DEA

DEA
Abbreviation	DEA
Predecessor	•  Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs •  Office of Drug Abuse Law Enforcement
Formation	July 1, 1973
Parent organization	US/DOJ
Headquarters	Arlington, Virginia
Leader	Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration
Subgroups	Special Operations Division
Staff	10,784
Interest of	Douglas Valentine
Subpage	•DEA/Administrator •DEA/Infiltration

The Drug Enforcement Administration was established on July 1, 1973, by Reorganization Plan No. 2 of 1973, signed by Richard Nixon, as a part of his rhetorical "war on drugs".

Infiltration

Full article: DEA/Infiltration

Douglas Valentine writes that "the DEA and its predecessor federal drug law enforcement organizations have always been infiltrated and, to varying degrees, managed by America’s intelligence agencies."

Whistleblowers

Sibel Edmonds' testimony illustrates how this infiltration plays out in these days of high technology mass surveillance. A recurrent pattern frustrates FBI and/or DEA drug sting operations which pose a serious threat to deep state drug trafficking. Apparently, the US State Department regularly gets such operations called off at the last minute by claiming that since the traffickers have diplomatic immunity they must under no circumstances be arrested, for fear of causing a diplomatic incident. As she notes, this is suggestive not only of deep state involvement in the global drug trade, but also of mass surveillance used in real time to monitor the actions of selected individuals. Her observations correlate closely with other whistleblower testimonies and the "disappearance" of drug kingpins such as Juan Carlos Ramírez Abadía.

Call Tracking

In 2015 it emerged during a court case that the DEA had secretly kept a vast database of American phone calls to foreign countries for over a decade. They claimed that the programme had been stopped.

 

Related Quotation

Page	Quote	Author	Date
Parallel Construction	“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.”	John Shiffman Kristina Cooke	5 August 2013

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Asset Forfeiture

Full article: Civil asset forfeiture

Under the US Justice Department's program of "civil asset forfeiture", the DEA claims the right to seize people's property without charging them with a crime. "We don’t have to prove that the person is guilty," an Albuquerque DEA agent stated "It's that the money is presumed to be guilty."

See Also

• Set of radio shows about the DEA