Bill

Ahh, that explains why my web search returned so few results. The correct spelling retuns quite a crop:

• The Cia - America's Premier International Terrorist Organization (which discusses drug trafficing through Mena, among other things)
• CIA & Drugs, linking to many other interesting web pages
• Mena Arkansas - Drugs, Money and Murder a good overview of the main conspiracy of conspiracy theorists
• Just do your own Alta Vista Advanced Search. I used "(Mena near (AR or Arkansas)) and drugs and Bush and Clinton" and sorted on the word "drugs" to obtain the above links at the top of the pile.....

== Bill

paul30

Since the Bush bombing, Afghanistan has become the world's major source of opium again.

Thank you, George. Free enterprise (with a little help from the US military) at its best.

Loren Pechtel

Well, opium is a lot less dangerous than terrorists.

jman0904

Just like Oil is a lot less dangerous?
It's not necessarily the product that harms, but the people who want it.

Oh, and Koy:
:notworthy :notworthy :notworthy :notworthy :notworthy

Godless Dave

I'm not going to yearn for the days of the Taliban. They were evil misogynist scum. But I will share in the condemnation of Bushco for not aniticpating this problem in advance and having a plan to do something about it. Or maybe they want it to happen, to help prop up the war on drugs.

DoubleDutchy

Don't worry, they'll be back too. 'You started this thing with one OBL, you'll end up with a hundred of them' . That's what the Egyptian foreign minister (forgot his name) said, and I am afraid he knows what he is talking about.

Hubble head

The Afghanistan Connection. A movie that would make the French Connection look like Sesame Street.

I've heard a few theories on the Afghan poppies. So far the one that claimed the post-Taliban increase is due to the new US created anarchy seemed to make the most sense.

A magority of that money has to go somewhere besides the tribal leaders who run the badlands. We're talking hundreds, maybe thousands of tons of black tar heroin a year.

But all drug money - especially the large sums needed to do business in places like Afghan or Columbia, has to be funneled through banks. You simply can't smuggle the kind of cash around over semi-hostile borders without drawing attention.

The banks they use know it's all illegal but push it around for the drug lords anyway. Anyone familiar with international banking laws (not me) knows this is not possible unless a lot of people -especially Govt type people -look the other way at some point in the process. Find out where those banks are located and you've found your biggest drug pushers in the world.

jman0904

Or the warlords take the fat cut and use the cash to buy weapons and arms.

Bill

I am not a conspiracy theorist. In fact, I'm pretty anti-conspiracy theory on damn near everything.

I have actually done international trade in the past. Here is more-or-less how every international transaction works:

• The buyer sends an order to the seller, which order generally conforms to the terms and conditions previously negotiated (or to a published price list; or whatever; the buyer knows what they want to buy and how much they are willing to pay for it and on what terms, etc.).
• The seller responds with a "pro forma" invoice and a demand for a Letter of Credit (the Letter of Credit, or LC, is the key instrument here; it is a guarantee by the buyer's bank that the seller will get paid so long as the seller delivers exactly what the buyer ordered, on the specified terms and conditions)
• The buyer then goes to their own bank and negotiates with said bank the issuance of an LC; the buyer has the power to tell their bank to include or exclude a large number of terms and conditions; it is all pretty-much under the control of the buyer, who (after all) generally has the cash in the bank needed to make a payment.
• The buyer's bank then transmits the LC information to a bank acceptable to the seller (the seller may specify a specific bank, or a general class of banks that are acceptable to the seller). This bank then notifies the seller that the LC has been received, and what the exact terms and conditions are to get paid. These terms and conditions are generally that certain documents (bills of lading, shipping manifests, etc. etc.) will be delivered to said confirming bank.
• The seller is then supposed to ship the goods to the buyer. During this process, the documents specified by the LC are created.
• After everything is shipped to the buyer, the seller sends the documents to the confirming bank, who examines them for conformance with the LC. If everything is OK, the confirming bank then issues a check (or wire transfer) to the seller and, at the same time, draws the appropriate funds, plus the confirming bank's fee, from the buyer's bank's account at a known international institution. The LC paperwork is then sent to the buyer's bank.
• The buyer's bank then immediately settles accounts with the buyer. Generally, the buyer will have put up some kind of collateral acceptable to the buyer's bank to guarantee the buyer's performance. So, the buyer either settles with their own bank or loses the collateral (whatever that might have been), because the seller and the seller's bank have already been paid.

