A collaboration by two of the world's most respected news organizations reveals how the Drug Enforcement Administration's efforts to crack down on the opioid epidemic were derailed as the number of opioid drug deaths increased. The results of the six-month investigation by 60 Minutes correspondent Bill Whitaker, producers Ira Rosen and Sam Hornblower, and The Washington Post's investigative reporters Scott Higham and Lenny Bernstein will appear Sunday, Oct. 15 in The Washington Post and on 60 Minutes at 7:30 p.m. ET and 7 p.m. PT.

The 60 Minutes double-length segment includes an interview with the highest-ranking DEA agent ever to turn whistleblower, former Deputy Assistant Administrator Joe Rannazzisi.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/how-the-dea-efforts-to-crack-down-on-the-opioid-epidemic-were-derailed/

Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga led a brutal drug gang that ferried tons of cocaine
north. Then he approached the Drug Enforcement Administration for a deal.

TEGUCIGALPA, HONDURAS — The number of murders the Honduran drug lord admitted to orchestrating over 10 years was stunning.

The dead included people he described as killers, rapists and gang members. Then there were the innocents: a lawyer, two journalists, a Honduran refugee in Canada, an official who was serving as Honduras’s antidrug czar and a politician who became his adviser; there were even two children caught in a shootout.

In all, the drug lord, Devis Leonel Rivera Maradiaga, said that, working in concert with drug traffickers and others, he had “caused” the deaths of 78 people — a number that posed a dilemma for United States officials when Mr. Rivera came to them offering to expose high-level corruption in this Central American nation of some nine million people.

Knowing that he was already in the sights of United States investigators, Mr. Rivera sought to help the Drug Enforcement Administration root out corrupt Honduran politicians and other elites who had made Honduras a gateway for massive amounts of cocaine headed for the United States through Mexico.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/world/americas/after-78-killings-a-honduran-drug-lord-rivera-partners-with-us.html?

Is American Made CIA Propaganda? from Tom Secker on Vimeo.

For over a decade, agents with a New Orleans-based DEA task force sold drugs, intimidated informants and stole cash on the job with total impunity.

According to the Advocate, Chad Scott, the former leader of the task force has been fired in the midst of the investigation. It was reported that Scott and some of the officers working under him had a massive operation selling painkillers and that they would sometimes sell other drugs that they managed to steal from dealers during raids.

“There were a series of complaints that went back years. This is a guy who probably shouldn’t have been allowed to run his own task force,” an anonymous law enforcement official said.

The good news, in this case, is that a large and growing number of federal criminal drug cases are being reversed and nonviolent offenders are being set free due to the fact that this corruption has been exposed.

The FBI is now involved in the investigation and is reviewing the allegations against the officers. Many of the crimes that were committed by these officers happened so long ago that they can’t even be charged with them anymore, but their crime spree continued long into recent times so there is still a large amount of evidence against them.

http://thefreethoughtproject.com/dea-ignored-agents-selling-drugs-for-over-a-decade/

There's a great moment in the new History channel miniseries, America's War on Drugs, when a former DEA agent named Celerino Castillo explains why America's crusade to purge drugs from the world is doomed to fail: "America is more addicted to drug money than they are addicted to drugs."

After risking his life going undercover in the 1980s, Castillo had been disillusioned – quite a few different times – to discover that the CIA couldn't care less about stemming the flow of cocaine from Latin America. In fact, the agency ignored the Contras' drug smuggling. The cocaine moved by the guerrillas made its way to America's inner cities as crack, fueling an epidemic of addiction and mass incarceration that has helped make America the number one jailer in the world. When San Jose Mercury reporter Gary Webb broke that story, he was maligned as a conspiracy theorist and fired. Webb eventually killed himself.

Unearthing these kinds of dizzying links in the global drug trade is the driving force behind the eight-hour, four-night event, which premieres this Sunday, June 18th. Using historic footage, dramatic re-enactments and interviews with a cast of fascinating characters – including former CIA and DEA agents, drug traffickers and gang members – the series makes the case that the drug trade has always been entwined in America's military adventures: all the way from the CIA's secret experiments with LSD in the early Cold War, to opium production in Afghanistan during the War on Terror. "We really wanted to do an epic look at the secret history of the war on drugs in America and tell this much bigger story," says Anthony Lappé, who produced the four-part series along with Julian Hobbs and Elli Hakami . "It's almost like the secret history of the last 50 years."

http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/features/americas-war-on-drugs-inside-engrossing-new-series-w487917

This never-ending war has been a phony contest, an arm wrestle between two arms of the US state: the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Routinely, the DEA’s attempts at prosecuting major traffickers in US courts were dismissed on national security grounds, because the traffickers were CIA assets. As CIA director George Bush explained in 1976, these cover-ups were legal under a 1954 agreement between the CIA and the Justice Department, which gave the CIA the right to block prosecutions and to keep its crimes secret in the name of national security. The “de-facto” immunity from prosecution enabled CIA assets to brazenly deal drugs, knowing they were ‘protected’.

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The U.S. Office of National Drug Control Policy … says that more than 60 percent of the profits reaped by Mexican drug lords are derived from the exportation and sale of cannabis to the American market. … (By comparison, only about 28 percent of their profits are derived from the distribution of cocaine, and less than 1 percent comes from trafficking methamphetamine.) … Government officials estimate that approximately half the marijuana consumed in the United States originates from outside its borders, and they have identified Mexico as far and away America’s largest pot provider.

