Financial Giants Put NY City Cops On Their Payroll

Who Do The White Shirt Police Report To At Occupy Wall Street Protests?

By PAM MARTENS
OCTOBER 10, 2011
Courtesy Of "CounterPunch"

Videos are springing up across the internet showing uniformed members of the New York Police Department in white shirts (as opposed to the typical NYPD blue uniforms) pepper spraying and brutalizing peaceful, nonthreatening protestors attempting to take part in the Occupy Wall Street marches.  Corporate media are reporting that these white shirts are police supervisors as opposed to rank and file.  Recently discovered documents suggest something else may be at work.

If you’re a Wall Street behemoth, there are endless opportunities to privatize profits and socialize losses beyond collecting trillions of dollars in bailouts from taxpayers.  One of the ingenious methods that has remained below the public’s radar was started by the Rudy Giuliani administration in New York City in 1998.  It’s called the Paid Detail Unit and it allows the New York Stock Exchange and Wall Street corporations, including those repeatedly charged with crimes, to order up a flank of New York’s finest with the ease of dialing the deli for a pastrami on rye.

The corporations pay an average of $37 an hour (no medical, no pension benefit, no overtime pay) for a member of the NYPD, with gun, handcuffs and the ability to arrest.  The officer is indemnified by the taxpayer, not the corporation.

New York City gets a 10 percent administrative fee on top of the $37 per hour paid to the police.  The City’s 2011 budget called for $1,184,000 in Paid Detail fees, meaning private corporations were paying  wages of $11.8 million to police participating in the Paid Detail Unit.  The program has more than doubled in revenue to the city since 2002.

The taxpayer has paid for the training of the rent-a-cop, his uniform and gun, and will pick up the legal tab for lawsuits stemming from the police personnel following illegal instructions from its corporate master.  Lawsuits have already sprung up from the program.

When the program was first rolled out, one insightful member of the NYPD posted the following on a forum: “… regarding the officer working for, and being paid by, some of the richest people and organizations in the City, if not the world, enforcing the mandates of the private employer, and in effect, allowing the officer to become the Praetorian Guard of the elite of the City. And now corruption is no longer a problem. Who are they kidding?”

Just this year, the Department of Justice revealed serious problems with the Paid Detail unit of the New Orleans Police Department.  Now corruption probes are snowballing at NOPD, revealing cash payments to police in the Paid Detail and members of the department setting up limited liability corporations to run upwards of $250,000 in Paid Detail work billed to the city.

When the infamously mismanaged Wall Street firm, Lehman Brothers, collapsed on September 15, 2008, its bankruptcy filings in 2009 showed it owed money to 21 members of the NYPD’s Paid Detail Unit.  (A phone call and email request to the NYPD for information on which Wall Street firms participate in the program were not responded to.  The police unions appear to have only scant information about the program.)

Other Wall Street firms that are known to have used the Paid Detail include Goldman Sachs, the World Financial Center complex which houses financial firms, and the New York Stock Exchange.

The New York Stock Exchange is the building in front of which the Occupy Wall Street protesters have unsuccessfully tried to protest, being herded behind metal barricades, clubbed with night sticks, kicked in the face and carted off to jail rather than permit the last plantation in America to be defiled with citizen chants and posters.  (A sample of those politically inconvenient posters and chants: “The corrupt are afraid of us; the honest support us; the heroic join us”; “Tell me what democracy looks like, this is what democracy looks like”; “I’ll believe a corporation is a person when Texas executes one.” The last sign refers to the 2010 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, giving corporations First Amendment personhood, which allows them to spend unlimited amounts of money in elections.)

On September 8, 2004, Robert Britz, then President and Co-Chief Operating Officer of the New York Stock Exchange, testified as follows to the U.S. House Committee on Financial Services:

 “…we have implemented new hiring standards requiring former law enforcement or military backgrounds for the security staff…We have established a 24-hour NYPD Paid Detail monitoring the perimeter of the data centers…We have implemented traffic control and vehicle screening at the checkpoints. We have installed fixed protective planters and movable vehicle barriers.”

Military backgrounds; paid NYPD 24-7; checkpoints; vehicle barriers?  It might be insightful to recall that the New York Stock Exchange originally traded stocks with a handshake under a Buttonwood tree in the open air on Wall Street.

In his testimony, the NYSE executive Britz states that “we” did this or that while describing functions that clearly belong to the City of New York.  The New York Stock Exchange at that time had not yet gone public and was owned by those who had purchased seats on the exchange – primarily, the largest firms on Wall Street.   Did the NYSE simply give itself police powers to barricade streets and set up checkpoints with rented cops?  How about clubbing protesters on the sidewalk?

Just six months before NYSE executive Britz’ testimony to a congressional committee, his organization was being sued in the Supreme Court of New York County for illegally taking over public streets with no authority to do so. This action had crippled the business of a parking garage, Wall Street Garage Parking Corp., the plaintiff in the case.  Judge Walter  Tolub said in his opinion that

“…a private entity, the New York Stock Exchange, has assumed responsibility for the patrol and maintenance of truck blockades located at seven intersections surrounding the NYSE…no formal authority appears to have been given to the NYSE to maintain these blockades and/or conduct security searches at these checkpoints…the closure of these intersections by the NYSE is tantamount to a public nuisance…The NYSE has yet to provide this court with any evidence of an agreement giving them the authority to maintain the security perimeter and/or conduct the searches that their private security force conducts daily.  As such, the NYSE’s actions are unlawful and may be enjoined as they violate plaintiff’s civil rights as a private citizen.”

The case was appealed, the ruling overturned, and sent back to the same Judge who had no choice but to dismiss the case on the appellate ruling that the plaintiff had suffered no greater harm than the community at large.  Does everyone in lower Manhattan own a parking garage that is losing its customer base because the roads are blocked to the garage?

Some believe that Wall Street is given special privileges and protection because New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg owes his $18.1 billion in wealth (yes, he’s that 1 percent the 99 percent are protesting) to Wall Street.  The Mayor was previously a trader for Salomon Brothers, the investment bank made famous for attempting to rig the U.S. Treasury market in two-year notes.

The Mayor’s business empire which bears his name, includes the awesome Bloomberg terminal, a computer that houses enormous pricing data for stocks and bonds, research, news, charting functions and much more.  There are currently an estimated 290,000 of these terminals on Wall Street trading floors around the globe, generating approximately $1500 in rental fees per terminal per month.  That’s a cool $435 million a month or $5.2 billion a year, the cash cow of the Bloomberg businesses.

