Ho ho ho.
Two military recruiting stations sit side-by-side there, one run by the Army, the other by the Marines. Between them, a total of seven recruiters were on the take, secretly accepting bribes to transport cocaine, even as most spent their days visiting local high schools.
They had help from several more recruiters at an Army National Guard office, where one recruiter was said to be selling cocaine from the trunk of his recruiting vehicle.
When one blogs one is supposed to have witty or insightful commentary to inject.
Here I am unsure what to say: it pretty much speaks for itself.
More on this cesspool of wrongdoing after the jump.
And speaking of speaking for itself I seriously doubt this will make it to TV. This sort of inequity is scrubbed from the US media. The lapdoggieness of the media didn't just happen when Team Bush hijacked America - it had been lapdoggin' the war on pot for 30 years.
This is why we blog, yes?
Many of the drug-running recruiters remained on the job, with continued access to local schools, for months — and often, years — after FBI agents secretly filmed them counting cash next to stacks of cocaine bricks, the Arizona Daily Star found in a months-long probe of court records and military employment data.
Some were still recruiting three years after they first were caught on camera running drugs in uniform. Most have pleaded guilty and are to be sentenced in March. Some honorably retired from the military.
There is no suggestion in court records that the recruiters were providing drugs to students.
Odd they elected to toss in that little blurb.
As dishonest as the War on Drugs is, one can almost safely assume that such a denial is tantamount to saying they DID sell to kids. Recruiting is hard work, you know....what with a disasterous occupation killing troops right and left.
What they did between FBI drug runs isn't known because they weren't under constant surveillance, the FBI said.
For example, in the middle of the cocaine sting, one of the recruiters was arrested by another law-enforcement agency in an unrelated drug case, accused of transporting nearly 200 pounds of marijuana on Interstate 19, court records show.
See?
Marijuana shows up everywhere. Even the name of the operation clearly references Job # 1: the War on Pot.
It's bigger than most people who read this article will ever grasp because the truth of the war on cannabis and drug users is blacked-out of the mainstream media. We hear more about Tom Cruise's baby than important things like this.
From a military standpoint, it's especially egregious that recruiters took part in the cocaine runs, experts say.
"The military definitely views recruiters as persons in a special position of trust," said Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of Military Justice, in Washington, D.C. Recruiters are supposed to meet high standards to promote an honorable image of the military, Fidell said. If court-martialed, they probably would be punished more harshly than non-recruiters, he said.
The willingness of Tucson recruiters to run drugs was clear to FBI agents from the start of the Lively Green sting, according to agent testimony at the court-martial of a Davis-Monthan technical sergeant — a non-recruiter — convicted in the Lively Green case in June.
In fact, it was a recruiter who caused the FBI to set up the sting in the first place, FBI Special Agent Adam Radtke said.
That recruiter, Radtke said, was former Army National Guardsman Darius W. Perry, who pleaded guilty Thursday in U.S. District Court.
Radtke said the sting got started in late 2001, when the FBI received numerous complaints that Perry, who worked out of the Guard's East Side recruiting office, was taking bribes to fix the military aptitude test scores of new recruits.
The FBI put an undercover informant in place to check it out. As the FBI plant was paying Perry to fix a test score in the parking lot of a Tucson restaurant, Perry opened the trunk of his recruiting vehicle and offered to sell part of a kilo of cocaine, Radtke said.
"Perry basically introduced the crime to us," the agent testified.
It's a long article which oddly seems like real journalism, further convincing me this won't see the light of day on TV.
If it's not on TV, then, in America, it ain't real.
The charges against the recruiters are likely very real but without this story being broadcast, it will sink into oblivion with pretty much everything else that happens in America's Longest War.
[UPDATE: cosmic debris posted this about 2.5 hours before I did. I simply did not see it. He has some good insights as well. Check it!]