Afghan War Intensifies: US Stealth Fighters Target Narcotics Production Facilities

16-years after the Bush administration began military operations in Afghanistan, President Trump has just launched a military campaign of his own using high-tech stealth fighters to bomb drug labs in the country.

The Pentagon’s playbook of nation building in the Middle East has stretched, now, to three Presidents making it the longest war in U.S. history. Ever since the U.S. started occupying the country in the early 2000s, opium production soared. Afghan President Ashraf Ghani said without drugs, the war in Afghanistan “would have been long over.”

In 2017, Afghanistan’s opium crop and production both hit a record high, despite the increased efforts by government to stop the drug trade. For the Taliban and other criminal elements in the region, opium is an important revenue source to fund operations.

On Monday, the Defense Department said it unleashed F-22 Raptor stealth fighters to bomb narcotic production facilities in southern Afghanistan targeting the revenue streams of the Taliban. The air operation started on Sunday and continued through Monday. The F-22s were accompanied by B-52 bombers and Afghan A-29 Super Tucanos for additional support to expand the strike mission.

According to the Washington Post,

This represents the first significant use of new legal authorities granted by the Trump administration in August that enable the Pentagon to target Taliban revenue streams, said Army Gen. John W. Nicholson Jr., the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

 

Previously, the U.S. military conducted strikes only when facing imminent threat or working directly with the Afghans. 

Nicholson said, the F-22 “was used because of its ability to deliver precision munitions — in this case, a 250-pound bomb, small-diameter, that causes the minimal amount of collateral damage.” The objective for more precise munitions comes at a time where civilian deaths in U.S. airstrikes have been heavily scrutinized. Earlier this month, U.S. airstrikes in the region killed ‘at least 13 civilians’ in a bombing raid.

“This target was also a Taliban narcotics production facility in Musa Qala. So I want to draw your attention — as you look at this strike, you’re going to see that inside this compound are multiple structures, and we destroy only two of them, while leaving the third standing, which we do to avoid collateral damage,” Nicholson said.

The Drug Enforcement Administration estimates there are 400 to 500 narcotic production facilities across Afghanistan. In the latest strike about 10 of them were taken out. The concentration of strikes resided in the Helmand province, an area where Taliban hold strong control.

Opium cultivation change in Afghanistan 2015/2016 shown on the chart below indicates a rapid increase in the northern tier of the country.

More details of the operation per The Washington Post,

The strikes Sunday hit seven Taliban drug laboratories and a headquarters in three districts across northern Helmand. Three occurred in Kajaki district, four in Musa Qala and one in Sangin — all areas controlled by the U.S. military at the height of Obama’s troop surge there. The largest, carried out by a B-52, struck a opium-processing facility where 50 barrels of drugs were cooking at the time, Nicholson said. Video released by the Pentagon shows the building being consumed by a massive fireball.

 

The U.S. government has pursued various anti-drug strategies during its 16-year war in Afghanistan, but it has done little to hamper the steady resurgence of opium poppy cultivation and drug trafficking since the Taliban’s fall in 2001. While in power before the U.S. invasion, the Taliban banned poppy growing as un-Islamic and staged bonfires of confiscated opium and heroin.

 

Until now, though, those U.S. efforts have not directly involved the military. During the early post-Taliban years, the Pentagon focused exclusively on pursuing al-Qaeda and Taliban insurgents and expressly avoided diverting efforts toward curbing the drug trade. In some cases, this was because of U.S. alliances with warlords or regional strongmen who were involved in drugs.

 

Later, as both poppy production and drug trading rebounded, the U.S. launched several ambitious programs to counter them. One was a crop substitution campaign that encouraged and paid farmers to grow almonds, apricots, green vegetables and saffron instead of poppy. Another paid farmers cash to destroy their poppy fields and funded interdiction campaigns in which Afghan security forces burned fields under cultivation.

 

These efforts were fatally hampered by a mix of factors, including the enormous appeal of drug profits, the long-accepted tradition of poppy growing by small farmers, the involvement of powerful Afghans in the trade, local hostility to interdiction, and the hardiness that enabled poppy plants to thrive in harsh and dry conditions.

 

Meanwhile, the Taliban insurgents, apparently abandoning their previous religious scruples, became increasingly involved in both poppy cultivation and drug trafficking as a means of supporting the war, especially in Helmand province. At first they primarily demanded taxes from growers, but gradually the overlap between Taliban recruits and local agricultural labor became so pronounced that the insurgents essentially suspended military operations during poppy harvest seasons.

In the latest figures from the United Nations, “Afghanistan opium production jumps 87 per cent to record level”… Most of the increase has occurred under the United States occupation of the region.

It seems as Afghan President Ashraf Ghani is bullish on President Trump’s new campaign to bomb the nation’s narcotic facilities...

Last night, Afghan and US forces launched operations in Helmand to abolish opium processing labs. 8 labs were destroyed on day one. We"re determined to tackle criminal economy and narcotics trafficking with full force. It"s the main source of financing violence and terror.

— Ashraf Ghani (@ashrafghani) November 20, 2017

Perhaps in a preview of things to come, Sunday through Monday’s U.S airstrikes in Afghanistan signal the war is about to intensify.

Stealth fighters and other support aircraft only managed to knockout 10 narcotic facilities and as the report states there are about another 400-500 to go.

 

Ex-DEA Agent Blasts Congress And Drug Industry For Creating The Opioid Crisis

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Whistleblower Joe Rannazzisi is telling all when it comes to placing blame for the nation’s opioid crisis. He says drug distributors pumped opioids into communities in the United States knowing that people were dying and that the US government is helping.

Joe Rannazzisi is a tough and blunt former DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) deputy assistant administrator with a law degree, a pharmacy degree, and a growing rage at the unrelenting death toll from opioids. Congress has often been complicit in atrocities, especially when a politician profits off of the removal of the rights of others. So it should not come as a surprise that Rannazzisi is blaming Congress and the drug industry for the opioid epidemic gripping the nation.

Rannazzisi ran the DEA’s Office of Diversion Control, the division that regulates and investigates the pharmaceutical industry. Now in a joint investigation by 60 Minutes and The Washington Post, Rannazzisi tells the inside story of how, he says, the opioid crisis was allowed to spread. Its quick spread was also aided by Congress, lobbyists, and a drug distribution industry that shipped, almost unchecked, hundreds of millions of pills to rogue pharmacies and pain clinics providing the rocket fuel for a crisis that, over the last two decades, has claimed 200,000 lives.

The DEA responded to the explosive report that the government is helping keep Americans addicted to opioids so that pharmaceutical companies can continue to boast big profits. The DEA says it has taken actions against far fewer opioid distributors under a new law. A Justice Department memo shows 65 doctors, pharmacies, and drug companies received suspension orders in 2011. Only six of them have gotten them this year.

“During the past seven years, we have removed approximately 900 registrations annually, preventing reckless doctors and rogue businesses from making an already troubling problem worse,” the DEA said in a written statement.

“Increasingly, our investigators initiated more than 10,000 cases and averaged more than 2,000 arrests per year.”

But Rannazzisi says this is an industry that is out of control and the DEA isn’t making a dent in this crisis.

“What they [big pharma] wanna do, is do what they wanna do, and not worry about what the law is. And if they don’t follow the law in drug supply, people die. That’s just it. People die.”

The harsh reality is that the burgeoning issue of the opioid epidemic is lining the pockets of the pharmaceutical industry and the politicians who help fuel it, so there’s no real rush to stem the bleeding of this crisis.

“This is an industry that allowed millions and millions of drugs to go into bad pharmacies and doctors’ offices, that distributed them out to people who had no legitimate need for those drugs,” Rannazzisi said.

Most of his anger is reserved for the distributors of opioid drugs. Some of them are actually multibillion-dollar, Fortune 500 companies. They are the middlemen that ship the pain pills from manufacturers, like Purdue Pharma and Johnson & Johnson to drug stores all over the country. Rannazzisi accuses the distributors of fueling the opioid epidemic by turning a blind eye to pain pills being diverted to illicit use.

