Everyone is surprised to find the government does shady stuff, but many of these operations are even acknowledged like Iran-Contra where the government sold arms to the embargoed Khomeini government to generate black money to fund the Contras.
> Senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to the Khomeini government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo.[2] The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras in Nicaragua.
> Everyone is surprised to find the government does shady stuff, but many of these operations are even acknowledged like Iran-Contra where the government sold arms to the embargoed Khomeini government to generate black money to fund the Contras.
Another one, maybe the biggest known one, is when the US sent 12 bn to 14 bn in the form of 100 bills (yup, in bills) using a military plane to Iraq and these bills mostly all mysteriously vanished.
12 to 14... billions.
At least 1.4 bn was found to have been stolen and stored in a bunker in... Lebanon (I don't remember if it was just located or seized). Overall an estimated 9 bn are unaccounted for I think.
(trying to insert the wikipedia and NY Times link to the story/stories but I get a "we have trouble processing your request, sorry" from HN)
There were wire transfer to the tune of billions too. But the 100 bills shrink-wrapped and flew in a military plane: you cannot make that up.
Shady stuff if any...
EDIT: like Iran-Contra, I'm pretty sure in the future movies are going to be made about these $100 bills.
> However, evidence before the committee suggests that senior American officials were unconcerned about the situation because the billions were not US taxpayers' money. Paul Bremer, the head of the CPA, reminded the committee that "the subject of today's hearing is the CPA's use and accounting for funds belonging to the Iraqi people held in the so-called Development Fund for Iraq. These are not appropriated American funds. They are Iraqi funds. I believe the CPA discharged its responsibilities to manage these Iraqi funds on behalf of the Iraqi people."
You left out something pretty damn important, it was Iraqi money to begin with. Maybe they requested large pallets of cash, it shouldn’t matter since it’s their (Iraq’s) money!
I don’t doubt the government has had a hand in shady stuff (US history from 1946-now in particular proves this), but this isn’t what it seems. We didn’t just break off $12B of US treasury money and send it off to Iraq with no oversight.
> EDIT: like Iran-Contra, I'm pretty sure in the future movies are going to be made about these $100 bills.
I highly doubt it, unless it is what Iraq did with its own money after they received it from the Fed, what would the movie be about even? Iraq requests it’s money and receives it is a pretty boring plot
It was Iraqi money, but the people spending it were Americans or American controlled. At the point Iraq was under direct occupation control. The fact we saw it as play money because we seized it from the Iraqi government "on behalf of the Iraqi people" and then splashed it around for fun is disgusting.
Edit: I have a recollection of this incident but certainly not as mysteriously inexplicable and shady as you make it out. There was some context I've forgotten. Your story rings false.
This wasn’t “shady,” this was essentially a sting operation where they eventually seized 90 million dollars in cash and arrested over 100 people. Not bad. The bigger result was that it poisoned trust of banks by there kinds of criminals.
Professionals already have banks for that. 90 million dollars? These are small fishes.
They only helped the bigger ones go get rid of the competition and the effect on drug trafficking is near zero.
From another perspective, consider it probably did not cost $90 million to execute this plan. So overall, this is a net profit, and most likely cost effective.
> Everyone is surprised to find the government does shady stuff
I really don't understand how this is still possible with everyone having access to the Internet. They're pretty consistent [1]. It must be a bubble thing.
Man that has taken my breath away. I'm pretty aware of how terrible the west can be (and how we can lie about it) but the sheer volume there is immense.
Worth emphasizing, this isn't "the West", this is just the US. Not that other parts of "the West" don't warrant their own lists, but framing it this way unnecessarily cushions the blow.
You realize that list has events going back to the 1700’s, right?
If you want to talk about countries that have a pretty good go at being awful to fellow humans and we get to go that far back, I don’t think the UK would have an insignificant list.
It's kind of weird you felt the need to post this whataboutism three times in the same subthread, especially being that your main complaint is that the history is a complete history... I don't think this is the kind of behavior we want on HN.
This list contains a lot of sensationalized points. It literally has things going back to the 1700’s. With that kind of latitude you could condemn every major country.
Why would you assume the west is perfect? This list contains things from the 1700’s. Any country will have a laundry list of atrocities if we start that far back.
