In a replay of the Federal Bureau of Investigation's infamous COINTELPRO operations targeting the left during the 1960s and '70s, America's political police launched raids on the homes of antiwar and solidarity activists on Friday.
Heavily-armed SWAT teams smashed down doors and agents armed with search warrants carried out simultaneous raids in Minneapolis and Chicago early Friday morning.
Rummaging through personal belongings, agents carted off boxes of files, documents, books, letters, photographs, computers and cell phones from Minneapolis antiwar activists Mick Kelly, Jessica Sundin, Meredith Aby, two others, as well as the office of that city's Anti-War Committee.
Meanwhile, as federal snoops seized personal property in Minneapolis, FBI agents raided the Chicago homes of activists Stephanie Weiner and Joseph Iosbaker. According to the Chicago Tribune, "neighbors saw FBI agents carrying boxes from the apartment of community activist Hatem Abudayyeh, executive director of the Arab American Action Network."
"In addition," the Tribune reported, "Chicago activist Thomas Burke said he was served a grand jury subpoena that requested records of any payments to Abudayyeh or his group."
Amongst those targeted by the FBI were individuals who organized peaceful protests against the imperialist invasion and occupation of Iraq and 2008 protests at the far-right Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.
As Antifascist Calling reported in 2008 and 2009, citing documents published by the whistleblowing web site WikiLeaks, state and local police, the FBI and agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, the Pentagon's Northern Command (NORTHCOM), the United States Secret Service, the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency implemented an action plan designed to monitor and squelch dissent during the convention.
As part of that plan's execution, activists and journalists were preemptively arrested, and cameras, recording equipment, computers and reporters' confidential notes were seized. Demonstrations were broken up by riot cops who wielded batons, pepper spray and tasers and attacked peaceful protesters who had gathered to denounce the war criminals' conclave in St. Paul.
With Friday's raids, the federal government under "change" huckster Barack Obama, has taken their repressive program to a whole new level, threatening activists with the specter of being charged with providing "material support of terrorism." A felony conviction under this draconian federal law (Title 18, Part I, Chapter 113B, § 2339B) carries a 15 year prison term.
State-Corporate Nexus
The trend by federal, state and corporate securocrats to situate antiwar and international solidarity activism along a bogus "terrorism continuum," is an alarming sign that plans for building an American police state are well underway as I pointed out in my 2008 analysis of the FBI's "Counterterrorism Analytical Lexicon."
Recently, the secrecy-spilling web site Public Intelligence posted 137 bulletins produced by the Institute of Terrorism Research and Response (ITRR), an American-Israeli company, under terms of a $125,000 contract to the Pennsylvania Office of Homeland Security.
Billing itself as "the preeminent Israeli/American security firm providing training, intelligence and education to clients across the globe," ITRR is part of a large, but little understood nexus of "public-private partnerships" fusing state and corporate surveillance against leftists and environmentalists.
Amongst the targets of ITRR's alarmist screeds were anti-drilling and environmental activists, permanent quarry for corporate spies and provocateurs, as the web site Green Is The New Red (GNR) amply documents.
Earlier this month, GNR reported that while ITRR and their political paymasters have been monitoring non-violent activists, "including a film screening of Gasland," Pennsylvania's heimat security boss James Powers wrote in an email that his office intended to "continue providing this support to the Marcellus Shale Formation natural gas stakeholders while not feeding those groups fomenting dissent against those same companies."
In the bizarre parallel universe inhabited by Powers and his Israeli cohorts, anti-drilling activists are "ecoterrorists," while the mass-murdering neo-Nazi mastermind of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people including 19 children, Timothy McVeigh, was "just a person very angry with the U.S. government."
While corporate polluters and criminals get a free pass from the federal government and an anti-Muslim and anti-Arab crusade is in full-swing, stoked by right-wing goons and their media shills, it is little wonder then, that Friday's raids targeted supporters of the Palestinian solidarity movement.
Neo-McCarthyite Witchhunt
With a pretext that the raids were seeking "evidence related to an ongoing Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation," FBI spokesperson Steve Warfield told The New York Times that repressors are "looking at activities connected to the material support of terrorism."
Attorney Ted Dooley who represents Mick Kelly, a union- and socialist activist targeted by the Bureau told the Times that the SWAT team broke down Kelly's door at 7 a.m. on Friday and served a search warrant on his companion.
According to Dooley, the warrant claimed the secret state was searching for "evidence" that activist groups had provided "material support" to "Hezbollah, the Popular Front for Liberation of Palestine and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia."
Dooley told the Minneapolis Star-Tribune that the raids are nothing less than "a probe into the political beliefs of American citizens and any organization anywhere that opposes the American imperial design."
The political nature of the raids was blatantly transparent. A copy of the search warrant on Kelly's home obtained by Twin Cities Independent Media Center (TC-IMC) revealed that the order, signed by U.S. Magistrate Judge Susan Nelson specified that Kelly's membership in the Freedom Road Socialist Organization (FRSO) was a primary motive behind the Bureau's home invasion.
The warrant allowed the FBI to take "documents, files, books, photographs, videos, souvenirs, war relics, notebooks, address books, diaries, journals, maps, or other evidence, including evidence in electronic form relating to Kelly's travels to and from and presence and activities in Minnesota and other foreign countries, to which Kelly has traveled as part of his work for FRSO."
Reprising the red-hunting frenzy of the McCarthy period at the height of the Cold War, the warrant specifies that the Bureau was authorized by Obama's Justice Department to seize material relating to "the recruitment, indoctrination, and facilitation of other individuals in the United States to join FRSO, including materials related to the identity and location of recruiters, facilitators, and recruits, the means by which the recruits were recruited to join FRSO, the means by which the recruitment was financed and arranged."
In other words, with a bogus "terrorism investigation" as a pretext, the Obama regime is targeting socialist political groups for destruction in order for Democrats to whip-up "War on Terror" and anticommunist hysteria prior to November general elections that may see Congress pass into the hands of the troglodytic Republican faction of war criminals and corporatists.
Grand Jury Intimidation
In addition to turning over the homes of antiwar and solidarity activists in Illinois, Michigan and Minnesota, the FBI handed out subpoenas ordering individuals to appear before a federal grand jury that will convene next month in Chicago.
While the Bureau cannot compel citizens to answer their questions, administrative means can be used by the secret state to coerce testimony against fellow activists: the federal grand jury system.
As civil liberties scholar Frank Donner wrote in his groundbreaking book, The Age of Surveillance: "Federal grand juries, judicial bodies limited under our legal system to an accusatory role, were in the same way [as red-hunting congressional committees] taken over by the executive branch in the Nixon years and converted into intelligence instruments."
Historically, federal grand juries have targeted dissident groups and individuals as an harassment and intimidation tactic, particularly when activists and organizations challenged the government's imperial adventures abroad and capitalist depredations at home.
Individuals subpoenaed by the state who refuse to answer questions posed by Star Chamber inquisitors can be receive an indeterminate jail sentence for failing to do so.
During the Nixon administration according to Donner, some one hundred grand juries subpoenaed more than one hundred thousand witnesses in a blatant attempt to silence New Left and antiwar groups; as well, members of the Catholic left and supporters of the African-American, Native American, Puerto Rican independence and women's liberation movements were similarly targeted.
While corporate media insist that the COINTELPRO-era disappeared with Nixon, FBI snoops throughout the 1980s, '90s down to the present moment have marked the left for destruction.
Recently, Bay Area Indymedia journalist Josh Wolf was jailed for 226 days in 2006-2007 by the U.S. District Court in San Francisco after refusing to turn over his raw, unedited video footage to the FBI in connection with the Bureau's alleged "arson investigation" against anti-G8 anarchist protests in 2005.
Wolf refused to comply with the subpoena, and National Lawyers Guild attorneys argued that to do so would have a "chilling effect" on journalists who covered future protests, effectively transforming reporters into an arm of the government. Their arguments failed to sway the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Wolf was imprisoned.
When Wolf was released from the Federal Corrections Institution in Dublin, California in 2007, he had been jailed longer than any other journalist for refusing to divulge sources or source materials.
Cover-Ups, Terror, Repression
Today, as the capitalist economic crisis deepens and the "War on Terror" morphs into a multiyear, multibillion dollar boondoggle engorging defense and security corporations with taxpayer-funded boodle, labor, environmental and socialist opponents are in the cross-hairs of the Obama administration, just as they were during the years of the criminal Bush regime.
Activists with diverse groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Group, Students for a Democratic Society, the Twin-Cities Anti-War Committee, the Colombia Action Network, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and the National Committee to Free Ricardo Palmera, a Colombian political prisoner, have now been targeted for "special handling" by Obama's Justice Department.
As the imperialist occupation project flies off the rails in Afghanistan, and as governments in Central and South America reject the capitalist "free trade" paradigm of militarism, hyperexploitation and resource extraction that benefit grifting North American multinationals and drug-money laundering banks, the repressive state is moving to shore-up its crumbling edifice here at home.
Friday's raids are all the more ironic, given the fact that just last week the Justice Department's own Office of the Inspector General (OIG) revealed that the Bureau had used false claims to launch "counterterror" investigations to justify covert spying and infiltration operations by provocateurs against activist groups across the country.
That report was a whitewash and largely exonerated the Bureau, clearing secret state agents of deliberate violations of their targets' civil rights and claimed that FBI snoops were motivated by a concern over "potential violence," not the leftist views expressed by U.S. policy opponents.
Although a cover-up, the OIG report disclosed new details of illegal FBI spying on an array of antiwar, Muslim, environmental and animal rights groups. Filled with mendacious characterizations designed as an alibi for "overzealous" agents, Inspector General Glenn A. Fine asserted that people were placed on terrorist watch lists because of "factually weak" evidence and that investigations were opened and continued "without adequate basis," not their opposition to imperialism or destruction of the environment.
The conduct by secret state repressors however, goes far beyond overzealousness. In the wake of the provocative 9/11 attacks, materially aided by the FBI's own informant, the al-Qaeda triple agent Ali Mohamed, "terrorism" continues to serve as a pretext--and justification--for a domestic clampdown against organizations engaged in legal political activity guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and is a key feature of Washington's "War on Terror" policies.
Parenthetically, Fox News reported Sunday that the Pentagon "has burned 9,500 copies of Army Reserve Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer's memoir 'Operation Dark Heart,' his book about going undercover in Afghanistan."
"The Defense Intelligence Agency," the right-wing news outlet reports, "attempted to block key portions of the book that claim 'Able Danger' successfully identified hijacker Mohammed Atta as a threat to the United States before the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks."
According to Fox, "the DIA wanted references to a meeting between Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer, the book's author, and the executive director of the 9/11 Commission, Philip Zelikow, removed. In that meeting, which took place in Afghanistan, Shaffer alleges the commission was told about 'Able Danger' and the identification of Atta before the attacks. No mention of this was made in the final 9/11 report."
Undercover at the time, Shaffer recounted that there was "stunned silence" at the meeting after he told the executive director of the commission and others that Atta was identified as early as 2000 by 'Able Danger'."
While far-right terrorists are given entrée to the United States by secret state agencies to murder its own citizens, organizations targeted by the Bureau's blanket spying according to the Inspector General included Greenpeace, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Catholic Worker and the Thomas Merton Center, a pacifist group dedicated to nonviolence. In one telling passage, Fine wrote, "in some cases, the FBI classified some investigations relating to nonviolent civil disobedience under its 'acts of terrorism' classification."
Given imperial assertions by the Bush and now, Obama regimes, that the Executive Branch, and it alone, has the authority to arrest and indefinitely detain anyone it so chooses without trial, on suspicion of "terrorism," categorizing nonviolent protesters as "terrorists" could lead to the seizure of individuals so designated and send them on a one-way trip to a military gulag such as Guantánamo Bay or even a CIA "black site."
In a statement commenting on the release of the OIG's report, Michael German, the American Civil Liberties Union Senior Policy Counsel, and a former FBI whistleblower said:
"The FBI has a long history of abusing its national security surveillance powers, reaching back to the smear campaign waged by the American government against Dr. Martin Luther King. Americans peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights were able to become targets of FBI surveillance because spying guidelines that were established after the shameful abuses of the 60s and 70s were loosened in 2002. Unfortunately, they were loosened again in 2008, even after this abuse was uncovered.
"Unless the rules regulating the FBI are strengthened to safeguard the privacy of innocent Americans, we are all in danger of being spied on and added to terrorist watch lists for doing nothing more than attending a rally or holding up a sign."
With Friday's raids on activist homes, the Bureau has issued its unambiguous reply to the Inspector General and the American people.
In response, over 150 people attended a community meeting in Minneapolis Friday night "on less than six hours notice, to begin to respond to Friday morning's FBI raids and subpoenas to local antiwar and international solidarity organizers," the Twin Cities Independent Media Center reported.
"Organizers," according to TC-IMC, "also announced two upcoming events: a protest outside the Minneapolis FBI office, 111 Washington Ave. S., at 4:30pm on Monday; and a solidarity committee meeting on Thursday at 7pm, location to be determined. The subpoenas ask activists to appear before a grand jury in Chicago, where a solidarity vigil was held last night as a raid was still ongoing in that city, on or around October 19, reported a Chicago Indymedia post."
Minnesota civil rights attorney Bruce Nestor told the St. Paul Pioneer Press that he was "profoundly troubled" by the raids. "Overwhelmingly they're people who are doing public political organizing, so I think it's shocking to have heavily armed federal agents show up at their homes. ... It's all people involved in anti-war activity, and it appears to be focused largely on opposition to the U.S. policy in Colombia and Palestine."
Nestor added. "This is a direct attack on people who are strong, dedicated advocates of freedom, of the right of people to be free from US domination. It is an attack upon anybody who organizes against US imperialism and US militarism abroad."
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Partners in Crime: The U.S. Secret State and Mexico's "War on Drugs"
For decades, investigative journalists, researchers and analysts have noted the symbiotic relationships forged amongst international drug syndicates, neofascists and U.S. intelligence agencies, documenting the long and bloody history of U.S. complicity in the global drugs trade.
While the United States has pumped billions of dollars into failed drug eradication schemes in target countries through ill-conceived programs such as Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative, in the bizarro world of the "War on Drugs," corporate interests and geopolitics always trump law enforcement efforts to fight organized crime, particularly when the criminals are partners in crimes perpetrated by the secret state.
Since 2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calderón turned the Army loose, allegedly to "dismantle" the drug cartels slowly transforming Mexico into a killing field some 28,000 people, primarily along Mexico's northern border with the U.S., have lost their lives. Countless others have been wounded, forced to flee or simply "disappeared."
Writing in The Guardian, journalist Simon Jenkins tells us that "cocaine supplies routed through Mexico have made that country the drugs equivalent of a Gulf oil state."
