US & NATO encourage Afghan poppy production

Making the world safe for drugs

A funny thing happened on the way to Afghanistan, the US

and NATO protected poppy producers from the Taliban.

The "War" on Drugs  -  Silly, and you thought the war in Afghanistan was about terrorism.

The Taliban was eradicating poppy production as "un-Islamic".  Then in comes NATO and poppy farmers are allowed to grow their crops again.

Today, with 87,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan, cultivation of poppies has hit record levels as NATO forces prepare to exit the country. The UN warned warlords may be the biggest benefactor of the situation.

The report, the Afghanistan Opium Survey for 2013, provides little cause for optimism among countries that have witnessed a surge in incidences of heroin abuse among their populace since US-led forces started a military offensive against the Taliban on Afghan soil in 2001.

Afghanistan, long the world’s main heroin supplier, has seen its total area of poppy seed plantations explode to 516,000 acres - a 36 percent increase from 2012, according to the report, released on Wednesday reports RT News.

Last year, the war-torn Central Asian country accounted for 75 percent of the world’s opium supplies; Jean-Luc Lemahieu, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in Afghanistan, has said in the past that supplies may reach 90 percent of the global total this year.

US Soldiers guarding opium in Afghanistan?

There is a single anti-Israel photo at the end of this video that I do not like. 

But 99% of the video is so cleaver that I felt I needed to post it.  Let those

with open minds view it and decide for themselves.

Afghan Drugs

A Russian point of view - poppy production had been nearly abolished.

 

The new data surpasses the previous record set in 2007, when 477,000 acres were cultivated, according to the UN drug watchdog. Total opium output is estimated at 5,500 tons, up 49 percent from 3,700 tons in 2012.

With profits from opium cultivation nearing $1 billion, or 4 percent of gross domestic product, insurgency groups like the Taliban will only benefit from the cash crop.

A massive inflow of cash connected to the sale of opium has helped the Taliban insurgency, which imposes a tax on poppy farmers in areas it controls, in addition to the outright participation in the selling and transferring of the crop.
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Afghan government officials and tribal warlords have also helped themselves to a piece of the opium trade action.
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"The short-term prognosis is not positive," said Jean-Luc Lemahieu, as quoted by Reuters. "The illicit economy is establishing itself, and seems to be taking over in importance from the licit economy."
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One reason for the surge in opium cultivation is the lack of political will, which is noticeably lacking with April presidential elections on the horizon, Lemahieu said. Afghan President Hamid Karzai is ineligible to run again, while some of the potential candidates receive their financial support from poppy producers.
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The US-led coalition has rejected any crop eradication operations by its soldiers for fear of bankrupting farmers and forcing them to join the insurgency, a policy criticized by Russia, among others.
  

2001 Blast from the Past Article
But only a "crazy" fringe person would suggest that the US and NATO went into Afghanistan in order to keep the supply of drugs flowing.  Only a conspiracy nut would suggest that governments want to keep their populations in a perpetual drugged stupor so they will not question their Masters.  It would be wrong to say these things, so I will not do it.

Fast forward to 2013
Afghanistan, long the world’s main heroin supplier, has seen its total area of poppy
seed plantations explode to 516,000 acres - a 36% increase from 2012.

87,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan

This October 2013 map displays approximate numbers of forces provided to ISAF by Allied and other contributing nations, and countries responsible for ISAF Regional Commands.
See more at:  ISAF.nato.int/troop numbers.

DEA has been spying on your phones since 1987

Trashing the Bill of Rights since 1987

The Big Brother DEA logged 4 billion phone

calls a day since 1987.

What the Fuck!  -  The fascist DEA is issuing their own search warrants to spy on billions of phone calls every God Damn fucking day!  No judge or grand jury is consulted.  Instead the DEA issues their own phony bullshit “administrative subpoenas” to bully phone companies into helping them spy on Americans.

I am so fucking tired of the fascist shit.

Please note this Fascist crap is totally bipartisan.  No matter who controls Congress or the White House this unconstitutional crap just gets bigger and bigger.

For at least six years, law enforcement officials working on a counter-narcotics program have had routine access, using subpoenas, to an enormous AT&T database that contains the records of decades of Americans’ phone calls — parallel to but covering a far longer time than the National Security Agency’s hotly disputed collection of phone call logs.       

The Hemisphere Project, an unconstitutional "partnership" between federal and local drug officials and AT&T that has not previously been reported, involves an extremely close association between the government and the telecommunications giant.
      

The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives and supply them with the phone data from as far back as 1987 reports the New York Times.
 

The project comes to light at a time of vigorous public debate over the proper limits on government surveillance and on the relationship between government agencies and communications companies. It offers the most significant look to date at the use of such large-scale data for law enforcement, rather than for national security.
      

The scale and longevity of the data storage appears to be unmatched by other government programs, including the N.S.A.’s gathering of phone call logs under the Patriot Act. The N.S.A. stores the data for nearly all calls in the United States, including phone numbers and time and duration of calls, for five years.
      

Hemisphere covers every call that passes through an AT&T switch — not just those made by AT&T customers — and includes calls dating back 26 years, according to Hemisphere training slides bearing the logo of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

Some four billion call records are added to the database every day, the slides say; technical specialists say a single call may generate more than one record. Unlike the N.S.A. data, the Hemisphere data includes information on the locations of callers.

The slides were given to The New York Times by Drew Hendricks, a peace activist in Port Hadlock, Wash. He said he had received the PowerPoint presentation, which is unclassified but marked “Law enforcement sensitive,” in response to a series of public information requests to West Coast police agencies.
      

