ACLU– Courts Shouldn’t let tech trump law
Tracked: The Supreme Court Shouldn't Let Technology Trump the Constitution
Yesterday we filed a friend-of-the-court brief in United States v. Jones, which Adam Liptak at The New York Times called "the most important Fourth Amendment case in a decade." We are asking the Supreme Court to hold that the government needs to establish probable cause and obtain a warrant before attaching a GPS device to a person's car and tracking their every move.
This case is one of the first in which the Supreme Court will grapple with the profound impact of new technologies on the privacy that Americans have always enjoyed and expected. It could shape whether the Fourth Amendment's protections from warrantless searches keep pace with new technologies, preserving our civil liberties into the 21st Century.
Our brief explains why it is important that the Court conclude that the Fourth Amendment protects us from warrantless GPS tracking:
GPS technology provides law enforcement agents with a powerful and inexpensive method of tracking individuals over an extensive period of time and an unlimited expanse of space as they traverse public and private areas. Unless this Court concludes that GPS tracking is a Fourth Amendment search, any individual's movements could be subject to remote monitoring, and permanent recording, at the sole and unfettered discretion of any police officer. Without judicial oversight, the police could track unlimited numbers of people for days, weeks, or months at a time. Americans could never be confident that they were free from round-the-clock surveillance of their activities. With a network of satellites constantly feeding data to a remote computer, police could, at any instant, determine an individual's current or past movements and the times and locations that he or she crossed paths with other GPS-tracked persons.
Although the Jones case involves attaching a GPS device to a car, its impact could stretch far beyond this specific circumstance. GPS devices are only one of numerous new technologies capable of exposing private facts about individuals who have done nothing more than set foot outside of their homes. The cost of being out of doors should not include being targeted by a battery of technologies that possess surveillance capabilities far exceeding those of the unaided five senses.
Today people carry their cell phones with them wherever they go, in private as well as public spaces. There are now more than 302 million active cell phone subscriber accounts in the United States. The latest statistics indicate that 26.6% of households no longer even maintain a landline. The government's proposed rule would effectively turn each of these cell phones into an instrument of state surveillance to be activated at the unsupervised whim of any law enforcement officer.
Last week the ACLU released to the public an extremely important Justice Department document explaining for the first time how long cell phone companies keep records on our movements. It should not have taken a public record request to the government to find out such a basic and important fact about how cell phones monitor hundreds of millions of Americans. It certainly should not have taken until 2011 — many years after most of us acquired our first Nokia brick phones — for the public to be informed about the way our personal information is stored and ultimately handed over to the government.
Now that we've forced disclosure of the Justice Department document, it is clear that all cell phone companies keep records of where we have been for a least a year and, if you use AT&T, it has recorded your location back to July 2008, with no indication that it ever purges location records from its system. The hundreds of millions of Americans who use cell phones deserve to rest assured that the government will not convert these cell phones into tracking devices without demonstrating probable cause and obtaining a warrant.
Join us in demanding your dotRights, because we shouldn't have to choose between civil liberties and using technologies so commonplace that it would be difficult to live in society without them.
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Why You Shouldn’t Vote … Ever
Site editor’s note: This post from DJ Pangburn originally appeared on death + taxes.
What to do if you’re courageous enough to admit the Obama administration and Democrats are full of shit and the Tea Party and Republicans are dangerous and stupid?
Barack Obama the messenger
President Barack Obama soared into the public consciousness with a stirring speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. He then took Howard Dean’s example and used the power of the Internet to create a fundraising juggernaut for his historic 2008 Presidential run. With a swiftness not seen since JFK’s political ascendancy, Obama became president and claimed broad power to affect “change” across the country. But Kennedy only had to surmount his Irish Catholic background — Barack Obama had to transcend the fact that he is African-American.
But appearances are, in the final analysis, immaterial. Just as a magician uses scenery and sleight-of-hand to divert the audience’s attention, Barack Obama has used his background, intellect, perceived worldliness and powers of speech to distort the reality field, as I call it (to repurpose Steve Jobs’ “reality-distortion field”). To get Americans thinking about a certain reality, while another is at work behind the scenes.
Maybe you — an Obama voter — have asked yourself, “What happened to the man for whom I voted?” I would argue nothing. Make no mistake about it: Barack Obama is a masterful political manipulator. And if one is able to let dissolve mental distinctions of party — Democrat, Republican — then Obama can be seen for what he really is: a trojan horse.
I am not a religious man. I am not a Republican and I am not a Democrat. A Jeffersonian Democrat might be more on point. But labels are so inelegant and ultimately rather pointless. And, I must admit, I erred most spectacularly in my vote for Barack Obama. There I sat front and center in the Obama Magic Show: my reason lobotomized by my desire—no, need—to see a man of great intellect inhabit the office after the devolutionary presidency of George W. Bush.
This was Obama’s greatest trick: the lobotomization of man’s capacity to reason. The wolf hadn’t come in sheep’s clothing — he’d used the alchemy of television and print to transmogrify himself into a saint. All were not fooled by the illusionist, however; but just enough were dazzled in the end to give Obama the presidency and the Democrats control of Congress, where they continued the Bush policy of caving to corporate masters and of American political and economic hegemony.
The Koch Brothers-funded Tea Party reactionaries, however, aren’t as into illusion as Obama and the Democrats, unless of course you examine the sugar daddies behind the Tea Party apparatus, flush with corporate dollars. Look into Robert Rowling and Trever Rees-Jones of American Crossroads (a 527 organization led by Karl Rove), or more prominently Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News, his perpetual motion machine of corporate pitch men.
The answer for them is limited government but robust national defense policy. Translation: unimpeded corporate dominance in the U.S. economy and muscular foreign policy in the Reagan and Bush 43 tradition, which will benefit defense contractors. Two different but ultimately convergent streams to enrich corporate entities. The openness of this method is startling in its brazenness.
