As drug cartels wreak murderous havoc from Mexico to Panama, the Obama administration is unable to show that the billions of dollars spent in the war on drugs have significantly stemmed the flow of illegal narcotics into the United States, according to two government reports and outside experts.
The reports specifically criticize the government's growing use of U.S. contractors, which were paid more than $3 billion to train local prosecutors and police, help eradicate fields of coca, operate surveillance equipment and otherwise battle the widening drug trade in Latin America over the last five years.
"We are wasting tax dollars and throwing money at a problem without even knowing what we are getting in return," said Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), who chairs the Senate subcommittee that wrote one of the reports, which was released Wednesday.
"I think we have wasted our money hugely," agreed Bruce Bagley, who studies U.S. counter-narcotics efforts and chairs international studies at the University of Miami at Coral Gables, Fla. "The effort has had corrosive effects on every country it has touched."
Obama administration officials strongly deny that U.S. efforts have failed to reduce drug production or smuggling in Latin America.
White House officials say the expanding U.S. counter-narcotics effort occupies a growing portion of time for President Obama's national security team even though it garners few headlines or congressional hearings in Washington.
The majority of U.S. counter-narcotics contracts are awarded to five companies: DynCorp, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, ITT and ARINC, according to the report for the contracting oversight subcommittee, part of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
Counter-narcotics contract spending increased 32% over the five-year period, from $482 million in 2005 to $635 million in 2009. DynCorp, based in Falls Church, Va., received the largest total, $1.1 billion.
Among other jobs, the U.S. contractors train local police and investigators, provide logistical support to intelligence collection centers and fly airplanes and helicopters that spray herbicides to eradicate coca crops grown to produce cocaine.
The Department of Defense has spent $6.1 billion since 2005 to help detect planes and boats heading to the U.S. with drug payloads, as well as on surveillance and other intelligence operations.
Senate staff members described some of the expenses as "difficult to characterize." The Army spent $75,000 for paintball supplies for training exercises in 2007, for example, and $5,000 for what the military calls "rubber ducks." The ducks are rubber replicas of M-16 rifles that are used in training exercises, a Pentagon spokesman said.
The Defense Department described its own system for tracking those contracts as "error prone," according to the Senate report. The report also said the Defense Department doesn't have reliable data about how successful its efforts have been.
A separate report last month by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, concluded that the State Department "does not have a centralized inventory of counter-narcotics contracts" and said the department does not evaluate the overall success of its counter-narcotics program.
"It's become increasingly clear that our efforts to rein in the narcotics trade in Latin America, especially as it relates to the government's use of contractors, have largely failed," McCaskill said.
Vanda Felbab-Brown, an expert on U.S. drug policy at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington, said the U.S. military and other government agencies, not private contractors, should take the lead in training foreign armies and police in drug eradication and control.
"But unless we are able to resource our government properly, that is the only way we can do it," Felbab-Brown said.
The latest assault on the United States' counter-narcotics strategy comes a week after a high-profile group of world leaders called the global war on drugs a costly failure.
The group, which included former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and past presidents of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia, recommended that regional governments try legalizing and regulating drugs to help stop the flood of cash going to drug mafias and other organized crime groups.
But James Gregory, a Pentagon spokesman, said the Defense Department's efforts against the drug trade "have been among the most successful and cost-effective programs" in decades. He cited the U.S. success in the 1980s in stopping cocaine shipments from Colombia that had been inundating Florida, and the efforts in the 1990s at helping Colombia overcome a drug-fueled insurgency.
"By any reasonable assessment, the U.S. has received ample strategic national security benefits in return for its investments in this area," he said.
Administration officials say that the counter-narcotics program is producing more recent benefits as well.
Along the Mexican border, increased patrols and other efforts have helped seize 31% more drugs, 75% more cash and 64% more weapons during the first 21/2 years of the Obama administration than in the previous 21/2 years, the Homeland Security Department says.
After a decade of U.S. assistance to Colombia and years of using U.S. contractors there, annual cocaine production in Colombia has fallen 60% since 2001, according to the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy. Some of that cocaine production has shifted to Peru, however.
Backed by the U.S., Mexico's stepped-up offensive against drug cartels similarly has had the unintended effect of pushing them deeper into Central America, especially Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Violence has soared in those countries.
One result has been a new emphasis on surveillance technology and intelligence collection.
