Video: Cops teargas Brazilians angered by sporting events spending – YouTube.
I don’t know about you but I am getting fed up with all these videos of people revolting against their governments only to be met with resistance and brutality from people just like them who wear state uniforms. We are the majority on the planet; why do we allow this to be inflicted upon us ? These police officers have families, don’t they ?
It looks like the best way to defuse police over- zealousness is to do this; hit them in the pocketbook. Lou
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Sheriff’s bust legal pot-grower – YouTube.
| Wired Opinion | Wired.com
Moxie Marlinspike
06.13.13
As James Duane, a professor at Regent Law School and former defense attorney, notes in his excellent lecture on why it is never a good idea to talk to the police:
Estimates of the current size of the body of federal criminal law vary. It has been reported that the Congressional Research Service cannot even count the current number of federal crimes. These laws are scattered in over 50 titles of the United States Code, encompassing roughly 27,000 pages. Worse yet, the statutory code sections often incorporate, by reference, the provisions and sanctions of administrative regulations promulgated by various regulatory agencies under congressional authorization. Estimates of how many such regulations exist are even less well settled, but the ABA thinks there are ”nearly 10,000.”
If the federal government can’t even count how many laws there are, what chance does an individual have of being certain that they are not acting in violation of one of them?
As Supreme Court Justice Breyer elaborates:
The complexity of modern federal criminal law, codified in several thousand sections of the United States Code and the virtually infinite variety of factual circumstances that might trigger an investigation into a possible violation of the law, make it difficult for anyone to know, in advance, just when a particular set of statements might later appear (to a prosecutor) to be relevant to some such investigation.
For instance, did you know that it is a federal crime to be in possession of a lobster under a certain size? It doesn’t matter if you bought it at a grocery store, if someone else gave it to you, if it’s dead or alive, if you found it after it died of natural causes, or even if you killed it while acting in self defense. You can go to jail because of a lobster.
If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet…
To my Polish friends: We, Canadians, have not forgotten the Dziekanski tragedy. We just move very slowly on these issues in Canada. Not a bad idea. Lou
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Officer connected to Dziekanski Taser case to stand trial for perjury at inquiry – Times Colonist.
James Keller / The Canadian Press
June 9, 2013
RCMP Const. Bill Bentley arrives to testify at the Braidwood inquiry into the Taser-related death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski in Vancouver, B.C., on Wednesday February 25, 2009. Bentley stands trial beginning Monday on charges of perjury for his testimony at a public inquiry into Robert Dziekanski’s death at Vancouver’s airport. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
VANCOUVER – The first of four RCMP officers involved in the death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski, who died after he was stunned with a Taser at Vancouver’s airport, stands trial beginning Monday on charges of perjury related to a public inquiry into the case.
Const. Bill Bentley was among four officers who confronted Dziekanski in October 2007, stunning him multiple times with a Taser within seconds of arriving to a call about a man throwing furniture. Dziekanski died on the airport floor.
The fatal confrontation fuelled a national debate about the safety of Tasers, prompting a public inquiry in B.C. that forced Bentley and the other three officers to account for why they used so much force so quickly on a man who, on an amateur video of the incident, appeared calm when police arrived.
Commissioner Thomas Braidwood’s final report concluded the officers used too much force and had no justification for using the Taser.
The report prompted the province to appoint a special prosecutor to review the case. In May 2011, the prosecutor approved perjury charges against Bentley, Const. Kwesi Millington, Const. Gerry Rundell and Cpl. Benjamin Robinson.
Full story:
Officer connected to Dziekanski Taser case to stand trial for perjury at inquiry – Times Colonist.
City of God, Guns & Gangs – Vanguard Documentary – YouTube.
24 Dec 2012
For decades, Rio de Janeiro’s sprawling favelas (slums) have been under the control of heavily armed drug gangs. But now, the government of Brazil wants to take them back, and reform one of the world’s most unequal and violent cities. The plan is part of a bold new initiative to give Brazil’s most picturesque city a face lift before the world turns its eyes on the country for the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. Correspondent Mariana van Zeller finds out that the traditional rulers of Rio’s favelas are not ceding control without a fight. The government of Brazil has promised to continue its campaign, and provide a blueprint for one of the most pressing and perplexing questions in our increasingly urban world: how to transform, develop and integrate sprawling, often crime-ridden slums.
