u.s. government is in partnership with the sinaloa drug cartel

Given the apparent role played by US agencies, whether by design or not, in empowering the Sinaloa organization via gun-walking, it should be seen as no small coincidence that Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, the son of top Sinaloa organization honcho Ismael Zambada, is now making remarkable claims about the existence of a quid pro quo pact between US law enforcement and the leadership of the Sinaloa syndicate.

Zambada Niebla is now sitting in prison in the Detroit area, awaiting trial in Chicago on narco-trafficking charges — a case in which US prosecutors are seeking to cloak evidence by invoking national security claims.

Zambada Niebla, who was extradited to the US from Mexico in February 2010,  raises the Fast and Furious debacle in his court pleadings, arguing, essentially, that the operation is proof of the US government’s cooperation deal with the Sinaloa “Cartel” leadership.

As a result of Operation Fast and Furious, Zambada Niebla’s pleadings assert, about “three thousand people” in Mexico were killed, “including law enforcement officers in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico, headquarters of the Sinaloa Cartel.”

Among those receiving weapons through the botched ATF operation, the pleadings continue, were DEA and FBI informants working for drug organizations, including the leadership of those groups.

click on image to see ny times article about the villa ahumad massacre

“The evidence seems to indicate that the Justice Department not only allowed criminals to smuggle weapons, but that tax payers’ dollars in the form of informant payments, may have financed those engaging in such activities,” the pleadings allege. “… It is clear that some of the weapons were deliberately allowed by the FBI and other government representatives to end up in the hands of the Sinaloa Cartel and that among the people killed by those weapons were law enforcement officers…

“… Mr. Zambada Niebla believes that the documentation that he requests [from the US government] will confirm that the weapons received by Sinaloa Cartel members and its leaders in Operation ‘Fast & Furious’ were provided under the agreement entered into between the United States government and [Sinaloa organization lawyer] Mr. Loya Castro on behalf of the Sinaloa Cartel….”

US prosecutors, of course, deny that any such pact exists between the Sinaloa “Cartel” and the US government.

Regardless, the available evidence seems to indicate that since 2006 (dating back to the Bush administration, and in tandem with Mexican President Calderon’s rise to power and declaration of war on the “cartels”), the gun-walking strategy employed by ATF, and ignored or tolerated by other US agencies and politicians across both parties until recently, appears to have gone a long way in tilting the always shifting balance of the drug war — for now.

However, it also seems clear that so long as our leaders insist on enforcing prohibition of a multi-billion dollar business that is fueled by US consumer demand, and doing so by means of a so-called drug war, the balance will always lean in favor of misery and death, because there will always be plenty of gold, “brechas” and bullets to keep the war in motion.

via US Troops May Now Be Coping with Fast and Furious Fallout | the narcosphere.

see previous posts on these topics:

Mexico arrests figure in Fast and Furious gun-smuggling scandal

obama strikes back: atf “fast and furious” whistleblower fired

attorney general refuses to supply congress with documents about arms sales to mexican drug cartels

and there’s this:

 Active duty cop: ‘The war on drugs is a war on people’

and this is making more sense to me now:

Obama, Mexico’s Calderon vow more drug crime, violence, death

Justice Department plans to arrest state licensers, tax dispensaries could doom medical marijuana industry

Is Fukushima’s Doomsday Machine About to Blow?

On March 8, 2012, Dr. Hiroaki Koide, Research Associate at the Research Reactor Institute of Kyoto University, gave his bleak assessment of the situation on the Japanese a news program called, “Morning Bird”. Koide explained how 1,500 rods are presently located in a “fuel pool” that has been severely damaged. The rods have to be cooled constantly or a “huge amount of radiation contained in the spent fuel will be released outside”. If an earthquake hits and undermines the pool, the coolant will exit the pool, the rods will melt and radioactive plumes will rise into the atmosphere. Koide explained that the rods could not be safely removed from the existing pool because “if you hoist them up in the air, huge amount of radiation will come out from the spent fuel and people nearby will die.”

One of the journalists on “Morning Bird” asked Koide what would happen if the Unit was struck by another earthquake

Koide answered, “That will be the end.”

“The end,” the journalist asked, visibly shaken?

