Exclusive: U.S. Directs Agents to Cover Up Program Used to Investigate Americans

[Hissyspit]

Source: Reuters

Exclusive: U.S. directs agents to cover up program used to investigate Americans

WASHINGTON | Mon Aug 5, 2013 5:16am EDT

By John Shiffman and Kristina Cooke

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

"It is one thing to create special rules for national security," Gertner said. "Ordinary crime is entirely different. It sounds like they are phonying up investigations."

THE SPECIAL OPERATIONS DIVISION

The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.

Read more: http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSBRE97409R20130805

[eShirl]

1. And there we have it.

The War on Drugs is about a lot more than just drugs.

[Jackpine Radical]

28. Exactly my thought. No wonder ya can't legalize pot in this country.

Not only does the DEA get all those helicopters, gunships, (no doubt) drones, and get to keep people's property, even if they were innocent, but they get to share information with the NSA, FBI, etc.

The roots of all these organizations are entangled. Effectively, we don't have separate agencies. The English-speaking world is under the domination of one single surveillance entity--or rather, the sinister forces, private and public, who control that surveillance network.

[Downwinder]

2. I will probably be testing this one.

I regularly refer to my quarterly medication delivery as a drug drop.

[dothemath]

9. The term ..........

'brass monkey' comes to mind, as in having the b**** of a brass monkey. I love the way you turn a phrase. Best of luck to you.

[ceonupe]

3. And you wonder why

Gun rights supports don't trust giving up just a little information to the government.


NSA killed the gun control star for the next 10years min.

In fact these spying discoveres are doing serious damage to progressive causes as faitih in government goes further down the tube.

[BainsBane]

5. Would it be possible to think of something besides weapons that kill people?

Just once?

The fact is your gun cause is backed by one of the biggest corporate lobbies in the country. Billions of dollars in profits are made from guns and murder. No one is going to take away your guns. Our lives are what is in jeopardy. Not that something as trivial as 32,000 people killed by guns every year matters to the gun evangelists.

[ceonupe]

6. The point is people

Don't belive government will limit itself with information it gets.

This is proven over and over again. This is the reason people don't support registration schemes and mandatory insurance and other "saftey" claims from the controllers because we see their long term goal. Gun controllers are on record pushing for even more restrictive measures and then they wonder why gun right supporters don't support their "saftey" pushes.

Look at the background checks bill. It was not until almost the very end that the gun controllers dropped their push to make it a national registration scheme. Heck they even tried to add AWB to the bill via amendment. People won't be fooled. If they were serious about background checks and that only they would have brought a clean bill. They did not and it failed for all to see. Now add in NSA scandal and you get a public that just does not trust it's government to act in its best intrests.

This lack of trust hurts progressive polices that need the power of the government to implement many of the changes we want. Kind of hard to get people to buy in when every other week we found out last weeks response to the spying was a lie and its deeper than they admit.

Another poster said it better than me.

Gun controllers really want no guns just like abortion saftey advocates really want no abortion.

In the abortion fight it is going to states to make certain rules and requirements for "saftey" but the real reason is discourage women from seeking abortions. The claim that abortion facility saftey and requirements need to be enhanced are just ways to reduce abvilibility and increase cost thus reducing access. Then the crazy polls that are manipulated to show majority of Americans support 20 week limits.


Gun controllers most of them admit they don't want civilian gun ownership so they start with small things to enhance their overall goal. Claiming "saftey" industry "regulation" restrictions on certain types purely for cosmetic reasons. And manipulative polling.

The play book for both is almost the same. Sorry you can't see that.

[Mojorabbit]

32. It is a good point. nt

[cantbeserious]

4. Sadly - Many Will Not See The Connection Between Massive Illegal Surveillance And Law Enforcement

eom

[matthews]

29. They'll see it. They'll either say "If you have nothing to hide..." OR

ask for proof.

[TransitJohn]

7. Who saw this coming?? Completely out of the blue!

[eShirl]

12. I know, right?

[Zorra]

18. Yeh, who would have ever suspected something like this could happen! nt

[Octafish]

8. Back when the USA PATRIOT Act was new...

...DUers warned us about how it would be misused by the government. Of course, many said it was "just in their heads."

[midnight]

11. If you see something Say something campaign is big here in Wisconsin.....

"The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses."

[nashville_brook]

14. leading to a complete collapse in faith in the justice system...as if

that hasn't already happened in minority communities. maybe this will wake up the rest of us?

[Solly Mack]

13. K&R

[Ghost Dog]

15. Thus, Byzantium.

[davidn3600]

16. This is not the land of the free. This is a police and prison state.

[AzDar]

17. I'd say : "Unbelievable"... but we all know better.

[City Lights]

19. USA! USA! USA! Freedumb ain't free, baby!

Ugh.