"Rather than try to stem its own voracious appetite for drugs," Jenkins writes, "rich America shifts guilt on to poor supplier countries. Never was the law of economics--demand always evokes supply--so traduced as in Washington's drugs policy. America spends $40bn a year on narcotics policy, imprisoning a staggering 1.5m of its citizens under it."
Judging the results, one might even think the drug war solely exists as the principle means through which wealthy elites organize crime.
Scenes from the Atrocity Exhibition
• December 13, 2009: The Observer reported that "drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis." Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he saw evidence that "the proceeds of organised crime were 'the only liquid investment capital' available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result." The Observer informed us that this "will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis." Costa told the British newspaper that "in many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor." Although the UN's drug czar declined to identify the countries or banks that benefited from narcotics investments, he said that "inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities... There were signs that some banks were rescued that way."
• February 26, 2010: Responding to charges by left-wing critics and academics, Mexican president Felipe Calderón was forced to counter evidence that his government's "offensive" against narcotraffickers has left the "largest and most powerful of the cartels relatively unscathed," the Los Angeles Times disclosed. Critics accused the government of favoritism towards the Sinaloa cartel, claiming it "has been allowed to escape most of the government's firepower and carry on with its illegal business as usual." During a news conference, Calderón said such charges were "absolutely false." The president said the suggestion was "painful," and went on to say: "I can assure you that this government has attacked without discrimination all criminal groups in Mexico ... without taking into consideration whether it's the cartel of so-and-so or what's-his-name. We've fought them all." Edgardo Buscaglia, an academic expert on organized crime challenged the president and said that arrest figures "skew heavily" toward the other cartels. "By his calculation," the Times reported, "of more than 53,000 people arrested in drug-trafficking cases in the three years since Calderón took office, fewer than 1,000 worked for the Sinaloa organization." Commanded by Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, the Sinaloa cartel crime boss placed 937 on Forbes 2010 survey of the world's billionaires with an estimated net worth of $1 billion. A similar modus operandi is standard practice where foreign policy and corporate concerns of America's wealthiest clients overseas override efforts by law enforcement to choke-off the flow of narcotics. In Colombia, secret state agencies such as the CIA have long-favored drug organizations that have served as intelligence assets or death squads. Examples abound. Consider the "untouchable" status enjoyed by the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers' Cali cartel. During the 1980s, at the height of America's Central American interventions, cocaine shipped into the United States as part of the U.S. government's "guns-for-drugs" arrangement with Nicaraguan Contra rebels, was principally supplied by Cali traffickers. When Medellín drug lord Pablo Escobar's group was brought down, the CIA, DEA and the Pentagon's Delta Force relied on operatives funded by the rival Cali faction and Los Pepes, a vigilante group founded by drug lord Carlos Castaño and his brothers Fidel and Vicente. Los Pepes had operational links to the Colombian National Police, especially the Search Bloc (Bloque de Búsqueda) hunting Escobar, and acted on intelligence provided by the CIA/DEA/Delta Force to execute their missions. After Escobar's death, the Castaño brothers launched the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a notorious right-wing death squad. The AUC in coordination with the Colombian Army, carried out multiple attacks and massacred thousands of leftists, trade union organizers and peasant activists. In 2001 under pressure from human rights groups, the U.S. State Department designated the AUC a "Foreign Terrorist Organization." This didn't however, prevent U.S. corporations such as Chiquita Brands International, Occidental Petroleum, Coca-Cola or the Drummond Company from allegedly hiring out AUC paramilitaries to murder trade union and peasant activists. In 2007, Chiquita pled guilty in federal district court and paid a $25 million fine under provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1991 for funding the AUC. Dole Food Company now faces similar charges. In 2002, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment against Carlos Castaño and accused him of trafficking some 17 tons of cocaine into the United States.
• March 9, 2010: The National Security Archive published a series of documents linking the U.S. secret state to Mexico's dirty warriors and drug cartel operatives under official protection by a CIA-allied intelligence agency. Following reporting by Peter Dale Scott that "both the FBI and CIA intervened in 1981 to block the indictment (on stolen car charges) of the drug-trafficking Mexican intelligence czar Miguel Nazar Haro, claiming that Nazar was 'an essential repeat essential contact for CIA station in Mexico City,' on matters of 'terrorism, intelligence, and counterintelligence'," the National Security Archive disclosed that Nazar Haro's corrupt Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS) was responsible for the disappearance, torture and murder of left-wing activists during the 1970s and '80s. The Archive revealed that "there is a deep connection between the former Mexican intelligence service and the country's drug mafias. As DFS agents took command of counterinsurgency raids in the 1970s, they often stumbled upon narcotics safe houses and quickly took on the job of protecting Mexico's drug cartels." Researchers Kate Doyle and Jesse Franzblau told us although "the DFS was disbanded in 1985 following revelations that it was behind the murder of DEA agent Enrique 'Kiki' Camarena, and Mexican journalist Manuel Buendia," of the 1,500 agents who suddenly found themselves unemployed, many "found their training in covert activities and brutal counterinsurgency operations easily adaptable to the needs of the criminal underworld." In 2006, the National Security Archive and investigative journalist Jefferson Morley disclosed that declassified U.S. documents "reveal CIA recruitment of agents within the upper echelons of the Mexican government between 1956 and 1969. The informants used in this secret program included President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and future President Luis Echeverría." As we now know, when he served as Interior Secretary in the Díaz government, Echeverría oversaw the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre of student activists just days before the Summer Olympics were staged in Mexico City. "The documents," Morley wrote, "detail the relationships cultivated between senior CIA officers, such as chief of station Winston Scott, and Mexican government officials through a secret spy network code-named 'LITEMPO.' Operating out of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, Scott used the LITEMPO project to provide 'an unofficial channel for the exchange of selected sensitive political information which each government wanted the other to receive but not through public protocol exchanges'." These, and other disclosures reveal that "one of the most crime-ridden CIA assets we know of is the Mexican DFS, which the US helped to create," Peter Dale Scott wrote back in 2000. "From its foundation in the 1940s, the DFS, like other similar kryptocracies in Latin America, was deeply involved with international drug-traffickers. By the 1980s possession of a DFS card was recognized by DEA agents as a 'license to traffic;' DFS agents rode security for drug truck convoys, and used their police radios to check of signs of American police surveillance." Evidence suggests that similar protection and management of the global drug trade persists today.
• March 16, 2010: Wachovia Bank, a subsidiary of banking giant Wells Fargo & Co., signed a Deferred Prosecution Agreement with the federal government. Wells admitted in court that its unit failed to monitor and report some $378.4 billion in suspected money laundering transactions by narcotics traffickers between 2004-2008, "a sum equal to one-third of Mexico's current gross domestic product," Bloomberg Markets magazine revealed. Cash laundered by drug mafias were used to purchase a fleet of planes that subsequently shipped some 22 tons of cocaine into the United States. Wells paid the government $160 million to resolve the case. American Express Bank and Western Union also agreed recently to huge settlements with the government for similar offenses.
• May 19, 2010: Retired Mexican Army General Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro was shot and wounded in Mexico City during an alleged robbery attempt. El Universal reports that police claimed that a thief wanted to "steal the general's watch" and shot him several times in the chest. In 2007, after a six-year imprisonment on charges of providing protection to late drug trafficking kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes, chief of the Juárez cartel and self-described "Lord of the Heavens," Acosta Chaparro was released from custody after his conviction was overturned on appeal. According to documents published by global whistleblowers WikiLeaks in 2009, the Swiss Bank Julius Baer's Cayman Islands unit, allegedly hid "several million dollars" of funds controlled by Acosta Chaparro and his wife, Silvia through a firm known as Symac Investments. WikiLeaks wondered whether Mexican authorities would "want to know whether the several millions of USD had anything to do with the allegations that Mr Chaparro, a former police chief from the Mexican state of Guerrero, stopped chasing his local drug dealers and joined them in business." According to reports cited by WikiLeaks, Acosta Chaparro was "already the subject of multiple allegations not only that he was a narcotrafficker but also that he had played a leading role in the dirty war of police and army against rural guerillas on his patch between 1975 and 1981. He was accused of organising the seizure, torture and murder of peasants who were suspected of helping the rebels and, with particular persistence of overseeing 'flights of death' in which well-tortured detainees were taken up in helicopters and pushed out over the ocean while still alive." Despite these serious charges, WikiLeaks informs us that "no action was taken at all [and] Chaparro's funds might still be managed by the former representative of Julius Baer, Mexico Curtis Lowell Jun in Zurich."
• June 7, 2010: Guerrero State Attorney General Albertico Guinto announced that 55 bodies were found deep in an abandoned silver mine outside Taxco, The Christian Science Monitor reported. In various states of decomposition, the victims showed signs of torture before being killed. "It was like a quicksand, but filled with bodies," Luis Rivera, the chief criminologist investigating the scene told The Washington Post. The recovery of the remains took nearly a week, "a task made more difficult" by the fact that some cadavers were mummified, others were dismembered by the fall and at least four of the victims had been decapitated. "There are headless bodies, but some of the heads don't match the bodies," Rivera said. Based on wound analysis of the corpses, investigators theorized that "many of the victims were alive when they were thrown down the mine shaft."
• June 12, 2010: The Narco News Bulletin reports "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." A "former U.S. government official who has experience dealing with covert operations," told journalist Bill Conroy that "black operations have been going on forever. The recent [mainstream] media reports about those operations under the Obama administration make it sound like it's a big scoop, but it's nothing new for those who understand how things really work." Perhaps we should recall how "things" have worked in the recent past. Back in 2003, the Brownsville Herald reported that Los Zetas, formerly the enforcement arm of the Gulf cartel, "feature 31 ex-soldiers once part of an elite division of the Mexican army, the Special Air Mobile Force Group. At least one-third of this battalion's deserters was trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga., according to documents from the Mexican secretary of defense." According to the U.S. Defense Department, some 513 Mexican Special Forces soldiers received training at the School of the Americas, and about 120 "graduates" joined the Special Air Mobile Force. Luis Astorga, a drug trafficking expert at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City told the Herald: "There is a higher level of danger with the type of knowledge that these people have, their arms capacity, their knowledge of techniques and specialization in (drug) traffic operations. Traffickers traditionally don't have that; they pay other people for those services." Is history repeating itself under the Mérida Initiative? A former DEA official told Narco News in 2005 that "A lot of the Zetas came from former Mexican police offices or the military ... So they come from a diverse background. Some of them have prior training from the DEA, FBI and the U.S. military, as well as other agencies."
• June 28, 2010: Rodolfo Torre Cantu, the leading candidate for governor in the state of Tamaulipas was gunned down in one of the highest profile assassinations since a presidential candidate was murdered under suspicious circumstances in 1994. Four others, including local lawmaker Enrique Blackmore, were also killed when their campaign van was sprayed with machine gun fire by unknown assailants. Cantu had vowed to crack down on drug gangs if elected.
• July 15, 2010: A powerful car bomb explodes on a crowded street near a federal police headquarters in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas. Four are killed, including a police officer and doctor lured to the scene.
• July 15, 2010: Investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker revealed that the pilot "of the American-registered DC-9 (N900SA) from St. Petersburg, FL caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine in Mexico's Yucatan several years ago," Carmelo Vasquez Guerra, "had been released from prison less than two years after being arrested." Readers will recall that the DC-9 and another American-registered plane, a Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA) that spilled "4 tons of cocaine across a muddy field," Hopsicker reported, were used in CIA "rendition" (torture) flights and had been purchased by Mexican drug gangs with funds laundered through Wachovia Bank. "The shocking news was delivered via an international headline stating that a pilot named Carmelo Vasquez Guerra had been arrested in the West African nation of Guinea Bissau on a twin-engine Gulfstream II carrying... what else? 550 kilos--a half-ton--of cocaine." According to Hopsicker, the drug pilot was arrested--and released--from three countries "under mysterious and unexplained circumstances." Seeking answers to the pilot's series of seemingly miraculous escapes, Hopsicker drolly observed: "Maybe there is an innocent explanation for everything. Maybe drugs just show up, unbidden, like unwanted guests. And maybe Carmelo Vasquez Guerra didn't escape each time he got busted. Maybe he just 'released himself on his own recognizance'."
• July 18, 2010: In the wake of the massacre of 17 people attending a birthday party in the northern city of Torreon, The Christian Science Monitor revealed that inmates from a prison in the nearby city of Gomez Palacio were the authors of the crime. "According to witnesses, the inmates were allowed to leave with authorization of the prison director ... to carry out instructions for revenge attacks using official vehicles and using guards' weapons for executions," said Ricardo Najera, a spokesman from the attorney general's office. After the atrocity, inmates drove back to their cells.
• July 20, 2010: Following the Juárez car bomb blast that killed four, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Arturo Sarukhan, downplayed it's significance and claimed, though disturbing, violence "has not yet reached the level of terrorism," The Washington Post reported. "Terrorism," the U.S. ambassador said, "refers to the acts by groups with political objectives that seek to control the government." But what if those with "political objectives" and limitless funds from the illicit trade already control the state's security apparatus?
• July 25, 2010: Of the more than 28,000 people killed since December 2006 when President Felipe Calderón "hurled the Mexican Army into the anti-cartel battle," nearly 6,300 (a quarter of the total) were murdered in Ciudad Juárez, The Nation reports. Under a three year deal, the United States has bankrolled the Army offensive with some $1.4 billion in funds under the Mérida Initiative. Journalists Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy wrote in response to Ambassador Sarukhan's statement: "We are supposed to believe in their evidence that 90 percent of the dead are criminals, but that they have no evidence at all of narco-terrorism?" Bowden and Molloy aver, "This, despite numerous incidents of grenades and other explosives being used in recent attacks in the states of Michoacan, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Guerrero, Sonora and many other places in Mexico. And that 'armed commandos' dressed like soldiers and wielding high-powered machine guns are witnessed at the scenes of hundreds of massacres documented since 2008." According to expert Diego Valle, the steep rise in homicide rates correlate directly to increased military operations against some cartels. In his recent study, Statistical Analysis and Visualisation of the Drug War in Mexico, Valle writes that "military operations in Chihuahua, Nuevo León, Veracruz and Durango have coincided with increases in homicides and attempts by the Sinaloa cartel to take over drug trafficking routes from rival cartels. After the army took control of Ciudad Juárez it became the most violent city in the world."
• July 27, 2010: Building on alliances forged during the Cold War amongst right-wing political gangs and drug traffickers, cartel operations in Central America have soared, The Washington Post informs us. Since 2006, drug networks in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras "are burrowing deeper into a region with the highest murder rates in the world." According to United Nations data, cocaine seizures in Central America "nearly quadrupled" between 2004 and 2007. "Over the past two years," the Post reports, "two national police chiefs and the former president have been arrested on charges related to drug trafficking or corruption. Two former interior ministers are fugitives." In Honduras, where a U.S.-sponsored coup toppled a democratically elected president in 2009, Mexican cartels have established "command-and-control" centers to coordinate cocaine shipments by sea and air to North America and Europe. In El Salvador, that country's leftist president has said that the violent street gang, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), have forged a working relationship with drug cartels that could eventually help the group mature into "an international syndicate."
