From: Fernandinande of Lemuria
Newsgroups: alt.binaries.slack
Date: Fri, Jan 4, 2002
http://www.reason.com/0201/fe.ml.battlefield.shtml
...
McNamara:
The fact is that sometimes the officer reaches inside the suspect's
pocket for the drugs and testifies that the suspect "dropped" it as
the officer approached. It's so common that it's called "dropsy
testimony." The lying is called "white perjury." Otherwise honest
cops think it's legitimate to commit these illegal searches and to
perjure themselves because they are fighting an evil. In New York
it's called "testilying," and in Los Angeles it's called joining
the "Liar's Club." It has lead some people to say L.A.P.D. stands
for Los Angeles Perjury Department. It has undermined one of the
most precious cornerstones of the whole criminal justice process:
the integrity of the police officer on the witness stand.
...
McNamara: One year when I was police chief in San Jose, the city
manager sent me a budget that contained no money for equipment. I
politely told him that when you have a police department, you have
to buy police cars, uniforms, and other equipment for the cops. He
laughed, waved his hand, and said, "Last year you guys seized $4
million dollars. I expect you to do even better this year. In fact,
you will be evaluated on that and you can use that money for
equipment." So law enforcement becomes a revenue-raising agency and
that takes, in too many cases, precedence over law enforcement.
...
McNamara: The drug war is an assault on the African-American
community. Any police chief that used the tactics used in the inner
city against minorities in a white middle-class neighborhood would
be fired within a couple of weeks.
...
Reason: After a quarter-century as an agent, how have you seen the
drug war change at the agent level?
Levine: It has become murderous. I remember back to the beginning of
the Drug Enforcement Administration, which was founded in 1973 by
President Richard Nixon. At that time, three agents went into the
wrong premises in Collinsville, Illinois. They were prosecuted for
breaking down the wrong door.
I was involved as an expert witness in the Donald Carlson case, which
was on 60 Minutes. In that case, a multi-agency task force, outfitted
in high-tech guerrilla gear, crashed into the home of a Fortune 500
executive and shot him down in his own living room on the basis of
the word of an uncorroborated informant. Nobody was penalized for it.
In fact, the people who did it were eventually promoted.
As the expert witness, I had access to all the reports and I recommended
that these people be prosecuted. They paid no attention to the man's
civil rights. He had no record or reputation for drugs. They did nothing
but crash through his door on the basis of an informant's say-so. The
drug war has succeeded in militarizing police against their own people.
...
Reason: At what point did you start to question the War on Drugs?
Levine: I was sent undercover to Bangkok during the Vietnam War. I was
hanging with Chinese drug dealers in Bangkok. They were smuggling heroin
into the U.S. in the dead bodies of GIs who were transshipped through
Thailand. The Chinese drug dealers invited me to go to the factory up
in the Golden Triangle area in northern Thailand, where much of the
heroin sent to the United States originated.
...
Levine: Before you become an agent, you're bombarded with stories of
drug war victories. It's painted as heroic -- guys in guerrilla outfits
and jungle gear fighting the drugs everywhere. You want to do something
for your country. Then when you get in, the first thing you discover is
that you can't touch some of the biggest drug dealers in the world because
they're protected by the CIA or they're protected by the State Department.
Everyone from Carlos Salinas de Gortari of Mexico to Manuel Noriega to
the contras in Nicaragua to the Mujahedin in Afghanistan. Those of us who
work overseas realize that this whole thing is a three-card monte game,
that it's a lie.
Reason: You say the cartel responsible for much of the cocaine in the
U.S. during the '80s not only didn't fear the drug war but that they
counted on it to increase the price and to weed out smaller dealers.
What is your evidence for that?
Levine: It's 1987 and I'm posing as Luis Miguel-Garcia, an undercover
Mafia don who's half Sicilian and half Puerto Rican. I'm in a meeting
at a restaurant outside of Panama with another undercover customs agent
and the ruling faction of La Corporacion, the Bolivian cocaine cartel.
