Study: If you don’t pay your cigarette taxes, you could be helping the terrorists

Comment:

The following so-called study is another example of how ‘terrorism’ is being used by the government to control you. Now, if you don’t buy your cigarettes at the local store, where you pay Uncle Sam the tobacco tax, you could be financing the terrorists.

Just when we thought the level of absurdity had reached its peak, after the government linked antiwar protesters, right-wingers, constitutionalists and Ron Paul supporters to terrorism, another nauseating claim is announced: If you participate in cigarette smuggling (which is a legal product), you might be helping the terrorists. I guess we won’t be bringing any cigarettes from New Hampshire or any Indian reservation because we will be charged with aiding the terrorists.

 
Securitymanagement.com

 
After crackdowns on fundraising following the 9/11 attacks, terrorist groups worldwide have increasingly turned to criminal rackets, officials say. And smuggling cigarettes — either untaxed or counterfeit — has proved a particularly lucrative, low-risk way to fund operations.

Hezbollah, the Taliban, and al-Qaeda are involved in smuggling cigarettes; so are the Real Irish Republican Army (Real IRA) and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Terrorist financing through cigarette smuggling is “huge,” says Louise Shelley, a transnational crime expert at George Mason University and an adviser to the World Economic Forum on illicit trade. “Worldwide — it’s no exaggeration… No one thinks cigarette smuggling is too serious, so law enforcement doesn’t spend resources to go after it.”

“Cigarettes are easy to smuggle, easy to buy, and they have a pretty good return on the investment,” adds David Cid, a former FBI counterterrorism agent and deputy director of the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism in Oklahoma City. “Drug dogs don’t alert on your car if it’s full of Camels.” And, he notes, “The other advantage is you don’t go to jail for 50 years.”

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