How many times do we have to hear these stories of police brutality before we ask ourselves, wait a minute, what the hell is going on ? Has the world gone extremely more violent ? No, the stats show less predatory crime than ever. Everywhere. I live in one of the best places on the planet and our cops are equally brutal, YouTube videos and all. This story is perfect because the officers involved cannot say , ever, that she attacked them or some other nonsense. I suspect it’s a Us or Them attitude fueled by the media that sees terrorists under every second tree.
Lou
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Photo Credit: Shutterstock.com
The alleged abuse occurred in Federal Way, Washington. Graham was trying to visit a friend at an apartment complex when she saw a police car trailing her. The police saw her using a cell phone, and she says she told the police she was going to drop her dog off at her friend’s apartment and that he could follow her.
That’s when the incident occurred. Graham says she did not hear the police officer’s order to get back into her car, and when the officer grabbed her wrist, she felt like she was being attacked. She called 911 to explain the situation to another police officer, and hoped that additional law enforcement officials could calm the situation down.
In a recording of the 911 call, Graham can be heard saying: “You attacked me before you said anything! There is no point whatsoever for you to touch me like that, especially with my condition, so how dare you even touch me?” The officer is heard saying that she is under arrest.
Another responding officer punched Graham in the face a few times, while telling Graham not to resist arrest. When a police officer put weight on Graham’s hip–where she was injured–”she reacted by trying to flip over. Federal Way police said she assaulted an officer during that struggle,” reports KIRO 7.
A photo published by KIRO 7 shows Graham with black and blue marks over her eye and face.
Graham’s friend Deborah Fenwick backed up Graham’s account in an interview with the local news outlet. “That woman was not resisting, I saw it. That woman doesn’t have a violent bone in her body. She’s got a heart of gold. If she would have understood the officer’s commands in the first place, she would have absolutely complied with him.”
The police dispute that narrative. In a statement e-mailed to KIRO 7, they said: “As the officer approached, Graham squared off against him in a fighter’s stance and attempted to strike him with closed fists. (The officer) responded with closed fist strikes to Graham’s face which brought her to the ground where she was handcuffed.”
Graham says she did not hit the officer, and that she told the officer “about my condition. Punching me over and over in the eye is obviously excessive force. He could have handled it a lot differently.”
Police in Washington, where voters legalized marijuana use last year, putting dogs on marijuana desensitization training
When Dusty, a 19-month-old black Labrador, walked past a pipe full of marijuana during a recent police search of a house, he was doing exactly what his handler hoped.
The newest drug-sniffing dog on the police force in Bremerton, near Seattle, is one of a few police dogs in Washington state that are not trained to point out pot during searches. Other police departments are considering or in the midst of re-training their dogs to ignore pot as well, part of the new reality in a state where voters last fall legalized marijuana use.
“We wanted to train our dog on what was truly illegal substances, that would be heroin, methamphetamine and cocaine,” said Dusty’s handler, Officer Duke Roessel, who added that Dusty nabbed 5lbs of meth during that recent search.
Police departments in Bremerton, Bellevue and Seattle, as well as the Washington state patrol, have either put the dogs through pot desensitization training or plan not to train them for marijuana detection.
The law decriminalized possession of up to an ounce of the drug for individuals over 21 years old. It also barred the distribution and growth of marijuana outside the state-approved system.
Police say that having a K-9 unit that doesn’t alert to pot will lessen challenges to obtaining search warrants because the dog won’t be pointing out possible legal amounts of the drug. Traditionally, dogs are trained to alert on the smell of marijuana, heroin, crack cocaine, methamphetamine and cocaine. They can’t tell which one it is or how much of each there is.
In December, the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys told officers in a guidance memo that dogs that alert on pot face limitations when a search warrant is sought but those are “not fatal to a determination of probable cause.”
The group instructed officers to point out that the dog was trained to smell pot and how that is relevant to other information when they seek a warrant, and that a “narcotics-trained canine’s alert will still be relevant to the probable cause equation.”
In Pierce County, however, prosecutor Mark Lindquist said authorities are being cautious about the new law because judges might excise the dog sniff from their analysis of probable cause. He’s also not convinced dogs can be re-trained. “We’ll need new dogs to alert on substances that are illegal,” he said.