The Bloomberg businesses are run independently from the Mayor but he certainly knows that his terminal is a core component of his wealth.  Nonetheless, the Mayor is not Wall Street’s patsy.  Bloomberg Publishing is frequently in the forefront of exposing fraud on Wall Street such as the 2001 tome “The Pied Pipers of Wall Street” by Benjamin Mark Cole,  which exposed the practice of releasing fraudulent stock research to the public.  Bloomberg News was responsible for court action that forced the Federal Reserve to release the details of what it did with trillions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts to Wall Street firms, hedge funds and foreign banks.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly may also have a soft spot for Wall Street.  He was formerly Senior Managing Director of Global Corporate Security at Bear, Stearns & Co. Inc., the Wall Street firm that collapsed into the arms of JPMorgan in March of 2008.

There has also been a bizarre revolving door between the Wall Street millionaires and the NYPD at times.  One of the most puzzling career moves was made by Stephen L. Hammerman.  He left a hefty compensation package as Vice Chairman of Merrill Lynch & Co. in 2002 to work as Deputy Commissioner of Legal Matters for the NYPD from 2002 to 2004.  That move had everyone on Wall Street scratching their head at the time.  Merrill collapsed into the arms of Bank of America on September 15, 2008, the same date that Lehman went under.

Wall Street is not the only sector renting cops in Manhattan.  Department stores, parks, commercial banks and landmarks like Rockefeller Center, Jacob Javits Center and St. Patrick’s Cathedral have also participated in the Paid Detail Unit, according to insiders.  But Wall Street is the only sector that runs a private justice system where its crimes are herded off to secret arbitration tribunals, has sucked on the public teat to the tune of trillions of dollars, escaped prosecution for the financial collapse, and can put an armed municipal force on the sidewalk to intimidate public protestors seeking a realignment of their democracy.

We may be learning a lot more in the future about the tactics Wall Street and the NYPD have deployed against the Occupy Wall Street protestors.  The highly regarded Partnership for Civil Justice Fund has filed a class action lawsuit over the approximately 700 arrests made on the Brooklyn Bridge on October 1.  The formal complaint and related information is  available at the organization’s web site, www.JusticeOnLine.org.

The organization was founded by Carl Messineo and Mara Verheyden-Hilliard.  The Washington Post has called them “the constitutional sheriffs for a new protest generation.”

The suit names Mayor Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Kelly, the City of New York, 30 unnamed members of the NYPD, and, provocatively, 10 unnamed law enforcement officers not employed by the NYPD.

The lawsuit lays out  dwhat has been curtailing the constitutional rights of protestors for a very long time in New York City.

“As seen in the movements for social change in the Middle East and Europe, all movements for social justice, jobs, and democracy need room to breathe and grow and it is imperative that there be a halt to law enforcement actions used to shut down mass assembly and free expression of the people seeking to redress grievances…

“After escorting and leading a group of demonstrators and others well out onto the Brooklyn Bridge roadway, the NYPD suddenly and without warning curtailed further forward movement, blocked the ability of persons to leave the Bridge from the rear, and arrested hundreds of protestors in the absence of probable cause.  This was a form of entrapment, both illegal and physical.

“That the trap and detain mass arrest was a command-level-driven intentional and calculated police operation is evidenced by the fact that the law enforcement officials who led the demonstration across the bridge were command officials, known as ‘white shirts.’ ”

In April 2001, I was arrested and incarcerated by the NYPD while peacefully handing out flyers on a public sidewalk outside of the Citigroup shareholders meeting – flyers that warned of growing corruption inside the company. (The unlawful merger of Travelers Group and Citibank created Citigroup and resulted in the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, the depression era investor protection legislation that barred depositor banks from merging with high-risk Wall Street firms.  Many of us from social justice groups in New York City had protested against the repeal but were out maneuvered by Wall Street’s political pawns in Washington.)

Out of a group of about two dozen protestors from the National Organization for Women in New York City, Rain Forest Action Network, and Inner City Press, I was the only person arrested.  There was no civil disobedience occurring.  Rain Forest Action Network was handing out fortune cookies with prescient warnings about Citigroup and urging pedestrians to cut up their Citibank credit cards.  The rest of us were peacefully handing out flyers.

Chained to a metal bar inside the police precinct, I was grilled on any crimes I might know about.  I responded that the only crimes I knew about were listed on the flyer and apparently, in New York City, one gets arrested for disclosing crimes by Wall Street firms.

A mysterious, mature, white shirted inspector who ordered my arrest on the sidewalk, and refused to give his first name, disappeared from the police report when it was filed, blaming the arrest instead on a young police officer.  Citigroup is only alive today because the Federal government inserted a feeding tube into Citigroup and infused over $2 trillion in loans, direct investment and guarantees as the company veered toward collapse.

The NYPD at the time of my arrest was run by Bernard Kerik – the man President George W. Bush later sent to Iraq to be the interim Interior Minister and train Iraqi police.  The President subsequently nominated Kerik to head the Department of Homeland Security for the entire nation.  The nation was spared of that eventuality only because of an illegal nanny popping up.  Today, Kerik is serving a four year sentence in Federal prison for a variety of criminal acts.

The New York Civil Liberties Union filed a Federal lawsuit on my behalf  (Martens v. Giuliani) and we learned that the NYPD had arbitrarily established a policy to arrest and hold for 72 hours any person protesting in a group of 20 or more.   The case was settled for a modest monetary award and the repeal by the NYPD of this unconstitutional and despicable practice.

Pam Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years. She spent the last decade of her career advocating against Wall Street’s private justice system, which keeps its crimes shielded from public courtrooms.  She has been writing on public interest issues for CounterPunch since retiring in 2006.   She has no security position, long or short, in any company mentioned in this article.  She can be reached at pamk741@aol.com

America’s Foreign Dictatorship

By Jacob G. Hornberger
Monday, October 17, 2011
Courtesy Of "The Future Of Freedom Foundation"

President Obama’s reaction to the alleged Iranian assassination plot reflects, once again, the dictatorial powers that the president of the United States now wields in foreign affairs.

