bureaucracy created by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 and put into place by President George H.W. Bush.

The NIDC’s main champion was Cong. John Murtha (D-Pa.), who included a measure authorizing the creation of the drug intelligence center in the 1993 Defense Appropriations Bill. Infamous for his military earmarks, Murtha, who served alternately as chair and ranking member of the House Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, died last year.

An Assessment of Defeat

The NIDC, which not coincidentally is located in Murtha’s old congressional district in Pennsylvania, paints a picture of defeat in latest drug intelligence assessment.

According to the NDIC threat assessment, the drug war isn’t going well. It says:

Drug consumption
- Overall drug availability is increasing.
- The abuse of several major illicit drugs, including heroin, marijuana, and methamphetamine, appears to be increasing, especially among the young.
- Marijuana use among adolescent students has begun to increase after a decade of gradual decline.
- An estimated 8 .7 percent of Americans aged 12 or older—or 21 .8 million individuals—were current illicit drug users in 2009, a statistically significant increase from 8.0 percent in 2008.
- The increase in heroin availability has resulted in an increase in heroin-related overdoses (HROs) in several locations throughout the United States. Increased HROs have been reported in cities and in more than 60 U.S. counties spanning at least 30 states across the nation.

Drug production and trafficking

- Across our southwestern border, drug-related violence has left more than 50,000 Mexicans dead since 2007.
- Increased heroin production in Mexico and increased involvement of Mexican transnational criminal organizations in the distribution of South American heroin have contributed to wider heroin availability in many U.S. markets, including some where the drug was previously unavailable.
- Cannabis cultivation in Mexico, combined with high levels of domestic cultivation, has resulted in high marijuana availability.
- The level of illicit poppy cultivation in Mexico was second only to that in Afghanistan in 2009, potentially producing an estimated 50 metric tons of heroin.

Threat projection
- The threat posed by the trafficking and abuse of illicit drugs will not abate in the near term and may increase.
- Mexican-based TCOs’ proficiency in the production and distribution of marijuana, methamphetamine, and heroin will ensure that the drugs remain readily available in markets throughout the United States.
- Major Mexican-based TCOs will continue to dominate wholesale drug trafficking in the United States for the foreseeable future and will further solidify their positions through collaboration with U.S. gangs.

Responding to U.S. counternarcotics operations, drug trafficking organizations “continue to alter patterns in drug production, trafficking, and abuse,” says NDIC. “Traffickers are modifying their interrelationships, altering drug production levels, and adjusting their trafficking routes and methods. Major Mexican-based TCOs continue to solidify their dominance over the wholesale illicit drug trade as they control the movement of most of the foreign-produced drug supply across the southwest border.”

The adaptive capacity of the drug trafficking organizations contributes to NDIC’s glum threat assessment. Noting that most illegal drugs are smuggled overland into the country, NDIC warns that “increased border security appears to be forcing traffickers to increase their use of alternative methods such as noncommercial vessels and ultralight aircraft.”

Stepped up border security operations and the U.S.-supported drug war in Mexico apparently have had little impact on the U.S. drug market and the crossborder drug trade.

According to NDIC, “The Mexican-based organizations’ preeminence derives from a competitive advantage based on several factors, including access to and control of smuggling routes across the U.S. southwest border and the capacity to produce (or obtain), transport, and distribute nearly every major illicit drug of abuse in the United States.”

The prospects of turning around the drug war, either at home or abroad, appear low, according to the drug intelligence assessment, which predicts that the above-stated “advantages are unlikely to change significantly in the short term, ensuring the dominance of Mexican-based TCOs for at least the next several years.”

There’s also bad news on the return side of the drug market. The Obama administration has dramatically stepped up operations to check southbound traffic at the southwestern border, monitoring for cash and gun smuggling into Mexico.

Getting drugs across the border into U.S. distribution networks must be matched, if the illegal drug market is to fucntion successfully, by pathways to ensure that drug profits return to drug trafficking organizations in Mexico. The NDIC calls bulk cash smuggling “a tactical vulnerability” for the illegal drug trade. Yet new “bulk cash interdiction efforts have not impacted overall TCO operations to a significant extent.”

Obama Keeps Drug War Budget but Changes Terminology

NIDC has a new term for the organizations that traffic illegal drugs.

Like it counterparts in the drug war bureaucracy, NIDC has adopted the new terminology of transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) to substitute for the old lexicon of drug trafficking organizations (DTOs). This change responds to the Obama administration’s new Strategy to Combat Transnational Organized Crime.

