Illegal narcotics are undoubtedly as debilitatingly destructive as the extreme ruthlessness that industry’s big money has wrought. In Sunday’s New York Timesinvestigation, U.S. Drug War Expands to Africa, a Newer Hub for Cartels By CHARLIE SAVAGE and THOM SHANKER, a significant expansion of the war on drugs is cited because the United States has begun training an elite unit of counternarcotics police in Ghana while planning similar units in Nigeria and Kenya as part of an effort to combat the Latin American cartels increasing use of Africa to smuggle cocaine to Europe.
As nobly minded as William R. Brownfield of the State Department, pictured above, is as a leading architect of new antidrug strategies, the self-righteous exploitation of the chemically dependent is just a byproduct of increasing the capacity for ruthlessness by both criminals and our policing enforcement agencies. As The Times points out, the growing American involvement in Africa follows an earlier escalation of antidrug efforts in Central America, according to documents, Congressional testimony and interviews with a range of officials at theState Department, the Drug Enforcement Administration and The Pentagon.
American officials are responding to fears that crackdowns in more direct staging points for smuggling, like Mexico and Spain, have prompted traffickers to move into smaller and weakly governed states, further corrupting and destabilizing them. Countries that are otherwise without the sufficient means to curb the narco-dollars that have and will corrupt participating cultures. Something that happened throughout the United States itself when, in the 1930s, after the end of liquor prohibition, Harry J. Anslinger stepped up the restriction of drug use by minorities as was pointed out by the authorsAllen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs who sagely advised against the continued escalation of the evolution of the United States into a country of finks on behalf of a warlord state.
The Times even prints the aggressive response by the United States is also a sign of how greater attention and resources have turned to efforts to fight drugs as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have wound down. Jeffrey P. Breeden, the chief of the D.E.A.’s Europe, Asia and Africa section, said, “We see Africa as the new frontier in terms of counterterrorism and counternarcotics issues. It’s a place that we need to get ahead of” as “we’re already behind the curve in some ways, and we need to catch up.”
These initiatives come amid a surge in successful interdictions in Honduras since May, but American officials have also been forced to defend their new tactics after a commando-style team of D.E.A. agents participated in at least three lethal interdiction operations alongside Honduran police officers. In one operation in May, the Honduran police killed four people near the village of Ahuas, and in two others in the past month American agents shot and killed smuggling suspects, who no doubt shot back but were legally due the protection of a justice system despite their inevitable ruthlessness.
To date, officials say, the D.E.A. commando team has not been deployed to work with the newly created elite police squads in Africa, where the effort to counter the drug traffickers is said to be about three years behind the one in Central America. The officials said if Western security forces did come to play a more direct operational role in Africa, for historical reasons they might be European and not American. Spreading the Criminal Enterprise System’s wealth as, after all, these are harmful drugs destined for Europe anyway. Sad, just sad, that it’s so important to destroy peace and tranquility in the name of defending and enforcing peace and tranquility.
In May as assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement, Mr. William R. Brownfield, a leading architect of the strategy now on display in Honduras, traveled to Ghana and Liberia to put the finishing touches on a West Africa Cooperative Security Initiative, which will try to replicate across 15 nations the steps taken in battling trafficking groups operating in Central America and Mexico where the desperate nonsense has escalated along with the governments’ insistence on sharing in the profit scheme.
Mr. Brownfield said the vision for both regions was to improve the ability of nations to deal with drug trafficking, by building up their own institutions and getting them to cooperate with one another, sharing intelligence and running regional law enforcement training centers. And so goes the friendly neighborhood addict unfortunately caught up in the mess as only the most desperate and ruthless have much to gain competing on this military level that had no doubt began with President Ronald Reagan’s insistence on self-righteousness being best for all of us. In the meantime the government has never taken a direct responsibility for the escalation of the drug war as not worth gauging in human terms when power can insist on its’ own way despite whatever result could be rationalized from any point of view.