As many commentators are noting, the whole scheme appears to be as bogus as a 3-dollar bill, but that isn’t really the point. The point is that we now live in a country in which the ruler wields the omnipotent power to send the entire nation into war for whatever reason he wants, bogus or not.

That’s not the way things were supposed to be. The Framers didn’t devise a system where the president had that omnipotent power. When they called the federal government into existence with the Constitution, they delegated the power to declare war to Congress and the power to wage war to the president.

Thus, under the Constitution Obama is required to come to Congress with a request to declare war on Iran (or even to impose sanctions on the country). Presumably Congress would say, “Show us the evidence on which you’re relying for your request for us to declare war on Iran.”

At that point, it would be “put up or shut up” time for Obama and his FBI, Justice Department, CIA, and Pentagon. They would have to submit their evidence to rigorous scrutiny from Congress, just as they’re going to have to do in a criminal trial of the alleged assassination plotter, Manssor Arbabsiar. (That’s assuming, of course, that they don’t send Arbabsiar down the “enemy combatant” route by removing him from the jurisdiction of America’s constitutional judicial system and delivering him into the clutches of the U.S. military.)

That’s not to say, of course, that Congress would necessarily decline to issue a declaration of war but rather that it’s an important barrier that Obama might not be able to overcome. Since war necessarily involves death, destruction, spending, debt, inflation, and infringements on liberty, that’s why the Framers decided to make it difficult for the president to send the nation into war against other nations.

But Obama doesn’t have to concern himself with that barrier. He now wields the authority to ignore that constitutional provision. When it comes to war, he is the declarer. He is the decider. He — and he alone (along with his advisers in the CIA and Pentagon) — decides whether America is going to war against Iran or any other nation.

And what happens if Obama sends the nation into war and the whole assassination plot turns out later to have been bogus? No problem. Obama will simply take the same position that George W. Bush took when he sent the United States into war against Iraq without the constitutionally required congressional declaration of war. Like Bush, Obama will simply claim that he regrets the error but that the troops are bringing “freedom and democracy” to Iran anyway.

The principle is actually no different with respect to Obama’s power to assassinate Americans. He doesn’t need a trial to determine whether a person really is engaged in an action that warrants a non-judicial execution. He is the decider — the determiner. He reviews the evidence and if he’s convinced of the person’s guilt, that’s all that’s necessary. He issues the order to take out the person, and the order is carried out by either the Pentagon or the CIA. No judicial review. No congressional impeachment. Just the omnipotent power to assassinate, along with the omnipotent power to send the nation into war.

Meanwhile, as the U.S. government accuses Iran of sending agents to conduct an assassination on American soil, the U.S. government continues to wield the post-9/11 “emergency” power to send its agents into any foreign country on earth to kidnap people, torture them, rendition them to dictatorial regimes to be tortured, or assassinate them.

It’s all enough to remind Americans of the dictatorial power that their ruler now wields in foreign affairs as well as the rank hypocrisy that people all over the world find so offensive.


Jacob Hornberger is founder and president of the Future of Freedom Foundation.

Hornberger’s Blog Archives

Canto de Andar

Posted By "CavalierZee" 

 Artist "Luar Na Lubre"

"

Neither Security Nor Democracy Comes From A Gun

By COLLEEN ROWLEY
Posted: Sunday, October 16, 2011 6:00 am
Courtesy Of "The WCF Courier"

I recently enjoyed the opportunity to speak to various groups at the University of Northern Iowa in connection with the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks and also in celebration of Constitution and Citizenship Week. All the more because the overarching post 9/11 challenge: "How do we defeat terrorism without terrorizing ourselves?" is very much tied to the need to return to adherence to the Constitution and to empowering America's citizenry.

There's little doubt that our Founding Fathers have rolled over many times in their graves this past decade as American citizens were first terrified into believing they must sacrifice their constitutional rights and liberties for "security" and then duped into believing that the U.S. launching of pre-emptive wars would somehow bring "freedom." It's certainly unfortunate we haven't heeded "Father of the Constitution" James Madison's famous warning that "no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."

The ubiquitous question at the end of nearly every interview about 9/11 is, "Are we safer now?" But we've yet to hear an answer from talking heads, at least on U.S. airwaves, that is not pure subjective opinion pulled entirely from thin air. Usually the "expert" opinion provided for political reasons, is geared toward keeping citizens optimistic that the hundreds of thousands of people killed and $4 to $5 trillion in long-term costs thus far spent is working to keep us "safe." Very few experts want to tell the harsh truth that this last decade has seen a precipitous increase in the level of both terrorist attacks worldwide and fatalities occurring from these attacks.

The truth is that behind the barrage of talking head propaganda, the hard statistics and figures show that international terrorism has increased approximately 20-fold over the last decade.

Remember in 2004 when Colin Powell's State Department was caught (twice) putting out wrong figures in its annual "Patterns of Global Terrorism" Report after press conferences falsely pointed to progress in the "war on terror"? Under challenge from scholars, the department was forced to withdraw its report and admit that its initial version vastly understated the level of worldwide terrorism and that nearly double the number of people had been killed in 2003 as originally reported. In the course of compiling the following year's report, the Washington Post discovered that attacks (per government analysts) had gone up once again - three times more, in fact. Rather than publish that sobering information, it was decided to strip the annual terrorism report of the numbers and rename it "Country Reports on Terrorism." But faced with an outcry once the redacted statistics leaked out showing a surge in terrorism, the National Counterterrorism Center was forced to release the figures, the highest ever in its 21-year history.

President George W. Bush, quizzed on the apparent upsurge of global terrorism at one of his prime-time news conferences, reportedly attributed the increase to aggressive U.S. action: "We've made the decision to defeat the terrorists abroad so we don't have to face them here at home. And when you engage the terrorists abroad, it causes activity and action."

A statistical annex prepared by the NCTC can now be found near the end of each year's "Country Reports" that provides the all-important numbers. Although the Bush administration frowned on comparisons (and probably the Obama administration does too), these numbers are relevant for purposes of comparison with pre 9/11 figures. From 1995 to 2000, the old annual global terrorism report showed fluctuation between 273 and 440 terrorist acts and between 165 and 741 people killed each year. (The 741 deaths occurred in 1998, the year of the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.) By contrast, the most recent "Country Reports" which came out in August 2011, reflecting figures for 2010, show more than 11,500 terrorist attacks occurred in 72 countries resulting in more than 13,200 deaths. (The number of attacks in 2010 rose by 5 percent from the previous year, with the only good news being that the number of deaths declined for a third consecutive year. From 2007 to 2010, attacks world wide fluctuated from about 11,000 to over 14,000, killing people in numbers ranging from last year's 13,200 to nearly 23,000 in 2007.)

