President Barack Obama is expected to nominate former George W. Bush-era Deputy Attorney General James Comey as the next director of the FBI, according to multiple media outlets that have published fawning reports about Comey’s supposed independence and upstanding moral character.

Comey, according to those reports, is deemed the ideal pick because he is a Republican who also is admired by Democrats for his principled stand against the Bush Administration’s warrantless surveillance program — a still highly-classified program Comey ultimately acquiesced to after some unspecified technical changes were adopted by the Bush administration.

But is Comey, who now serves on the board of the giant British Lender HSBC, really the guy in the white hat the commercial media – always enamored of power and not so much principle – paints him to be? Read more È

The scale of what had taken place in the name of an ill-conceived “sting” operation is difficult to comprehend. Not only had the ICE informant participated in the torture and murder of more than a dozen people with the full knowledge of his government handlers; not only had this operation led to the needless endangerment of a DEA agent in Juarez and possibly that of other agents; not only had the ICE agents in charge of the case broken international rules and protocol by failing to report these murders to the DEA in Mexico City; not only had ICE then lied to Mexican federal authorities that their informant had merely “witnessed” a murder in Chihuahua, but ICE even refused to hand their informant over to Mexican authorities in the wake of the DEA evacuation to allow them probably cause to search the house in question and arrest corrupt police officials in Juarez who were colluding with the drug gang.

In this fourth episode of our EyeOpener Report on whistleblowers James Corbett presents the anatomy of a cover up in the House of Death scandal, and discusses the case of the special agent in charge of the DEA’s El Paso field office at the time, a 26-year DEA veteran named Sandalio Gonzalez, and the almost total silence on the case and its true implications from the mainstream media.

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The administration of Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto has made it a priority to divert the media’s focus from the drug war and toward his economic efforts to bring the Latin American nation in closer alignment with the international corporate agenda of assuring a cheap supply labor and nearly risk-free return on investment. So he is much more eager to talk about the benefits of a gradual privatization of PEMEX, Mexico’s state-owned energy company, than he is to discuss the realities of the ongoing, bloody drug war that was ramped up by his predecessor in Los Pinos, former Mexican President Felipe Calderón.

Toward that end, Peña Nieto has put a halt to the parade of TV-camera narco-villain perp walks popularized by Calderón and promised to address the street-level violence of the drug war as opposed to employing the military in large numbers to hunt down criminal-organization leaders. Given Peña Nieto’s radical policy departure from the Calderon administration’s all-out war on the “cartels,� and his imperative of putting corporate trade and commerce at the tip of his policy sword, it is crucial that Peña Nieto demonstrate early success in reducing the visible violence of the drug war — which produced some 120,000 homicides in Mexico over the course of the six years Calderón held office…

Read the rest of this story by Bill Conroy here at Narco News: Click Here

US training of Mexican military forces spiked in fiscal years 2010 and 2011, coinciding with a sharp rise in drug-war homicides in Mexico, an analysis of records made public under the Foreign Assistance Act show.

The training in those two years, funded by the US Department of Defense, and to a lesser extent by the US Department of State, covered a wide range of military skill sets and involved hundreds of training programs offered in the US to Mexican forces as well as dozens (at least 60) provided inside Mexico. Read more È

Earlier this week, the Washington Post and a series of other mainstream media outlets breathlessly reported that the Pentagon has set up a US-based special operations center that is focused on helping the Mexican government track down “cartels.�

The real nut-graph of the Post story, however, is buried at the end of the article:

US officials stress that sharing this expertise does not mean U.S. special operations teams will be conducting raids against targets in Mexico, nor will they be entering the country with their own weapons. Mexico forbids U.S. military or law enforcement officers from carrying guns inside their borders, with few exceptions, though American commandos have conducted training missions in the past, two current and one former U.S. military official said. Read more È

US soldiers are operating inside Mexico as part of the drug war and the Mexican government provided critical intelligence to US agents in the now-discredited Fast and Furious gun-running operation, a Mexican diplomat claims in email correspondence with a Texas-based private intelligence firm.
The emails, obtained and made public by the nonprofit media organization WikiLeaks, also disclose details of a secret meeting between US and Mexican officials held in 2010 at Fort Bliss, a US Army installation located near El Paso, Texas. The meeting was part of an effort to create better communications between US undercover operatives in Mexico and the Mexican federal police, the Mexican diplomat reveals.

