Hakim, Secord, North, associates

[[ marked for update ]]  

the following is fiction, except for the parts that are true:

contra are the guys who got kicked out Nicaragua, the allied and associates of the  Somoza regime, supported by the U.S. (right?)
time period:  Carter to Reagan administrations  
  deeply unpopular U.S.-aligned Somoza regime in Nicaragua
the Somoza has been in power for so long that the common people in Nicaragua got tired of him,
Somoza got kicked out, causing heartburn for the Nicaragua who got kicked out, because they are now homeless, stateless, and has no country ...
Those that can left, and they came to the U.S.
([ we are going to pin it all on the CIA, even though it is not all on the CIA, and CIA was following order; where have you heard that before; National Security Council - NSC - was place where the they ran the operation to sell arms at a ridiculious marked up price to Iran to fund the Contra operation (counter revolutionary operation) to give Nicaragua back to the Nicaraguan who got kicked out ...])
... mean while ...
we have two alternate reality, both of which did happen, and
you can decide to
  (a.)   believe in both,
  (b.)   believe in neither,
  (c.)   believe in one and not the other,
  (d.)   believe in the other and not the one,
  (e.)   believe in some aspects of the one, and not at all in the other;
  (f.)   believe in some aspects of the other, not not at all in the one;
  (g.)   believe in some aspects of both, and not believe in other aspect of both.

if you got all that, you've got an A
Apply a., b., c., d., e., f., g. to the following:  
  so the first reality is this:
     the Contra operation was funded completely and wholely from arms sales to Iran (this is highly likely, and this is also the official version)
  the other reality is this:
     the Contra operation was funded completely and wholely from drug trafficking (this did happen; meaning there were lots of cocaine drug come back via the same route that was used to ship arms and aids, on empty cargo aircraft; what happen after the cocaine drugs enter the U.S. nobody know, but money from the cocaine drug sales did flow back up stream, and got laundry some where)

then pick
  (a.)   believe in both,
  (b.)   believe in neither,
  (c.)   believe in one and not the other,
  (d.)   believe in the other and not the one,
  (e.)   believe in some aspects of the one, and not at all in the other;
  (f.)   believe in some aspects of the other, not not at all in the one;
  (g.)   believe in some aspects of both, and not believe in other aspect of both.
  (h.)   all of the above
  (i.)   none of the above
  (j.)   I want to write my own story, thank you very much:  you write your own story.  

 

 

source:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada

Syādvāda is a theory of qualified predication, states Koller. It states that all knowledge claims must be qualified in many ways, because reality is many-sided.[4] It is done so systematically in later Jain texts through saptibhaṅgīnaya or "the theory of sevenfold scheme".[4] These saptibhaṅgī seem to have been first formulated in Jainism by the 5th or 6th century CE Svetambara scholar Mallavadin,[31] and they are:[30][32][33]

  1. Affirmation: syād-asti—in some ways, it is,
  2. Denial: syān-nāsti—in some ways, it is not,
  3. Joint but successive affirmation and denial:
        syād-asti-nāsti—
        in some ways, it is, and it is not,
  4. Joint and simultaneous affirmation and denial:
        syāt-asti-avaktavyaḥ—
        in some ways, it is, and it is indescribable,
  5. Joint and simultaneous affirmation and denial:
        syān-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ—
        in some ways, it is not, and it is indescribable,
  6. Joint and simultaneous affirmation and denial:
        syād-asti-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ—
        in some ways, it is, it is not, and it is indescribable,
  7. Joint and simultaneous affirmation and denial:
        syād-avaktavyaḥ—
        in some ways, it is indescribable.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaina_seven-valued_logic

The Saptabhangivada, the seven predicate theory may be summarized as follows:[4]

The seven predicate theory consists in the use of seven claims about sentences, each preceded by "arguably" or "conditionally" (syat), concerning a single object and its particular properties, composed of assertions and denials, either simultaneously or successively, and without contradiction. These seven claims are the following.

  1. Arguably, it (that is, some object) exists (syad asty eva).
  2. Arguably, it does not exist (syan nasty eva).
  3. Arguably, it exists; arguably, it doesn't exist (syad asty eva syan nasty eva).
  4. Arguably, it is non-assertible (syad avaktavyam eva).
  5. Arguably, it exists; arguably, it is non-assertible (syad asty eva syad avaktavyam eva).
  6. Arguably, it doesn't exist; arguably, it is non-assertible (syan nasty eva syad avaktavyam eva).
  7. Arguably, it exists; arguably, it doesn't exist; arguably it is non-assertible (syad asty eva syan nasty eva syad avaktavyam eva).

There are three basic truth values, namely, true (t), false (f) and unassertible (u).
   ____________________________________
[[ place holder ]]

   ____________________________________
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Dark_Gene#Project_Ibex

Project Ibex
Project Ibex was closely linked to Project Dark Gene. The same airfields were used and operations were often run in conjunction. In essence they can be considered the same operation, each with separate and overlapping objectives. One of the advantages of operating them together was the ELINT data that could be gathered when Soviet air defences were activated by a Project Dark Gene aircraft that was detected. The resulting emissions and activity would be recorded by Project Ibex aircraft on the Iranian side of the border.[1]

Funded by the Shah, the listening posts were constructed in Northern Iran by the CIA.[5] After the Iranian Revolution, Iran maintained the facilities in "impeccable condition" despite having little or no knowledge about how to operate them.[6] With the potential to provide information about Iraqi troop movements, CIA official George W. Cave advised Iran's interim government to make use of the system.[7]
   ____________________________________

The Office of Independent Counsel/Walsh investigation produced four interim reports to Congress. Its final report was published as the Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters.

Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters.

http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB567-Iran-Contra-Reagan-Oliver-North-and-Post-Truth-30-years-later/

https://www.archives.gov/legislative/guide/senate/chapter-18-1969-1988.html#18F-2

http://intelligence.senate.gov/pub100thcongress.html

http://intelligence.senate.gov/pub101stcongress.html
https://www.archives.gov/research/investigations/walsh.html
   ____________________________________

The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia is a 1972 non-fiction book on heroin trafficking in Southeast Asia and the CIA complicity and aid to the Southeast Asian opium/heroin trade. Written by Alfred W. McCoy, the book covers the period from World War II to the Vietnam War.

   ── "We have to continue to fight the evil of Communism, and to fight you must have an army, and an army must have guns, and to buy guns you must have money. In these mountains the only money is opium." General Tuan Shi-wen, commander of the Kuomintang Fifth Army (based in the Golden Triangle), as quoted by McCoy.
   ── en.wikipedia.org, The politics of heroin in southeast asia
   ── https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_Southeast_Asia
   ── The politics of heroin in southeast asia, 1972
      ── authors (Alfred W. McCoy, Cathleen B. Read, Leonard P. Adams II),
      ── subject: heroin trafficking, cover operations, central intelligence agency (CIA)
      ── To attain its operational goals, McCoy notes, the CIA tolerated and concealed the drug dealing by its local assets.
      ── "it is difficult to state unequivocally that the individual drug lords allied with the CIA did or did not shape the long-term trajectory of supply and demand within the vastness and complexity of the global drug traffic" (p. 529).
      ── Simply put, they [the CIA and the national security apparatus] prioritize their national security goals over the drug war and the profits from illegal drugs help our military allies wage war.
      ── the U.S. government is not the only country to be involved this type of illegal activity.
      ── Although charges that the agency engaged in the crack cocaine epidemic that devastated African American inner cities in the US during the 1980s and 1990s are not true(strictly speaking)- the worst that the CIA can be held responsible for is turning a blind eye to drug trafficking by their Contra allies,

source:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Politics_of_Heroin_in_Southeast_Asia
   ____________________________________

occurred during the second term of the Reagan administration.

Between 1981 and 1986, senior administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo.[2] The administration hoped to use the proceeds of the arms sale to fund the Contras, a right-wing rebel group, in Nicaragua. Under the Boland Amendment, further funding of the Contras by the government had been prohibited by Congress.

Eleven convictions resulted, some of which were vacated on appeal.[13]
The rest of those indicted or convicted were all pardoned in the final days of the presidency of George H. W. Bush, who had been Vice President at the time of the affair.[14]

Former Independent Counsel Walsh noted that in issuing the pardons, Bush appeared to have been preempting being implicated himself by evidence that came to light during the Weinberger trial, and noted that there was a pattern of "deception and obstruction" by Bush, Weinberger and other senior Reagan administration officials.[15]

Firewall: The Iran-Contra Conspiracy and Cover-Up.

A group of senior Reagan administration officials in the Senior Interdepartmental Group conducted a secret study on 21 July 1981,

At the same time that the American government was considering its options on selling arms to Iran, Contra militants based in Honduras were waging a guerrilla war to topple the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN) revolutionary government of Nicaragua. Almost from the time he took office in 1981, a major goal of the Reagan administration was the overthrow of the left-wing Sandinista government in Nicaragua and to support the Contra rebels.[18]

The Reagan administration's policy towards Nicaragua produced a major clash between the executive and legislative branches as Congress sought to limit, if not curb altogether, the ability of the White House to support the Contras.[18]

Direct U.S. funding of the Contras insurgency was made illegal through the Boland Amendment, the name given to three U.S. legislative amendments between 1982 and 1984 aimed at limiting U.S. government assistance to Contra militants. By 1984, funding for the Contras had run out; and, in October of that year, a total ban came into effect. The second Boland Amendment, in effect from 3 October 1984 to 3 December 1985,

Between 1981 and 1986, secret arms sale to Iran
By 1984, funding for the Contras had run out;
in October of that year (1984), a total ban came into effect.

In violation of the Boland Amendment, senior officials of the Reagan administration continued to secretly arm and train the Contras and provide arms to Iran,

Given the Contras' heavy dependence on U.S. military and financial support, the second Boland Amendment threatened to break the Contra movement, and led to President Reagan ordering in 1984 that the National Security Council (NSC) "keep the Contras together 'body and soul'", no matter what Congress voted for.[18]

As part of the effort to circumvent the Boland Amendment, the NSC established "the Enterprise", an arms-smuggling network headed by a retired U.S. Air Force officer turned arms dealer Richard Secord that supplied arms to the Contras. It was ostensibly a private sector operation, but in fact was controlled by the NSC.[21] To fund "the Enterprise", the Reagan administration was constantly on the look-out for funds that came from outside the U.S. government in order not to explicitly violate the letter of the Boland Amendment, though the efforts to find alternative funding for the Contras violated the spirit of the Boland Amendment.[23] Ironically, military aid to the Contras was reinstated with Congressional consent in October 1986, a month before the scandal broke.[24][25]

 "Soon after taking office in 1981, the Reagan Administration secretly and abruptly changed United States policy." Secret Israeli arms sales and shipments to Iran began in that year, even as, in public, "the Reagan Administration" presented a different face, and "aggressively promoted a public campaign... to stop worldwide transfers of military goods to Iran." The New York Times explains: "Iran at that time was in dire need of arms and spare parts for its American-made arsenal to defend itself against Iraq, which had attacked it in September 1980," while "Israel [a U.S. ally] was interested in keeping the war between Iran and Iraq going to ensure that these two potential enemies remained preoccupied with each other." Maj. Gen. Avraham Tamir, a high-ranking Israeli Defense Ministry official in 1981, said there was an "oral agreement" to allow the sale of "spare parts" to Iran. This was based on an "understanding" with Secretary Alexander Haig (which a Haig adviser denied). This account was confirmed by a former senior American diplomat with a few modifications. The diplomat claimed that "[Ariel] Sharon violated it, and Haig backed away...". A former "high-level" CIA official who saw reports of arms sales to Iran by Israel in the early 1980s estimated that the total was about

Reagan always publicly insisted after the scandal broke in late 1986 that the purpose behind the arms-for-hostages trade was to establish a working relationship with the "moderate" faction associated with Rafsanjani to facilitate the reestablishment of the American–Iranian alliance after the soon to be expected death of Khomeini, to end the Iran–Iraq War and end Iranian support for Islamic terrorism while downplaying the importance of freeing the hostages in Lebanon as a secondary issue.[46] By contrast, when testifying before the Tower Commission, Reagan declared that hostage issue was the main reason for selling arms to Iran.[47]

On the day of McFarlane's resignation, Oliver North, a military aide to the United States National Security Council (NSC), proposed a new plan for selling arms to Iran, which included two major adjustments: instead of selling arms through Israel, the sale was to be direct at a markup; and a portion of the proceeds would go to Contras, or Nicaraguan paramilitary fighters waging guerrilla warfare against the Sandinista government, claiming power after an election full of irregularities.[57][not specific enough to verify]

North proposed a $15 million markup, while contracted arms broker Ghorbanifar added a 41% markup of his own.[59] Other members of the NSC were in favor of North's plan; with large support, Poindexter authorized it without notifying President Reagan, and it went into effect.[60] At first, the Iranians refused to buy the arms at the inflated price because of the excessive markup imposed by North and Ghorbanifar. They eventually relented, and in February 1986, 1,000 TOW missiles were shipped to the country.[60] From May to November 1986, there were additional shipments of miscellaneous weapons and parts.[60]

Throughout February 1986, weapons were shipped directly to Iran by the United States (as part of Oliver North's plan), but none of the hostages were released.

The American delegation comprised McFarlane, North, Cave (a retired CIA officer who worked in Iran in the 1960s–70s), Teicher, Israeli diplomat Amiram Nir and a CIA translator. They arrived in Tehran in an Israeli plane carrying forged Irish passports on 25 May 1986.[68] This meeting also failed.

On 26 July 1986, Hezbollah freed the American hostage Father Lawrence Jenco, former head of Catholic Relief Services in Lebanon.[69]

By this point, the Americans had grown tired of Ghobanifar who had proven himself a dishonest intermediary who played off both sides to his own commercial advantage.[69] In August 1986, the Americans had established a new contact in the Iranian government, Ali Hashemi Bahramani, the nephew of Rafsanjani and an officer in the Revolutionary Guard.[69] The fact that the Revolutionary Guard was deeply involved in international terrorism seemed only to attract the Americans more to Bahramani, who was seen as someone with the influence to change Iran's policies.[69]

In September and October 1986 three more Americans – Frank Reed, Joseph Cicippio, and Edward Tracy – were abducted in Lebanon by a separate terrorist group, who referred to them simply as "G.I. Joe," after the popular American toy. The reasons for their abduction are unknown, although it is speculated that they were kidnapped to replace the freed Americans.[71] One more original hostage, David Jacobsen, was later released. The captors promised to release the remaining two, but the release never happened.[72]

North's explanation for destroying some documents was to protect the lives of individuals involved in Iran and Contra operations.[59] It was not until 1993, years after the trial, that North's notebooks were made public, and only after the National Security Archive and Public Citizen sued the Office of the Independent Counsel under the Freedom of Information Act.[59]

 U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese admitted on 25 November that profits from weapons sales to Iran were made available to assist the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. On the same day, John Poindexter resigned, and President Reagan fired Oliver North.[79] Poindexter was replaced by Frank Carlucci on 2 December 1986.[80]

 The American historian James Canham-Clyne asserted that Iran–Contra affair and the NSC "going operational" were not departures from the norm, but were the logical and natural consequence of existence of the "national security state", the plethora of shadowy government agencies with multi-million dollar budgets operating with little oversight from Congress, the courts or the media, and for whom upholding national security justified almost everything.[82] Canham-Clyne argued that for the "national security state", the law was an obstacle to be surmounted rather than something to uphold and that the Iran–Contra affair was just "business as usual", something he asserted that the media missed by focusing on the NSC having "gone operational."[82]

In Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987, journalist Bob Woodward chronicled the role of the CIA in facilitating the transfer of funds from the Iran arms sales to the Nicaraguan Contras spearheaded by Oliver North. According to Woodward, then-Director of the CIA William J. Casey admitted to him in February 1987 that he was aware of the diversion of funds to the Contras.[83]

On 6 May 1987, William Casey died the day after Congress began public hearings on Iran–Contra. Independent Counsel, Lawrence Walsh later wrote: "Independent Counsel obtained no documentary evidence showing Casey knew about or approved the diversion. The only direct testimony linking Casey to early knowledge of the diversion came from [Oliver] North."[84]

President Reagan appeared before the Tower Commission on 2 December 1986, to answer questions regarding his involvement in the affair. When asked about his role in authorizing the arms deals, he first stated that he had; later, he appeared to contradict himself by stating that he had no recollection of doing so.[87]

The report published by the Tower Commission was delivered to the president on 26 February 1987.