Attempting to explain the new terminology, NIDC says its new usage of TCOs is “in reference to those TCOs that engage in drug trafficking activity,” while acknowledging that “some members of the intelligence community continue to use the term ‘drug trafficking organizations.’”

NDIC doesn’t directly address the implied assertion of the TCO thesis and strategy that the TCOs have a crossborder or transnational presence. But the intelligence assessment does address the issue indirectly by pointing to the role of U.S.-based gangs in distributing the drugs from the Mexican drug trafficking organizations.

According to NDIC, “With gangs already the dominant retail drug suppliers in major and midsized cities, some gang members are solidifying their ties to Mexican TCOs to bolster their involvement in wholesale smuggling, internal distribution, and control of the retail trade.”

Rather than having a direct presence, then, Mexican drug traffickers rely on gangs and other distribution networks to market the drugs. “Criminal gangs —that is street, prison, and outlaw motorcycle gangs—remain in control of most of the retail distribution of drugs throughout much of the United States, particularly in major and midsize cities,” reports NDIC.

No Evidence of Spillover Violence

The NDIC’s new threat assessment doesn’t support the claims by many border hawks, such as Texas Governor Rick Perry, that the drug war in Mexico in spilling into the United States. But its assessment of spillover violence is vague and seems purposefully intended to keep the intelligence center out of the political tensions about spillover violence and border security.

According to the drug intelligence assessment:

Violent infighting among rival Mexican TCOs, at least partially attributable to competition over control of lucrative crossing points along the Southwest Border, is occurring mainly on the Mexico side of the border.

Criminal activity such as kidnappings and home invasion robberies directed against individuals involved in drug trafficking has been reported in some U .S. border communities. But limitations on the data make it difficult to assess whether such activity is increasing.

The available data are insufficient to support trend analysis—particularly an analysis of whether such crime is increasing.

FBI data show that overall violent crime rates in the southwestern states trended downward between 2007 and mid-2010, while overall property crime rates generally remained stable.

According to the National Drug Threat Survey (NDTS) 2010, crack cocaine, and ice methamphetamine are the drugs that most often contribute to crime. Heroin was reported as a significant contributor to property crime (18 .6% of respondents). There is little relation to widespread marijuana consumption to violent or property crime.

The Marijuana Threat

Border security is largely conceived as the effort to seal the border between the ports of entry (POEs). But what exactly is the threat? Border hawks correctly say the long stretches of isolated border are the main entry points for most of the drugs entering the United States.

But what the border hawks don’t say is the drug loads smuggled across the border outside the POEs are almost exclusively bundles of marijuana. The administration asserts that its border security operations are “risk-based.” But the administration doesn’t attempt to explain how it can rightly claim a risk-based enforcement strategy on the border when the “threat” along the border is largely marijuana, which has no serious side effects, is increasing regarded as medically beneficially, and is not physically addictive.

Increasingly, as the number of illegal immigrants decreases, the border security buildup is focused on the marijuana trade. As NDIC reports:

More than 99 percent of illicit drug seizures made between POEs in Arizona and New Mexico involve marijuana; more than 91 percent of the marijuana seized in these incidents is seized from smugglers on foot.

One of the fascinating developments in the drug war is the emergence of Florida-based Cuban traffickers. It is not that, as the U.S. government has long charged, the Cuban government is a player in the transnational drug trade, but rather recent Cuban immigrants have started producing and distributing “high-potency marijuana” in Florida, whose role “contributed to the state’s ranking as first in the nation for the number of indoor cannabis grow sites seized (863) and second for the number of cannabis plants eradicated at indoor grow sites in 2009 (55,378).”

Designer Drugs Skirt Drug Prohibition

Drug prohition enforcement has sparked the creation of a rapidly expanding market for synthetic drugs that are not yet classified as illegal by the federal government.

Such natural substances as marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms, and peyote are prohibited as Schedule 1 substances under the provisions of the the Controlled Substances Act. Seeking drug experiences that avoid entering the criminal illegal drug market, many U.S. consumers are finding a expanded offering of synthetic cannabinoids (chemical compounds found in marijuana) and stimulants.

Across the country, even in some of the smallest towns, these synthetics are on sale at local convenience stores, tobacco (now called smoke) shops, gas stations, and sex merchandise stores, as well on the Internet. Over the past fews, the synthetic cannabinoids and stimulants have emerged as “serious problems,” says NIDC.

The synthetic cannabinoids – marketed as an “legal alternative to marijuana” – and stimulants –marketed as an “legal alternative to cocaine” or Ecstasy – have resulted in a spike in calls to poison control centers.

