AZ_IZ_OT posted:

I know that was true for Jobs and Apple culture in general. idk about the rest. what I find confusing is the implicit destruction of nature involved in the production of technofascist utopia, when juxtaposed with that new age stuff

the ideology behind this stuff is based on seeing the processes of technology as extensions of the genetic processes of naturalist cybernetic vitalism, not something opposed to it

Populares posted:

Frats are also males doing drugs and living communally, and they're basically institutionally sanctioned rape gangs.

as were hippie communes in the 60s

tears posted:

essential reading, even though catherine austin fitts is way down some small gubbermint alex jones make america great again rabbit hole, be warned :shrug:,

key points discussed which i feel are essential for understanding how the drug economy is the economy:
1. US economy is entirely dependant on drug money, this has become more and more entrenched since the end of WW2, the stock market is kept afloat and rising by narcomoney
2. Withdrawal of drug money would collapse the US economy and potentially the global economy
3. (beyond its usefullness for suppressing people of colour &c,) the only reason drugs are illegal is to maintain a monopoly on distribution, legalisation of drugs would ccause the collapse of the US economy

http://www.businessinsider.com/mattress-firm-conspiracy-grows-after-accounting-problems-2018-1

swampman posted:

tears posted:

essential reading, even though catherine austin fitts is way down some small gubbermint alex jones make america great again rabbit hole, be warned :shrug:,

key points discussed which i feel are essential for understanding how the drug economy is the economy:
1. US economy is entirely dependant on drug money, this has become more and more entrenched since the end of WW2, the stock market is kept afloat and rising by narcomoney
2. Withdrawal of drug money would collapse the US economy and potentially the global economy
3. (beyond its usefullness for suppressing people of colour &c,) the only reason drugs are illegal is to maintain a monopoly on distribution, legalisation of drugs would ccause the collapse of the US economy

http://www.businessinsider.com/mattress-firm-conspiracy-grows-after-accounting-problems-2018-1

yes

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/baltimore-police-detective-fatally-shot-in-head-with-own-gun-died-clutching-radio/2017/11/22/d4180b20-cfd4-11e7-9d3a-bcbe2af58c3a_story.html?utm_term=.b4c2c7da0f52 posted:

Baltimore police detective fatally shot in head with own gun, died clutching radio
By Peter Hermann November 22, 2017

A Baltimore police detective was shot in the head with his own gun at close range while struggling with a man and died with his radio still clutched in his left hand, the city’s top law enforcement official said Wednesday.

Detective Sean Suiter’s death came a day before he was set to testify before a grand jury in an ongoing federal investigation of police corruption and drug shakedowns by an elite gun recovery unit.

Police Commissioner Kevin Davis said he was assured by prosecutors and the FBI that Suiter, an 18-year veteran of the force, was not a target of the investigation that has led to the indictments of eight current officers. Four have pleaded guilty to racketeering charges.

Davis said Suiter’s testimony was to have been about an incident several years ago involving some of the indicted officers. The commissioner sought to dispel notions Suiter was targeted the afternoon of Nov. 15 and said evidence gathered so far refutes the notion of a conspiracy.

“The encounter with a man was a spontaneous observation of a man behaving suspiciously and a spontaneous decision to investigate his conduct,” Davis said. But, he said, “I understand the speculation that exists.”

Suiter and his partner were in the Harlem Park neighborhood canvassing about a December 2016 triple killing when they happened to twice notice a man acting suspiciously within a span of about 20 minutes, Davis said.

The department’s chief spokesman said Suiter, 43 and a married father of five, was not lured to Bennett Place, where he was shot, and that he had no appointment set there. Davis said Suiter confronted the man in an empty lot between two rowhouses but did not say what made him stand out.



The mystery surrounding Suiter’s death continues after a week with no arrests, no detailed description of the shooter and the fact that it appears only one gun was involved. A funeral for Suiter, who is originally from the District, is scheduled for Wednesday.

Davis said there was evidence found on Suiter’s shirt that indicated a struggle he called “brief and violent” and lasted mere seconds. Suiter made a radio transmission before he was killed that included what Davis said he believes are gunshots in the background. The commissioner said the words in that call have not been deciphered but that the recording is being analyzed with help from the FBI.

“He was clearly in distress,” Davis said of the sounds on Suiter’s radio call.

Authorities have previously stated that investigators found three shell casings that matched Suiter’s weapon, which was recovered at the scene. An autopsy Sunday ruled the death a homicide, Davis said, and also provided information about the trajectory of the bullet that caused police to return to the crime scene for another search. That repeat search recovered the bullet that killed Suiter, Davis said Wednesday.

Suiter’s partner, who has not been named publicly by the department and is considered a police witness in the shooting, Davis has said, took cover at the sound of gunfire and called in the shooting on his cellphone.

The partner has been continually talking with detectives, Davis said, and provided the spare description police said they have of the suspect as a black male wearing a black coat with a white stripe.

A reward for information leading to Suiter’s killer has reached $215,000, and Davis urged people to come forward.

In the days since the shooting, police have focused on Harlem Park, a small and violent patch of depressed real estate west of downtown in a city that ranks near the nation’s top in homicides per capita. Police kept the crime scene active for five days, restricting residents’ movements as they searched for the killer. The neighborhood is marked by more vacant houses than occupied homes.