[starroute]

20. Nixon originally created the DEA to be a private presidential army

Watergate saved us from the worst of that, but the potential was built in from the start. According to Edward Jay Epstein's Agency of Fear:

http://www.edwardjayepstein.com/agency/chap34.htm

The proposal for a new narcotics superagency was submitted to Congress on March 28, 1973. Even though the House Committee on Government Operations noted, "The plan was hastily formed.... Administration witnesses were able to give the Sub-Committee only a bare outline of the proposed new organization and its functions," Congress refused to block the reorganization plan which purported to heighten the efficiency of the war against heroin. Accordingly, Reorganization Plan Number Two automatically became effective sixty days later, and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) was created on July 1, 1973. The Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, which itself had been created by Reorganization Plan Number One, in 1967, was absorbed into the superagency, along with the Office for Drug Abuse Law Enforcement and the Office of National Narcotics Intelligence. In the process John Ingersoll's position as director of the BNDD was abolished, and the directors of the two other offices-Myles Ambrose and William Sullivan-resigned. Five hundred special agents of the Customs Bureau were transferred to this new agency, which employed. on paper, at least, more than four thousand agents and analysts and resembled the FBI as a domestic law-enforcement agency. John R. Bartels, the son of a federal judge who had been recommended for ODALE by Henry Petersen, was now named acting director of this new conglomerate.

If the Watergate burglars had not been arrested and connected to the White House strategists, the Drug Enforcement Agency might have served as the strong Investigative arm for domestic surveillance that President Nixon had long quested after. It had the authority to request wiretaps and no-knock warrants, and to submit targets to the Internal Revenue Service; and, with its contingent of former CIA and counterintelligence agents, it had the talent to enter residences surreptitiously, gather intelligence on the activities of other agencies of the government, and interrogate suspects. Yet, despite these potential powers, the efforts of the White House strategists had been effectively truncated by the Watergate exposures: Ehrlichman and Krogh were directly implicated. in the operations of the Plumbers; Sullivan had been involved in the administration's wiretapping program; and Liddy and Hunt were in prison. The grand design could not be realized, and DEA became simply a protean manifestation of the earlier narcotics agencies.

Bartels soon found, however, that it was not an easy matter to turn this superagency into a conventional narcotics police force. For one thing, when the special offices created by executive order were collapsed into the new agency, Bartels inherited some fifty-three former (or detached) CIA agents and a dozen counterintelligence experts from the military or other intelligence agencies-all of whom, under the original game plan, were supposed to work on special projects designated by the White House strategists. These high-level intelligence agents and analysts had a very different approach to narcotics intelligence from that of the traditional narcotics agent, who operated mainly by spreading "buy money" among his contacts in the underworld until someone attempted to sell him a significant quantity of narcotics. James Ludlum, a former CIA official who took over-the Office of Strategic Services of the new drug agency, explained to me, "My approach was not to arrest a few traffickers but to build the entire intelligence picture of what was going on in the drug world.... I wanted to identify the modus operandi of the major heroin wholesalers, and this meant acquiring a great deal of information which the drug agency did not possess about the patterns of narcotic use."

[matthews]

30. Good God, I just went to that website. This whole freaking program was

founded on thuggery, deception, and brutality all under the name of 'law enforcement'.

[denverbill]

21. You can bet this will be used against 'ecoterrorists' too.

You know, those dangerous threats to America's security that set lab animals free, burn SUVs, and protest pipelines.

[appal_jack]

22. k&r. Wish this was the stuff of dystopian sci-fi, but it's all too real. n/t

[47of74]

23. Ugh.

[L0oniX]

24. The DEA is chomping at the bit to get their dirty hands on the NSA data base.

[askeptic]

35. Mostly semantics - If NSA feeding them info, same as if they have access

Some of the early Snowden releases indicated NSA was feeding law enforcement with data on Americans, and so this is the only way it can work -- recreate a phony discovery trail to hide the illegal discovery they've already done.

[warrprayer]

25. welcome to the gulag n/t

[99th_Monkey]

26. Whatever it takes to keep our Prison-Industrial Complex fat & happy

Hell, the public pays for 90% occupancy rates in private prisons anyway,
may as well "get our money's worth".

[matthews]

27. Well, score one for the tin foil hat crowd, huh?

"Trust me", they say.

[snot]

31. K&R'd and bookmarked.

[Hissyspit]

33. Kick nt

[Tx4obama]

34. Kick n/t

[bobthedrummer]

36. K&R#76 n/t