 Oliver North wrote that "Ronald Reagan knew of and approved a great deal of what went on with both the Iranian initiative and private efforts on behalf of the contras and he received regular, detailed briefings on both...I have no doubt that he was told about the use of residuals for the Contras, and that he approved it. Enthusiastically."[93]

 • Alan D. Fiers, Chief of the CIA's Central American Task Force, convicted of withholding evidence and sentenced to one year probation. Later pardoned by President George H. W. Bush.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Fiers

 • Clair George, Chief of Covert Ops-CIA, convicted on two charges of perjury, but pardoned by President George H. W. Bush before sentencing.[106]
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clair_George

 • Oliver North, member of the National Security Council was indicted on 16 charges.[107] A jury convicted him of accepting an illegal gratuity, obstruction of a Congressional inquiry, and destruction of documents. The convictions were overturned on appeal because his Fifth Amendment rights may have been violated by use of his immunized public testimony[108] and because the judge had incorrectly explained the crime of destruction of documents to the jury.[109]

 • Duane Clarridge. An ex-CIA senior official, he was indicted in November 1991 on seven counts of perjury and false statements relating to a November 1985 shipment to Iran. Pardoned before trial by President George H. W. Bush.[114][115]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duane_Clarridge

 • Richard V. Secord. Former Air Force major general, who was involved in arms transfers to Iran and diversion of funds to Contras, he pleaded guilty in November 1989 to making false statements to Congress and was sentenced to two years of probation. As part of his plea bargain, Secord agreed to provide further truthful testimony in exchange for the dismissal of remaining criminal charges against him.[116][19]
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Secord
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STTGI

 • Albert Hakim. A businessman, he pleaded guilty in November 1989 to supplementing the salary of North by buying a $13,800 fence for North with money from "the Enterprise," which was a set of foreign companies Hakim used in Iran–Contra. In addition, Swiss company Lake Resources Inc., used for storing money from arms sales to Iran to give to the Contras, plead guilty to stealing government property.[117] Hakim was given two years of probation and a $5,000 fine, while Lake Resources Inc. was ordered to dissolve.[116][118]
     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hakim

 • Thomas G. Clines. A former CIA clandestine service officer. According to Special Prosecutor Walsh, he earned nearly $883,000 helping retired Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard V. Secord and Albert Hakim carry out the secret operations of "the Enterprise". He was indicted for concealing the full amount of his Enterprise profits for the 1985 and 1986 tax years, and for failing to declare his foreign financial accounts. He was convicted and served 16 months in prison, the only Iran-Contra defendant to have served a prison sentence.[119]
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_G._Clines


 • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolfo_Calero
 • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enrique_Berm%C3%BAdez

 • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arturo_Cruz
 • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfonso_Robelo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_pardoned_or_granted_clemency_by_the_president_of_the_United_States

Although Bush publicly insisted that he knew little about the operation, his statements were contradicted by excerpts of his diary released by the White House in January 1993.[125][127] An entry dated 5 November 1986 stated: "On the news at this time is the question of the hostages... I'm one of the few people that know fully the details, and there is a lot of flak and misinformation out there. It is not a subject we can talk about..."[125][127]

The Iran–Contra affair and the ensuing deception to protect senior administration officials (including President Reagan) was cast as an example of post-truth politics by Malcolm Byrne of George Washington University.[131]

source:
       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
   ____________________________________
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Secord

Involvement in Iran–Contra affair

Operation Tipped Kettle was a precursor to the Iran-Contra logistics operation. Sources are not explicit about the dates of Secord's involvement, but it seems he may have carried over this project from his military service into his retirement. Operation Tipped Kettle, transferred Palestinian Liberation Organization weapons seized by Israel in Lebanon to the Contras.[26]


In the aftermath Secord filed a libel case against Leslie Cockburn, Andrew Cockburn, Morgan Entrekin, Atlantic Monthly Press, and Little, Brown and Company, Inc. for publishing a book in 1987 entitled Out of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administration's Secret War in Nicaragua, the Illegal Pipeline, and the Contra Drug Connection. Entrekin, Atlantic Monthly Press, and publishers Little, Brown and Company were dropped from the suit. The court then ordered summary judgment on behalf of the defendants Leslie Cockburn and Andrew Cockburn, indicating that Secord was unable to show the defendants had malicious intent.[29]

book 1987
Out of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administration's Secret War in Nicaragua, the Illegal Pipeline, and the Contra Drug Connection
Leslie Cockburn, Andrew Cockburn

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Secord
   ____________________________________
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Cave

Iran-Contra Affair

In March 1986, at the behest of CIA Director William J. Casey, Cave joined the unofficial, but presidentially approved, covert operation to provide American-made missiles to the Islamic Republic of Iran that constituted part of the Iran-Contra affair. The weapons sales were part of a deal that was supposed to include the release of several American citizens being held hostage in Lebanon by Hezbollah, a close ally of Iran. Cave was one of the participants who hoped that the operation would also eventually lead to improved U.S. and Israeli political relations with the Iranian regime. Over several months, he served as an Iran expert, Persian-English interpreter, and sometime negotiator, in numerous meetings with Iranian representatives in Europe and Washington, D.C. In May 1986 he was part of the delegation that traveled clandestinely to Tehran in hopes of meeting with senior Iranian officials. In November 1986, an exposé of the Tehran mission in a Lebanese news magazine brought the secret deals to an abrupt halt.[12]

In the aftermath of the scandal, in-depth probes by Congress and an Office of Independent Counsel focused intently on Cave's role but generally concluded he had not played a fundamental role. He had been brought in at the CIA director's insistence, had not been aware of all of the plans or tactics of the main actors (such as manipulating weapons pricing), and had objected to the involvement of Iranian arms dealer Manucher Ghorbanifar. His depositions to congressional investigators and testimony in legal proceedings, such as at the trial of senior CIA official Clair George, provided important factual information about the operations and the roles of various NSC, CIA, and other players.[13][14][15]

 13.  U.S. Congress (1987). Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, with Supplemental, Minority, and Additional Views (1st ed.). US Government Printing Office. ISBN 978-0788126024.
 14.  Lewis, Neil A. (1992-08-11). "Ex-C.I.A. Expert on Iran Ties Agent to Arms Sale". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2016-04-25.
 15.  Ostrow, Ronald J. (1992-08-11). "Ex-CIA Chief's Statements on Secord Contradicted". Los Angeles Times. ISSN 0458-3035. Retrieved 2016-04-25.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_W._Cave

source:
       1980 October surprise theory

       Duane Clarride entry in en.wikipedia.org
       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duane_Clarridge

       Newsweek article by Nicholas Schou
       1980 October Surprise theory as depicted in George Cave's novel, October 1980
       George Cave's novel, October 1980
 
Cave published his first novel, October 1980 in December 2013.[16] In his final interview Duane Clarridge, former CIA operations officer and Iran-Contra figure, hinted that this novel was a largely accurate depiction of how Reagan's October Surprise transpired.[17]
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CounterSpy_2-2_Weisberg.pdf
https://github.com/lattera/CounterSpy/blob/master/CounterSpy_2-2_Weisberg.pdf

   ____________________________________

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Cockburn

unrelated to ... current topic  


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leslie_Cockburn
   ____________________________________
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Cockburn

unrelated to ... current topic  


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Cockburn
   ____________________________________

1978
ex-CIA officials and contract operatives
 • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_G._Clines
 • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rafael_Quintero
 • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Shackley
 • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricardo_Chavez

source:
       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_G._Clines
   ____________________________________
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Brewton

unrelated to ... current topic  

Pete Brewton teaches journalism and law at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas.[1] Brewton is best known for an investigative journalism series he wrote for the Houston Post that were the basis of a book, The Mafia, CIA and George Bush. He is a journalist with 15 years reporting experience at the Houston Chronicle and the Houston Post. He practiced law in Houston for five years.[2]


The Mafia, CIA and George Bush

He is the author of the book The Mafia, CIA and George Bush, which is based on his investigations of powerful Texas businessmen, politicians, and their connections to the savings and loans scandals of the 1980s.[5] The book grew out of an 8-part investigative reporting series that ran in the Houston Post, a series that the Seattle Times columnist John Hinterberger described as "a bombshell series backed up by eight months of investigation."[6] The series won the Galvaston Press Club award for best investigative series.[7] In 1991 PEN awarded the Journalism prize to Brewton, "Awarded for his series on the Savings & Loan scandal," in the Houston Post.[8]

Andrew Ferguson of the Weekly Standard characterized Brewton's book as one of a series of anti-Bush books "written in Texas by veteran Texas activists who have grown bitter from the endless frustration and resentment that is their unhappy lot." Andrew Ferguson was a speech writer for George H. W. Bush in 1992.[9] Brewton promoted the book on Alternative Views.[10]

Texas politician Jon Lindsay took out a newspaper advertisement to discredit Brewton's book.[11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pete_Brewton
   ____________________________________

Lawrence Walsh, appointed Indepedent counsel in December 1986
Firewall : the iran-contra conspiracy and cover-up


As part of the effort to circumvent the Boland Amendment, the NSC established "the Enterprise", an arms-smuggling network headed by a retired U.S. Air Force officer turned arms dealer Richard Secord that supplied arms to the Contras. It was ostensibly a private sector operation, but in fact was controlled by the NSC.[21] To fund "the Enterprise", the Reagan administration was constantly on the look-out for funds that came from outside the U.S. government in order not to explicitly violate the letter of the Boland Amendment, though the efforts to find alternative funding for the Contras violated the spirit of the Boland Amendment.[23] Ironically, military aid to the Contras was reinstated with Congressional consent in October 1986, a month before the scandal broke.[24][25]

The trial

During the trial, North testified that on 21, 22 or 24 November, he witnessed Poindexter destroy what may have been the only signed copy of a presidential covert-action finding that sought to authorize CIA participation in the November 1985 Hawk missile shipment to Iran.[59] U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese admitted on 25 November that profits from weapons sales to Iran were made available to assist the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

The National Security Act of 1947, which created the NSC, gave it the vague right to perform "such other functions and duties related to the intelligence as the National Security Council may from time to time direct."[82]

Bob Woodward, Veil : the secret wars of the CIA 1981–1987

 diversion of funds allotted to the Afghan operation.
   Gust Avrakodos
  Clair George

source:
       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair
   ____________________________________

Ricky Ross
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Freeway%22_Rick_Ross

Through his connection to Blandón, and Blandón's supplier Norwin Meneses Cantarero, Ross was able to purchase Nicaraguan cocaine at significantly reduced rates.[20] Ross began distributing cocaine at $10,000 per kilo less than the average street price, distributing it to the Bloods and Crips street gangs. By 1982, Ross had received his moniker of "Freeway Ricky" and claimed to have sold up to US$3 million worth of cocaine per day, purchasing 1,000 pounds of cocaine a week.[8]

 ── Drug supply (Nicaraguan cocaine at significantly reduced rates)
      Nicaragua is not a known cocaine producer (?)    
      Nicaragua - a trans shipment point
Central America - a trans shipment point - the planes needed a place to refuel
      Columbia, - [drug producers]
          Peru, - [drug producers]      
    and Bolivia - [drug] producers  
       ── source:
                  http://www.whale.to/b/webb10.html
 ── Ricky Ross <== Blandón <== Norwin Meneses Cantarero
 ── Nicaraguan cocaine <== ??
 ── significantly reduced rates (how much?)
     ── Ross began distributing cocaine at $10,000 per kilo less than the average street price

Ross initially invested most of his profits in houses and businesses, because he feared his mother would catch on to what he was doing if he started spending lavishly on himself. In a jailhouse interview with reporter Gary Webb, Ross said, "We were hiding our money from our mothers."[21] He invested a portion of the proceeds from his drug dealing activities in Anita Baker's first album.

Drug empire

With thousands of employees [independent contractors], Ross has said he operated drug sales not only in Los Angeles but in places across the country including St. Louis, New Orleans, Texas, Kansas City, Oklahoma, Indiana, Cincinnati, North Carolina, South Carolina, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Seattle. He has said that his most lucrative sales came from the Ohio area. He made similar claims in a 1996 PBS interview.[22]

 ── Ricky Ross's 1996 PBS interview

Federal prosecutors estimated that between 1982 and 1989 Ross bought and resold several metric tons of cocaine. In 1980 dollars, his gross earnings were said to be in excess of $900 million – with a profit of nearly $300 million. As his distribution empire grew to include forty-two cities, the price he paid per kilo of powder cocaine dropped from as much as $60,000 to as low as $10,000."[7]

 ── several metric tons of cocaine.
 ── the price [Ross] paid per kilo of powder cocaine dropped from as much as $60,000 to as low as $10,000."[7]

Much of Ross's success at evading law enforcement was due to his ring's possession of police scanners and voice scramblers. Furthermore, journalist Gary Webb alleged that the CIA was sponsoring the operation as part of its effort to finance Contras, giving Ross another level of protection. Following one drug bust, a Los Angeles County sheriff remarked that Ross's men had "better equipment than we have."[23]
   ____________________________________
Gary Webb
 ── cia involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking
 ── claim that the cocaine trafficking had played an important role in the creation of the crack cocaine problem in central Los Angeles
 ── in the cia report, it was found that CIA assets had been trafficking narcotics to fund the Contra rebels.
 ── the cia (The Agency) was aware of this trafficking, and in some cases dissuaded the DEA and other government agencies from investigating the Contra drug supply networks involved.[6]

Former Panamanian deputy health minister Dr. Hugo Spadafora, who had fought with the Contra army, outlined charges of cocaine trafficking to a prominent Panamanian official.  Spadafora was later found murdered.

drug enforcement administration (DEA),
customs service,
federal bureau of investigation (FBI),
costa rica public security ministry,
rebels,
Americans who work with [the rebel]

note: "two Cuban-Americans used armed rebel troops to guard cocaine at clandestine airfields in northern Costa Rica. They identified the Cuban-Americans as members of Brigade 2506, an anti-Castro group that participated in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Several also said they supplied information about the smuggling to U.S. investigators."
 One of the Americans said "that in one ongoing operation, the cocaine is unloaded from planes at rebel airstrips and taken to an Atlantic coast port where it is concealed on shrimp boats that are later unloaded in the Miami area."[7]

 Julio Zavala, also convicted on trafficking charges, said "that he supplied $500,000 to two Costa Rican-based Contra groups and that the majority of it came from cocaine trafficking in the San Francisco Bay area, Miami and New Orleans."[11]

April 1986
"Twelve American, Nicaraguan and Cuban-American rebel backers interviewed by The Associated Press said they had been questioned over the past several months [about contra cocaine trafficking] by the FBI. In the interviews, some covering several days and being conducted in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Colorado and California, several of the Contra backers told AP of firsthand knowledge of cocaine trafficking."[12]

“Once you set up a covert operation to supply arms and money, it's very difficult to separate it from the kind of people who are involved in other forms of trade, and especially drugs. There is a limited number of planes, pilots and landing strips. By developing a system for supply of the Contras, the US built a road for drug supply into the US.”

