Why The War On Some Drugs Exists, Reason #1324087

Thanks to WikiLeaks, we now know, in reading between the lines, that the exorbitant budgets of anti-drug orgs are favorite places for our intelligence agencies to go to for ‘black budget’ or ‘off budget’ dough for all those projects they don’t want us finding about it through their own balance sheets:

The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables.

[…]

Diplomats recorded unforgettable vignettes from the largely unseen war on drugs:

¶In Panama, an urgent BlackBerry message from the president to the American ambassador demanded that the D.E.A. go after his political enemies: “I need help with tapping phones.”

¶In Sierra Leone, a major cocaine-trafficking prosecution was almost upended by the attorney general’s attempt to solicit $2.5 million in bribes.

¶In Guinea, the country’s biggest narcotics kingpin turned out to be the president’s son, and diplomats discovered that before the police destroyed a huge narcotics seizure, the drugs had been replaced by flour.

¶Leaders of Mexico’s beleaguered military issued private pleas for closer collaboration with the drug agency, confessing that they had little faith in their own country’s police forces.

¶Cables from Myanmar, the target of strict United States sanctions, describe the drug agency informants’ reporting both on how the military junta enriches itself with drug money and on the political activities of the junta’s opponents.

Officials of the D.E.A. and the State Department declined to discuss what they said was information that should never have been made public.

But even the DEA isn’t omnipotent:

In Venezuela, the local intelligence service turned the tables on the D.E.A., infiltrating its operations, sabotaging equipment and hiring a computer hacker to intercept American Embassy e-mails, the cables report.

If anybody thinks the CIA and/or FBI wasn’t in cahoots with the DEA on this, they’ve got another think coming. And of course various dictators the world over asked the DEA for the use of its high-tech snooping systems. Once wonders how many of them made access to it part of the price they charge the US for doing business in their countries. We might need another WikiLeaks release to find out.

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