In January, the Washington State Criminal Justice Training Commission removed detecting marijuana from its canine team certification standards. The change doesn’t prohibit trainers from doing so, but it’s not required anymore.
But some police departments aren’t making any changes. And some observers say that a state Supreme Court decision in 2010 in which the justices sided against medical marijuana patients who argued police officers no longer had probable cause to immediately arrest or investigate due to the legalization of medical pot.
Last fall’s legalization law “just made one ounce not a crime for adults. That means that any amount over an ounce is still illegal, growing marijuana is still illegal, selling marijuana is still illegal, passing a joint to somebody is still illegal,” said medical marijuana advocate and attorney Douglas Hiatt.
For different reasons, dog trainer Fred Helfers of the Pacific Northwest Detection Dog Association agreed with Hiatt.
But having spent 20 years as a narcotics investigator, Helfers said departments who abandoned pot training are having a “knee-jerk” reaction. He said they may miss actual crimes being committed. “What about trafficking? What about people who have more than an ounce?” he said.
Nonetheless, Helfers is helping departments who want to go through the “extinction” training, which he said is a common method to change what substances dogs alert to. It takes about an initial 30 days plus every day reinforcements to modify the dog’s behavior.
“Overall, I think there’s still a large amount of agencies on a wait-and-see approach with their dogs,” Helfers said.
Why Spain’s Costa del Crime is now the worst place to go on the run – Telegraph.
Telegraph
Since he last gained fame as a brief item in the “Crimewatch” slot of his local television news, a lot has changed for Manchester armed robber Jason Coghlan.
Having broken out of the dock during a court appearance in 1999, he spent a fortnight as one of the North West’s most wanted men before being re-arrested and sentenced to 12 years in Britain’s highest security jails.
Today, though, the man the police warned the public not to approach comes across as very approachable, having turned his back on crime in favour of a new venture in sunny Marbella.
This time he is on the right side of the law – just – acting as a legal “Mr Fixit” to the British criminal fraternity, who complain that a decent Spanish lawyer is as hard to find as a decent Spanish plumber.
“A lot of lawyers out here aren’t good at acting for foreign criminals, and when Brits get arrested they need someone like me to guide them to a decent one,” said Mr Coghlan, 43, whose younger brother, Arran, is nicknamed the “Teflon Don” back in Manchester after three separate attempts to prosecute him for different murders failed.
Jason Coghlan
“I make sure they’re represented properly and handle the translation issues, but I can also talk the criminal’s language, as it were, because of my background,” Mr Coghlan added.
One potential client for Mr Coghlan now is fellow Mancunian Andrew Moran, 31, who last week became the star of his very own mini-gangster movie when Spanish police released a video of his arrest at the poolside of his villa in Calpe, near Benidorm.
The footage, which received widespread media coverage, showed police creeping up on Mr Moran as he sunbathed, pouncing on him as he vaulted over a garden wall to escape. That it looked like a scene from the Costa-based crime flick Sexy Beast, in which Ray Winstone’s retired villain whiles away life by the pool, was no coincidence. Spanish police, who allegedly discovered two pistols at Moran’s villa, knew that if they grabbed him in his trunks, he was unlikely to be armed.
In the back yard of Moran’s empty villa this weekend, a bottle of Factor 20 suncream was the only remaining sign of his life in the run, which began four years ago with a previous vault from the dock of Burnley Crown Court, when he was on trial for a mail van hold-up. Spanish judges are now debating whether to extradite him to Britain, or try him in Spain, where he faces separate charges of cannabis dealing and ramming two police cars while evading a previous arrest attempt last year.
Yet while Moran’s arrest was hailed as a triumph by British police, who nowadays work much more closely with their Spanish counterparts, it also showed that the “Costa del Crime” is still popular with Britons facing accusations of villainy.
Moran was on a list of no less than 65 “most wanted” issued in the past six years by Operation Captura, the Spanish arm of Britain’s Crimestoppers scheme, which targets suspects thought to be hiding in Spain by distributing leaflets and beer mats with hotline numbers to expat bars. Of that 65, all but 15 have now been arrested. And at the risk of doing himself out of future clients, Mr Coghlan says that other fugitives planning on coming here should think again.