NPR is using a clickbait headline. I fell for it just like you did. This conveys the opposite of what it actually is - "Govt Agents setup a fake bank in a sting to attract drug traffickers to launder money netting $90mm in cash and over 100 arrests".
No, I'm of the same opinion of croes and saul_goodman.
> they didn't nab any of the big players in the operation. So effectively they helped the biggest players by making it harder for the small to mid-tier drug cartels do conduct business.
Let's see, so they didn't nab any of the big players in the operation. So effectively they helped the biggest players by making it harder for the small to mid-tier drug cartels do conduct business. Sure, way to put the squeeze on the cartels there...
A tangent to this is the way we conduct drug enforcement in the US. It's much better for police departments to wait until after the dealers make money to catch them so they can seize the cash as part of the crime. This dis-incentivises the actual prevention of the spread of illegal drugs. The entire system is corrupt and there's little to no incentive for the authority to behave in the spirit of the laws they enforce - to raise public health by eliminating the personal health and social problems that drug addition creates.
You nailed it. You have to let the fruit ripen before you pick it. Also if you don’t go after the suppliers, you will have more distributors to harvest later. It’s literally a cash crop for the DEA/police
I recall there testimony around Operation Fast And Furious where the DEA basically said that they chose a cartel to dominate the trade and busted them once a decade or so.
They justified this on the ground that otherwise, the various factions would be fighting things out. But yeah, this make the DEA effectively the ultimate Mafia boss.
And yet, each vicious step in this vicious game can be justified by a logic that seems reasonable on it's own ("Drugs" should be illegal 'cause of harm of drug use to society, drug dealing should be actually organized by the police 'cause of harm of unfettered drug dealing, the truth should be covered 'cause of harm of not trusting authorities...).
I think it’s bold to assume the government even wants to nab the big guys.
One example is fentanyl is killing us by the thousands every year. We know who the guy is who owns the factor that’s providing most of the fentanyl and precursors to the cartels. He lives in China and runs an also legit chemical factory. He commits the crime right in the main factory in the open. We politely asked China to arrest him, but they said no. No real political pressure to do anything, no assassinations, nothing. Thousands dead every year.
In response to the Fentanyl/heroin issue, State govs clamp down on legit opioid Rx, leaving Dr's too wary to Rx any effective pain meds at all.
People in chronic pain now get to live their lives without any relief at all. They get ignored my news orgs who are obsessed with amplifying an opioid hysteria narrative.
Agree. The opiod epidemic is just the latest moral panic used to justify limitng people's rights.if you want to o.d., that's your right and your fault. OTC pain medication useless for serious chronic pain and a bigger ripoff than prescription drug companies. Opiods are safe when taken under doc guidelines. This notion that otc drugs are safe is wrong too: Otc drugs are known to cause liver and kidney problems too.
I agree with a bunch of your point, but I want to contest one thing - opioids are not necessarily safe by following your doctor's guidelines.
There's not (as far as I've found) currently any consistent threshold for how much of a given opioid you have to take for how long to develop an addiction. Some people might be able to take a high dose for an extended interval and not blink. Some people might take a much lower dose and have a very bad time indeed. (For that matter, I've known some people who got IV opioids with no effect. Biochemistry is wild.)
So I don't think it's reasonable to argue "opioids are safe if you follow the guidelines" and "OTC pain meds are unsafe [if you ignore the guidelines]" - both have risks that you can try to mitigate by following the guidelines given, but unknown factors can result in it still having negative outcomes.
I think it depends on your location and situation.
A couple months ago, I had minor (in absolute terms) surgery which resulted in a good deal of pain; the doctor asked if I wanted a prescription for opioids, I said yes, it was sent in, no further questions.
Am I saying people in chronic pain don't now have issues? No, I have no direct experience with that situation.
But it's still quite possible for people to get opioids sometimes.
> No real political pressure to do anything, no assassinations, nothing. Thousands dead every year.
Assassinating a Chinese citizen in China would be a huge overreach and a major violation of sovereignty. Not to mention it wouldn't stop the drug trade.
Instead of looking at the Liberal Hegemony playbook for a solution, they should de-criminalize and regulate. During prohibition many people were dying from additives/impurities in bootleg alcohol, now we don't have that problem.