These huge increases in the level of international terrorism world wide, do not count the "collateral damage" civilian casualties occurring in U.S. wars nor do they count "domestic terrorism" incidents (like the mass shooting in Norway or the shooting of Congresswoman Giffords).

Beyond the quantification of attacks and deaths, which should provide a resounding "No!" to the question of whether we are safer, there exist other quantifiable measures, most importantly those from University of Chicago Professor Robert Pape, head of the "Chicago Project" and perhaps the world's foremost expert on suicide terrorism. In The Truth Behind Suicide Terrorism monograph, Pape shows that they don't "hate us because of our freedom," but suicide terrorism is instead engendered by the presence of U.S. armies. Pape's now well-understood conclusion that suicide terrorism occurs in response to our invasions and long-term occupations is augmented by his reflections on "America's massive decline in power" since 9/11:

"A nation's relative power is based on its economic wealth compared to the rest of the world. In 2000, the U.S. controlled 31 percent of the world economy; in 2008, that figure had fallen to 23 percent and, according to the International Monetary Fund, the projection for 2013 is 21 percent. In the past eight years, the United States has lost one-third of its economic wealth or, put another way, since 2000, the U.S. has lost nearly a third of its relative power in international politics while China's has doubled and Russia's has tripled. This decline represents the largest drop in the history books, Pape says. Our international decline was well under way before the economic downturn of 2008, which is likely to further weaken our influence. The Iraq war, growing government debt and myriad unwise decisions resulting in economic weakness have cost the U.S. real power in today's world. ‘If present trends continue, we will look back at the previous administration's term as the death knell of American domination," he predicts.'"

These sad facts prove that U.S. wars and military occupations are neither bringing democracy to the world nor keeping us safe. If we want to bring democracy to the world, wouldn't it be far more effective and less costly to use the methods that UNI educators employed recently to teach middle school students about the Constitution and good citizenship?

Colleen Rowley was an FBI special agent for almost 24 years and was legal counsel to the FBI Field Office in Minneapolis from 1990 to 2003. She grew up in New Hampton. Rowley wrote a "whistleblower" memo in May 2002 and testified to the Senate Judiciary on some of the FBI's pre 9/11 failures. She retired at the end of 2004.

What Happens When Everyone Else Starts Using Drones?

By TED MANN
OCT 09, 2011
Courtesy Of "The Atlantic Wire"

The country is growing accustomed to debate about the use of drone aircraft in military surveillance and strikes. Should the U.S., as it has under President Barack Obama, be leaning more heavily on the use of the remote-controlled airplanes to hunt and kill terrorists — including American citizens?

In The New York Times this weekend, Scott Shane points to another debateabout drones, one that is inevitable as other countries hurry to catch up to America in their development of the weapons. What should the U.S. do when another country starts to use drones the way it has in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere?

Eventually, the United States will face a military adversary or terrorist group armed with drones, military analysts say. But what the short-run hazard experts foresee is not an attack on the United States, which faces no enemies with significant combat drone capabilities, but the political and legal challenges posed when another country follows the American example. The Bush administration, and even more aggressively the Obama administration, embraced an extraordinary principle: that the United States can send this robotic weapon over borders to kill perceived enemies, even American citizens, who are viewed as a threat.

“Is this the world we want to live in?” asks Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Because we’re creating it.”

The challenge could be faced along any number of restive borders (in Kashmir, or in northern Mexico) or against breakaway elements within a country (the Uighurs in Xinjiang Province, in China, perhaps, or in Chechnya). And the United States won't be able to say much in protest without sounding hypocritical. “The problem is that we’re creating an international norm,” Dennis M. Gormley, a senior research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh tells Shane. The U.S. position is that it can strike across borders to kill terrorists — Anwar al-Awlaki, for instance — when they are even suspected of planning attacks. How could this country now tell other military powers they can't do the same. So far, the only other country to have made a strike outside the Afghanistan war zone, where British drones are active, is Israel, which used an unmanned vehicle to attack suspected militants in Gaza.

As the Obama administration has dramatically ramped up drone attacks, the country may face a new arms race. It may also eventually have to debate the underlying question that is now being avoided: does this type of warfare really work? At 10 civilians killed for every terrorist, as the Brookings Institution estimates, the attacks may be undermining any effort to win over the proverbial hearts and minds. But for the U.S., to kill an al-Awlaki, that may prove to be worth the cost. How will we respond when another country starts making similar, cold calculations?

Wanna Live Forever? Become A Noun

Submitted By Guest Poster "Sayf Maslul" 

Courtesy Of "National Press Radio (NPR)" 



Joseph Guillotin, Henry Shrapnel and Jules Leotard became immortal -- by entering the English language. But NPR's Robert Krulwich and Adam Cole discover that when your entire life is reduced to a single definition, the results are sometimes upsetting.

Producers: Robert Krulwich and Adam Cole
Music and Animation: Adam Cole (youtube.com/​cadamole)
Assistant Producer: Maggie Starbard
Production Assistant: Marina Dominguez
Supervising Producers: Jessica Goldstein, Maria Godoy

Why Is USA Targeting Pakistan?

By Yasmeen Ali
October 7, 2011
Courtesy Of "Asia Times Online"

Pakistan has taken hits in recent reports, being depicted as supporting terror. But this may be the United States' false tiger and not Pakistan's doing. The result of such discord could mean a fundamental change to South Asian diplomacy and relations.

The US has often resorted to presenting a diatribe against their supposed ally Pakistan. Repeatedly, the US has accused Pakistan of playing a double game, maneuvering, going behind the US's back to serve self interests.

The most recent has been quite hard hitting with Admiral Mike Mullen, the outgoing chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, accusing the Haqqani network of being a veritable arm of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and being responsible for not only the attack on US Embassy on Kabul but also the murder of Burhannudin Rabbani, the former Afghan president tasked with negotiating with the insurgents. 

However, the US tends to forget that the interests of Pakistan and the US may diverge in the interests of each's national security.

