Part 2, Update On Our Lost War On Drugs: Corrupted Banks, Wisconsin Pot Fields, and More

Yesterday was the first of two posts on our update on the losing war on drugs that the Federal government has been fruitlessly waging since Nixon was in office. We reviewed how innocent Mexican citizens were being killed or their lives ruined by the powerful Mexican drug cartels along with the recent death of a U.S. Coast Guard sailor who was working on drug interdiction duty off the coast of California. We also reviewed how two former Presidents, Carter and Clinton, have come to the realization that our war on drugs has been a losing proposition, wasting trillions of dollars with minimal benefits.

So what did we not get to cover yesterday:

1) We promised to show how our failed war on drugs would impact our national security at some point in time. Consider the recent words publicly spoken by Hillary Clinton at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. on Nov. 30:

“We already know very well that the Iranian regime already exports terrorism, not only to Israel’s doorstep, but across the world. If we had a map I could put up there, I could show you what we track and plot on that map. The evidence of terrorism, mostly, thankfully, plots foiled or unsuccessful, unfortunately, as in Bulgaria, some that succeeded,. But those plots, those activities of Iran directly or through their agents, stretches from Mexico to Thailand.”

Mexico. Remember that we already have had a potential terror attack via Mexican drug cartels in the recent past when the Iranians tried to utilize the drug cartels’ network in the U.S. to kill the Saudi ambassador to the U.S. Given the power and reach of the cartels, the hatred the Iranians have for us, and the wealth the Iranians could probably put together for the cartels’ cooperation, the fact that our Secretary of State publicly acknowledges that the link exists between Mexico and Iran exists should scare all of us.

2) But the Secretary of State is not the only government official to worry about this potentially violent link. Congresswoman Sue Myrick, R-N.C., was interviewed on WABC Radio in New York City on November 29, 2012. In that interview she stated that she believes it’s possible that Hezbollah, the radical terrorist organization tied to Iran, may be working with Mexican cartels to funnel not only drugs, but also terrorist agents into the U.S.:

• “Former [Defense Intelligence Agency] people and others have told me what is going on, there have been a couple of arrests in this country relative to people who have had ties to Hezbollah or Iran, and my concern has been with the drug cartels and the gangs that are operating in Mexico. There is, what I have been told, a very strong presence there of coordination between the two.”
• She went on to state that she shared her concern with the Obama administration and wanted to know what was being done at the Mexican border to thwart such smuggling of terrorist agents. She came away with little confidence that anything was being done.

For more details on what is potentially happening relative to terrorists' links to the drug cartels, visit the following two websites:

http://dailycaller.com/2012/11/20/mexico-disputes-house-gop-report-alleging-terrorists-ties-with-drug-cartels/

http://cognitionemission.wordpress.com/2011/04/15/cartels-%E2%99%A5-terrorists/

The first site contains details of a House of Representatives investigative report that highlights the potential and dangerous relationship between the cartels and terrorism. The second site is an extensive historical review of Mexico's ties to terrorism entities. It is well sourced and if even ten percent of what it claims is true, the implications could be a disaster relative to the safety of Americans right here at homnd

3) HSBC is a British bank and one of the largest banks in the world. Which makes the following news really scary in that the cartels’ reach has gotten that deeply into the world of banking and high finance. A CBS News report from December 11, 2012, along with other credible news sources reported that:

• HSBC has admitted that it laundered more than $800 million for Mexican drug cartels, and covered up illegal transactions for Burma, Iran, Sudan, Cuba, and Libya, all of whom were under international banking sanctions including terrorism.
• The bank will pay a $1.9 billion fine to the U.S. government.
• According to CBS News, in eighty pages of court documents, HSBC admits to sometimes going out of its way to act as a financial clearing house for drug dealers and cartels.
• One of the U.S. Attorneys working the case, Loretta Lynch, stated in the report that the government investigation revealed that staggering amounts of cash, hundreds of thousands of dollars were being deposited daily into HSBC Mexican bank locations using boxes specially made to fit through HSBC tellers' windows to speed the cartel transactions.
• While no one went to jail from HSBC for the money laundering, a fact that the bank admits to, they have cleaned house of many executives who should have been aware and stopped the laundering.
• HSBC will now be monitored by a Federal monitor to ensure this does not happen again.