“This is an industry that allowed millions and millions of drugs to go into bad pharmacies and doctors’ offices, that distributed them out to people who had no legitimate need for those drugs,” Rannazzisi said.

“The three largest distributors are Cardinal Health, McKesson, and AmerisourceBergen. They control probably 85 or 90 percent of the drugs going downstream,” he added when prompted.

Rannazzisi said it’s a “fact” that the big pharmaceutical companies knew they were pumping drugs into people unnecessarily for profits and that people were dying.

In the late 1990s, opioids like oxycodone and hydrocodone became a routine medical treatment for chronic pain. Drug companies assured doctors and congressional investigators that the pain medications were effective and safe. With many doctors convinced the drugs posed few risks, prescriptions skyrocketed and so did addiction.

Big pharma had a plan. It was solely a business plan. Their plan was to sell a lotta pills and make a lot of money. And they did both of those very well.

"Enough To Kill 5 Million People": Authorities Make One Of Biggest Fentanyl Busts In History

The Acting United States Attorney for the District of Nebraska announced earlier this morning that a joint force involving both the Drug Enforcement Administration and Nebraska State Patrol made one of the largest fentanyl busts in the history of the country.  According to authorities, 27 year old Edgar Navarro-Aguirre of California was arrested at an Amtrak station in Omaha carrying 15 kilos (33 pounds) of the deadly opioid.  Here is more from a local NBC affiliate:

Navarro-Aguirre was traveling on the Amtrak train and waiting at the station when a Drug Enforcement Administration agent was doing a routine surveillance there and noticed a suspicious person with a bag.

"We have officers that are trained to pick out people that are different than the normal traveling public," Nebraska State Patrol Lt. Jason Scott said.

According to an affidavit, Navarro-Aguirre said it was his friend"s bag, and he denied that anything illegal was inside.

Inside Navarro-Aguirre"s luggage was 15 vacuum-sealed bundles of what forensic chemists determined was pure or nearly pure fentanyl.

"This fentanyl seizure is the largest ever in Nebraska and one of the largest in the nation," a news released from the U.S. Attorney"s Office said.

For those who may not be familiar with this deadly epidemic, fentanyl is a synthetic opioid that is 40-50 times more potent than herion and has resulted in a wave of overdoses across the country, and particularly in the midwest.  Experts say it only takes a small amount, about 3 milligrams, for the drug to be fatal.

"This is playing Russian Roulette knowing every cylinder has a bullet in it," DEA Associate Special Agent in Charge Matt Barden said.

With that in mind, the amount seized by authorities in its pure form would be enough to kill approximately 4.9 million people, or nearly the entire populations of Iowa and Nebraska.

"I think it was literally one mishap away from something extremely tragic for Nebraska," Lt. Scott said, "dropping a suitcase or it being cut open, this is in a public venue, this was not in a private room."

As the New York Times pointed out last month, fentanyl is estimated to have killed over 20,000 people in the U.S. in 2016, a 5x increase over just a couple of years.

Drug overdoses killed roughly 64,000 people in the United States last year, according to the first governmental account of nationwide drug deaths to cover all of 2016. It’s a staggering rise of more than 22 percent over the 52,404 drug deaths recorded the previous year — and even higher than The New York Times’s estimate in June, which was based on earlier preliminary data.

Drug overdoses are expected to remain the leading cause of death for Americans under 50, as synthetic opioids — primarily fentanyl and its analogues — continue to push the death count higher. Drug deaths involving fentanyl more than doubled from 2015 to 2016, accompanied by an upturn in deaths involving cocaine and methamphetamine. Together they add up to an epidemic of drug overdoses that is killing people at a faster rate than the H.I.V. epidemic at its peak.

The explosion in fentanyl deaths and the persistence of widespread opioid addiction have swamped local and state resources. Communities say their budgets are being strained by the additional needs — for increased police and medical care, for widespread naloxone distribution and for a stronger foster care system that can handle the swelling number of neglected or orphaned children.

Navarro-Aguirre is facing a charge of possession with intent to distribute 400 grams or more of a mixture or substance containing fentanyl. The penalty carries a minimum of 10 years with a maximum of life in prison.  The 27-year-old will appear in federal court Friday afternoon.

Police Seize Enough Fentanyl "To Kill Half Of NYC" In Recent Bust

The opioid crisis is killing tens of thousands of Americans a year as powerful synthetic drugs like fentanyl are increasingly mixed in with the heroin supply, killing unsuspecting addicts in greater numbers. These lab-manufactured opioids and their pharmacological cousins are so powerful, a 20-pound mixture of fentanyl and heroin that was recently seized by law enforcement was said to contain enough of the narcotic to kill half of New York City’s 9 million residents, according to one Drug Enforcement Administration agent who spoke with Consumerist.

The drugs were taken when DEA agents busted a heroin mill operating out of an apartment across the street from Central Park. Police arrested four men, including one who was posing as an Uber driver, for their alleged involvement in the drug-distributing ring.

According to NYC’s department of Health and Mental Hygiene, fentanyl – which is 50 times more potent than heroin - is driving a spike in fatal overdoses, which reached an all-time high of 1,374 deaths in 2016, a 46% increase over 2015. Nationwide, the rate of drug-related deaths per 100,000 people peaked at 19.7 during the third quarter, up from 16.7 during the same period a year earlier, according to government data released Tuesday. The increase was driven largely by opioids, specifically fentanyl, carfentanil and other synthetics. Deaths from drug overdoses in the US are believed to have surpassed the 60,000 mark last year.

“Fentanyl is the deadliest street drug to ever hit this country,” said DEA Special Agent-in-Charge James J. Hunt. “This seizure alone contains enough potency to kill half of the population of New York City, if laboratory analysis proves it is all fentanyl. Fentanyl is manufactured death that drug dealers are mixing with heroin.”

Here’s an account of the bust, courtesy of Consumerist:

“DEA agents were conducting surveillance near the building on Central Park West on Aug. 4 when they saw one defendant leaving with two boxes inside a large shopping bag. He got into a vehicle driven by another defendant, an Uber driver, with agents following behind.

Investigators stopped the vehicle, and observed the suspect sitting in the backseat with two boxes: One box was open and they could see a clear plastic bag containing a tan powdery substance inside.

After looking more closely at that box — the larger of the two — investigators say they also saw six large cylindrical packages wrapped in tape and plastic wrap.

And in the smaller box, officials spotted a large cylindrical package wrapped in tape and plastic wrap, and a clear plastic bag containing a tan powdery substance.

Agents seized the packages, and arrested both the Uber driver and the passenger. Meanwhile, investigators kept watching the building, and eventually observed a man previously identified as a member of a drug trafficking organization exiting with another man. When questioned by agents, he said he lived in the building, and admitted to having a gun and drugs in the apartment."

The bust also generated some laughable headlines. According to the Verge, the dealers had branded the some of the packaged heroin with the Uber logo. The drug crew used other corporate logos, like McDonald’s, as well as generic names like “Black Friday.”

President Donald Trump’s Commission on Drug Addiction and Combating the Opioid Crisis urged the president to declare a state of emergency to help combat the crisis. On Tuesday, Trump said the US has “no alternative” but to triumph over the crisis.

The US already has the highest rate of drug-related deaths in the world.

It's Been Exactly 80 Years Since The US Declared War On Weed - And Weed Is Still Winning

Authored by Carey Wedler via TheAntiMedia.org,

The government fought cannabis - and cannabis won.

This Wednesday is the eightieth anniversary of the first major action the federal government took against cannabis in the United States, and eight decades later, that same federal government has still failed to reduce Americans’ consumption of the plant. In fact, it’s on the rise.