The Tea Party has some sensible ideas in the limited government platform, but the reality of their vision would be an approximation of the Reagan and Bush presidencies: secrecy, hawkish military maneuvering, corporate welfare, rapacious capitalism and so forth. That is the endpoint of the limited government espoused by the Tea Party reactionaries. Defense contractors and corporations benefit markedly, and maybe some benefit will be seen elsewhere, but certainly not in middle-class bank accounts. Limited government, in fact, is devoid of meaning because the master remains the same: big business.
President Obama revealed his true colors when he had a unique moment in American history to effectively punish Wall Street and the banking system that brought the nation and the world to its knees, but did not. Wall Street’s banks went unpunished. Why? Obama’s economic team, populated by ex-Goldman Sachs bankers, continues to let the Federal Reserve act as Wall Street’s visible hand in the nation and world’s economy. What, I ask, has really changed from President Bush’s presidency to Obama’s?
When it comes to the treatment of big business, we can’t tell the difference, either
Obama’s pulling the military out of Iraq finally (though advisors will remain) but escalating our Afghan campaign. He lords over the largest intelligence services in the world in the CIA and NSA, who continue their culture of violating civil liberties. And Obama will be given the power to essentially “kill” the internet by way of the Senator Joseph Lieberman-sponsored “Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act (PCNAA).” The bill would allow the President to shut down all or portions of the internet in the event of a cyber attack, but this is all scenery because the potentialities of such power should be downright frightening to all Americans.
In the event that our government becomes outwardly oppressive in the future — a fundamentalist, crusading religious state, for example — the President would be able to shut down the Internet. The President, in effect, would be able to effectively control the flow of information; control the message in any critical moment; dissent would be crippled; mobilization of protests eliminated, or at least rendered more manageable. It would make a mockery of the American right of free speech and assembly, and mark us as no freer than the Chinese people.
And, as Dylan Ratigan noted last week with his well-articulated rant on “Morning Joe,” Obama is maintaining the U.S. policy of not going after the source of radical Islamic terrorism–Saudi Arabian funding of Wahabi schools. Schools that gave birth to the men who have visited terror on the U.S. and the world for decades now, including the 9/11 attacks.
What is an informed voter to do when presented with the illusionary tactics of Obama and the Democrats and the oligarchical platform of the Tea Party Republicans?
I might be courting controversy here, but it occurs to me the only gesture that makes any sense is: Don’t vote.
Voting in past elections has continually given us two options — one found in the open contempt for common people (Republicans) and the other in the two-faced champion of the people (Democrats).
Your vote tethers you to the machine. It absorbs the last bit of freedom you possess: the freedom to resist your ownership by the mechanisms of power. We can never fully escape the political reality that a minority, cloaked in the illusion of majority rule (Democrats or Republicans), manages our lives in one form or another from the moment of our birth to our very last breath.
Vote and you endorse one unfair political system over another. You legitimize its existence. You may vote for Democrats in the mid-terms because you don’t want to hand power over to the Tea Party reactionaries (a legitimate concern), but you are endorsing an apparatus (the Democratic party) that is still dominated by big business.
Do not let others saddle you with guilt for exercising your right of refusal. Instead of voting, why not take a more direct path of action in your community by volunteering your time by helping a literacy organization, for instance. Teach creative writing so a generation will rise who can speak truth to power. Educate others about the real stories behind history that our education system cannot and will not (by government sanction) teach. Volunteer your time at a food pantry. Work for lower rent in your neighborhood, like James Sullivan would have you do. Organize with others to combat racial or other social injustices in your neighborhood.
As Professor Brian Martin of University of Wollongong, Australia, writes:
“[T]he founding of the modern state a few centuries ago was met with great resistance: people would refuse to pay taxes, to be conscripted or to obey laws passed by national governments. The introduction of voting and the expanded suffrage have greatly aided the expansion of state power. Rather than seeing the system as one of ruler and ruled, people see at least the possibility of using state power to serve themselves. As electoral participation has increased, the degree of resistance to taxation, military service, and the immense variety of laws regulating behaviour, has been greatly attenuated.”
There are other ways of exercising your civic duty to your fellow citizens.
Don’t vote. Do something
Disinfo.com
8 Reasons Young Americans Don’t Fight Back: How the US Crushed Youth Resistance
Bruce E. Levine writes on Alternet:
The ruling elite has created social institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance.
Traditionally, young people have energized democratic movements. So it is a major coup for the ruling elite to have created societal institutions that have subdued young Americans and broken their spirit of resistance to domination.
Young Americans—even more so than older Americans—appear to have acquiesced to the idea that the corporatocracy can completely screw them and that they are helpless to do anything about it.
A 2010 Gallup poll asked Americans “Do you think the Social Security system will be able to pay you a benefit when you retire?” Among 18- to 34-years-olds, 76 percent of them said no. Yet despite their lack of confidence in the availability of Social Security for them, few have demanded it be shored up by more fairly payroll-taxing the wealthy; most appear resigned to having more money deducted from their paychecks for Social Security, even though they don’t believe it will be around to benefit them.
How exactly has American society subdued young Americans?
For more information, see original article.
US Government the World’s Leading Drug Peddler
The war on (certain) drugs
Noam Chomsky in “What Uncle Sam Really Wants”
One substitute for the disappearing Evil Empire has been the threat of drug traffickers from Latin America. In early September 1989, a major government-media blitz was launched by the President. That month the AP wires carried more stories about drugs than about Latin America, Asia, the Middle East and Africa combined. If you looked at television, every news program had a big section on how drugs were destroying our society, becoming the greatest threat to our existence, etc.
The effect on public opinion was immediate. When Bush won the 1988 election, people said the budget deficit was the biggest problem facing the country. Only about 3% named drugs. After the media blitz, concern over the budget was way down and drugs had soared to about 40% to 45%, which is highly unusual for an open question (where no specific answers are suggested).
Now, when some client state complains that the US government isn't sending it enough money, they no longer say, "we need it to stop the Russians" - rather, "we need it to stop drug trafficking." Like the Soviet threat, this enemy provides a good excuse for a US military presence where there's rebel activity or other unrest.
