Our Continuing Lost War On Drugs - More Fast and Furious Fallout, Cartel Hitmen In The U.S., U.S.Troops In Mexico, and More

Yesterday we started our update to the latest insanity our "war on drugs" has resulted in. From the creativity of the drug cartels to the violence being imposed on the Mexican government and citizenry, there have been very few domestic successes in this expensive and fruitless war.

We will finish up that discussion with some other drug war observations:

1) A little while ago, Wikileaks hacked a number of government computer systems and emails systems and made off with millions of pieces of government information. Some of those emails were related to a private intelligence firm called Stratfor and those emails contained some very distressing war on drug accusations:

• First, there is the accusation that the U.S. Federal government allowed Mexican cartel hitmen to murder people inside the U.S. under the cover of being confidential informants.
• Other stolen emails allege that government sources in both the Mexican and U.S. governments told Stratfor personnel that American special operations armed forces are secretly already physically located in Mexico fighting the war on drugs.
• Other emails accuse the Federal government in Washington of working with certain favored drug cartels — especially Sinaloa — in an effort to put smaller Mexican criminal organizations out of business. The e-mails repeat allegations made in numerous reports and statements by officials, drug-cartel operatives, and other sources, an accusation that we discussed in the following post using different data sources:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-deaths-carnage-and-stupidity-of.html

Scary stuff if true. American troops secretly deployed without the knowledge or approval of Congress or the American people, government partnerships with criminal organizations, and murders being conducted in this country under the auspices of our Federal government. On their own, these leaked emails prove nothing. In the context of the other insanity going on relative to the war on drugs, and the evolving information we are finding out about the Fast and Furious drug running operation, these emails begin to have some serious credibility.

2) In early August, Congressional committees investigating the Fast and Furious gun running disaster issued their first reports, outlining how five senior ATF managers, who were involved with the Fast and Furious operation had either retired or been reassigned. One of the reassigned managers was actually a former acting head of ATF so this program reached pretty high up into the upper echelons of the Federal government.

A U.S. border agent was killed by the guns passed to Mexican drug cartels via Fast And Furious and similar guns have helped kill dozens of Mexican civilians at dozens of Mexican drug cartel crime sites. The blood of those victims have reached deep into the Federal government via the association and reassignment of these five managers.

3) An article in the December, 2012 issue of Reason magazine gave a quick and disheartening history review of the electronic/virtual fence that was supposed to be deployed the Mexican border to inhibit illegal activity. This is different than the actual physical we talked about yesterday, a fence that cartel members tried to drive an SUV over and the same fence that is not a detriment to some drug running since the cartels have simply used catapults to shoot illegal drugs over the fence.

According to the article:

• The pilot project of this effort was passed and funded by Congress in 1977 and was called the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence system (ISIS).
• Since then, many of the ISIS cameras scanning the border malfunctioned from the desert heat when the temperatures exceeded 70 degrees. Since these cameras were deployed in the desert, exceeding 70 degrees was a big problem.
• Ground sensors could not tell the difference between a large cactus from a human.
• The entire program was accused of being infested with fraud and corruption besides inept management.
• According to Robert Maril of East Carolina University, who has written two books about the border, “much of the equipment installed during the ISIS era is rotting in the West Texas wind.” Good, wasteful use of taxpayer wealth, estimated at about $1 billion.

The program was shut down, leaving the Federal government and border patrol officers with zero functionality.

Unfortunately, the death of this ineffective government program could not stay dead. The Department of Homeland Security has set aside almost $92 million in its 2013 budget to try the virtual fence concept again, this time in a pilot program. The article correctly points out that there might not be much value in a virtual fence, even if it works.

A working virtual fence would signal a distant Border Patrol office that someone was illegally coming over the border. But given the unforgiving terrain of the border, any intruder is likely to be long gone before any Border Patrol agents arrived. But this reality will not stop the political class from wasting more taxpayer wealth on virtually nothing.

5) That issue of Reason magazine also had an interview with Douglas Fine, author of the book, “Too High To Fail: Cannabis and the New Green Economic Revolution.” Part of the interview contained a discussion of the pot industry of Mendocino County, California:

• Fine correctly points out that whenever there’s any kind of prohibition, crime tends to be a profit maker, resulting in the super rich drug cartels that have formed.
• Most experts estimate that 70% of the cartels’ profits come from simple marijuana.
• This was the setting for the activities in Mendocino County, California which has become at least one place in the U.S. where marijuana is more or less legal to possess and use as directed by the county Sheriff and the local political bodies.
• This action allowed the county to reap $600,000 worth of revenue from the pot sales in the county and also resulted in reduced county law enforcement expenses since seven police officers were no longer needed once the crime of pot was revoked.

Interesting and progressive thinking in Mendocino. Imagine how much revenue could flow to cash strapped cities and states if the Mendocino experience could be repeated across the country, denying the cartels of 70% of their profit base, reducing the cost of staffing and operating prisons, reducing law enforcement resources, allowing us to focus on treatment rather than incarceration.

Imagine, because obviously our political class cannot.

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http://www.reason.com/
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http://www.robertringer.com/
http://realpolichick.blogspot.com/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08j0sYUOb5w