The US has expected Pakistan to risk its own national security at the expense of US's. Pakistan has done this repeatedly. Allowing drone attacks, causing the deaths of thousands of innocent lives, and according to the Economic Times, suffered a loss of US$68 billion since becoming an ally to the US in the "war of terror". In return, Pakistan has received $15-17 billion, a figure which includes reimbursements of $8.2 billion through the Coalition Support Fund.

These funds are not assistance but a payback of debts incurred according to the Economic Survey 2010-11. However, in all this period of being allies against "war on terror", not once has the US endangered its own national security or economy, for Pakistan.

Tom Englehart spells out in his article, Details of Secret Pact Emerge: Troops stuck in Afghanistan till 2024 carried by Alternet on August 23rd, 2011. 

Englehart quotes Ben Farmer of British Telegraph that the Barack Obama administration is negotiating a "pact" with the Afghan government, to leave American "trainers", thousands of them, as well as special operations forces, and US Air Force elements settled in Afghanistan air bases that the Pentagon has built until 2024.

The US is now fighting a war Obama promised to end in his election campaign and to bring the boys home. A promise that was not only never kept but things have gone from bad to worse with the escalating war and regional issues.

With elections in the US approaching, he needs to give a reason why he failed to deliver on this most important promise. Replacing al-Qaeda with the Haqqanis and the supposed involvement and complicity of the ISI with the Haqqanis is the card to be played.

The only way out of this quagmire of accusations, counter-accusations, lies and deceit is an early withdrawal of American and North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces from Afghanistan and an end to this war. Cooler, smarter heads in Washington must rule and drive home the point, as the problem is the occupying forces, not Pakistan.

Yasmeen Ali is a lawyer and university professor based in Lahore. She can be reached at yasmeen.a.9@gmail.com 

(Copyright 2011 Yasmeen Ali.) 

The Price Of Democracy In The Middle East

Iraq has been marked by sectarian violence since Saddam Hussein was overthrown [EPA]


A Period Of Sectarian Violence Is Almost Inevitable In Newly Democratic Countries, Until A New Balance Is Reached.

By Robert Grenier
Last Modified: 17 Oct 2011 12:37
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"


The questioner's tone was notably hostile. How, he wanted to know, could the US justify an invasion which had resulted in the deaths of so many Iraqis?

The clear implication of his query was that if the US incursion and occupation had set in motion a chain of events which resulted in so many Mesopotamian deaths, then it was the US which must be held directly responsible for all the carnage we had seen in Iraq. An uncomfortable hush settled over the audience. My inquisitor was clearly speaking for many in the room. I could feel the sting of a thousand pair of accusing eyes.

It hardly seemed the moment to attempt a defense of the US campaign to overthrow Saddam. Given all the post-invasion errors made by the Americans under even the most charitable view, where would one start? And so I began by acknowledging the obvious: Yes, the US had made many errors in Iraq. One could quibble over what to include in the list, but it was undeniable that the US had contributed substantially to the disaster that had befallen that country.

But if, I went on, one's analysis were to begin and end there, what would that imply? However long the indictment against the Americans, it had to be acknowledged that the vast majority of the Iraqis killed and maimed after the US invasion of 2003 were not the victims of Americans, but of other Iraqis.

"[Do the Iraqis need] to be kept under the heel of a dictatorial boot to ... prevent them from lunging at one another's throats?"

Accountability


The mass-casualty car bombs, the bloody work of sectarian militias, the confessionally-based "ethnic cleansing", even the brutal suicide bombings of al-Qaeda in Iraq, all came largely at the hands of Iraqis.

Did the questioner mean to suggest that Iraqis themselves were completely unaccountable for their actions?

Leaving aside the circumstances of Saddam's departure, was his removal the real crime? For if so, wouldn't that be just another way of saying that Iraqis could not be trusted to rule themselves, that they needed to be kept under the heel of a dictatorial boot to maintain any semblance of social order, or to prevent them from lunging at one another's throats?

I never did get a satisfactory answer to my questions. But I was put in mind of this exchange by the news from Cairo concerning the recent clashes between the Egyptian Army and Christian Copts. Many of the casualties, which numbered some 26 deaths and 200 injured, came at the hands of civilian thugs whose intervention was apparently solicited by the Army.

The Coptic demonstrations which triggered the Army's brutality appear in turn to have been set off by Salafi extremists, for some of whom post-Mubarak instability poses a welcome opportunity for sectarian score-settling.

Meanwhile, secularists, some of whom are associated with the former regime, are trying to marshal electoral forces against the Muslim Brothers, who have the support of the anti-Mubarak youth to at least temporarily ban former regime-affiliated parliamentarians from the process. Would-be democrats of highly divergent stripes thus advocate anti-democratic means to safeguard a nascent democracy.


After A Dictator Is Deposed ...

The growing threat of violence weighs heavily over these wary proceedings, providing a potential justification for the Army to postpone elections, nominally in deference to social stability. Across the region, democrats are quickly learning that deposing the dictator is but the first step. They are learning that the pent-up forces of latent social anarchy manifest themselves quickly, once the dead hand of repression is lifted, forcing people to revert to old sources of identity, be it ethnicity, creed or tribe, as their only means of protection.

In Syria, once moribund sectarian divisions are becoming distinctly sharper as opposition to the Assad regime spreads, threatening violent social splits and potentially undermining the uprising itself. As brilliantly documented in these spaces by Nir Rosen, the most cynical regime of the Middle East has created a trap for the Alawites, robbing them of the religious basis of their identity and cleaving them instead to the ruling clique, preparing them for the choice they now face: Support the government or face the fire.

The true cynic assumes the worst motives in others. In this, the Assads are not being disappointed.

Likewise, across the Mediterranean, as the Gaddafi regime enters its final, spasmodic death throes, the regional and tribal pillars of a purportedly post-tribal regime once again manifest themselves, threatening to undermine the social cohesion necessary to create democratic institutions.

"The coming transitions will be marked by violence, as a new social equilibrium is established."

Anti-democratic forces, both within and outside the region, will point to these developments and cite them as excuses for maintenance of the old, repressive order. The Gulf monarchies, already obsessed with the notion that their Shiite communities are mere pawns of Tehran, will find reinforcement for their most paranoid - and ultimately self-destructive - political instincts.