So internationally, "the war on drugs" provides a cover for intervention. Domestically, it has little to do with drugs but a lot to do with distracting the population, increasing repression in the inner cities, and building support for the attack on civil liberties.
That's not to say that "substance abuse" isn't a serious problem. At the time the drug war was launched, deaths from tobacco were estimated at about 300,000 a year, with perhaps another 100,000 from alcohol. But these aren't the drugs the Bush administration targeted. It went after illegal drugs, which had caused many fewer deaths - over 3500 a year - according to official figures. One reason for going after these drugs was that their use had been declining for some years, so the Bush administration could safely predict that its drug war would "succeed" in lowering drug use.
U.S. Federal Court: ‘1984 May Have Come A Bit Later Than Predicted, But It’s Here At Last’
DISINFO.COM AND THE NYTimes
Posted by majesticon September 11, 2011
What are the chances that the U.S. Supreme Court will restrict the use of GPS tracking devices in police surveillance? We’ll find out soon, reports Adam Liptak in the New York Times:
In a series of rulings on the use of satellites and cellphones to track criminal suspects, judges around the country have been citing George Orwell’s “1984” to sound an alarm. They say the Fourth Amendment’s promise of protection from government invasion of privacy is in danger of being replaced by the futuristic surveillance state Orwell described.
In April, Judge Diane P. Wood of the federal appeals court in Chicago wrote that surveillance using global positioning system devices would “make the system that George Orwell depicted in his famous novel, ‘1984,’ seem clumsy.” In a similar case last year, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski of the federal appeals court in San Francisco wrote that “1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last.”
Last month, Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis of the Federal District Court in Brooklyn turned down a government request for 113 days of location data from cellphone towers, citing “Orwellian intrusion” and saying the courts must “begin to address whether revolutionary changes in technology require changes to existing Fourth Amendment doctrine.”
The Supreme Court is about to do just that. In November, it will hear arguments in United States v. Jones, No. 10-1259, the most important Fourth Amendment case in a decade. The justices will address a question that has divided the lower courts: Do the police need a warrant to attach a GPS device to a suspect’s car and track its movements for weeks at a time?
Their answer will bring Fourth Amendment law into the digital age, addressing how its 18th-century prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures” applies to a world in which people’s movements are continuously recorded by devices in their cars, pockets and purses, by toll plazas and by transit systems.
The Jones case will address not only whether the placement of a space-age tracking device on the outside of a vehicle without a warrant qualifies as a search, but also whether the intensive monitoring it allows is different in kind from conventional surveillance by police officers who stake out suspects and tail their cars…
A Dead Prez documentary by Pardeep Dhillon
Dead Prez is a hip-hop duo, M1 and Stic Man from the United States, composed of stic.man and M-1, formed in 1996 in New York City, New York. They are known for their confrontational style, combined with socialist lyrics focused on both militant social justice and Pan-Africanism. The duo maintains an ethical stance against corporate control over the media, especially hip hop record labels. - Wikipedia
Valley of the Dollars
Source: Fortune (FORTUNE Magazine) - Oh, the agony of sleeplessness. "Last night she had only slept three hours with five red ones and two yellows," mourns Neely, a character in Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann's great work of pill- popping literature, and even those who haven't read Susann's novel may know the feeling she describes. Susann's masterpiece of sex and sleeping pills was a twisted ode to Seconal--a.k.a. the red ones, or the dolls--but Seconal, which is technically a barbiturate, was just one in a long parade of pharmacological sleep aids. Long before it there was morphine (Morpheus was the Greek god of dreams), and after it there were benzodiazepines, which include Valium and Halcion--the benzos. All have delivered sleep, blessed sleep, but they've also come with unfortunate side effects, including addiction, tolerance (eventually, you can't sleep even with 'em), rebound insomnia (certainly can't sleep without 'em), and sometimes with Halcion, episodes of memory loss and violence. But we all crave a quick fix, and the pharmaceutical companies crave dollars, and so today there are more pills than ever before. (Forget sex and money--this is the era of sleep and money.) In just the past 14 months, three new sleeping pills have been approved, and more are on the way. Turn on your TV set (but not before you try to go to sleep) or flip through the pages of a glossy magazine, and you can't escape an advertisement for one of the new dolls--Lunesta, Sonata, Rozerem. (There's an art to the soothing yet meaningless name.) Currently, about $2.5 billion of sleeping pills are sold in the U.S. each year; almost all of that is Ambien (the numbers are imprecise because older antidepressants like trazodone are often prescribed off-label for insomnia). Wall Street predicts that the market will mushroom to as much as $5 billion by 2009. "It's the ideal market, like depression before the SSRIs," says David Southwell, the CFO of Sepracor, which sells Lunesta.
Date: 7 February 2006
Fire Sale, USA, Earth – Poor People in the World… Ignite
Stimulator.TV
BREAKING THE SPELL - One riot at a time!
Opium, Afghanistan , wealth and war
Source: L A Times
Date: 28 May 2005
The Lure of Opium Wealth Is a Potent Force in Afghanistan Western officials warn of a nascent narco state as drug traffickers act with impunity, some allegedly with the support of top officials
By Paul Watson
Times Staff Writer
May 28, 2005
Kunduz, Afghanistan. Like a frustrated hunter, the head of the local anti-drug squad keeps snapshots of the ones who got away.
One photo shows a prisoner wearing a flat, round pakol hat, standing in front of 10 pounds of opium packaged in plastic bags laid out on a table. Lt. Nyamatullah Nyamat took the picture on the February day he arrested the suspect. Hours later, the man was freed.
The stocky, plain-spoken cop glumly tossed another photo onto a desk in his basement office as if playing a losing hand of cards. In this one, a man in a white pillbox cap is handcuffed to a police officer and standing next to 62 pounds of opium. A local judge sentenced him to 10 years in prison. A higher court ordered his release.