I think it's important to help people understand that the stated goals of the government are completely out of alignment with their behavior. The state pretends that it wants to stop the drug trade, but its behavior is the opposite. I have no reason to believe that the CIA and other three letter agencies care one iota about sovereignty.
What the actual policy should be towards drugs is downstream of helping the public understand they are being misled systematically, and have been being misled since school.
> to raise public health by eliminating the personal health and social problems that drug addition creates.
If that had ever been the aim of any drug policy, drugs - including hard drugs - would be legally accessible at licensed stores, mental health care and social services would be accessible for everyone, and fact-based drug education in school be the norm, not the exception.
The reality is that drug policy has direct roots in racism - marijuana and crack prosecution intended to specifically target hippies and people of color.
"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."
Per the grandparent, yes "marijuana and crack prosecution" have explicitly racist elements.
Specifically, the 1930s anti-cannabis is specifically anti-Hispanic, and the question of why there are massively different sentencing laws around crack and powder cocaine seems to me and most of the people I know to have many obvious racial elements.
> But by the mid-1980s, black fatherlessness skyrocketed. Today, only 44% of black children have a father in the home. In unison, the rate of black out-of-wedlock births went from 24.5% in 1964 to 70.7% by 1994, roughly where it stands today.
One of the US political parties has had their strategists admit that several of their policies are racist, and that their communication strategy foments and encourages racism. This is not news, it's been publicly out there for decades.
> > But by the mid-1980s, black fatherlessness skyrocketed. Today, only 44% of black children have a father in the home. In unison, the rate of black out-of-wedlock births went from 24.5% in 1964 to 70.7% by 1994, roughly where it stands today.
Jesus Christ, that is an atrocity. Thank you for digging out that one.
But what I wonder... is this a result of the welfare policy you mentioned, or rather a result of way too many Black fathers ending up in prison, gangs or dead as a result of "selective enforcement" and other abuses of police power?
> Racism is thrown around as a justification for anything today, but _real_ racist policies like:
> different sentencing laws around crack and powder cocaine
That persist today are almost never mentioned.
There are lots of explicitly racist policies in the US; you can't really understate it. Almost all land use and zoning policies were created out of very explicit racism, as in you can look up anything from city council meeting notes to Supreme Court arguments and they'd just say they did it to keep out black and Chinese people.
Robert Moses built low bridges surrounding NYC to prevent busses from being able to use those roads, and the reason the US has highways running through instead of around cities is literally because the planners wanted an excuse to demolish black neighborhoods. In California it's also the reason there are so many small cities in SF Bay (Palo Alto/EPA and Piedmont/Oakland) and several public parks like in Manhattan Beach.
Right, like in Oregon they recently decriminalized "personal amounts" of all drugs. Crack, heroin, meth, fentanyl, etc. Whatever you want...it's now just a misdemeanor offense like a parking ticket as long as you're under some limit. So personal amounts are "ok," but how does one obtain a "personal" amount from someone else unless they have more than a personal amount? In other words, on one hand it's illegal to deal the drugs, but after you've obtained them illegally it's ok. That logic doesn't square.
> Just because small amounts are decriminalized, it doesn't apply when a person has more than is specified under the law.
> "Possession of larger amounts of drugs, manufacturing and distribution are still crimes," Fox said.
The point of decriminalizing personal amounts of drugs is to change police behavior because they are doing more harm than good in this area.
You want to arrest the people who are dealing drugs or causing other crimes, not permanently ruining the lives of people who are doing no harm to society.
It's not strictly true that they do no harm to society. A lot of deeply addicted people are still objectively a blight on their surroundings, even if you view it as a health issue that calls for help rather than a moral issue that calls for punishment.
Let's not underplay that damage drugs and addicts do. They're not the source of the problem, they shouldn't be the focus of the solution but let's be honest.
Drugs aren't magical life-ruiners, that suddenly descend on unsuspecting healthy people and destroy them. The people you're describing are mostly already damaged by their own lives, hurting badly, and unable to emotionally function on their own. If you removed heroin or meth from the equation, they'd get drunk, instead... And they'd be roughly the same blight on their surroundings, regardless of their choice of substance.
Our drug problems are, at root, a mental health issue. And neither will ever be resolved in a society that doesn't understand that both problems are one.