           — Former contract analyst for the CIA David MacMichael[14]

U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee's Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations

According to the report, the U.S. State Department paid over $806,000 to "four companies owned and operated by narcotics traffickers" to carry humanitarian assistance to the Contras.[1]

From August 18–20, 1996, the San Jose Mercury News published the Dark Alliance series by Gary Webb,[15][16] which claimed:
             For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. [This drug ring] opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles [and, as a result,] the cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America.[17]

Ricky Ross
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Freeway%22_Rick_Ross
          https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch06p3.htm

Oscar Danilo Blandón
          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Danilo_Bland%C3%B3n
          https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch02p1.htm

Norwin Meneses
<< get en.wikipedia.org entry >>
<< no wikipedia page on Norwin Meneses >>
          https://oig.justice.gov/sites/default/files/archive/special/9712/ch03p1.htm

 three men: Ricky Ross, Oscar Danilo Blandón, and Norwin Meneses.

Drug supply  (Nicaraguan cocaine at significantly reduced rates)
Ricky Ross <== Oscar Danilo Blandón <== Norwin Meneses Cantarero

According to the series, Ross was a major drug dealer in Los Angeles, and Blandón and Meneses were Nicaraguans who smuggled drugs into the U.S. and supplied dealers like Ross. The series alleged that the three had relationships with the Contras and the CIA, and that law enforcement agencies failed to successfully prosecute them largely due to their Contra and CIA connections.

On October 3, 1996, LA County Sheriff Sherman Block ordered a fourth investigation into Webb's claims that a 1986 raid on Blandón's drug organization by the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department had produced evidence of CIA ties to drug smuggling and that this was later suppressed.[22]

Drug supply  (Nicaraguan cocaine at significantly reduced rates)
Ricky Ross <== Oscar Danilo Blandón <== Norwin Meneses Cantarero
([ according to Ricky Ross, Oscar Danilo Blandón was his sole supplier, because Blandón was providing Ricky with Nicaraguan cocaine at significantly reduced rates. ])
([ both, Blandón and Meneses were major drug dealers, according to the justice department report ]) ([ define major ])

Justice Department report: concluded that "the claims that Blandón and Meneses were responsible for introducing crack cocaine into South Central Los Angeles and spreading the crack epidemic throughout the country were unsupported."  Although [the justice department report] did find that both men [Blandón and Meneses] were major drug dealers, "guilty of enriching themselves at the expense of countless drug users", and that they had contributed money to the Contra cause, "we did not find that their activities were responsible for the crack cocaine epidemic in South Central Los Angeles, much less the rise of crack throughout the nation, or that they were a significant source of support for the Contras."

 drug dealing activities
  ── responsible for the crack cocaine epidemic in South Central Los Angeles;
  ── rise of crack throughout the nation;
  ── significant source of support for the Contras

([ who were other drug supplier; how were Blandón and Meneses able to get their cocaine at significantly reduced rate? ])

[the justice department report] found that some [personnels] in the government were "not eager" to have DEA agent Celerino Castillo "openly probe" activities at Ilopango Airport in El Salvador, where covert operations in support of the Contras were undertaken, and that the CIA had indeed intervened in a case involving smuggler Julio Zavala.

 ── ([ the following is not true:  what if the u.s. support for the Nicaraguan contra is a legal cover, a pretext, a national security curtain; the real benefit, the money to be made  from financing the supply of gears, equipment, arms, and training to the Nicaraguan contra  is in the drugs trafficking; got to track the (stock-level, flow-rate) of the money ])

In the 623rd paragraph, the report described a cable from the CIA's Directorate of Operations dated October 22, 1982, describing a prospective meeting between Contra leaders in Costa Rica for "an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms, which then are shipped to Nicaragua."[49][non-primary source needed] The two main Contra groups, US arms dealers, and a lieutenant of a drug ring which imported drugs from Latin America to the US west coast were set to attend the Costa Rica meeting. The lieutenant trafficker was also a Contra, and the CIA knew that there was an arms-for-drugs shuttle and did nothing to stop it.[52]

 ── "an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms, which then are shipped to Nicaragua."[49]
      ── pay for arms in narcotics
      ── how did they pay for the narcotics?
 ── imported drugs from Latin America to the US west coast
 ── arms-for-drugs shuttle
([ arms supplier to the Nicaraguan contra, who? ])

The report also stated that former DEA agent Celerino Castillo III alleged that during the 1980s, Ilopango Airport in El Salvador was used by Contras for drug smuggling flights, and "his attempts to investigate Contra drug smuggling were stymied by DEA management, the U.S. Embassy in El Salvador, and the CIA".[53]

During a PBS Frontline investigation, DEA field agent Hector Berrellez said, "I believe that elements working for the CIA were involved in bringing drugs into the country."

PBS Frontline investigation

"I know specifically that some of the CIA contract workers, meaning some of the pilots, in fact were bringing drugs into the U.S. and landing some of these drugs in government air bases. And I know so because I was told by some of these pilots that in fact they had done that."[54]

source:
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking
    ____________________________________
         Panama - international banking center for drug money - banking
      Nicaragua - a trans shipment point
Central America - a trans shipment point - the planes needed a place to refuel
      Columbia, - [drug producers]
          Peru, - [drug producers]      
    and Bolivia - [drug] producers  


source:
        https://ourhiddenhistory.org/
        http://www.whale.to/b/webb10.html

CIA Connections to Contra Drug Trafficking
Journalist Gary Webb — January 16, 1999

Dark Alliance author Gary Webb gave a fascinating talk on the evening of January 16, outlining the findings of his investigation of the CIA's connection to drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan contras. Approximately 300 people, crowded into the First United Methodist Church in Eugene, Oregon, listened with rapt attention as Webb detailed his experiences. Webb's riveting speech was followed by an intense question-and-answer session, during which he candidly answered questions about the "Dark Alliance" controversy, his firing from the San Jose Mercury News, and CIA/contra/cocaine secrets that still await revelation.

ORIGINAL: http://www.whale.to/b/webb10.html

  ...  ...  ...
  ...  ...  ...

 ── Well, what Noriega had done was sort of create an international banking center for drug money. That was his part of it. Nicaragua was nothing ever than just a trans-shipment point. Central America was never anything more than a trans-shipment point. Columbia Peru and Bolivia were the producers, and the planes needed a place to refuel, and that's all that Central America ever was. The banking was all done in Panama.
  ...  ...  ...
   ____________________________________

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, one of the things that your editor said in his letter was that the series had oversimplified the spread of the crack epidemic and blaming it sort of on Ricky Ross and its explosion eastward from Los Angeles. Yet, and I seem to recall that the L.A. Times itself had pinned a lot of the blame for the expanding crack epidemic on Ricky Ross years before. What’s your sense—do you think that that charge that the oversimplifying of the spread of crack was accurate?

GARY WEBB: No, I don’t think so at all. And I think it’s very clear, when you look at the historical record, that it started in South Central Los Angeles. It spread primarily through the gangs. I mean, there are federal government reports that we have which said that, you know, they found evidence of Crip crack dealing and Blood crack dealing in 45 cities in 32 states. And this was a couple of years ago, and it’s still spreading. I mean, part of the problem is that the media often times believes its own propaganda. And one of the biggest propaganda efforts that I came across in the story was the idea that crack happened overnight, that in 1986 suddenly we woke up one morning and we were engulfed by this tidal wave of crack. And that’s pretty much the prevailing media belief to this day, which, you know, it’s nonsense. I mean, it started very slowly and started in South Central, and it took years to spread to other cities. So, I mean, I think Ceppos and I just disagree on the whole epidemiology of crack. And unfortunately, he’s the editor, and he gets to write a column, and I don’t. I mean, I stand by the story.


source:
      https://www.democracynow.org/1997/5/14/san_jose_mercury_news_editor_claims
    ____________________________________

https://www.democracynow.org/1997/5/14/san_jose_mercury_news_editor_claims

Jerry Ceppos, editor of the San Jose Mercury News, has made statements that the integrity of his paper’s story connecting the CIA to crack cocaine distribution in South Central Los Angeles and the military contras in Nicaragua. Amy and Juan are joined by Gary Webb, the journalist that first broke the story. Webb defended his journalistic integrity as well as the information in his articles about the L.A. drug ring.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re listening to Democracy Now! I’m joined now by my co-host, Juan González, a columnist with the New York Daily News. Nice to see you again, Juan.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Good day, Amy. And how are you?

AMY GOODMAN: Good. And we’re going to start off with a piece we’ve both been following since last summer, when the San Jose Mercury News series began, and we’re going to talk about the latest development. The executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News has acknowledged that its controversial series suggesting a link between the CIA and cocaine trafficking was, quote, “oversimplified,” omitted important conflicting evidence and, quote, “fell short of my standards,” he said. He is Jerry Ceppos. He wrote in a column on Sunday that the “Dark Alliance” series “strongly implied CIA knowledge” that a drug ring linked to the Nicaraguan contras was selling crack in Los Angeles in the 1980s. And he said, quote, “I feel that we did not have proof that top CIA officials knew of the relationship. … We also did not include CIA comment about our findings, and I think we should have.”

Well, when they were originally published last summer, the “Dark Alliance” series of articles by investigative reporter Gary Webb caused a sensation, prompting black congressional leaders, headed by Congressmember Maxine Waters of Los Angeles, to demand an independent investigation into the role of the CIA in illegal drug trafficking. Then, CIA Director John Deutch went so far as to hold a town meeting in Los Angeles, where he said a full investigation into the allegations would be held. For its part, the media establishment, led by The New York Times, The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, attacked the articles and claimed that radio shows and street corner gossip had distorted the facts of the CIA’s role in drug trafficking.

Joining us right now to talk about this extraordinary move of the editor of the—executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News is Gary Webb, the reporter at the San Jose Mercury News who broke the “Dark Alliance” series. I should say, by the way, that we did invite Mr. Ceppos to join us, but he didn’t and just said his words stand on their own.

So we welcome you, Gary Webb, to Democracy Now!

GARY WEBB: Hi. It’s good to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, good to be with you. Why don’t you start out by telling us your reaction to Jerry Ceppos’s basically allegations against you, saying that you just engaged in shoddy journalism?

GARY WEBB: Well, I don’t think he said that. I mean, if you read the thing carefully—and believe me, you have to read it very carefully to get this out of it—he says that the story essentially is true, that, you know, the contras were selling cocaine in South Central Los Angeles, they were selling large quantities of it, and the money from the sales of the drugs were going to the war effort. And, you know, as he noted, we have solid documentation for that.

 ── the story is essentially true
 ── Nicaraguan contra were selling cocaine in South central los angeles
 ── they were selling large quantities of it
 ── the money from the sales of drugs were going to the war effort.
 ── we have solid documentation

What he took issue with was a couple of things which I consider sort of trivial. And the other problem is that a lot of the criticisms he made in that column are moot, because we’ve been investigating this for eight months since, and we’ve come up with a lot of additional information that so far the Mercury has not printed. And it’s specifically on point with a couple of the issues he raises. Primarily, you know, one of the issues he says is that the figure that we used, which was sort of a broad figure of millions of dollars going to the contras, he said was an estimate. I think it’s obvious to a lot of people that when you don’t put a number on something, when you just use a phrase like “millions,” it is an estimate.

Subsequent to that, however, we’ve interviewed one of the couriers for this drug ring, who told us that he took $5 million to $6 million down in one year alone, in 1982. I tried to persuade Mr. Ceppos that this is information that we ought to share with the public, and so far we haven’t done that. The other problem is that we have evidence now of direct CIA involvement with this drug operation. We also have evidence of very high-level CIA knowledge of at least portions of it. Again, this is information that was turned in several months ago and has not appeared in the paper, and I can’t really get a straight answer as to why that information is just sitting there.

 ── couriers drug ring: $5 million to $6 million down in one year alone, in 1982.
 ── direct CIA involvement with this drug operation.
 ── high-level CIA knowledge of at least portions of this drug operation.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Gary, what kind of pressure came on the paper, as far as you can tell, in terms of the public outcry of this series from government institutions or the federal government itself?

GARY WEBB: I don’t know about any. I mean, there was pressure on us initially not to print this information about Danilo Blandón, who was one of the drug traffickers that we wrote about, from the DEA. I mean, they were insistent that we not do this, and tried to set up various enticements for us to leave that bit out. After the series appeared, I mean, there was a huge, huge controversy. And, you know, I think it was a situation where you had us against the world, essentially. You know, The New York Times, The Washington Post, the L.A. Times were all saying that, you know, this wasn’t any big deal, that there was only five tons of cocaine sold by these folks down in South Central. And I think, you know, journalists are like anybody: They succumb to peer pressure very easily—and which is I think why you don’t see more stories like this. If you go back to the '80s and look at what happened to Brian Barger and Bob Parry, when they did their contra cocaine stories back in the ’80s, the same thing. I mean, it was them against the entire rest of the press. And it's not a comfortable position to be in. I don’t mind it, because I know the story is true, but I think other people get a little knock-kneed when that happens.

 ── pressure from the DEA not to print information about Danilo Blandón
 ── Danilo Blandón, drug traffickers
 ── Danilo Blandón, DEA informant?? (info not from democracy now Gary Webb interview)
 ── only five tons of cocaine sold by these folks down in South Central.
 ── Brian Barger and Bob Parry, did their Nicaraguan contra cocaine stories back in the ’80s

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, one of the things that your editor said in his letter was that the series had oversimplified the spread of the crack epidemic and blaming it sort of on Ricky Ross and its explosion eastward from Los Angeles. Yet, and I seem to recall that the L.A. Times itself had pinned a lot of the blame for the expanding crack epidemic on Ricky Ross years before. What’s your sense—do you think that that charge that the oversimplifying of the spread of crack was accurate?

GARY WEBB: No, I don’t think so at all. And I think it’s very clear, when you look at the historical record, that it started in South Central Los Angeles. It spread primarily through the gangs. I mean, there are federal government reports that we have which said that, you know, they found evidence of Crip crack dealing and Blood crack dealing in 45 cities in 32 states. And this was a couple of years ago, and it’s still spreading. I mean, part of the problem is that the media oftentimes believes its own propaganda. And one of the biggest propaganda efforts that I came across in the story was the idea that crack happened overnight, that in 1986 suddenly we woke up one morning and we were engulfed by this tidal wave of crack. And that’s pretty much the prevailing media belief to this day, which, you know, it’s nonsense. I mean, it started very slowly and started in South Central, and it took years to spread to other cities. So, I mean, I think Ceppos and I just disagree on the whole epidemiology of crack. And unfortunately, he’s the editor, and he gets to write a column, and I don’t. I mean, I stand by the story.

 ── expanding crack epidemic spread primarily through the gangs.
 ── federal government reports: evidence of Crip crack dealing and Blood crack dealing in 45 cities in 32 states.


AMY GOODMAN: You’ve said a few times now in this brief conversation that you have more evidence and that you’ve attempted to write more articles.

GARY WEBB: I have written more articles. They just haven’t appeared in the paper.

AMY GOODMAN: So what’s happening?

GARY WEBB: Nothing. They’re just sitting there. I mean, Georg Hodel, who is my Nicaraguan colleague who’s been working on this with me, we turned in four more parts of the series in February, and nobody’s even lifted a finger to edit them. They’re just sort of sitting there.

AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t Jerry Ceppos just call them notes?

GARY WEBB: He was quoted in the Times calling them notes. I was frankly astonished to see that. I mean, unless his definition of “notes” is different than 99 percent of the American public, that’s just not true. These were very long, very detailed stories.

AMY GOODMAN: Like the first series you did?

GARY WEBB: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the second part of the series goes—I mean, it’s probably even more explosive than the first part. The second part deals with who in the government knew about this, which federal agents were either aware of this and did nothing or, in some cases, were working with the members of the drug ring. I mean, we’ve got a paper trail now that goes all the way into the National Security Council. And, you know, when we were sent out to do these additional stories back in October, the feeling at the newspaper was let’s go after, let’s get this stuff, let’s put this stuff in the paper, let’s shut everybody up. And I said, you know, “That’s a great idea.” We went down to Central America two more times, came back with what I thought was just dynamite stuff. And it has just sat there. And instead, we have this column that ignores a lot of the stuff that we found then and pretends it doesn’t exist and says, “Well, I guess—you know, I guess we weren’t as right as we thought we were.” The truth is we were more right than we knew.