One of Nyamat's biggest catches, arrested with 114 pounds of heroin, a derivative of opium, hadn't even appeared in court when the local prosecutor let him go in late March.
Nyamat said that was normal in Kunduz, a hub on one of the world's busiest drug-smuggling routes.
Three and a half years after the United States led an invasion of Afghanistan to oust the Taliban regime, the United Nations and the U.S. government warn that the country is in danger of becoming a narco-state controlled by traffickers. The State Department recently called the Afghan drug trade "an enormous threat to world stability." The United Nations estimates that Afghanistan produces 87% of the world's opium.
For decades, poor farmers trying to make a living in Afghanistan's mountain valleys have harvested the opium poppies that feed the world's drug pipeline. Now the trade is booming, partly the result of the U.S. strategy for overthrowing the Taliban and stabilizing the country after two decades of war.
U.S. troops forged alliances with warlords, who provided ground forces in the battle against the Taliban. Some of those allies are suspected of being among Afghanistan's biggest drug traffickers, controlling networks that include producers, criminal gangs and even members of the counter-narcotics police force. They are willing to make deals with remnants of the Taliban if the price is right.
The U.S.-backed Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, has brought some of those warlords into his popularly elected government, a recognition of their political clout and a calculated risk that keeping them close might make it easier to control them.
"Drug money is absolutely supporting terrorist groups," said Alexandre Schmidt, deputy head of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan. And regardless of their allegiance, Schmidt said, most suspects are released within 48 hours because of intervention by higher authorities.
Kunduz, in northeastern Afghanistan, is one of the front lines in what Karzai calls a holy war on drugs. It is just a 90-minute drive from the border with Tajikistan, where low-grade smack starts the next leg of its journey to the streets of Europe.
Nyamat says that as fast as he and his men can catch the smugglers, corrupt officials spring them. Many others are untouchable because they have important friends.
Nyamat carries a handwritten list, four neatly folded pages held together with a pin, to record his losing score. Reading it recently, he shook his head in disgust. Only three of 17 suspects arrested this year were still in prison.
"We have the complete ID list of all smugglers ... but we cannot arrest them because they have the power now, not us," he said.
The list of those suspected of involvement in the drug trade reaches high into Karzai's government.
Nyamat and an Afghan trafficker singled out Gen. Mohammed Daoud, a former warlord who is Afghanistan's deputy interior minister in charge of the anti-drug effort.
An official of a human rights commission in eastern Afghanistan said police in Nangarhar province routinely ignore drug traffickers and other well-connected criminals, even though they take a strict stand against poppy growing. The provincial police are under the command of Hazrat Ali, a warlord who provided the bulk of the Afghan ground force that aided U.S. soldiers in the attempt to capture Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora in late 2001.
Daoud and Ali deny the charges.
U.S. allies are not the only ones reaping the drug bonanza. Taliban guerrillas also have a share in the opium and heroin trade, which the United Nations estimates is worth $3 billion a year. Warlords who once fought them collect a tax on drug shipments heading to Iran, Pakistan or Tajikistan. As long as the Taliban pay cash, they are pleased to let bygones be bygones, said police and two drug traffickers who claimed to have done business with the militants.
Some drug barons have changed their ways because they have already made millions of dollars and now see their self-interest in reform and politics, said a senior Western official involved in the anti-drug effort.
"Others are still involved in drug trafficking and today are part — at the highest level — of government," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "The idea is not to leave them in the provinces anymore, but to bring them on board in official positions in order to better control them."
But the official said he doubted the strategy would work.
Still, the U.N. and the Afghan government predict that this year's opium harvest will be at least 30% smaller than the record 4,200 tons in 2004, partly because of a more aggressive eradication effort. The law of supply and demand has helped too. A glut has driven down prices and profits. But this year's smaller harvest is expected to push prices back up and encourage more planting and trafficking.
It is crucial for the Afghan government and foreign donors to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to farmers before the next planting season this year to make it unnecessary for them to grow opium poppies, said Schmidt, the U.N. official. Sufficient money has been pledged, but some governments have failed to make good on their promises, he said. And continuing insecurity in large parts of the country makes development work difficult.
Schmidt said he was certain that the poppy crop this year would be smaller than last year's. "But the question is 2006."
More than 2,000 years ago, much of Kunduz was a swamp. Alexander the Great stopped here for fresh horses as he pressed south in 329 BC in his conquest of much of the known world.
Today it's a dust-blown smugglers' paradise.
As they have for generations, horses decorated with small pompoms and bells clip-clop through the city, pulling carts that are used as taxis. The police chief of Kunduz province, former militia commander Gen. Mutaleb Baig, is also a throwback to the old Afghanistan. Instead of a police uniform, he prefers a green quilted coat, which he drapes over his shoulders like a chieftain's cloak.
In late 2001, U.S. Special Forces and Central Intelligence Agency operatives worked with the Northern Alliance rebel group to besiege thousands of Taliban soldiers in Kunduz. The fight to take the city helped form close ties between U.S. forces and warlord Daoud, who had been finance secretary to Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Northern Alliance leader who was assassinated two days before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Before the attacks and the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, State Department officials had often cited Northern Alliance drug trafficking as one reason the U.S. should not publicly support the anti-Taliban militia.
But police and traffickers interviewed in Kunduz said Daoud did more than use narcotics to help fund the fight against the Taliban: He made drug smuggling a family business. They said he continued to profit from the opium and heroin trade even after Karzai brought him into the central government last August.
Nyamat, a former intelligence agent who has been on the police force for 25 years, accused Daoud's brother, Haji Agha, of handling the family drug business for Daoud, and he said that when his men arrested small-scale smugglers, the deputy minister had them released.
Nyamat, whose almond-shaped eyes are reminiscent of Genghis Khan's Mongols, who swept through Afghanistan in the 13th century, said four of his own officers moonlight for drug traffickers. Even counting them, his unit is 15 officers short of full strength.
He got up from his desk in a basement office of the Kunduz police station, closed two small windows, and lowered his voice. He said he couldn't trust anyone, least of all provincial chief Baig, a former deputy to Daoud.
