Our country is full of police departments that fund themselves through seizures of drug money, that they know about by using data our intelligence services collected on us.
I wonder who's using the phone data to buy and sell stocks? Maybe that's what they'll get into once we legalize marijuana.
There are easier ways for the government to make money. There is a strong belief the CIA was selling drugs to citizens in the 80s to fund themselves [1]
A strong belief in the sense that it's a fact. Read about operation Dark Star [1]. The cia was complicit in Rick Ross selling several metric tons of cocaine (earning himself inflation adjusted $0.85B [2]). Every American should read Dark Star [3] to know what cia and republicans get up to when a central american country exercises a little too much democracy or our pet dictator is overthrown. That is, while the cia is not busy encouraging rape, torture, indiscriminate killings of civilians, etc.
In his affidavit to the World Court, former contra Edgar Chamorro testified
that "The CIA did not discourage such tactics. To the contrary, the Agency
severely criticized me when I admitted to the press that the FDN had
regularly kidnapped and executed agrarian reform workers and civilians. We
were told that the only way to defeat the Sandinistas was to...kill, kidnap,
rob and torture..." [4]
While this story may be true, it doesn't quite support 'There are easier ways for the government to make money.'
The CIA is very different from local law enforcement agencies, and they don't just rely on the material support of siezures of cash and other things which go to auction, but a substantial portion of all of their staffing budgets come from federal drug grants, which means that there are individuals who need to protect the drug war in order to protect their jobs.
There are scarcely easier ways for law enforcement to fund itself than to sieze cash from marijuana farmers and distributors. Even legalization campaigns to tax and regulate come across as shockingly close to protection schemes, since not supporting them is effectively supporting the continued risk of militarized police encounters.
McCoy addresses this theory in his book: The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. His conclusion was that the CIA appreciated having a little no-strings-attached pocket change, but that it wasn't funding them in a meaningful way, and that their involvement in the drug trade was more for the access that it gave them to shady people.
Comments
Our country is full of police departments that fund themselves through seizures of drug money, that they know about by using data our intelligence services collected on us.
I wonder who's using the phone data to buy and sell stocks? Maybe that's what they'll get into once we legalize marijuana.
There are easier ways for the government to make money. There is a strong belief the CIA was selling drugs to citizens in the 80s to fund themselves [1]
[1]http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/9712/ch01p1.htm
Why the downvotes? French article, one among many that mention Drug smuggling by some agencies (CIA?) http://www.lepoint.fr/monde/la-vie-abracadabrante-d-un-pilot...
Some people are always surprised by well established facts half the world knows about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_traffic...
A strong belief in the sense that it's a fact. Read about operation Dark Star [1]. The cia was complicit in Rick Ross selling several metric tons of cocaine (earning himself inflation adjusted $0.85B [2]). Every American should read Dark Star [3] to know what cia and republicans get up to when a central american country exercises a little too much democracy or our pet dictator is overthrown. That is, while the cia is not busy encouraging rape, torture, indiscriminate killings of civilians, etc.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_traffic...[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Freeway%22_Rick_Ross
[3] http://www.narconews.com/darkalliance/drugs/start.htm
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contras#Human_rights_violations
While this story may be true, it doesn't quite support 'There are easier ways for the government to make money.'
The CIA is very different from local law enforcement agencies, and they don't just rely on the material support of siezures of cash and other things which go to auction, but a substantial portion of all of their staffing budgets come from federal drug grants, which means that there are individuals who need to protect the drug war in order to protect their jobs.
There are scarcely easier ways for law enforcement to fund itself than to sieze cash from marijuana farmers and distributors. Even legalization campaigns to tax and regulate come across as shockingly close to protection schemes, since not supporting them is effectively supporting the continued risk of militarized police encounters.
McCoy addresses this theory in his book: The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. His conclusion was that the CIA appreciated having a little no-strings-attached pocket change, but that it wasn't funding them in a meaningful way, and that their involvement in the drug trade was more for the access that it gave them to shady people.