Read how “Tucson Military Recruiters Ran Cocaine” and feel the outrage boil over.
Ahhh, the best of the best:
A Midtown strip mall that should have housed the best of the best served as Corruption Central in Tucson.
Two military recruiting stations sit side-by-side there, one run by the Army, the other by the Marines. Between them, a total of seven recruiters were on the take, secretly accepting bribes to transport cocaine, even as most spent their days visiting local high schools.
They had help from several more recruiters at an Army National Guard office, where one recruiter was said to be selling cocaine from the trunk of his recruiting vehicle.
Of course this news isn’t really shocking. More like business as usual. This is proof positive that there is nothing new under the rock from which some government agencies crawl. Just like the CIA’s secret war to control the Golden Triangle during the Vietnam War where they then used the coffins of killed GIs to ship heroin back to the United States, or their intricate cocaine-to-crack network running from South and Central America exposed during the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal by the murder of nuns, or their more recent acquisition of the world’s poppy trade via Afghanistan, here is another example of the rampant criminality of certain branches of the military.
Don’t worry, we aren’t even going to get into the horrors of torture, pornography, and human trafficking in which they are complicit, simply because I don’t have the time or encyclopedia-length space necessary just to document the known crimes in these areas. I figure just the criminal drug trafficking will be enough for one afternoon. Like this blast from the past: “Genocide, and drug-trafficking too.”
Read for instance James Gritz’s books or watch his videos on the CIA and Opium, such as A Nation Betrayed.
Or Alfred M McCoy’s The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global drug Trade
Or Cocaine Politics by Scott and Marshall.
Or Cockburn’s Whiteout.
Or any of hundreds of other books and articles about the shadowy world of their criminality.
The point is, where you have no accountability with black budget secret organizations, you are guaranteed to have criminal activity. It might just be human nature.
But back to the visible end of the spectrum. Like hometown recruiters. I know that when I was growing up the people who had the drugs for sale in the backwoods of Mississippi were all cops, agents, and military people. The locals never left the county, hated everything foreign and unknown, and had no means of access or money to traffick in such substances. But everyone knew who did and they would enter the county and set up offices, usually under the guise of recruiting the local students into their service (broadest possible multilayered definition definitely implied).
It is sadder than sad. It makes me angry. What makes me angriest is that Dumbya has forced through a law requiring the private information on every child in America be handed over to the military. These same people are also given mandatory entrance into every school and college and hell, mall, store, sidewalk, playground, park, etc. Their budget has been vastly expanded as has been their reach — though even this doesn’t keep them from resorting to outright lies and criminal recruiting tactics. Plus, as in the recent scandals in the news just this year, they engage in underage sex, rape, and prostitution of children..while recrutiing. But hey, that’s another story.
Let’s just focus on Tuscon for now. Even though the FBI caught these guys dealing drugs on camera in undercover stings, they were allowed to keep on recruiting and dealing with kids on a daily basis for over three years before the news broke.
What?
Imagine any poor black trouble inner city youth being caught in a drug sting and then allowed to keep on dealing and wandering the streets for three years. Yeah, right. Hell, they shoot unarmed, non-violent, uncriminal blacks fifty times just for having bachelor parties. Imagine what they do to actual black drug dealers.
But military recrutiers? Just stay on the job and salute the flag, you patriot you.
What did the military spokesperson have to say about it all?
“Allegations of recruiter misconduct are rare,” considering the thousands of recruiters on the job nationwide, said Janice Hagar, a Marine Corps recruiting spokeswoman. “This was an isolated incident.”
Of course. Just like the only people who tortured prisoners in Iraq were the two people accidentally caught actually in the pictures taken at Abu Ghraib.
Sure. Nothing to see here. Isolated incident. Move along.
Or, you could wake up, take a look around, and notice the mountains of evidence, and corpses, stretching back beyond the horizon into the past and realize this is actually business as usual.
Case in point. Even after these guys were caught running drugs (and given prostitutes as a bandaid by the FBI, apparently), allowed to keep working for years and hence pockets hundreds of thousands in illegal profits, they were given honorable discharges.
Five worked at the Army’s Midtown recruiting office: Mills, Sheldon L. Anderson, 27; Derreck J. Curry, 30; Ronricco M. Allen, 36; and Jason E. Kitzmiller, 27.
Two Marine recruiters whose office was next door to the Army recruiters also pleaded guilty: James M. Clear, 26, and Jared A. Wright, 28.
National Guard recruiters who pleaded guilty include Perry, Fillman and Castillo. A fourth National Guard recruiter, Raul F. Portillo, 34, was identified by the FBI as a suspect but was never charged. Portillo is the recruiter arrested during the FBI sting by another police agency on marijuana trafficking charges. He is believed to have fled to Mexico.
In May, Perry retired honorably from the military, six months before the FBI arrested him. Fillman also retired honorably in May 2003, two years before he was charged.
In two cases, the Arizona Army National Guard gave suspected or convicted recruiters general discharges under “honorable” conditions.
One went to Castillo, the recruiter who brought his brother into the drug ring. The lawyer for the Arizona Army National Guard, Col. Richard Palmatier, said Castillo resigned from the Guard a day before his guilty plea, which kept his personnel file free of information about the crime.
Portillo, the former recruiter believed to be in Mexico, also received a general discharge under honorable conditions, even though he was wanted in Santa Cruz County – and still is – on the unrelated drug charges. Palmatier said Guard officials didn’t know about those charges, and even if they had, Portillo wasn’t convicted so the case couldn’t be used against him upon discharge.
Portillo was stopped on northbound I-19 in a vehicle filled with pot in July 2003, and is thought to have left the country to escape prosecution, said Santa Cruz County Attorney George Silva. Portillo couldn’t be reached for comment.
Silva was astonished to hear the National Guard gave Portillo a military discharge that includes the word “honorable.”
“That is shocking. It’s absolutely amazing,” he said.
Shocking. Amazing.
Nah, not really. All too sadly typical. Honor among thieves and all that.
Kind of reminds me of this essay by Bill Schardt I recently read, “Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and ‘The Gospel in Brief.'” In one section it said:
“The world is the totality of facts, not of things.”
– Tractatus, 1.1“Wittgenstein is referring to the philosophical use of the word `fact’ whereupon a fact may usually be thought of as a worldly correlate of a true proposition. A proposition, in turn is a truth functional item, i.e. it must be either true or false. At the time he wrote the Tractatus Wittgenstein believed that the world could be completely described by a finite number of true propositions. This implies that that which cannot be described by propositions is not in the world. Hence in Tractatus 6.41, Wittgenstein states that the sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world no value exists, for
if it did it would have no value.“The above argument means that there cannot be ethical facts because the rightness or wrongness of an action cannot be determined by any examination of the world. Hence the truth or falsity of the statement It is wrong to murder people cannot be determined in this way. Ethical or moral statements are not propositions; they are not truth functional in the way that real propositions must be. Ethics is not propositional and cannot, therefore, be put into words. Ethics is, thus, transcendental (Tractatus 6.421), and as such must be passed over in silence (Tractatus 7). Propositions can express nothing that is higher than themselves, i.e. nothing beyond states of affairs of the world (whether true or false), and so there can be no propositions of ethics.”
That, my friends, is as clear as I can make the mud. Words like relativity come to mind. Maybe I should proclaim a new universal law? The Relativity of Ethics in Recruiters.
I have three young children. Before I know it, they will be turning into adults. One is only a few years away from high school. I fear very much the iron-clawed horror and criminality that is awaiting them at that enforced military beachhead stationed inside their classrooms during what should be their innocent years of education and awakening.
It makes me nauseous.