In particular, the U.S. effort has focused on improving efforts to intercept cellphone and Internet traffic of drug cartels in the region, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
During a visit to El Salvador in February, the head of the State Department's counter-narcotics programs, William Brownfield, opened a wiretapping center in San Salvador, as well as a regional office to share fingerprints and other data with U.S. law enforcement. El Salvador is the hub for U.S. law enforcement efforts in Central America.
So the Obama administration, after spending billions of taxpayer dollars, is having a hard time justifying it's expenses in the War on (Some) Drugs. After spending roughly $3 billion on hiring military contractors to train various police organizations in Mexico and Latin America, as well as $6.1 billion by the Department of Defense on surveillance and intelligence, there is almost nothing to show for it.
As if that weren't bad enough. it seems that the State Department and Defense Department's handling of the entire situation is incredibly, for lack of a better phrase, half-assed. Rather than actually defeat drug cartels, the actions of the US government has merely moved their operations deeper into Latin America. Cocaine production in Colombia has been steadily moving to Peru, while former Mexican cartels have now begun operating in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.
On a related note: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... ences.html
More than 50 per cent on inmates in U.S. federal prisons were jailed for drug offences, shocking new figures show.
The statistics from the Federal Bureau of Prisons, an agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, reveal that out of a total inmate population of 215,888, 102,391 (that's 50.8 per cent) were jailed for drug offences.
The second highest crime area was weapons, explosives and arson offences with a prison population of 30,509, that's 15.1 per cent, according to the figures published on the Department's website on May 28 of this year.
Murder, aggravated Assault and kidnapping Offenses made up 2.7 per cent with 5,473 inmates.
The drug offences relate to crime in multiple ways. Most directly, it is use, possession, manufacturing and distributing drugs classified as having a potential for abuse, such as cocaine, heroin, morphine and amphetamines.
But the offences also involve crimes such as drug trafficking and drug production controlled by drug cartels, organized crime and gangs.
The concept of drug related crime, however, has frequently been criticized for its failure to distinguish between the types of crime associated with drugs.
Use-related crimes are those that result from or involve people who ingest drugs and who commit crimes as an result of the effect the drug has on their behaviour.
The second main area is economic-related crimes where an individual commits a crime to fund a drug habit. These include theft and prostitution.
The third are system-related crimes resulting from the structure of the drug system, including manufacture, transportation, sale of drugs and violence related to the production or sale of drugs, such as a turf war.
The Washington DC-based Justice Police Institute, in its 2009 paper 'Pruning Prisons: How Cutting Corrections Can Save Money and Protect Public Safety,' said: 'The number of people in state prisons for drug offences has increased 550 per cent over the last 20 years. A recent JPI report found that the amount spent on “cops and courts” – not rates of drug use -- is correlated to admissions to prison for drug offences.
'Counties that spend more on law enforcement and the judiciary admit more people to prison for drug offences than counties that spend less. And increases in federal funding through the Edward Byrne Memorial State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance Grant Program have promoted increases in resources dedicated to drug enforcement.
'As crime continues to fall in many communities, law enforcement will have more time to focus on aggressive policing of drug offences; this can be expected to lead to even higher drug imprisonment rates and crowded jails and prisons.
'According to FBI reports, 83 per cent of drug arrests are for possession of illegal drugs alone. And regardless of crime in a particular jurisdiction, police often target the same neighbourhoods to make drug arrests, which can increase the disproportionate incarceration of people of colour.'
The new figures are sure to ignite the debate over whether drug offenders need more treatment instead of being dealt with through the traditional judicial system.
The National Association of Criminal Defence Lawyers concluded after a two-year study that national standards must be developed to deal with drug offenders, and the role of drug courts should be reduced in favour of more treatment programmes
The figures come after a report earlier this year that showed that African Americans are eight times more likely to face jail for petty drugs crimes than whites convicted of the same offence.
The report, by the Illinois Disproportionate Justice Impact Study Commission, found 19 per cent of black defendants accused of minor drug-possession crimes in the state were sent to prison, compared to just four per cent of white defendants.
Over 50% of US prison inmates are in jail on drug charges. Around 83% of those arrests are for simple possession, and a disproportionate amount of the people arrested are minorities. It seems, since crime rates have been steadily declining, police departments justify their budgets by focusing more attention on arresting drug users (not producers and dealers, users).
Where's the conservative outrage over such wasteful spending and governmental mismanagement? Nowhere in sight, it seems.