 ── The truth is we were more right than we knew.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Have you—I’m familiar with the whole process when you initially break a story, that you inevitably get all kinds of people coming forward with even more tips.

GARY WEBB: Yeah.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And I’m sure that must have happened. You must have been overwhelmed.

GARY WEBB: They were coming out of the woodwork, yeah. They were coming out of the woodwork. And people that I had been looking for for a year suddenly surfaced after the story came out. And we went down, and we interviewed them. We interviewed pilots that were flying this cocaine in and out of the country. We interviewed the man who was taking the money down there. It was really a mess. And, you know, we got—like I said, we were more right than we knew. I was astonished how deep this thing went.

 ── We interviewed pilots that were flying this cocaine in and out of the country.
 ── courier: We interviewed the man who was taking the money down there.


AMY GOODMAN: Gary Webb, if you can’t publish this new series in the San Jose Mercury News, would you like to name the names here on Democracy Now!?

GARY WEBB: I’m going to give the Mercury the opportunity to print the stuff first. If I can’t reach some agreement with them, then I’ll have to see what else we can do. But, I mean, it’s a very—it’s a sort of a hard position to be in, to have your paper sort of take a dive on a story that you know is true, a story that they know is true, and pretend that we don’t have this other information.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you thinking about leaving?

GARY WEBB: No, I’m thinking about staying there and fighting to get these stories in the newspaper. I mean, whatever the situation is, I mean, I like the Mercury News. I’ve like working for it. I like the people there. I think it’s a good, honest newspaper. I find these latest moves to be very bizarre, however.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, let me ask you about that, because I’m personally familiar with one of the executives there, Jay Harris, the publisher, who I—

GARY WEBB: Right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I used to work with him at the Philadelphia Daily News. And I generally considered him a more courageous news executive than most others, and certainly he’s one of the few African-American publishers, if not the only, of a major daily newspaper in the country.

GARY WEBB: Right.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: What has been Harris’s role? Has he met with you? Or has all the word from management come down directly through the editor?

GARY WEBB: You know, you’re talking about a level now that is not visible to mere mortals like me. I’m sure Harris was involved in some of this. What the extent of his involvement was, I don’t know. I mean, I did not talk to him about this.

AMY GOODMAN: And yet, the paper has let you continue the investigation, presumably. You’re there as a regular reporter, and you’ve done this four-part series.

GARY WEBB: And that—right, and that’s all I’ve been working on since the series started. So, I mean, it seems to me—and certainly my immediate editor is intent on getting these other stories published. But, you know, I’ve got to tell you, I don’t think the chances are all that great, given the fact that the paper’s come out with this strange column, which says that we don’t have information that we do have.

 ── the paper’s come out with this strange column, which says that we don’t have information that we do have.


AMY GOODMAN: Is there any direct CIA intervention there—I mean, even in taking the CIA seal that you had originally on the “Dark Alliance” series with a person smoking crack in the middle of it, taking that off?

GARY WEBB: If there was, I don’t know about it. You know, I’ve heard rumors that CIA attorneys showed up at the paper. I never heard or saw anything to substantiate that. Again, I mean, they don’t contact me. If there’s contact going on, it’s above my level. They don’t seem to like talking to me very much for some reason.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, Gary Webb, we thank you for talking to us. Gary Webb, a San Jose Mercury News reporter, who broke the series, the “Dark Alliance,” last year, the story behind the crack explosion. And we do look forward to seeing these next series of articles published, hopefully in the San Jose Mercury News.

GARY WEBB: I hope so, too.

AMY GOODMAN: Thank you for being with us.

GARY WEBB: All right.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.
   ____________________________________

In a three-part exposé, investigative journalist Gary Webb reported that a guerrilla army in Nicaragua had used crack cocaine sales in Los Angeles’ black neighborhoods to fund an attempted coup of Nicaragua’s socialist government in the 1980s — and that the CIA had purposefully funded it.

It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel, right? Except it actually happened.

For Webb, his reporting “challenged the widely held belief that crack use began in African American neighborhoods not for any tangible reason but mainly because of the kind of people who lived in them.”

“Nobody was forcing them to smoke crack, the argument went, so they only have themselves to blame. They should just say no. That argument never seemed to make much sense to me because drugs don’t just appear magically on street corners in black neighborhoods. Even the most rabid hustler in the ghetto can’t sell what he doesn’t have. If anyone was responsible for the drug problems in a specific area, I thought, it was the people who were bringing the drugs in.”

 ── “... If anyone was responsible for the drug problems in a specific area, I thought, it was the people who were bringing the drugs in.” (Gary Webb)
 ── “... drugs don’t just appear magically on street corners in black neighborhoods. Even the most rabid hustler in the ghetto can’t sell what he doesn’t have. If anyone was responsible for the drug problems in a specific area, I thought, it was the people who were bringing the drugs in.” (Gary Webb)

Those people, he found, were backed by the CIA.

source:
       https://allthatsinteresting.com/gary-webb
https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%253A//allthatsinteresting.com/gary-webb
   ____________________________________

 ── “It’s not a situation where the government or the CIA sat down and said, 'Okay, let’s invent crack, let’s sell it in black neighborhoods, let’s decimate black America,’” Webb says. “It was a situation where, 'We need money for a covert operation, the quickest way to raise it is sell cocaine, you guys go sell it somewhere, we don’t want to know anything about it.'" (Gary Webb)

source:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gary-webb-dark-alliance_n_5961748

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That big aircraft came largely from El Salvador, according to U.S. General Accounting Office records.

When DEA agent Celerino Castillo III, who was assigned to El Salvador, heard that the Contras were flying cocaine out of a Salvadoran airport and into the U.S., he began logging flights — including flight numbers and pilot names.

“Was he involved with the CIA? Probably. Was he involved in drugs? Most definitely… Were those two things involved with each other? They’ve never said that, obviously. They’ve never admitted that. But I don’t know where these guys get these big aircraft.”

Bradley Brunon, attorney for Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes
He sent his information to DEA headquarters in the 1980s, but the only response he got was an internal investigation — not of these flights, but of him. He retired in 1991.

“Basically, the bottom line is it was a covert operation and they [DEA officials] were covering it up,” he told Webb. “You can’t get any simpler than that. It was a cover-up.”

A cover-up with devastating consequences. L.A.’s drug lords had come up with a way to make cocaine cheaper and more potent: cooking it into “crack.” And nobody spread the plague of crack as far and wide as Ricky Donnell “Freeway Rick” Ross.

Freeway Rick And South-Central: Crack Capital Of The World
Gary Webb believed that if Blandón, Meneses, and Rick Ross had worked in any other legal line of business, they “would have been hailed as geniuses of marketing.”

source:
https://allthatsinteresting.com/gary-webb
https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%253A//allthatsinteresting.com/gary-webb
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Associate Press report from 1985 and a House Subcommittee from 1989 that found that “U.S. officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua.”

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https://allthatsinteresting.com/gary-webb
https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https%253A//allthatsinteresting.com/gary-webb
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How Gary Webb Linked The CIA To The Crack Epidemic — And Paid The Ultimate Price
By Marco Margaritoff
Published December 5, 2019
Updated February 18, 2022
Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" series boldly claimed the CIA knew about a U.S. drug trafficking scheme that ravaged the country's inner cities to fund Nicaragua's Contra rebels. Years later, he shot himself in the head.
In a three-part exposé, investigative journalist Gary Webb reported that a guerrilla army in Nicaragua had used crack cocaine sales in Los Angeles’ black neighborhoods to fund an attempted coup of Nicaragua’s socialist government in the 1980s — and that the CIA had purposefully funded it.

It sounds like a Tom Clancy novel, right? Except it actually happened.

The series of reports, published in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996, set off a firestorm of protests in L.A. and in black communities across the country, as African-Americans became outraged by the assertion that the U.S. government could have supported — or at least turned a blind eye to — a drug epidemic that had ravaged their population while at the same time incarcerating a generation with Ronald Reagan’s “War on Drugs.”

 ── Ronald Reagan’s “War on Drugs.”

For Webb, his reporting “challenged the widely held belief that crack use began in African American neighborhoods not for any tangible reason but mainly because of the kind of people who lived in them.”

“Nobody was forcing them to smoke crack, the argument went, so they only have themselves to blame. They should just say no. That argument never seemed to make much sense to me because drugs don’t just appear magically on street corners in black neighborhoods. Even the most rabid hustler in the ghetto can’t sell what he doesn’t have. If anyone was responsible for the drug problems in a specific area, I thought, it was the people who were bringing the drugs in.”

Those people, he found, were backed by the CIA.

 ── the people who were bringing the drugs were backed by the CIA

[Image: Gary Webb Speaks At A Congressional Conference]

Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/Getty ImagesGary Webb speaking at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Annual Legislative Conference. He participated in a panel discussion called, “Connections, Coverage, and Casualties: The Continuing Story of the CIA and Drugs.” Sept. 11, 1997.

On the other hand, more prominent newspapers couldn’t believe that a small-time newspaper had scooped them in such a groundbreaking story. Webb faced an onslaught of reports from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and especially the Los Angeles Times that sought to discredit him — and it worked.

The CIA, amid a public relations “nightmare,” broke its policy of not commenting on any individual’s agency affiliation and denied Webb’s story entirely.

Facing intense pressure from the biggest names in media, Webb’s own editor-in-chief rescinded support for his story.

Gary Webb’s career was ruined, and in 2004 he ended it all for good with two .38-caliber bullets to the head.

Here’s how Webb’s groundbreaking story propelled him to the national stage — and spelled his doom.

Gary Webb’s “Dark Alliance”
Webb’s “dark alliance” consisted of a group of rebels trying to overthrow the socialist government of Nicaragua. These Contras were funded by a Southern California drug ring and backed by the CIA.

 ── contras were a group of rebels trying to overthrow the socialist government of Nicaragua.

“For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to an arm of the contra guerrillas of Nicaragua run by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

 ── why are cocaine being sold from san francisco bay area drug ring to Crips and Bloods gangs of Los Angeles?
 ── drug profits use to arm the contra guerrillas in Nicaragua
 ── Nicaraguan contra guerrillas run by the c.i.a.

Gary Webb, August 1996
Let’s go back to where it all began.

The U.S.-backed dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua came to an end with the Sandinista Revolution of 1978 and 1979. With no legal recourse to topple the five-person junta that took Somoza’s place, CIA interests had to find alternative means to plant a figurehead of their choosing.

President Ronald Reagan allocated $19.9 million to set up a U.S.-trained paramilitary force of 500 Nicaraguans, what eventually became known as the FDN, or the Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense (Nicaraguan Democratic Force).

But in order to topple the Sandanistas, the FDN, also known as the Contras, needed a lot more weapons — and a lot more money. And to get that money, it needed to look beyond foreign aid.

 ── U.S.-trained paramilitary force of Nicaraguans
 ── became known as the FDN, or the Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense (Nicaraguan Democratic Force)
 ── the FDN, also known as the Contras

Soon enough, according to Webb, the FDN set its sights on the poor, black neighborhood of South-Central Los Angeles — and rendered it ground zero of the 1980s crack epidemic.

A C-SPAN segment in which Gary Webb elaborates on his investigative work on the dark alliance of CIA agents, Contra rebels, and California drug dealers.
Webb’s reporting, focused on a few central players of the L.A. coke scene and the Contra rebels, illustrated how a CIA-backed war in South America devastated black communities in southern California and across the country.

 ── South-Central Los Angeles is ground zero of the 1980s crack epidemic.
 ── Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua (U.S.-backed dictatorship) came to an end
    ==> Sandinista Revolution of 1978 and 1979
    ==> U.S.-trained paramilitary force of Nicaraguans (the Contras) (FDN)
    ==> needed a lot more weapons
    ==> a lot more money, beyond foreign aid
    ==> generate profits from drug trafficking
    ==> drug dealers (distributors?): Crips and Bloods gangs of Los Angeles
    ==> South-Central Los Angeles is ground zero of the 1980s crack epidemic.
 ── how a CIA-backed war in Nicaragua devastated black communities in southern California and across the country.


At worst, the CIA orchestrated the drug ring. At best, they knew about it for years and did absolutely nothing to stop it. All the better to serve the country’s economic and political interests abroad.

Shepherding Traffickers To Safety
One of the most notable street-level players was Oscar Danilo Blandón Reyes, a former Nicaraguan bureaucrat-turned-prolific cocaine supplier in California.

 ── Oscar Danilo Blandón Reyes

From 1981 to 1986, Blandón seemed to be protected by invisible higher-ups that quietly held jurisdiction over local authorities.

After six years of shepherding thousands of kilos of cocaine worth millions of dollars to the black gangs of L.A. during the early 1980s without a single arrest, Blandón was busted on drugs and weapons charges on Oct. 27, 1986.

[Image: Teenage Contra Rebels]

Jason Bleibtreu/Sygma/Getty ImagesTeenage Contra rebels at a training camp in Nicaragua. The Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguauense (FDN) guerrilla group was created in 1981 to oust the country’s socialist government.

In a written statement to obtain a search warrant for Blandón’s sprawling cocaine operation, L.A. County sheriff’s Sergeant Tom Gordon confirmed that local drug agents knew about Blandón’s involvement with the CIA-backed Contras — all the way back in the mid-1980s:

“Danilo Blandon is in charge of a sophisticated cocaine smuggling and distribution organization operating in Southern California… The monies gained from the sales of cocaine are transported to Florida and laundered through Orlando Murillo, who is a high-ranking officer of a chain of banks in Florida named Government Securities Corporation. From this bank the monies are filtered to the contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua.”

 ── chain of banks in Florida named Government Securities Corporation

All of this and more was later backed up by Blandón himself, after he became an informant for the DEA and took the stand as the Justice Department’s key witness in a 1996 drug trial.

“There is a saying that the ends justify the means,” said Blandón in his court testimony. “And that’s what Mr. Bermudez [the CIA agent who instructed the FDN] told us in Honduras, OK? So we started raising money for the contra revolution.”

[Image: South Central Los Angeles Resident]

Luis Sinco/Los Angeles Times/Getty ImagesDonald Shorts, a mechanic and resident of Watts, blamed the crack epidemic that washed over South-Central Los Angeles on the complicity of the CIA and the lack of employment opportunities for black youth.

Meanwhile, Blandón testified that his drug ring sold close to one ton of cocaine in the U.S. in 1981 alone. In the following years, as more and more Americans became hooked on crack, that figure skyrocketed.

While he wasn’t sure how much of that money went to the CIA, he said that “whatever we were running in L.A., the profit was going for the contra revolution.”

Blandón confessed to crimes that would have meant life in prison for the average dealer, but instead he spent just 28 months in prison, followed by unsupervised probation. “He has been extraordinarily helpful,” said O’Neale to Blandón’s judge while arguing for his release.

The DOJ proceeded to pay him more than $166,000 in the two years after his 1994 release, for his services as an informant for the U.S. government.

Even Blandón’s lawyer, Bradley Brunon, was convinced of Blandón’s alliance with the world’s most powerful intelligence agency.

[Image: Boston Cia Protests]

Tom Landers/The Boston Globe/Getty ImagesProtestors march outside of the CIA’s Boston offices in the middle of winter to demonstrate against the war in Nicaragua. March 2, 1986.

Brunon said that his client never specifically claimed he was selling cocaine for the CIA, but figured as much from the “atmosphere of CIA and clandestine activities” that surfaced during that time.

That big aircraft came largely from El Salvador, according to U.S. General Accounting Office records.

When DEA agent Celerino Castillo III, who was assigned to El Salvador, heard that the Contras were flying cocaine out of a Salvadoran airport and into the U.S., he began logging flights — including flight numbers and pilot names.