“Quote me on this – Spain is singularly the worst place to go on the run,” he said.
Police capture Andrew Moran in Calpe.
“In the 1970s it was okay because there was no extradition treaty. But nowadays there is lots of police attention, both British and Spanish. You might as well hide in Norfolk. Spain is not an imaginative choice at all, but then again, many villains do not have much imagination.”
It is a far cry from the old days, which Mr Coghlan himself caught the tail end of in the 1990s, when he would regularly head out to Marbella to spend the proceeds of his crimes, blowing tens of thousands of pounds in just a few weeks.
“Back then I felt like a king, and it felt safe to spend money there,” he said. “There was a place where you could hire Ferraris for £600 a day, and the women were experts at parting you from your cash. I loved the birds, and I’d buy them whatever it took – jewellery, clothes whatever – just so we’d look good when out at night.
“But the Spanish police back then were a different breed, and you could still offer them money to get out of serious situations. Act all flash these days, and you’ll soon get into trouble.”
Certainly, Mr Moran appears to have kept a low profile, having had a distinctive mole removed via plastic surgery and swapping his skinhead look for a short-back-and sides and wispy moustache. He also seems to have avoided the expat bars in Calpe’s “English Square” where, apart from a local character named “Pikey Pete”, no-one remembers seeing any villainous types for years.
“Nowadays, those kind of people stay in villas out in the countryside and keep themselves to themselves,” said one drinker, who nonetheless asked not to named.
Making life harder these days is increased airport security, the introduction of the pan-European arrest warrant in 2004, and occasional swoops by Spanish police, who will sometimes do random ID checks in bars frequented by British villains.
Yet many fugitives do still take their chances here, as is evident from a flick through the outstanding Captura wanted list, where the mugshots of Glasgow hardmen, Geordie gangsters and East End enforcers show the modern British underworld at all levels.
At the upper end are current fugitives like David Andrews, 66, accused of running a major cocaine trafficking gang, and Derek “Decco” Ferguson, wanted over a Strathclyde pub carpark shooting in 2007. Further down, meanwhile, are men like alleged heroin dealer Scott Coleman, who, with a distinctive pair of lips tattooed on his buttocks, has presumably had to be more cautious with the ladies than Mr Coghlan was.
So why do they still come? “It’s partly because there is a well established British community there that they can assimilate into very easily,” said Dave Allen, head of the fugitives unit at the Serious and Organised Crime Agency.
“Parts of Spain are basically like south London with sunshine. Having said that, we’ve changed our policing methods a lot in the last 30 years, and nowadays, criminals who move abroad are never off our radar.”
The other attraction is Spain’s prime location in the drug trade, which is now booming more than ever. Cocaine and marijuana is easily trafficked in from North Africa, from where it can then be sold retail on the Costa club scene, or shipped wholesale to Britain. According to some estimates, as many as 30 or 40 British criminal gangs now operate in southern Spain, alongside Dutch, Eastern European and Irish gangs, the latter fleeing recent crackdowns in their Dublin strongholds.
True, increased transport hub security in the post 9/11 era makes airports and ports harder for fugitives. But many use so-called “FOG” passports – or “fraudulently obtained genuine” passports – whereby a criminal will bribe someone for their personal documents and then use them to obtain a legally valid passport.
Once out in Spain, criminals can also usually rely on networks of contacts to help them, said Mr Allen – assuming they are not “too hot to handle”.
But while a large criminal fraternity can help provide a support network, it can also be a problem. Fellow villains are far more likely to recognise fugitives – and give their game away – than ordinary members of the public are.
“The police always call it ‘intelligence’ to make themselves sound intelligent, but when they arrest someone it’s usually just some other villain has informed on them,” said Mr Coghlan.
Which is where his new Marbella-based firm, Jacog Law, comes in.
Specialising in “Spanish to English Criminal Legal Services”, it has gained 28 clients since starting 16 months ago, including a Briton accused of smuggling a tonne of hashish, and a suspected IRA hitman convicted of murdering Daniel Smith, himself a suspected gangster, in a bar near Marbella in 2010. And while Mr Coghlan does not claim to be a lawyer, he does bring considerable practical experience of criminal legal systems, both in Britain and in Spain.