Long before the era of prohibition, druggists used cannabis as a medicine. According to Origins, a joint publication by the Ohio State University and Miami University history departments:

“Cannabis, like opiates and cocaine, was freely available at drug stores in liquid form and as a refined product, hashish. Cannabis was also a common ingredient in turn-of-the-century patent medicines, over-the-counter concoctions brewed to proprietary formulas.”

Then, like today, it helped people relax:

“The hashish candy advertised in an 1862 issue of Vanity Fair as a treatment for nervousness and melancholy, for example, was also ‘a pleasurable and harmless stimulant.’ ‘Under its influence all classes seem to gather new inspiration and energy,’ the advertisement explained.”

Though in 1906 the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act required patent medicine companies to list cannabis as an ingredient in products where it was present – and between 1914 and 1925 26 states passed laws prohibiting it — it wasn’t until 1937 federal authorities took substantial action.

On August 2, 1937, Congress passed the “Marihuana Tax Act,” which was largely the result of anti-narcotic crusader Henry Anslinger’s mission to ban the plant. As Time has explained, creating a “tax” on the substance effectively outlawed it:

“As with the Harrison Narcotic Act in 1914, Congress deemed an act taxing and regulating drugs, rather than prohibiting them, less susceptible to legal challenge. As a result, the 1937 legislation was ostensibly a revenue measure. Just as the Harrison Act used taxation and regulation to, in effect, prohibit morphine, heroin and other drugs, the Marijuana Tax Act essentially outlawed the possession or sale of marijuana.”

There are a variety of documented reasons for this ban. For one, Henry Anslinger was hysterically opposed to drugs. According to Origins, Anslinger,  a “former assistant commissioner of the Prohibition Bureau who headed the U.S. Treasury Department’s Narcotics Bureau from 1930 to 1962,” had previously advocated against a ban on cannabis because he believed it would be difficult to enforce (you don’t say!).

Origins explained:

“However, Anslinger began to capitalize on fears about marijuana while pressing a public relations campaign to encourage the passage of uniform anti-narcotics legislation in all 48 states. He later lobbied in favor of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937.”

Many of these fears were the result of calculated campaigns in the 1920s by prohibition activists, who were inspired by their “success” in banning alcohol. Further, William Randolph Hearst, the infamous publishing magnate, launched a campaign to associate cannabis with violence and the degradation of society.

“The association of murder, torture, and mindless violence with marijuana was not borne out by evidence or actual events but blossomed thanks to the vivid imaginations of the journalists charged with sensationalizing the tired story of drug use and addiction,” Origins noted.

Similarly, Anslinger sounded the alarm on the alleged murders and rapes people committed while under the influence of the devil’s lettuce. In 1936, the film Reefer Madness, which now plays like a comedy, warned of the psychosis, violence, and dangers cannabis could bring about. The film warned of “marijuana, the burning weed with its roots in hell.” Much of the testimony advocating the 1937 tax act focused on these unfounded fears, and Anslinger led the way.

“How many murders, suicides, robberies, criminal assaults, holdups, burglaries and deeds of maniacal insanity it causes each year can only be conjectured,” he wrote in a 1937 article titled “Marijuana, Assassin of Youth.” (Today, some research suggests cannabis is not linked to increases in violent crime).

The only witness who testified against the proposed ban was a representative from the American Medical Association, who congressmen dismissed (Anslinger also made an effort throughout his career to discredit research suggesting cannabis was not dangerous). The bill easily passed, undermining legal cannabis and also outlawed the production of hemp. President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it into law.

Another related driver behind the ban stemmed from racism within American society. Though cannabis had been used in medicines and hemp was used in industry to produce materials like rope (in the 1600s, colonists were actually required to grow it), Mexican immigrants introduced the practice of smoking the plant, which, “in turn, generated a reaction in the U.S., tinged perhaps with anti-Mexican xenophobia.” This fear spurred the 1906 regulation in the Pure Food and Drug Act and persisted into the 1930s.

As Rolling Stone noted, there had been conversations in the United States not just about cannabis use, but other drugs, since the late 19th century.

“But in the next 50 years, concerns about inebriation only translated into law if the substance wasn’t already controlled by a powerful industry, and if there was a perception, accurate or not, that a given drug was being used by poor people, immigrants, and people of color.”

As fears surrounding substance use grew, Rolling Stone observed, they dovetailed with racist stereotypes about the poor and minorities that assumed these groups were more likely to commit crimes, be lazy, and lack self-control when it came to “sex, violence, and intoxication.”

By 1952, Congress had passed the Boggs Act, which imposed strict mandatory sentences for various drugs, including cannabis. In the 1970s, the Controlled Substances Act was passed, placing drugs into “schedules” as we know them today.

Though Nixon touted the war on drugs as an effort to save society, one of his advisers, John Ehrlichman, reportedly claimed in the 1990s that they pursued cannabis as an effort to criminalize black and anti-war activist. Other former advisers then claimed Ehrlichman was either joking or mistaken, but a cursory examination of arrests for cannabis shows the war on weed has disproportionately affected African-Americans though they use the substance at roughly the same rate as white Americans.

Overall, according to the ACLU, cannabis arrests accounted for over half of all drug arrests between 2000 and 2010, and 88% of those were for possession.

Though states across the country have begun to legalize cannabis both for medicinal and recreational use, the federal government continues to dig its heels in. The DEA recently insisted that even cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive cannabinoid, falls into the ominous Schedule I category, which also includes MDMA, LSD, and mushrooms but fails to cover highly dangerous and toxic legal drugs like alcohol and opioids.

Many industries also continue to oppose cannabis legalization. The alcohol industry, the private prison industry, and prison guard and police unions all lobby against legalization.  Most notably, pharmaceutical companies fight to keep cannabis illegal, all while at least one opioid producer concocts its own synthetic cannabis with the approval of the same FDA and DEA that opted to keep cannabis a Schedule I drug.

But against all these odds, cannabis continues to beat the government and establishment’s decades-long fight against it.

Many Americans have outgrown the fears instilled in them through films like Reefer Madness and are beginning to accept a live-and-let-live mentality. Though more research on the plant is undoubtedly needed (and limited due to federal restrictions), preliminary scientific studies and anecdotal evidence suggest the plant has the potential to treat a variety of ailments, from epilepsy to nausea to Parkinson’s disease. Veterans are increasingly using it to treat PTSD.

The United States’ relationship with cannabis is coming full circle, returning to times when it was a common ingredient in everyday medications. Many Americans are opting to substitute opioids with cannabis for pain, and opioid overdose deaths are lower in states with legal medical cannabis. Cannabis also poses a threat to profits from other pharmaceuticals.

Beer company profits have fallen in states where cannabis is legal, and some states are even moving to legalize hemp.

Meanwhile, cannabis industry is expected to generate $20 billion annually by 2020, and police are frequently trolled for attempting to enforce cannabis laws that Americans increasingly perceive as petty and unproductive.

All the while, federal bureaucracies continue to lag behind, clinging to outdated myths and prohibitions that — over the course of the better half of a century — have been debunked and proven ineffective, which is unsurprising considering humans have been consuming the plant for well over 2,000 years.

"Then True Hunger Crept In Where I Live" - An AP Reporter's 3 Year Nightmare In Venezuela

Authored by Hannah Dreier via APNews.com,

The first thing the muscled-up men did was take my cellphone. They had stopped me on the street as I left an interview in the hometown of the late President Hugo Chavez and wrangled me into a black SUV.

Heart pounding in the back seat with the men and two women, I watched the low cinderblock homes zoom by and tried to remember the anti-kidnapping class I’d taken in preparation for moving to Venezuela. The advice had been to try to humanize yourself.

“What should we do with her?” the driver asked. The man next to me pulled his own head up by the hair and made a slitting gesture across his throat.

What might a humanizing reaction to that be?

I had thought that being a foreign reporter protected me from the growing chaos in Venezuela. But with the country unraveling so fast, I was about to learn there was no way to remain insulated.

I came to Caracas as a correspondent for The Associated Press in 2014, just in time to witness the country’s accelerating descent into a humanitarian catastrophe.

