DEA, NSA, FBI, CIA, IRS, ABC, 123 – We’re All Wanted Criminals Now!

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – There’s a great way to combat Latin American drug cartels, ladies and gentlemen.  It’s called legalize the substance.  Make it so that it is freely traded just like coconuts and lettuce leaves.  Then when it is decriminalized, there won’t be a criminal element.  You see anyone standing on a corner hawking illicit and illegally-obtained heads of cabbage, do you?  Is there anyone out there that’s engaging in the illegal radish trade?  Do we have smuggled-in cucumbers from Mexico and Central America?  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

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A secretive US Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.

Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin – not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.

The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to “recreate” the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant’s constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don’t know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence – information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.

“I have never heard of anything like this at all,” said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.

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Mike:  I can guarantee you it targets common citizens labeled drug dealers.  We have these laws on the books, so I guess it is the duty of law enforcement to enforce them.  I would also hazard a guess to say that most of you LEOs probably agree with most of the laws.  Government, Daddy and the cops know best, you know.  But after having waded through that part of the story here, please explain to me why the National Security Agency, which was created to protect us from madmen across the planet and from those that might want to wage war against us in various forms, and from the FBI and CIA and all these other ABC agencies, why they are illegally gathering, through these massive data mining operations that we know they’re undertaking, and as they’re gathering this information, now we know that the info and intel is being fed to other agencies who can then feed it to Barney Fife or your state troopers so they know where and when to show up when an illicit deal is about to go down.

Mike Church Show Transcript – Ron Paul Points Out What Should Be Obvious: Politicians Lie And The NSA Spies

You can say all you want to about [mocking] “They gotta enforce the laws.”  Don’t they also have to obey the laws?  Don’t you actually have to obtain through due process this information?  Those of you that say there’s nothing to see here, citizen, move along, please explain this.  How do you explain this one?  God knows what else they’re funneling and feeding to other agencies.  [mocking] “We got this intercept here.  This guy’s saying he’s not obeying EPA laws and he’s dumping fertilizer in his backyard in an illegal manner.  So if you show up at 6 a.m. on a Saturday morning, you might find him with a shovel in hand and a bag of 142114.”  He’s not making a bomb with it or anything, mind you, he’s just using the fertilizer in an un-federally-approved manner….

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What about all of you mattress criminals out there who are sending emails to Ma and Pa Kettle telling them that you’re going to ceremoniously snip the tags off your mattresses this weekend?  Don’t you think the Feds would want to have that information, would want to send some agents in there swooping in to prevent you from committing this atrocity against humanity?  Where does this stuff end?  You people that say you’re apathetic about this and you don’t care about it, okay.  When does the care kick in?  When the food pyramid has been pared down to four items and you consume anything other than the four items, then does the concern kick in?

I, for the life of me, do not understand what part about a free civilization that is primarily organized not by the strength of its laws but by the moral strength and character of its people who believe it is against the eternal law to commit most of these atrocities and therefore do not engage in it.  Are there bad actors?  Yes.  As Lew Rockwell points out in his “Legalize Drunk Driving” essay which I put in today’s Pile of Prep:

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There’s a more fundamental point. What precisely is being criminalized? Not bad driving. Not destruction of private property. Not the taking of human life or reckless endangerment. The crime is having the wrong substance in your blood. Yet it is possible, in fact, to have this substance in your blood, even while driving, and not commit anything like what has been traditionally called a crime.

What have we done by permitting government to criminalize the content of our blood instead of actions themselves? We have given it power to make the application of the law arbitrary, capricious, and contingent on the judgment of cops and cop technicians. Indeed, without the government’s “Breathalyzer,” there is no way to tell for sure if we are breaking the law.

Sure, we can do informal calculations in our head, based on our weight and the amount of alcohol we have had over some period of time. But at best these will be estimates. We have to wait for the government to administer a test to tell us whether or not we are criminals. That’s not the way law is supposed to work. Indeed, this is a form of tyranny.

Now, the immediate response goes this way: drunk driving has to be illegal because the probability of causing an accident rises dramatically when you drink. The answer is just as simple: government in a free society should not deal in probabilities. The law should deal in actions and actions alone, and only insofar as they damage person or property. Probabilities are something for insurance companies to assess on a competitive and voluntary basis.

This is why the campaign against “racial profiling” has intuitive plausibility to many people: surely a person shouldn’t be hounded solely because some demographic groups have higher crime rates than others. Government should be preventing and punishing crimes themselves, not probabilities and propensities. Neither, then, should we have driver profiling, which assumes that just because a person has quaffed a few he is automatically a danger.

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Mike:  Back to the DEA story:

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The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. [Mike: There’s another acronym in there.] Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service . . .

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Mike:  Gee, I wonder what they would want with our email communications, phone records and chats.  Gosh, guys, I can’t think of anything the IRS would want with my personal email communication, would want with my personal business transactions maybe.  [mocking] “Did you purchase an item from a Mr. Legiere that cost $601?” — “Yeah, I think I did.” — “Where’s your 1099 form?” — “I just gave him $601.” — “That’s over the amount allowed by the government. You have to report that.  That’s income.” — “No, it’s not, I already had the money.  I just exchanged . . .” — “You didn’t!”  Of course, citizen, there’s nothing to see here.  Just move along.  Don’t worry about any of this.  None of this will ever come back to haunt any of us ever.  I have that on the assurance of Lindsey Graham himself.  Any of this sinking in today?  [mocking] “Mike, just get back to bashing Obama.”  Oh, that’s coming, hang on.

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. . . and the Department of Homeland Security. [Mike: This is all under the umbrella of the SOD, the Special Operations Division.] It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.

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Mike:  There’s a great way to combat Latin American drug cartels, ladies and gentlemen.  It’s called legalize the substance.  Make it so that it is freely traded just like coconuts and lettuce leaves.  Then when it is decriminalized, there won’t be a criminal element.  You see anyone standing on a corner hawking illicit and illegally-obtained heads of cabbage, do you?  Is there anyone out there that’s engaging in the illegal radish trade?  Do we have smuggled-in cucumbers from Mexico and Central America?  [mocking] “Hey, you, come here.  Come here, come here.  Nah, I don’t wanna hurt ya.  You’ve never seen cucumbers like this, buddy.  These are the sweetest, grown in South America, strong.  Ya can’t get these.  They aren’t FDA-approved.”  Can you imagine smuggling in all kinds of meats not approved by our federal overlords?

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Today, much of the SOD’s work is classified, and officials asked that its precise location in Virginia not be revealed. The documents reviewed by Reuters are marked “Law Enforcement Sensitive”, a government categorization that is meant to keep them confidential.

“Remember that the utilization of SOD cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function,” a document presented to agents reads. [Mike: So we’re going to let you in on how we’re spying and snooping and illegally getting to people here, but you’re not allowed to tell anyone.] The document specifically directs agents to omit the SOD’s involvement from investigative reports . . .

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Mike:  In other words they’re told to lie.  Just think about this.  What if you omit how you obtained something that the IRS wants to tax, that the TSA wants you to not bring on an airplane or stick in some stupid mailer and mail it to yourself for $60?  What do they tell you about that?  Citizen, you will obey!  But these citizens who work for these agencies, they don’t have to obey anyone, not even the laws under which they are supposed to operate.  It’s nice work if you can find it, isn’t it?

End Mike Church Show Transcript

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