“Was he involved with the CIA? Probably. Was he involved in drugs? Most definitely… Were those two things involved with each other? They’ve never said that, obviously. They’ve never admitted that. But I don’t know where these guys get these big aircraft.”

Bradley Brunon, attorney for Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes
He sent his information to DEA headquarters in the 1980s, but the only response he got was an internal investigation — not of these flights, but of him. He retired in 1991.

“Basically, the bottom line is it was a covert operation and they [DEA officials] were covering it up,” he told Webb. “You can’t get any simpler than that. It was a cover-up.”

A cover-up with devastating consequences. L.A.’s drug lords had come up with a way to make cocaine cheaper and more potent: cooking it into “crack.” And nobody spread the plague of crack as far and wide as Ricky Donnell “Freeway Rick” Ross.

Freeway Rick And South-Central: Crack Capital Of The World
Gary Webb believed that if Blandón, Meneses, and Rick Ross had worked in any other legal line of business, they “would have been hailed as geniuses of marketing.”

[Image: Freeway Rick Ross]

Ray Tamarra/GC Images“Freeway” Rick Ross didn’t know how to read until he taught himself at the age of 28 while imprisoned. It was as a direct result that he noticed a flaw in his conviction, which subsequently led to a successful appeal. June 24, 2015.New York City, New York.

According to Esquire, Ross raked in more than $900 million in the 1980s, with a profit encroaching on $300 million (nearly $1 billion in today’s dollars).

His empire ultimately grew to 42 U.S. cities, but it all came tumbling down after Blandón, his main supplier, turned into a confidential informant.

Webb first heard of Ross while researching asset forfeitures in 1993 and found he was “one of the biggest crack dealers in L.A.,” he recalled in his 1998 book. He then discovered that Blandón was the CI that got Ross imprisoned in 1996.

When Webb realized that Blandón — the fund-raiser for the Contras — sold cocaine to Ross, South-Central’s biggest crack dealer, he had to speak to him. He eventually got Ross on the phone, and asked him what he knew about Blandón. Ross had only known him as Danilo, and figured he was regular guy with an entrepreneurial streak.

Freeway Rick Ross, Gary Webb, and John Kerry tell their side of the story.
“He was almost like a godfather to me,” said Ross. “He’s the one who got me going. He was [my main source]. Everybody I knew, I knew through him. So really, he could be considered as my only source. In a sense, he was.”

Ross confirmed to Webb that he met Blandón in 1981 or 1982, right around the time when Blandón started dealing drugs. Webb spent hours talking with Ross at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, where he found that Ross knew nothing about Blandón’s past at all.

He didn’t even know who the Contras were, or who was financing their war. Blandón was just a smooth-talking guy with an unending stash of cheap cocaine.

When Webb told Ross that Blandón had worked for the Contras, selling drugs to finance their weapons supplies, Ross was flabbergasted.

“And they put me in jail? I’d say that was some fucked up shit there,” said Ross. “They say I sold dope all over, but man, I know he done sold ten times more dope than me… He’s been working for the government the whole damn time.”

[Image: Contra Forces Moving Down San Juan River]

Bill Gentile/Corbis/Getty ImagesContra forces move down San Juan River (which separates Costa Rica from Nicaragua). “Freeway” Rick Ross said he was entirely unaware his rampant drug dealing in L.A. was funding this group of anti-Sandinistas in Central America.

Ross learned how to read at the age of 28 while imprisoned and found a legal loophole that set him free. The three-strikes law had been falsely applied, which led to a sentence reduction of 20 years after he appealed. He was released in 2009, and has since spread his story far and wide.

Problems With Gary Webb’s Reporting
To be sure, there were serious problems with Webb’s writing and reporting. As Peter Kornbluh laid out in the Columbia Journalism Review in 1997, Webb presented some powerful evidence that two FDN-affiliated Nicaraguans became prolific drug smugglers in the 1980s U.S.

But when it came to the most enticing bit of the story and the part that most animated and enraged the American public — that these smugglers were linked to the CIA — there was, on a closer reading, very little direct evidence.

In all 20,000 words of “Dark Alliance,” Gary Webb never claimed outright that the CIA knew about the Contras’ drug scheme, but he certainly implied as much.

[Image: Gary Webb Portrait]

Bob Berg/Getty ImagesThe CIA denied Gary Webb’s reporting, while his fellow journalists nitpicked Webb’s faults while failing to follow up on his claims. Los Angeles. March 1999.

Kornbluh writes: “Speculative passages like ‘Freeway Rick had no idea just how “plugged” his erudite cocaine broker [Blandón] was. He didn’t know about Norwin Meneses or the CIA,’ were clearly intended to imply CIA involvement.”

It was clear that Blandón and Meneses had connections to the FDN, and it was a known fact that the FDN was backed by the CIA, but Webb failed to make a compelling case for Blandón’s and Meneses’ direct connection to the CIA.

“To some this may seem a trivial distinction,” Kornbluh writes. Rep. Maxine Waters said at the time that “it doesn’t make any difference whether [the CIA] delivered the kilo themselves, or they turned their heads while somebody else delivered it, they are just as guilty.”

But, in the words of Kornbluh, “the articles did not even address the likelihood that CIA officials in charge would have known about these drug operations.”

Failing to do so — and crafting the whole piece as a one-sided, damning report without presenting contradictory evidence — was a major oversight by Webb and his editors, and made his exposé wide open to criticism.

[Image: Maxine Waters Holding A Brick Of Cocaine]

Mike Nelson/AFP/Getty ImagesU.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, representing a majority-minority district in Los Angeles, holds up an apparent package of cocaine for the press. She pushed the government to investigate Webb’s findings. Oct. 7, 1996.

The Major Papers Poke Holes
And that criticism came like a tidal wave — after a brief blackout.

While some Bay Area papers and talk radio, particularly black talk radio, pounced on the story, the country’s major newspapers and TV news networks remained mostly silent.

“Dark Alliance” was breaking internet records, boasting 1.3 million site visits daily — a remarkable feat at a time when only about 20 million Americans had home internet access. And all the while, at least for the first month after the series’ release, America’s most popular news sources were mum.

Then, on October 4, the Washington Post published a scathing “investigation” declaring that “available information does not support the conclusion that the CIA-backed contras — or Nicaraguans in general — played a major role in the emergence of crack as a narcotic in widespread use across the United States.” Even though Webb’s article focused on southern California, not the U.S. in general.

A C-SPAN segment in which Gary Webb fields a range of questions on investigative hurdles and the journalism world’s response.
A couple weeks later, the New York Times released it’s declaration: that there was “scant proof” for Webb’s main contentions.

But the greatest criticism came from the Los Angeles Times, which assembled a 17-person team; one member remembered it being called the “get Gary Webb team.” On October 20, the L.A. paper — incensed that it had been scooped in its own backyard — began publishing a three-part series of its own.

Like the other major papers, the Times relied on the very hyperbole and selective reporting in its own takedown series that it criticized Webb of committing.

Reporter Jesse Katz, who two years prior had written a profile of “Freeway Rick” Ross describing him as “a criminal mastermind…most responsible for flooding Los Angeles streets with mass-marketed cocaine” did a complete about face and characterized Ross as just one small player in a sprawling landscape of L.A. crack dealers. “How the crack epidemic reached that extreme, on some level, had nothing to do with Ross,” he wrote.

All three papers ignored evidence already out there — including a mostly ignored Associate Press report from 1985 and a House Subcommittee from 1989 that found that “U.S. officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua.”

According to a CIA article that was finally released in 2014 titled “Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,” the media’s penchant for jealousy and cannibalism worked in the agency’s favor. Rather than mount a stealth public relations campaign, all the agency had to do was provide reporters with comments of denial. The reporters didn’t need to be convinced to go after Webb, they did it gladly.

“Clearly, there was room to advance the contra/drug/CIA story rather than simply denounce it,” Kornbluh wrote. Instead of investigating the questions Gary Webb raised and provide crucial information to an enraged public that had been devastated by crack addiction and the War on Drugs, the “big three” papers made it their main goal to discredit Webb.

The “Dark Alliance” saga began as a matter of, “Look what horrible things the government may be implicated in.” But it turned into, “Look at what a sloppy journalist Gary Webb is.”

Steve Weinberg of The Baltimore Sun was one of the few who rationally defended Webb’s supposed guesswork.

“[Webb] took the story where it seemed to lead — to the door of U.S. national security and drug enforcement agencies. Even if Webb overreached in a few paragraphs — based on my careful reading, I would say his overreaching was limited, if it occurred at all — he still had a compelling, significant investigation to publish.”

Kill The Messenger: The Death Of Gary Webb
Whatever the desired effect was — To vindicate their own journalists for not covering the groundbreaking story first? To assure black Americans that all was fine and the CIA really did have their backs? — the biggest impact it had was on Gary Webb’s life.

Jerry Ceppos, then the executive editor of the Mercury News, wrote an open letter to readers in May 2017 rescinding support for Webb’s reporting and listing the editorial flaws in “Dark Alliance.”

The news media took his apology and put it on blast. Webb, who just a few years prior had won a Pulitzer Prize, was reassigned to the Cupertino desk, where his thirst for investigative reporting went depressingly unquenched. He resigned from the paper by the end of the year, and his reputation was so tarnished that he couldn’t get a good job anywhere else.

He was forced to sell his home in 2004, but on moving day he shot himself in the head with two .38-caliber bullets.

Webb’s rise and fall was most recently dramatized in the 2014 movie Kill the Messenger starring Jeremy Renner as Webb, based on journalist Nick Schou’s titular book.

The official trailer for Michael Cuesta’s 2014 film Kill the Messenger.
“Once you take away a journalist’s credibility, that’s all they have,” said Schou. “He was never able to recover from that.”

Webb’s reporting ultimately panned out: We now know that the U.S. government was complicit in drug smuggling in order to support its foreign policy interests. It was a phenomenon that, combined with the “War on Drugs,” devastated large and mostly black swaths of Americans for generations.

Still, the journalism world’s response to Webb’s “Dark Alliance” spelled his doom.

“It’s impossible to view what happened to him without understanding the death of his career as a result of this story,” said Schou. “It was really the central defining event of his career and of his life.”

After reading about Gary Webb exposing the CIA’s potential complicity in L.A.’s crack epidemic,
   ____________________________________

Oliver North, the White House National Security Counsel official in charge of the Contra operation, was notified in a memo that Calero’s deputies were involved in the drug business. Robert Owen, North’s top staffer in Central America, warned that Jose Robelo had “potential involvement with drug-running and the sale of goods provided by the [U.S. government]” and that Sebastian Gonzalez was “now involved in drug-running out of Panama.” North’s own diary, originally uncovered by the National Security Archive, is a rich source of evidence as well. “Honduran DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into the U.S.,” reads an entry for Aug. 9, 1985, reflecting a conversation North had with Owen about Mario Calero, Adolfo’s brother. An entry from July 12, 1985 relates that “14 million to finance [an arms depot] came from drugs” and another references a trip to Bolivia to pick up “paste.” (Paste is slang term for a crude cocaine derivative product comprised of coca leaves grown in the Andes as well as processing chemicals used during the cocaine manufacturing process.)

 ── An entry from July 12, 1985 relates that “14 million to finance [an arms depot] came from drugs” (Oliver North, the White House National Security Counsel official in charge of the Contra operation, diary)

Celerino Castillo, a top DEA agent in El Salvador, investigated the Contras' drug-running in the 1980s and repeatedly warned superiors, according to a Justice Department investigation into the matter. Castillo “believes that North and the Contras’ resupply operation at Ilopango were running drugs for the Contras,” Mike Foster, an FBI agent who worked for the Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, reported in 1991 after meeting with Castillo, who later wrote the book Powderburns about his efforts to expose the drug-running.

book, Powderburns

source:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gary-webb-dark-alliance_n_5961748

https://www.textise.net/showText.aspx?strURL=https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gary-webb-dark-alliance_n_5961748#main
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A recently declassified article titled “Managing A Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,” from the agency’s internal journal, “Studies In Intelligence,”

declassified article titled “Managing A Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,”

“The charges could hardly be worse,” the article opens. “A widely read newspaper series leads many Americans to believe CIA is guilty of at least complicity, if not conspiracy, in the outbreak of crack cocaine in America’s inner cities. In more extreme versions of the story circulating on talk radio and the Internet, the Agency was the instrument of a consistent strategy by the US Government to destroy the black community and to keep black Americans from advancing. Denunciations of CIA -- reminiscent of the 1970s -- abound. Investigations are demanded and initiated. The Congress gets involved.”


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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gary-webb-dark-alliance_n_5961748

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December 1997
an internal inspector general report

“In 1984, CIA received allegations that five individuals associated with the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance (ARDE)/Sandino Revolutionary Front (FRS) were engaged in a drug trafficking conspiracy with a known narcotics trafficker, Jorge Morales,” the report found. “CIA broke off contact with ARDE in October 1984, but continued to have contact through 1986-87 with four of the individuals involved with Morales.” It also found that in October 1982, an immigration officer reported that, according to an informant in the Nicaraguan exile community in the Bay Area, “there are indications of links between [a specific U.S.-based religious organization] and two Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary groups. These links involve an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms, which then are shipped to Nicaragua. A meeting on this matter is scheduled to be held in Costa Rica ‘within one month.’ Two names the informant has associated with this matter are Bergman Arguello, a UDN member and exile living in San Francisco, and Chicano Cardenal, resident of Nicaragua." The inspector general is clear that in some cases “CIA knowledge of allegations or information indicating that organizations or individuals had been involved in drug trafficking did not deter their use by CIA.” In other cases, “CIA did not act to verify drug trafficking allegations or information even when it had the opportunity to do so.”

“Let me be frank about what we are finding,” the CIA’s inspector general, Frederick Hitz, said in congressional testimony in March 1998. “There are instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegations.”

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https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gary-webb-dark-alliance_n_5961748

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While Blandon may have been operating on behalf of the Contras early in his career, they charged, he later broke off on his own. But an October 1986 arrest warrant for Blandon indicates that the LA County Sheriff's Department at the time had other information.
“Blandon is in charge of a sophisticated cocaine smuggling and distribution organization operating in southern California,” the warrant reads, according to Webb's orginal report. “The monies gained through the sales of cocaine are transported to Florida and laundered through Orlando Murillo who is a high-ranking officer in a chain of banks in Florida. … From this bank the monies are filtered to the Contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua.”

Blandon's number-one client was “Freeway” Rick Ross, whose name has since been usurped by the rapper William Leonard Roberts, better known by his stage name “Rick Ross” (an indignity that plays a major role in the film). The original Ross, who was arrested in 1995 and freed from prison in 2009, told Webb in "Dark Alliance" that the prices and quantity Blandon was offering transformed him from a small-time dealer into what prosecutors would later describe as the most significant crack cocaine merchant in Los Angeles, if not the country.

His empire -- once dubbed the “Walmart” of crack cocaine -- expanded east from LA to major cities throughout the Midwest before he was eventually taken down during a DEA sting his old supplier and friend Blandon helped set up.

source:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gary-webb-dark-alliance_n_5961748

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LOS ANGELES -- With the public in the U.S. and Latin America becoming increasingly skeptical of the war on drugs, key figures in a scandal that once rocked the Central Intelligence Agency are coming forward to tell their stories in a new documentary and in a series of interviews with The Huffington Post.

More than 18 years have passed since Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Webb stunned the world with his “Dark Alliance” newspaper series investigating the connections between the CIA, a crack cocaine explosion in the predominantly African-American neighborhoods of South Los Angeles, and the Nicaraguan Contra fighters -- scandalous implications that outraged LA’s black community, severely damaged the intelligence agency's reputation and launched a number of federal investigations.