• August 22, 2010: Journalist Bill Conroy reports in The Narco News Bulletin that despite surging violence in Ciudad Juárez, the murder-plagued city "where some 10,000 small businesses have closed their doors since 2008 due, in large part, to a wave of burglaries, kidnappings, extortion and murders that has washed over the city during the past two and a half years," why is the violence not affecting the entire city? Conroy writes "there is often an exception to most rules, and in the case of Juárez, the rule of violence does not extend to its industrial zones, which are home to some 360 maquiladora factories that employ more than 190,000 people." According to a report obtained by Narco News from the El Paso Regional Economic Development Corporation, or REDCO, "there was only one homicide carried out in the maquila industrial zones" since 2008. "That's right," Conroy avers, "just one murder in this huge swath of Juárez that is dotted with maquila plants operated by huge corporations such as General Motors, Delphi, Motorola, Visteon, TECMA and Honeywell. Maquiladoras, also known as twin plants, are Mexico-based factories owned and/or operated by foreign companies that benefit from the cheap labor and favorable tax treatment." REDCO officials refused to comment to Narco News. However, Conroy writes, TECMA executive vice president Toby Spoon told ABC's El Paso affiliate KVIA that "If they [the narco-trafficking organizations] got the maquila industry, or American companies or foreign companies, if they became targets of this, it would just take it to a whole different level, and nobody wants that." Isn't that an interesting statement! "So it would appear, based on that comment," Conroy writes, "that the narco-trafficking organizations, the Mexican government and the maquila factory owners have some sort of unspoken alliance of convenience that assures protection for the maquila factories and their professional employees." Indeed, Narco News discovered that "at last three security zones have been set up in Juárez that are guarded by Mexican soldiers who assure safe passage for Maquila executives commuting from El Paso to the Juárez factory sites. In addition, the maquila industrial zones themselves, according to media reports, are under the close watch of Mexican state police as well as private security guards employed by the maquilas." This is the same Army and federal police force that is seemingly "powerless" to halt the slaughter of Juárez citizens by ubiquitous, yet invisible, drug gangs which have transformed that city, and northern Mexico, into a free-fire zone. Curious indeed!
• August 25, 2010: A wounded Ecuadorean migrant stumbled to a Mexican Marine checkpoint in the northern state of Tamaulipas and leads officials to a blood-splashed room. Inside, authorities discover the bodies of 58 men and 14 women, allegedly murdered by Los Zetas, or another cartel seeking to discredit their rivals. "Years ago," IPS reported, "Los Zetas found a gold mine: kidnapping undocumented migrants." The UN estimates that some half million undocumented migrants from Central and South America "cross Mexico from south to north every year in their attempt to reach the United States." And more than 10,000 were kidnapped between September 2009 and February 2010 according to Mexico's National Human Rights Commission. According to multiple press reports, the migrants were killed after they refused to serve as forced labor for Los Zetas.
• August 26, 2010: A veteran officer with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection service (CBP), a satrapy within the sprawling Department of Homeland Security, Martha Alicia Garnica, 43, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for drug trafficking, human smuggling and bribery. "Three other defendants," the Center for Investigative Reporting disclosed, received prison sentences, ranging from two years to a little more than five years. A fourth defendant was murdered in February in Juárez."
• August 27, 2010: "Federal prosecutors," The Nation revealed, "have used top leaders of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), known as the most violent gang in the US and Central America, as secret informants over a decade of murders, drug-trafficking and car-jackings across a dozen US states and several Central American countries." Former California state senator Tom Hayden told us that "the informants are identified as Nelson Comandari, described by law enforcement as 'the CEO of Mara Salvatrucha,' and his self described 'right hand man,' Jorge Pineda, nicknamed 'Dopey' because of his drug-dealing background." According to The Nation, Comandari's grandfather "was Col. Agustin Martinez Varela, a powerful right-wing Salvadoran who served as an interior minister during El Salvador's civil wars. Comandari's uncle, Franklin Varela, was a central informant in the Reagan administration's scandalous investigation into the activist Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador [CISPES]." In his 1998 written testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, retired DEA Special Agent Celerino Castillo III told Congress that "while our government shouted 'Just Say No !', entire Central and South American nations fell into what are now known as, 'Cocaine democracies'." Castillo testified: "On Jan. 18, 1985, [retired CIA officer Felix] Rodriguez allegedly met with money-launderer Ramon Milan-Rodriguez, who had moved $1.5 billion for the Medellin cartel. Milan testified before a Senate Investigation on the Contras' drug smuggling, that before this 1985 meeting, he had granted Felix Rodriguez's request and given $10 million from the cocaine for the Contras." Contra drug operations were coordinated by the CIA out of El Salvador's Ilopango airport and protected from prying eyes, and U.S. law enforcement investigators, by troops drawn from by Col. Varela's interior ministry. According to the National Security Archive's Oliver North File, "Mr. North's diary entries, from the reporter's notebooks he kept in those years, noted multiple reports of drug smuggling among the contras. A Washington Post investigation published on 22 October 1994 found no evidence he had relayed these reports to the DEA or other law enforcement authorities."
• August 28, 2010: The bullet-ridden body of Roberto Suarez Vasquez, the lead investigator probing the murder of 72 Central- and South American migrants was found on a highway not far from where the massacre took place.
• August 31, 2010: The entire 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexico border will be monitored by Predator drones. Part of a $600 million package passed by Congress earlier this year, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the border was now "safer than ever."
• August 31, 2010: Some 3,200 Mexican federal police, "nearly a tenth of the force," have been fired this year "under new rules designed to weed out crooked cops and modernize law enforcement," the Los Angeles Times reports. Amongst the 465 cops arrested in early August, federal authorities took four commanders into custody after 250 subordinates in violence-plagued Ciudad Juárez publicly accused them of corruption.
• September 6, 2010: The Los Angeles Times reports that "drug traffickers who siphon off natural gas, gasoline and even crude, rob the Mexican treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars annually." The newspaper disclosed that "the cartels have taken sabotage to a new level: They've hobbled key operations in parts of the Burgos Basin, home to Mexico's biggest natural gas fields." Times' journalist Tracy Wilkinson writes that "the world's seventh-largest oil producer has become another casualty of the drug war." A series of kidnappings and murders in the gas-rich region has curtailed production. Pemex officials refused to comment and have sought to "repress information on the kidnappings." Despite a massive outcry by Mexico's citizens against moves by the Calderón administration to privatize Pemex, which generates some $77 billion in annual revenue, Chevron's Latin American operations chief Ali Moshiri told the Houston Chronicle that the company wants to make Mexico "a big part of our portfolio." In this light, violence against Pemex workers and crippled production is nothing more than an odd coincidence, right?
• September 8, 2010: Speaking at the elite Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton claimed that Mexico's drug cartels "increasingly resemble an insurgency with the power to challenge the government's control of wide swaths of its own soil," the Los Angeles Times reported. Comparing Mexico to Colombia, Clinton's comments reflect past U.S. claims that Colombia's well-entrenched drug mafias were part of a leftist "narcoguerrilla" strategy to topple the government. This is a mendacious comparison given rich evidence that for decades Colombia's leading mafia groups are allied with extreme right-wing forces in that country's political establishment. Declassified U.S. documents revealed that former President Álvaro Uribe, enjoyed close ties to drug-linked paramilitary organizations. A darling of the Pentagon and the American secret state, according to multiple press reports and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, when Uribe was mayor of Medellín, the epicenter of Pablo Escobar's narcoempire, the now-dead mafia boss's former lover Virginia Vallejo, told the Spanish paper El País: "Pablo used to say, that if it weren't for that blessed little boy [Uribe], we would have to swim to Miami to get drugs to the gringos." According to Vallejo, when Uribe was the director of Colombia's Civil Aviation authority, he granted dozens of licenses for runways and hundreds of permits for planes and helicopters, on which the drug trade's infrastructure was built. The 1991 document by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency noted that Uribe was a "close personal friend of Pablo Escobar" who was "dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín [drug] cartel at high government levels."
• September 9, 2010: 25 people, including women and teenagers ranging in age from 15 to 60, were murdered in Ciudad Juárez by Juárez cartel gunmen, the El Paso Times reports. The operation was allegedly mounted against their rivals in the Sinaloa drugs organization, apparently in retaliation for a kidnapping. The well-coordinated attacks took place in different parts of the city. Despite thousands of Mexican Army troops and federal police stationed in the city, the attacks took place with impunity. Since 2008, more than 6,400 Juárez citizens have been killed. While President Calderón claims that 90 percent of victims are connected to drug organizations, evidence suggests that like the 72 migrant workers slaughtered in Tamaulipas in August, most of the victims had no ties to the murderous trade.
• September 10, 2010: Seeking to calm a "diplomatic furor" over recent comments by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Mexico "resembled Colombia" during the heyday of cartel power, President Obama disputed Clinton's assertion, the Los Angeles Times reported. In what could generously be described as a replay of President Ronald Reagan's repeated denials that right-wing Nicaraguan Contra "rebels" were deeply mired in cocaine trafficking, Obama said that "Mexico is a great democracy, vibrant, with a growing economy," the president told the Spanish-language La Opinion newspaper. "And as a result, what is happening there can't be compared with what happened in Colombia 20 years ago." Human rights abuses are widespread. According to Amnesty International, political dissidents, environmentalists, trade union activists and indigenous human rights defenders are routinely disappeared, tortured or murdered with impunity.
• September 12, 2010: An in-depth Washington Post profile of convicted U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer Martha Garnica, sentenced in August for drug smuggling and human trafficking along the border, revealed that "the number of CBP corruption investigations opened by the inspector general climbed from 245 in 2006 to more than 770 this year." The Post reports that "corruption cases at its sister agency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, rose from 66 to more than 220 over the same period." The vast majority of cases involve "illegal trafficking of drugs, guns, weapons and cash across the Southwest border." Although Garnica received a 20-year sentence for her crimes, not a single criminal indictment has been issued by the U.S. Justice Department for crimes committed by top corporate officers of Wells Fargo-owned Wachovia Bank, who admitted earlier this year to laundering hundreds of billions of dollars for Mexico's ultra-violent drug mafias. Aside from Bloomberg Markets magazine's comprehensive investigation, neither the Post, nor other U.S. "newspaper of record" reported on the bank's "deferred prosecution agreement" with the federal government.
• September 15, 2010: Writing in The Nation, investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill revealed that the private security firm Blackwater "have provided intelligence, training and security services to US and foreign governments as well as several multinational corporations." According to Scahill, "former CIA paramilitary officer Enrique 'Ric' Prado, set up a global network of foreign operatives, offering their 'deniability' as a 'big plus' for potential Blackwater customers." While Blackwater's mercenary network was originally created to service CIA black ops, Prado wrote an email to a Total Intelligence executive (a Blackwater cut-out) with the subject line, "Possible Opportunity in DEA-Read and Delete," a pitch to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The Nation reports "that executive was an eighteen-year DEA veteran with extensive government connections." Prado explained that Blackwater "has developed 'a rapidly growing, worldwide network of folks that can do everything from surveillance to ground truth to disruption operations.' He added, 'These are all foreign nationals (except for a few cases where US persons are the conduit but no longer 'play' on the street), so deniability is built in and should be a big plus'." According to Scahill, the executive wrote back and suggested that "one of the best places to start may be the Special Operations Division, (SOD)." Scahill writes that "the SOD is a secretive joint command within the U.S. Justice Department, run by the DEA" and serves "as the command-and-control center for some of the most sensitive counternarcotics and law enforcement operations conducted by federal forces." As we have seen with other clandestine operations run amok in the drug war, "deniable" assets, especially when they are "foreign nationals" with no direct ties to the U.S. government, have a funny habit of lending their well-compensated "expertise" to drug traffickers. One is reminded of the case of Israeli mercenary Yair Klein, a former IDF lieutenant colonel. Klein's private security firm, Spearhead Ltd., produced training videos and tutored drug lord Carlos Castaño's AUC in the fine art of murder. In 2001, Klein was convicted by a Colombian court for his firm's work with right-wing death squads and the enforcement arms of several drug trafficking organizations. According to Democracy Now!, Klein was "accused of training Mafia assassins" and "suspected of involvement in the explosion of a Colombian airliner in November 1989." Given Blackwater's sensitivity to human rights (just ask Baghdad residents!) one can be certain that the mercenary firm's interest in the drug war will assure Mexico's citizens that help is on the way!
The Grim Road Ahead
It should be clear: the "War on Drugs" like the "War on Terror" is a colossal, multibillion dollar fraud perpetrated on the American people.
North Americans consume drugs and line the pockets of state-connected killers; Latin Americans do the dying. Low-level dealers and the poor who buy their illicit products are rewarded with wrecked lives, devastated communities and one-way tickets to prison.
U.S. banking and financial elites reap whirlwind profits and are handed virtual get-out-of-jail-free cards by federal prosecutors and courts that levy fines regarded as little more than chump change by the banks. The CIA and their far-flung network of private contractors siphon-off illegal proceeds from the grim trade laundered through U.S. and European financial institutions.
The U.S. secret state, seeking geopolitical advantage over their imperialist rivals deploy drug mafias and right-wing terrorists as plausibly deniable intelligence assets, just as they have for decades.
Congressional banking and intelligence probes are killed. Black operations in areas of strategic interest to U.S. policy planners spread death and destruction, particularly where rich petrochemical and mineral reserves owned by other people are lusted after by American multinationals.
Corporate media collaborate in this charade; pointing the finger at black and brown citizens, white elites on both sides of the border escape scrutiny. It is far easier to demonize black and brown youth as "predators" than to take a hard look in the mirror at a ruling class that are the real American drug lords.
And still we wonder why Mexico is slowly transformed into a killing field.
While the United States has pumped billions of dollars into failed drug eradication schemes in target countries through ill-conceived programs such as Plan Colombia and the Mérida Initiative, in the bizarro world of the "War on Drugs," corporate interests and geopolitics always trump law enforcement efforts to fight organized crime, particularly when the criminals are partners in crimes perpetrated by the secret state.
Since 2006, when Mexican President Felipe Calderón turned the Army loose, allegedly to "dismantle" the drug cartels slowly transforming Mexico into a killing field some 28,000 people, primarily along Mexico's northern border with the U.S., have lost their lives. Countless others have been wounded, forced to flee or simply "disappeared."
Writing in The Guardian, journalist Simon Jenkins tells us that "cocaine supplies routed through Mexico have made that country the drugs equivalent of a Gulf oil state."
