Afghan Drug Cops Point Fingers

The Afghan minister of counter narcotics says foreign troops are earning money from drug production in Afghanistan!

Yes, that is a mighty bold statement, apparently made by the Afghan equivalent of the U.S. DEA….. can there actually be any truth to this claim?

General Khodaidad Khodaidad said the majority of drugs are stockpiled in two provinces controlled by troops from the US, the UK, and Canada, IRNA reported on Saturday.

He went on to say that NATO forces are taxing the production of opium in the regions under their control.

Afghanistan is the world’s biggest supplier of opium.

Drug production in the Central Asian country has increased dramatically since the US-led invasion eight years ago.

A recent report by the United Nations states that Afghan opium is having a devastating impact on the world, killing thousands in consumer countries.

Meanwhile, The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Ahmad Wali Karzai, a brother of the Afghan president, is involved in the opium trade, meets with Taliban leaders, and is also a CIA operative.

The opium trade is the major source of Taliban financing.

Militarization of Law Enforcement

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One of the most alarming side effects of the federal government’s war on drugs is the militarization of law enforcement in America. There are two aspects to the militarization phenomenon. First, the American tradition of civil-military separation is breaking down as Congress assigns more and more law enforcement responsibilities to the armed forces. Second, state and local police officers are increasingly emulating the war-fighting tactics of soldiers. Most Americans are unaware of the militarization phenomenon simply because it has been creeping along imperceptibly for many years. To get perspective, it will be useful to consider some recent events:

The U.S. military played a role in the Waco incident. In preparation for their disastrous 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound, federal law enforcement agents were trained by Army Special Forces at Fort Hood, Texas. And Delta Force commanders would later advise Attorney General Janet Reno to insert gas into the compound to end the 51-day siege. Waco resulted in the largest number of civilian deaths ever arising from a law enforcement operation.1

Between 1995 and 1997 the Department of Defense gave police departments 1.2 million pieces of military hardware, including 73 grenade launchers and 112 armored personnel carriers. The Los Angeles Police Department has acquired 600 Army surplus M-16s. Even small-town police departments are getting into the act. The seven-officer department in Jasper, Florida, is now equipped with fully automatic M-16s.2

In 1996 President Bill Clinton appointed a military commander, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, to oversee enforcement of the federal drug laws as the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy.3

Since the mid-1990s U.S. Special Forces have been going after drug dealers in foreign countries. According to the U.S. Southern Command, American soldiers occupy three radar sites in Colombia to help monitor drug flights. And Navy SEALs have assisted in drug interdiction in the port city of Cap-Haitien, Haiti.4

The U.S. Marine Corps is now patrolling the Mexican border to keep drugs and illegal immigrants out of this country. In 1997 a Marine anti-drug patrol shot and killed 18-year-old Esequiel Hernandez as he was tending his family’s herd of goats on private property. The Justice Department settled a wrongful death lawsuit with the Hernandez family for $1.9 million. 5 … Continue Reading

U.S. Soldiers Armed and Wasted

Certain types of Prescription drugs used by soldiers can prove to be deadly.

Marine Corporal Michael Cataldi woke as he heard a truck rumble past.
He opened his eyes, but saw nothing. It was the middle of the night, and he was facedown in the sands of western Iraq. His loaded M16 was pinned beneath him.

Cataldi had no idea how he’d gotten to where he now lay, some 200 meters from the dilapidated building where his buddies slept. But he suspected what had caused this nightmare: His Klonopin prescription had run out.

His ordeal was not all that remarkable for a person on that anti-anxiety medication. In the lengthy labeling that accompanies each prescription, Klonopin users are warned against abruptly stopping the medicine, since doing so can cause psychosis, hallucinations, and other symptoms. What makes Cataldi’s story extraordinary is that he was a U. S. Marine at war, and that the drug’s adverse effects endangered lives — his own, his fellow Marines’, and the lives of any civilians unfortunate enough to cross his path.

“It put everyone within rifle distance at risk,” he says.

In deploying an all-volunteer army to fight two ongoing wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has increasingly relied on prescription drugs to keep its warriors on the front lines. In recent years, the number of military prescriptions for antidepressants, sleeping pills, and painkillers has risen as soldiers come home with battered bodies and troubled minds. And many of those service members are then sent back to war theaters in distant lands with bottles of medication to fortify them.

According to data from a U. S. Army mental-health survey released last year, about 12 percent of soldiers in Iraq and 15 percent of those in Afghanistan reported taking antidepressants, anti-anxiety medications, or sleeping pills. Prescriptions for painkillers have also skyrocketed. Data from the Department of Defense last fall showed that as of September 2007, prescriptions for narcotics for active-duty troops had risen to almost 50,000 a month, compared with about 33,000 a month in October 2003, not long after the Iraq war began.

In other words, thousands of American fighters armed with the latest killing technology are taking prescription drugs that the Federal Aviation Administration considers too dangerous for commercial pilots.Military officials say they believe many medications can be safely used on the battlefield. They say they have policies to ensure that drugs they consider inappropriate for soldiers on the front lines are rarely used. And they say they are not using the drugs in order to send unstable warriors back to war.