It did not end well for Webb, however. Major media, led by The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, worked to discredit his story. Under intense pressure, Webb's top editor abandoned him. Webb was drummed out of journalism. One LA Times reporter recently apologized for his leading role in the assault on Webb, but it came too late. Webb died in 2004 from an apparent suicide. Obituaries referred to his investigation as "discredited."

Now, Webb’s bombshell expose is being explored anew in a documentary, “Freeway: Crack in the System,” directed by Marc Levin, which tells the story of “Freeway” Rick Ross, who created a crack empire in LA during the 1980s and is a key figure in Webb’s “Dark Alliance” narrative. The documentary is being released after the major motion picture “Kill The Messenger,” which features Jeremy Renner in the role of Webb and hits theaters on Friday. Webb's investigation was published in the summer of 1996 in the San Jose Mercury News. In it, he reported that a drug ring that sold millions of dollars worth of cocaine in Los Angeles was funneling its profits to the CIA’s army in Nicaragua, known as the Contras.

Webb’s original anonymous source for his series was Coral Baca, a confidante of Nicaraguan dealer Rafael Cornejo. Baca, Ross and members of his “Freeway boys” crew; cocaine importer and distributor Danilo Blandon; and LA Sheriff's Deputy Robert Juarez all were interviewed for Levin's film.

The dual release of the feature film and the documentary, along with the willingness of long-hesitant sources to come forward, suggests that Webb may have the last word after all.

* * * * *

Webb’s entry point into the sordid tale of corruption was through Baca, a ghostlike figure in the Contra-cocaine narrative who has given precious few interviews over the decades. Her name was revealed in Webb's 1998 book on the scandal, but was removed at her request in the paperback edition. Levin connected HuffPost with Baca and she agreed to an interview at a cafe in San Francisco. She said that she and Webb didn’t speak for years after he revealed her name, in betrayal of the conditions under which they spoke. He eventually apologized, said Baca, who is played by Paz Vega in “Kill The Messenger."

The major media that worked to undermine Webb's investigation acknowledged that Blandon was a major drug-runner as well as a Contra supporter, and that Ross was a leading distributor. But those reports questioned how much drug money Blandon and his boss Norwin Meneses turned over to the Contras, and whether the Contras were aware of the source of the funds.

During her interview with HuffPost, Baca recounted meeting Contra leader Adolfo Calero multiple times in the 1980s at Contra fundraisers in the San Francisco Bay Area. He would personally pick up duffel bags full of drug money, she said, which it was her job to count for Cornejo. There was no question, she said, that Calero knew precisely how the money had been earned. Meneses' nickname, after all, was El Rey De Las Drogas -- The King of Drugs.

"If he was stupid and had a lobotomy," he might not have known it was drug money, Baca said. "He knew exactly what it was. He didn't care. He was there to fund the Contras, period." (Baca made a similar charge confidentially to the Department of Justice for its 1997 review of Webb's allegations, as well as further allegations the investigators rejected.)

Indeed, though the mainstream media at the time worked to poke holes in Webb's findings, believing that the Contra operation was not involved with drug-running takes an enormous suspension of disbelief. Even before Webb’s series was published, numerous government investigations and news reports had linked America's support for the Nicaraguan rebels with drug trafficking.

After The Associated Press reported on these connections in 1985, for example, more than a decade before Webb, then-Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) launched a congressional investigation. In 1989, Kerry released a detailed report claiming that not only was there “considerable evidence” linking the Contra effort to trafficking of drugs and weapons, but that the U.S. government knew about it.

According to the report, many of the pilots ferrying weapons and supplies south for the CIA were known to have backgrounds in drug trafficking. Kerry's investigation cited SETCO Aviation, the company the U.S. had contracted to handle many of the flights, as an example of CIA complicity in the drug trade. According to a 1983 Customs Service report, SETCO was “headed by Juan Ramon Matta Ballesteros, a class I DEA violator.”

Two years before the Iran-Contra scandal would begin to bubble up in the Reagan White House, pilot William Robert “Tosh” Plumlee revealed to then-Sen. Gary Hart (D-Colo.) that planes would routinely transport cocaine back to the U.S. after dropping off arms for the Nicaraguan rebels. Plumlee has since spoken in detail about the flights in media interviews.

“In March, 1983, Plumlee contacted my Denver Senate Office and … raised several issues including that covert U.S. intelligence agencies were directly involved in the smuggling and distribution of drugs to raise funds for covert military operations against the government of Nicaragua,” a copy of a 1991 letter from Hart to Kerry reads. (Hart told HuffPost he recalls receiving Plumlee's letter and finding his allegations worthy of follow-up.)

Plumlee flew weapons into Latin America for decades for the CIA. When the Contra revolution took off in the 1980s, Plumlee says he continued to transport arms south for the spy agency and bring cocaine back with him, with the blessing of the U.S. government.

The Calero transactions Baca says she witnessed would have been no surprise to the Reagan White House. On April 15, 1985, around the time Baca says she saw Calero accepting bags of cash, Oliver North, the White House National Security Counsel official in charge of the Contra operation, was notified in a memo that Calero’s deputies were involved in the drug business. Robert Owen, North’s top staffer in Central America, warned that Jose Robelo had “potential involvement with drug-running and the sale of goods provided by the [U.S. government]” and that Sebastian Gonzalez was “now involved in drug-running out of Panama.” North’s own diary, originally uncovered by the National Security Archive, is a rich source of evidence as well. “Honduran DC-6 which is being used for runs out of New Orleans is probably being used for drug runs into the U.S.,” reads an entry for Aug. 9, 1985, reflecting a conversation North had with Owen about Mario Calero, Adolfo’s brother. An entry from July 12, 1985 relates that “14 million to finance [an arms depot] came from drugs” and another references a trip to Bolivia to pick up “paste.” (Paste is slang term for a crude cocaine derivative product comprised of coca leaves grown in the Andes as well as processing chemicals used during the cocaine manufacturing process.)

Celerino Castillo, a top DEA agent in El Salvador, investigated the Contras' drug-running in the 1980s and repeatedly warned superiors, according to a Justice Department investigation into the matter. Castillo “believes that North and the Contras’ resupply operation at Ilopango were running drugs for the Contras,” Mike Foster, an FBI agent who worked for the Iran-Contra independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, reported in 1991 after meeting with Castillo, who later wrote the book Powderburns about his efforts to expose the drug-running.

* * * * *

Webb's investigation sent the CIA into a panic. A recently declassified article titled “Managing A Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story,” from the agency’s internal journal, “Studies In Intelligence,” shows that the spy agency was reeling in the weeks that followed.

“The charges could hardly be worse,” the article opens. “A widely read newspaper series leads many Americans to believe CIA is guilty of at least complicity, if not conspiracy, in the outbreak of crack cocaine in America’s inner cities. In more extreme versions of the story circulating on talk radio and the Internet, the Agency was the instrument of a consistent strategy by the US Government to destroy the black community and to keep black Americans from advancing. Denunciations of CIA -- reminiscent of the 1970s -- abound. Investigations are demanded and initiated. The Congress gets involved.”

The emergence of Webb’s story “posed a genuine public relations crisis for the Agency,” writes the CIA Directorate of Intelligence staffer, whose name is redacted.

In December 1997, CIA sources helped advance that narrative, telling reporters that an internal inspector general report sparked by Webb's investigation had exonerated the agency.

Yet the report itself, quietly released several weeks later, was actually deeply damaging to the CIA.

“In 1984, CIA received allegations that five individuals associated with the Democratic Revolutionary Alliance (ARDE)/Sandino Revolutionary Front (FRS) were engaged in a drug trafficking conspiracy with a known narcotics trafficker, Jorge Morales,” the report found. “CIA broke off contact with ARDE in October 1984, but continued to have contact through 1986-87 with four of the individuals involved with Morales.” It also found that in October 1982, an immigration officer reported that, according to an informant in the Nicaraguan exile community in the Bay Area, “there are indications of links between [a specific U.S.-based religious organization] and two Nicaraguan counter-revolutionary groups. These links involve an exchange in [the United States] of narcotics for arms, which then are shipped to Nicaragua. A meeting on this matter is scheduled to be held in Costa Rica ‘within one month.’ Two names the informant has associated with this matter are Bergman Arguello, a UDN member and exile living in San Francisco, and Chicano Cardenal, resident of Nicaragua." The inspector general is clear that in some cases “CIA knowledge of allegations or information indicating that organizations or individuals had been involved in drug trafficking did not deter their use by CIA.” In other cases, “CIA did not act to verify drug trafficking allegations or information even when it had the opportunity to do so.”

“Let me be frank about what we are finding,” the CIA’s inspector general, Frederick Hitz, said in congressional testimony in March 1998. “There are instances where CIA did not, in an expeditious or consistent fashion, cut off relationships with individuals supporting the Contra program who were alleged to have engaged in drug trafficking activity or take action to resolve the allegations.”

* * * * *

One of the keys to Webb's story was testimony from Danilo Blandon, who the Department of Justice once described as one of the most significant Nicaraguan drug importers in the 1980s.

“You were running the LA operation, is that correct?” Blandon, who was serving as a government witness in the 1990s, was asked by Alan Fenster, attorney representing Rick Ross, in 1996. “Yes. But remember, we were running, just -- whatever we were running in LA, it goes, the profit, it was going to the Contra revolution,” Blandon said.

Levin, the documentary filmmaker, tracked down Blandon in Managua.

“Gary Webb tried to find me, Congresswoman Maxine Waters tried to find me, Oliver Stone tried to find me. You found me,” Blandon told Levin, according to notes from the interview the director provided to HuffPost. Waters, a congresswoman from Los Angeles, had followed Webb’s investigation with one of her own. In the interview notes with filmmaker Levin, Blandon confirms his support of the Contras and his role in drug trafficking, but downplays his significance. "The big lie is that we started it all -- the crack epidemic -- we were just a small part. There were the Torres [brothers], the Colombians, and others," he says. "We were a little marble, pebble, rock and [people are] acting like we're big boulder."

[Image: kill]

The Managua lumberyard where Levin tracked down Blandon. Webb’s series connected the Contras' drug-running directly to the growth of crack in the U.S., and it was this connection that faced the most pushback from critics. While Blandon may have been operating on behalf of the Contras early in his career, they charged, he later broke off on his own. But an October 1986 arrest warrant for Blandon indicates that the LA County Sheriff's Department at the time had other information.
“Blandon is in charge of a sophisticated cocaine smuggling and distribution organization operating in southern California,” the warrant reads, according to Webb's orginal report. “The monies gained through the sales of cocaine are transported to Florida and laundered through Orlando Murillo who is a high-ranking officer in a chain of banks in Florida. … From this bank the monies are filtered to the Contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua.”

Blandon's number-one client was “Freeway” Rick Ross, whose name has since been usurped by the rapper William Leonard Roberts, better known by his stage name “Rick Ross” (an indignity that plays a major role in the film). The original Ross, who was arrested in 1995 and freed from prison in 2009, told Webb in "Dark Alliance" that the prices and quantity Blandon was offering transformed him from a small-time dealer into what prosecutors would later describe as the most significant crack cocaine merchant in Los Angeles, if not the country.

His empire -- once dubbed the “Walmart” of crack cocaine -- expanded east from LA to major cities throughout the Midwest before he was eventually taken down during a DEA sting his old supplier and friend Blandon helped set up.

Levin's film not only explores the corrupt foundations of the drug war itself, but also calls into question the draconian jail sentences the U.S. justice system meted out to a mostly minority population, while the country's own foreign policy abetted the drug trade.

“I knew that these laws were a mistake when we were writing them," says Eric Sterling, who was counsel to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee in the 1980s and a key contributor to the passage of mandatory-minimum sentencing laws, in the documentary.

In 1980, there were roughly 40,000 drug offenders in U.S. prisons, according to research from The Sentencing Project, a prison sentencing reform group. By 2011, the number of drug offenders serving prison sentences ballooned to more than 500,000 -- most of whom are not high-level operators and are without prior criminal records.

"There is no question that there are tens of thousands of black people in prison serving sentences that are decades excessive,” Sterling says. “Their families have been destroyed because of laws I played a central role in writing.”

The height of the drug war in the 1980s also saw the beginning of the militarization of local law enforcement, the tentacles of which are seen to this day, most recently in Ferguson, Missouri.

In an interview with The Huffington Post, former LA County Sheriff's Deputy Robert Juarez, who served with the department from 1976 to 1991 and was later convicted along with several other deputies in 1992 during a federal investigation of sheriff officers stealing seized drug money, described a drug war culture that frequently put law enforcement officers into morally questionable situations that were difficult to navigate.

[Image: kill]

The hunter and the hunted: A Los Angeles detective finally meets the kingpin he'd pursued.
“We all started getting weapons,” said Juarez, who served five years in prison for skimming drug-bust money. “We were hitting houses coming up with Uzis, AK-47s, and we’re walking in with a six-shooter and a shotgun. So guys started saying, 'I’m going to get me a semi-automatic and the crooks are paying for it.' So that’s how it started.”

But Juarez, who served in the LA County Sheriff’s narcotics division for nearly a decade, explained that what started as a way for some officers to pay for extra weapons and informants to aid in investigations quickly devolved into greed. Since asset forfeiture laws at the time allowed the county to keep all cash seized during a drug bust, Juarez says tactics changed.

“It got to where we were more tax collectors than we were dope cops,” Juarez recalled. “Everything seized was coming right back to the county. We turned into the same kind of crooks we’d been following around ... moving evidence around to make sure the asshole goes to jail; backing up other deputies regardless of what it was. Everyone, to use a drug dealer's term, everyone was taking a taste.”

* * * * *

Between 1982 and 1984, Congress restricted funding for the Contras, and by 1985 cut it off entirely. The Reagan administration, undeterred, conspired to sell arms to Iran in exchange for hostages, using some of the proceeds to illegally fund the Contras. The scandal became known as Iran-Contra. Drug trafficking was a much less convoluted method of skirting the congressional ban on funding the Contras, and the CIA's inspector general found that in the early years after Congress cut off Contra funding, the CIA had alerted Congress about the allegations of drug trafficking. But while the ban was in effect, the CIA went largely silent on the issue. “CIA did not inform Congress of all allegations or information it received indicating that Contra-related organizations or individuals were involved in drug trafficking,” the inspector general's report found. “During the period in which the FY 1987 statutory prohibition was in effect, for example, no information has been found to indicate that CIA informed Congress of eight of the ten Contra-related individuals concerning whom CIA had received drug trafficking allegations or information.”

This complicity of the CIA in drug trafficking is at the heart of Webb’s explosive expose -- a point Webb makes himself in archival interview footage that appears in Levin’s documentary.

