Posted on 08/05/2013 8:21:02 AM PDT by Gorilla44
A secretive U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration unit is funneling information from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records to authorities across the nation to help them launch criminal investigations of Americans.
Although these cases rarely involve national security issues, documents reviewed by Reuters show that law enforcement agents have been directed to conceal how such investigations truly begin - not only from defense lawyers but also sometimes from prosecutors and judges.
The undated documents show that federal agents are trained to "recreate" the investigative trail to effectively cover up where the information originated, a practice that some experts say violates a defendant's Constitutional right to a fair trial. If defendants don't know how an investigation began, they cannot know to ask to review potential sources of exculpatory evidence - information that could reveal entrapment, mistakes or biased witnesses.
"I have never heard of anything like this at all," said Nancy Gertner, a Harvard Law School professor who served as a federal judge from 1994 to 2011. Gertner and other legal experts said the program sounds more troubling than recent disclosures that the National Security Agency has been collecting domestic phone records. The NSA effort is geared toward stopping terrorists; the DEA program targets common criminals, primarily drug dealers.
(Excerpt) Read more at in.reuters.com ...
In other words, they can manufacture suspicion, chain of evidence and investigator’s reports from whole cloth to railroad whomever they wish.
Welcome to 1930’s USSR.
“Welcome to 1930s USSR.”
Which is exactly what the liberals and political left has hoped for and worked for years.
I suppose I shouldn’t mention the fifty kilograms of cocaine I’m trafficking this week.
Or Nazism .
Our Constitution and our laws mean nothing to those sworn to obey and carry them out.
We are watching the German Judges following the orders of the German Reich.
Roberts was just the first.
As long as you purchased it from a CIA approved drug cartel, you are fine. They are only using this information to take out the competition.
They're witnesses as the German government gradually grows more and more lawless, with the approval of a majority of its citizens. They don't even bother pretending to tell the truth about their activities because the population is either intimidated into silence or champions the lawlessness and intimidation as beneficial to the society.
The parallels in the book to today's America are eerie. The level of violence is not really comparable, but the tactics and the consent of the majority are.
Obamaland...
“”non-fiction book called “In the Garden of Beasts””
Thanks for that - I’ll look for it in the library.
In case you haven’t read Bonhoeffer - Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy by Eric Metaxas, I highly recommend it also. He was witness as a young man to what was coming in Germany and spent his time to expose it. Excellent.
You really do get a sense of just how it can happen here!
Yes, Big Brother IS watching you.
Just by coincidence, before I started reading In the Garden of Beasts, I just finished Ken Follet's historical novel, Fall of Giants, which ended around the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The timelines of the two books merged nicely.
Now I'm in the mood to read more about Hitler's rise. It's so fascinating to see an entire country go Manson-family at the same time. Freakish.
Yeah, I just worked a pro-life charity event a few months ago that Metaxas headlined. He’s a very good guy while still being a cut-up, and the story he tells about Bonhoeffer is inspirational - it stretches between Germany and the US, as well.
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