Medical Cannabis: Voices from the Frontlines » Blog Archive » DEA claims agent is not Blackwater employee
I was able to speak today with Tami Abdollah, the Los Angeles Times (LAT) reporter who wrote the article associated with the photo of the agent wearing a Blackwater t-shirt. First, Abdollah explained that at the time of the raid (when the photo was taken) she had asked about whether the agent in question was a Blackwater employee, but was not given a straight answer. After the raid, and after the story had been published by the LAT, Abdollah was contacted by Sarah Pullen, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles office of the DEA. Pullen requested that the face of the agent wearing the Blackwater t-shirt be blurred because he was an undercover agent and the photo might jeopardize his apparent anonymity. At the same time, Pullen assured Abdollah that the “undercover” agent was in fact an employee of the Drug Enforcement Administration and has never been an employee of Blackwater. Pullen also felt it necessary to explain to Abdollah that the request to blur the agent’s face and the fact that he was wearing a Blackwater t-shirt was completely coincidental. In a subsequent conversation with the DEA, Abdollah was told that the agent was not undercover for the raid, but does routinely engage in undercover operations.

According to Abdollah, the Photo Desk at the LAT has a policy of not altering photos, so their response was simply to pull the photo from circulation. After I expressed concern that the sequence of events still seemed suspect, Abdollah assured me that she would continue to follow up on the matter.

In the meantime, certain questions that come to mind are: why would an undercover agent, concerned about maintaining anonymity, conduct a circus-like, paramilitary-style raid in broad daylight with media swarming around? Doesn’t the DEA realize that by censoring a controversial photo, it is ensuring greater exposure of it, thereby creating a greater identity risk for the agent? Is it not careless, to say the least, when police are supposed to be explicitly identified during such enforcement actions, to have one of the agents conducting the raid be identified as Blackwater?

And these guys tend to be sticklers for details.  Look at all the time it would take them to get dressed alone – the body armor, the guns, the grenades, shields, batons, tasers, gas masks, thermal vision goggles, and all the other vehicles and equipment… and you’re telling me that Agent Steven Seagal here was allowed to show up to the pre-raid drill in a non-regulation uniform?

(click for larger image)

NORML Daily Audio Stash
“We heard some noise outside, and then the door literally burst in, and the DEA came in in full combat gear, told everybody to get on the floor and put their hands behind their heads,” Carey said. “It was like, literally, an episode of “24,” when they bust in on a terrorist cell.”

That’s the description of the Culver City DEA dispensary raid I blogged about last Friday.  Who knew that the “terrorist cell” description would have another frightening parallel.  That agent unloading DEA evidence is wearing a Blackwater t-shirt.

Blackwater is the private “security firm” with millions of dollars in no-bid US government contracts in Iraq.

This is a photo published by the LA Times as part of its photo slideshow online accompanying the news story about the raid.

Or, it was published.  If you click that photo slideshow link above, you’ll find that the seven picture slideshow has now been reduced to six.  The Blackwater man is no longer there.

As of this writing, the photo is still online at the Times, but it’s an orphan (you won’t find links to it), along with the caption:

DEA agents remove evidence from Organica Collective after the business was raided by federal agents. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)

Now, maybe the LA Times took the photo down because the caption was inaccurate.  If he’s working for Blackwater, he’s not part of “DEA agents”.  But then why not just fix the caption?

Maybe he is a DEA agent and he just got the Blackwater shirt as swag at some convention, and the LA Times took the picture down to protect the identity of the hip young pony-tailed goatee-sportin’ undercover narc with a Robocop-sized gun on his hip.

It would be nice to know whether or not our federal Drug Employment Administration is outsourcing federal police duties to private mercenary armies like Blackwater.  After all, they’ve done such a bang-up job with domestic policing in Iraq, like shooting up 17 unarmed civilians without provocation.  The Iraqi government revoked their license and kicked Blackwater out of the country, but, of course, they’re still there.

The Iraqi government has learned what the California government has learned – when it is engaged in a war on nouns like “drugs” or “terror”, the US government will do whatever it damn well pleases.