Nyamat alleged that Baig's officers had undermined his efforts by rationing gas and refusing to provide armed backup during drug raids. Baig has fired him four times. The commander of the anti-drug force in Kabul keeps reinstating him.
Nyamat said he had reported his suspicions several times to his superiors, and in November he approached American officials working with the counter-narcotics police in Kabul. When nothing resulted from the discussions, he sent a trusted deputy to the Afghan capital to complain again in late February.
Daoud denied involvement in the drug trade but said other senior government officials, police and militia commanders were guilty of it.
He said in an interview that he and his brother had never had anything to do with opium or heroin, and said no Northern Alliance commander had ever trafficked narcotics, because Massoud did not tolerate it. He accused enemies of spreading lies about him.
"If there is even one [drug] case that I'm involved in, I am ready to be punished," Daoud said.
Western officials involved in the anti-drug effort said privately that Daoud was once a trafficker but that they now trusted him as a committed leader in the fight against narcotics.
"Gen. Daoud is absolutely a key element in the eradication effort," said Schmidt, the U.N. official.
The United Nations estimates that Afghan opium, morphine and heroin feed the habits of 10 million addicts, or two-thirds of the world's opiate abusers. Afghan narcotics kill about 10,000 people a year, it says. Europe is the most lucrative market.
Until last year, Afghanistan was known as an opium exporter, not a major heroin producer. But with the poppy boom, and post-Taliban instability, small heroin labs sprang up in hundreds of villages. Even if police find them, they are easily replaced.
One Kunduz trafficker, a man in his late 20s with a wool hat resting high on his head, said an average lab had 10 barrels, a pressing machine, cotton filters and acetic anhydride, an acid, to refine opium paste into heroin powder.
The trafficker estimated that there was enough opium stashed in village wells and other hiding places to keep labs and smugglers working for 10 to 15 years, even if poppy cultivation stopped entirely. Schmidt said that was probably an underestimation.
Early last year, Karzai set up the paramilitary Special Narcotics Force, which answers only to him and his interior minister. Officials refused to provide details on its size and capabilities.
The Interior Ministry says the force carried out 12 operations in three of the country's 34 provinces last year, destroying 70 labs and 88 tons of opiates — about 2% of Afghanistan's production.
In late February, Afghan forces and American advisors from the Drug Enforcement Administration delivered 1.5 tons of heroin, opium and hashish to the counter-narcotics police headquarters in Kabul. The drugs were seized from homes and shops during three months of raids in southern Helmand province, said Muhibullah Ludin, a senior official in the newly formed Counter-Narcotics Ministry.
"It wasn't very well hidden because it's so common there," he said. "Right now they're trying to make it a bit more secret because so many people are being detained."
In the lobby of the police station, officers laid out a long row of burlap and plastic sacks, several stained with gooey black opium gum, and weighed each sack on a freight scale in the corner. They also spilled out individual plastic bags packed with almost pure heroin, an off-white powder that looks like flour, to count them on the floor. There were 559 one-kilo bags — more than 1,200 pounds.
It seemed an impressive haul, but DEA advisors watched the count skeptically.
"Trying to get rid of drugs in Afghanistan is like trying to clear sand from a beach with a bucket," said an American counter-narcotics agent.
The three-month operation resulted in charges against only one trafficker, Ludin said. A Western diplomat involved in the effort said that the special force had not gone after the people behind the drug networks yet because the justice system was too weak.
"We find it difficult to get any successful prosecutions of any significant traffickers, basically because people pay bribes," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
With foreign assistance, the Afghan government is setting up special courts to try traffickers, with added security to protect investigators, prosecutors and judges. They will start with low-level cases and gradually move up the drug trafficking chain as they gain confidence, the Western official said.
Judges are easily bribed because they earn only about $100 a month, Schmidt said.
"We'll be monitoring it very, very carefully in order to respond to any problems in the prosecution of these cases," he said. "But I cannot tell you today that everything will be utterly beautiful and perfect."
The Kunduz trafficker said he wasn't worried.
He counts Daoud as one of his connections. Late in the summer of 2003, he said, Daoud helped him retrieve heroin worth $200,000 that had been seized at the Salang Tunnel, a link between southern and northern Afghanistan that is 11,000 feet up in the Hindu Kush mountains. Daoud denied this, saying drugs were never seized at the tunnel and that the trafficker was lying.
The trafficker also said he had sold a large consignment of heroin last year that had yet to be smuggled into Iran from the southwestern province of Nimroz. Premium Afghan heroin going to the West through Iran fetches a higher price and is less likely to be seized.
He predicted that the government crackdown would be good for business. Increased arrests and interdiction would cut competition and reduce the glut that forced down prices by two-thirds last year.
"The more restrictions, the more the business will boom," the trafficker said. "The price will go high, the number of dealers will go down, and my income will go up. The professional businessmen will remain. They have good connections. Whoever works hard in a business wins."
No matter where Afghan narcotics are headed, most of them pass through Kabul, a transit point on the main route linking poppy fields and labs in east and north to border smuggling routes.
Each day, from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., police set up checkpoints on the edge of the capital. They ask drivers the "Seven Golden Questions," taught by British advisors, which include where are they coming from, where are they going and who owns the vehicle. They try to form a hunch about whether they should conduct a search.
A sniffer dog named Warsola, a German shepherd trained in Kazakhstan to take commands in Pashto, stands by in a cage, eager to root out hidden drugs. The police also have a camera probe, a long black hose with a tiny lens on the tip, which allows them to peer into gas tanks and radiators.
But at the end of the day, the outmatched police, paid $60 a month, lock up their weapons, go home and wait for death threats. They worry about their families.
"When I leave my house I tell my children, 'Please don't go out.' And I tell them, 'If you need anything, please tell me. I will bring it to you,' " Mohammed Nazir said. "We are afraid.
"Even if a cat jumps into my house, I get scared and I think that there is somebody in the house to kill me."
