No More Incumbents Blog

Rudy Giuliani took on a client surely after leaving the mayor’s office in 2002. That client pled guilty last week and agreed to pay a total of $635 million and they pled guilty to a single felony of “Misbranding” their opium derived drug OxyContin, which is Purdue Pharma’s trade name for oxycodone.

This fine and this felony relate to activities that took place from 1996 until 2001. During that time, Giulian’s client earned $2.8 billion in sales from their self claimed “miracle drug”, a drug that most law enforcement agencies consider to be one of the most problematic drugs to come along since heroine. Many people have become addicted to oxycodone and OxyContin after receiving prescriptions from their doctors.

The opium derived drug causes many people to have serious problems withdrawing from the drug after taking it to dampen the consequences of pain. People that work in regular blue-collar jobs, white-collar jobs even talk show host such as Rush Limbaugh have fallen victim to this extremely addictive drug.

Yet Rudy Giuliani who professed to being tough on crime during his days as a prosecutor and later mayor of New York City took on Purdue Pharma as a client a month after he left office as mayor. As Mayor Rudy Giuliani worked very hard to get drug dealers off the streets of New York City and out of plain sight. Not too many people today complain about the results of his achievements in New York City even though the drug industry has gone high-tech in New York City where drug abusers today can order up their drugs which are delivered through a highly web 2.0 network of order takers and couriers that deliver drugs to your door after verifying your drug purchasing account electronically.

Much attention as been called to Giuliani’s paradoxical stance on abortion over the last few days. However only fractional attention has been paid to his paradoxical platform where he prosecutes small drug dealers and defends some of the largest white-collar drug dealers in the world.

I personally like Rudy Giuliani and I think that he could potential to make a very good president, however it is extremely troubling that we he would compromise his own principles to earn a few bucks even if those books are used to get them into the White House.

Bill Clinton had money from China, George Bush had money from big oil companies and from the Saudi family and Rudy Giuliani has taken money from his convicted drug dealing client Purdue Pharma.

Link to Giuliani backed drug company that misled public - Newsday.com

The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed piece by Richard A. Posner, a Federal Circuit Judge and a lecturer at the University of Chicago Law school. The article was titled “Time to rethink the FBI.”

Judge Posner provides several salient points. His premise is that the FBI is not suited to perform internal intelligence tasks in the United States, and as a law-enforcement priority that precludes prevention of terrorist activities. He also hints that the conflicting responsibilities of law enforcement and internal intelligence may create a situation where an internal almost secret styled police force develops powers beyond their control.

He states that prosecutors and detectives measure their success by arrest convictions and prosecutions. Those three areas do not include preventing a terrorist attack. In addition, they would also lend themselves to stacking the metrics with success is measured by stopping nuisance the actions of “obnoxious but minor political criminals, such as white supremacist, animal rights extremists and makers of idle (but frightening) phone threats.”

He specifically mentions the ridiculous arrest made in Florida of seven suspected terrorists, that didn’t seem to have the technical capability to do much of anything until an FBI informant provided the money and access and direction to potential terrorist organizations. Once the group was provided all of these items, the FBI that had evidence to arrest.

The problem with this approach is that the FBI tips their hand to real terrorists providing insights into their investigative style and focus. The terrorists can then continue to pursue their secret goals, while the FBI tracks after buffoons.

Other civilized countries separate the powers of law enforcement from that of internal security. In the United Kingdom the group known as M. I.-5 provides internal security but does not have any arrest powers. Their goal is to identify terrorist activity so that it can be prevented. The FBI has to prioritize its activities based on those items that will result in arrest. This created a paradox in 2001 when many initial claims and warnings were received about a potential attack that ultimately culminated in bringing down the World Trade Center.

The FBI is also received many new powers since the attacks on 9/11. Many of those powers have been severely abused since that time. The FBI cannot keep track of how many times it’s issued subpoenas to invade the privacy of everyday Americans. They have been accused of tapping phone lines, reading e-mails and more with potential questions raised about the possibility of partisan use of this information.

For many years the FBI and the CIA were not allowed to cross each other’s paths. Out of necessity they had to start working together after 9/11. Before that the CIA was not allowed to spy on Americans with them our country. The presence of international terrorists living in our country make it necessary for someone to to watch what’s happening within our borders. However if you combine that ability to watch into an organization whose priority is to prosecute their subjective goals will always get in the way in the real terrorists will continue to escape and evade us. We need a government body to look out for terrorists without abridging our rights.

In addition to training and management of FBI personnel is extremely inefficient due to this paradox. All members of the FBI go to special agent training. This requires several months of law enforcement training to include firearms training and and combat and many other aspects of making an arrest successfully. That has very little to do with the type of work that goes into tracking down terrorists utilizing advanced technology, analysis, and big picture scenario considerations. We need to put some very good brains on this topic of tracking terrorists, and some of those brains don’t need to learn how to fire a handgun, break down a door, or take down a musclebound dug that weighs 250 pounds.

I say this as a former intelligence analyst myself. I know firsthand what goes into some of these requirements and skills. In the Army we have a separation of duties such that we send the Rangers, or long-range surveillance or special forces specifically trained to tackle the bad guys, while we put essentially the intelligence geeks on trying to figure out who the bad guys are what they’re doing and more importantly what they’re going to do next. This is not a one-size-fits-all type of operation requires specialization.