"Rather than try to stem its own voracious appetite for drugs," Jenkins writes, "rich America shifts guilt on to poor supplier countries. Never was the law of economics--demand always evokes supply--so traduced as in Washington's drugs policy. America spends $40bn a year on narcotics policy, imprisoning a staggering 1.5m of its citizens under it."
Judging the results, one might even think the drug war solely exists as the principle means through which wealthy elites organize crime.
Scenes from the Atrocity Exhibition
• December 13, 2009: The Observer reported that "drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis." Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he saw evidence that "the proceeds of organised crime were 'the only liquid investment capital' available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result." The Observer informed us that this "will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis." Costa told the British newspaper that "in many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system's main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor." Although the UN's drug czar declined to identify the countries or banks that benefited from narcotics investments, he said that "inter-bank loans were funded by money that originated from the drugs trade and other illegal activities... There were signs that some banks were rescued that way."
• February 26, 2010: Responding to charges by left-wing critics and academics, Mexican president Felipe Calderón was forced to counter evidence that his government's "offensive" against narcotraffickers has left the "largest and most powerful of the cartels relatively unscathed," the Los Angeles Times disclosed. Critics accused the government of favoritism towards the Sinaloa cartel, claiming it "has been allowed to escape most of the government's firepower and carry on with its illegal business as usual." During a news conference, Calderón said such charges were "absolutely false." The president said the suggestion was "painful," and went on to say: "I can assure you that this government has attacked without discrimination all criminal groups in Mexico ... without taking into consideration whether it's the cartel of so-and-so or what's-his-name. We've fought them all." Edgardo Buscaglia, an academic expert on organized crime challenged the president and said that arrest figures "skew heavily" toward the other cartels. "By his calculation," the Times reported, "of more than 53,000 people arrested in drug-trafficking cases in the three years since Calderón took office, fewer than 1,000 worked for the Sinaloa organization." Commanded by Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, the Sinaloa cartel crime boss placed 937 on Forbes 2010 survey of the world's billionaires with an estimated net worth of $1 billion. A similar modus operandi is standard practice where foreign policy and corporate concerns of America's wealthiest clients overseas override efforts by law enforcement to choke-off the flow of narcotics. In Colombia, secret state agencies such as the CIA have long-favored drug organizations that have served as intelligence assets or death squads. Examples abound. Consider the "untouchable" status enjoyed by the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers' Cali cartel. During the 1980s, at the height of America's Central American interventions, cocaine shipped into the United States as part of the U.S. government's "guns-for-drugs" arrangement with Nicaraguan Contra rebels, was principally supplied by Cali traffickers. When Medellín drug lord Pablo Escobar's group was brought down, the CIA, DEA and the Pentagon's Delta Force relied on operatives funded by the rival Cali faction and Los Pepes, a vigilante group founded by drug lord Carlos Castaño and his brothers Fidel and Vicente. Los Pepes had operational links to the Colombian National Police, especially the Search Bloc (Bloque de Búsqueda) hunting Escobar, and acted on intelligence provided by the CIA/DEA/Delta Force to execute their missions. After Escobar's death, the Castaño brothers launched the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a notorious right-wing death squad. The AUC in coordination with the Colombian Army, carried out multiple attacks and massacred thousands of leftists, trade union organizers and peasant activists. In 2001 under pressure from human rights groups, the U.S. State Department designated the AUC a "Foreign Terrorist Organization." This didn't however, prevent U.S. corporations such as Chiquita Brands International, Occidental Petroleum, Coca-Cola or the Drummond Company from allegedly hiring out AUC paramilitaries to murder trade union and peasant activists. In 2007, Chiquita pled guilty in federal district court and paid a $25 million fine under provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1991 for funding the AUC. Dole Food Company now faces similar charges. In 2002, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment against Carlos Castaño and accused him of trafficking some 17 tons of cocaine into the United States.
• March 9, 2010: The National Security Archive published a series of documents linking the U.S. secret state to Mexico's dirty warriors and drug cartel operatives under official protection by a CIA-allied intelligence agency. Following reporting by Peter Dale Scott that "both the FBI and CIA intervened in 1981 to block the indictment (on stolen car charges) of the drug-trafficking Mexican intelligence czar Miguel Nazar Haro, claiming that Nazar was 'an essential repeat essential contact for CIA station in Mexico City,' on matters of 'terrorism, intelligence, and counterintelligence'," the National Security Archive disclosed that Nazar Haro's corrupt Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS) was responsible for the disappearance, torture and murder of left-wing activists during the 1970s and '80s. The Archive revealed that "there is a deep connection between the former Mexican intelligence service and the country's drug mafias. As DFS agents took command of counterinsurgency raids in the 1970s, they often stumbled upon narcotics safe houses and quickly took on the job of protecting Mexico's drug cartels." Researchers Kate Doyle and Jesse Franzblau told us although "the DFS was disbanded in 1985 following revelations that it was behind the murder of DEA agent Enrique 'Kiki' Camarena, and Mexican journalist Manuel Buendia," of the 1,500 agents who suddenly found themselves unemployed, many "found their training in covert activities and brutal counterinsurgency operations easily adaptable to the needs of the criminal underworld." In 2006, the National Security Archive and investigative journalist Jefferson Morley disclosed that declassified U.S. documents "reveal CIA recruitment of agents within the upper echelons of the Mexican government between 1956 and 1969. The informants used in this secret program included President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and future President Luis Echeverría." As we now know, when he served as Interior Secretary in the Díaz government, Echeverría oversaw the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre of student activists just days before the Summer Olympics were staged in Mexico City. "The documents," Morley wrote, "detail the relationships cultivated between senior CIA officers, such as chief of station Winston Scott, and Mexican government officials through a secret spy network code-named 'LITEMPO.' Operating out of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City, Scott used the LITEMPO project to provide 'an unofficial channel for the exchange of selected sensitive political information which each government wanted the other to receive but not through public protocol exchanges'." These, and other disclosures reveal that "one of the most crime-ridden CIA assets we know of is the Mexican DFS, which the US helped to create," Peter Dale Scott wrote back in 2000. "From its foundation in the 1940s, the DFS, like other similar kryptocracies in Latin America, was deeply involved with international drug-traffickers. By the 1980s possession of a DFS card was recognized by DEA agents as a 'license to traffic;' DFS agents rode security for drug truck convoys, and used their police radios to check of signs of American police surveillance." Evidence suggests that similar protection and management of the global drug trade persists today.
• March 16, 2010: Wachovia Bank, a subsidiary of banking giant Wells Fargo & Co., signed a Deferred Prosecution Agreement with the federal government. Wells admitted in court that its unit failed to monitor and report some $378.4 billion in suspected money laundering transactions by narcotics traffickers between 2004-2008, "a sum equal to one-third of Mexico's current gross domestic product," Bloomberg Markets magazine revealed. Cash laundered by drug mafias were used to purchase a fleet of planes that subsequently shipped some 22 tons of cocaine into the United States. Wells paid the government $160 million to resolve the case. American Express Bank and Western Union also agreed recently to huge settlements with the government for similar offenses.
• May 19, 2010: Retired Mexican Army General Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro was shot and wounded in Mexico City during an alleged robbery attempt. El Universal reports that police claimed that a thief wanted to "steal the general's watch" and shot him several times in the chest. In 2007, after a six-year imprisonment on charges of providing protection to late drug trafficking kingpin Amado Carrillo Fuentes, chief of the Juárez cartel and self-described "Lord of the Heavens," Acosta Chaparro was released from custody after his conviction was overturned on appeal. According to documents published by global whistleblowers WikiLeaks in 2009, the Swiss Bank Julius Baer's Cayman Islands unit, allegedly hid "several million dollars" of funds controlled by Acosta Chaparro and his wife, Silvia through a firm known as Symac Investments. WikiLeaks wondered whether Mexican authorities would "want to know whether the several millions of USD had anything to do with the allegations that Mr Chaparro, a former police chief from the Mexican state of Guerrero, stopped chasing his local drug dealers and joined them in business." According to reports cited by WikiLeaks, Acosta Chaparro was "already the subject of multiple allegations not only that he was a narcotrafficker but also that he had played a leading role in the dirty war of police and army against rural guerillas on his patch between 1975 and 1981. He was accused of organising the seizure, torture and murder of peasants who were suspected of helping the rebels and, with particular persistence of overseeing 'flights of death' in which well-tortured detainees were taken up in helicopters and pushed out over the ocean while still alive." Despite these serious charges, WikiLeaks informs us that "no action was taken at all [and] Chaparro's funds might still be managed by the former representative of Julius Baer, Mexico Curtis Lowell Jun in Zurich."
• June 7, 2010: Guerrero State Attorney General Albertico Guinto announced that 55 bodies were found deep in an abandoned silver mine outside Taxco, The Christian Science Monitor reported. In various states of decomposition, the victims showed signs of torture before being killed. "It was like a quicksand, but filled with bodies," Luis Rivera, the chief criminologist investigating the scene told The Washington Post. The recovery of the remains took nearly a week, "a task made more difficult" by the fact that some cadavers were mummified, others were dismembered by the fall and at least four of the victims had been decapitated. "There are headless bodies, but some of the heads don't match the bodies," Rivera said. Based on wound analysis of the corpses, investigators theorized that "many of the victims were alive when they were thrown down the mine shaft."
• June 12, 2010: The Narco News Bulletin reports "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." A "former U.S. government official who has experience dealing with covert operations," told journalist Bill Conroy that "black operations have been going on forever. The recent [mainstream] media reports about those operations under the Obama administration make it sound like it's a big scoop, but it's nothing new for those who understand how things really work." Perhaps we should recall how "things" have worked in the recent past. Back in 2003, the Brownsville Herald reported that Los Zetas, formerly the enforcement arm of the Gulf cartel, "feature 31 ex-soldiers once part of an elite division of the Mexican army, the Special Air Mobile Force Group. At least one-third of this battalion's deserters was trained at the School of the Americas in Fort Benning, Ga., according to documents from the Mexican secretary of defense." According to the U.S. Defense Department, some 513 Mexican Special Forces soldiers received training at the School of the Americas, and about 120 "graduates" joined the Special Air Mobile Force. Luis Astorga, a drug trafficking expert at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City told the Herald: "There is a higher level of danger with the type of knowledge that these people have, their arms capacity, their knowledge of techniques and specialization in (drug) traffic operations. Traffickers traditionally don't have that; they pay other people for those services." Is history repeating itself under the Mérida Initiative? A former DEA official told Narco News in 2005 that "A lot of the Zetas came from former Mexican police offices or the military ... So they come from a diverse background. Some of them have prior training from the DEA, FBI and the U.S. military, as well as other agencies."
• June 28, 2010: Rodolfo Torre Cantu, the leading candidate for governor in the state of Tamaulipas was gunned down in one of the highest profile assassinations since a presidential candidate was murdered under suspicious circumstances in 1994. Four others, including local lawmaker Enrique Blackmore, were also killed when their campaign van was sprayed with machine gun fire by unknown assailants. Cantu had vowed to crack down on drug gangs if elected.
• July 15, 2010: A powerful car bomb explodes on a crowded street near a federal police headquarters in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso, Texas. Four are killed, including a police officer and doctor lured to the scene.
• July 15, 2010: Investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker revealed that the pilot "of the American-registered DC-9 (N900SA) from St. Petersburg, FL caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine in Mexico's Yucatan several years ago," Carmelo Vasquez Guerra, "had been released from prison less than two years after being arrested." Readers will recall that the DC-9 and another American-registered plane, a Gulfstream II business jet (N987SA) that spilled "4 tons of cocaine across a muddy field," Hopsicker reported, were used in CIA "rendition" (torture) flights and had been purchased by Mexican drug gangs with funds laundered through Wachovia Bank. "The shocking news was delivered via an international headline stating that a pilot named Carmelo Vasquez Guerra had been arrested in the West African nation of Guinea Bissau on a twin-engine Gulfstream II carrying... what else? 550 kilos--a half-ton--of cocaine." According to Hopsicker, the drug pilot was arrested--and released--from three countries "under mysterious and unexplained circumstances." Seeking answers to the pilot's series of seemingly miraculous escapes, Hopsicker drolly observed: "Maybe there is an innocent explanation for everything. Maybe drugs just show up, unbidden, like unwanted guests. And maybe Carmelo Vasquez Guerra didn't escape each time he got busted. Maybe he just 'released himself on his own recognizance'."
• July 18, 2010: In the wake of the massacre of 17 people attending a birthday party in the northern city of Torreon, The Christian Science Monitor revealed that inmates from a prison in the nearby city of Gomez Palacio were the authors of the crime. "According to witnesses, the inmates were allowed to leave with authorization of the prison director ... to carry out instructions for revenge attacks using official vehicles and using guards' weapons for executions," said Ricardo Najera, a spokesman from the attorney general's office. After the atrocity, inmates drove back to their cells.
• July 20, 2010: Following the Juárez car bomb blast that killed four, U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Arturo Sarukhan, downplayed it's significance and claimed, though disturbing, violence "has not yet reached the level of terrorism," The Washington Post reported. "Terrorism," the U.S. ambassador said, "refers to the acts by groups with political objectives that seek to control the government." But what if those with "political objectives" and limitless funds from the illicit trade already control the state's security apparatus?
• July 25, 2010: Of the more than 28,000 people killed since December 2006 when President Felipe Calderón "hurled the Mexican Army into the anti-cartel battle," nearly 6,300 (a quarter of the total) were murdered in Ciudad Juárez, The Nation reports. Under a three year deal, the United States has bankrolled the Army offensive with some $1.4 billion in funds under the Mérida Initiative. Journalists Charles Bowden and Molly Molloy wrote in response to Ambassador Sarukhan's statement: "We are supposed to believe in their evidence that 90 percent of the dead are criminals, but that they have no evidence at all of narco-terrorism?" Bowden and Molloy aver, "This, despite numerous incidents of grenades and other explosives being used in recent attacks in the states of Michoacan, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Guerrero, Sonora and many other places in Mexico. And that 'armed commandos' dressed like soldiers and wielding high-powered machine guns are witnessed at the scenes of hundreds of massacres documented since 2008." According to expert Diego Valle, the steep rise in homicide rates correlate directly to increased military operations against some cartels. In his recent study, Statistical Analysis and Visualisation of the Drug War in Mexico, Valle writes that "military operations in Chihuahua, Nuevo León, Veracruz and Durango have coincided with increases in homicides and attempts by the Sinaloa cartel to take over drug trafficking routes from rival cartels. After the army took control of Ciudad Juárez it became the most violent city in the world."