The synthetics market mocks drug prohibition, galling law enforcement officials and befuddling concerned parents of young users. Marketed as Spice and K2, among other labels, the marijuana substitutes are generically sold as plant food or incense, while the synthetic stimulants are widely sold as “bath salts.”

Marijuana is the most widely used illegal drug. Its top ranking may soon be disputed by the total number of nonmedical users of controlled prescription drugs (CPDs).

Since 2008 there has been a 12 percent increased in the use of medication that that, according to NDIC, have “abuse potential, mainly pain relievers and depressants. This abuse of CPDs involves at least 7 million individuals aged 12 or older.

If the main concern of the drug warrior bureaucracy is the public health impact, the NDIC’s conclusions about the expansion of nonmedical CPD use also points to the need for a rethinking of the drug problem.

According to NDIC, “the number of prescription overdose deaths exceeds the number of cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine deaths combined.” There is no overdose threat for marijuana users, yet the marijuana trade and marijuana consumption are the main targets of U.S. drug prohibition, border security, and Mexico drug-war operations.

Republicans Take the Lead

The Obama administration did request less funding for some divisions of the drug war bureaucracy in the 2012 budget request, including a $19.3 billion decrease for NDIC.

But is has been House Republicans that have led the fight to cut some drug war agencies like NDIC, which has long been championed by Democrats and opposed by Republicans. The Bush administration tried unsuccessfully to end NDIC funding, which has long counted on unwavering support from Democrats.

Cong. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) insists that the NDIC budget should be zeroed out given the inability of agency to demonstrate its impact or even to show that its “intelligence” is not duplicated by other agencies. He characterizes NDIC funding as typical pork barrel funding by Democrats.

But few Republicans, except for libertarian ideologues like Ron Paul, have been unwilling to take on the drug war as part of their challenge to big government and their campaign to balance the budget.

President Obama has not demonstrated any inclination to end the drug wars and drug prohibition. To the contrary, the president has either increased or redirected federal funding for counternarcotics operations, especially along the border.

The federal government’s commitment to the drug war – redesignated by Obama as the “combat against transnational crime” – is a telling case of how big government can break bad.


Tom Barry directs the TransBorder Project at the Center for International Policy and is the author of Border Wars from MIT Press. See his work at http://borderlinesblog.blogspot.com/

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011 ... ug-war/?hp

October 1, 2011, 5:26 pm

Perry Open to Military Intervention in Mexico’s Drug War

By RICH OPPEL


Kayana Szymczak/Getty ImagesGov. Rick Perry of Texas spoke to local residents at a town hall event in Hampton, N.H., on Saturday.

MANCHESTER, N.H. — Gov. Rick Perry of Texas said on Saturday that as president, he would consider sending American troops into Mexico to help defeat drug cartels and improve border security. He indicated that any such action would be done “in concert” with the Mexican government.

“It may require our military in Mexico working in concert with them to kill these drug cartels and to keep them off of our border and to destroy their network,” Mr. Perry said during a campaign appearance here.

“I don’t know all the different scenarios that would be out there,” he said. “But I think it is very important for us to work with them to keep that country from failing.”

Sending soldiers into Mexico — even with the approval of the Mexican government — would represent a far more aggressive policy than the one employed by Washington in recent years, ---

* ahem bullshit * (it would be an escalation & acknowledgment of what has already begun)

--- despite the stepped-up surveillance and logistical aid that has been provided to Mexican authorities.

The idea would also almost certainly be a nonstarter with Mexican authorities. Mexico lost half of its territory to the United States in the 1850s, and ever since it has been very sensitive to the idea of any involvement by American troops in its territory.

Mr. Perry’s comments seemed to be his latest effort to show that he is tough on border security and illegal immigration after being painted by rivals for the Republican presidential nomination as being soft on the subject.


His stance on that issue appears to have cost him in some polls, especially after his statement during the last debate that those who disagree with his immigration position were heartless. He later backpedaled and said that the description was inappropriate.

Mr. Perry made the comments about potentially sending troops into Mexico while describing his hopes for increased cooperation with the Mexican government, and he said that if he were elected president, he would work hard to “create a very trusting relationship” with his counterpart in Mexico.

His comments also suggested that he might pursue a far more interventionist military and foreign policy in Mexico, one that is much more expansive that even the widened approach that the Obama administration has sought.

The United States has already been sending drones deep inside Mexico to gather intelligence about drug trafficking. And the Obama administration has also let Mexican authorities mount cross-border operations against drug traffickers from inside the United States. But Mexican President Felipe Calderon kept those operations secret in order to avoid legal and political protests from his opponents.