If the Obama administration wishes to once and for all reduce this unprecedented wave of Mexican drug-gang violence, then it needs to remove the drug lord’s primary source of income — and that’s marijuana trafficking.

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Like its progeny the global war on terror, the US war on drugs is a war that its antagonists never want to end since its termination would mean an end to their profit and status. Indeed, an end to the war on drugs would mean an end to the very agencies designed to fight it and the billions of dollars those agencies take from the taxpayers every year. Also like the global war on terror, the war on drugs is against an enemy that does not exist in terms of sovereignty persons, but as a phenomenon impossible to defeat. Therefore, it is an endless pursuit. In addition, it is a pursuit where the individual actors are often on both sides of the battle: where a drug dealer is also an informer and where a terrorist is also a CIA plant. To top it all off, these two wars on phantasms are interlinked. From the poppy fields and heroin labs of Afghanistan and Pakistan to the coca fields and cocaine labs of Colombia (with many other places in between), the funding of terror and insurgent groups and the funding of forces fighting them is connected to the international drug trade.

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The DEA carried out no investigation into two American-registered planes busted in Mexico’s Yucatan carrying more than ten tons of cocaine. The reason, a top DEA official in Miami told us, was that the planes belonged to a “rogue” U.S. Customs operation, and any investigation would rightly be the purview of the Office of the Inspector General of the Cabinet Department under which U.S. Customs operates, the Dept. of Homeland Security.

The name of the operation in question is Operation Blue Lightning.

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Judge Can Make History Right by Keeping Pleadings in Ex-DEA agent Richard Horn’s Lawsuit on the Books
by Bill Conroy

Former DEA agent Richard Horn, with the help of his attorney, former federal prosecutor Brian Leighton, recently brought the mighty CIA to its knees.

For some 15 years, Horn waged a legal battle in federal court against a former CIA official whom Horn alleged had illegally eavesdropped on him as part of a CIA- and State Department-backed effort to thwart DEA’s anti-narcotics mission in Burma in the early 1990s.

The CIA’s efforts to undermine Horn’s work in Burma in getting that nation’s government to stem the flow of heroin to the United States should come as no surprise to those who are familiar with the “Agency’s” history. It seems the CIA, over the decades, has often found itself in the corner of narco-traffickers and thugs who support the Agency’s covert objectives in areas deemed critical to U.S. special interests – whether that be in Southeast Asia, Central Asia or Latin America.

That’s the big pretense of the drug war practiced as dark art by the CIA.

Read full article »»

by Bill Conroy

A top gun with the DEA’s Special Operations Division, along with two fellow law enforcers, are not what they seem, if Gaetano (Guy) DiGirolamo Sr., a convicted heroin dealer, is to be believed.

The trio are, in fact, drug dealers themselves, argues Yale law professor Steven B. Duke in court pleadings filed on behalf of his client, DiGirolamo.

Those pleadings are part of a long-running effort by DiGirolamo to get his 1994 conviction overturned by the court. To date, DiGirolamo, who is serving a life sentence in a federal penitentiary in Otisville, N.Y., has failed to convince the judicial system of his point of view.

However, documents recently provided to Narco News by DiGirolamo (uncovered years after his conviction), as well as revelations that have surfaced recently in the case of national security whistleblower Sibel Edmonds, seem to open the door to reasonable doubt in the government’s case against DiGirolamo.

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Judge revokes former DEA agent’s bond even after being made aware of prosecutorial misconduct allegations

Castillo, as well as other law enforcers who spoke with Narco News, contend the federal prosecutor in the case turned Castillo’s paperwork violation (selling legally purchased weapons without a firearms-dealer permit) into a federal arms-trafficking case as payback for his whistleblowing activity — for exposing the CIA and White House’s complicity in arms- and narco-trafficking as part of the Iran/Contra scandal that played out during the administration of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

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As the Obama administration ramps up the Drug Enforcement Administration's presence in Afghanistan, some special-agent pilots contend that they're being illegally forced to go to a combat zone, while others who've volunteered say they're not being properly equipped.

In interviews with McClatchy, more than a dozen DEA agents describe a badly managed system in which some pilots have been sent to Afghanistan under duress or as punishment for bucking their superiors.

Agents say DEA is forcing them illegally to work in Afghanistan »»

Major DEA Scandal & Time Magazine

This second project report is based on the first-hand documented experience of Mr. Sandalio Gonzalez, retired Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) Special Agent in Charge. Time Magazine reporters Tim Burger and Tim Padgett had an opportunity to speak at length with Mr. Gonzalez and several other veteran DEA agents with direct knowledge of a major corruption case involving several DEA agents on drug traffickers’ payrolls in Colombia. The involved corrupt US officers were also directly involved in helping Colombia's paramilitary death squads launder drug proceeds. Further presented was the documented cover up of this major scandal by the DEA and DOJ IG offices. Despite corroboration by a number of other sources, including several veteran DEA agents and other government officials with first-hand knowledge of the case, and documented evidence disclosed and provided, and despite being given an ‘exclusive’ to the story as insisted on by them, Time Magazine never published the story, and no reasons were ever provided.

123 Real Change »»

Evidence has emerged that the Texan who bankrolled English cricket may have been a US government informer.

Sir Allen Stanford, who is accused of bank fraud, is the subject of an investigation by the BBC's Panorama.

Sources told Panorama that if he was a paid anti-drug agency informer, that could explain why a 2006 probe into his financial dealings was quietly dropped.

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