Originally from Stockport, he fell into crime when he was young, being booted out of the Commandos for assault and theft and then becoming involved in car-ringing and robbery. His brother Arran, meanwhile, has been accused three times of the murders of northern gangland figures and also arrested over a large-scale cocaine smuggling plot. He has never been convicted of any of the offences, however, and insists he is a legitimate businessman facing a police vendetta.
After his initial arrest for the 1999 post office robbery, Jason Coghlan escaped from Trafford Magistrates Court, where, having told guards he needed crutches for a leg injury, he threw the crutches away and leaped over the dock. He was then caught in Blackpool a fortnight later, and having been classified as a Category Double AA high-risk prisoner, served his time in maximum security jails like Whitemoor, where he met Britain’s topmost gangsters. Among them was the Brinks Mat bullion handler and road rage killer Kenneth Noye, who himself was arrested in Spain in 1998 after two years on the run.
“I did ask him once why he’d gone to the south of Spain,” said Mr Coghlan. “He said that for people of his generation, it was the only place they really knew.”
Having decided to reform, Mr Coghlan become a jail-house lawyer while inside, advising other prisoners on legal cases and appeals. He got the idea for his current venture, though, after subsequently being thrown in jail in Spain, where he went after his release in Britain to pursue an alleged time-share fraudster who owed his mother money. The man complained to the police, who then arrested Mr Coghlan and held him on remand for 11 months. Worse still, he claims, a lawyer he paid €10,000 to only visited him once.
“It is hard to describe how bad the legal service is out here,” he said.
“While I was in prison I also heard dozens of other complaints about the inefficiencies of lawyers out here, and having learned the hard way, I now want to change that.”
To that end, his firm refers work to a number of favoured legal firms, in return for a percentage of any fees they then charge. Unlike some Spanish legal firms, he says, they will challenge weak police cases rather than simply plea bargaining.
“It is fair to say that a lot of Spanish lawyers take a rather laid back approach,” agreed Antonio Flores, a leading lawyer at Lawbird Legal Services in Marbella, which has had referrals from Mr Coghlan.
True, Mr Coghlan freely admits that his own reputation helps to ensure that nobody trifles with his clients. But he adds: “There is nothing legally wrong with what we do, even if the authorities don’t like it. And I’m not pretending to be a lawyer, I’m just a good case administrator.”
Ironically for a man who now claims to have gone straight, the success of his future venture will, of course, depend on the Costa del Crime continuing to attract villains. As things stand, though, that seems likely – even if they do look over their shoulder rather more often while sitting by the pool.
As Obama visits Mexico, many are asking how uncorroborated testimony led to dubious cases against innocent officials, with apparent US approval, while drug cartels went undisturbed
When Mexico‘s former drug tsar Noé Ramírez was arrested on suspicion of receiving monthly payments from the Beltrán-Leyva drug cartel he was confident the charges would quickly be dropped.
No court, he thought, would believe testimony from a former cartel member who claimed to have seen Ramírez receive a briefcase full of cash at a Mexico City restaurant – on a day he was actually travelling to Las Vegas for a meeting with US law-enforcement officials, in the company of two US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents.
Ramírez was wrong. It took four years, four months and a change of government before a judge exonerated him, ruling that not only was the witness lying, but that prosecutors might also have fabricated evidence.
“I realised that I had the whole state against me,” says Ramírez, who spent months in a high-security jail before he was released in March. “They all knew I was innocent and nobody stood up for me.”
Ramírez was one of the highest-profile officials to be imprisoned during the government of the former president Felipe Calderón in a string of cases relying on uncorroborated testimony from protected witnesses – many with the apparent seal of approval of the US. The collapse of the cases raises embarrassing questions about the US role in anti-narcotic operations in Mexico just as Washington is renegotiating the terms of its collaboration with the new administration of Enrique Peña Nieto.
Addicts prepare to inject heroin at a drug den in Ciudad Juárez.
Numbers of drug users have soared with the rise of the cartels. Photograph: Reuters Anti-narcotics co-operation has been in the spotlight ahead of Barack Obama’s two-day visit to Mexico, amid press reports that the Mexican government is insisting on more control over US activity in the country.