The program was started in 2007, according to the slides, and has been carried out in great secrecy.
       

“All requestors are instructed to never refer to Hemisphere in any official document,” one slide says. A search of the Nexis database found no reference to the program in news reports or Congressional hearings.
      

The Obama administration acknowledged the extraordinary scale of the Hemisphere database and the unusual embedding of AT&T employees in government drug units in three states.

"The further a society drifts from truth
the more it will hate those who speak it."
George Orwell

But they said the project, which has proved especially useful in finding criminals who discard cellphones frequently to thwart government tracking, employed routine investigative procedures used in criminal cases for decades and posed no novel privacy issues.
      

Crucially, they said, the phone data is stored by AT&T, and not by the government as in the N.S.A. program. It is queried for phone numbers of interest mainly using what are called “administrative subpoenas,” those issued not by a grand jury or a judge but by a federal agency, in this case the D.E.A.
      

Brian Fallon, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement that “subpoenaing drug dealers’ phone records is a bread-and-butter tactic in the course of criminal investigations.”
      

Fallon said that “the records are maintained at all times by the phone company, not the government,” and that Hemisphere “simply streamlines the process of serving the subpoena to the phone company so law enforcement can quickly keep up with drug dealers when they switch phone numbers to try to avoid detection.”
      

He said that the program was paid for by the D.E.A. and the White House drug policy office but that the cost was not immediately available.
      

Officials said four AT&T employees are now working in what is called the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area program, which brings together D.E.A. and local investigators — two in the program’s Atlanta office and one each in Houston and Los Angeles.
      

Government to subsidize marijuana for the poor

"Dude, thanks for the free pot."

From each according his ability, to each according

to his need to get high.

An unprecedented D.C. government program will require medical marijuana dispensaries to put aside 2 percent of their profits in order to subsidize pot purchases for poor patients.

Under the proposed rule, which was published in the D.C. Register last week and is in the midst of a 30-day review period, dispensaries will give at least a 20 percent discount on marijuana to low-income people at or below 200 percent of the federal poverty level.

Clinics often offer discounts to poor patients, and other states mention low-income provisions in medical marijuana legislation. But Allen St. Pierre, executive director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, said no other states have inserted this type of provision into regulations reports the Washington Times.

“This rule is totally unprecedented in the medical marijuana community,” he said.

Medical marijuana sales in the District began last month at the Capital City Care clinic. Prices for marijuana range between $380-$440 per ounce, according to the clinic’s website.

The sliding scale program is intended to improve access to medical marijuana for the poor, which potentially comprise a large percentage of marijuana consumers. Often, marijuana patients do not hold full-time jobs due to the nature of their illnesses that qualify them to use pot medically, analysts say.

Medical marijuana cards issued to patients indicate whether they are low-income and eligible for discounts on the drug.

City officials in March proposed a subsidy program in which dispensaries would pay into a city-operated fund, but that proposal was amended. Under the new rule, dispensaries would have to reserve funds themselves to ensure that the discounts they give amount to 2 percent of their income. The city will audit the fund annually and can adjust the percentage of their profits that dispensaries have to reserve for subsidies.

Secret Courts gathering Secret Data for the DEA - Goodbye Constitution

Government digs deep for your data

Illegal and unconstitutionally collected NSA data is used

by the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The Growing American Police State  -  The Bill of Rights is being openly pissed on by the very hacks who took an oath to protect and defend the Constitution.

The great Federalist Constitutional Republic of the Founding Fathers is gone.  Replacing it is a centralized neo-Fascist 1984 Surveillance State with Secret Courts, with Secret Rulings and Secret Police spying on every American.

A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses reports Reuters News.

"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations."


Dr. Michael Savage
Savage Defends NSA Whistleblower, Edward Snowden, Hero and True Patriot.  Savage rails that there is no Republican Party . . . There is no opposition party in America.  There is only the one party of the State.  A Savage show from June 10th.

THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS DIVISION

The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.

Today, much of the SOD's work is classified, and officials asked that its precise location in Virginia not be revealed. The documents reviewed by Reuters are marked "Law Enforcement Sensitive," a government categorization that is meant to keep them confidential.

"Remember that the utilization of SOD cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function," a document presented to agents reads. The document specifically directs agents to omit the SOD's involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony. Agents are instructed to then use "normal investigative techniques to recreate the information provided by SOD."

A spokesman with the Department of Justice, which oversees the DEA, declined to comment.

Two senior DEA officials defended the program, and said trying to "recreate" an investigative trail is a technique that is used almost daily.

A former federal agent in the northeastern United States who received such tips from SOD described the process. "You'd be told only, ‘Be at a certain truck stop at a certain time and look for a certain vehicle.' And so we'd alert the state police to find an excuse to stop that vehicle, and then have a drug dog search it," the agent said.

A QUESTION OF CONSTITUTIONALITY

"That's outrageous," said Tampa attorney James Felman, a vice chairman of the criminal justice section of the American Bar Association. "It strikes me as indefensible."

Lawrence Lustberg, a New Jersey defense lawyer, said any systematic government effort to conceal the circumstances under which cases begin "would not only be alarming but pretty blatantly unconstitutional."

Lustberg and others said the government's use of the SOD program skirts established court procedures by which judges privately examine sensitive information, such as an informant's identity or classified evidence, to determine whether the information is relevant to the defense.

"You can't game the system," said former federal prosecutor Henry E. Hockeimer Jr. "You can't create this subterfuge. These are drug crimes, not national security cases. If you don't draw the line here, where do you draw it?"