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Wikileaks: Panama Row Reveals US Drug Agency's Power
Diplomatic cables published by the website WikiLeaks have plunged the United States into a diplomatic row with Panama over the secret intelligence-gathering work of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) in the Central American country.
Panama's President, Ricardo Martinelli, denied the claim made in one of the cables that he asked American diplomats to provide him with access to the DEA's extensive wiretapping program so he could spy on his political opponents. The cables also paint a vivid picture of the DEA's large and expanding operations across the world as the US wars on drugs and terrorism have merged, and as the agency has developed a secret service-like role working with governments
that have traditionally been hostile to other US organisations such as the CIA.
The DEA has expanded to 87 offices in 63 countries, and the most potentially explosive of the latest diplomatic leaks relate to its work in Panama under the presidency of Mr Martinelli, a supermarket magnate who came to power in elections last year.
In a diplomatic cable in August 2009, the then-US ambassador to Panama, Barbara Stephenson, is quoted saying the newly elected conservative President asked for DEA help with wiretaps. "He clearly made no distinction between legitimate security targets and political enemies," the cable states, adding that Ms Stephenson said "we will not be party to any effort to expand wiretaps to domestic political targets". According to the cable, the ambassador thought Mr Martinelli was making an implicit threat to cut back on anti-drug cooperation if he did not get US help with the wiretaps - though he backed off on his request when she countered that she would "readily inform Washington and we would all see Panama's reputation as a reliable partner plummet dramatically".
One of Mr Martinelli's top officials, Jimmy Papadimitriu, purportedly told a DEA official that the taps would be aimed at any attempts by leftist governments in the region to interfere in Panamanian politics, as well as people targeted in anti-corruption or anti-drug campaigns.
Panamanian opposition politicians
seized on Ms Stephenson's description of Mr Martinelli as having a "penchant for bullying and blackmail". Francisco Sanchez Cardenas, the leader of the main opposition group, the Democratic Revolutionary Party, said Mr Martinelli's request "goes outside the bounds of democratic practices" and that the President "has not understood that democracy is something quite different from the way he is used to managing his supermarkets".
Mr Martinelli's office insisted that "help in tapping the telephones of politicians was never requested" and that "any such interpretation of that request is completely mistaken".
US authorities are refusing to comment on the contents of any of the diplomatic cables, almost 2,000 of which have been published by WikiLeaks so far out of a cache of more than one-quarter of a million it has obtained.
Other revelations in the leaked documents relating to the DEA and the war on drugs include a characterisation by the Mexican Defence Secretary, Guillermo Galvan Galvan, that his country's army expects its role in the anti-drug offensive to last between seven and 10 more years and that the country would welcome additional assistance and training from the US.
The DEA's wiretapping operation, known by the code-name Matador, has provided evidence that has enabled the capture of major traffickers and led to the break-up of some cartels, as the US tries to disrupt supplies of narcotics.
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15 Comments so far
Show AllAnd they're doing such a good job too; the DEA.
I've not been able to buy any pot since - oh, wait... I can buy weed whenever I want to. But the price of drugs in North America has gone through the roof since the DEA has become a multi-billion dollar industry... Down you say? No, I pay just as much for weed today as I did 20 years ago. The price of cocaine and heroin have actually gone down, well, what do you know...
I guess maybe the only job they're good at is spying on people, too bad they can't stop what they're supposed to be stopping...
When you declare a war on something; you become what you hate!
So what came first with the DEA? Chicken or the Egg?
Or; does it matter, as governments world wide scramble for money....
the thugs and their massers going for each other's jugular will be good for humanity.
go for it and finish the job.
how's that war on poverty doing?
Same as the War on Drugs, Afghanistan, or any other phony war.
And ever, and ever, what is war good for? Tony
None have such a long history of supporting the elimination of their liberties as the American people, and invariably done in defense of freedom and liberty.
May I assume history was not your strong point in school? You might want to read up on how places like Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia became part of the Soviet Union, or how Tibet became part of China...
You may be using outdated history books, but Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania did not cede their liberty. It was taken away in a deal between Stalin and Hitler. That is no excuse for Americans to give up their liberty.
Martinelli gets uppity with his masters. Remember the last Panamian leader to embarass the USA had to be removed with Operation "Just Cause" wherein the US Military slaughtered some 2500 civilians.
Just in case folk wonder how they arrived at the name Just cause.
>>The Pentagon renamed the operation "Just Cause" in order to aid sustaining the perceived legitimacy of the Invasion throughout the operation.[37]General Collin Powell said that he liked the name Operation Just Cause because "even our severest critics would have to utter 'Just 'Cause' while denouncing us
Haha - no - it goes like this: we interfere in their politics and invade "Just Cause" we feel like it, Just Cause we can. Just Cause our corporates are such dishonest wimps they need an army to support their business.
lol
With every layer that is peeled, the Empire shows its ugliness, decadence and the blackness that's been no so carefully hidden.
One of the hi technology areas in which the United States still retains global leadership is electronic surveillance. Here we have a sensitive State Department cable exposed by Wikileaks which verifies that wiretap gadgetry originally developed for military, national security espionage, and law enforcement purposes is widely recognized as "dual purpose" technology by ordinary hack politicians who'd like to gain advantage and insider leverage against their domestic partisan critics and rivals. Surprise, surprise.
Much of what made the Watergate scandal scandalous was that the Nixon White House got caught using CIA operatives and CIA bugging techniques to spy upon the political party headquarters of the loyal opposition. J Edgar Hoover's boys had done shit like that for years, of course, without regard to which of the two major parties ran the White House. It was the entry of the spooks from Langley and the NSA geeks into the domestic mix which proved to be the no-no that ultimately led to Tricky Dick's fall from grace.
It wasn't until decades later that we learned Woodward and Bernstein's confidential source Deep Throat was in reality a very high ranking FBI official. The motive for the leakage had more to do with ongoing turf battles inside Washington DC between the FBI and the CIA than concerns about illegality and government corruption in high places.
In the 30 years since Watergate, the number of federal agencies with access to the most sophisticated surveillance technology on the planet has proliferated grotesquely. The DEA is a major player, now ostensibly coordinated and watch dogged under the big bureaucratic umbrella of Homeland Security alongside fifteen other national intelligence entities. Feeling safer yet?
The newly elected president of Panama was merely asking for a friendly, cooperative favor from the Drug Enforcement Agency and the US State Department that apparently many other politicians, in many other places, clandestinely enjoy. What was newsworthy about this flap (unless you are a politically active Panamanian) is that the current American ambassador objected to extending the courtesy.
With the passage of time, it is readily apparent that the United States government no more internalized the lessons of Watergate than it internalized the lessons of Vietnam.
Bill from Saginaw
Bill, you have a good grip on the situation. The gov't is just one, big, stinking , mess.....Q