Venezuela had been a rising nation, buoyed by the world’s largest oil reserves, but by the time I arrived, even high global oil prices couldn’t keep shortages and rapid inflation at bay.

Life in Caracas was still often marked by optimism and ambition. My friends were buying apartments and cars and making lofty plans for their careers. On weekends, we’d go to pristine Caribbean beaches and drink imported whiskey at nightclubs that stayed open until dawn. There was still so much affordable food that one of my first stories was about a growing obesity epidemic.

Over the course of three years, I said good-bye to most of those friends, as well as regular long-distance phone service and six international airline carriers. I got used to carrying bricks of rapidly devaluing cash in tote bags to pay for meals. We still drove to the beach, but began hurrying back early to get off the highway before bandits came out. Stoplights became purely ornamental because of the risk of carjackings.

There was no war or natural disaster. Just ruinous mismanagement that turned the collapse of prices for the country’s oil in 2015 into a national catastrophe.

As things got worse, the socialist administration leaned on anti-imperialist rhetoric. The day I was put into the black SUV in Chavez’s hometown of Barinas coincided with a government-stoked wave of anti-American sentiment. The Drug Enforcement Administration had just jailed the first lady’s nephews in New York on drug trafficking charges, and graffiti saying “Gringo, go home” went up around the country overnight. An image of then-President Barack Obama with Mickey Mouse ears appeared on the AP office building.

I was trying to make small talk with the men who had grabbed me when we pulled past a high, barbed wire-topped wall, and I glimpsed the logo of the secret police. Flooded with relief, I realized I hadn’t been kidnapped, just detained.

Inside, the men trained a camera on me for an interrogation. One said that I would end up like the American journalist who had recently been beheaded in Syria. Another said if I gave him a kiss I could go free.

The man who had been driving said they would be keeping me until the DEA agreed on a swap for the first lady’s nephews. He accused me of helping sabotage the economy. “How much does the U.S. pay you to be their spy?” he asked.

The government of President Nicolas Maduro blames the U.S. and right-wing business interests for the economic collapse, but most economists say it actually stems from government-imposed price and currency distortions. There often seemed to be a direct line between economic policy and daily hardship. One week, the administration declared that eggs would now be sold for no more than 30 cents a carton. The next week, eggs had disappeared from supermarkets, and still have not come back.

In the early days, the shortages seemed almost whimsical. My Venezuelan friends were used to going on Miami shopping sprees. When I made trips home, they asked me to bring back perfume, leather jackets, iPhones and condoms. I usually took two near-empty suitcases to carry back the requests, plus food and toiletries for myself. As the crisis deepened, the requests became harder to fill, and traced the outlines of darker personal dramas: Medication for heart failure. Pediatric epilepsy drugs. Pills to trigger an abortion. Gas masks.

And things were still somehow getting worse. The first time I saw people line up outside the bakery near my apartment, I stopped to take photos. How crazy: A literal bread line.

Then true hunger crept into where I lived. People started digging through the trash at all hours, pulling out vegetable peelings and soggy pizza crusts and eating them on the spot. That seemed like rock bottom. Until my local bakery started organizing lines each morning, not to buy bread but to eat trash.

People waited for their turn to hunt through black bags of bakery garbage. A young woman found a box of muffin crumbs. A teenage boy focused on finding juice containers and drinking whatever remained.

The collapse has been so quick that the trappings of flusher times have not yet disappeared. The capital is still filled with fine restaurants, though tables are often empty. Luxury car dealerships still line the streets and lure people with access to dollars or who have gotten rich off corruption. Many Venezuelans have bodies sculpted by plastic surgery and movie star smiles from years of braces and professional whitening.

At the same time, crime has become so pervasive that it fades into the background of even the swankiest places. One afternoon, I walked past two men in motorcycle helmets talking with customers on a restaurant patio. When I asked the cashier inside for a bottle of water, she gave me a funny look. Once the men left, she explained that they had just robbed everyone outside at gunpoint. Hadn’t I noticed?

People rarely call for help, and with the murder rate surging to become the highest in the world, it’s easy to understand why. Thugs killed a young doctor at the end of my block when he accidentally dropped his cellphone during a daylight robbery. Mindful of the doctor’s fate, I handed over my whole purse when I was mugged a few months later.

In the end, the secret police cut me loose a few hours after they arrested me, with a warning not to return to the city of Barinas. The burly men put me in the same black SUV and drove me to the airport, then watched with crossed arms as I boarded the plane to Caracas.

Finally, this summer, I decided to leave the country on my own accord, heading to the airport with full suitcases instead of empty ones.

This is where I should mention the gorgeous gold and blue parrots that fly in pods over the capital. Or quote Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who once wrote of Caracas, “It is one of the beautiful frustrations of my life that I did not stay forever in that infernal city.” Or tell of the joy that comes with unexpectedly finding milk at the store, or having running water all day.

Instead, I’m thinking of Nubia Gomez, who does cleaning and maintenance in my apartment building and cried when I told her I was leaving. Sadness is just under the surface for so many here. Gomez’s daughter has moved to Spain, and her friends and clients are also departing. Trying to say something comforting, I suggested things might get back to normal before too long.

“They won’t,” Gomez said as she wept. “Not for a long time.”

As Opioid Crisis Rages, Federal Drug Prosecutions Hit 25-Year Low

Members of the legal marijuana industry, who for months have been nervously anticipating a federal crackdown led by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, can breathe a sigh of relief. According to data from the Justice Department, the number of federal drug-crime prosecutions has fallen to its lowest level in 25 years, and the decline has continued to accelerate since President Donald Trump took office.

The latest data show that federal law-enforcement agencies prosecuted fewer drug offenders over the past 12 months than at any time during the last quarter century. During the first five months of the Trump administration, only 8,814 drug offenders were prosecuted by the federal government, a drop of 9 percent as compared with the 9,687 federal criminal cases prosecuted between February and June 2016.

Prosecutions fell sharply in June on a month-to-month basis following a spike in May. Over the long term, the six-month average has been declining slowly since 2003.

“During the month of June 2017, only 1,578 new prosecutions for drug crimes were brought - down 16.1 percent from the number in May. And prosecutions over the past year are even lower than they were five years ago. Overall, the data show that drug prosecutions in U.S. district courts are down 27.6 percent from levels reported in 2012.”

According to the report, most (75.8%) federal drug prosecutions involve trafficking charges, while another 21.8% are related to organized crime.

“So far during the first nine months of FY 2017, about 1 in 5 cases (21.8%) were the result of organized crime task force efforts. An additional three out of four (75.8%) fell under drug trafficking programs, while simple drug possession was the nature of the offense in the remaining 2.5 percent of cases.

The lead investigative agency for the largest number of prosecutions so far during FY 2017 was the Drug Enforcement Administration. It was the lead investigative agency in nearly four out every ten (38.9%) federal criminal prosecutions filed.”

If the decline continues at the current rate, the US is on track to see a sharp drop in the number of per-capita prosecutions in 2017.

“During FY 2016 the Justice Department said the government obtained 68.9 narcotics/drugs prosecutions for every one million people in the United States. If pace during the first nine months of FY 2017 continues at the same rate, narcotics/drugs prosecutions for one million people in the United States this year will be 65.3.”

While the long-term trend appears to ignore the worsening opioid epidemic, some of the largest year-over-year increases occurred in regions where opioid abuse has surged since the beginning of the decade. The Northern District of West Virginia, a state with the largest number of opioid prescriptions written per capita, saw the largest year-over-year increase. Over the past five years, Wyoming saw the largest increase n prosecutions, up 242%. The district with the largest projected drop in the rate of prosecutions was New Mexico, with 30%.

The most-active district is unsurprisingly situated along the US-Mexico border. The Southern District of California, which encompasses San Diego, saw 453.6 prosecutions per million people last year, while the District of Arizona ranked second.  

