How the government set up a fake bank to launder drug money (2012) (opens in new tab)

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...).

Feature or bug? Cui bono?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_bono

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.

Go Gov.

> 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.

On average, approximately 7x more people die in the US each day from use of tobacco use than do from use of opiates.

The US govt didnt give any meaningful punishment to the Sackler family who live in the US for OxyContin, why should they go after someone in China?

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.

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.

The enforcement objectives are like a horseshoe.

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.

> (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)

Try base64 encoding them and pasting the results?

To think that this money didn't end up financing insurgency is to be naive.

> 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

This comment begs for some sources and citations.

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.

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.

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.

Wow, thanks for that link.

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.

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.

Source: https://www.migalhas.com.br/amp/depeso/302660/principio-da-l...

Morality is totally flexible too, all you need to do to justify your atrocity is to make it help kids in some small way

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.

> 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

“ 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.

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

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.