However, the diplomat expresses concern that the Fort Bliss meeting was infiltrated by the “cartels,� whom he contends have “penetrated both US and Mexican law enforcement.�

The Mexican diplomat is referred to as “MX1â€� in the some of the emails obtained by WikiLeaks but also identified by name in others. Read more È

Rio Grande Valley Businessman Was The Target of Multiple Arms-Trafficking Investigations Yet He Continued To Acquire Guns Through Straw Buyers

A series of criminal investigations initiated some four years ago by ATF agents, all focused on a weapons-trafficking ring in South Texas, appear to shred the long-running talking point that the Obama Administration alone is responsible for unleashing an irresponsible operation that allowed thousands of illegally purchased guns to be trafficked into Mexico via a tactic known as “gunwalking.�

That Obama Administration operation, dubbed Fast and Furious, was launched in the fall of 2009 and terminated in early 2011 in the wake of a Republican-led Congressional probe into the program. Read more È

Los Pinos Retains Las Vegas-Based R&R Partners to Promote Government’s Successes as the Bloody Drug War Rages On

The administration of Felipe Calderón has retained a politically connected US advertising and public relations firm to promote the political and economic agenda of the Mexican president in advance of the upcoming G20 Summit, which will be held in Los Cabos, Mexico, only a few weeks prior to the July 1 Mexican general election.

The move raises serious questions about whether Calderón is skirting, possibly even violating, a Mexican constitutional provision, Article 41, that prohibits the Mexican government from engaging in political promotion and advertising prior to a national election.

The Group of 20 (G20) Summit, a gathering of the leaders from the dominant global economies to be chaired this year by Mexico, will take place in Los Cabos, located on the southern tip of the Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, in mid-June at a plush convention center built for the occasion by the Mexican government at a cost exceeding $100 million. The Mexican government also is kicking in some $47 million to stage and promote the convention itself. Read more È

Zambada Niebla, son of one of the leaders of the Sinaloa “Cartel,� arguably the most powerful international narco-trafficking organization on the planet, argues in his criminal case, now pending in federal court in Chicago, that he and the leadership of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug-trafficking organization, were, in effect, working for the U.S. government for years by providing US agents with intelligence about rival drug organizations.

In exchange for that cooperation, Zambada Niebla contends, the US government granted the leadership of the Sinaloa “Cartel� immunity from prosecution for their criminal activities — including the narco-trafficking charges he now faces in Chicago.

The government, in court pleadings filed last month, denies that claim but at the same time has filed a motion in the case seeking to invoke the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA), a measure designed to assure national security information does not become public during court proceedings.

CIPA, enacted 30 years ago, is designed to keep a lid on public disclosure in criminal cases of classified materials, such as details associated with clandestine FBI or CIA operations. In this case, however, the invocation appears to be for the purpose of covering up a scandalous and shady quid pro quo deal between the US government and a drug cartel. Not only that, the Niebla case also threatens to further expose another US government scandal:

It is important to note again that most of the weapons allowed to cross from the US unimpeded into Mexico by ATF’s Fast and Furious were going to the Sinaloa “Cartel,” according to a report issued in July by Issa and Grassley.

So, given Zambada Niebla’s claim ithat “some of the [Fast and Furious] weapons were deliberately allowed by the FBI and other government representatives to end up in the hands of the Sinaloa “Cartel,â€� it seems his attorneys may want to pose some serious questions to witnesses suspected of having knowledge of that alleged act, including DEA’s Roberts, as well as the special agent in charge of the FBI’s New Mexico operations, Carol K.O. Lee and the U.S. Attorney for New Mexico, Kenneth J. Gonzales.

Such a prospect can’t be very uplifting for the prosecution in Zambada Niebla’s case and might explain, in part, why there is an effort afoot by the US law-enforcement and intelligence officials to cloak the revelations, the evidence, that might surface in the case under the seal of national security.

Prosecutors on Monday, Oct. 3, filed a motion in federal court in Chicago rebutting the accused Mexican narco-trafficker’s argument that he has been denied access to critical evidence in preparing his defense:

In their pleadings, prosecutors again affirm the government’s position that there was no immunity deal offered to the accused narco-trafficker or to the leadership of the Sinaloa drug-trafficking organization. The pleadings filed by the prosecution do not address directly why the government is seeking to invoke national-security procedures for Zambada Niebla’s case
…

Monday’s filing by prosecutors confirms that Zambada Niebla’s case does raise national security issues that require, according to those prosecutors, that special procedures be established by the court — under a 30-year-old law known as the Classified Information Procedures Act — to assure that classified materials do not become public during the court proceedings.

There seems to be another equally troubling and scandalous angle to this story: the US media’s synchronized and orchestrated black out of this massive scandal, most likely at the behest of the US government: Read more È