Adam Dick

A disturbing story out of Florida recounts that Matt Crull spent six weeks in jail on a drug trafficking charge after police claimed, based on drug field test results, that a substance in Crull’s van was heroin. Crull was released this month after further testing indicated the substance was actually laundry detergent.

While the mistreatment of Crull is terrible, it is important to understand that his experience is far from unique. In fact, for some people the situation is worse: Seeing little hope for vindication in the judicial system, they plead guilty and are sentenced due to shoddy drug field test results.

A new episode of Five Minutes Five Issues posted on Friday. You can listen to it, and read a transcript, below. You can also find previous episodes of the show at Stitcher, iTunes, YouTube, and SoundCloud.

Listen to the new episode here:

Read a transcript of the new episode, including links to further information regarding the topics discussed, here:

The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity welcomes you to Five Minutes Five Issues.

Starting in five four three two one.

People tend to think of Amazon as a big store on the internet. It is more than that. For example, in August of 2013, soon after Amazon founder and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post, I wrote about Amazon’s Amazon Web Services having as customers hundreds of government agencies. Included among them is the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with which Amazon had a 10 years, 600 billion dollars contract to build private cloud servers inside CIA data centers.

Included in a Thursday foreign policy report by Rick Sanchez at RT, are portions of an interview with peace advocate and former United States House of Representatives Member Ron Paul (R-TX) in which Paul explains that a big barrier to moving toward nonintervention overseas is that “warmongering” has become a bipartisan fixation. “It used to be the Democrats were considered less likely to be involved in war, but they’re every bit as aggressive as the Republicans,” said Paul.

Julian Assange and WikiLeaks have not just been targeted by the United States government in response to their publishing of US government secrets. They have also been subjected to false reporting in the media.

In an email sent to media organizations on Sunday, WikiLeaks details that, due to “a pervasive climate of inaccurate claims about WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, including purposeful fabrications planted in large and otherwise ‘reputable’ media outlets,” Wikileaks is providing in the email a list of false and defamatory claims about WikiLeaks and Assange for journalists and publishers “to ensure they do not spread and have not spread falsehoods about WikiLeaks or Julian Assange.” A Reuters report counts a total of 140 items in the email’s “Defamation List.”