About 70,000 people are thought to have died in drug war violence during Calderón’s six-year term, and violence has continued at the same level since Peña Nieto took office in December. Few deny that the cartels have succeeded in penetrating state institutions, but the string of failed cases has raised the possibility that prosecutions depend more on political feuding than solid evidence of criminal collusion.
Ramírez believes that US pressure on Mexico to root out corrupt officials was a driving force behind the wave of detentions in late 2008 called Operación Limpieza (Operation Cleanup), in which his was the biggest scalp. At the time the US government was preparing to release the first $400m ($250m) from a multi-year anti-narcotics aid package called the Merida Initiative.
“It was important to show the Americans that Mexico was going after corruption,” Ramírez said.
The star witness in many of the Operation Cleanup cases (including the one against Ramírez), was a male former cartel lawyer who went by the codename “Jennifer”.
According to the weekly news magazine Proceso, “Jennifer” was first used by Mexican investigators after approaching the DEA. He was also involved in undercover DEA operations in Ecuador in 2010 and 2011, according to the newspaper Reforma. Court documents from the Ramírez trial show that “Jennifer” ratified his declarations before the judge in Mexico through a video link-up from the US.
According to one former US law-enforcement official, Mexican officials would approach their US counterparts in search of evidence, not the other way around.
Mexican officials “would detain someone and then call us up and say, ‘Do you have anything on him?,” the former official told the Associated Press. “It was arrest first and ask questions later. This isn’t against their law, not out of the ordinary. That’s the system.”
US agencies active in Mexico have long depended on intelligence from informers – but not all those informers are reliable, said a security expert, Raul Benítez. “They have good information, bad information and very bad information,” he said. “The problem is how you work out which is which.”
And by the time the witness testimony found its way into anti-corruption cases, it had been filtered through the seething internal power struggles and personal vendettas within Calderón’s offensive against organised crime.
The former Mexican president Felipe Calderón, right, with the then federal police chief, Genaro García Luna, in Mexico City. Photograph: Alfredo Estrella/AFP/Getty
Diplomatic cables sent from the US embassy in Mexico in 2008 and 2009, and revealed by WikiLeaks, are filled with concern over the way these rivalries were perverting the use of intelligence. One cable dated 27 October 2009 lauds efforts to crack down on corruption even as it bemoans the damage done by the “deep personal animosity” between the then attorney general, Eduardo Medina Mora (now ambassador to the US), and public security minister, Genaro García Luna.
According to Samuel González, a security expert and former drug tsar himself, the case against Ramírez (who was a subordinate of Medina Mora) was triggered by García Luna’s anger at the prosecution of his own right-hand man: Gerardo Garay, then head of the federal police.
Garay was arrested following a raid on a party at a Colombian trafficker’s mansion near Mexico City in October 2008. Officials who participated in the raid – and several guests who were arrested – later testified that Garay had been in no hurry to leave the faux-medieval mansion, which had its own private zoo including an albino tiger and a couple of panthers. They claimed he shut himself in the jacuzzi for the night with four women, chosen from among the detainees, along with a supply of cocaine. When he finally left he allegedly took with him $500,000 in cash, expensive jewellery and a bulldog. Garay was cleared of protecting drug traffickers and abuse of authority in November 2011, but convicted of theft. That conviction was overturned a year later, days before Calderón left office. In a television interview hours after his release, Garay claimed he had been a “political prisoner” within an effort orchestrated by the attorney general’s office to undo the good work of the federal police..
“García Luna demanded that Calderón go after Noé Ramírez because of the legal proceedings against Garay. He demanded somebody of the same rank,” said González.
Another high-level federal police officer called Javier Herrera Valles was arrested on dubious protected-witness testimony after expressing his suspicions that García Luna’s anti-cartel operations were deliberately pointless.
Herrera Valles sent two private letters to the president detailing his concerns, but when he got no response from Calderón, he took his suspicions to the media. He was arrested in November 2008 on his way to a television interview. “I sent the letters because I thought the president was being misled about what was happening on the ground,” said Herrera, who was released in September 2012. “Now I think the president backed the decision to go after me.”
The arrest of an army General, Tomás Ángeles, in May 2012, was similarly interpreted as retaliation for his outspoken criticism of the president’s drug war strategy – although recent allegations suggest a link to power struggles within the army
Ángeles was released shortly after Ramírez when officials in the new administration dropped charges against him. As with Ramírez and Herrera Valles, the prosecution case was partly based on information from “Jennifer”.