Just to add - much of the damage of Heroin, and other drugs cut with fentanyl is precisely BECAUSE it is illegal.
Heroin is smuggled in from Colombia in some mule's intestines and then injected DIRECTLY into the user's bloodstream. This causes many different kinds of fatal blood clots and bacterial infections.
When Heroin was legal in this country (given as a cough medicine to young kids in the 1920s) it didn't lead to a reduction in the life expectancy of the users.
If you are saying addicts commit crimes e.g. burglary well then prosecute them for those crimes, that’s the only way I can take the “blight on their surroundings. Taken a different way, there are a lot of humans in the us who use other drugs, alcohol e.g. who are not considered a blight on their surroundings. Street drugs could be like those drug, and in fact during prohibition alcohol was an illegal “street” drug.
That makes sense to me. Chasing consumers is a waste of time and money. The arrest itself might cause more societal damage than the drugs if it ruins people's lives or is used to target minorities.
At the very least, it makes it hard to prosecute low level drug offenders, which is where the most abuse (originating from the government) is in the system.
In a perfect world, I would like to see all drugs decriminalized. I would like to see drugs given to people by the government free of charge. Of course they would have to sit through a common sense education movies, titled "Ok you want to ruin your life with hard drugs--fine, but sit through this educational film."
Until we get there; I am fine with small amounts of illegial drugs being an infraction.
I like decriminalization, but don't like government production.
The film idea is funny, but I still disagree with that too. As anyone can tell from my commentary, I'm a crazy no government guy, so that's just my bias.
The police have an incentive to get collars for petty possession, mostly to bank warrants for future trouble, and to go after big or brazen networks.
The people in the middle are mostly free of interference. I used to work in a building that was about a block away from the county court, 4 blocks from a police precinct hq. Yet I watched three guys sell drugs across the street for the two years that I worked there.
It has its ups and downs. In my state, with bail reform, woke stuff, and marijuana possession decriminalization, there has been a wave of shootings and murders as the gangs reorg and the cops are caught with their pants down.
Well the reason for that is that the large cartels are already part of the game.
SOCOM needs a place to get the money for their off the books operations, and if you start looking into special operations units it turns out there are a lot of those guys pretty heavily involved in drug trafficking.
I always wonder how this is legal in the U.S.A? Creating a fake bank in another country sounds like committing fraud in another country. At worst it can be they would be charged with money laundering themselves.
What is the line of what is acceptable at entrapment in the United States? What stops any agency from creating permanent fake banks for example?
I am glad drug lords get busted. I hate them, but I think if there is no line, then we do not need any kind of law. Just declare drug traffickers as not human and exterminate them. I do not think the outcome would be good.
It's legal because the law doesn't explicitly forbid it, I guess? Legality is a very flexible thing. Morality is another, but not necessarily the same.
Anyway, generally speaking, law enforcement is granted things that citizens do not, e.g. visibly wearing weapons, owning and transporting narcotics, etc. But those things are obvious.
Your last bit is very totalitarian, and I would have hoped we had intellectually grown beyond that.
Interestingly, the principal of legality in Brazil has two different meanings:
1. For regular people, it mean that they can do whatever the law doesn't forbid.
2. For public officials, it means they can only do what the law allows.
If the government setup their own Silk Road and busted a bunch of drug dealers it wouldn’t be any different than starting a bank. The first informant said I have drug traffickers asking for banking services. They setup what they were already seeking.
Most likely a few governments and courts in multiple countries were already OK with it by the end.
Yeah, just a heads up that darknet commerce goes much darker after every enforcement action.
More of it switches to Monero despite being less convenient, debilitating tracing capabilities.
It accelerated need for completion of Monero multisignature capabilities, allowing the custody of funds to remain with the buyer and seller, instead of requiring the exchange as an escrow provider which is where many of the funds are seized when the government finds a server and takes it down.
Buyers and sellers do their own encryption handshakes based on certain software protocols. Instead of all messages stored on the marketplace server. And they avoid certain apps like Wickr.
The effort to take down a marketplace increases while the yield decreases. Classic war of attrition.
Everyone already knows the best practices, they are just too lazy to implement them until there is evidence that it’s necessary and not just paranoia.
