The
U.K. gave Ghana officials £1m
which Ghanaian police used to assist drug smugglers in evading security.
Then there's the cables about the U.S. and Africa's cocaine trade. One cable talks about Ghana President John Atta Mills' request for U.S. assistance with his corrupt narcotics control board (Nacob.) It was Nacob officers who worked with the British officials. According to the cables, Narob officers:
- Sabotaged sensitive drug scanners provided to the Ghanaian government.
- Channelled passengers including pastors and bank managers and their wives, into the security-exempt VVIP lounge despite suspicions they were trafficking drugs.
The cable says:
Smuggling has become so blatant that on one flight last year, two traffickers vomited drugs they had swallowed and subsequently died, while parcels of cocaine were found taped under the seats of a KLM plane even before boarding.
The Ghana cables are here. According to other cables, things are just as bad in Mali and Sierra Leone. Some Mali cables are here and Sierra Leone cables are here.
According to one cable, the Sierre Leone Aviation Minister was sacked for corruption in a cocaine trafficking conspiracy. The DEA stepped in to help.
You can access all the African drug cables here.
The three African men brought to New York in 2009 aren't the only ones the DEA has set up in Africa and flown to New York for prosecution. There is this case involving Liberia, the Ukraine and Ghana. One of the defendants is a Russian pilot named Konstantin Yaroshenko. In checking the court docket today, I see that two weeks ago, the court denied his motion to dismiss alleging the DEA manufactured jurisdiction, and had him kidnapped in Liberia, where he says he was tortured before being handed over to the DEA and flown to New York. The Government's brief argues he wasn't kidnapped and tortured, but even if he was, the law allows it and it's not a ground for dismissal. The Government relies on the Ker-Frisbee doctrine:
This doctrine, which has come to be known as the Ker-Frisbie rule, provides that “the power of a court to try a person for crime is not impaired by the fact that he had been brought within the court’s jurisdiction by reason of a ‘forcible abduction.’” In the decades since Ker and Frisbie were decided, the Supreme Court has repeatedly reaffirmed the doctrine...
...Courts have applied the Ker-Frisbie doctrine to situations where – as here – a defendant claims he was forcibly abducted from a foreign country.....In acknowledging that the defendant’s abduction might be “‘shocking’ and . . . in violation of general international law principles,” 504 U.S. at 669 (citation omitted), the Court concluded that so long as the extradition treaty did not expressly prohibit forcible abduction, the Ker-Frisbie rule applied – “and the court need not [even] inquire as to how [the defendant] came before it.”
The same goes for torture, according to the Government's brief:
...Courts have also applied this doctrine to physical abuse of defendants before and during pre-trial detention...In short, recent Supreme Court and Second Circuit case law establish that neither the manner by which a defendant is brought to court for prosecution, nor the conditions of his confinement prior to that prosecution, are valid grounds for dismissal of an indictment.
.... The Government takes such allegations very seriously and does not condone physical abuse or torture. Even if, however, these allegations have merit – which they demonstrably do not – they would not entitle Yaroshenko to relief.
The drugs in Yaroshenko's case were to go from South America to Liberia to Ghana. There was no connection to the U.S. --except that the DEA informant demanded some of the drugs go to the U.S. after reaching Ghana. As Yaroshenko's lawyer unsuccessfully argued, this is manufactured jurisdiction:
The case has no connection to the United States except for the law enforcement tactics used to create the appearance of some nexus to the United States in order to bring the charges in this jurisdiction.
And, as in the case of Oumar Issa, no drugs went anywhere. Yaroshenko's lawyer writes:
The essence of the charges is that defendants discussed air shipments of several tons of cocaine from Latin America to West Africa. (Indictment¶¶1-9). The only factual allegation connecting the alleged conspiracy to the United States is that the undercover DEA agent
“CS” intended on his own behalf to send his share of cocaine to the United States. (Indictment ¶12®,12(s)). Upon information and belief, no cocaine was actually shipped anywhere.
...The Indictment in this case fails to set forth any facts connecting the alleged conspiracy to the United States, except for an allegation that the DEA agent CS intended, on his behalf, to transport drugs to the U.S. The sole purpose of that statement was to create the appearance of some nexus to the United States. The alleged object of the conspiracy was the transportation of drugs from Latin America to Africa and within Africa. The Indictment does not set forth any specific factual allegation that supports the conclusion that Konstantin Yaroshenko agreed to bring any drugs into the United States....Had Yaroshenko agreed to bring drugs to the U.S., the government would not have missed to include such fact in the Indictment...There is no factual allegation that Konstantin Yaroshenko neither agreed to take any part in shipping the drugs to the United States nor concurred in such action.
Once again, how much of our money is the DEA spending on its African adventures? And how much are we spending to fly these sting targets from Africa to the U.S., hold them for a year or more in pre-trial detention, fund their defense, try them, incarcerate them for decades, and then fly them back when they are deported after their sentences? Considering unless the DEA demands otherwise, the (illusory) drugs are going from South America to Africa to Europe, why is it even their business to intervene? Or to steer non-U.S. criminal activity into the U.S.? As Yaroshenko's lawyer writes:
Instead of artificially manufacturing nexus to the United States, the DEA agents could have cooperated with the Liberian authorities to ensure that the defendants were brought to justice in Liberia. In addition, Russia or Ukraine also had an interest in the alleged criminal activity, since Konstantin Yaroshenko was a Russian citizen and some of the alleged meetings took place in Ukraine.
In contrast, the sovereign interest of the United States was not implicated: none of the
defendants are U.S. citizens and the alleged conspiracy had nothing to do with the United States except for DEA’s manufactured nexus.
The result, according to Yaroshenko's lawyer:
While the Supreme Court of the United States is cauti