They invited us to Bolivia to look at their production facilities. At
that time, the U.S. had begun its paramilitary operations in Bolivia,
which are now in Colombia.
So as a pretext, I told the man that we can't go down there because we
read in the newspapers that the U.S. military is down there. He laughed
and said, "That's just for the gringos. That's not real." And his hand
slid up and down above the table. He said, "They have helicopters that
go up and that go down. We know what they are doing before they do."
That's the reality of the drug war. It's completely fictitious. It's
only for the American people.
...
Levine: ...
There is no U.S. Constitution any more when it comes to the drug war.
Reason: What's the worst drug case you've had come before you?
Gray: I was on Juvenile Court for Abused and Neglected Children. I
can't get these cases out of my mind. It was common that a single
mother -- say she has two children -- would hook up with the wrong
boyfriend, who would be a drug dealer. One fine day he would tell
her, "Look, Maria, I'll pay you $500 to take this package across
town to Charlie." She basically knows it has narcotics in it. She
gets arrested and gets five years in prison.
What happens to her children? They come into my court as abused and
neglected children. There's the mother in a prison jumpsuit and
handcuffs and I tell her the truth. "You know, ma'am, you're not
going to be a functional part of your children's lives for the next
five years." She starts to well up with tears. Then I tell her that
unless she's fortunate and has either a close personal friend or family
member who is both willing and able to take custody of her children,
they are very likely going to be adopted by somebody else by the time
she gets out of prison. She dissolves into tears.
Taxpayers can start to dissolve in tears, also. Because for the next
year they're going to spend $25,000 of taxpayer money to keep this
mother of two in prison. We're going to spend upwards of $5,000 a
month to keep each child in a group home until they are finally
adopted by somebody else. So that's $60,000 a year per child, plus
$25,000 for the mother. We are spending $145,000 of taxpayer money
to physically separate a mother from her children. It just doesn't
make any sense.
Reason: You write about a drug exception to the Bill of Rights.
Gray: When I graduated from law school in 1971, it was illegal for
a police officer, even after arresting you, to search anything that
was outside of your grasp. If you can reach over to something, then
you could search it. But if a suitcase you were carrying was locked,
the police could not go in there unless they got a search warrant
first. They couldn't go into the trunk of your car, they couldn't
go into the glove compartment, and they couldn't go into the backseat.
That has totally been reversed. The police not only can search you
and everything in your car, but they can also search your passengers.
They can search your mobile home, which is in effect a home on wheels.
They can go through and search everything.
...
Gray: Anyone who talks about it with me in the elevator or in the
judges' lunchroom agrees that what we're doing is not working.
Publicly, judges are pretty conservative people. A lot of them don't
see themselves as social workers. A lot of them are concerned about
their effectiveness and getting reelected, so they are just not going
to say publicly what they believe privately.
That was really brought home to me when I gave four forums sponsored by
the American Bar Association. After doing so, I received a letter from
the present chief justice of the Supreme Court of a Southern state. He
wrote, "Dear Jim: You're right. The War on Drugs isn't working. You're
also right that it's fully appropriate for a sitting judge to discuss
it because of what our position is in society. And I see these cases all
the time coming across my desk. What we are doing simply isn't working.
But I gave up a lucrative law practice for this present job. I love my
job and if I were to speak publicly, I would have to spend all my time
justifying myself. I just don't think I could do it."
...
When I was running for Congress a few years ago, I met individually
with two sitting congressmen from Orange County to try to get their
support. They both said that the War on Drugs isn't working, but the
problem is even worse than I thought because most federal agencies get
extra money to fight the War on Drugs. It's not just the obvious ones
like the U.S. Customs Service and the DEA. It's the little guys too,
the Bureau of Land Management, the Bureau of Indian Affairs. They are
addicted to drug war funding.