That’s actually a massive understatement. According to a lengthy analysis in the New York Times, the latest batch of diplomatic cables released by Wikileaks reveal that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) has become a “global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies. …” (Emphasis is mine.)
The Drug Enforcement Administration has been transformed into a global intelligence organization with a reach that extends far beyond narcotics, and an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, according to secret diplomatic cables.
n far greater detail than previously seen, the cables, from the cache obtained by WikiLeaks and made available to some news organizations, offer glimpses of drug agents balancing diplomacy and law enforcement in places where it can be hard to tell the politicians from the traffickers, and where drug rings are themselves mini-states whose wealth and violence permit them to run roughshod over struggling governments.
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Like many of the cables made public in recent weeks, those describing the drug war do not offer large disclosures. Rather, it is the details that add up to a clearer picture of the corrupting influence of big traffickers, the tricky game of figuring out which foreign officials are actually controlled by drug lords, and the story of how an entrepreneurial agency operating in the shadows of the F.B.I. has become something more than a drug agency. The D.E.A. now has 87 offices in 63 countries and close partnerships with governments that keep the Central Intelligence Agency at arm’s length.
The Economic Times puts it more bluntly:
The US Drug Enforcement Administration , an agency tasked with the job of tracking drug traffickers around the world, has over the years transformed into a global intelligence organisation with its tentacles extending far beyond narcotics, according to secret American diplomatic cables .
The organisation has an eavesdropping operation so expansive it has to fend off foreign politicians who want to use it against their political enemies, the New York Times reported on Sunday, quoting a cache of cables published by WikiLeaks . The body’s vast network of informants also had on its roll David Headley, an accused in the Mumbai attacks case, who worked as a double agent for the DEA.
For example (my emphasis):
One August 2009 cable reported Panamanian President Ricardo Martinelli as having sent an urgent BlackBerry message to the US ambassador asking the DEA go after his political enemies.
“I need help with tapping phones,” the paper quoted the president as saying.
The request was denied, which sparked new tensions between the two countries.
Martinelli, who, according to the cables, “made no distinction between legitimate security targets and political enemies,” retaliated by proposing a law that would have ended the DEA’s work with specially vetted Panamanian police units.
Then he tried to subvert the drug agency?s control over the programme by assigning non-vetted officers to the counternarcotics unit, The Times said.
At the beginning of the year, the United States faced a similar situation in Paraguay.
Diplomatic dispatches sent from that South American country described the DEA fighting requests from that country?s government to help spy on an insurgent group, known as the Paraguayan People?s Army (EPP).
The leftist group suspected of having ties to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) had conducted several high-profile kidnappings and was trying to finance its activities through collecting ransom.
According to The Times, when US diplomats refused to give Paraguay access to the drug agency?s wiretapping system, Interior Minister Rafael Filizzola threatened to shut it down, saying: “Counternarcotics are important, but won?t topple our government. The EPP could.”
So not only are these entanglements not helping to stop drug trafficking, they are actually compromising U.S. foreign policy.
But of course the American people have no right to know that a government agency tasked with drug law enforcement has, with no public disclosure or debate and, indeed, completely unbeknownst to the general public, become an international intelligence network — a second Central Intelligence Agency — which, as Conor Friedersdorf observes, may be helping to create “a black market that destabilizes dozens of nations and ravages countless lives” — possibly “provok[ing] a whole different kind of terrorist to come after us sooner or later.”
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