A common factor in the cases was the involvement of Marisela Morales, the woman who replaced Ramírez as drug tsar in July 2008. Morales has always denied long-standing accusations in the Mexican press that she frequently moulded cases to suit political ends. “The attorney general’s office has acted in strict accordance with the law as well as responsibility in every single one of our cases,” she said in August 2012 in answer to a specific question about the arrest of Ángeles. “The only interest that exists is to apply the law and ensure the constitution is upheld.”
Morales personally interrogated “Jennifer”, as well as another star protected witness used in the cases, according to Proceso magazine. Even if she was not in the room, Mexican law-enforcement experts say it is very unlikely she would not have been fully informed of the details of such important cases.
A soldier walks past guns seized from traffickers. The six-year struggle against the cartels has so far killed some 70,000 people. Photograph: Edgard Garrido/Reuters
There is no evidence that the DEA or any other US agency was directly involved in building the dubious narco-corruption cases. But US authorities seemed to have taken the charges against Ramírez at face value, and the case was repeatedly cited in congressional committees as proof of Calderón’s commitment to pursue cartel infiltration – even though at least two DEA agents knew that Ramírez’s alibi was true.
Following his arrest in 2008, Ramírez’s lawyer requested documents from US customs that would prove that he was going through customs in Las Vegas airport at about the time “Jennifer” said he was accepting a case full of dollars. Court documents show the documents did not arrive until May 2012.
By then Morales had been promoted to attorney general, three weeks after she had been honoured by Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton at a ceremony in Washington as one of 10 “International Women of Courage” in March 2011.
Since leaving office in December, Morales has disappeared from public life. García Luna is rumoured to be living in Miami, though there has been no official notification of this and he has made no comment since leaving office.
A senior DEA official at its Washington headquarters declined to comment on the collapse of the narco corruption cases.
In the wake of the mess left by Operation Cleanup, the more professional demeanour of the new attorney general, Jesús Murillo Karam, has been widely welcomed in Mexico, even though few analysts expect politics to be removed from judicial procedures altogether. Karam has promised to investigate the fabrication of evidence in the Ramírez case and the specific role played by “Jennifer”.
In the meantime, bilateral anti-narcotics co-operation still faces the thorny problem of how to attack collusion with the drug cartels, which remains a major problem within Mexican law enforcement. In the words of Ramírez: “If we are not the guilty ones, where are they?”
Mental health issues for soldiers, police up 47% since 2008 – Politics – CBC News.
The number of soldiers and RCMP officers suffering from mental health injuries such as post-traumatic stress disorder has skyrocketed over the last six years, driven in part by the gruelling decade-long combat mission in Afghanistan.
Data provided to CBC News Network’s Power & Politics from Veterans Affairs Canada shows the number of veterans, soldiers and federal police officers receiving disability benefits for mental health conditions has swelled to 16,206 at last count, from just over 11,050 in 2008. That marks an increase of 47 per cent.
Second World War and Korean War vets with mental health problems is the only group that saw their caseload decline, and that is due to an aging population. There are now 1,932 “traditional” veterans of that era with PTSD and other mental disorders, down from 3,036 six years ago.
Canadian Armed Forces personnel – including those still serving and out of uniform – have seen the biggest jump, from 6,587 in 2008 to the current 11,600. The number in this group who have served in Afghanistan has climbed from 697 in 2008 to 3,411.
Veterans Affairs did not have a figure immediately available on the costs of benefits and services to individuals with mental conditions, but the Defence Department spends about $50 million a year on mental health services.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay has described the care of ill and injured soldiers as his “number 1 priority.”
A statement from MacKay’s office to CBC News said the Armed Forces has made “tremendous strides” in supporting personnel who suffer from deployment-related mental health conditions like PTSD.
“Post-traumatic stress disorder and depression are a priority focus for military health programs because they are the most common operational stress injuries,” he said. “Canada is now recognized as a world leader in fighting stigmatization and raising awareness of mental health illnesses. In fact, we have the greatest ratio of mental health care workers to soldiers in NATO.”
The data also shows the number of Mounties suffering with mental disorder has also spiked to 2,674 cases from 1,427 in the last six years.
