The photo of a law enforcement agent conducting a raid on a state-sanctioned medical marijuana dispensary in Culver City, posted last week by ASA’s Rebecca Saltzman, has attracted significant online attention. The photo depicts the agent carrying a box marked “DEA,” and wearing a t-shirt with the word “Blackwater” and its logo on it. Blackwater is a private security company that has deployed personnel in Iraq and is increasingly being used for international drug interdiction efforts. Blackwater has recently come under fire with Congress on its dealings with the federal government. Given that no private company has taken part in federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) raids on medical marijuana dispensaries, the obvious question on people’s minds is whether the DEA is using Blackwater personnel to carry out its misguided war on medical marijuana in states like California. That question was amplified when the Los Angeles Times photograph taken was removed from its website Friday without explanation.

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?

I will post more as I and others uncover it. Stay tuned as to whether the DEA is telling the truth, or trying to conceal its relationship with Blackwater in carrying out raids on medical marijuana providers, or trying to make an embarrassing situation of mis-identity go away.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 2:55 pm and is filed under Activism, Americans for Safe Access (ASA), California, Congress, DEA, Dispensaries, Federal, Law Enforcement, Legal, Media, Medical Cannabis, Raids. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.