“There is nothing we won’t consider,” Davis said. “Right now, the evidence that’s available to us is indicative of a homicide.” He said it would be entirely plausible for it to be coincidental that Suiter was killed in a random encounter unrelated to his pending grand jury appearance.

“It’s a very dangerous area,” Davis said. “He was following up on a brutal murder in 2016. Detective Suiter was not interviewing schoolteachers and mailmen.”

The commissioner said conspiracy theories swirling around the investigation are “certainly a distraction for leadership” and are “very hurtful for the Suiter family and friends.”

Suiter was a U.S. Navy veteran who had grown up in Washington and lived with his wife and family in Pennsylvania.

The commissioner said he met with homicide detectives Monday night on the investigation and that “they are determined to get it right.”

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/article194187699.html posted:

How drug lords make billions smuggling gold to Miami for your jewelry and phones

By Jay Weaver, Nicholas Nehamas And Kyra Gurney

January 16, 2018 08:00 AM
Updated January 24, 2018 03:09 PM

When Juan Granda ventured into Peru’s Amazon rainforest to score another illicit load of gold, he boasted that he felt like legendary Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.

“I’m like Pablo coming ... to get the coke,” he told two co-workers in a text message in 2014.

A 36-year-old Florida State University graduate who once sold subprime loans, Granda was no cartel kingpin. But his offhand comparison was apt: Gold has become the secret ingredient in the criminal alchemy of Latin American narco-traffickers who make billions turning cocaine into clean cash by exporting the metal to Miami.

The previous year, Granda’s employer, NTR Metals, a South Florida precious-metals trading company, had bought nearly $1 billion worth of Peruvian gold supplied by narcos — and Granda and NTR needed more.

The United States depends on Latin American gold to feed ravenous demand from its jewelry, bullion and electronics industries. The amount of gold going through Miami every year is equal to roughly 2 percent of the market value of the vast U.S. stockpile in Fort Knox.

But much of that gold comes from outlaw mines deep in the jungle where dangerous chemicals are poisoning rainforests and laborers who toil for scraps of metal, according to human rights watchdogs and industry executives. The environmental damage and human misery mirror the scale of Africa’s “blood diamonds,” experts say.

“A large part of the gold that’s commercialized in the world comes stained by blood and human rights abuses,” said Julián Bernardo González, vice president of sustainability for Continental Gold, a Canadian mining company with operations in Colombia that holds legal titles and pays taxes, unlike many smaller mining operations.

Pope Francis condemned the horrors of illegal mining during a visit to the Peruvian Amazon on Friday. The region’s gold boom, the pope said, has become a “false god that demands human sacrifice.”

In Latin America, criminals see mining and trading precious metals as a lucrative growth business, carefully hidden from U.S. consumers who flaunt gold around their necks and fingers but have no idea where it comes from — or who gets hurt. The narcos know their market is strong: America’s addiction to the metal burns as insatiably as its craving for cocaine. NTR, for instance, was the subsidiary of a major U.S. gold refinery that supplied Apple and 67 other Fortune 500 companies, as well as Tiffany & Co., according to a Miami Herald analysis of corporate disclosures.

Last March, federal prosecutors in Miami charged Granda, his boss, Samer Barrage, and another NTR trader, Renato Rodriguez, with money laundering, saying the three men bought $3.6 billion of illegal gold from criminal groups in Latin America. They claimed the gold traders, who eventually pleaded guilty, fueled “illegal gold mining, foreign bribery narcotics trafficking.”

Now, those prosecutors are investigating other U.S. precious-metals dealers suspected of buying tainted gold from drug traffickers, law enforcement sources say. Their goal is not just to take out crooked gold firms like NTR — they also want to kneecap the drug cartels.

Here’s why: Over the past two decades, as the U.S. war on drugs undercut the cash flow of narco-traffickers, kingpins diversified into Latin America’s gold industry. By using drug profits to mine and sell gold to American and multinational companies, criminal organizations can launder “staggering amounts of money,” said John Cassara, a retired U.S. Treasury special agent. The end result: The gold in American jewelry, coins and smartphones is helping finance shipments of narcotics to the United States, as well as illegal mining in Latin America, current and former law enforcement officials say.

Mining regions in the rainforest have become epicenters of human trafficking, disease and environmental destruction, according to government officials and human rights investigators. Miners are forced into slavery. Prostitutes set up camps near the miners, fueling the spread of sexually transmitted infections. One human rights group found that 2,000 sex workers, 60 percent of them children, were employed in a single mining area in Peru.

Meanwhile, strip mining and the indiscriminate use of mercury to ferret out gold are turning swaths of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems into a nightmarish moonscape. In 2016, Peru declared a temporary state of emergency over widespread mercury poisoning in Madre de Dios, a jungle province rife with illegal mining. Nearly four in five adults in the area’s capital city tested positive for dangerous levels of mercury, according to the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.

Even criminal outfits from Russia and China are investing in gold mining, observers say, abandoning heavy machinery in the jungle once they’ve extracted the metal. Soaring prices over the last two decades have driven the modern-day gold rush. In January, gold traded at roughly $1,300 per ounce on the open market, compared to less than $300 in 2001.