• July 27, 2010: Building on alliances forged during the Cold War amongst right-wing political gangs and drug traffickers, cartel operations in Central America have soared, The Washington Post informs us. Since 2006, drug networks in Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras "are burrowing deeper into a region with the highest murder rates in the world." According to United Nations data, cocaine seizures in Central America "nearly quadrupled" between 2004 and 2007. "Over the past two years," the Post reports, "two national police chiefs and the former president have been arrested on charges related to drug trafficking or corruption. Two former interior ministers are fugitives." In Honduras, where a U.S.-sponsored coup toppled a democratically elected president in 2009, Mexican cartels have established "command-and-control" centers to coordinate cocaine shipments by sea and air to North America and Europe. In El Salvador, that country's leftist president has said that the violent street gang, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), have forged a working relationship with drug cartels that could eventually help the group mature into "an international syndicate."
• August 22, 2010: Journalist Bill Conroy reports in The Narco News Bulletin that despite surging violence in Ciudad Juárez, the murder-plagued city "where some 10,000 small businesses have closed their doors since 2008 due, in large part, to a wave of burglaries, kidnappings, extortion and murders that has washed over the city during the past two and a half years," why is the violence not affecting the entire city? Conroy writes "there is often an exception to most rules, and in the case of Juárez, the rule of violence does not extend to its industrial zones, which are home to some 360 maquiladora factories that employ more than 190,000 people." According to a report obtained by Narco News from the El Paso Regional Economic Development Corporation, or REDCO, "there was only one homicide carried out in the maquila industrial zones" since 2008. "That's right," Conroy avers, "just one murder in this huge swath of Juárez that is dotted with maquila plants operated by huge corporations such as General Motors, Delphi, Motorola, Visteon, TECMA and Honeywell. Maquiladoras, also known as twin plants, are Mexico-based factories owned and/or operated by foreign companies that benefit from the cheap labor and favorable tax treatment." REDCO officials refused to comment to Narco News. However, Conroy writes, TECMA executive vice president Toby Spoon told ABC's El Paso affiliate KVIA that "If they [the narco-trafficking organizations] got the maquila industry, or American companies or foreign companies, if they became targets of this, it would just take it to a whole different level, and nobody wants that." Isn't that an interesting statement! "So it would appear, based on that comment," Conroy writes, "that the narco-trafficking organizations, the Mexican government and the maquila factory owners have some sort of unspoken alliance of convenience that assures protection for the maquila factories and their professional employees." Indeed, Narco News discovered that "at last three security zones have been set up in Juárez that are guarded by Mexican soldiers who assure safe passage for Maquila executives commuting from El Paso to the Juárez factory sites. In addition, the maquila industrial zones themselves, according to media reports, are under the close watch of Mexican state police as well as private security guards employed by the maquilas." This is the same Army and federal police force that is seemingly "powerless" to halt the slaughter of Juárez citizens by ubiquitous, yet invisible, drug gangs which have transformed that city, and northern Mexico, into a free-fire zone. Curious indeed!
• August 25, 2010: A wounded Ecuadorean migrant stumbled to a Mexican Marine checkpoint in the northern state of Tamaulipas and leads officials to a blood-splashed room. Inside, authorities discover the bodies of 58 men and 14 women, allegedly murdered by Los Zetas, or another cartel seeking to discredit their rivals. "Years ago," IPS reported, "Los Zetas found a gold mine: kidnapping undocumented migrants." The UN estimates that some half million undocumented migrants from Central and South America "cross Mexico from south to north every year in their attempt to reach the United States." And more than 10,000 were kidnapped between September 2009 and February 2010 according to Mexico's National Human Rights Commission. According to multiple press reports, the migrants were killed after they refused to serve as forced labor for Los Zetas.
• August 26, 2010: A veteran officer with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection service (CBP), a satrapy within the sprawling Department of Homeland Security, Martha Alicia Garnica, 43, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for drug trafficking, human smuggling and bribery. "Three other defendants," the Center for Investigative Reporting disclosed, received prison sentences, ranging from two years to a little more than five years. A fourth defendant was murdered in February in Juárez."
• August 27, 2010: "Federal prosecutors," The Nation revealed, "have used top leaders of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), known as the most violent gang in the US and Central America, as secret informants over a decade of murders, drug-trafficking and car-jackings across a dozen US states and several Central American countries." Former California state senator Tom Hayden told us that "the informants are identified as Nelson Comandari, described by law enforcement as 'the CEO of Mara Salvatrucha,' and his self described 'right hand man,' Jorge Pineda, nicknamed 'Dopey' because of his drug-dealing background." According to The Nation, Comandari's grandfather "was Col. Agustin Martinez Varela, a powerful right-wing Salvadoran who served as an interior minister during El Salvador's civil wars. Comandari's uncle, Franklin Varela, was a central informant in the Reagan administration's scandalous investigation into the activist Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador [CISPES]." In his 1998 written testimony to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, retired DEA Special Agent Celerino Castillo III told Congress that "while our government shouted 'Just Say No !', entire Central and South American nations fell into what are now known as, 'Cocaine democracies'." Castillo testified: "On Jan. 18, 1985, [retired CIA officer Felix] Rodriguez allegedly met with money-launderer Ramon Milan-Rodriguez, who had moved $1.5 billion for the Medellin cartel. Milan testified before a Senate Investigation on the Contras' drug smuggling, that before this 1985 meeting, he had granted Felix Rodriguez's request and given $10 million from the cocaine for the Contras." Contra drug operations were coordinated by the CIA out of El Salvador's Ilopango airport and protected from prying eyes, and U.S. law enforcement investigators, by troops drawn from by Col. Varela's interior ministry. According to the National Security Archive's Oliver North File, "Mr. North's diary entries, from the reporter's notebooks he kept in those years, noted multiple reports of drug smuggling among the contras. A Washington Post investigation published on 22 October 1994 found no evidence he had relayed these reports to the DEA or other law enforcement authorities."
• August 28, 2010: The bullet-ridden body of Roberto Suarez Vasquez, the lead investigator probing the murder of 72 Central- and South American migrants was found on a highway not far from where the massacre took place.
• August 31, 2010: The entire 2,000 mile U.S.-Mexico border will be monitored by Predator drones. Part of a $600 million package passed by Congress earlier this year, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the border was now "safer than ever."
• August 31, 2010: Some 3,200 Mexican federal police, "nearly a tenth of the force," have been fired this year "under new rules designed to weed out crooked cops and modernize law enforcement," the Los Angeles Times reports. Amongst the 465 cops arrested in early August, federal authorities took four commanders into custody after 250 subordinates in violence-plagued Ciudad Juárez publicly accused them of corruption.
• September 6, 2010: The Los Angeles Times reports that "drug traffickers who siphon off natural gas, gasoline and even crude, rob the Mexican treasury of hundreds of millions of dollars annually." The newspaper disclosed that "the cartels have taken sabotage to a new level: They've hobbled key operations in parts of the Burgos Basin, home to Mexico's biggest natural gas fields." Times' journalist Tracy Wilkinson writes that "the world's seventh-largest oil producer has become another casualty of the drug war." A series of kidnappings and murders in the gas-rich region has curtailed production. Pemex officials refused to comment and have sought to "repress information on the kidnappings." Despite a massive outcry by Mexico's citizens against moves by the Calderón administration to privatize Pemex, which generates some $77 billion in annual revenue, Chevron's Latin American operations chief Ali Moshiri told the Houston Chronicle that the company wants to make Mexico "a big part of our portfolio." In this light, violence against Pemex workers and crippled production is nothing more than an odd coincidence, right?
• September 8, 2010: Speaking at the elite Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton claimed that Mexico's drug cartels "increasingly resemble an insurgency with the power to challenge the government's control of wide swaths of its own soil," the Los Angeles Times reported. Comparing Mexico to Colombia, Clinton's comments reflect past U.S. claims that Colombia's well-entrenched drug mafias were part of a leftist "narcoguerrilla" strategy to topple the government. This is a mendacious comparison given rich evidence that for decades Colombia's leading mafia groups are allied with extreme right-wing forces in that country's political establishment. Declassified U.S. documents revealed that former President Álvaro Uribe, enjoyed close ties to drug-linked paramilitary organizations. A darling of the Pentagon and the American secret state, according to multiple press reports and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, when Uribe was mayor of Medellín, the epicenter of Pablo Escobar's narcoempire, the now-dead mafia boss's former lover Virginia Vallejo, told the Spanish paper El País: "Pablo used to say, that if it weren't for that blessed little boy [Uribe], we would have to swim to Miami to get drugs to the gringos." According to Vallejo, when Uribe was the director of Colombia's Civil Aviation authority, he granted dozens of licenses for runways and hundreds of permits for planes and helicopters, on which the drug trade's infrastructure was built. The 1991 document by the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency noted that Uribe was a "close personal friend of Pablo Escobar" who was "dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín [drug] cartel at high government levels."
• September 9, 2010: 25 people, including women and teenagers ranging in age from 15 to 60, were murdered in Ciudad Juárez by Juárez cartel gunmen, the El Paso Times reports. The operation was allegedly mounted against their rivals in the Sinaloa drugs organization, apparently in retaliation for a kidnapping. The well-coordinated attacks took place in different parts of the city. Despite thousands of Mexican Army troops and federal police stationed in the city, the attacks took place with impunity. Since 2008, more than 6,400 Juárez citizens have been killed. While President Calderón claims that 90 percent of victims are connected to drug organizations, evidence suggests that like the 72 migrant workers slaughtered in Tamaulipas in August, most of the victims had no ties to the murderous trade.
• September 10, 2010: Seeking to calm a "diplomatic furor" over recent comments by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that Mexico "resembled Colombia" during the heyday of cartel power, President Obama disputed Clinton's assertion, the Los Angeles Times reported. In what could generously be described as a replay of President Ronald Reagan's repeated denials that right-wing Nicaraguan Contra "rebels" were deeply mired in cocaine trafficking, Obama said that "Mexico is a great democracy, vibrant, with a growing economy," the president told the Spanish-language La Opinion newspaper. "And as a result, what is happening there can't be compared with what happened in Colombia 20 years ago." Human rights abuses are widespread. According to Amnesty International, political dissidents, environmentalists, trade union activists and indigenous human rights defenders are routinely disappeared, tortured or murdered with impunity.
• September 12, 2010: An in-depth Washington Post profile of convicted U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officer Martha Garnica, sentenced in August for drug smuggling and human trafficking along the border, revealed that "the number of CBP corruption investigations opened by the inspector general climbed from 245 in 2006 to more than 770 this year." The Post reports that "corruption cases at its sister agency, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, rose from 66 to more than 220 over the same period." The vast majority of cases involve "illegal trafficking of drugs, guns, weapons and cash across the Southwest border." Although Garnica received a 20-year sentence for her crimes, not a single criminal indictment has been issued by the U.S. Justice Department for crimes committed by top corporate officers of Wells Fargo-owned Wachovia Bank, who admitted earlier this year to laundering hundreds of billions of dollars for Mexico's ultra-violent drug mafias. Aside from Bloomberg Markets magazine's comprehensive investigation, neither the Post, nor other U.S. "newspaper of record" reported on the bank's "deferred prosecution agreement" with the federal government.
• September 15, 2010: Writing in The Nation, investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill revealed that the private security firm Blackwater "have provided intelligence, training and security services to US and foreign governments as well as several multinational corporations." According to Scahill, "former CIA paramilitary officer Enrique 'Ric' Prado, set up a global network of foreign operatives, offering their 'deniability' as a 'big plus' for potential Blackwater customers." While Blackwater's mercenary network was originally created to service CIA black ops, Prado wrote an email to a Total Intelligence executive (a Blackwater cut-out) with the subject line, "Possible Opportunity in DEA-Read and Delete," a pitch to the Drug Enforcement Administration. The Nation reports "that executive was an eighteen-year DEA veteran with extensive government connections." Prado explained that Blackwater "has developed 'a rapidly growing, worldwide network of folks that can do everything from surveillance to ground truth to disruption operations.' He added, 'These are all foreign nationals (except for a few cases where US persons are the conduit but no longer 'play' on the street), so deniability is built in and should be a big plus'." According to Scahill, the executive wrote back and suggested that "one of the best places to start may be the Special Operations Division, (SOD)." Scahill writes that "the SOD is a secretive joint command within the U.S. Justice Department, run by the DEA" and serves "as the command-and-control center for some of the most sensitive counternarcotics and law enforcement operations conducted by federal forces." As we have seen with other clandestine operations run amok in the drug war, "deniable" assets, especially when they are "foreign nationals" with no direct ties to the U.S. government, have a funny habit of lending their well-compensated "expertise" to drug traffickers. One is reminded of the case of Israeli mercenary Yair Klein, a former IDF lieutenant colonel. Klein's private security firm, Spearhead Ltd., produced training videos and tutored drug lord Carlos Castaño's AUC in the fine art of murder. In 2001, Klein was convicted by a Colombian court for his firm's work with right-wing death squads and the enforcement arms of several drug trafficking organizations. According to Democracy Now!, Klein was "accused of training Mafia assassins" and "suspected of involvement in the explosion of a Colombian airliner in November 1989." Given Blackwater's sensitivity to human rights (just ask Baghdad residents!) one can be certain that the mercenary firm's interest in the drug war will assure Mexico's citizens that help is on the way!
The Grim Road Ahead
It should be clear: the "War on Drugs" like the "War on Terror" is a colossal, multibillion dollar fraud perpetrated on the American people.
North Americans consume drugs and line the pockets of state-connected killers; Latin Americans do the dying. Low-level dealers and the poor who buy their illicit products are rewarded with wrecked lives, devastated communities and one-way tickets to prison.
U.S. banking and financial elites reap whirlwind profits and are handed virtual get-out-of-jail-free cards by federal prosecutors and courts that levy fines regarded as little more than chump change by the banks. The CIA and their far-flung network of private contractors siphon-off illegal proceeds from the grim trade laundered through U.S. and European financial institutions.
The U.S. secret state, seeking geopolitical advantage over their imperialist rivals deploy drug mafias and right-wing terrorists as plausibly deniable intelligence assets, just as they have for decades.
Congressional banking and intelligence probes are killed. Black operations in areas of strategic interest to U.S. policy planners spread death and destruction, particularly where rich petrochemical and mineral reserves owned by other people are lusted after by American multinationals.
Corporate media collaborate in this charade; pointing the finger at black and brown citizens, white elites on both sides of the border escape scrutiny. It is far easier to demonize black and brown youth as "predators" than to take a hard look in the mirror at a ruling class that are the real American drug lords.
And still we wonder why Mexico is slowly transformed into a killing field.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Preparing the Domestic Battlespace: LA County Jail to Field-Test Raytheon Pain Ray
"Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001," the Congressional Research Service (CRS) tells us that "Congress has appropriated more than a trillion dollars for military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere around the world."
And with our "change" administration expanding "the stealth war began in the Bush administration," as The New York Times disclosed earlier this month, why the surprise by Times' reporters that "virtually none of the newly aggressive steps undertaken by the United States government have been publicly acknowledged"?
After all, isn't this what imperial states, lusting to steal other peoples' resources for their own greedy corporate elites, do?