Sessions has insisted that stepped up enforcement of drug laws is essential to combating the worsening opioid abuse crisis, but the decline  But the decline in prosecutions suggests that law enforcement agencies have been somehow less active in targeting high-level drug offenders, even as overdose deaths rise to all-time highs thanks to powerful synthetic opioids that have penetrated the markets for heroin, cocaine and even prescription pills. Given the high stakes, and the actions against drug manufacturers recetly ataken by a nmber of states" attorneys general, the decline in prosecutions at the federal level makes little sense.

Iran Rejects Trump's Warning; Foreign Minister Slams "Saudis Involvement In 94% Of Terrorist Attacks In The World"

The US president warned that Iran would face ‘new and serious consequences’ if the detained Americans were not released.

But now, as MiddleEastEye reports, Iran demanded on Saturday that the United States release Iranians detained there, a day after US President Donald Trump called on the Islamic Republic to release three US citizens.

“America should quickly release Iranian prisoners in the country,” foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Ghasemi said, according to the Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA).

On Friday, Trump urged Tehran to return Robert Levinson, an American former law enforcement officer who disappeared in Iran more than a decade ago, and to release businessman Siamak Namazi and his father, Baquer, both jailed on espionage charges.

Trump warned that Iran would face “new and serious consequences” if the three men were not released.

Trump warns Iran over detained Americans: White House https://t.co/u0fQ8kAo6q

— Late Night Watch (@LateNightWatch) July 22, 2017

“The judiciary, courts and judges in Iran are completely independent, as in any other country,” Ghasemi said in a statement.

“Any interventionist and threatening statement by American officials and institutions has no effect on the will and determination of the country’s judicial system to try and punish criminals and violators of the country’s laws and national security.”

The statement capped a week of US rhetoric against Tehran, which announced last Sunday that another US citizen, Xiyue Wang, a graduate student from Princeton University, had been sentenced to 10 years in jail on spying charges.

On Tuesday, Washington slapped new economic sanctions on Iran over its ballistic missile programme and said Tehran’s “malign activities” in the Middle East undercut any “positive contributions” coming from the 2015 nuclear accord.

Last October, an Iranian court sentenced 46-year-old Siamak Namazi and his father, Baquer Namazi, 80, to 10 years in prison on charges of spying and cooperating with the US.

Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps detained Siamak in October 2015 while he was visiting his family in Tehran, and Baquer, a former Iranian provincial governor and ex-UNICEF official, in February last year, family members said.

Levinson, a former agent for the Federal Bureau of Investigation and for the Drug Enforcement Administration, disappeared in Iran in 2007. The US government has a $5m reward for information leading to his safe return.

Levinson left Iran years ago and the Islamic Republic has no information about his whereabouts, Ghasemi said on Saturday.

“The statements of the White House, as usual, are an example of interference in Iran’s internal affairs and the demands are unacceptable and rejected,” Ghasemi said, according to ISNA.

And then, as The American Herald Tribune reports, the Islamic Republic of Iran"s Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, told The National Interest.

"We don’t see the situation in our region as a winning or losing battle. It’s a situation where the initial U.S. invasion of Iraq has led everybody to lose.

Because we believe that the situation in today’s world is so interconnected that we cannot have winners and losers; we either win together or lose together,."

Zarif also said that Shias, Sunnis and Kurds are all important segment of Iraqi society with whom Iran needs to have relations.

“Iran has rushed to the aid of the Iraqis, not just the Shias, but everybody. For us, the Shias, the Sunnis, the Kurds—all of them are an important segment of Iraqi society with whom we need to have relations.” 

Citing an example of Iran’s help to Iraqis when Daesh invaded Iraq in 2014, the foreign minister said, “We went to the support of the Kurds: when they had been invaded by ISIS, we were the first to go to Erbil to secure it and to rescue it, basically, from a Daesh occupation.” 

He added there are certain countries in the Middle East who have been “consistently” supporting terrorism.

“You have countries in the region who have consistently supported extremists…

Some countries consistently supported the wrong groups - these are the same countries from whose nationals, almost 94 percent of those engaged in acts of terror, came - so we are talking about a consistent record on their side and a consistent record on the Iranian side.” 

He added that Iran does not seek to exclude Saudi Arabia from the security calculus of the Middle East region.

“We believe that Saudi Arabia is an important part of that security, as we believe that other countries in the region should be an important part of that security understanding.”

The Feds Just Expanded Civil Asset Forfeiture 'Laws' Nationwide

When you"re a government agency, asking for a tax increase is always a hassle. As Ryan McMaken notes, for the most part, taxpayers don"t like taxes, and if asked if they want to pay more, they"re likely to often say "no." Moreover, when public officials pass tax increases, they may face the wrath of taxpayers at the ballot box. For this reason, governments are always looking for ways to get revenue without having to use tax revenue.

One such "hidden" method of seizing wealth from the taxpayers is through what is now called "civil asset forfeiture."

This occurs when a law enforcement agency seizes the assets - including real estate, cars, cash, and other valuables - from private citizens based merely on the suspicion that the person has committed a crime with the assets in question. No due process is necessary. No conviction in a court of law need occur. While it is technically possible to sue a government agency to reclaim one"s possessions, this requires immense amounts of time and legal fees to pursue. Needless to say, civil asset forfeiture has become a lucrative source of income for law enforcement agencies. And, over the past 30 years, the practice has become widespread.

As Martin Armstrong detailed, between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually. In 2010 alone, the value of assets seized grew by +52.8% from 2009 and was six times greater than the total for 1989. Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year, making this 35% of the entire number of assets collected from 1989 to 2010 in a single year. Now, according to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses.

This means that the police are now taking more assets than the criminals.

“Civil forfeiture laws represent one of the most serious assaults on private property rights in the nation today. Under civil forfeiture, police and prosecutors can seize your car or other property, sell it and use the proceeds to fund agency budgets—all without so much as charging you with a crime. Unlike criminal forfeiture, where property is taken after its owner has been found guilty in a court of law, with civil forfeiture, owners need not be charged with or convicted of a crime to lose homes, cars, cash or other property. Americans are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, but civil forfeiture turns that principle on its head.  With civil forfeiture, your property is guilty until you prove it innocent.”

- “ Policing for Profit: The Abuse of Civil Asset Forfeiture,” Institute for Justice

In jolly old England, Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor. But as John Whitehead noted, in modern-day America, greedy government goons steal from the innocent to give to the corrupt under court- and legislature-sanctioned schemes called civil asset forfeiture. This is how the American police state continues to get rich: by stealing from the citizenry.

At every turn, “we the people” are getting swindled, cheated, conned, robbed, raided, pickpocketed, mugged, deceived, defrauded, double-crossed and fleeced by governmental and corporate shareholders of the American police state out to make a profit at taxpayer expense.

President Trump has made it clear his loyalties lie with the police, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has previously declared his love for civil asset forfeiture, the Supreme Court keeps marching in lockstep with the police state, and the police unions don’t want their gravy train to go away, so there’s not much hope for federal reform anytime soon. As always, change will have to begin locally and move upwards.

Some state legislatures (Florida, Michigan, Nebraska, New Mexico, and Ohio) are beginning to push back against these clearly unconstitutional asset forfeiture schemes. As the National Review reports, “New Mexico now requires a criminal conviction before law enforcement can seize property, while police in Florida must prove “beyond reasonable doubt” that property is linked to a crime before it’s seized.”

And it is that pushback that has seemingly pushed the federal government to "fix" the situation. As Reuters reports, the U.S. Justice Department announced on Wednesday that the federal government will reinstate a program that helps local and state law enforcement seize cash and other assets they suspect have been earned from crimes.

Local police will now be able to seize cash, often from those suspected of drug crimes, even in states that do not condone the policy.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein told reporters that most seizures were warranted because the "vast majority" of people who have property taken by police do not contest it in court.

"This is going to enable us to work with local police and our prosecutors to ensure that when assets are lawfully seized they are not returned to criminals," said Rosenstein at a media briefing at the Justice Department.