Nazir's 13-member team has arrested more than 30 suspected drug traffickers since it started work nine months ago. The team's first bust was of uniformed police officers armed with hand grenades and guns. They were caught with 24 pounds of opium in a knapsack in a civilian car. They said they had no idea that the drugs were there, Nazir said.
One of the unit's most dangerous arrests was last summer, when it discovered more than 400 pounds of opium concealed in the cabin of a gas tanker coming from northern Afghanistan. The smuggler had tried to mask the musky opium smell with piles of melons.
When police confronted the driver, he used his cellphone to call for help. Then he offered a bribe, and when that didn't work, he invoked the name of Gen. Haji Mohammed Almas, a Northern Alliance warlord, whose forces are suspected in many robberies and killings in the capital.
On the way to jail with their suspects, the police noticed that they were being followed by two SUVs full of gunmen. They kept their distance when the drug squad officers pulled into the jail, said Shamsuddin, a member of Nazir's unit. Like many Afghans, he uses only one name.
That night, about 1 a.m., a phone call woke him. Lying next to his wife, Shamsuddin began sweating in anger as a voice on the phone threatened him, he recalled.
"I was sweating just because he wasn't next to me," the cop snarled. "Otherwise I would have beaten him to death."
A few days later, when Shamsuddin was sitting with other officers at the drug squad's headquarters, the same man called and repeated the threat.
Nazir said traffickers had no trouble finding phone numbers to harangue counter-narcotics police at any hour. "All of these people have friends inside the government," he said.
A week after their arrest, the truck driver and his assistant walked free and drove off in their tanker.
Almas, the warlord, denied that he trafficked in drugs and declared that the police were hopelessly corrupt.
"In reality, the police are very sleepy in Kabul," he said. "And that is because all the thieves and criminals have joined the National Police. Whenever they commit a crime ... they name a [militia] commander and say that his men did this."
Like many in the front-line drug squad, Shamsuddin, a 23-year police veteran, is angry that warlords with a long record of crimes and abuses in the country's wars have been promoted to top police positions, putting uniformed officers at their mercy.
"I can only trust these 12 people in my team," he said. "Our government is not a real government. I pray and hope for a day that we have a foreigner as a boss, and he is standing over our heads and controlling us. There is no management in our government and there is no authority from the Afghans."
East of Kabul, in one of Afghanistan's oldest opium-producing regions, Karzai has tried to resolve the police-warlord conflict by melding the two in the person of Hazrat Ali.
Western officials praise the Nangarhar police chief for his strict stand against poppy growing. Cultivation has been cut drastically in a region where spring usually brings fields full of red and white opium poppy flowers.
But Jandad Spin Ghar, who leads the eastern regional office of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said Ali's police routinely arrested innocent people and committed other serious abuses while letting drug traffickers and other well-connected criminals go free.
"He only stopped the cultivation and he has done nothing to stop the trafficking," Spin Ghar said. "I don't understand why the U.S. and the central government are supporting him."
Daoud, the deputy interior minister, said he had summoned Ali to Kabul to answer such allegations, and was satisfied that they were false. Ali accused enemies of spreading lies about him.
"I told him, 'Look, General, I have never been in the drug business my whole life,' " Ali recalled. "I hate drugs more than anything else and neither I nor my men are involved in the drug business."
Part of the solution to Afghanistan's drug problem may lie in the soft petals and sweet scent of the Bulgarian rose. A German aid group has persuaded a dozen farmers in one Nangarhar village to grow them to see whether they can provide the essence for fine French perfumes.
Janaan Khan, a village leader in Dara-e-Noor, planted 150 rose seedlings on half an acre. They poke just a few inches out of the wet soil, which once provided bumper harvests of premium red opium. He earned about $4,000 from his last poppy crop in 2002, a fortune in a country where per capita income in 2003 was about $200, putting it among the bottom 20 nations.
It's more difficult to produce high-quality rose oil than high-grade opium, and German experts told Khan that it would take three years to find out what, if anything, their Bulgarian roses are worth.
A stiff wind can bruise the blossoms, rendering them worthless. At harvest time, farmers have just one day to gently pluck the flowers and process them into rose oil, Khan said. At most, he expects to earn a quarter of what he did from opium. But he says that would be enough for an honest living.
"I told the farmers that if this thing succeeds, then Afghanistan will be famous for flowers and perfumes, not for war and opium, and Dara-e-Noor will be as famous as Paris," Khan said, his eyes lighting up with the dream.
"I told them that these flowers will have great smell and foreigners will come from all over the world for a picnic. And they will enjoy being here. And everywhere you look there will be foreigners, and we will build guest houses and take money from the foreigners who stay here. And we will all be rich."
Despite his outward confidence, Khan acknowledged that he was worried he might be wrong. The German aid group has promised a small cash subsidy to tide the farmers over, but Khan said it was far less than the thousands of dollars they were used to earning. They probably will wait only a year or two before they start growing opium poppies again, he said.
HOME
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Kandahar Vice
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Meet The Family
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Just For Chemists
Off-shore Pharmacies
Taliban Drug-Warriors
Heroin after the Taliban
The UK and Afghan Heroin
2006: a Bumper Opium Harvest
Is the opium trade halal in Islam?
Afghanistan, Opium and the Taliban
Afghan farmers prepare fields for poppies
Afghanistan 2002: opium after the Taliban
Should opium poppy production be legalized?
Osama bin Laden: "heroin dealer" and "narco-terrorist"
Osama bin Laden: a ‘heroin dealer’ and ‘narco-terrorist’ (drug war pt.4)
Source: Washington Times
Date: 22 January 2004
Osama bin Laden a 'narco-terrorist'
photograph of Osama bin Laden
By Rowan Scarborough
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The al Qaeda terror group has embraced heroin trafficking to such an extent that its leader, Osama bin Laden, is now a "narco-terrorist," says a U.S. congressman just back from a fact-finding mission in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
"It seems clear to me heroin is the No. 1 financial asset of Osama bin Laden," Rep. Mark Steven Kirk, Illinois Republican, told The Washington Times. "There is a need to update our view of how terrorism is financed.