Deputy Secretary of State William J. Burns recently said that the scope of the American cooperation with Mexico would be strictly limited and defined.

“There are clear limits to our role,” Mr. Burns said. “Our role is not to conduct operations. It is not to engage in law enforcement activities. That is the role of the Mexican authorities. And that’s the way it should be.”

A Perry campaign spokesman, Robert Black, emphasized that what Mr. Perry was talking about was a cooperative arrangement with Mexican officials and that he wanted to “look at all options to work with the Mexican government.”

Asked whether Mr. Perry would ever consider sending American troops into Mexico without that government’s consent, Mr. Black said: “That’s way big hypotheticals. He’s going to work with the Mexican government to do what is necessary.”


Copyright 2011 The New York Times Company
NYTimes.com 620 Eighth Avenue New York, NY 10018

[American Dream]

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebo ... id-pro-quo

Zambada Niebla Case Exposes US Drug War Quid Pro Quo
Posted by Bill Conroy - December 10, 2011

Prosecutor, DEA Agent Confirm Intel From Sinaloa Mafia Used to Undermine Juarez, Beltran Leyva Drug Organizations

U.S. government officials have long presented the drug war through the media as a type of "Dirty Harry” movie, in which hardscrabble cops are engaged in a pitched battle with hardened street criminals who threaten the very social fabric of life behind America’s gated communities.

Of course it’s a big pretense, with the truth being closer to what really goes on in the marketplace of the US everyday. The drug war is, in reality, a drug business in which backroom deals are cut to advance the profit motives of the business entities involved, whether they be narco-trafficking organizations, or weapons manufacturers or government bureaucracies — and the aspiring, greedy careerists who inhabit their leadership ranks.




But even the US government makes mistakes, and in this case it’s the government’s own agents and prosecutors who have that egg on their face via affidavits filed in early December in a controversial criminal case now pending in the Windy City. The pleadings supposedly advance the government’s case against a major Mexican narco-trafficker, Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla. In reality, though — for any person of a critical mind reading them — the court documents demonstrate the insidious nature of the cooperation that exists between the US government and Mexico’s Sinaloa mafia organization.

Nowhere has the peel on that sour fruit been stripped back more cleanly with the paring knife of truth, revealing the bloody pulp inside, than in the ongoing narco-trafficking case against the rising Mexican Sinaloa Cartel capo Zambada Niebla — son of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada Garcia, who, together with business associate Joaquin Guzman Loera (El Chapo), serves as a godfather of the Sinaloa organization.

Mexican soldiers arrested Zambada Niebla in late March 2009 after he met with DEA agents in a posh Mexico City hotel, a meeting arranged by a US government informant who also is a close confident of Ismael Zambada and Chapo Guzman. That informant, Mexican attorney Humberto Loya Castro, by the US government’s own admission in court pleadings in the Zambada Niebla case, serves as an intermediary between the Sinaloa Cartel leadership and US government agencies seeking to obtain information on rival narco-trafficking organizations.

Toward the end of June 3, 2005, the CS [informant Loya Castro] signed a cooperation agreement with the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of California,” states an affidavit filed in the Zambada Niebla case by Loya Castro’s handler, DEA agent Manuel Castanon. “… Thereafter, I began to work with the CS. Over the years, the CS’ cooperation resulted in the seizure of several significant loads of narcotics and precursor chemicals. The CS’ cooperation also resulted in other real-time intelligence that was very useful to the United States government.”

According to Zambada Neibla, he and the rest of the Sinaloa leadership, through the informant Loya Castro, negotiated a quid-pro-quo immunity deal with the US government in which they were guaranteed protection from prosecution in exchange for providing US law enforcers and intelligence agencies with information that could be used to compromise rival Mexican cartels and their operations.

From U.S. government pleadings filed in the case earlier this month, and so far ignored by the US mainstream media:

[Zambada Niebla’s] theory to support his affirmative defense of public authority [acting with US government sanction] and his motion to dismiss on an alleged grant of immunity rests on the premise that, as part of his cooperation with the US government, the CS [informant Loya Castro] obtained information from the leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel “about rival cartel leaders and their associates” and supplied that information to the US government “in return for carte blanche for the Sinaloa Cartel to continue their narcotics business in the United States and Mexico without interference and in return for immunity and protection from arrest from the United States and Mexican authorities.”