The human rights abuses and deforestation are a “bleeding sore that affects millions of people and their future livelihoods,” said Douglas Farah, a national security consultant and visiting fellow at the Pentagon-funded National Defense University in Washington, D.C.

“It’s become an enormously damaging industry that very few people are looking at seriously,” Farah said. “Just as with ‘blood diamonds,’ the gold issue ... brings together money laundering, forced prostitution, drug traffickers, human trafficking and child slavery.”

Until now, the international gold market’s dark side has drawn little public attention in the United States.

That lack of scrutiny has allowed the trade in dirty gold to grow more profitable than cocaine, according to government estimates in Latin America.

“Criminal groups make so much more money from gold than from coca, and it’s so much easier,” said Ivan Díaz Corzo, a former member of Colombia’s anti-criminal-mining task force.

And just like cocaine, a market for illicit metal has blossomed in South Florida, where nearly a third of the nation’s imported gold enters.

Over the past decade, Miami, a longtime point of entry into the United States for contraband, imported $35 billion worth of gold via air, according to U.S. Customs records analyzed by WorldCity, a Coral Gables-based economic data firm. That was more than any other U.S. city.

Some of the metal shipped to Miami is refined locally. Other batches are sent across the country to be melted down and manufactured into jewelry and bullion. Central banks around the world are major buyers of gold. So is the U.S. Mint. And electronics companies use small amounts of gold in consumer products because it is an effective conductor and doesn’t corrode.

One way or another, almost everyone has Miami gold in their pockets, portfolios or jewelry boxes.

Simple math shows it can’t all be clean.

Take Colombia, a country with a substantial mining industry that exported 64 tons of gold in 2016, much of it to the United States, according to government statistics. That same year, Colombia’s large-scale, legal mining operations produced only eight tons, according to the Colombian Mining Association. A significant part of the gap between what Colombia’s big mines produce and what the country exports is unlicensed gold — sometimes unearthed by operations controlled by narco-traffickers and other criminals.

The big Colombian mines that “ produce gold can be counted on one hand,” said Jaime Pinilla, an engineer and legal gold mine owner in Colombia. “There’s a huge difference in the amount that is produced and the amount that is exported.”

And the discrepancy is not just happening in Colombia: Statistics from other Latin American gold-producing nations show similar ratios between legal and illegal gold mining.

It’s impossible to know where all the illegal gold is coming from — but it’s clear where most of it ends up. Latin America accounts for nearly three-quarters of the gold imported into the United States, roughly 200 tons in 2015, according to Miami-based trade analytics firm Datamyne and the U.S. Geological Survey. That’s not far off from the total amount of gold mined in the United States annually.

A currency of pain

The parallels between gold and cocaine are striking.

Both the white powder and yellow metal are sold by Latin American cartels at huge costs to workers and the environment. Terrorists, including al-Qaida, use gold and cocaine to finance their plots. Officials say they are major threats to law and order.

“Criminal mining has become the fuel for a large part of the violence in this country,” Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos has said.

In Colombia, criminal gangs threaten small gold miners

One big difference between cocaine and gold? Cocaine is obviously illegal. With gold, it’s hard to tell. Papers can be forged. The metal can be melted and remelted until its origin is impossible to pinpoint.

Another distinction? Profit.

In 2014, a kilo of gold was worth between $30,000 and $40,000 in Colombia, according to Colombian intelligence figures obtained by the Miami Herald. By comparison, a kilo of cocaine sold for roughly $2,500. While drug trafficking in Colombia generated less than a billion dollars in total revenue in 2014, according to those same estimates, illegal mining produced roughly $2.4 billion.

Gold’s luster has exerted a powerful hold on humanity since ancient times.

Today, the metal appeals to the darkest corners of the financial system. It is a safe investment. It is rare and hard to trace. Best of all: Human beings covet it.

Those factors, coupled with industrial mining and heightened demand from investors and tech companies, have turned the precious-metals business into “the Rolls-Royce of money laundering,” said Robert Mazur, a former federal agent who infiltrated drug cartels in the 1980s.

Those cartels are always looking for ways to hide how they make their money.

But banks can’t accept big deposits of cash, let alone duffel bags of coke-dusted bills, without checking how the funds were made. One solution for criminals: investing in supposedly legitimate businesses.

Here’s how gold fits in: Drug-cartel associates posing as precious-metals traders buy and mine gold in Latin America. Cocaine profits are their seed money. They sell the metal through front companies — hiding its criminal taint — to refineries in the United States and other major gold-buying nations like Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates.

Once the deal is made, the cocaine kingpins have successfully turned their dirty gold into clean cash. To the outside world, they’re not drug dealers anymore; they’re gold traders. That’s money laundering.

The U.S. government — laser-focused on traditional money laundering and terror financing through banks — has shied away from untangling the twisted tentacles of gold smuggling, which can be hard to follow across borders.

But that’s starting to change — and it’s happening in America’s gold-import capital, Miami.

The criminal case against Granda — the self-styled Escobar — and his colleagues at NTR Metals is the largest money-laundering prosecution involving precious metals in U.S. history, authorities say.