This is not a two bit bank in the deserts of Mexico. This is a premier, major international banking company that should have known better. But given the wealth and reach of the drug cartels, based on their lucrative trade in illegal drugs, it should not come as any surprise that they were able to manipulate a major bank to launder their money.

This also brings up a related assertion that we have made many times in this blog. We have observed that very few in the U.S. banking industry have been arrested, prosecuted, or jailed as a result of the hanky-panky that went on and which contributed to the Great Recession, e.g. sub-prime lending.

Given that no one went to jail for causing the greatest economic meltdown in this country since the Depression, I guess it is not surprising that no banker went to jail for aiding and abetting the drug cartels and other rogue nations.

4) An article from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, that was reprinted in the November 18, 2012 issue of the Tampa Bay Times, showed how deeply the cartels have moved their production of marijuana into U.S. Borders.

According to the article:

• Heavily armed Mexican drug traffickers are using the only national forest in Wisconsin to grow thousands and thousands of marijuana plants.
• The value of their Wisconsin pot farms are in the millions of dollars.
• Once they harvest their crops they leave behind a blighted area of garbage, animal carcasses, and dangerous pesticides and herbicides.
• The police have made a number of arrests in this area with all of the arrested suspects being almost all Mexican citizens (far away from Mexico, in Wisconsin, close to the Canadian border) and have confiscated numerous weapons including handguns, AK 47s, and powerful rifles.
• Since 2008, Wisconsin authorities have found 11 major pot growing areas but believe this is just the tip of the iceberg relative to the total number of Mexican operated pot farms in Wisconsin.
• The ecologic damage has been extensive since the pot growers cut down hundreds of trees to provide sunlight to the pot plants, sunlight that damages the ecology of the fishing environment in the numerous Wisconsin streams.
• The cartels chose Wisconsin because of the remote areas for growing and the fact that the Wisconsin grown pot can be easily shipped to large Midwest cities like Chicago and Detroit, saving the cartels the transportation costs of ship Mexican grown pot all the way from Mexico to the upper Midwest.

Scary stuff. If the cartels can get workers and farmer implements up to Wisconsin to set up pot harvesting operations, you can see how easy it would be for them to sneak a fewer Islamic terrorists across the border and get them into any area of the United States.

The other scary aspect of this operation is the safety of Wisconsin citizens who are enjoying the outdoors. It is not too hard to imagine a hiker, a fisherman, or hunter stumbling across a pot farm in the Wisconsin wilderness. Combine their discovery with cartel employees armed with AK47s and the potential for death and injury of innocents is highly likely.

5) It certainly is a lost war. Big banks laundering cartel money, cartels possibly involved with terrorism entities, cartel’s invading areas deep in America’s heartland to operate multimillion dollar pot farms, cartels endangering the lives of innocent citizens, etc. The cartels have won the war on drugs so far. They have creatively fed a demand and became rich and very powerful in the process.

But there are a few hopeful signs around the country that promise to look at the lost war on drugs and take a different, more rational path. Washington state and Colorado voters recently passed referendums that relax the laws regarding marijuana and its legalization.

According to a Reason magazine article from November 14, 2012, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts politicians are in various stages of launching drives to relax or legalize the use of marijuana in their states also.

It seems that some sanity is prevailing at the state government levels where local politicians realize that 1) some Americans will continue to get high, regardless of who supplies them the illegal drugs, 2) continuing to focus anti-drug resources on enforcement and imprisonment is costly and has done nothing to reduce the demand and addiction levels, and 3) continuing to make the use of drugs illegal introduces all kinds of criminal elements into the community.

Unfortunately, this sanity has not reached the Federal government level where the Washington political class continues to wage a lost war, a war that wastes taxpayer wealth, does not help citizens with their addiction problems, does not keep our borders secure, does not protect us from foreign terrorism elements, and enriches the cartels while weakening governments.

It should be very interesting when state level sanity collides with Federal level insanity relative to the war on drugs. We would suggest that the Washington politicians read Step 26 from “Love My Country, Loathe My Government.” Step 26 provides a rational and intelligent process for putting together a compassionate, effective, and less costly strategy when it comes to drug use and addiction.

If we do not eventually get this problem under control and move away from an ineffective and liberty reducing war on drugs, I fear the prediction of William Simpson will eventually come to past: “What are the politicians going to tell the people when the Constitution is gone and we still have a drug problem?”

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