home

DEA's Latest Most Excellent African Adventure

While the rest of the nation is in financial straits due to the sequester cuts, the DEA soldiers on. It just finished spending months on yet another Most Excellent African Adventure, which ended with traipsing 5 Africans, who had never set foot on U.S. soil or planned to commit any crime here before the DEA suggested one to them, to New York where they face potential life sentences.

Once again, the case involves FBI informants pretending to be Colombian providers of cocaine offering to fly drugs from South America to West Africa. Had the drugs been real, they would been shuttled from Africa to Europe. For jurisdictional purposes, the informants made sure to tell the Africans that a minor portion of the drugs would go to the U.S. and Canada.

To make the case fit the DEA’s “narco-terrorism” meme, the informants also asked the Africans to supply missiles and weapons, telling them they wanted to use them in Colombia to shoot down U.S. aircraft destroying their cocaine fields.

There never were any drugs or weapons of course. It was just another sting. [More...]

The “big fish” they caught was Na Tchuto, a colorful former navy officer in Guinea-Bisseau with a history of being involved in coups against his government and long suspected of facilitating drug trafficking. The Indictment is here. In 2010, the U.S. put him on OFAC’s list of designated drug traffickers (which prohibits anyone in the U.S. from doing business with him and allows the U.S. to seize any and all of his assets it can get its hands on.) Tchuto, the U.S. believes, acts as a middle man between the South American suppliers and the crooked members of Guinea-Bissau’s military. (See Wikleaks released cable here.