“It’s not a situation where the government or the CIA sat down and said, 'Okay, let’s invent crack, let’s sell it in black neighborhoods, let’s decimate black America,’” Webb says. “It was a situation where, 'We need money for a covert operation, the quickest way to raise it is sell cocaine, you guys go sell it somewhere, we don’t want to know anything about it.'"
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Effect on African American communities[edit]

Due to racial segregation and discriminatory practices by real estate agents, African American families were largely located in low-income inner city neighborhoods. This led to crack impacting African American communities far more than others.[8]

Between 1984 and 1989, the homicide rate for Black males aged 14 to 17 more than doubled, and the homicide rate for Black males aged 18 to 24 increased nearly as much. During this period, the Black community also experienced a 20–100% increase in fetal death rates, low birth-weight babies, weapons arrests, and the number of children in foster care.[9] The United States remains the largest overall consumer of narcotics in the world as of 2014.[10][11]

A 2018 study found that the crack epidemic had long-run consequences for crime, contributing to the doubling of the murder rate of young Black males soon after the start of the epidemic, and that the murder rate was still 70 percent higher 17 years after crack's arrival.[12] The paper estimated that eight percent of the murders in 2000 are due to the long-run effects of the emergence of crack markets, and that the elevated murder rates for young Black males can explain a significant part of the gap in life expectancy between black and white males.[12]

Crack cocaine use and distribution became popular in cities that were in a state of social and economic chaos such as New York, Los Angeles and Atlanta, and particularly in their low-income inner city neighborhoods with high African American concentrations.[8] "As a result of the low-skill levels and minimal initial resource outlay required to sell crack, systemic violence flourished as a growing army of young, enthusiastic inner-city crack sellers attempt to defend their economic investment."[13] Once the drug became embedded in the particular communities, the economic environment that was best suited for its survival caused further social disintegration within that city.


source:
Crack epidemic in the united states
www.wikipedia.org entry
   ____________________________________

 • CIA-supplied contra planes and pilots carried cocaine from Central America to U.S. airports and military bases. In 1985, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Celerino Castillo reported to his superiors that cocaine was being stored at the CIA’s contra-supply warehouse at Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador for shipment to the U.S. The DEA did nothing, and Castillo was gradually forced out of the agency.

source:
The CIA, Contras, Gangs, and Crack
Based on a year-long investigation, reporter Gary Webb wrote that during the 1980s the CIA helped finance its covert war against Nicaragua's leftist government through sales of cut-rate cocaine to South Central L.A. drug dealer, Ricky Ross.
November 1, 1996
William Blum
http://fpif.org/the_cia_contras_gangs_and_crack/
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https://ourhiddenhistory.org/
http://www.whale.to/b/webb10.html

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO6oMN8idUQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO6oMN8idUQ

CIA Connections to Contra Drug Trafficking
Journalist Gary Webb — January 16, 1999


ORIGINAL: http://www.whale.to/b/webb10.html


Transcript: Gary Webb Speaks on CIA Connections to Contra Drug Trafficking (and Related Topics)

Dark Alliance author Gary Webb gave a fascinating talk on the evening of January 16, outlining the findings of his investigation of the CIA's connection to drug trafficking by the Nicaraguan contras. Approximately 300 people, crowded into the First United Methodist Church in Eugene, Oregon, listened with rapt attention as Webb detailed his experiences. Webb's riveting speech was followed by an intense question-and-answer session, during which he candidly answered questions about the "Dark Alliance" controversy, his firing from the San Jose Mercury News, and CIA/contra/cocaine secrets that still await revelation.

Date: January 16, 1999
Time: 7:30 p.m.
Location: First United Methodist Church, 1376 Olive St., Eugene, Oregon
 
Gary Webb: I look like an idiot up here with all these mikes, the CIA agents are probably behind one or the other... [laughter from the audience]. It's really nice to be in Eugene -- I've been in Madison, Wisconsin talking about this, I've been in Berkeley, I've been in Santa Monica, and these are sort of like islands of sanity in this world today, so it's great to be on one of those islands.

One of the things that is weird about this whole thing, though, is that I've been a daily news reporter for about twenty years, and I've done probably a thousand interviews with people, and the strangest thing is being on the other side of the table now and having reporters ask me questions. One of them asked me about a week ago -- I was on a radio show -- and the host asked me, "Why did you get into newspaper reporting, of all the media? Why did you pick newspapers?" And I really had to admit that I was stumped. Because I thought about it -- I'd been doing newspaper reporting since I was fourteen or fifteen years old -- and I really didn't have an answer.

So I went back to my clip books -- you know, most reporters keep all their old clips -- and I started digging around trying to figure out if there was one story that I had written that had really tipped the balance. And I found it. And I wanted to tell you this story, because it sort of fits into the theme that we're going to talk about tonight.

I think I was fifteen, I was working for my high school paper, and I was writing editorials. This sounds silly now that I think about it, but I had written an editorial against the drill team that we had for the high school games, for the football games. This was '71 or '72, at the height of the protests against the Vietnam War, and I was in school then in suburban Indianapolis -- Dan Quayle country. So, you get the idea of the flavor of the school system. They thought it was a cool idea to dress women up in military uniforms and send them out there to twirl rifles and battle flags at halftime. And I thought this was sort of outrageous, and I wrote an editorial saying I thought it was one of the silliest things I'd ever seen. And my newspaper advisor called me the next day and said, "Gosh, that editorial you wrote has really prompted a response." And I said, "Great, that's the idea, isn't it?" And she said, "Well, it's not so great, they want you to apologize for it." [Laughter from the audience.]

I said, "Apologize for what?" And she said, "Well, the girls were very offended." And I said, "Well, I'm not apologizing because they don't want my opinion. You'll have to come up with a better reason than that." And they said, "Well, if you don't apologize, we're not going to let you in Quill & Scroll," which is the high school journalism society. And I said, "Well, I don't want to be in that organization if I have to apologize to get into it." [More laughter from the audience, scattered applause.]

They were sort of powerless at that point, and they said, "Look, why don't you just come down and the cheerleaders are going to come in, and they want to talk to you and tell you what they think," and I said okay. So I went down to the newspaper office, and there were about fifteen of them sitting around this table, and they all went around one by one telling me what a scumbag I was, and what a terrible guy I was, and how I'd ruined their dates, ruined their complexions, and all sorts of things... [Laughter and groans from the audience.] ...and at that moment, I decided, "Man, this is what I want to do for a living." [Roar of laughter from the audience.] And I wish I could say that it was because I was infused with this sense of the First Amendment, and thinking great thoughts about John Peter Zenger and I.F. Stone... but what I was really thinking was, "Man, this is a great way to meet women!" [More laughter.]

And that's a true story, but the reason I tell you that is because it's often those kinds of weird motivations and unthinking consequences that lead us to do things, that lead us to events that we have absolutely no concept how they're going to turn out. Little did I know that twenty-five years later, I'd be writing a story about the CIA's wrongdoings because I wanted to meet women by writing editorials about cheerleaders.

But that's really the way life and that's really the way history works a lot of times. You know, when you think back on your own lives, from the vantage point of time, you can see it. I mean, think back to the decisions you've made in your lifetimes that brought you to where you are tonight, think about how close you came to never meeting your wife or your husband, how easily you could have been doing something else for a living if it hadn't been for a decision that you made or someone made that you had absolutely no control over. And it's really kind of scary when you think about how capricious life is sometimes. That's a theme I try to bring to my book, Dark Alliance, which was about the crack cocaine explosion in the 1980s.

So for the record, let me just say this right now. I do not believe -- and I have never believed -- that the crack cocaine explosion was a conscious CIA conspiracy, or anybody's conspiracy, to decimate black America. I've never believed that South Central Los Angeles was targeted by the U.S. government to become the crack capitol of the world. But that isn't to say that the CIA's hands or the U.S. government's hands are clean in this matter. Actually, far from it. After spending three years of my life looking into this, I am more convinced than ever that the U.S. government's responsibility for the drug problems in South Central Los Angeles and other inner cities is greater than I ever wrote in the newspaper.

But it's important to differentiate between malign intent and gross negligence. And that's an important distinction, because it's what makes premeditated murder different from manslaughter. That said, it doesn't change the fact that you've got a body on the floor, and that's what I want to talk about tonight, the body.

Many years ago, there was a great series on PBS -- I don't know how many of you are old enough to remember this -- it was called Connections. And it was by a British historian named James Burke. If you don't remember it, it was a marvelous show, very influential on me. And he would take a seemingly inconsequential event in history, and follow it through the ages to see what it spawned as a result. The one show I remember the most clearly was the one he did on how the scarcity of firewood in thirteenth-century Europe led to the development of the steam engine. And you would think, "Well, these things aren't connected at all," and he would show very convincingly that they were.

In the first chapter of the book on which the series is based, Burke wrote that "History is not, as we are so often led to believe, a matter of great men and lonely geniuses pointing the way to the future from their ivory towers. At some point, every member of society is involved in that process by which innovation and change come about. The key to why things change is the key to everything."

What I've attempted to demonstrate in my book was how the collapse of a brutal, pro-American dictatorship in Latin America, combined with a decision by corrupt CIA agents to raise money for a resistance movement by any means necessary, led to the formation of the nation's first major crack market in South Central Los Angeles, which led to the arming and the empowerment of LA's street gangs, which led to the spread of crack to black neighborhoods across the country, and to the passage of racially discriminatory sentencing laws that are locking up thousands of young black men today behind bars for most of their lives.

But it's not so much a conspiracy as a chain reaction. And that's what my whole book is about, this chain reaction. So let me explain the links in this chain a little better.

The first link is this fellow Anastasio Somoza, who was an American-educated tyrant, one of our buddies naturally, and his family ruled Nicaragua for forty years -- thanks to the Nicaraguan National Guard, which we supplied, armed, and funded, because we thought they were, you know, anti-communists.

Well, in 1979, the people of Nicaragua got tired of living under this dictatorship, and they rose up and overthrew it. And a lot of Somoza's friends and relatives and business partners came to the United States, because we had been their allies all these years, including two men whose families had been very close to the dictatorship. And these two guys are sort of two of the three main characters in my book -- a fellow named Danilo Blandón, and a fellow named Norwin Meneses.

They came to the United States in 1979, along with a flood of other Nicaraguan immigrants, most of them middle-class people, most of them former bankers, former insurance salesmen -- sort of a capitalist exodus from Nicaragua. And they got involved when they got here, and they decided they were going to take the country back, they didn't like the fact that they'd been forced out of their country. So they formed these resistance organizations here in the United States, and they began plotting how they were going to kick the Sandanistas out.

At this point in time, Jimmy Carter was president, and Carter wasn't all that interested in helping these folks out. The CIA was, however. And that's where we start getting into this murky world of, you know, who really runs the United States. Is it the president? Is it the bureaucracy? Is it the intelligence community? At different points in time you get different answers. Like today, the idea that Clinton runs the United States is nuts. The idea that Jimmy Carter ran the country is nuts.

In 1979 and 1980, the CIA secretly began visiting these groups that were setting up here in the United States, supplying them with a little bit of money, and telling them to hold on, wait for a little while, don't give up. And Ronald Reagan came to town. And Reagan had a very different outlook on Central America than Carter did. Reagan saw what happened in Nicaragua not as a populist uprising, as most of the rest of the world did. He saw it as this band of communists down there, there was going to be another Fidel Castro, and he was going to have another Cuba in his backyard. Which fit in very well with the CIA's thinking. So, the CIA under Reagan got it together, and they said, "We're going to help these guys out." They authorized $19 million to fund a covert war to destabilize the government in Nicaragua and help get their old buddies back in power.

Soon after the CIA took over this operation, these two drug traffickers, who had come from Nicaragua and settled in California, were called down to Honduras. And they met with a CIA agent named Enrique Bermúdez, who was one of Somoza's military officials, and the man the CIA picked to run this new organization they were forming. And both traffickers had said -- one of them said, the other one wrote, and it's never been contradicted -- that when they met with the CIA agent, he told them, "We need money for this operation. Your guy's job is to go to California and raise money, and not to worry about how you did it. And what he said was -- and I think this had been used to justify just about every crime against humanity that we've known -- "the ends justify the means."

Now, this is a very important link in this chain reaction, because the means they selected was cocaine trafficking, which is sort of what you'd expect when you ask cocaine traffickers to go out and raise money for you. You shouldn't at all be surprised when they go out and sell drugs. Especially when you pick people who are like pioneers of the cocaine trafficking business, which Norwin Meneses certainly was.

There was a CIA cable from I believe 1984, which called him the "kingpin of narcotics trafficking" in Central America. He was sort of like the Al Capone of Nicaragua. So after getting these fundraising instructions from this CIA agent, these two men go back to California, and they begin selling cocaine. This time not exclusively for themselves -- this time in furtherance of U.S. foreign policy. And they began selling it in Los Angeles, and they began selling it in San Francisco.

Sometime in 1982, Danilo Blandón, who had been given the LA market, started selling his cocaine to a young drug dealer named Ricky Ross, who later became known as "Freeway" Rick. In 1994, the LA Times would describe him as the master marketer most responsible for flooding the streets of Los Angeles with cocaine. In 1979, he was nothing. He was nothing before he met these Nicaraguans. He was a high school dropout. He was a kid who wanted to be a tennis star, who was trying to get a tennis scholarship, but he found out that in order to get a scholarship you needed to read and write, and he couldn't. So he drifted out of school and wound up selling stolen car parts, and then he met these Nicaraguans, who had this cheap cocaine that they wanted to unload. And he proved to be very good at that.

Now, he lived in South Central Los Angeles, which was home to some street gangs known as the Crips and the Bloods. And back in 1981-82, hardly anybody knew who they were. They were mainly neighborhood kids -- they'd beat each other up, they'd steal leather coats, they'd steal cars, but they were really nothing back then. But what they gained through this organization, and what they gained through Ricky Ross, was a built-in distribution network throughout the neighborhood. The Crips and the Bloods were already selling marijuana, they were already selling PCP, so it wasn't much of a stretch for them to sell something new, which is what these Nicaraguans were bringing in, which was cocaine.

This is where these forces of history come out of nowhere and collide. Right about the time the contras got to South Central Los Angeles, hooked up with "Freeway" Rick, and started selling powder cocaine, the people Rick was selling his powder to started asking him if he knew how to make it into this stuff called "rock" that they were hearing about. This obviously was crack cocaine, and it was already on its way to the United States by then -- it started in Peru in '74 and was working its way upward, and it was bound to get here sooner or later. In 1981 it got to Los Angeles, and people started figuring out how to take this very expensive powdered cocaine and cook it up on the stove and turn it into stuff you could smoke.

When Ricky went out and he started talking to his customers, and they started asking him how to make this stuff, you know, Rick was a smart guy -- he still is a smart guy -- and he figured, this is something new. This is customer demand. If I want to progress in this business, I better meet this demand. So he started switching from selling powder to making rock himself, and selling it already made. He called this new invention his "Ready Rock." And he told me the scenario, he said it was a situation where he'd go to a guy's house, he would say, "Oh man, I want to get high, I'm on my way to work, I don't have time to go into the kitchen and cook this stuff up. Can't you cook it up for me and just bring it to me already made?" And he said, "Yeah, I can do that." So he started doing it.

So by the time crack got ahold of South Central, which took a couple of years, Rick had positioned himself on top of the crack market in South Central. And by 1984, crack sales had supplanted marijuana and PCP sales as sources of income for the gangs and drug dealers of South Central. And suddenly these guys had more money than they knew what to do with. Because what happened with crack, it democratized the drug. When you were buying it in powdered form, you were having to lay out a hundred bucks for a gram, or a hundred and fifty bucks for a gram. Now all you needed was ten bucks, or five bucks, or a dollar -- they were selling "dollar rocks" at one point. So anybody who had money and wanted to get high could get some of this stuff. You didn't need to be a middle-class or wealthy drug user anymore.

Suddenly the market for this very expensive drug expanded geometrically. And now these dealers, who were making a hundred bucks a day on a good day, were now making five or six thousand dollars a day on a good day. And the gangs started setting up franchises -- they started franchising rock houses in South Central, just like McDonald's. And you'd go on the streets, and there'd be five or six rock houses owned by one guy, and five or six rock houses owned by another guy, and suddenly they started making even more money.

And now they've got all this money, and they felt nervous. You get $100,000 or $200,000 in cash in your house, and you start getting kind of antsy about it. So now they wanted weapons to guard their money with, and to guard their rock houses, which other people were starting to knock off. And lo and behold, you had weapons. The contras. They were selling weapons. They were buying weapons. And they started selling weapons to the gangs in Los Angeles. They started selling them AR-15s, they started selling them Uzis, they started selling them Israeli-made pistols with laser sights, just about anything. Because that was part of the process here. They were not just drug dealers, they were taking the drug money and buying weapons with it to send down to Central America with the assistance of a great number of spooky CIA folks, who were getting them [audio glitch -- "across the border"?] and that sort of thing, so they could get weapons in and out of the country. So, not only does South Central suddenly have a drug problem, they have a weapons problem that they never had before. And you started seeing things like drive-by shootings and gang bangers with Uzis.