The alleged deal assured protection for the Sinaloa Cartel’s business operations while also undermining its competition — such as the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes organization out of Juarez, Mexico, the murder capital of the world.

At the same time, the information provided by the Sinaloa Cartel to US agencies against its rivals assures a steady flow of drug busts and media victory headlines for US agencies and for the Mexican government. That propaganda is necessary for hoodwinking their citizens into believing that progress is being made in the drug war and thereby assuring the continued funding of bloated drug-war budgets and support for failed policies that have cost the lives of some 50,000 Mexican citizens since late 2006 and ended any hope of a productive life for hundreds of thousands of US citizens — most wasting away in US prisons and not a small number the victims of street homicides linked to drug deals gone bad.

This is the true picture of the drug war in America and across the border in Mexico. It’s a bloody business that throws off a lot of money, power and privilege for those pulling the strings — both the “good” guys and the “bad” guys. In the case of Zambada Niebla, however, he, in his view, got the short end of the stick, betrayed due to some combination of bad timing and inner-circle power struggles that led to his arrest and ultimate extradition to the United States in February 2010, and he now faces the possibility of life behind bars pending the outcome of his trial in federal court in Chicago.

So it makes perfect sense that Zambada Niebla would have an incentive to spill the beans on the sham that is the drug war and reveal the pretense for what it is by outlining the special relationship that exists between the US government and the Sinaloa drug organization.

US prosecutors, of course, deny that any such immunity/cooperation arrangement is in place between US agencies and Zambada Niebla, or the broader leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel. And they claim Zambada Niebla has no evidence to prove the existence of such a pact.



At the same time US prosecutors have invoked national security via the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA) in his trial in an attempt to assure certain sensitive and/or embarrassing evidence is not made available to Zambada Niebla’s attorneys.

Lawyers for the accused Mexican narco-trafficker last month filed a motion asking the court to block U.S. prosecutors’ efforts to use CIPA as a means of excluding the defense from discussions with the judge over the treatment of evidence deemed classified material. Zambada Niebla’s attorneys contend they must be part of those discussions since the supposed classified material goes to the heart of their client's claims in the case.

From the motion filed in October by Zambada Niebla’s attorneys:

Mr. Zambada Niebla is alleged in the indictment to be a high-ranking member of the Sinaloa cartel. We believe that the information [the US government is seeking to cloak under national security] is material to the defense in that it may … contain information pertaining to agreements between agents of the United States government and the leaders of the Sinaloa cartel as well as policy arrangements between the United States government and the Mexican government pertaining to special treatment that was to be afforded to high-ranking members of the Sinaloa Cartel. Thus, Mr. Zambada Niebla’s counsel should be granted high-level security clearances to review the sensitive information.

However, the judge in the case recently went along with US prosecutors on that front, issuing an order that allows the government to introduce that supposedly classified evidence “ex parte” [to the judge alone] so that a determination can be made by the judge as to whether the evidence should be made off limits for discovery by Zambada Niebla’s attorneys.

Common Sense

So the stage is set for Zambada Niebla’s trial. He must now prove his narco-trafficking activities, and those of the leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel, had sanction from the US government — absent a host of “classified information” that the US government seeks to keep hidden from his defense attorneys and the public at large.

However, some key questions arise with respect to the nature of the relationship between the US government, the Sinaloa Cartel leadership (in particular Chapo Guzman and Ismael Zambada) and the informant Loya Castro. Both the government and Zambada Niebla, through their court pleadings, concede that Loya Castro was close enough to both Chapo Guzman and Ismael Zambada that information could be easily passed back and fort between the Sinaloa leadership and US government law enforcers.

If the relationship was that close, then why would US law enforcers not choose to use Loya Castro to set up a sting on Chapo Guzman and Ismael Zambada, thereby taking down the top leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel? And if those Sinaloa godfathers had any inkling that Loya Castro, who they knew to be cooperating with US law enforcers, might betray them, then why has he been allowed to live and continue serving as a US informant?

The mere fact that the top leaders of the Sinaloa criminal organization knew Loya Castro was US informant should have been enough to guarantee him an ugly death — unless Chapo Guzman and Ismael Zambada believed there was some sort of arrangement in place that made Loya Castro more useful to them alive than dead. That’s simple common sense in the drug world.

In addition, the fact that the US government, in its own court pleadings, verifies that Loya Castro served as a go-between for them in communicating with the leadership of the Sinaloa Cartel is a type of implicit verification that some type of deal was in place that worked to the satisfaction of both parties.