Russia and China - no friends of genuine democracy - needed little excuse to veto the recent UN Security Council resolution condemning the Assad regime. But even if we take the Russians at their word, citing as they do the threat of civil war and the consequent need for dialogue between the Syrian regime and its opponents, one must concede that the practical effect of the Russian policy line would be to sacrifice democratic freedoms on the altar of social stability, precisely the Faustian bargain they have made at home.

Different arguments to similar effect will again be heard in Israel and the West. We have heard them before, perhaps most notably in 2006, when the purported champions of liberal values sought justification for strangling an inconvenient Palestinian democracy in its cradle.

Democracy, we were told, was not merely a matter of elections, but of supporting institutions, of civil society, of education, of habits of mind. All of this may be true. Scratch the surface of these arguments, however, and a darker, uglier attitude emerges: The belief that Arab Muslim societies in our day are incapable of democracy.

Do not believe it.

The fruits of democracy must and will come to the Middle East, but they will not come easily or cheaply. 

Outsiders can do what is possible to encourage social comity. We can hope that societies, newly free of authoritarian shackles, will follow the better angels of their nature. But such hope is neither a strategy nor a choice. In many cases, the coming transitions will be marked by violence, as a new social equilibrium is established.

The present generation will, in many cases, pay the price for the sins of their fathers, in whose time social differences were forcibly repressed, rather than reconciled.

In time, societies of the Middle East will have to learn for themselves the necessity of tolerance in the social and political order they hope to build. These lessons can be learned relatively easily or with unspeakable difficulty, as in Iraq.

But inevitably, the freedoms of future generations will be bought and paid for through the struggle and suffering of the present. The price will be high, but it will be necessary.

Robert Grenier is a retired, 27 year veteran of the CIA's Clandestine Service. He was Director of the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Center from 2004-2006.

40 Signs That America Is Rotting From The Inside Out

Courtesy Of "End Of The American Dream"

It would be easy to know how to defend America if enemy forces were invading our shores.  But how do you defend a nation that is rotting from the inside out?  How do you eradicate the internal decay that is eating away at the heart and soul of this nation a little bit more every single day?  Just like we saw happen with the Roman Empire, the internal rot that is eating its way to the surface threatens to bring us down as a nation.  Greed, corruption, gluttony, lust and pride have become national pastimes.  We are addicted to debt, food, entertainment and pleasure.  We have been taught to hate those that look different from us or that believe different things than we do.  Society is literally coming apart at the seams and the federal government is increasingly implementing "Big Brother" security measures in an attempt to maintain control and keep us "safe".  We have far more people in prison than any other nation on the planet and yet things just keep getting worse and worse.  So how can we fix America?  How do we rescue a nation that is rotting from the inside?

It is absolutely crucial that we acknowledge just how bad things have gotten.  Simply getting the right political party into power will not save America.  Neither will implementing a new political system or a new economic system.  America's problems are deeper than that.  The very core of America is deeply sick, and once we admit that, then perhaps we will start focusing on some real solutions.

The following are 40 signs that America is rotting from the inside out....

#1 A secret panel of government officials can now put American citizens on a "kill list".  A recent Reuters article explained that no law established this secret panel and that there are no laws which govern it....

There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council, several current and former officials said. Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

#2 It is on record that the federal government facilitated the sale of thousands upon thousands of very powerful guns to Mexican drug cartels.  The Mexican government was never told about this operation.  U.S. border agents have been shot with these guns, and these guns have been involved in dozens of murders already in Mexico.  Mexican drug cartels will continue to kill people with these guns for many years to come.  The Obama administration is working incredibly hard to cover up this scandal and the mainstream media is mostly ignoring the story.

#3 The other day, CBS News reporter Sharyl Attkisson shared with radio show host Laura Ingraham that Obama administration officials have yelled at her and cussed at her for aggressively investigating Operation Fast and Furious.  This must have created a lot of waves, because now CBS News has now put her on lockdown and has made her unavailable for interviews.

#4 A host of other recent examples show that if you are associated with the mainstream media in any way and you make a "politically incorrect" comment, you will be given the boot so fast that it will make your head swim.  For example, Hank Williams Jr. was recently booted off Monday Night Football simply because he compared Barack Obama to Hitler.

#5 At the current protests in New York City, police are beating people with clubs and shooting pepper spray in their faces.  As the economic crisis gets even worse and protests spread and become more intense in future years, will all of America soon look like this?

#6 The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world and thelargest total prison population on the entire globe.

#7 The other day, a group of thieves stole a 50 foot long bridge in Pennsylvania.  Yes, you read that correctly.  They stole the entire bridge.

#8 Criminals seem willing to steal just about anything that is not bolted down these days.  For example, a group of thieves has stolen more than 1,000 pigsfrom farms in Minnesota and Iowa in recent months.

#9 Class warfare is certainly rising to a new level in this nation.  Recently, Roseanne Barr said that it would be a good idea for some bankers to "go to the reeducation camps".

#10 Michael Moore is warning that the economic riots that we are starting to see around the country could potentially become violent in the future....

"The smart rich know they can only build the gate so high. And, and, sooner or later history proves that people when they’ve had enough aren’t going to take it anymore. And much better to deal with it nonviolently now, through the political system, than what could possibly happen in the future, which nobody wants to see"

#11 Have we become a socialist nation?  At this point, nearly half of all Americans live in a household that receives some form of government benefits.

#12 From the time George Washington became president until January 1993, the United States government accumulated a national debt of $4.16 trillion.  Since Barack Obama entered the White House, more than $4.2 trillion has been added to the national debt.

#13 Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke recently warned Congress not to cut "too much" from the federal budget right now.

#14 According to one recent report, the EPA wants to hire 230,000 more bureaucrats that will help enforce all of the new greenhouse gas regulations that the EPA plans to implement.

#15 There are more than 3 million reports of child abuse in the United States every single year.

#16 Horrifying brawls involving groups of young people are breaking out all over the nation.  For example, check out this disturbing footage of a brawl that recently broke out during a football game in California.

#17 All over the nation, little children are being publicly arrested by police in their own classrooms and are being marched out of their schools in handcuffs.

#18 In some areas of the country, law enforcement officials are now using "extraction devices" to download data from the cellphones of motorists that they pull over.

#19 In the United States today, it is estimated that one out of every four girls is sexually abused before they become adults.

#20 Religious broadcaster Pat Robertson recently declared that it if your spouse develops Alzheimer's disease, it is okay to divorce them.

