How the government set up a fake bank to launder drug money (2012)
npr.org
npr.org
> 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...
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.
Try base64 encoding them and pasting the results?
Way too many piglets. Way too few tits.
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 is representive because it is a democracy. This sort of thinking you described is what leads to people skirting on their responsibilities.
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 person had his motel all paid off. So the Government decided to size it because they could sell it. He fought them off, barely:
https://www.wbur.org/news/2012/11/14/tewksbury-motel-owner-f...
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.
1. https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrociti...
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.
> 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.
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.
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...).
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.
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.
Go Gov.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, at least the government is consistent. When all you have is a hammer...
> 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.
https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/2021/01/31/what-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Until we get there; I am fine with small amounts of illegial drugs being an infraction.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Source: https://www.migalhas.com.br/amp/depeso/302660/principio-da-l...
Most likely a few governments and courts in multiple countries were already OK with it by the end.
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.
... 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Is it because the amount of money is too low?
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
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/francescop...
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.
Also it’s not entrapment if the criminals are soliciting them.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/8/22524307/anom-encrypted-me...