But foreign wars and occupations have their domestic analogues, measured not only in dollars but in broken lives as unemployment and home foreclosure rates soar; inconsequential matters for those whose business is to keep us "safe."
According to Homeland Security Market Research, while the economic downturn "has had an adverse effect on the 2010 US Private Sector Homeland Security (HLS) market ... the market is positioned to recover strongly in the 2011-2014 period."
Call it a "counterterrorism stimulus package" for America's largest defense and security firms, one fully consonant with America's role as a failing state.
As for the rest of us? We'll have to content ourselves with mindless flag-waving, feverish fear-mongering and troglodytic nationalism, an atavistic witch's brew and media spectacle rolled-out as the hottest new game the whole family can play: the anti-Muslim pogrom.
Step out of line and you just might find yourself a long-term resident in one of exurbian America's hottest growth communities: I refer of course, to the prison-industrial complex that has replaced manufacturing as a real job creator!
According to U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics, some 2.4 million Americans were incarcerated in 2010, the vast majority in federal and state prisons.
And like imported commodities piling up of the docks, "surplus populations" too, are in need of a strong management hand, and a revealing piece in the Los Angeles Daily News tell of plans to do just that.
Bringing the War Home
With prison overcrowding a real threat to the New Order during lean economic times, the Daily News disclosed that "guards trying to break up fights between inmates at a Castaic jail will be armed with the hottest nonlethal weapon on the market next week."
And with product spin-offs from the Pentagon infiltrating the homeland security market at an ever-faster pace, like a Hollywood starlet making her red carpet debut, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is rolling-out Raytheon Corporation's Assault Intervention Device (AID).
The 7 1/2 foot tall ceiling-mounted robo-fryer works by heating the outer layer of the skin to 130 degrees F. Known for its "goodbye effect," the beam can penetrate clothing and will cause excruciating pain for anyone unfortunate enough to make contact with its invisible electromagnetic fangs.
A perfect addition to stun grenades, pepper spray, tasers, long-range acoustic devices (LRADs), rubber bullets or wooden dowels that can, and have been, fired at restless heimat natives by riot cops, the AID is touted as a "less-lethal" way to keep the lid on LA's teeming gulags.
Indeed, the American Civil Liberties Union told us last year in a scandalous report that "brutally overcrowded conditions cause or contribute to violence and serious mental illness."
As if life in the "shining city on a hill" weren't bad enough for those awaiting trial, ACLU investigators found "that idleness and massive overcrowding at the jail leads to violence, victimization, custodial abuse and ultimately psychotic breakdown even in relatively healthy people, as well as potentially irreversible psychosis in detainees with pre-existing illness."
I don't think a blast of microwave radiation from a Raytheon pain ray was what the ACLU had in mind when they demanded LA county "stop subjecting people to the nightmarish conditions."
Pentagon Provenance
Part of a "family" of weapons developed for imperial stormtroopers by Raytheon, like the firm's Active Denial System (ADS), a truck- or humvee-mounted NLW or the Silent Guardian, a compact version of ADS tricked-out for civilian use by the riot squad, the AID is a directed energy weapon developed as a spin-off by the Pentagon's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWP).
Originally designed for use by U.S. occupation troops in Iraq, as I pointed out last year, the prospect that American "liberators" would soon be zapping "unruly mobs," that is, Iraqi citizens objecting to the destruction of their country and the looting of their resource-rich nation by predatory corporate invaders proved to be a public relations nightmare for the White House.
Even the Bush regime's Defense Science Board concluded that an ADS deployment was "not politically tenable," because of a "possible association with torture" if the system were used at detention centers to ensure "compliance" from recalcitrant prisoners.
But fear not, the Pentagon and corporate sponsor Raytheon found a solution near at hand. Back in 2006, then-Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne had serious misgivings about an ADS battlefield deployment. Wynne's solution? The Associated Press reported that to avoid international sanction, the system should be used on crowds in the U.S. first!
"If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," Wynne said. "[Because] if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press."
No need to worry about alarming press reports here! After all, our media pride themselves on their clever use of euphemisms to hide things like torture, domestic spying, corporate crime and violence or ubiquitous secret state corruption. After all, what's a zap or two to some unruly jailbird in the grand scheme of things!
Commander Bob Osborne, the director of the Sheriff's Department Technology Exploration Program told the Daily News, "We hope that this type of technology will either cause an inmate to stop an assault or lessen the severity of an assault by them being distracted by the pain as a result of the beam."
Touted as a more humane form of control, Osborne, with the best of intentions no doubt, told reporter C.J. Lin its deployment will have a deterrent effect so "that we have fewer injuries, fewer assaults, those kinds of things."
However, critics have pointed out that repeated exposure to high-intensity microwave beams can cause serious injuries or even death if targets are subjected to repeated weapon blasts.
A 2008 report published by the Deutsche Stiftung Friedensforschung (DSF, German Foundation for Peace Research), written by physicist Dr. Jürgen Altmann found that:
Deputies who have field tested the grisly device--on themselves, we're told--say the beam is painful "especially when it's not expected."
"You begin to to feel this warming feeling, and then you go 'Yow, I need to get out of the way'."
Mimicking other "neat" tools in the Empire's arsenal of high-tech, democracy-killing contraptions, the AID is controlled by a computer, joystick and glitchy software program that has known "issues" that have resulted in serious injuries to other "test subjects.". Traveling at light speed, the 9 mm beam can target inmates up to 100 feet from its swivel-mounted aperture.
Financed by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the devilish device will undergo a rigorous six-month evaluation "for use in jails nationwide" according to the Daily News. It was installed "at no cost" to the LA Sheriff's Department.
Although NIJ may be funding the six-month evaluation, the impetus for developing microwave weapons as a means for "crowd control" and for dispersing "rioters" comes from the Pentagon.
As I wrote back in 2008, despite all all the hoopla, it should be clear by now that descriptors such as "non-lethal" or "less-than-lethal" are, strictly speaking, Orwellian constructs that mask their application as repressive tools for domination. Their primary purpose is not to "save lives" but to be used as instruments of social control.
And Raytheon, No. 4 on Washington Technology's "Top 100" list of government contractors with some $6.7 billion in defense revenue from secret state agencies such as the CIA, tout their suite of pain ray toys as an exemplary means of providing "a zone of protection that saves lives, protects assets and minimizes collateral damage."
Mike Booen, a vice president for advanced security at Raytheon told the Daily News, "If you got in the way, you'll know. ... When you get that many of your pain receptacles telling you brain 'This needs to stop,' you can't think of anything else," Booen said. "And that tends to be very effective."
A spokeswoman with the firm declined to state what the AID will eventually cost taxpayers. However, a sheriff's deputy familiar with the program "estimated just the hardware costs at least hundreds of thousands of dollars."
"With this device, we can affect people that we need to have experience that effect and not have anything happen to other people," LA County Sheriff's Dept. mouthpiece Osborne told the Daily News. "And there's nothing to clean up, and no injuries."
The American Civil Liberties Union was less enthusiastic and said in a recent press release: "The idea that a military weapon designed to cause intolerable pain should be used against county jail inmates is staggeringly wrongheaded," said Margaret Winter, Associate Director of the ACLU National Prison Project.
"Unnecessarily inflicting severe pain and taking such unnecessary risks with people's lives," Winter averred, "is a clear violation of the Eighth Amendment and due process clause of the U.S. Constitution."
Although the civil liberties watchdogs have a "court-appointment responsibility to monitor the Los Angeles County jails," they were never consulted by LA County Sheriff Lee Baca.
According to the ACLU, "the military incarnation of the device was briefly fielded in Afghanistan in June and then withdrawn in July without ever being used."
BBC News reported last month, that the U.S. Army decided against deploying the Active Denial System in Afghanistan. "The ADS was not used and was shipped from Afghanistan. The operational need for the device was not approved by commanders", Colonel Shanks, Chief of Public Affairs for ISAF told BBC.
"While the device was being tested by the Air Force," the ACLU stated, "a miscalibration of the device's power settings caused five airmen in its path to suffer lasting burns, including one whose injuries were so severe that he was airlifted to an off-base burn treatment center."
No matter what, the show must go on.
Prisoners: Secret State Guinea Pigs
Although the Air Force and the LA County Sheriff's Department claim the weapon is "safe," a 2008 report by Wired Magazine undercut the Pentagon's rosy assertions.
The high-tech publication reported that "a newly-obtained accident report shows that ... the weapon's operators were dangerously undertrained--exposing test subjects, as one official puts it, 'to unconscionable risks'."
An unredacted Air Force report obtained by Wired, revealed that "the accident raises some basic questions about the weapon." Never meant to see the light of day the report, though unclassified, "contains privileged safety information" and should be destroyed "in accordance with AFMAN 37-123 when no longer needed for mishap prevention purposes."
"Built-in range finders," the report states, "'have been basic features of high tech line-of-sight weapons and sensors for decades' and typically will prevent operators from using systems in an unsafe fashion, says one Pentagon official familiar with weapon’s development. 'Yet those critical safety features, that were integrated into the HMMWV [Humvee] ADS System 1, were removed by the AFRL [Air Force Research Lab] prior to testing, exposing the test subjects to unconscionable risks'."
Why were details of these serious accidents withheld? The Air Force will only say that "The Active Denial System 2 has incorporated many safety features based on the operating experiences of the System 1."
"By not releasing the report," journalist Sharon Weinberger, a test subject along with her husband, journalist Nathan Hodge, said "the Air Force and the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate deprived volunteers of making informed decisions about their participation. But, at least we were volunteers."
The same cannot be said for prisoners in LA County jail facilities.
As guinea pigs for the development of repressive technologies to be used to keep the lid on here in the heimat, prisoners have been literal captive audiences for illicit secret state experiments--from inhuman, Nazi-inspired radiological and bioweapons tests, to CIA "mind control" atrocities under Project ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA.
Similar motives operate today as the federal government and local police partners plan to introduce pain ray technologies into the nation's jails and prisons. And who's to say that Raytheon's devilish device won't be used as a means to elicit information from prisoners under interrogation?
As a scandalous investigative series in the Chicago Reader revealed, between 1972 and 1991 approximately 135 African-American men and women were arrested and tortured at the hands of former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and officers under his command. Some of the victims were as young as thirteen.
Court cases against Burge and other cops established that the methods of torture used in the interrogation of suspects included electric shock to the ears and genitalia, mock executions, suffocation, and burning. Egregious examples of police torture are not isolated to the city of Chicago.
How much easier will it be for police to abuse prisoners when they have at their disposal technologies that won't even leave a mark? As LA County Sheriff's Commander Osborne blandly remarked "there's nothing to clean up."
Fry one and who'll care? After all, they're criminals who got what they deserved.
And with our "change" administration expanding "the stealth war began in the Bush administration," as The New York Times disclosed earlier this month, why the surprise by Times' reporters that "virtually none of the newly aggressive steps undertaken by the United States government have been publicly acknowledged"?
After all, isn't this what imperial states, lusting to steal other peoples' resources for their own greedy corporate elites, do?
But foreign wars and occupations have their domestic analogues, measured not only in dollars but in broken lives as unemployment and home foreclosure rates soar; inconsequential matters for those whose business is to keep us "safe."
According to Homeland Security Market Research, while the economic downturn "has had an adverse effect on the 2010 US Private Sector Homeland Security (HLS) market ... the market is positioned to recover strongly in the 2011-2014 period."
Call it a "counterterrorism stimulus package" for America's largest defense and security firms, one fully consonant with America's role as a failing state.
As for the rest of us? We'll have to content ourselves with mindless flag-waving, feverish fear-mongering and troglodytic nationalism, an atavistic witch's brew and media spectacle rolled-out as the hottest new game the whole family can play: the anti-Muslim pogrom.
Step out of line and you just might find yourself a long-term resident in one of exurbian America's hottest growth communities: I refer of course, to the prison-industrial complex that has replaced manufacturing as a real job creator!
According to U.S. Bureau of Justice statistics, some 2.4 million Americans were incarcerated in 2010, the vast majority in federal and state prisons.
And like imported commodities piling up of the docks, "surplus populations" too, are in need of a strong management hand, and a revealing piece in the Los Angeles Daily News tell of plans to do just that.
Bringing the War Home
With prison overcrowding a real threat to the New Order during lean economic times, the Daily News disclosed that "guards trying to break up fights between inmates at a Castaic jail will be armed with the hottest nonlethal weapon on the market next week."
And with product spin-offs from the Pentagon infiltrating the homeland security market at an ever-faster pace, like a Hollywood starlet making her red carpet debut, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department is rolling-out Raytheon Corporation's Assault Intervention Device (AID).
The 7 1/2 foot tall ceiling-mounted robo-fryer works by heating the outer layer of the skin to 130 degrees F. Known for its "goodbye effect," the beam can penetrate clothing and will cause excruciating pain for anyone unfortunate enough to make contact with its invisible electromagnetic fangs.
A perfect addition to stun grenades, pepper spray, tasers, long-range acoustic devices (LRADs), rubber bullets or wooden dowels that can, and have been, fired at restless heimat natives by riot cops, the AID is touted as a "less-lethal" way to keep the lid on LA's teeming gulags.
Indeed, the American Civil Liberties Union told us last year in a scandalous report that "brutally overcrowded conditions cause or contribute to violence and serious mental illness."
As if life in the "shining city on a hill" weren't bad enough for those awaiting trial, ACLU investigators found "that idleness and massive overcrowding at the jail leads to violence, victimization, custodial abuse and ultimately psychotic breakdown even in relatively healthy people, as well as potentially irreversible psychosis in detainees with pre-existing illness."
I don't think a blast of microwave radiation from a Raytheon pain ray was what the ACLU had in mind when they demanded LA county "stop subjecting people to the nightmarish conditions."
Pentagon Provenance
Part of a "family" of weapons developed for imperial stormtroopers by Raytheon, like the firm's Active Denial System (ADS), a truck- or humvee-mounted NLW or the Silent Guardian, a compact version of ADS tricked-out for civilian use by the riot squad, the AID is a directed energy weapon developed as a spin-off by the Pentagon's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWP).
Originally designed for use by U.S. occupation troops in Iraq, as I pointed out last year, the prospect that American "liberators" would soon be zapping "unruly mobs," that is, Iraqi citizens objecting to the destruction of their country and the looting of their resource-rich nation by predatory corporate invaders proved to be a public relations nightmare for the White House.
Even the Bush regime's Defense Science Board concluded that an ADS deployment was "not politically tenable," because of a "possible association with torture" if the system were used at detention centers to ensure "compliance" from recalcitrant prisoners.
But fear not, the Pentagon and corporate sponsor Raytheon found a solution near at hand. Back in 2006, then-Secretary of the Air Force Michael W. Wynne had serious misgivings about an ADS battlefield deployment. Wynne's solution? The Associated Press reported that to avoid international sanction, the system should be used on crowds in the U.S. first!