The Obama administration had rolled back the policy in 2015, saying it incentivized police to take money from people who had committed crimes.

Since former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder weighed in on the issue in 2015, Justice Department agencies like the Drug Enforcement Administration has been barred from rewarding local police for taking possessions from people they stop.

Now, the federal government will again be able to return up to 80 percent of the assets seized to local law enforcement.

Rosenstein said the 2015 policy had a chilling effect on seizures by local law enforcement.

Many states have civil asset forfeiture laws that allow the state government to redistribute money seized for programs like education. But the federal program returns cash directly to the police department that took the asset, allowing them to buy new equipment or as drug sniffing dogs.

The Justice Department under President Donald Trump has made efforts to improve relationships with local and state law enforcement, which they viewed as damaged under the Obama administration. Rosenstein said that the president had heard from police who were concerned about the 2015 policy, but the administration was not acting to score political points with police unions that supported Trump"s campaign.

"This is not an effort to appease any particular constituency. It is an effort to empower law enforcement," Rosenstein said.

The Police State"s tentacles just reached a little further into your "pocketbook" as what has become known as “policing for profit,” goes nationwide.. by federal law!

DoJ"s Full new asset forfeiture policy letter below (confirming police can sezie proeprty from people not charged with crimes even in states where it is banned)...

As John Whitehead concluded so eloquently, remember, long before Americans charted their revolutionary course in pursuit of happiness, it was “life, liberty, and property” which constituted the golden triad of essential rights that the government was charged with respecting and protecting. To the colonists, smarting from mistreatment at the hands of the British crown, protecting their property from governmental abuse was just as critical as preserving their lives and liberties. As the colonists understood, if the government can arbitrarily take away your property, you have no true rights: you’re nothing more than a serf or a slave. The Fifth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was born of this need to safeguard against any attempt by the government to unlawfully deprive a citizen of the right to life, liberty, or property, without due process of law. Little could our ancestral forebears have imagined that it would take less than three centuries of so-called “independence” to once again render us brow-beaten subjects in bondage to an overlord bent on depriving us of our most inalienable and fundamental rights. Yet if the government can arbitrarily freeze, seize or lay claim to your property (money, land or possessions) under government asset forfeiture schemes, you have no true rights.

Enough is enough.

We leave it to Liberty Blitzkrieg"s Mike Krieger to sum it all up...Washington D.C. has become a clear threat to hundreds of millions of Americans who just want to lead a decent lives for themselves and their families. The only policies coming out of that cesspool have made things far worse for the political and economic well-being of the vast majority of us. The time for us to take our constitutional powers back and reinstate self-government is long overdue.

Has The Drug War Incentivized Police To Treat Citizens Like Terrorists?

Authored by Duane Norman via Free Market Shooter blog,

A video of a Florida Sheriff making a promo video to scare has been making the rounds recently.  Casey Research recently covered the affair, noting the following quote from Sheriff Grinnell:

“Enjoy looking over your shoulder, constantly wondering if today’s the day we come for you. Enjoy trying to sleep tonight, wondering if tonight’s the night our SWAT team blows your front door off the hinges. We are coming for you.”

The video (reproduced below, with commentary from Casey Research) is as surreal as the above picture implies…

Sheriff Grinnell delivered this message last month while flanked by four combat-ready officers wearing ski masks. It looks like someone from ISIS directed it.

Grinnell’s message was aimed at local drug dealers. You see, Lake County has a serious opioid problem. And like many other places in the US, it’s fighting its drug problem as if it were a war.

…but this is hardly the first time a video like this has been produced, and it likely won’t be the last.  Last year, former Sheriff Clay Higgins, known as the “Cajun John Wayne” in Louisiana, released the below video calling out the “Gremlins” gang, and before his resignation, was known for making many similar videos:

Some notable quotes from Sheriff Higgins:

• You won’t walk away.  Look at you. Men like us, son, we do Dumbbell presses with weights bigger than you.


• Young man, I’ll meet you on solid ground, anytime, anywhere. Light or heavy, it makes no difference to me.


• You will be hunted, you will be tracked. And if you raise your weapon to a man like me, we’ll return fire with superior fire.


• You don’t like the things I’ve told you tonight?  I’ve got one thing to say – I’m easy to find.

This guy certainly has enough one-liners to be worthy of the “Cajun John Wayne” moniker, but it seems none of the police or community leaders behind him bothered to ask why criminals engage in such violent behavior; they are trying to profit from the obscenely high price of illegal drugs.  And when it comes to profit, the criminals are hardly alone.

Free Market Shooter has covered the problems with Civil Asset Forfeiture in the past…

Martin Armstrong of Armstrong Economics explains how police have every reason to seize assets, largely because these civil asset forfeitures are literally funding police departments:

Between 1989 and 2010, U.S. attorneys seized an estimated $12.6 billion in asset forfeiture cases. The growth rate during that time averaged +19.4% annually. In 2010 alone, the value of assets seized grew by +52.8% from 2009 and was six times greater than the total for 1989. Then by 2014, that number had ballooned to roughly $4.5 billion for the year, making this 35% of the entire number of assets collected from 1989 to 2010 in a single year. According to the FBI, the total amount of goods stolen by criminals in 2014 burglary offenses suffered an estimated $3.9 billion in property losses. This means that the police are now taking more assets than the criminals.

…but if you take a closer look at the forfeitures themselves, you’ll realize just how many of them are related to the war on drugs:

“Thirty-six percent of all local police departments received money, property, or goods from a drug asset forfeiture program during 2002 (table 32). These departments employed 78% of all local police officers. At least 80% of the departments in each population category of 25,000 or more had drug asset forfeiture receipts.”

“There can be few components of law enforcement programmes which actually cost nothing. The asset forfeiture provision of the federal law for crop suppression (relating mainly to cannabis in the State of Kentucky), proved to be such a case, costing the United States Government $13.7 million, but yielding a return of $53 million in 1991, or almost $4 in assets seized for every $1 invested by the Drug Enforcement Administration.”

“The advent of a now common police tactic, called the “reverse sting,” illustrates the shift in priorities from crime control to funding raids. In a reverse sting, an officer attempts to sell drugs to an unsuspecting buyer. The method permits the police to seize the buyer’s cash rather than a seller’s drugs, which have no value to the agency.

“During the past decade, law enforcement agencies increasingly have turned to asset seizures and drug enforcement grants to compensate for budgetary shortfalls, at the expense of other criminal justice goals. We believe the strange shape of the criminal justice system today—the law enforcement agenda that targets assets rather than crime, the 80 percent of seizures that are unaccompanied by any criminal prosecution, the plea bargains that favor drug kingpins and penalize the “mules” without assets to trade, the reverse stings that target drug buyers rather than drug sellers, the overkill in agencies involved even in minor arrests, the massive shift towards federal jurisdiction over local law enforcement ^- is largely the unplanned by-product of this economic incentive structure.”

So the drug war has created a massive financial incentive for police to seize property from individuals, one that many departments could require to stay afloat.  What do you think happens next?

As Free Market Shooter has covered previously for Single Dude Travel, raids from SWAT teams have become commonplace, with police becoming better armed by the day:

Our nation’s policing system has become profit-driven instead of crime-driven, largely due to the failure of the war on drugs, and the fact that cops have been given surplus military hardware from the armed forces at bargain basement prices. SWAT team raids have gone from a few hundred per year in the 1970s to 50,000 annually, largely because they call SWAT in when “Special Weapons And Tactics” aren’t really needed, such as when apprehending a credit card scammer or raiding an organic farm for the filmiest of reasons. When a SWAT team nearly kills a 19-month old baby with a flashbang grenade, in a raid without the suspect present, how are there no charges filed?

And now that police are all armed to the teeth looking for property to seize, what happens next?  The practice is applied everywhere.  If you look at a report on the “most outlandish SWAT team raids” across the country, you’ll see just how common it is to have a SWAT team called in:

• Armed agents raid animal shelter in search of baby deer—and kill it.