“The scope of the conspiracy is enormous,” federal prosecutor Francisco Maderal told a judge during a hearing in Miami last year.

So far, the scandal has not only shut down NTR and cost its Dallas-based parent company, Elemetal, the ability to trade gold on bullion and commodity exchanges. It’s also put hundreds of employees at Elemetal’s refinery in rural Ohio out of work. Elemetal and its executives have not been charged but remain under federal investigation, according to sources with knowledge of the probe. The company and its attorney, Trey Gum, did not respond to repeated requests for comment, although Elemetal has previously said it is cooperating with authorities.

The downfall of one of North America’s biggest gold companies is shaking the entire industry, all the way up to the bankers whose lines of credit sustain dealers and refineries doing multimillion-dollar deals.

“The case against is a big deal,” said Jason Rubin, CEO of Republic Metals, based in Opa-locka, just north of Miami, and a major rival of Elemetal. “Financial institutions ... have rightfully and correctly increased their scrutiny of companies in the wake of the allegations.”

Alejandro Esponda, a South Florida gold trader, said he fears NTR’s misdeeds will unjustly tarnish the entire industry.

“Everybody is guilty by association,” said Esponda, vice president of Universal Precious Metals, based in the Miami suburb Doral.

Although Latin America’s gold market is known for corruption and danger, precious metal there is plentiful and labor cheap.

In comparison, the U.S. gold supply, mostly mined in Nevada and Alaska, offers stiff competition and regulations. Big companies control the big mines. Smaller companies looking to deal in U.S. gold are restricted to buying recycled “scrap” gold from pawnshops and jewelry stores. To gain a competitive edge, many U.S. gold traders look south.

But because Latin America’s gold market is so fragmented — with the metal sometimes changing hands among many small companies before it’s exported — it’s hard to guarantee that individual shipments imported to the United States are lawful, experts say.

And since gold’s price is set on a worldwide basis and the vast majority of trades are financed on credit, the metal must move quickly between Latin America and the United States. If one importer can pay a supplier faster than a rival can, it wins the deal. Profit margins are surprisingly small, making gold a volume business. The need for speed and quantity means obeying anti-money-laundering laws is a costly requirement for the industry.

The top three traders at NTR seemed to spend their days dreaming up ways to avoid those restrictions.
Heart of darkness

Juan Granda met Samer Barrage, 40, and Renato Rodriguez, 43, when they were hawking subprime loans at HSBC, according to federal court documents. Barrage and Granda later moved to work at Kaplan University, a for-profit school.

Barrage, a London-born U.S. citizen who traveled back and forth between an NTR office in Colombia and his wife and children in Miami, eventually recruited Granda and Rodriguez to work with him buying gold.

In 2012, the company did relatively little business in Latin America.

But the next year, NTR struck a rich vein, becoming the largest U.S. importer of Peruvian gold with $980 million worth of deals, according to federal prosecutors.

How did they do it?

With help from Peruvian businessman Pedro Pérez Miranda, who is suspected by authorities in Peru and the United States of laundering drug money through the gold trade.

Shell companies tied to Pérez, whose alias is Peter Ferrari, quickly became some of NTR’s biggest suppliers. None of his firms had any track record selling gold. That raised suspicions back at the headquarters of NTR’s parent company, Elemetal.

The firm’s compliance officer repeatedly warned Barrage and at least four Elemetal executives that criminal gold mining and smuggling were serious problems in Peru — and that Ferrari seemed to be involved.

“We need to be extremely careful going forward,” the compliance office, led by retired U.S. Customs Service agent Steve Crogan, told Barrage and his Elemetal bosses in an August 2012 email cited by federal prosecutors.

Ferrari even came to visit Elemetal’s giant refinery in rural Jackson, Ohio, according to one employee who saw him at the plant.

“He was wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt,” said the worker, who asked not to be named. “It didn’t feel right. He wasn’t dressed like a businessman. His appearance didn’t match the amount of money he was supposed to represent.”

The warnings were ignored.

For the three NTR traders — who declined to comment for this story through their lawyers — breaking the law meant big money: Elemetal “incentivized Barrage, Rodriguez and Granda to purchase as much gold as possible with volume-based commissions,” court documents show.

In 2013, NTR went on to buy $400 million in gold from Ferrari — whose birthday party in Lima early that year was attended by Granda, an avid watcher of the Netflix show “Narcos,” and his two fellow traders. The trio flew in from Miami for the celebration.

The NTR traders hid the purchases from Elemetal’s compliance office through front companies and false U.S. Customs declarations, and by arranging to bribe Peruvian customs officials, according to court documents.

The scheme didn’t last long: NTR’s Peruvian operations collapsed at the end of 2013 when local authorities raided a storage facility outside Lima holding gold that belonged to Ferrari and other traders. Agents seized $18.8 million worth of gold bound not only for NTR Metals but three other Miami-based gold importers, as well as refineries in Switzerland and Italy, according to local media reports.

The year after the gold raid outside Lima, NTR’s exports from Peru dropped 92 percent.

But the party wasn’t over — it simply moved to neighboring countries.