"If we're not willing to use it here against our fellow citizens, then we should not be willing to use it in a wartime situation," Wynne said. "[Because] if I hit somebody with a nonlethal weapon and they claim that it injured them in a way that was not intended, I think that I would be vilified in the world press."
No need to worry about alarming press reports here! After all, our media pride themselves on their clever use of euphemisms to hide things like torture, domestic spying, corporate crime and violence or ubiquitous secret state corruption. After all, what's a zap or two to some unruly jailbird in the grand scheme of things!
Commander Bob Osborne, the director of the Sheriff's Department Technology Exploration Program told the Daily News, "We hope that this type of technology will either cause an inmate to stop an assault or lessen the severity of an assault by them being distracted by the pain as a result of the beam."
Touted as a more humane form of control, Osborne, with the best of intentions no doubt, told reporter C.J. Lin its deployment will have a deterrent effect so "that we have fewer injuries, fewer assaults, those kinds of things."
However, critics have pointed out that repeated exposure to high-intensity microwave beams can cause serious injuries or even death if targets are subjected to repeated weapon blasts.
A 2008 report published by the Deutsche Stiftung Friedensforschung (DSF, German Foundation for Peace Research), written by physicist Dr. Jürgen Altmann found that:
The power and duration of emission for one trigger event is controlled by a software program. Model calculations [for the larger ADS system] show that with the highest power setting, second- and third-degree burns with complete dermal necrosis will occur after less than 2 seconds. Even with a lower setting of power or duration there is the possibility for the operator to re-trigger immediately. (Dr. Jürgen Altmann, "Millimetre Waves, Lasers, Acoustics for Non-Lethal Weapons? Physics Analyses and Inferences," Deutsche Stiftung Friedensforschung (DSF), 2008, p. 4)
Deputies who have field tested the grisly device--on themselves, we're told--say the beam is painful "especially when it's not expected."
"You begin to to feel this warming feeling, and then you go 'Yow, I need to get out of the way'."
Mimicking other "neat" tools in the Empire's arsenal of high-tech, democracy-killing contraptions, the AID is controlled by a computer, joystick and glitchy software program that has known "issues" that have resulted in serious injuries to other "test subjects.". Traveling at light speed, the 9 mm beam can target inmates up to 100 feet from its swivel-mounted aperture.
Financed by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ), the devilish device will undergo a rigorous six-month evaluation "for use in jails nationwide" according to the Daily News. It was installed "at no cost" to the LA Sheriff's Department.
Although NIJ may be funding the six-month evaluation, the impetus for developing microwave weapons as a means for "crowd control" and for dispersing "rioters" comes from the Pentagon.
As I wrote back in 2008, despite all all the hoopla, it should be clear by now that descriptors such as "non-lethal" or "less-than-lethal" are, strictly speaking, Orwellian constructs that mask their application as repressive tools for domination. Their primary purpose is not to "save lives" but to be used as instruments of social control.
And Raytheon, No. 4 on Washington Technology's "Top 100" list of government contractors with some $6.7 billion in defense revenue from secret state agencies such as the CIA, tout their suite of pain ray toys as an exemplary means of providing "a zone of protection that saves lives, protects assets and minimizes collateral damage."
Mike Booen, a vice president for advanced security at Raytheon told the Daily News, "If you got in the way, you'll know. ... When you get that many of your pain receptacles telling you brain 'This needs to stop,' you can't think of anything else," Booen said. "And that tends to be very effective."
A spokeswoman with the firm declined to state what the AID will eventually cost taxpayers. However, a sheriff's deputy familiar with the program "estimated just the hardware costs at least hundreds of thousands of dollars."
"With this device, we can affect people that we need to have experience that effect and not have anything happen to other people," LA County Sheriff's Dept. mouthpiece Osborne told the Daily News. "And there's nothing to clean up, and no injuries."
The American Civil Liberties Union was less enthusiastic and said in a recent press release: "The idea that a military weapon designed to cause intolerable pain should be used against county jail inmates is staggeringly wrongheaded," said Margaret Winter, Associate Director of the ACLU National Prison Project.
"Unnecessarily inflicting severe pain and taking such unnecessary risks with people's lives," Winter averred, "is a clear violation of the Eighth Amendment and due process clause of the U.S. Constitution."
Although the civil liberties watchdogs have a "court-appointment responsibility to monitor the Los Angeles County jails," they were never consulted by LA County Sheriff Lee Baca.
According to the ACLU, "the military incarnation of the device was briefly fielded in Afghanistan in June and then withdrawn in July without ever being used."
BBC News reported last month, that the U.S. Army decided against deploying the Active Denial System in Afghanistan. "The ADS was not used and was shipped from Afghanistan. The operational need for the device was not approved by commanders", Colonel Shanks, Chief of Public Affairs for ISAF told BBC.
"While the device was being tested by the Air Force," the ACLU stated, "a miscalibration of the device's power settings caused five airmen in its path to suffer lasting burns, including one whose injuries were so severe that he was airlifted to an off-base burn treatment center."
No matter what, the show must go on.
Prisoners: Secret State Guinea Pigs
Although the Air Force and the LA County Sheriff's Department claim the weapon is "safe," a 2008 report by Wired Magazine undercut the Pentagon's rosy assertions.
The high-tech publication reported that "a newly-obtained accident report shows that ... the weapon's operators were dangerously undertrained--exposing test subjects, as one official puts it, 'to unconscionable risks'."
An unredacted Air Force report obtained by Wired, revealed that "the accident raises some basic questions about the weapon." Never meant to see the light of day the report, though unclassified, "contains privileged safety information" and should be destroyed "in accordance with AFMAN 37-123 when no longer needed for mishap prevention purposes."
"Built-in range finders," the report states, "'have been basic features of high tech line-of-sight weapons and sensors for decades' and typically will prevent operators from using systems in an unsafe fashion, says one Pentagon official familiar with weapon’s development. 'Yet those critical safety features, that were integrated into the HMMWV [Humvee] ADS System 1, were removed by the AFRL [Air Force Research Lab] prior to testing, exposing the test subjects to unconscionable risks'."
Why were details of these serious accidents withheld? The Air Force will only say that "The Active Denial System 2 has incorporated many safety features based on the operating experiences of the System 1."
"By not releasing the report," journalist Sharon Weinberger, a test subject along with her husband, journalist Nathan Hodge, said "the Air Force and the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate deprived volunteers of making informed decisions about their participation. But, at least we were volunteers."
The same cannot be said for prisoners in LA County jail facilities.
As guinea pigs for the development of repressive technologies to be used to keep the lid on here in the heimat, prisoners have been literal captive audiences for illicit secret state experiments--from inhuman, Nazi-inspired radiological and bioweapons tests, to CIA "mind control" atrocities under Project ARTICHOKE and MKULTRA.
Similar motives operate today as the federal government and local police partners plan to introduce pain ray technologies into the nation's jails and prisons. And who's to say that Raytheon's devilish device won't be used as a means to elicit information from prisoners under interrogation?
As a scandalous investigative series in the Chicago Reader revealed, between 1972 and 1991 approximately 135 African-American men and women were arrested and tortured at the hands of former Chicago Police Commander Jon Burge and officers under his command. Some of the victims were as young as thirteen.
Court cases against Burge and other cops established that the methods of torture used in the interrogation of suspects included electric shock to the ears and genitalia, mock executions, suffocation, and burning. Egregious examples of police torture are not isolated to the city of Chicago.
How much easier will it be for police to abuse prisoners when they have at their disposal technologies that won't even leave a mark? As LA County Sheriff's Commander Osborne blandly remarked "there's nothing to clean up."
Fry one and who'll care? After all, they're criminals who got what they deserved.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Space War Update: Secretive Mini-Shuttles, Dirty Tricks Spy Sats, and Much, Much More!
While centrist political hacks, crypto-fascist block heads and know-nothing déclassé "mama grizzlies" are intent on destroying what little remains of American democracy (I refer of course, to the slow-motion pogrom against U.S. Muslims, targets of the sordid "ground zero mosque" affair, and yes, Senator Reid, former speaker Gingrich and Ms. Palin, I mean you), Pentagon militarists and the corporate gangsters they so lovingly serve are moving forward with plans to enlarge the precincts of that "shining city on a hill" into orbital space.
Last spring, Antifascist Calling reported on the launch of the Pentagon's secretive X-37B mini space shuttle, a 29-foot long unmanned orbital test vehicle (OTV).
Built by Boeing Corporation, the multibillion dollar project was the culmination of a decades-long dream of Pentagon space warriors: to field a reusable spacecraft that combines an airplane's agility with the means to travel at 5 miles per second in orbit.
After the craft's successful April 22 launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) denied that the X-37B was a prototype for a near-earth weapons platform.
Back in 2005 however, The New York Times reported that General Lance W. Lord, then commander of AFSPC, told an Air Force conference that "space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny. ... Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future."
And with no public debate whatsoever, new weapons programs spawned in the bowels of the Pentagon's black budget parallel universe are on coming on-line.
We do know however, that the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) the secretive Defense Department satrapy that builds and flies America's fleet of spy satellites, is ramping up operations for the "most aggressive launch schedule that this organization has undertaken in the last 25 years," NRO director Bruce Carlson said in a speech at the National Space Symposium, according to Aviation Week.
Among the most heavily-outsourced American secret state agencies, NRO and its sister organization, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) are preparing the "battlespace" for new imperial adventures. The AllGov web site reported Friday that NGA "recently awarded $7.3 billion in contracts for its EnhancedView commercial imagery program, which is intended to yield higher resolution photos of earth targets than what is currently available to the military."
Reporters David Wallechinsky and Noel Brinkerhoff tell us that "DigitalGlobe operates three satellites capable of collecting imagery at resolutions of better than 1 meter, and GeoEye has two satellites in orbit that can photograph objects as small as half a meter in size." Perfect for zeroing-in on "anti-government forces" or perhaps pesky dissidents and whistleblowers here in the heimat.
A short blurb on AFSPC's web site hailing the space plane's orbital insertion was long on cheesy boilerplate but short on details of what the mission hoped to accomplish.
The Air Force informed us that "the X-37B ... will provide an 'on-orbit laboratory' test environment to prove new technology and components before those technologies are committed to operational satellite programs."
What that "test environment" might produce is anyone's guess and the Air Force isn't saying.
Prior to the launch however, AFSPC was far less coy, proclaiming "if these technologies on the vehicle prove to be as good as we estimate, it will make our access to space more responsive, perhaps cheaper, and push us in the vector toward being able to react to warfighter needs more quickly."
Such as bombing any point on earth in under an hour as the mad Prompt Global Strike program hopes to do, or, given the X-37B's diminutive profile, serving as an anti-satellite weapon that could threaten the space assets of other nations, particularly those of China and Russia.
While speculation as to what X-37B capabilities are have run the gamut from an orbital delivery system for conventional or nuclear weapons, to a satellite killing drone, to a relatively inexpensive means to launch mini-satellite swarms into orbit, the best guess is that all three are plausible hypotheses.
Despite contrary claims by the Obama administration, the "space superiority" that the Air Force lusts after include plans to weaponize space, imperialism's "high frontier." Or, as Gen. Lord would have it, the "freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack" in earth orbit.
"International Cooperation" and other Fairy Tales
Writing in The Diplomat, journalist David Axe reported last month that during the 2008 presidential campaign candidate Barack Obama made opposition to space-based weapons "part of his platform."
According to the changling's campaign material, "He [Obama] believes the United States must show leadership by engaging other nations in discussions of how best to stop the slow slide towards a new battlefield."
"Yet just two years into the Obama presidency," Axe wrote, "it's clear that these noble sentiments aren't being matched by US deeds."
Brian Weeden, the author of a briefing paper for the Pentagon- and industry-connected Secure World Foundation (SWF), claims that the mini space plane "has near zero feasibility as an orbital weapons system for attacking targets on the ground."
Weeden alleges that the X-37B's payload bay is too small for carrying an effective space-launched weapon, and moves too slowly to carry out bombing runs when re-entering the atmosphere, unlike the hypersonic glide vehicle under development by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a component of the Pentagon's "Prompt Global Strike" program.
Policy wonks such as Eric Sterner, an analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based Marshall Institute, a rightist think tank chock-a-block with former Cold Warriors, retired Pentagon clock-punchers and corporatist bag men, told Axe that "in theory" the X-37B could be weaponized or might be ideal for sneaking up on and probing, capturing, or even destroying an adversary's satellites.
"You open the payload bay, you can have in it anything you want, like a hard-point on an aircraft," Sterner told The Diplomat. "You can put sensors in there, satellites in there. You could stick munitions in there, provided they exist."
Sterner should know. After all, the Marshall Institute is pushing for the accelerated development of a "robust" U.S. missile defense system.
The Institute, along with right-wing grifters from the American Foreign Policy Council, the Claremont Institute, the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, The Heritage Foundation, High Frontier, the Institute of the North and a gaggle of defense corps, are the dark heart of the Rumsfeldian Independent Working Group (IWG).
Last year, the IWG published another in a series of alarmist screeds urging deployment of this exquisitely destabilizing first strike weapons system.
The group's 2009 report, Missile Defense, the Space Relationship & the Twenty-First Century, told us that "Missile defense has entered a new era. With the initial missile defense deployments, the decades-long debate over whether to protect the American people from the threat of ballistic missile attack was settled--and settled unequivocally in favor of missile defense."
Although the United States is a founding member of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and is a signatory to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty banning orbital nuclear weapons, as the previous administration amply demonstrated, international treaties and agreements are so many worthless scraps of paper to be tossed aside when it inconveniences the Empire.
Ratcheting up tensions in the wake of the 9/11 provocation as plans to invade Iraq were secretly being hatched by the Bush crime family, at former SecDef Rumsfeld's insistence, the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty with Russia and proclaimed that it would build--and deploy--a missile defense system.
With a cover story that the system would be based in Central Europe to "protect" NATO allies from a nonexistent "Iranian threat," Washington believes it has the right to threaten and cajole other nations because of its status as the world's "sole superpower."
Mikhail Barabanov, the editor of Arms Export magazine, believes that the "real motivation of the multibillion-dollar undertaking is the desire to expand U.S. military and strategic capacities and constrict those of other states that have nuclear missiles, Russia and China most of all," UPI reported.
Barabanov argued that "even a limited missile defense system injects a high degree of indeterminacy into the strategic plans of other countries and undermines the principle of mutual nuclear deterrence.
"With Russia continuing to reduce its nuclear arsenal significantly and China maintaining a low missile potential," Barabanov said that "the Americans' ability to down even a few dozen warheads could deprive the other side of guaranteed ability to cause the U.S. unacceptable damage in a nuclear war."
In response to the American threat, Barabanov wrote that "the only way to prevent a slow growth of the American strategic advantage is a significant increase in the purchase of new ballistic missiles by Russia."