"And the view of Osama bin Laden relying on Wahhabi donations from abroad is outdated. And the view of him as one of the world's largest heroin dealers is the more accurate, up-to-date view."
Mr. Kirk wants a pronounced shift in how the Bush administration tries to stop al Qaeda funding. Up to now, Washington has focused on bin Laden's traditional sources: Islamic charities and his family fortune.
But the Bush team has choked off much of that flow, forcing bin Laden to adjust. In Afghanistan, bin Laden has the benefit of the world's largest poppy crop, as he evades capture in Pakistan's notorious border areas. He is reaping $24 million alone from one narcotics network in Kandahar, Afghanistan, according to Mr. Kirk's investigation.
The congressman said it is no longer sufficient to go after only the charities and bank accounts. Washington now must fuse counterterrorism and counternarcotics into an inseparable mission.
"The most important thing here is to change the language to not describe Osama bin Laden anymore as a terrorist, but to more accurately describe him as a narco-terrorist," said Mr. Kirk, who sits on the Appropriations subcommittee on commerce, justice, state and judiciary.
Mr. Kirk and his team of House staff investigators spent five days in Pakistan and Afghanistan, whose farm areas once again are sprouting thousands of acres of poppies from which opium and heroin are produced. Hundreds of illicit drug labs have sprung up to process the heroin for shipment to Pakistan.
The al Qaeda-heroin connection is becoming more clear to Washington. The first big break came last month, when Navy ships seized boats concealing large stashes of heroin and operated by crew members linked to al Qaeda. In Afghanistan, Mr. Kirk talked to a variety of sources, including U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents, U.S. troops and Afghan counternarcotics officials.
A kilogram of heroin that can fetch $2,000 in Pakistan can get $10,000 in Turkey. That is why al Qaeda has begun sending drug-laden boats into the Arabian Sea: to find more lucrative markets outside Pakistan.
"If he can expand his operation closer and closer to the retail market, he will dramatically increase his profit," Mr. Kirk said.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld is reluctant to get his troops too deeply involved in the drug wars, aides say. Some Pentagon officials view counternarcotics as predominately a law enforcement duty. In Afghanistan, where the United Nations reports 264,000 poppy-growing families, the U.S. military does not want to alienate citizens whose support it needs for the U.S.-backed government of Hamid Karzai.
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Heroin War
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Off-shore Pharmacies
Heroin after the Taliban
Afghanistan Bans Opium
The UK and Afghan Heroin
2006: a Bumper Opium Harvest
Portugal Decriminalises Drug Use
Afghanistan: The Heroin Economy
Is the opium trade halal in Islam?
Allies plan to buy Afghan opium crop
Afghan opium crop: a bumper harvest
Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
Should opium poppy production be legalized?
The Heroin Trail: Britain, USA and Afghanistan
"Taliban prepare to unleash their deadliest weapon"
Afghanistan regains its title as world's biggest heroin dealer
Opium and the new Afghanistan: a drug smuggler's paradise
Anonymous… what is the purpose? Take a look.
Governments shut down the internet ...Shut down the governments.
Remember the last two or three years? Most seem to forget, so let's review.
DHS - Department of Homeland Security runs the "US-CERT"
What is the National Cyber Alert System?
The National Cyber Alert System is America's first cohesive national cyber security system for identifying, analyzing, and prioritizing emerging vulnerabilities and threats. Managed by the US-CERT, the system relays computer security update and warning information to all users. It provides all citizens—from computer security professionals to home computer users with basic skills—with free, timely, actionable information to better secure their computer systems. The National Cyber Alert System provides valuable cyber security information in the form of Technical Cyber Security Alerts, Cyber Security Alerts, Cyber Security Tips, and Cyber Security Bulletins.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
“You should have expected us.”
THE POLICE STATE: The Drug War III (Vol. #3)
The Drug War is Real: For All of us. Terrorism? Very is unlikely, Unless it's done by U.S.
Cop Slams Racist "Drug War"
Neill Franklin, a former Baltimore narcotics cop, says that policing in the "war on drugs" has a racially disproportionate impact but that our prohibition laws create crime and violence that everyone is unfortunately subject to being victimized by. Neill is a member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), which any civilian can join for free at http://www.CopsSayLegalizeDrugs.com
This is why I post the 2nd video
Every action has consequences:
Scene 1: Happy
Then some trigger Police
then Retaliation by the only way we / (as Americans) are taught.
This is fiction, for now! Please help the cause before WWIII, US civil war II or whatever is next comes. The TSA, FEMA, SWAT , etc are firing first. Stop it before it's too late.
Download these tracks here: http://www.sendspace.com/file/i9fj0g
Food Clothes & Shelter
Verse 1
The televisions have eyes
Your modern religion is lies
Plotting a collision world wide
Watch the hour glass the power clash
Showing currency for world supremacy
Burroughs is burned down deliberately son
We ain't about whats devil level
Smell the gun metal
King to mo' man
I read Mao Tse Tung
Feel the foul taste that run on my tongue
Burn a L for everyone of my sons
There so much more than just herb in my lungs
Similar to spilt Mercury,
With enough force
They could've killed Hercules
This whole nation was built
Virtually, from capital to captivity
The earth could be demolished tomorrow
You not listening
It's cold outside
They got the whole South side
Using bar codes,
Military blocks on all the state roads
And worse, somebody's child got hung
They took his pants off,
Covered his whole body with ants, and cut his hands off
The type of shit that have your brain bleedin'
They about to start scanning the back of niggas hands
And get your vein readin'
They call it New World Order
But, son, this game is in the fourth quarter
World War 3, don't drink the water
Because...