• Girl’s home wrongfully raided with flashbangs despite door being open.


• SWAT team raids DJ’s studio to enforce copyright law.


• SWAT squad invades private poker game.


• SWAT team raids man’s home in search of stolen koi fish.


• Sex toys, condoms and pajamas seized in drug/prostitution SWAT team raid.


• Peaceful monks arrested in SWAT team action.


• Feds raid Amish dairy farm—twice—for selling unpasteurized milk.


• Police unlawfully invade a series of barbershops without warrants.


• Police forcibly search and detain 19 patrons in gay bar.


• SWAT team confiscates wood used to make instruments during illegal raid.

So, how do you stop police from treating civilians like they would treat terrorists?  The best place to start is removing the incentive structure that has been created by the war on drugs, which brings us back to Casey Research’s commentary:

Illegalizing something does nothing but create a black market and give people a reason to induce other people to get high. I mean, people have been drinking alcohol for about the last 10,000 years. But it didn’t become a real problem until the Eighteenth Amendment and the Volstead Act passed in 1920. At that point, it financed the mafia.

Laws turn simple bad habits into massive and profitable criminal enterprises.

The government learned absolutely nothing from the failure of alcohol prohibition. What they’re doing with drugs makes an occasional, trivial problem into a national catastrophe…

However, do not expect that to happen anytime soon; again, as Free Market Shooter has covered in the past, new Attorney General Jeff Sessions is adamant about expanding the war on drugs:

And, in case you weren’t aware, this is the same Jeff Sessions who is on the record as being not only against medicinal marijuana, it is the same Jeff Sessions that has stated that marijuana is only slightly less awful than heroin:

     And I am astonished to hear people suggest that we can solve our heroin crisis by legalizing marijuana – so people can trade one life-wrecking dependency for another that’s only slightly less awful.

Then again… it’s not like the prior ten attorney generals did anything but continue the war on drugs.  Remember what Casey said about “massive profitable criminal enterprises”?

The Watergate Style Break In That Covered Up Shocking Wave Of Clinton State Department Scandals

Via Disobedient Media

In 2013, it was first reported that the Clinton State Department had called off eight separate internal investigations into alleged misconduct by the diplomatic corps. When whistleblowers attempted to highlight the wave of coverups, they were subjected to a harassment campaign by the State Department. The law firm representing the former State Department employee who publicized the misconduct was broken into and key evidence stolen in an apparent effort to further obfuscate efforts to ensure a proper investigation into the crimes was carried out. The event was not given widespread attention by the media when it first emerged.

I. The U.S. Government Failed To Appoint An Inspector General For Five Years

Hillary Clinton was appointed to her position as Secretary of State on January 21, 2009, serving until February 1, 2013.  From January 16, 2008 to September 30, 2013, the Obama administration had failed to appoint an Inspector General for the Department of State (DS).  This led some lawmakers to question DS as to why the agency’s top watchdog position, tasked with investigating the practices of roughly 260 embassies worldwide, had been left empty for more than five years, creating the longest such vacancy in the history of any federal agency.  This led Rep. Ed Royce (R-CA), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, and ranking member Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) to write a letter to then Secretary of State John Kerry requesting that he urge the President to nominate a permanent Inspector General for the Department of State as soon as possible. Because DS lacked an Inspector General, Harold W. Geisel, the Deputy Inspector General, was appointed the interim Inspector General of the State Department. Geisel would remain in this position for the next five years, until June 2013.

In 2013, it was first reported that the Clinton State Department had called off eight separate internal investigations into alleged misconduct by the diplomatic corps during the time that there was no appointed inspector general. Of these eight quashed investigations, the one which has found its way back into the limelight, as a result of the media’s complete blackout of President Trump’s human trafficking busts, is that of the former U.S. Ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman. MSNBC’s Chuck Todd detailed these allegations in a video report from early June of 2013.

II. Ambassador Gutman Was Shielded From Criminal Charges By The State Department

Howard W. Gutman was sworn in as the U.S. Ambassador to Belgium on August 14, 2009. Before being sworn into his role as Ambassador, Gutman was known to be one of President Obama’s top donors, raising a staggering $775,000 for the 2008 campaign and inauguration committee.  In 2016, hacker Guccifer2.0 began releasing documents from the DNC and DCCC.  According to these documents, Gutman is said to have raised a total of $816,550 for Obama For America (OFA) and $724,500 for the DNC.  The donations are part of what was a culture of pay to play politics in the Obama administration. Four years later, Gutman would again be find himself in the public eye, after the release of a ‘damning’ internal memo.

According to this memo, the Department of State assigned an agent to conduct an investigation into possible criminal behavior involving the ambassador to Belgium.  The agent reported that Ambassador Gutman would regularly leave his protective security detail, in order to solicit sexual favors from both prostitutes and minors.  However, after only two days of preliminary inquiry, the agent was directed to stop any further investigation into the matter, because of a decision by senior Department officials to treat the matter as a “management issue.”  In June of 2011, in response to the allegations and information obtained by the agent, Ambassador Gutman was recalled to Washington D.C., where he met with Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick F. Kennedy, and then Chief of Staff and Counselor to the Secretary of State, Cheryl Mills.  During the meeting, the Ambassador denied all allegations of wrongdoing, and was then permitted to return to his post, with no further action being sought.

Despite the decision to terminate the investigation after only two days, DS Management argued to OIG that the decision was proper, as “no further investigation was possible”.  However, in its findings, OIG concluded that DS was wrong, and that further evidence could have in fact been recovered.  According to the memo, OIG found that over the course of the two-day investigation, “only one of multiple potential witnesses on the embassy’s security staff had been interviewed.”  OIG further found that not only did DS fail to interview Ambassador Gutman, but DS did not follow its normal, established investigative procedures of assigning an investigative case number to the matter or opening.  Lastly, OIG found that DS failed to even keep investigative case files on the matter.

Patrick Kennedy told OIG that he decided to handle the incident as a “management issue”, based on disciplinary provision 3 FAM 4322.2 of the Foreign Affairs Manual.  According to this provision, when “exceptional circumstances” exist, the Under Secretary need not refer the suspected misconduct to OIG or DS for further investigation.  Kennedy went on to explain that he cited as “exceptional circumstances” the fact that the Ambassador worked overseas. When questioned about his determination to terminate the investigation and characterize the explosive allegations as a “management issue”, Kennedy responded that he has, “always acted to honor the brave men and women I serve, while also holding accountable anyone guilty of wrongdoing. In my current position, it is my responsibility to make sure the Department and all of our employees-no matter their rank-are held to the highest standard, and I have never once interfered, nor would I condone interfering, in any investigation.”

On January 23, 2017, amid rumors that he would be replaced, Kennedy left the State Department, ending a career which began in 1973.  This was the same day Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made his first trip to the State Department, in order to introduce himself.

III. State Department Memos Were Edited To Prevent Scandal, Cover Up Embarrassing Details

Earlier drafts of the memo provided to the Washington Examiner, showed DS interim Inspector General, Harold W. Geisel, along with other state officials, editing out passages of the memo, that would have been extremely embarrassing to Hillary Clinton just days before she stepped down from her post.

According to a draft dated November 16, senior officials in the State Department would actively influence the progress and results of internal investigations, as well as to shield “rising stars” from criminal charges or embarrassment that could potentially harm their career. One case, which triggered outraged comment from several special investigations division sources, related to allegations that a Regional Security Officer engaged in serious criminal conduct including sexual abuse of local embassy staff during a series of embassy postings. Sources also stated that a senior diplomatic security official successfully protected some agents on the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton"s security detail from investigations into misbehavior while on official trips. The Examiner reported that no explanation was given as to why this text was removed from the final OIG report published in February 2013.

Another passage that was removed from the February 2013 report indicates that officials from the State Department"s "7th Floor Group" shielded Ambassador Gutman from an investigation into alleged pedophilia. In a separate draft from November 27, next to the passage detailing the investigation into the pedophilia allegations against Ambassador Gutman, someone had typed: “[T]hese allegations must be deleted.” However, this comment was removed from the November 28 draft.