But because drug traffickers have already moved into Africa, Mr. Brownfield said, there is also a need for the immediate elite police units that have been trained and vetted. “We have to be doing operational stuff right now because things are actually happening right now,” Mr. Brownfield said.
But some specialists have expressed skepticism. Bruce Bagley, a professor at the University of Miami who focuses on Latin America and counternarcotics, said that what had happened in West Africa over the past few years was the latest example of the “Whac-A-Mole” problem, in which making trafficking more difficult in one place simply shifts it to another. Hello. “As they put on the pressure, they are going to detour routes, but they are not going to stop the flow, because the institutions are incredibly weak” and “I don’t care how much vetting they do,” Professor Bagley said. “There is always blowback to this. You start killing people in foreign countries, whether criminals or not, and there is going to be fallout.”
American government officials acknowledge the challenges, but they are not as pessimistic about the chances of at least pushing the trafficking organizations out of particular countries. And even if the intervention leads to an increase in violence as organizations that had operated with impunity are challenged, the alternative, they said, is worse. What? Without a realistic consideration of getting it through people’s thick skulls there could be safer drug dependencies and even safer use of non-narcotics?
But Mr. Brownfield, with a status innocently above the tragedy, states, “There is no such thing as a country that is simply a transit country, for the very simple reason that the drug trafficking organization first pays its network in product, not in cash, and is constantly looking to build a greater market.” Which is how Mexican cartels were recruited to ambitiously destroy each other pursuing wealth at all costs. As Mr. Brownfield says, “Regardless of the name of the country, eventually the transit country becomes a major consumer nation, and at that point they have a more serious problem.” Yep. But replacing the tragic consequences with better fought wars can, and has, only produced more ruthless participants. Period.
The United Nations says cocaine smuggling and consumption in West Africa have soared in recent years, contributing to instability in places like Guinea-Bissau. As an example The Times notes, several years ago, a South American drug gang tried to bribe the son of the Liberian president to allow it to use the country for smuggling. Instead, he cooperated with the D.E.A., and the case resulted in convictions in the United States. Even more ominous, according to American officials, was a case in which a militant group called Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb offered three of its operatives to help ship tons of cocaine through North Africa into Europe to raise money to finance terrorist attacks. The case ended this past March with conviction and sentencing in federal court in New York. Point being Governments continued participation in the Criminal Enterprise System is quite possibly a main source of finance for movements among the most resentful people on earth who despite government resolve still have to have a way out of the resentful mess they’ve inherited from a backward past that’s still present today because governments can’t be bothered to care about the basis for their resentment.
American counternarcotics assistance for West Africa has totaled about $50 million for each of the past two years, and up from just $7.5 million in 2009, according to the State Department. The D.E.A. also is opening its first country office in Senegal, officials said, while the Pentagon has worked with Cape Verde to establish a regional center to detect drug-smuggling ships.
Though agency units have not been sponsored in West Africa before, there have been operations with similar teams, given training, equipment and pay while subjected to rigorous drug and polygraph testing in countries around the world whose security forces are plagued by corruption, including the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala and Panama. All of which had been experienced on a large-scale in the United States before the system yielded and increased law enforcement’s cut/share. Same old story, same old song and dance, my friend. Here might be a good place to substitute Al Pacino’s accent, as Tony Montana in the 1983 film Scarface when he’d look at his gun he called “my little friend.”
It is routine for D.E.A. agents who are assigned to mentor the specially trained and screened units to accompany them on raids, but it had been unusual for Americans to kill suspects. Several former agents said the recent cases in Honduras suggested the D.E.A. was at the vanguard of the operations rather than merely serving as advisers in the background.
By contrast, officials say, the effort in West Africa is still at the beginning stages. Oh boy. But the problems there are the same and growing. Officials described one instance in which a methamphetamine lab was discovered in Africa, with documents suggesting it had been set up by a Mexican trafficking organization. William F. Wechsler, the Pentagon’s top counternarcotics officer, said that observing drug traffickers’ advances into West Africa, and the response from American and local authorities, was like watching a rerun of the drug war in this hemisphere in years past. Uh huh. Forgive the pun Sir, but that’s straight from the horse’s mouth.