Chorus:
These are the times that try a nigga soul
Population control,
We wasting time chasing gold
They after more than your mind
They want your nation as a whole
It's time to take off the blindfold (Novus Ordo Seclorum) x2
(A thousand men, a thousand sorrows)
Verse 2
These are the times that try my thug sole
White collar crime
Deaf tones, gold, and drug sold
The truth is never told
I call it black Holocaust
Some say all is lost
But in the end
Your life is all it costs
Pronounce counter insurgency
Global 2000 ?, what they plan to do
In case of emergency
They building mad prisons with urgency
Son, I solemnly swear
They keep them slugs in the air
Until they murder me
Shut down the government
Revolutionaries be lovin' it
Clinton flee the country in a bubble jet
Trouble is yet to come,
For each crime, they trying' niggas three times
Then probably prosecute me for this rhyme
International nickel and dime hustlers
Move weight and muscle us around
But my army busting' rounds
Shells covered the ground for miles
Street like ? from here to Capitol Hill
And you can read it on a dollar bill
Chorus
I know(I know)
The time(the time)
They trying to take this world(world)
Of mine(Yeah) x2
Verse 3
They breakin' windows out with canisters of tear gas
Put out the cannabis
We fighting cannibals with silver badges
I feel the madness in the wind
Like a premonition
Dee got the ammunition
Puffin' reefer while we cleaning pieces
None of my niggas don't believe in Jesus
We fight a war against the beasts Chevrolet Caprices
Whatever way we find feasible
Sometime shit be unbelievable
I'm seeing skeletons in parked vehicles
Put all the terrible types behind sandbags
My philosophy is much more than snatch your handbag
I'm talkin' shit like hand-to-hand,
Man-to-man, clan-for-clan
What side you stand?
Some of us will breakdown mentally
Some of us will pass away
Overwhelmed by injuries
But our victory is meant to be
I studied the signs for twenty-two years
And this is what it meant to me
Chorus x2
I know(I know)
The time(the time)
They tryin to take this world(world)
Of mine x2
This is about:
Government racism oppression fight power black panther revolution revolutionary humanity human rights war slave slavery black emancipation pain lies television religion supremacy terrorism mao tse tung Trotsky Che Guevara soldier military blood beheading new world order world war III population control political rap hip hop white holocaust scars murder companies masons Bilderberg ufo George w. bush
Crime? Defiantly Punishment!
Private Prisons are filling up and stocks are soaring.. When crime pays, it usually pays law makers who make things illegal. No system based both on capitalism and law can survive with an industry like private prisons. The inevitable is that people go to jail more and stay longer…
Look at this article and the charts along with it if you still doubt…
Pasted from: http://www.apfn.org/apfn/private-prisons.htm
Greasing the Wheels of Power to Keep Jails Full
To be profitable, private prison firms must ensure that prisons are not only built but also filled. Industry experts say a 90-95 per cent capacity rate is needed to guarantee the hefty rates of return needed to lure investors. Prudential Securities issued a wildly bullish report on CCA a few years ago but cautioned, "It takes time to bring inmate population levels up to where they cover costs. Low occupancy is a drag on profits." Still, said the report, company earnings would be strong if CCA succeeded in ramp(ing) up population levels in its new facilities at an acceptable rate".
"(There is a) basic philosophical problem when you begin turning over administration of prisons to people who have an interest in keeping people locked up" notes Jenni Gainsborough of the ACLU's National Prison Project.
Private prison companies have also begun to push, even if discreetly, for the type of get-tough policies needed to ensure their continued growth. All the major firms in the field have hired big-time lobbyists. When it was seeking a contract to run a halfway house in New York City, Esmor hired a onetime aide to State Representative Edolphus Towns to lobby on its behalf. The aide succeeded in winning the contract and also the vote of his former boss, who had been an opponent of the project. In 1995, Wackenhut Chairman Tim Cole testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee to urge support for amendments to the Violent Crime Control Act -- which subsequently passed -- that authorized the expenditure of $10 billion to construct and repair state prisons.
CCA has been especially adept at expansion via political payoffs. The first prison the company managed was the Silverdale Workhouse in Hamilton County, Tennessee. After commissioner Bob Long voted to accept CCA's bid for the project, the company awarded Long's pest control firm a lucrative contract. When Long decided the time was right to quit public life, CCA hired him to lobby on its behalf. CCA has been a major financial supporter of Lamar Alexander, the former Tennessee governor and failed presidential candidate. In one of a number of sweetheart deals, Lamar's wife, Honey Alexander, made more than $130,000 on a $5,000 investment in CCA. Tennessee Governor Ned McWherter is another CCA stockholder and is quoted in the company's 1995 annual report as saying that "the federal government would be well served to privatize all of their corrections."
In another ominous development, the revolving door between the public and private sector has led to the type of company boards that are typical of those found in the military-industrial complex. CCA co-founders were T. Don Hutto, an ex-corrections commissioner in Virginia, and Tom Beasley, a former chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party. A top company official is Michael Quinlan, once director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The board of Wackenhut is graced by a former Marine Corps commander, two retired Air Force generals and a former under secretary of the Air Force, as well as James Thompson, ex-governer of Illinois, Stuart Gerson, a former assistant US attorney general and Richard Staley, who previously worked with the INS. http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=867
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_incarceration_timeline-clean.svg
Private Prisons: A Reliable American Growth Industry
FULL REPORT:>>
CXW - Corrections Corporation of America Stock Research - Stock ...
Research Corrections Corporation of America with InvestorGuide.com stock research tool. CXW quotes, charts, earnings, profiles, news, analysis, financials, ...
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Corrections Corporation of America is the nation's largest owner and operator of privatized correctional and detention facilities and one of the largest prison operators in the United States, behind only the federal government and three states. CXW currently operates 65 facilities, including 44 company-owned facilities, with a total design capacity of approximately 87,000 beds in 19 states and the District of Columbia.
http://www.gurufocus.com/news.php?id=72487
Judges in PA take bribes from private prisons | media island ...
Feb 19, 2009 ... No charges have been filed against the private prisons that paid the bribes. Pennsylvania's Supreme Court has appointed an outside judge to ...
MORE:>>
Government's Management of Private Prisons -
MORE:>>
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