The ever-continuing story of a narcotics turtle…

posted by Bill Arnett @ 12:12 PM Permalink

…whose very existence could not be previously revealed. I found out about this amazing creature from a staff member of The Turtle Squad, a super secret division of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), who requested and received anonymity because his position as chief turtle wrangler would be jeopardized were I to reveal that he, Billy Bob "BB" Jones, revealed this information to me.

This secret turtle squad has been years in the creation of this program, the training of the turtles complicated by their (the turtles) inability to move at more than a few hundred feet an hour, limiting their usefulness in large forested areas of the country.

However, as BB my anonymous informant described the first successful use of trained turtles I knew it was time for this program to be exposed as these turtles, armed only with FBI National Security letters, have been and are infiltrating fields of green, pot that is, with no regard to privacy and the Fourth Amendment providing that there shall be no unreasonable searches and seizures of property.

"In many cases this is the only manner in which we can get operatives in 'under the radar' to gather evidence," said my source.

From the NYT comes more detail:

The hero of this little crime drama has a brain about the size of a raisin, so of course she has no idea what happened. She's a reptile -- but who cares? There's a drug suspect in custody, so let's credit her with the arrest.

Her name is Turtle No. 72.

Ken Ferebee, a National Park Service researcher, has been monitoring Turtle No. 72 for seven years, occasionally venturing into the woods to see her. Since Turtle No. 72's purpose in life is limited pretty much to finding a berry or bug to nibble on, there's no telling where in her roughly 50-acre range she might wander on a given day.

A few weeks ago, her little turtle brain guided her to a sun-splashed clearing deep in the woods.

He saw Turtle No. 72 in the clearing and moved toward her.

"But as I'm walking, I could see a patch of bare soil that didn't look quite right. And when I got closer, I could tell it had been cleared and some plants had been planted. They looked like they'd been grown somewhere else and then actually replanted in the park."

Suspicious vegetation -- about 10 plants, some four feet tall.

"I could tell they were marijuana plants," said Ferebee, 46. "I've seen pictures of the leaves before. I've actually seen marijuana plants before, too. . . . And I was a little surprised to see them right there. They've been found in the park before, but it's been a long time."

He said, "I called the police to come see, because I knew they'd be interested in that."

A Park Police spokesman, Sgt. Robert Lachance, said yesterday that investigators covertly watched the pot patch from time to time until the alleged grower, a Montgomery County resident, showed up to tend to the plants. The suspect, Isiah Johnson, 19, of 2300 block of Washington Avenue in Chevy Chase, was arrested Wednesday and charged with possession of marijuana with intent to distribute.

It is crystal clear that a powerful new weapon to fight drug crime is now on the scene, and that's Turtle 72, relentlessly cruising it's fifty acre territory in search of the newest and most dangerous strains of pot ever created, 5,000,000,000,000 times more potent than any weed ever before discovered.

Unfortunately Turtle 72 ingested so much of the pot that it was last seen flying north, in the direction of Canada, meaning that its years of training were essentially wasted. Turtle 73 is now being trained and should be ready for operation as early as 2012, the end of Barack Obama's first term in office.

The bush maladministration vehemently denies any knowledge of Turtle 72 or the Reptilian Defense Force being trained for use in Columbia in the hopes that the search for cocoa plants will speed up search times.

Labels: criminal justice system, disclosure, humor, marijuana, snark