Now, from a close examination of the above process, you can tell that none of the banks involved in this process ever looked at what was being sold or whether the whole deal was reasonable or not. All the banks do is to see if the seller has delivered to the confirming bank the documents that the buyer said would constitute adequate proof allowing payment to be made to the seller.

Thus, there is no way to know whether what was actually shipped from the seller to the buyer was 5 container loads of computer equipment, or 5 container loads of mostly computer equipment, plus some illegal drugs. 5 cargo containers left Asia and went to the USA. Several million bucks went from the USA to Asia. The banks don't know diddly about what was actually in those cargo containers.

If you recall the descriptions of the 9/11 situation, where they had thousands of cargo containers backed up in New Jersey and they didn't know whether there was any "nasty terrorist stuff" loaded inside any of them? At that point in time, they were physically inspecting less than 2% of all containers shipped into the United States. My understanding now is that they've upped it to about 4%, but that is still an acceptable level of loss to a drug cartel, provided that the inspectors even manage to catch the drugs in the cargo container (and, generally speaking, they will not; my guess is that, absent a bunch of very-high-technology stuff, most drug-laden containers will get right through all of the safeguards).

Let us remember that these aren't street gans who are running these drug cartels. The New York ports have been under largely mob control for so long it isn't funny. Making sure that certain special containers get special treatment (i.e., end up in the worst place on the dock for any US inspectors to get to) is no big deal. So, this reduces even further the odds that a drug-laden container will be looked at by an inspector. Finally, we have to ask just how many of the inspectors themselves are "on the take." In the New York ports, that is most certainly a non-zero quantity.

==========

But the bottom line here is that you cannot expect the banks to be the world's police force, seeking out the drug transactions from all of the other international trade transactions. And it is most certainly NOT FAIR to accuse banks, generally, of being "in on the game." Their may well be mob-owned banks out there someplace, but the federal bank examiners would look at them the same way that they would look at any other bank for compliance with the various laws regarding handling of funds and so forth. Its increasingly hard to run a crooked bank in this country (particularly since they are virtually all federally insured).

The most vulnerable part of the entire supply chain is the part where the payments from the street pushers are "laundered" into some form or another such that theycan be deposited into a bank and can't be traced back down to the street pushers. The federal government knows this, so there have been lots of restrictions put into place to prohibit large cash transactions, and when unexpected large cash transactions take place, to report them to the DEA, etc. This is probably the only place where organized crime has a bit of a struggle. Nonetheless, they manage to handle it, so it is a problem that can be easily solved.

Again, the banks get their instructions from the federal reserve on just how much cash they can accept without making a report. That number isn't a secret, so the criminals know it as well as the banks do. The last I recall, the "no report" level was down to something like $4,000 in a cash deposit. Thus, depositing $2K to $3K per day would run "under the radar" of the current system. Even at that level, that would represent the depositable receipts from a fair number of street pushers before one money launderer would run out of banks to make deposits into during any given day. So, this part, too, tends to run fairly unimpeded by the law.

==========

Yes, it is possible to develop a better system that would catch more of the criminals. But, it would involve a loss of individual privacy for every citizen, criminal or not. Most US citizens are more willing to tolerate the criminal element than they are to live "under the thumb of Big Brother." This is the age-old trade-off: personal security or personal privacy; you can't have both!

== Bill

jman0904

Thanks Bill!!
:notworthy