Mr. Wechsler also said, “West Africa is now facing a situation analogous to the Caribbean in the 1980s, where small, developing, vulnerable countries along major drug-trafficking routes toward rich consumers are vastly under-resourced to deal with the wave of dirty money coming their way.” Don’t worry. Those countries will also increase pay to those assigned enforcement and, as has gripped America’s increase in bureaucratic pay to stem corruption, the value of money will deflate crippling and debilitating the world-wide economic system further where no one was ever really able to afford their own home when you consider the fact mortgages were planned on forty-year payment plans. Right. We can afford to fight the drug war forever. But stopping it is a complete other issue. So in prayerful hope may Allah/God bless us for we know not what we do.
7/24/2012
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Hurtling Toward World-Wide-War On Drugs Destruction
7/24/2012 concluded: Mr. Wechsler also said, “West Africa is now facing a situation analogous to the Caribbean in the 1980s, where small, developing, vulnerable countries along major drug-trafficking routes toward rich consumers are vastly under-resourced to deal with the wave of dirty money coming their way.” Don’t worry. Those countries will also increase pay to those assigned enforcement and, as has gripped America’s increase in bureaucratic pay to stem corruption, the value of money will deflate crippling and debilitating the world-wide economic system further where no one was ever really able to afford their own home when you consider the fact mortgages were planned on forty-year payment plans. Right. We can afford to fight the drug war forever. But stopping it is a complete other issue. So in prayerful hope may Allah/God bless us for we know not what we do.
April 20 - May 8, 2018
Tuesday May 8, 2018 Everyone knows six is a landmark age.
Monday May 7, 2018
A P. T. Barnum with a negligible conscience is a nasty thought.
Monday May 7, 2018
A P. T. Barnum with a negligible conscience is a nasty thought.
Pep Rally America?
Has all the rationality gone? Hyped up, up, and away?
When we admit it, we reject blowhards casting bandwagon spells. When there's enough history to dichotomously balance the illustrious imagery shrouding power's nuance-less strides over imagined inconveniences. Where ethics took a backseat to process. For verification, ask the Shrugger-in-Chief when he's back from River City.
WELL
According to a BBC reporter, Kim Jong-un arrived in Panmunjom by motorcade to meet President Moon Jae-in. It's probably assumable then, that, likewise, the socialist aspects of South Korea didn't provide an adequate train connection to the site for either president either?
The rest of the story:
Huh? Well what do you know?
Both Moon Jae-in and Kim Jung-un are traveling by mobile throne motorcade, despite railroad access? Elitism rules.
So I asked the South Korean government (that didn't respond).
No doubt the BBC didn't bother to ask -
Having learned of Kim Jung-un's imminent travel by motorcade, before walking into Panmunjom, I'm inquiring whether the South Korean president has a statement regarding his own traveling method when trains, to the site, exist for both leaders?
Having learned of Kim Jung-un's imminent travel by motorcade, before walking into Panmunjom, I'm inquiring whether the South Korean president has a statement regarding his own traveling method when trains, to the site, exist for both leaders?
A response would appear in a Soapbox View.
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Yes, no response. Nothing gets through the waving hands and adulation except the most powerful agendas. Well-rounded economic vision just has to wait out the rites of power's enjoying their toys? Just kidding? Unfortunately not.
The Soapbox View's Previous Korean Hopes
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World-Wide-War's Unnecessary Roughness,
What's the Penalty?
So yeah. We've carved this dilemma for ourselves, where the visualization of the moral life doesn't include variations in behavior, condemned by the superior point of view. This concept of people riding bad drugs to the gutter, while authentic in various respects, is shortsighted about what civilized behavior means because monotonous frames of reference brought about society's stilted condemnation resulting in a criminal enterprise system.
Face without facing. When the solution's ruthlessness, that's the result. End The Criminal Enterprise System
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The (in progress) short story -
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