Whether a formal legal pact existed assuring immunity specifically for Zambada Niebla, though, is another question, and such an official bargain may not, in fact, have been struck. But it seems clear, based on the prosecutors’ own pleadings, that there was a working arrangement between the US government and the top dogs of the Sinaloa organization.

More from DEA agent Castanon’s affidavit:

The CS [Loya Castro] told me that he had been instructed to meet with Zambada Niebla by Joaquin Guzman-Loera [Chapo]. The CS [again, who was known by the Sinaloa leadership to be a US informant] had been told by Guzman-Lorea that Ismael Zambada-Garcia was interested in having his son, Zambada Niebla, cooperate with the DEA in order to work off his pending charges in the United States. The CS told me that he had then met with Zambada Niebla to discuss the possibility of Zambada Neibla approaching DEA to cooperate.

All the King’s Men

Perhaps any deal that might exist between the Sinaloa leadership is limited to Chapo Guzman and Ismael Zambada, perhaps it was put in place by a US intelligence agency under the guise of law enforcement, or through some secret pact cobbled together by the US State Department that does not have to be honored by the Justice Department because it applies only in Mexico. In this case, the devil is in the details, and in all those scenarios, the cloak of national security could easily be invoked to prevent evidence of the pact surfacing in a court of law.

None of this can be ruled out, but nor can it be verified so long as the US government can play by two sets of rules, one for its citizens and those accused in its courts, and another for government agents acting in an “official” capacity under the protection of national security.

And Zambada Niebla, in such a case, easily becomes a pawn in such a king’s game. It is no stretch to assume that as a rising leader in the Sinaloa Cartel, with a powerful father presently at the helm of the mafia organization, that he had many enemies who saw him as a future threat, possibly even Chapo Guzman himself sees it that way.



In any event, it is clear that the informant Loya Castro moved between both worlds freely, with his identity as a double agent well-known in both worlds, yet he was not skinned alive by the Sinaloa organization nor was he locked up by US law enforcement, nor used by US agencies to set up Chapo Guzman or Ismael Zambada for capture or assassination.

Why is that?

Well, one US prosecutor, Patrick Hearn, who was involved in prosecuting another case against Zambada Niebla still pending in federal court in Washington, D.C., goes a long way in answering that question.

From an affidavit provided by Hearn and filed in the Zambada Niebla case currently pending in Chicago:

… I was the lead trial attorney in the matter of United States v. Vicente Zambada Niebla … currently pending in the United States District Court for the District of Colombia. That case arose out of an investigation into a conspiracy to manufacture, import, and distribute thousands of kilograms of cocaine into the United States between approximately 1992 and January 28, 2003.

… On about March 4, 2009, I received an email from Steve Fraga, my [DEA] case agent in the District of Columbia case. He informed me of an apparent opportunity to interview Zambada Niebla in Mexico. He informed me that DEA agents in Mexico were working with a cooperating source [Loya Castro] who had been indicted by the US Attorney’s Office in San Diego. According to Agent Fraga’s email, the cooperating source had apparently been very effective, and the indictment against the cooperating source had been dismissed.

Agent Fraga told me that the cooperating source [again, Loya Castro] had provided information [likely obtained from the Sinaloa Cartel leadership] leading to a 23-ton cocaine seizure, other seizures related to the Vicente Carrillo-Fuentes drug trafficking organization [based in Juarez, Mexico] and information relating to Arturo Beltran Leyva’s drug trafficking organization.

[Beltran Leyva was a former associate of Chapo Guzman who later became a bitter rival and was eventually assassinated in December 2009 by Mexican Navy special forces assisted by US agents and intelligence. What are the odds of that being unrelated to the special arrangement that exists between the Sinaloa Cartel and the US government?]

Well, kind readers, that’s the scoop so far, down to the pulp of it all. It seems that the argument advanced by Zambada Niebla’s attorneys early on in his case may not be that far from the truth of it all.

The United States government considered the arrangements with the Sinaloa Cartel an acceptable price to pay, because the principal objective was the destruction and dismantling of rival cartels by using the assistance of the Sinaloa Cartel — without regard for the fact that tons of illicit drugs continued to be smuggled into Chicago and other parts of the United States and consumption continued virtually unabated.

Essentially, the theory of the United States government in waging its “war on drugs” has been and continues to be that the “end justifies the means” and that it is more important to receive information about rival drug cartels’ activities from the Sinaloa Cartel in return for being allowed to continue their criminal activities, including and not limited to their smuggling of tons of illegal narcotics into the United States. This is confirmed by recent disclosures by the Congressional Committee’s investigation of the latest Department of Justice, DEA, FBI, and ATF’s “war on drugs” operation known as “Fast & Furious”[an ATF operation in which thousands of weapons purchased at US gun stores by criminal groups were allowed to move across the border into Mexico unimpeded, many going into the hands of Sinaloa Cartel mercenaries.]