In 2014, Granda and his colleagues began smuggling gold across the border to Ecuador and Bolivia to hide its origins, according to text messages and confidential informants interviewed by U.S. prosecutors. Soon, NTR’s purchases in Ecuador and Bolivia soared by $485 million. Some deals were disguised through the use of companies like one headquartered at a high-end furniture store in Coral Gables, prosecutors alleged.

In February 2015, Barrage laid out the plot in a text message obtained by the government: “We need more Peruvian gold from Bolivia and Ecuador,” he told Granda. “Can u make it happen?”

Granda couldn’t. Local governments in those countries had also begun cracking down.

The party moved again, this time to Colombia. In 2015, NTR’s imports from Colombia soared to $722 million, more than double the previous year’s haul. That accounted for more than half of the country’s gold exports to the United States. Barrage, who owns houses in Nicaragua and Spain, ran the show in Colombia, where he made $2 million overseeing NTR’s operations, prosecutors said.

The company often hid its dirty dealing by exporting gold from Colombia’s free-trade zones, which are tax- and duty-free economic development areas where customs regulations are weaker.

But the smuggling ring finally came crashing down in 2016 after two gold brokers who collaborated with NTR became confidential informants for the U.S. government. One worked as a private customs broker in Peru and dealt directly with Granda, helping him smuggle gold out of the country. The other was a courier based in Chile who carried shipments of illicit gold on flights from South America to Miami. As NTR grew more and more desperate for gold, the courier told investigators that he was sent to Africa, a no-go zone for U.S. gold companies, to secure more metal.

Subpoenas flew, parent company Elemetal began an internal investigation, and Granda, Barrage and Rodriguez were arrested last spring.

Then, last week, federal prosecutors investigating NTR indicted Ferrari, his twin sons and another Peruvian man on a money-laundering charge filed in Miami.

Ferrari’s lawyer in Peru, Benji Espinoza Ramos, said his client, who is in custody in his home country on domestic money-laundering charges, did not break the law. Espinoza said the gold operations were legitimate.

“We believe there is no proof of the existence of illegal gold,” he said.

Granda, Barrage and Rodriguez pleaded guilty to a money-laundering conspiracy that carried a maximum of 10 years in prison. They are cooperating with federal prosecutors and providing information about foreign suppliers with narco ties, and about Elemetal. On Friday, Granda and Barrage were sentenced to six and nearly seven years in prison, respectively. Rodriguez will be sentenced later this month.

Will their case scare off other unscrupulous operators in the gold industry?

That’s unlikely, experts say, as long as overwhelming demand from U.S. consumers and corporations fuels the market for narco gold.

“The cartels are so powerful,” said Mazur, the former federal agent. “They buy banks. They buy refineries. The amount of money they have is ridiculous.”

And the lure of gold’s profit is too strong.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176383/tomgram%3A_nick_turse%2C_the_u.s._military%27s_drug_of_choice posted:

Drug Wars, Missing Money, and a Phantom $500 Million
Pentagon Watchdog Calls Out Two Commands for Financial Malfeasance
By Nick Turse
February 8, 2018

2017 was a year of investigations for U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). There was the investigation of the two-star commander of U.S. Army Africa who allegedly sent racy texts to an enlisted man’s wife. There was the investigation into the alleged killing of a Special Forces soldier by Navy SEALs in Mali. There was the inquiry into reports of torture and killings on a remote base in Cameroon that was also used by American forces. There was the investigation of an alleged massacre of civilians by American special operators in Somalia. And don’t forget the inquiry into the killing of four Special Forces soldiers by Islamic State militants in Niger.

And then there was the investigation that hardly anyone heard about, that didn’t spark a single headline. And still, the question remains: Whatever became of that $500 million?

To be fair, this particular scandal isn’t AFRICOM’s alone, nor did that sizeable sum belong only to that one command. And unlike the possibly tens of thousands of dollars in cash that reportedly went missing in connection with the strangulation of the Green Beret in Mali, that $500 million didn’t simply vanish. Still, a report by the Defense Department’s Inspector General (IG), released into the news wasteland of the day after Christmas 2017, does raise questions about a combatant command with a history of scandals, including significant failures in planning, executing, tracking, and documenting projects across the African continent, as well as the effectiveness of U.S. assistance efforts there.

From fiscal years 2014 through 2016, AFRICOM and Central Command (CENTCOM), the umbrella organization for U.S. military activities in the Greater Middle East, received a combined $496 million to conduct counternarcotics (CN) activities. That substantial sum was used by the respective commands to fund myriad projects from the construction of border outposts in allied nations to training personnel in policing skills like evidence collection. Or at least, that’s how it was supposed to be used. According to the IG, neither AFRICOM nor CENTCOM “maintained reliable data for the completion status and funding of training, equipping, and construction activities.” That means no one -- not the IG investigators, not AFRICOM, not CENTCOM personnel -- seems to have any idea how much of that money was spent, what it was spent on, whether the funded projects were ever completed, or whether any of it made a difference in the fight against illegal drugs in Africa and the Middle East.