However, the case against Ambassador Gutman is just one of many State Department cover-ups outlined in the memo. Some of the other alleged cover-ups include:

• Justine Sincavage, Director of Diplomatic Security Service, closing an investigation into former DS regional security officer in Beirut, Chuck Lisenbee, after he was accused of multiple sexual assaults on guards in Baghdad, Khartoum and Monrovia. Sincavage declared the allegations a "witch hunt" and gave agents "only three days" to investigate before closing the investigation.

• Details about an “underground drug ring” operating near the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad which supplied State Department security contractors with drugs, causing one individual to die of a methadone overdose, which he was taking to counteract his addiction to oxycodone.  DS regional security officer prevented a special investigation into these matters.

• One passage, completely redacted in the final memo, which revealed that many bureau of diplomatic security officials whom were the subject of investigations, would often come to work with their firearms, leading some investigators to do the same.

• William Brownfield, assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs allegedly “gave the impression” to the Diplomatic Security Service that a probe into the deaths of four Hondurans involving the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) should not be pursued.  At the time the memo was written, the case reportedly remained open, as the DEA refused to cooperate.

• Clinton’s Chief of Staff, Cheryl Mills" intervention into an investigation into an affair between then-Iraq Ambassador-designee, Brett McGurk and Wall Street Journal reporter Gina Chon, after his emails were leaked.

• The ‘endemic’ hiring of prostitutes among agents belonging to then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s security detail.  According to the memo, seven security agents were accused of paying for sex while they were traveling overseas with Secretary Clinton.  Two of these agents would confessed to the allegations, while a third stated that he ‘paid for services that were ultimately not received’.  Despite these confessions, senior State Department personnel allowed one of the offending agents to continue his role in securing a Moscow hotel, ‘despite obvious counterintelligence issues.’  Investigators would later uncover evidence against four more agents, however, senior officials would halt any further investigation into the remaining agents, ‘despite the possibility of counterintelligence issues.’

IV. The State Department Harassed Whistleblowers Who Made The Scandals Public

The Examiner obtained these earlier drafts from Richard Higbie, a senior criminal investigator at the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, after he had disclosed the documents to several members of Congress, as well as multiple congressional committees, under federal whistleblower protections. In a live interview with The Blaze, Higbie provides further insight into the alleged State Department cover-ups. Many of these documents were provided by whistleblower, Aurelia Fedenisn, through a subpoena issued by Higbie’s legal team.

Fedenisn, a former investigator for the State Department Inspector General for 26 years, stated that she wanted to share the original memo with the media, in order to show how internal investigations were being influenced by officials in the State Department.  In an interview with CBS, Fedenisn stated that investigators, “uncovered several allegations of criminal wrongdoing in cases, some of which never became cases."  Fedenisn explained that agents were very upset with the pushback they received from senior State Department officials: "We were very upset. We expect to see influence, but the degree to which that influence existed and how high up it went, was very disturbing.” According to Fedenisn, when a high-ranking State Department security official was shown a draft of their findings, detailing how investigations were being interfered with by senior State Department officials, he said, “This is going to kill us.”

However, once the final report was released, all references to these specific cases had been removed. Regarding how investigators felt after receiving so much pushback for simply doing their jobs, Fedenisn stated, "I mean my heart really went out to the agents in that office, because they really want to do the right thing, they want to investigate the cases fully, correctly, accurately ... and they can"t.” Cary Schulman, Fedenisn’s lawyer, told NBC that her client felt it was important that Congress get this information. Schulman went on to state, “It’s a coverup…The whole agency is impaired. Undue influence . . . is coming from political appointees. It’s coming from above the criminal investigation unit.”

Fedenisn claimed that in response to bringing this information to light, she has been the subject of an intimidation campaign by the Department of State. In an interview with The Cable, Fedenisn’s attorney stated that the Department of State had law enforcement officers camp out in front of Fedenisn"s house, harass her children and attempt to incriminate her. Schulman said after Fedenisn’s interview with CBS, investigators from the State Department’s Inspector General, arrived at Fedenisn’s residence and went to the door where they talked to both of her children and never identified themselves. Investigators talked to the “…older brother and then the younger daughter, a minor, asking for their mom’s place of work and cell phone number…They camped out for four to five hours.” According to Schulman, the purpose of the investigators visit was to have Fedenisn sign a document admitting that she stole State Department materials. However, Fedenisn’s separation agreement with the State Department includes a provision, which legally allows disclosures of misconduct. Schulman further stated that none of this material was classified.

V. Intruders Broke Into The Firm Representing Whistleblowers To Steal Evidence

On June 29, 2013, the firm representing both Higbie and Fedenisn, Schulman & Mathias, was broken into multiple times. The entire incident was captured on camera and reported by the local Fox affiliate. The report states that after kicking the glass of the door in, the two burglars sawed a hole through the wall from an adjoining office and stole three computers, leaving behind other valuables. The firm was the only suite burglarized in the high-rise office building, while all other offices were left untouched.

Security camera footage showing break in at Schulman & Mathias

In a statement to The Cable, Schulman noted that the break-in was, “…a crazy, strange and suspicious situation… It’s clear to me that it was somebody looking for information and not money. My most high-profile case right now is the Aurelia Fedenisn case, and I can’t think of any other case where someone would go to these great lengths to get our information."

The break-in came shortly after it was reported that Higbie’s email account had been hacked. According to Schulman, the hack targeted Higbie’s Gmail account and the perpetrators, deleted four years of emails, some detailing alleged wrongdoing at the State Department. As reported by the New York Post the deleted e-mails included evidence of misconduct by top officials at the department, communications with other potential whistleblowers there, correspondence with members of Congress who were investigating the allegations, and correspondence between Higbie and Schulman regarding legal strategy. Schulman, calling the hacking job “sophisticated” and the targeting of his client is “alarming”, noted, “Obviously, somebody is not happy with something he’s doing and wanted to get that information and also cause him an inability in the future to have ready access to that.”

Although it’s been nearly four years since this story broke, Disobedient Media was able to contact Damon Mathias, formerly of the Schulman & Mathias law firm. When asked about the circumstances surrounding the break-in, Mathias noted that he was “fresh out of law school”, and that they were a very small firm.

“I was a very young attorney and I partnered with an older attorney…and we had a very small, humble office, it was just us two. We weren’t exactly a prime target. I flew to Washington that same week the story broke…[and] gave testimony before Congressional committees. And then…15 days later all the computers are taken”

When asked if they ever heard back from members of Congress after giving testimony before committees, Mathias confirmed a disappointing truth: that these Congressional hearings are simply just for show. While Congressmen enjoy getting their names in an article in relation to the topic, the subject is usually dropped soon afterwards. “It’s all a show, it’s all a show. And right after I met with them, you saw the OIG meeting with Royce’s committee and after that it was crickets. It was over" Mathias said. Recounting his experience with the information he was able to see, Mathias stated, “At the end of the day…the glimpse that I saw going through those documents, and going through everything was just, wow, you know, in our name? We are citizens and they go abroad in our name. The stuff that they’re doing…It definitely needs to be brought to light.”

The final thought Mathias left us with was a sad, bleak picture regarding the fears held by many other governmental officials who have seen wrongdoing throughout their time in government, and why they either wait until the end of their careers or instead, choose to never whistleblow at all, “I’ll tell you this…the one thing with Aurelia, where it was kind of the perfect storm, is that she was on her way out. There are a lot of people up there who will not say anything… I’m not gonna judge them, but, you know, it’s very tough to do that when you still have a lot riding on the line. And the thing with Aurelia is she was out, so she had that freedom to speak out and the retaliation wasn’t really there…there’s a lot out there, but a lot of people are just way too afraid to speak out, unfortunately. We haven’t really helped whistleblowers in that regard.”