The objections are being raised despite an agreement two months ago that the alliance's campaign in Afghanistan would be broadened to include attacks on narcotics facilities, traffickers, middlemen and drug lords whose profits help to finance insurgent groups.
During a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Budapest in October, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and General Craddock successfully lobbied the alliance to give troops operating in Afghanistan official permission to mount attacks on narcotics "facilities and facilitators supporting the insurgency".
General Craddock wrote that "it was no longer necessary to produce intelligence or other evidence that each particular drug trafficker or narcotics facility in Afghanistan meets the criteria of being a military objective," the news magazine reported.
In a letter to Gen. Egon Ramms, a German who heads the NATO command center responsible for Afghanistan, General Craddock said that "it was no longer necessary to produce intelligence or other evidence that each particular drug trafficker or narcotics facility in Afghanistan meets the criteria of being a military objective".
In May, Cardinal settled the action brought by the D.E.A. in connection with its Florida sales by agreeing to suspend shipments of controlled drugs, like narcotics, from a facility in that state for two years.
"Where we can make a clear intelligence linkage between a narcotics dealer or a facility and the insurgency, I consider that a force protection issue, and we can deal with that in a military way".
Related: The disappeared: Chicago police detain Americans at abuse-laden 'black site' "[S]ensitive units housed at the [Homan Square] facility include the Bureau of Organized Crime (including the narcotics unit)," the fact sheet reads.
"If you were an analyst monitoring the development of narcotics crops, or you were watching a new military facility being constructed somewhere, you faced significant delays".
These facilities, often described as "pill mills," employed doctors who wrote narcotics prescriptions after cursory examinations of patients.
"Some districts do not have the facilities to keep covert our undercover officers," Lieutenant William Kilroy, a senior narcotics officer at the Homan Square-based bureau of organized crime, said in his November deposition.
A new 99-page task force study envisions at least two safe-use facilities — one in Seattle, another in the suburbs — where heroin addicts can legally take narcotics while being monitored by medical personnel who can administer aid or call 911 if needed.