“U.S. Central and U.S. Africa Commands did not provide effective oversight of 2014 through 2016 counternarcotics activities,” wrote Michael Roark, an assistant inspector general, in a memorandum sent to the chiefs of both commands as well as to Pentagon officials in December 2017. “Specifically, neither U.S. Central nor U.S. Africa Command maintained reliable data for the completion status and funding of counternarcotics training, equipping, and construction activities.” What is clear is that large sums of taxpayer dollars allotted to such training activities were inconsistently tracked or accounted for, including -- according to Bruce Anderson, a spokesman for the Office of Inspector General -- $73 million in AFRICOM counternarcotics funding.

TomDispatch repeatedly contacted Africa Command for comment about the IG’s report. According to digital receipts, AFRICOM read the emailed questions but failed to respond prior to the publication of this piece.

The War on Drugs

Since 9/11, U.S. military activity on the African continent has grown at an exponential rate. U.S. troops are now conducting about 3,500 exercises, programs, and activities per year, an average of nearly 10 missions a day. Meanwhile, America’s most elite troops -- including Navy SEALs and Green Berets -- deployed to no fewer than 33 of the 54 African countries last year.

Many of the command’s missions focus on training local allies and proxies. “AFRICOM’s Theater Security Cooperation programs remain the cornerstone of our sustained security engagement with African partners,” reads its “What We Do” credo. “Conditions for success of our security cooperation programs and activities on the continent are established through hundreds of engagements supporting a wide range of activities.” These include not only foreign military aid and training, but also counternarcotics assistance.

By 2012, U.S. Africa Command's Counternarcotics and Law Enforcement Assistance branch was already providing about $20 million in aid per year to various partner nations. In doing so, it relied on special legislation that allows the military to work not only with other armed forces but with interagency partners like the Drug Enforcement Agency and the FBI, as well as local law enforcement agencies and the justice, customs, and interior ministries of various African countries.

The command’s African partners often suffer, however, from their own drug problems. “On the governance front, the proceeds of drug trafficking and other forms of illicit trafficking are fueling a dramatic increase in corruption among the very institutions responsible for fighting crime,” observed David Luna of the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs last year in a speech on combating organized crime in Africa. “The collusion and complicity of some government officials with criminal networks have helped carve out an illicit trafficking corridor that stretches from the West African coast to the Horn of Africa, from North Africa south to the Gulf of Guinea.”

But corrupt allies, as the Pentagon’s Inspector General points out, are only one of the problems facing U.S. counternarcotics efforts there. AFRICOM itself is another.

The Wisdom of the Crowd vs. a Simple Spreadsheet

In 2014, Coast Guard captain Ted St. Pierre, the division chief of AFRICOM’s Counter Narcotics and Law Enforcement Assistance branch, turned to the consulting firm Wikistrat to design and conduct a “scenario-driven simulation” to aid the command in developing strategies to combat drug trafficking in northwest Africa. That simulation was sold as a crowd-sourced, futuristic approach to a twenty-first-century problem. “The idea is that this technology leverages the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ just as averaging the guesses of the crowd at the county fair will come very close to the amount of jelly beans in a jar,” said Tim Haffner, a program analyst for AFRICOM’s Counter Narcotics and Law Enforcement Assistance branch and its point man for the simulation project. As it turned out, AFRICOM’s counternarcotics officials could have benefited from far lower-tech assistance -- like help in maintaining accurate spreadsheets.

Take the radio equipment that the command procured to help Senegal battle narcotics trafficking. According to a spreadsheet provided to the Inspector General by AFRICOM, $1.1 million was budgeted for that in 2014. Leaving aside whether such equipment is helpful in curtailing drug trafficking, it was at least clear how much money was spent on those radios. Until, that is, IG investigators consulted another spreadsheet also provided by AFRICOM. Its data indicated that nearly triple that sum -- $3.1 million -- had been budgeted for and spent on those radios. The question was: Did Senegalese forces receive $1 million worth of radios or three times that figure? No one at AFRICOM knew.

In fact, those two spreadsheets told radically different stories about the larger U.S. counternarcotics campaign on the continent in 2014. One indicated that taxpayers had funded 55 different projects budgeted at $15 million; the other, 134 activities to the tune of $24 million. Investigators were especially troubled by the second spreadsheet in which the “budgeted, obligated, and expended amounts… were identical for each activity causing the team to question the reliability of the data.” So which spreadsheet was right? How many projects were really carried out? How many millions of dollars were actually spent? The IG’s office concluded that AFRICOM counternarcotics officials didn’t know and so “could not verify which set of data was complete and accurate.”

Or take Cameroon in 2016. That year, according to AFRICOM officials, the United States budgeted $143,493 for training that country’s forces in “evidence collection.” (This was at a moment when AFRICOM officials seemed oblivious to copious evidence that civilian detainees were being tortured, sometimes even killed, on a Cameroonian base used by American forces.) Yet a 2016 spreadsheet examined by the Inspector General’s investigators indicated that only $94,620 had actually been budgeted for such training, while $165,078 had been “obligated” -- that is, an agreement was made to pay that sum for services rendered -- for the same activities. In the end, according to the IG’s December 2017 report, AFRICOM counternarcotics personnel couldn’t say how much money had actually been spent on training Cameroonians in evidence collection because of “a law enforcement agency error in tracking funding.”