“The end,” Koide repeated emphatically. (“Fukushima Dai-Ichi No. 4: An earthquake before spent fuel rods are moved to safe storage would be “the end”, Lambert Strether, Naked Capitalism)

Now, check this out:

“Japan’s former Ambassador to Switzerland, Mr. Mitsuhei Murata… strongly stated that if the crippled building of reactor unit 4—with 1,535 fuel rods in the spent fuel pool 100 feet (30 meters) above the ground—collapses, not only will it cause a shutdown of all six reactors but it will also affect the common spent fuel pool containing 6,375 fuel rods, located some 50 meters from reactor 4. In both cases the radioactive rods are not protected by a containment vessel; dangerously, they are open to the air. This would certainly cause a global catastrophe like we have never before experienced. … Such a catastrophe would affect us all for centuries.”

(“Fukushima Daiichi Site: Cesium-137 is 85 times greater than at Chernobyl Accident”, akiomatsumura.com)

Murata’s concerns have been brought to the attention of the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, to high-ranking officials in the Obama administration and EU, and to leaders around the world. The reaction has basically been the same everywhere, which is, “It’s Japan’s problem. Let them deal with it.”

There is no way to overstate the media’s complicity in concealing critical information about the tragedy that is presently unfolding at Fukushima. If there is another earthquake, the media will certainly be every bit as responsible as the government officials who saw the danger, but chose to do nothing.

via   Is Fukushima’s Doomsday Machine About to Blow?: Information Clearing House.

日本政府と東京電力では裏切り者は、意図的に、日本の人々を殺している！

Fukushima Never Again – video

Fukushima cover-up continues, opposition leader fears Japan will become uninhabitable.

Fukushima water cooling pumps fail at reactor 5, crippled reactors unprepared for storms

 

Homeland Security’s ‘Pre-Crime’ Screening

The U.S. Department of Homeland security is working on a project called FAST, the Future Attribute Screening Technology, which is some crazy straight-out-of-sci-fi pre-crime detection and prevention software which may  come to an airport security screening checkpoint near you someday soon. Yet again the threat of terrorism is being used to justify the introduction of super-creepy invasions of privacy, and lead us one step closer to a turn-key totalitarian state. This may sound alarmist, but in cases like this a little alarm is warranted. FAST will remotely monitor physiological and behavioral cues, like elevated heart rate, eye movement, body temperature, facial patterns, and body language, and analyze these cues algorithmically for statistical aberrance in an attempt to identify people with nefarious intentions. There are several major flaws with a program like this, any one of which should be enough to condemn attempts of this kind to the dustbin. Lets look at them in turn.

First, predictive software of this kind is undermined by a simple statistical problem known as the false-positive paradox. Any system designed to spot terrorists before they commit an act of terrorism is, necessarily, looking for a needle in a haystack. As the adage would suggest, it turns out that this is an incredibly difficult thing to do. Here is why: let’s assume for a moment that 1 in 1,000,000 people is a terrorist about to commit a crime. Terrorists are actually probably much much more rare, or we would have a whole lot more acts of terrorism, given the daily throughput of the global transportation system. Now lets imagine the FAST algorithm correctly classifies 99.99 percent of observations — an incredibly high rate of accuracy for any big data-based predictive model. Even with this unbelievable level of accuracy, the system would still falsely accuse 99 people of being terrorists for every one terrorist it finds. Given that none of these people would have actually committed a terrorist act yet distinguishing the innocent false positives from the guilty might be a non-trivial, and invasive task.

Of course FAST has nowhere near a 99.99 percent accuracy rate. I imagine much of the work being done here is classified, but a writeup in Nature reported that the first round of field tests had a 70 percent accuracy rate. From the available material it is difficult to determine exactly what this number means. There are a couple of ways to interpret this, since both the write-up and the DHS documentation (all pdfs) are unclear. This might mean that the current iteration of FAST correctly classifies 70 percent of people it observes — which would produce false positives at an abysmal rate, given the rarity of terrorists in the population. The other way of interpreting this reported result is that FAST will call a terrorist a terrorist 70 percent of the time. This second option tells us nothing about the rate of false positives, but it would likely be quite high. In either case, it is likely that the false-positive paradox would be in full force for FAST, ensuring that any real terrorists identified are lost in a sea of falsely accused innocents.

via Homeland Security’s ‘Pre-Crime’ Screening Will Never Work – Alexander Furnas – Technology – The Atlantic.