#21 The United States has the highest divorce rate on the globe by a wide margin.

#22 Children in the United States are three times more likely to be prescribed antidepressants as children in Europe are.

#23 Former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld recently stated that "extremism in Christianity" is a significant danger to the United States.

#24 More pornography is created in the United States than anywhere else on the entire globe.  89 percent is made in the U.S.A. and only 11 percent is made in the rest of the world.

#25 Vanderbilt University has ruled that five on-campus Christian groups have violated Vanderbilt's non-discrimination policy because they will not allow people that do not believe in Christianity to become leaders in the groups.

#26 Globally, the United States is tied with the U.K. for the most hours of television watched per person each week.

#27 According to NationMaster.com, the United States has the highest percentage of obese people in the world.

#28 The federal government recently sued a company down in Texas for firing a 600 pound worker.

#29 Are American students getting dumber?  This year, the average score on the verbal portion of the SAT was the lowest ever recorded.

#30 The United States has more people on pharmaceutical drugs than any other country on the planet.

#31 The percentage of women taking antidepressants in America is higher than in any other country in the world.

#32 One out of every four teen girls in the United States now has an STD.

#33 Law enforcement officials estimate that about 600,000 Americans and about 65,000 Canadians are trading dirty child pictures online.

#34 There are more reported rapes in the United States each year than anywhere else in the world.

#35 Totalitarian police states used to be ridiculed in this country, but now that has all changed.  In fact, the "If You See Something, Say Something" campaign looks like it could have been pulled right out of an East German security handbook.

#36 According to a shocking FBI document obtained by Oath Keepers, the FBI definition of "suspicious activity" now includes making "extreme religious statements" and believing in "radical theology".

#37 It is estimated that 500,000 babies that will be born this year will be sexually abused before they turn 18.

#38 In airports all over the country, the federal government is forcing large numbers of women and children to endure very offensive "enhanced pat-downs" during which their private parts are touched before they are allowed to get on to their flights.

#39 It was bad enough when the TSA was just abusing our families at the airports.  Now, TSA "VIPR teams" are conducting approximately 8,000 "unannounced security screenings" a year at subway stations, bus terminals, ports and highway rest stops.

#40 Since 1973, approximately 50 million babies have been slaughtered in the United States before they were even born.

Some of the examples above may seem unrelated at first glance, but they really are not.  The truth is that all of those examples illustrate the deep decay that has taken hold in this nation.

Sadly, hundreds more examples could easily be listed.  This country is deeply sick, and "tweaking" a couple of things or electing the right politician is not going to cure us.

America is dying and time is running out.

So what do all of you think?  Do you believe that America is rotting from the inside out?  Please feel free to leave your thoughts below....

Note: The below video was not part of the above article.

"The American Dream"

By "George Carlin"

The CIA & The Drug Trade

By James Corbett
14 October, 2011
Courtesy Of "The Corbett Report"

Just as the British Empire was in part financed by their control of the opium trade through the British East India Company, so too has the CIA been found time after time to be at the heart of the modern international drug trade. From its very inception, the CIA has been embroiled in the murky underworld of drug trafficking.

There are billions of dollars per year to be made in keeping the drug trade going, and it has long been established that Wall Street and the major American banks rely on drug money as a ready source of liquid capital. With those kinds of funds at stake, it is unsurprising to see a media-government-banking nexus develop around the status quo of a never-ending war on drugs -- aided, abetted and facilitated by the modern-day British East India Company, the CIA.

This is our EyeOpener Report by James Corbett presenting the history, documented facts, and cases on the CIA's involvement and operations in the underworld of drug trafficking, from the Corsican Mafia in the 1940s through the 1980s Contras to the recent Zambada Niebla Case today.


I want to thank you for watching and add that I just post the videos to stimulate healthy debate. This posting is not meant to be indicative of my agreement or disagreement. I sincerely appreciate your opinions. Hope your having a great day. Peace, Michael

The media material presented in this production is protected by the FAIR USE CLAUSE of the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, which allows for the rebroadcast of copyrighted materials for the purposes of commentary, criticism, and education.
The content in this video is provided without any warranty, express or implied. All opinions expressed on this site are those of the author and may contain errors or omissions.



Full Transcript Is Below:

The cultivation of what we know today as the opium poppy goes back to the beginnings of recorded history, when the Sumerians in ancient Mesopotamia cultivated what they referred to as Hul Gil, or the “joy plant.” The practice was passed down through the Assyrians to the Babylonians and from there to the Egyptians, by which time the opium trade had begun to to fluorish and was fast becoming the lynchpin of international trade across the Mediterranean into Europe.

Indeed, as far back as one cares to go, control of the international opium trade has been a key factor in the rise and fall of empires.

During the 18th century, the British monopolized the opium trade in India and shipped thousands of chests of opium per year to China as a way of financing their huge trade deficit with that nation. When the Chinese cracked down on opium trafficking in the mid-19th century, the British fought two wars to ensure their Chinese opium market.

By the 1830s, American traders were already getting in on the act, with Samuel Russell’s “Russell & Company” becoming the largest American trading house in China. Russell’s cousin, William Huntington Russell, founded Skull & Bones, a secret society at Yale that has formed the core of the American intelligence establishment, a set of documentable facts that the establishment media seems eager to avoid.

The association between Skull and Bones and the American intelligence establishment from the OSS to the CIA is well-established by now, with a litany of agents, directors, and of course Director of Central Intelligence, George “Poppy” Bush himself, having been Bonesmen before being recruited for the agency. But the connection between the CIA and the international drug trade is not simply a historical one about 19th century opium traders.

Just as the British empire was in part financed by their control of the opium trade through the British East India Company, so too has the CIA been found time after time to be at the heart of the modern international drug trade.

From its very inception, the CIA has been embroiled in the murky underworld of drug trafficking.

In the late 1940s, the CIA funneled arms and funds to the Corsican Mafia in return for their assistance in breaking up widespread labour strikes in France that were threatening to establish communist control over the Old Port of Marseille. The Corsican crime syndicate, in turn, used the CIA support to set up the trafficking network known as “The French Connection” which saw heroin smuggled from Turkey to France, and shipped to the US, feeding an American heroin epidemic.