Records of construction activities were in a similar state of disarray. While counternarcotics officials provided IG personnel with a spreadsheet specifically devoted to such projects, its information proved inconsistent with other AFRICOM documents. In reading the IG’s account of this, I was reminded of an interview I conducted several years ago with Chris Gatz of the Army Corps of Engineers Africa about construction projects for Special Operations Command Africa. “I’ll be totally frank with you,” he told me, “as far as the scopes of these projects go, I don’t have good insights.” I then asked if some projects had been funded with counter-narco-terrorism funds. “No, actually there was not,” he assured me, which led me to ask him about Niger. I knew that the U.S. was devoting significant resources to such projects there, specifically in the towns of Arlit and Tahoua. When I explained that I had already uncovered that information, he promptly located the right paperwork, adding, “Oh, okay, I’m sorry. You’re right, we have two of them... Both were actually awarded to construction.”

That construction began -- at least on paper -- in 2013. It seems that, in the time since, little has changed when it comes to record-keeping. When IG investigators looked into more recent construction efforts in Niger for their report, they found, for example, a phantom counternarcotics project -- a classroom somehow integral to the fight against drugs in that West African country. When they requested documentation for the 2015 construction of this classroom, the investigators were told by AFRICOM officials that the project had been terminated. The classroom was actually never built. Yet none of the data in any of the spreadsheets previously provided by the command indicated that the construction had been canceled.

Both AFRICOM and CENTCOM also left substantial funds on the table, monies that were apparently never spent and might have been used for other counternarcotics activities, had they not been lost, according to the IG report. For example, a “law enforcement agency” conducted 20 counternarcotics training classes over two years in an unspecified African nation (or nations), leaving an estimated excess of $805,000 in funding untouched, at least based on the officially budgeted costs for such instruction. As it turned out, however, AFRICOM officials had no idea that all of the funds hadn’t been spent. The report, in its typical bureaucratic prose, summed up the situation this way: “he amount unused could be higher or lower because USAFRICOM does not know how much was actually expended for the trainings executed.”

In all, faulty accounting seems to have resulted in at least $128 million worth of CENTCOM and AFRICOM counternarcotics funding for 2014-2016 going unspent.

Prior Bad Acts

This is hardly the first time that Africa Command has run into trouble accounting for work performed and dollars spent. In 2014, TomDispatch revealed the results of an Inspector General’s report (“Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa Needed Better Guidance and Systems to Adequately Manage Civil-Military Operations”) that was never publicly released. It uncovered failures in planning, executing, tracking, and documenting humanitarian projects by AFRICOM’s subordinate Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA).

At the time, the IG found record-keeping so faulty that CJTF-HOA officials “did not have an effective system to manage or report community relations and low-cost activities.” A spreadsheet tracking such projects was so incomplete that 43% of those efforts went unmentioned. Nonetheless, the IG did manage to review 49 of CJTF-HOA’s 137 identified humanitarian assistance and civic assistance projects, which cost U.S. taxpayers about $9 million, and found that the military officials overseeing the projects “did not adequately plan or execute” them in accordance with AFRICOM’s objectives. Examining 66 community relations and low-cost activities (like the distribution of sports equipment and seminars on solar panel maintenance), investigators discovered that its officials had failed to accurately identify their strategic objectives for, or maintained limited documentation on, 62% of them.

In some cases, they failed to explain how their efforts supported AFRICOM’s objectives on the continent; in others, financial documentation was missing; in yet more, personnel failed to ensure that local populations were equipped to keep the projects running once U.S. forces moved on. The risk, the report suggested, was that projects like American-built wells, water fountains, and cisterns would quickly fall into disrepair and become what one official called “monuments to U.S. failure.”

Drug Problems

After years of failing to maintain reliable data about and effective oversight of its counternarcotics activities, Africa Command has, according to the Pentagon’s Inspector General, finally taken corrective measures. “USAFRICOM officials developed standard operating procedures that fully addressed the recommendation” of the December 2017 IG report, Bruce Anderson of the Office of the Inspector General told TomDispatch. “They also provided their 2018 Spend Plan as evidence of some of the processes being implemented.” Whether these new measures will be effective and other types of assistance will also be comprehensively tracked remains to be seen.

While AFRICOM may be cleaning up its act, the same cannot be said of CENTCOM, which, according to Anderson, apparently wasted or didn’t adequately track almost $423 million in counternarcotics funds between 2014 and 2016. Like AFRICOM, Central Command failed to provide answers to TomDispatch’s questions prior to publication, although the command did respond to email messages. More than a month after the December 2017 report was issued, CENTCOM would not say if it had implemented the IG’s recommendations. “As you know, this is a complex issue, and it needs to be coordinated within the chain of command,” spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Earl Brown wrote in an email. Bruce Anderson of the IG’s office was, however, able to shed further light on the matter. “The two recommendations to USCENTCOM remain unresolved,” he told TomDispatch. “USCENTCOM implemented some corrective actions, but the actions only partially addressed the recommendations.”

More troubling than the findings in the IG’s report or CENTCOM’s apparent refusal to heed its recommendations may be the actual trajectory of the drug trade in the two commands’ areas of responsibility: Africa and the Greater Middle East. Last year, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime noted that while West Africa “has long been a transit zone for cocaine and heroin trafficking, it has now turned into a production zone for illicit substances such as amphetamines and precursors” and that drug use “is also a growing issue at the local level.” Meanwhile, heroin trafficking has been on the rise in East Africa, along with personal use of the drug.