This drug war isn’t about Dirty Harry taking on the street thugs for the benefit of family values.

No, this drug war is far more a tale of monarchs and powerful feudal lords maneuvering on a chess board as they divide up the kingdom at the expense of the peasants, who for too long have believed what goes on behind the castle walls does not affect them — until it’s too late, until the king’s horsemen come for you and disappear your life for the benefit of securing their kingdom.

Stay tuned….

[American Dream]

Charles Bowden is an author and journalist whose work has largely focused on the US/Mexico Border region. His writing has especially centered on the Mexican Drug War and Ciudad Juárez, the border city known as the epicenter of Mexican drug violence. His critically acclaimed book, Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields, was published in 2010 by Nation Books. His latest work, edited along with Molly Molloy, is El Sicario: The Autobiography of a Mexican Assassin and was just released, also by Nation Books.

On June 30, 2011 Bowden sat down for a video interview with David Zlutnick while in San Francisco for a speaking engagement. In his responses he argues the extreme violence seen in Mexico is a sign of a deeper societal disintegration resulting from governmental corruption, failed economic policies, and the War on Drugs.

[Sounder]

Thanks AD for that you-tube.

As Charles Bowden says, 'Labor is trapped while capital moves', ouch -what a system.

Failure is the plan. There is big money in making people suffer.

Gee, how could we all be so collectively stupid so as to allow obviously insane people to set the agendas of our lives?

[American Dream]

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefie ... ers-mexico

All They Are Saying Is Give War a Chance: "Narco-Mania!" Premiers in Mexico

By Al Giordano



I can’t verify that this alleged transcript of today’s US State Department daily press briefing is real, but it came across my desk and it sure does sound like those crazy flashback-plagued hippies down at Foggy Bottom:

US Department of State Daily Press Briefing – December 8, 2011

Thu, 8 Dec 2011 17:42:34 -0500

Victoria Nuland

Spokesperson
Daily Press Briefing

Washington, DC

September 30, 2011

TRANSCRIPT:

12:45 p.m. EDT

MS. NULAND: Afternoon, everybody. I have one thing at the top and then we’ll go to your questions.

This is with regard to the reported leak of covert State Department documents claimed today by Narco News TV in its release of a video offensively titled “Narco-Mania.” The US Department of State can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the so-called “Operation Oh-No” to break up the Sinaloa drug crime organization in Mexico by fixing up Chapo Guzman with Yoko Ono. However, we have two words for whichever public employee leaked this alleged document to Narconews.com: “Bradley Manning.” Got it?

Furthermore, Secretary Clinton has asked me to pass along her personal offense, as a lifelong Beatles fan, that Narco News TV chose the date of December 8 for release of this alleged video about our alleged covert plan. As everybody knows, today marks the 31st anniversary of John Lennon’s death. I am sure I speak for every American citizen over 60 when I deplore the tasteless choice of this solemn day to premier a video that parodies that classic American film, A Hard Day’s Night.

John Lennon himself, if he were here today, would surely denounce this video’s message of ridiculing the war on drugs, one that promotes the legalization of illicit substances while claiming that ending a war would “give peace a chance.” Furthermore, we emphatically deny that four agents of the US Embassy ever held a “bed-in for war” on the Mexico City Zocalo, as portrayed in this offensive video. We strongly urge all American and Mexican citizens: Do not watch this video. Do not click http://www.narconews.com/nntv. Do not turn up the volume. And, of course, do not use any illegal drugs while watching it.

Now, let’s go to your questions…

Oh my. Let’s see what the harrumphing is all about! This is the new Narco News TV video, directed by Gregory Berger, “Narco-Mania!”





Greg began working on the idea for this video late last year, and the first scenes were filmed in Mexico City last February. And I have to say, to imagine family members of drug war victims chasing US Drug Enforcement Administration and Embassy agents out of Mexico seems a more hopeful and inspiring message than shouting and chanting slogans about 50,000 dead from their “war on drugs.”

The short film shows how the declarations of war by Mexican President Felipe Calderón in 2011 sound too much like US President Richard Nixon’s discourse 40 years ago, before our filmmaker Greg (affectionately known in Mexico as “Gringoyo”) was even born! Forty years of fighting the drug war the same way – a prohibition policy enforced by police and armies that deploy weapons and prisons and other punishments - without an iota of success. We noticed that so many of today’s leading drug warriors – from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich – were once the very sixties hippies that Nixon targeted with his drug war and look at them now: They’re doing the same things to the next generations, too.