In Burma in 1950, the CIA regrouped the remnants of the defeated Nationalist Chinese Army, or KMT, to start an invasion of Southern China and draw Chinese troops away from the Korean front. Easily beaten back by Mao’s forces, the KMT instead turned their attention to occupying Burma, imposing an opium tax on all farmers in the opium-rich Shan highlands. Members of the Burmese military claimed that the KMT opium was flown out to Thailand and Taiwan on the same unmarked C-47s that the CIA had used to supply the group in the first place.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, the CIA recruited the Laotian Hmong tribe to fight communist forces in the region. The CIA encouraged the Hmong to grow opium instead of rice to make them dependent on CIA air drops of food. The agency could then force their compliance by threatening to withdraw the food aid. To make the deal even sweeter, they even located a heroin refinery at CIA headquarters in northern Loas and used Air America, a passenger and cargo airline that was covertly owned and operated by the CIA, to export the Laotian opium and heroin. Much of it ended up in Vietnam, causing an epidemic of heroin addiction in US soldiers.

In the 1980s, the locus of opium production shifted from the Golden Triangle, where the CIA was disengaging, to the Golden Crescent, where it was engaging with the Afghan mujahedeen in their CIA-funded struggle against the Soviets. Opium became a key funding mechanism for the insurgency, and as Peter Dale Scott explained on The Eyeopener earlier this year, the correlation between CIA involvement in the region and increasing opium production was not coincidental.

Also in the 1980s, the US supported the Contras in their fight against the Sandanista government in Nicaragua. Officially barred from arming and funding the Contras by congress, the CIA came up with a scheme to sell arms to Iran and use the funds to illegally arm and supply the Contras. CIA-protected drug smugglers flew down to Nicaragua loaded with arms to supply the Contras and flew back loaded with Columbian cocaine. A decade later, investigative reporter Gary Webb used official government documents to prove that the CIA had sheltered these drug smuggling operatives and followed the trail of this cheap Columbian cocaine to the beginning of the crack epidemic in South-Central LA.

Despite the numerous, documented and fully admitted examples of CIA involvement in drug dealing in the past, the idea that the agency is still tied in with international drug traffickers is largely dismissed as the stuff of conspiracy theory.

Over the last several years, however, some sensational but under-reported stories of plane crashes in Mexico have served to focus attention once again on the issue of agency complicity in drug dealing.

In 2004, a Beech 200 was apprehended in Nicaragua with 1100 kilos of cocaine. It was bearing a false tail number for a CIA aircraft owned by a CIA shell company.

In 2006, a DC9 was seized on a jungle airstrip in the Yucatan carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine packed into 126 identical black suitcases. The plane’s owner was linked to a company called Skyway Communications, whose CEO, James Kent, had previously held contract positions supporting intelligence projects for the DoD.

In 2007, a Grumman Gulfstream II jet crashed in Mexico carrying 3.3 tons of Columbian cocaine linked to the Mexican Sinaloa drug cartel. Later it was revealed that the plane had previously been used by the CIA to carry out rendition flights to Guantanamo Bay.

In 2008, a Cessna 402c aircraft was seized in Columbia with 850 kilos of cocaine bound for the United States. The plane’s purchase history links it to a company that one ex-CIA asset has fingered as a company that has a history of being involved in US government operations.

Now, the issue of intelligence agency drug dealing has once again raised its head in spectacular fashion in a rather unlikely place: a Chicago federal courtroom.

The case revolves around the prosecution of an accused Mexican drug trafficker, Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla. Zambada Niebla is part of the famed Sinaloa drug cartel, an organization that has risen in Calderon’s Mexico to become one of the most powerful international drug trafficking cartels in the region, if not on the globe.

His case revolves around “Fast and Furious,” an offshoot of the ATF’s Project Gunrunner which was ostensibly set up to stop the flow of illegal weapons into Mexico but has in fact allowed over 2000 guns to be smuggled under the ATF’s nose into the hands of Mexican drug gangs.

Zambada Niebla is in court on charges of serving as the logistical coordinator for the Sinaloa cartel, helping to import tons of cocaine into the us by land, rail, and air.

The only problem is that Zambada Niebla is now claiming to to be an asset of the US government. In response to this claim, US government prosecutors are attempting to invoke the “Classified Information Procedures Act” to keep classified material relation to national security out of public court proceedings.

According to a former federal agent contacted for comment on the case by Bill Conroy of NarcoNews, the invocation of CIPA means that CIA involvement in the case “is a very reasonable conclusion” and that “there is hot stuff to hide.”

Earlier this week, I had the chance to talk to Bill Conroy about the case, and about the possible relationship between the CIA and the Mexican drug cartels.

Despite the startling nature of the case, and the likelihood of agency complicity in drug trafficking into the United States yet again, the establishment media has been almost completely silent on this aspect of the Fast and Furious scandal, with Bill Conroy at NarcoNews being one of the only reporters on the beat at the moment.

Perhaps this is not surprising, given the shameful history of the American media in their coverage of CIA-drug connections in the past.

After the publication of Gary Webb’s expose on the CIA-Contra drug connections in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996, he was subjected to a fierce critique from the Washington Post, the LA Times and the New York Times. The backlash eventually forced Webb’s editors at the Mercury News to back away from the story. The CIA’s own internal investigation by Inspector General Frederick Hitz vindicated much of Webb’s reporting, but Webb remained a journalistic outcast and the story was commonly believed to be discredited.

In 2004, Gary Webb was found dead from two gunshot wounds to the head. The death was ruled a suicide.

In the end, perhaps it is a simple matter of economics. There are billions of dollars per year to be made in keeping the drug trade going, and it has long been established that Wall Street and the major American banks rely on drug money as a ready source of liquid capital.

In late 2009, Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, even went on record to say that it was primarily drug money that kept the American financial system afloat during the 2008 crisis, estimating that some $352 billion dollars of drug profits had been laundered via the major US banks during that time.

With those kinds of funds at stake, it is unsurprising to see a media-government-banking nexus develop around the status quo of a never-ending war on drugs, aided, abetted and facilitated by the modern-day British East India Company, the CIA.

As Presidential candidate Ron Paul pointed out during his 1988 run for the White House, it is not until the people take back their government and repeal the drug laws that help to maintain this phony drug war and artificially inflate the prices of this age-old scourge that we can begin to actually deal with the root of the drug problem, and at the same time remove one of the key funding sources for the CIA’s illegal operations