Even the Pentagon’s Africa Center for Strategic Studies is sounding an alarm. “Drug trafficking is a major transnational threat in Africa that converges with other illicit activities ranging from money laundering to human trafficking and terrorism,” it warned last November. “According to the 2017 U.N. World Drug Report, two-thirds of the cocaine smuggled between South America and Europe passes through West Africa, specifically Benin, Cape Verde, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Nigeria, and Togo. Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania are among the countries that have seen the highest traffic in opiates passing from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Western destinations.” As badly as this may reflect on AFRICOM’s efforts to bolster the counter-drug-trafficking prowess of key allies like Kenya, Mali, and Nigeria, it reflects even more dismally on CENTCOM, which oversees Washington’s long-running war in Afghanistan and its seemingly ceaseless counternarcotics mission there.

In the spring of 2001, American experts concluded that a ban on opium-poppy cultivation by Afghanistan’s Taliban government had wiped out the world’s largest heroin-producing crop. Later that year, the U.S. military invaded and, since 2002, America has pumped $8.7 billion in counternarcotics funding into that country. A report issued late last month by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction detailed the results of anti-drug efforts during CENTCOM’s 16-year-old war: “Afghanistan’s total area under opium cultivation and opium production reached an all-time high in 2017,” it reads in part. “Afghanistan remains the world’s largest opium producer and exporter, producing an estimated 80% of the world’s opium.”

In many ways, these outcomes mirror those of the larger counterterror efforts of which these anti-drug campaigns are just a part. In 2001, for example, U.S. forces were fighting just two enemy forces in Afghanistan: al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Now, according to a recent Pentagon report, they’re battling more than 10 times that number. In Africa, an official count of five prime terror groups in 2012 has expanded, depending on the Pentagon source, to more than 20 or even closer to 50.

Correlation doesn’t equal causation, but given the outcomes of significant counternarcotics assistance from Africa Command and Central Command -- including some $500 million over just three recent years -- there’s little evidence to suggest that better record-keeping can solve the problems plaguing the military’s anti-drug efforts in the greater Middle East or Africa. While AFRICOM and, to a lesser extent, CENTCOM have made changes in how they track counternarcotics aid, both seemingly remain hooked on pouring money into efforts that have produced few successes. More effective use of spreadsheets won’t solve the underlying problems of America’s wars or cure an addiction to policies that continue to fail.

Nick Turse is the managing editor of TomDispatch, a fellow at the Nation Institute, and a contributing writer for the Intercept. His 2017 Harper’s magazine article, “Ghost Nation,” is a finalist for an American Society of Magazine Editors award. His website is NickTurse.com.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jun/14/us-anti-narcotic-afghanistan-opium-costly-failure-official-report posted:

US anti-narcotic effort in Afghanistan is a costly failure, official report finds

Opium production hits record high in 2017
US has spent $8.6bn to curb production since 2001

AFP in Washington

Thu 14 Jun 2018 16.18 BST
Last modified on Thu 14 Jun 2018 16.54 BST

Poppy cultivation in Afghanistan hit a record high last year, a US government watchdog has said, describing American-funded counternarcotics efforts in the war-torn country as a failure.

Since the American-led invasion in late 2001, the US has spent about $8.6bn on counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan, yet the country remains the world’s largest producer of opium.

According to a new study by the office of the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (Sigar), opium cultivation reached about 328,000 hectares (1,265 square miles) in 2017 – a 63% jump from the year before and the greatest amount tallied since 2002.

“To put it bluntly, these numbers spell failure, and the outlook is not encouraging,” John Sopko, the special inspector general, said in prepared remarks at the launch of his office’s new report.

The amount grown last year is enough to produce 900 tons of export-quality heroin, Sigar said, and the money from sales is helping fuel insurgent violence across Afghanistan.

In an effort to cut back on the cash flow, US and Afghan planes last year conducted a series of air strikes on drug labs that were being used to process opium, including in the poppy-rich southern province of Helmand, a Taliban stronghold.

But Sigar said it was hard to measure the effectiveness of the expensive air campaign, as new labs can be set up in three or four days.

“There is also the risk that expanded airstrikes by Afghan and international forces could result in civilian deaths, alienate rural populations and strengthen the insurgency,” the report states.

The report found that no program by the US, the Afghans or by coalition partners had succeeded in causing lasting reductions in poppy or opium production.

“Their overall impact has been negligible,” Sopko said.

give me the 8.6 billion

BBC investigation into the illegal sale of an addictive opioid has triggered sweeping reform across Nigeria and beyond.

...

This is a major victory for anti-drugs campaigners and a major financial loss for pharmaceutical companies, who previously sold the product for as much as 3,000 naira ($8; £6) a bottle.

The government had previously estimated more than three million bottles of codeine syrup ... were being consumed every day in just two states.

Once the recall is complete, the Nigerian government will accumulate a stockpile of addictive drugs worth millions of pounds.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-45032842

same in ghana. also their tramadol imports account for 20% of global production. will be interesting to keep an eye on what players enter the disrupted opiod market.