Of course, but these patterns are true of most businesses (and indeed much human behavior). Companies have policies planned exceeding implementation because the cost isn't justified (until it is).
... and "enforcing the law incentivizes criminals to spend more on not getting caught" isn't really an argument for not enforcing the law. Indeed, from the point of view of law enforcement, it's short-term win-win... Every resource spent on being harder to catch is a resource not spent on the actual harmful criminal activity.
> If the government setup their own Silk Road and busted a bunch of drug dealers it wouldn’t be any different than starting a bank.
Silk road was e-commerce. The laws & regulations of e-commerce and banking are very different, so yes they would different. Doubly so as it's in two nations. Thirdly so, because now international laws and regulations apply
Were the bank activities themselves illegal? It would only be entrapment if they were soliciting the illegal activity. It sounds like they were just soliciting banking services in a way that was attractive to illegal actors. Even if the banking services themselves were not legal, it would seem like entrapment if they used that to charge them with banking crimes.
If NYPD operated a Limousine service in hopes that criminals would discuss their crimes while being overheard by an undercover officer, it would not be entrapment.
“ It would only be entrapment if they were soliciting the illegal activity.”
I’d like to note that this isn’t how entrapment works in the US (or many other places). If I’m an investigator, it is not entrapment for me to go to government employees and say “Hey, I’ll give you $100 in exchange for state secrets. You in?”. Covertly soliciting illegal activity to try to catch criminals is not entrapment. It only rises to the level of entrapment when it is something that would cause a “normally law-abiding person” to break the law, or that the defendant would otherwise have had no criminal intent - for example, “Give me state secrets or I’ll kill your wife” would be entrapment.
But in this case they are setting up a bank that has the ability to facilitate certain banking practices that would be difficult to accomplish without a complicit bank. As such, no person, whether a criminal or not, would be able to commit these crimes without the help of the bank acting as law enforcement agent. The only way it would not be entrapment with regards to the illegal banking would be if they could show that there are other non-law-enforcement run banks that were available to make these facilities available to the defendant. If other banks have mechanisms in place to prevent these banking crimes in the first place, then you couldn't expect that the defendant could have committed them without the assistance of the government agent.
However if they learned information about other criminal activities through this, then those activities would not be subject to a defense of entrapment.
So go ahead and charge them on drug trafficking. But the laundering charges look like entrapment to me. Not a 100% shut and closed case, because it is a bit subjective, but I would expect any defense to have a good chance with it.
That’s not how the court decides if something is entrapment or not. To determine if something is entrapment there are two tests, and this fails both.
Objective test (Did LEOs use incentives that would cause a normally law-abiding person also do this?): Most normally law abiding people won’t launder money given the opportunity, as they have no incentive and the police didn’t provide any additional incentive here. Not entrapment on those grounds.
Subjective test (Was the defendant pressured into doing this?): It would be hard to argue that these people laundered money against their wills. Furthermore, they’ve all committed additional crimes which would predispose them to want to launder money. Not entrapment on those grounds either.
Yes, if the money was higher, then it is entrapment. E.g. 100k for a secret.
The question is “did the police agent catch a crime or cause a crime to happen” of course where it becomes entrapment is a grey area.
The bank activities were illegal and non compliant. The OCC was about to cut them out of the entire banking network for poor reporting, meaning no OCC-licensed banks could take or send wires to them or hold accounts in their name. It would have shut off all trade for this bank without knowing what they’re doing or alleging any crime, yet.
This is how the US enforces its will worldwide.
The Treasury has a similar way to do that, without the OFAC list. They did it in 2018
Back to the OCC, the outcome of the audit would have solidified criminal charges against the bank directors, but then they backed off with the “this is a government operation” excuse. Other reasons they would back off being any other kind of leverage, which small banks do not have.
Government provides an encrypted platform, a bank for money laundering, ... the supply chain has long been CIA side hustle. Basically private drug criminals are really federal contractors by now.
> Senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to the Khomeini government of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo.[2] The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras in Nicaragua.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
It's also discussed that the CIA does similar things with poppies to generate black money to fund regime changey activities.
Here's one such article which is a weird source, but points to more mainstream sources for evidence.
https://www.thelibertybeacon.com/a-conspiracy-theory-that-be...