Yet the experience of soldiers and Marines like Cataldi show the dangers of drugging our warriors. It also worries some physicians and veterans’ advocates. “There are risks in putting people back to battle with medicines in their bodies,” says psychiatrist Judith Broder, M. D., founder of the Soldiers Project, a group that helps service members suffering from mental illness.

Obama Raises Intelligence Budget

President Obama’s fiscal 2010 budget would fund a major new spy satellite proposal, provide $2 billion in additional funding for Department of Defense surveillance efforts and increase spending on drug-related intelligence programs.

Although most specifics of the intelligence budget are classified, budget documents provide hints of some priorities.

The budget would allocate an unspecified amount to the new “Imagery Satellite Way Ahead” program, a joint effort between the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Defense designed to revamp the nation’s constellation of spy satellites.

The mostly classified plan would include new, redesigned “electro-optical” satellites, which collect data from across the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as the expanded use of commercial satellite imagery. Although the cost is secret, most estimates place it in the multibillion-dollar range.

The Senate Intelligence Committee has been at odds with Defense appropriators and intelligence community leaders over spy satellite capabilities.

The top Republican on the Intelligence panel, Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, has pushed for alternative plans to those recommended by intelligence community leaders, contending that his proposals would cost less and perform better.

The Pentagon would get about $2 billion more for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) programs such as unmanned drones and improved software for processing data — all to better combat terrorists and insurgents. The total amount is classified.

According to a Pentagon budget summary, that money would pay for:

• 50 Predator-class unmanned aerial patrols. According to a Defense Department summary, “This capability, which has been in high demand in Iraq and Afghanistan, will now be permanently funded in the base budget.”

• An increase in manned ISR capabilities, “such as the turbo-prop aircraft deployed as part of Task Force Odin in Iraq.”

• “Research and development on a number of ISR enhancements and experimental platforms.”

In addition, the FBI would get a boost of $555.6 million to help pay for an additional 357 agents and 321 intelligence analysts, according to a Department of Justice summary.

The Treasury Department’s counterterror and financial intelligence operations would receive $168 million, or 10 percent more than in fiscal 2009. Some of the funds would go toward supporting a joint program between the Treasury and U.S. Special Operations Command, an Afghanistan Threat Finance Cell designed to disrupt terror financing in that country, with an emphasis on narcotics.

Increased funding through the Drug Enforcement Administration and other Justice Department drug-related programs would pay for 25 new intelligence analysts. Much of their work would focus on interrupting drug flows across the U.S.-Mexico border and aiding law enforcement in combating Mexican drug cartels.

Unlike his predecessor, Obama does not recommend closing the National Drug Intelligence Center, a program that is located in the district of House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John P. Murtha , D-Pa., and has prompted heated partisan floor fights.

Although the request for the National Intelligence Program — which includes all spy agencies except those of the military branches — is classified, recently disclosed figures for fiscal 2008 put the budget total at $47.5 billion.

Military Injects Addicted Soldiers

Drug-addicted veterans are being injected with cocaine by researchers at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in taxpayer-funded studies.

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The study subjects are being given the injections as part of a search for medicines that researchers hope will block cocaine absorption in the body, said Timothy O’Leary, the VA’s acting director of research and development.

All the subjects were recruited because they were addicted to cocaine, O’Leary said. About 40 volunteers — most of them veterans — are being given injections at VA labs in Kansas City and San Antonio, he added.

Hundreds of veterans have apparently been used as human subjects in the past decade, according to records and interviews with officials.

The VA has handed over several other abstracts from studies over the past decade, and O’Leary said his agency has been conducting such research for at least 25 years.

O’Leary said that the subjects’ safety was paramount. But documents of a decade-old study that tested morphine on veterans found nearly 800 “adverse events” from anorexia to heart tremors.

Last month, The Examiner reported that the federal government had spent millions of taxpayer dollars to give addicts drugs such as crack and intravenous cocaine as well as morphine and other opiates in publicly funded clinical studies. The VA documents and interviews suggest that the programs have been even more widespread than previously suspected.

According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, more than 6,000 licenses have been given to scientists to use otherwise illegal drugs in their experiments. DEA officials declined to hand over their records.

O’Leary said the studies were desperately needed to find ways to treat addiction. An estimated 140,000 vets suffer from drug addiction, according to VA officials.

“As you know, there are a lot of people out there who suffer from addictions. It’s a huge societal problem,” O’Leary said in a phone interview.

Critics say that experimenting on addicts runs contrary to ethical guidelines on “informed consent.” The doctrine requires that human laboratory subjects understand the risks of the experiment and can say no. For at least 20 years, scientists have recognized that addiction is a disease, which means that addicts can’t simply say no.

Pressure is mounting on the government to come clean about its drug experiments.

“How many ways can the government get it wrong?” Cato Institute scholar Tim Lynch asked The Examiner.

Compared with the CIA’s former habit of testing dangerous drugs on unwilling volunteers, these programs are “an improvement if the research deals with volunteers and full disclosure of the risks involved,” Lynch said. “But it is not clear to me why the government has to subsidize such research.”

U.S. Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said through a spokesman that he was “closely reviewing” the matter.

O’Leary said that the cocaine injections in San Antonio and Kansas City were being given in “extremely controlled conditions,” but when asked to detail what he meant by that phrase, he said he wasn’t familiar with those labs.

VA officials have not acted on a Freedom of Information Act request for access to their files.