In this video, the US State Department cooks up a plan from their drug-addled brains to break up the Mexican drug “cartels” by fixing up alleged “cartel boss” Chapo Guzmán with Yoko Ono. The “expert analyst” in the film, one Jorge Martín, explains: “We have to remember that the US State Department is led by aging baby boomer Hillary Clinton and lots of other former 1960’s youth. And they all suffer from one traumatic, collective memory: The break-up of the Beatles in 1970.”

Watch as the fab four US agents try every dumbass thing they can think of to play Cupid to Chapo and Yoko (including an Easter “Bed-In for War” on the Mexico City zócalo reminiscent of Beatle John Lennon and Ono’s Christmas “Bed-In for Peace” in 1969) and it may occur to you, as it did to us, that these bizarre tactics are no less absurd than every other hapless way they are waging the so-called “war on drugs” today.

The video began shooting weeks before a Mexican citizens mass movement to end the drug war rose up in April of this year – a nonviolent movement that last week saw one of its own fledgling leaders, Nepomuceno Moreno, gunned down in Hermosillo, capital of the state of Sonora – and if the movement is going to keep growing and stripping away the institutional rings of support for the drug war, it is going to have to do what all successful movements have done: Learn to laugh as well as cry, to triumph as well as mourn. Ridicule and humor are among the most powerful nonviolent weapons available to those of us who understand that you can’t beat gunfire with gunfire.

This video is also an appeal to the hearts and minds of those of you elder folks who were once rebellious youth but now fill the halls of government, media, business and every other power: Would you please get your generation under control and stop it already with the hypocrisy of claiming to love the rebel music and celebrities of your era while doing the same terrible things to today’s youth that Nixon et al – look in the mirror, you’ve become him! – did to you and yours. Remember that the Nixon White House tried, in 1972, to deport the British ex-Beatle, and the “drug war” (his 1968 guilty plea to misdemeanor marijuana possession) was the pretext they used to do it. Maybe you cried when Lennon was gunned down on this week of 1980, even if you didn’t know him personally. Imagine how family members of 50,000 Mexicans killed in the past five years of the US-imposed war on drugs have cried as a result of the policies that you prop up with your silent consent (or, even in the case of too many who do advocate ending the drug war, your ineffective self-indulgent forms of “activism”).

In the United States, you have not succeeded in organizing a mass movement against this war, despite decades of trying. Your steps are as repetitive and unimaginative as those of the drug warriors you oppose. But in nine months, Mexicans have already done the job you did not want to do. This video aims, from their creative foxhole, at the heart of your stinking war on drugs and its policy of prohibition. The events in this video are so ridiculous and yet at the same time tell an awful truth. You may not know whether to laugh or to cry. But perhaps if you can laugh with us, together we can wield the weapon of ridicule to weaken the prohibition policy and gain more heart and strength to organize ourselves for the nonviolent battle required – and long overdue – to defeat it once and for all.

You can start by helping this video to “go viral” by posting it on your Facebook and other social network pages, embedding it on your blogs and email lists, and helping us to scout and recruit journalists and other talents to apply for the 2012 School of Authentic Journalism – we just announced this week that it will happen March 21 to 31 in Mexico, and completed applications are due December 28 (to receive an application write to 2012application@narconews.com) - so that we can continue to multiply the number of people trained to do the kind of effective journalism and video creation that Greg and so many others of our graduates and colleagues do… eight days a week.

[slomo]

Mexico's cartels build own national radio system

MEXICO CITY (AP) — When convoys of soldiers or federal police move through the scrubland of northern Mexico, the Zetas drug cartel knows they are coming. The alert goes out from a taxi driver or a street vendor, equipped with a high-end handheld radio and paid to work as a lookout known as a "halcon," or hawk. The radio signal travels deep into the arid countryside, hours by foot from the nearest road. There, the 8-foot-tall (2-meter-tall) dark-green branches of the rockrose bush conceal a radio tower painted to match. A cable buried in the dirt draws power from a solar panel. A signal-boosting repeater relays the message along a network of powerful antennas and other repeaters that stretch hundreds of miles (kilometers) across Mexico, a shadow communications system allowing the cartel to coordinate drug deliveries, kidnapping, extortion and other crimes with the immediacy and precision of a modern military or law-enforcement agency.

more...