America's drive for nuclear- and space superiority excludes any attempt to limit deployment of new weapons systems anywhere, including space. While Bush and his minions may have receded from the headlines, Washington militarists are up to their old tricks--and semantic parlor games--rebranded as "change."
In June, The New York Times reported that the administration will "consider proposals and concepts for arms control measures if they are equitable, effectively verifiable, and enhance the national security of the United States and its allies."
As with all things Obama however, the administration's "new space policy" mantra is more public relations puffery than substance.
Peter Marquez, director of space policy at the National Security Council told the Times that Washington would "oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access or use of space."
This of course, is a red herring since no other nation has sought to "prohibit or limit" America's "access or use of space" for peaceful purposes. As a means to preclude the prospect for negotiating a new arms control treaty for space, despite international backing by China, Russia and America's NATO allies, caveats and distortions by the NSC are deal killers.
"Those are the gates," Marquez told the Times, "that the arms control proposals must come through before we consider them." In other words, the global godfather has spoken so forget it.
If the U.S., as candidate Obama declared, is truly interested in stopping the "the slow slide towards a new battlefield," why then has the Pentagon embarked on a crash program to field a new generation of orbital weapons?
Washington's lack of transparency when it comes to the X-37B's potential to compromise other nations' satellite systems reveal that Obama's pledge to strengthen "international cooperation" for de-escalating conflicts in space, like his promise to close the Guantánamo Bay gulag, end torture or halt secret state domestic spying, are a cynical pack of lies.
Space Situational Awareness: Preparing the Orbital Battlespace
With the upcoming launch of the first in a series of spysats called the Space Based Surveillance System (SBSS) by AFSPC, we can expect more in the orbital dirty tricks department.
Built by usual suspects Boeing and Northrop Grumman for the Air Force, the SBSS, The Register tells us "is intended to make life much easier for the US air force Space Superiority Wing, which tries to keep tabs on all other nations' military 'space assets'."
In April, Defense Systems reported that AFSPC has "identified four pillars" of space situational awareness: "intelligence characterization, data integration and exploitation, threat warning, and attack reporting."
To address those "pillars," three new hardware programs are coming on-line: "the Space Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) space vehicle, Space Fence and Space Surveillance Telescope (SST)."
SBSS is viewed by Pentagon star warriors as an ideal spy platform because it "offers a resilient space-based capability that weather cannot affect. It doesn't have foreign basing issues. And it provides more timely revisit rates for high-interest objects at geosynchronous orbit."
Or, more realistically, given Pentagon proclivities to shoot first and analyze later, provide wannabe starship troopers with real-time targets for efficient takedown.
While deliberate meddling with other nation's satellites is strictly forbidden by international treaty, The Register informs us that "America might not be above a little bit of unattributable orbital naughtiness itself at some point in the future."
Indeed, "unattributable orbital naughtiness" is the name of the game. Last week, The Register reported that the Pentagon's new "'fractionated' swarm satellites--in which groups of small wirelessly-linked modules in orbit will replace today's large spacecraft--will be able to scatter to avoid enemy attacks and then reform into operational clusters."
According to a DARPA press release, "System F6 (Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying Spacecraft) demonstrator program [will] emphasize development of an open and ubiquitous space architecture and an associated set of open standards. The fractionated spacecraft concept replaces large, monolithic space assets with clusters of smaller, wirelessly-interconnected modules that share resources to create, in effect, a 'virtual satellite'."
In other words, satswarms in constant communication with their Pentagon masters on the ground.
With an emphasis on "real-time, fault-tolerant resource sharing over wireless cross-links; algorithms for safe and agile multi-body cluster flight; persistent broadband communications between low earth orbit (LEO) spacecraft and the ground; and a robust and scalable multi-level information assurance architecture," DARPA believes the F6 program will "enable multiple payloads supplied by different agencies, services or even countries to share common infrastructure at multiple levels of security."
DARPAcrats say the project will "exploit benefits of democratization of innovation" and find better ways to kill people in the process. How's that for innovation!
Last spring, Antifascist Calling reported on the launch of the Pentagon's secretive X-37B mini space shuttle, a 29-foot long unmanned orbital test vehicle (OTV).
Built by Boeing Corporation, the multibillion dollar project was the culmination of a decades-long dream of Pentagon space warriors: to field a reusable spacecraft that combines an airplane's agility with the means to travel at 5 miles per second in orbit.
After the craft's successful April 22 launch from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, Air Force Space Command (AFSPC) denied that the X-37B was a prototype for a near-earth weapons platform.
Back in 2005 however, The New York Times reported that General Lance W. Lord, then commander of AFSPC, told an Air Force conference that "space superiority is not our birthright, but it is our destiny. ... Space superiority is our day-to-day mission. Space supremacy is our vision for the future."
And with no public debate whatsoever, new weapons programs spawned in the bowels of the Pentagon's black budget parallel universe are on coming on-line.
We do know however, that the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) the secretive Defense Department satrapy that builds and flies America's fleet of spy satellites, is ramping up operations for the "most aggressive launch schedule that this organization has undertaken in the last 25 years," NRO director Bruce Carlson said in a speech at the National Space Symposium, according to Aviation Week.
Among the most heavily-outsourced American secret state agencies, NRO and its sister organization, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) are preparing the "battlespace" for new imperial adventures. The AllGov web site reported Friday that NGA "recently awarded $7.3 billion in contracts for its EnhancedView commercial imagery program, which is intended to yield higher resolution photos of earth targets than what is currently available to the military."
Reporters David Wallechinsky and Noel Brinkerhoff tell us that "DigitalGlobe operates three satellites capable of collecting imagery at resolutions of better than 1 meter, and GeoEye has two satellites in orbit that can photograph objects as small as half a meter in size." Perfect for zeroing-in on "anti-government forces" or perhaps pesky dissidents and whistleblowers here in the heimat.
A short blurb on AFSPC's web site hailing the space plane's orbital insertion was long on cheesy boilerplate but short on details of what the mission hoped to accomplish.
The Air Force informed us that "the X-37B ... will provide an 'on-orbit laboratory' test environment to prove new technology and components before those technologies are committed to operational satellite programs."
What that "test environment" might produce is anyone's guess and the Air Force isn't saying.
Prior to the launch however, AFSPC was far less coy, proclaiming "if these technologies on the vehicle prove to be as good as we estimate, it will make our access to space more responsive, perhaps cheaper, and push us in the vector toward being able to react to warfighter needs more quickly."
Such as bombing any point on earth in under an hour as the mad Prompt Global Strike program hopes to do, or, given the X-37B's diminutive profile, serving as an anti-satellite weapon that could threaten the space assets of other nations, particularly those of China and Russia.
While speculation as to what X-37B capabilities are have run the gamut from an orbital delivery system for conventional or nuclear weapons, to a satellite killing drone, to a relatively inexpensive means to launch mini-satellite swarms into orbit, the best guess is that all three are plausible hypotheses.
Despite contrary claims by the Obama administration, the "space superiority" that the Air Force lusts after include plans to weaponize space, imperialism's "high frontier." Or, as Gen. Lord would have it, the "freedom to attack as well as freedom from attack" in earth orbit.
"International Cooperation" and other Fairy Tales
Writing in The Diplomat, journalist David Axe reported last month that during the 2008 presidential campaign candidate Barack Obama made opposition to space-based weapons "part of his platform."
According to the changling's campaign material, "He [Obama] believes the United States must show leadership by engaging other nations in discussions of how best to stop the slow slide towards a new battlefield."
"Yet just two years into the Obama presidency," Axe wrote, "it's clear that these noble sentiments aren't being matched by US deeds."
Brian Weeden, the author of a briefing paper for the Pentagon- and industry-connected Secure World Foundation (SWF), claims that the mini space plane "has near zero feasibility as an orbital weapons system for attacking targets on the ground."
Weeden alleges that the X-37B's payload bay is too small for carrying an effective space-launched weapon, and moves too slowly to carry out bombing runs when re-entering the atmosphere, unlike the hypersonic glide vehicle under development by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) as a component of the Pentagon's "Prompt Global Strike" program.
Policy wonks such as Eric Sterner, an analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based Marshall Institute, a rightist think tank chock-a-block with former Cold Warriors, retired Pentagon clock-punchers and corporatist bag men, told Axe that "in theory" the X-37B could be weaponized or might be ideal for sneaking up on and probing, capturing, or even destroying an adversary's satellites.
"You open the payload bay, you can have in it anything you want, like a hard-point on an aircraft," Sterner told The Diplomat. "You can put sensors in there, satellites in there. You could stick munitions in there, provided they exist."
Sterner should know. After all, the Marshall Institute is pushing for the accelerated development of a "robust" U.S. missile defense system.
The Institute, along with right-wing grifters from the American Foreign Policy Council, the Claremont Institute, the Free Congress Research and Education Foundation, The Heritage Foundation, High Frontier, the Institute of the North and a gaggle of defense corps, are the dark heart of the Rumsfeldian Independent Working Group (IWG).
Last year, the IWG published another in a series of alarmist screeds urging deployment of this exquisitely destabilizing first strike weapons system.
The group's 2009 report, Missile Defense, the Space Relationship & the Twenty-First Century, told us that "Missile defense has entered a new era. With the initial missile defense deployments, the decades-long debate over whether to protect the American people from the threat of ballistic missile attack was settled--and settled unequivocally in favor of missile defense."
Although the United States is a founding member of the UN Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space and is a signatory to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty banning orbital nuclear weapons, as the previous administration amply demonstrated, international treaties and agreements are so many worthless scraps of paper to be tossed aside when it inconveniences the Empire.
Ratcheting up tensions in the wake of the 9/11 provocation as plans to invade Iraq were secretly being hatched by the Bush crime family, at former SecDef Rumsfeld's insistence, the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty with Russia and proclaimed that it would build--and deploy--a missile defense system.
With a cover story that the system would be based in Central Europe to "protect" NATO allies from a nonexistent "Iranian threat," Washington believes it has the right to threaten and cajole other nations because of its status as the world's "sole superpower."
Mikhail Barabanov, the editor of Arms Export magazine, believes that the "real motivation of the multibillion-dollar undertaking is the desire to expand U.S. military and strategic capacities and constrict those of other states that have nuclear missiles, Russia and China most of all," UPI reported.
Barabanov argued that "even a limited missile defense system injects a high degree of indeterminacy into the strategic plans of other countries and undermines the principle of mutual nuclear deterrence.
"With Russia continuing to reduce its nuclear arsenal significantly and China maintaining a low missile potential," Barabanov said that "the Americans' ability to down even a few dozen warheads could deprive the other side of guaranteed ability to cause the U.S. unacceptable damage in a nuclear war."
In response to the American threat, Barabanov wrote that "the only way to prevent a slow growth of the American strategic advantage is a significant increase in the purchase of new ballistic missiles by Russia."
America's drive for nuclear- and space superiority excludes any attempt to limit deployment of new weapons systems anywhere, including space. While Bush and his minions may have receded from the headlines, Washington militarists are up to their old tricks--and semantic parlor games--rebranded as "change."
In June, The New York Times reported that the administration will "consider proposals and concepts for arms control measures if they are equitable, effectively verifiable, and enhance the national security of the United States and its allies."
As with all things Obama however, the administration's "new space policy" mantra is more public relations puffery than substance.
Peter Marquez, director of space policy at the National Security Council told the Times that Washington would "oppose the development of new legal regimes or other restrictions that seek to prohibit or limit U.S. access or use of space."
This of course, is a red herring since no other nation has sought to "prohibit or limit" America's "access or use of space" for peaceful purposes. As a means to preclude the prospect for negotiating a new arms control treaty for space, despite international backing by China, Russia and America's NATO allies, caveats and distortions by the NSC are deal killers.
"Those are the gates," Marquez told the Times, "that the arms control proposals must come through before we consider them." In other words, the global godfather has spoken so forget it.
If the U.S., as candidate Obama declared, is truly interested in stopping the "the slow slide towards a new battlefield," why then has the Pentagon embarked on a crash program to field a new generation of orbital weapons?
Washington's lack of transparency when it comes to the X-37B's potential to compromise other nations' satellite systems reveal that Obama's pledge to strengthen "international cooperation" for de-escalating conflicts in space, like his promise to close the Guantánamo Bay gulag, end torture or halt secret state domestic spying, are a cynical pack of lies.
Space Situational Awareness: Preparing the Orbital Battlespace
With the upcoming launch of the first in a series of spysats called the Space Based Surveillance System (SBSS) by AFSPC, we can expect more in the orbital dirty tricks department.
Built by usual suspects Boeing and Northrop Grumman for the Air Force, the SBSS, The Register tells us "is intended to make life much easier for the US air force Space Superiority Wing, which tries to keep tabs on all other nations' military 'space assets'."
In April, Defense Systems reported that AFSPC has "identified four pillars" of space situational awareness: "intelligence characterization, data integration and exploitation, threat warning, and attack reporting."
To address those "pillars," three new hardware programs are coming on-line: "the Space Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) space vehicle, Space Fence and Space Surveillance Telescope (SST)."
SBSS is viewed by Pentagon star warriors as an ideal spy platform because it "offers a resilient space-based capability that weather cannot affect. It doesn't have foreign basing issues. And it provides more timely revisit rates for high-interest objects at geosynchronous orbit."
Or, more realistically, given Pentagon proclivities to shoot first and analyze later, provide wannabe starship troopers with real-time targets for efficient takedown.
While deliberate meddling with other nation's satellites is strictly forbidden by international treaty, The Register informs us that "America might not be above a little bit of unattributable orbital naughtiness itself at some point in the future."
Indeed, "unattributable orbital naughtiness" is the name of the game. Last week, The Register reported that the Pentagon's new "'fractionated' swarm satellites--in which groups of small wirelessly-linked modules in orbit will replace today's large spacecraft--will be able to scatter to avoid enemy attacks and then reform into operational clusters."
According to a DARPA press release, "System F6 (Future, Fast, Flexible, Fractionated, Free-Flying Spacecraft) demonstrator program [will] emphasize development of an open and ubiquitous space architecture and an associated set of open standards. The fractionated spacecraft concept replaces large, monolithic space assets with clusters of smaller, wirelessly-interconnected modules that share resources to create, in effect, a 'virtual satellite'."
In other words, satswarms in constant communication with their Pentagon masters on the ground.
With an emphasis on "real-time, fault-tolerant resource sharing over wireless cross-links; algorithms for safe and agile multi-body cluster flight; persistent broadband communications between low earth orbit (LEO) spacecraft and the ground; and a robust and scalable multi-level information assurance architecture," DARPA believes the F6 program will "enable multiple payloads supplied by different agencies, services or even countries to share common infrastructure at multiple levels of security."
DARPAcrats say the project will "exploit benefits of democratization of innovation" and find better ways to kill people in the process. How's that for innovation!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