By 1985, the LA crack market had become saturated. There was so much dope going into South Central, dope that the CIA, we now know, knew of, and they knew the origins of -- the FBI knew the origins of it; the DEA knew the origins of it; and nobody did anything about it. (We'll get into that in a bit.)
But what happened was, there were so many people selling crack that the dealers were jostling each other on the corners. And the smaller ones decided, we're going to take this show on the road. So they started going to other cities. They started going to Bakersfield, they started going to Fresno, they started going to San Francisco and Oakland, where they didn't have crack markets, and nobody knew what this stuff was, and they had wide open markets for themselves. And suddenly crack started showing up in city after city after city, and oftentimes it was Crips and Bloods from Los Angeles who were starting these markets. By 1986, it was all up and down the east coast, and by 1989, it was nationwide.

Today, fortunately, crack use is on a downward trend, but that's something that isn't due to any great progress we've made in the so-called "War on Drugs," it's the natural cycle of things. Drug epidemics generally run from 10 to 15 years. Heroin is now the latest drug on the upswing.

Now, a lot of people disagreed with this scenario. The New York Times, the LA Times and the Washington Post all came out and said, oh, no, that's not so. They said this couldn't have happened that way, because crack would have happened anyway. Which is true, somewhat. As I pointed out in the first chapter of my book, crack was on its way here. But whether it would have happened the same way, whether it would have happened in South Central, whether it would have happened in Los Angeles at all first, is a very different story. If it had happened in Eugene, Oregon first, it might not have gone anywhere. [Restless shuffling and the sounds of throats being cleared among the audience.] No offense, but you folks aren't exactly trend setters up here when it comes to drug dealers and drug fads. LA is, however. [Soft laughter and murmuring among the audience.]

You can play "what if" games all you like, but it doesn't change the reality. And the reality is that this CIA-connected drug ring played a very critical role in the early 1980s in opening up South Central to a crack epidemic that was unmatched in its severity and influence anywhere in the U.S.

One question that I ask people who say, "Oh, I don't believe this," is, okay, tell me this: why did crack appear in black neighborhoods first? Why did crack distribution networks leapfrog from one black neighborhood to other black neighborhoods and bypass white neighborhoods and bypass Hispanic neighborhoods and Asian neighborhoods? Our government and the mainstream media have given us varying explanations for this phenomenon over the years, and they are nice, comforting, general explanations which absolve anyone of any responsibility for why crack is so ethnically specific. One of the reasons we're told is that, well, it's poverty. As if the only poor neighborhoods in this country were black neighborhoods. And we're told it's high teenage unemployment; these kids gotta have jobs. As if the hills and hollows of Appalachia don't have teenage unemployment rates that are ten times higher than inner city Los Angeles. And then we're told that it's loose family structure -- you know, presuming that there are no white single mothers out there trying to raise kids on low-paying jobs or welfare and food stamps. And then we're told, well, it's because crack is so cheap -- because it sells for a lower price in South Central than it sells anywhere else. But twenty bucks is twenty bucks, no matter where you go in the country.

So once you have eliminated these sort of non-sensical explanations, you are left with two theories which are far less comfortable. The first theory -- which is not something I personally subscribe to, but it's out there -- is that there's something about black neighborhoods which causes them to be genetically predisposed to drug trafficking. That's a racist argument that no one in their right mind is advancing publicly, although I tell you, when I was reading a lot of the stories in the Washington Post and the New York Times, they were talking about black Americans being more susceptible to "conspiracy theories" than white Americans, which is why they believe the story more. I think that was sort of the underlying current there. On the other hand, I didn't see any stories about all the white people who think Elvis is alive still, or that Hitler's brain is preserved down in Brazil to await the Fourth Reich... [laughter from the audience] ...which is a particularly white conspiracy theory, I didn't see any stories in the New York Times about that...

The other more palatable reason which in my mind comes closer to the truth, is that someone started bringing cheap cocaine into black neighborhoods right at the time when drug users began figuring out how to turn it into crack. And this allowed black drug dealers to get a head start on every other ethnic group in terms of setting up distribution systems and trafficking systems.

Now, one thing I've learned about the drug business while researching this is that in many ways it is the epitome of capitalism. It is the purest form of capitalism. You have no government regulation, a wide-open market, a buyer's market -- anything goes. But these things don't spring out of the ground fully formed. It's like any business. It takes time to grow them. It takes time to set up networks. So once these distribution networks got set up and established in primarily South Central Los Angeles, primarily black neighborhoods, they spread it along ethnic and cultural lines. You had black dealers from LA going to black neighborhoods in other cities, because they knew people there, they had friends there, and that's why you saw these networks pop up from one black neighborhood to another black neighborhood.

Now, exactly the same thing happened on the east coast a couple of years later. When crack first appeared on the east coast, it appeared in Caribbean neighborhoods in Miami -- thanks largely to the Jamaicans, who were using their drug profits to fund political gains back home. It was almost the exact opposite of what happened in LA in that the politics were the opposite -- but it was the same phenomenon. And once the Miami market was saturated, they moved to New York, they moved east, and they started bringing crack from the east coast towards the middle of the country.

So it seems to me that if you're looking for the root of your drug problems in a neighborhood, nothing else matters except the drugs, and where they're coming from, and how they're getting there. And all these other reasons I cited are used as explanations for how crack became popular, but it doesn't explain how the cocaine got there in the first place. And that's where the contras came in.

One of the things which these newspapers who dissed my story were saying was, we can't believe that the CIA would know about drug trafficking and let it happen. That this idea that this agency which gets $27 billion a year to tell us what's going on, and which was so intimately involved with the contras they were writing their press releases for them, they wouldn't know about this drug trafficking going on under their noses. But the Times and the Post all uncritically reported their claims that the CIA didn't know what was going on, and that it would never permit its hirelings to do anything like that, as unseemly as drug trafficking. You know, assassinations and bombings and that sort of thing, yeah, they'll admit to right up front, but drug dealing, no, no, they don't do that kind of stuff.

Unfortunately, though, it was true, and what has happened since my series came out is that the CIA was forced to do an internal review, the DEA and Justice Department were forced to do internal reviews, and these agencies that released these reports, you probably didn't read about them, because they contradicted everything else these other newspapers had been writing for the last couple of years, but let me just read you this one excerpt. This is from a 1987 DEA report. And this is about this drug ring in Los Angeles that I wrote about. In 1987, the DEA sent undercover informants inside this drug operation, and they interviewed one of the principals of this organization, namely Ivan Torres. And this is what he said. He told the informant:

"The CIA wants to know about drug trafficking, but only for their own purposes, and not necessarily for the use of law enforcement agencies. Torres told DEA Confidential Informant 1 that CIA representatives are aware of his drug-related activities, and that they don't mind. He said they had gone so far as to encourage cocaine trafficking by members of the contras, because they know it's a good source of income. Some of this money has gone into numbered accounts in Europe and Panama, as does the money that goes to Managua from cocaine trafficking. Torres told the informant about receiving counterintelligence training from the CIA, and had avowed that the CIA looks the other way and in essence allows them to engage in narcotics trafficking."

This is a DEA report that was written in 1987, when this operation was still going on. Another member of this organization who was affiliated with the San Francisco end of it, said that in 1985 -- and this was to the CIA -- "Cabezas claimed that the contra cocaine operated with the knowledge of, and under the supervision of, the CIA. Cabezas claimed that this drug enterprise was run with the knowledge of CIA agent Ivan Gómez."

Now, this is one of the stories that I tried to do at the Mercury News was who this man Ivan Gómez was. This was after my original series came out, and after the controversy started. I went back to Central America, and I found this fellow Cabezas and he told me all about Ivan Gómez. And I came back, I corroborated it with three former contra officials. Mercury News wouldn't put it in the newspaper. And they said, "We have no evidence this man even exists."

Well, the CIA Inspector General's report came out in October, and there was a whole chapter on Ivan Gómez. And the amazing thing was that Ivan Gómez admitted in a CIA-administered polygraph test that he had been engaged in laundering drug money the same month that this man told me he had been engaged in it. CIA knew about it, and what did they do? Nothing. They said okay, go back to work. And they covered it up for fifteen years.

So, the one thing that I've learned from this whole experience is, first of all, you can't believe the government -- on anything. And you especially can't believe them when they're talking about important stuff, like this stuff. The other thing is that the media will believe the government before they believe anything.

This has been the most amazing thing to me. You had a situation where you had another newspaper who reported this information. The major news organizations in this country went to the CIA, they went to the Justice Department, and they said, what about it? And they said, oh, no, it's not true. Take our word for it. And they went back and put it in the newspaper! Now, I try to imagine what would happen had reporters come back to their editors and said, look, I know the CIA is involved in drug trafficking. And I know the FBI knows about it, and I've got a confidential source that's telling me that. Can I write a story about that? What do you think the answer would have been? [Murmurs of "no" from the audience.] Get back down to the obit desk. Start cranking out those sports scores. But, if they go to the government and the government denies something like that, they'll put it in the paper with no corroboration whatsoever.

And it's only since the government has admitted it that now the media is willing to consider that there might be a story here after all. The New York Times, after the CIA report that came out, ran a story on its front page saying, gosh, the contras were involved in drugs after all, and gosh, the CIA knew about it.

Now you would think -- at least I would think -- that something like that would warrant Congressional investigation. We're spending millions of dollars to find out how many times Bill Clinton had sex with Monica Lewinsky. Why aren't we interested in how much the CIA knew about drug traffic? Who was profiting from this drug traffic? Who else knew about it? And why did it take some guy from a California newspaper by accident stumbling over this stuff ten years later in order for it to be important? I mean, what the hell is going on here? I've been a reporter for almost twenty years. To me, this is a natural story. The CIA is involved in drug trafficking? Let's know about it. Let's find out about it. Let's do something about it. Nobody wants to touch this thing.

And the other thing that came out just recently, which nobody seems to know about, because it hasn't been reported -- the CIA Inspector General went before Congress in March and testified that yes, they knew about it. They found some documents that indicated that they knew about it, yeah. I was there, and this was funny to watch, because these Congressmen were up there, and they were ready to hear the absolution, right? "We had no evidence that this was going on..." And this guy sort of threw 'em a curve ball and admitted that it had happened.

One of the people said, well geez, what was the CIA's responsibility when they found out about this? What were you guys supposed to do? And the Inspector General sort of looked around nervously, cleared his throat and said, "Well... that's kind of an odd history there." And Norman Dix from Washington, bless his heart, didn't let it go at that. He said, "Explain what you mean by that?" And the Inspector General said, well, we were looking around and we found this document, and according to the document, we didn't have to report this to anybody. And they said, "How come?" And the IG said, we don't know exactly, but there was an agreement made in 1982 between Bill Casey -- a fine American, as we all know [laughter from the audience] -- and William French Smith, who was then the Attorney General of the United States. And they reached an agreement that said if there is drug trafficking involved by CIA agents, we don't have to tell the Justice Department. Honest to God. Honest to God. Actually, this is now a public record, this document. Maxine Waters just got copies of it, she's putting it on the Congressional Record. It is now on the CIA's web site, if you care to journey into that area. If you do, check out the CIA Web Site for Kids, it's great, I love it. [Laugher from the audience.] I kid you not, they've actually got a web page for kids.

The other thing about this agreement was, this wasn't just like a thirty-day agreement -- this thing stayed in effect from 1982 until 1995. So all these years, these agencies had a gentleman's agreement that if CIA assets or CIA agents were involved in drug trafficking, it did not need to be reported to the Justice Department.

So I think that eliminates any questions that drug trafficking by the contras was an accident, or was a matter of just a few rotten apples. I think what this said was that it was anticipated by the Justice Department, it was anticipated by the CIA, and steps were taken to ensure that there was a loophole in the law, so that if it ever became public knowledge, nobody would be prosecuted for it.

The other thing is, when George Bush pardoned -- remember those Christmas pardons that he handed out when he was on his way out the door a few years ago? The media focused on old Caspar Weinberger, got pardoned, it was terrible. Well, if you looked down the list of names at the other pardons he handed out, there was a guy named Claire George, there was a guy named Al Fiers, there was another guy named Joe Fernández. And these stories sort of brushed them off and said, well, they were CIA officials, we're not going to say much more about it. These were the CIA officials who were responsible for the contra war. These were the men who were running the contra operation. And the text of Bush's pardon not only pardons them for the crimes of Iran-contra, it pardons them for everything. So, now that we know about it, we can't even do anything about it. They all received presidential pardons.

So where does that leave us? Well, I think it sort of leaves us to rely on the judgment of history. But that is a dangerous step. We didn't know about this stuff two years ago; we know about it now. We've got Congressmen who are no longer willing to believe that CIA agents are "honorable men," as William Colby called them. And we've got approximately a thousand pages of evidence of CIA drug trafficking on the public record finally.

That said, let me tell you, there are thousands of pages more that we still don't know about. The CIA report that came out in October was originally 600 pages; by the time we got ahold of it, it was only 300 pages.

One last thing I want to mention -- Bob Parry, who is a fine investigative reporter, he runs a magazine in Washington called I.F. Magazine, and he's got a great website, check it out -- he did a story about two weeks ago about some of the stuff that was contained in the CIA report that we didn't get to see. And one of the stories he wrote was about how there was a second CIA drug ring in South Central Los Angeles that ran from 1988 to 1991. This was not even the one I wrote about. There was another one there. This was classified.

The interesting thing is, it was run by a CIA agent who had participated in the contra war, and the reason it was classified is because it is under investigation by the CIA. I doubt very seriously that we'll ever hear another word about that.

But the one thing that we can do, and the one thing that Maxine Waters is trying to do, is force the House Intelligence Committee to hold hearings on this. This is supposed to be the oversight committee of the CIA. They have held one hearing, and after they found out there was this deal that they didn't have to report drug trafficking, they all ran out of the room, they haven't convened since.

So if you're interested in pursuing this, the thing I would suggest you do is, call up the House Intelligence Committee in Washington and ask them when we're going to have another CIA/contra/crack hearing. Believe me, it'll drive them crazy. Send them email, just ask them, make sure -- they think everybody's forgotten about this. I mean, if you look around the room tonight, I don't think it's been forgotten. They want us to forget about it. They want us to concentrate on sex crimes, because, yeah, it's titillating. It keeps us occupied. It keeps us diverted. Don't let them do it.

Thanks very much for your attention, I appreciate it. We'll do questions and answers now for as long as you want.[Robust applause.]


Question and Answer Session
Gary Webb: I've been instructed to repeat the question, so...

Voice From the Audience: You talked about George Bush pardoning people. Given George Bush's history with the CIA, do you know when he first knew about this, and what he knew?

Gary Webb: Well, I didn't at the time I wrote the book, I do now. The question was, when did George Bush first know about this? The CIA, in its latest report, said that they had prepared a detailed briefing for the vice president -- I think it was 1985? -- on all these allegations of contra drug trafficking and delivered it to him personally. So, it's hard for George to say he was out of the loop on this one.

I'll tell you another thing, one of the most amazing things I found in the National Archives was a report that had been written by the U.S. Attorney's Office in Tampa -- I believe it was 1987. They had just busted a Colombian drug trafficker named Allen Rudd, and they were using him as a cooperating witness. Rudd agreed to go undercover and set up other drug traffickers, and they were debriefing him.

Now, let me set the stage for you. When you are being debriefed by the federal government for use as an informant, you're not going to go in there and tell them crazy-sounding stories, because they're not going to believe you, they're going to slap you in jail, right? What Rudd told them was, that he was involved in a meeting with Pablo Escobar, who was then the head of the Medellín cartel. They were working out arrangements to set up cocaine shipments into South Florida. He said Escobar started ranting and raving about that damned George Bush, and now he's got that South Florida Drug Task Force set up which has really been making things difficult, and the man's a traitor. And he used to deal with us, but now he wants to be president and thinks that he's double-crossing us. And Rudd said, well, what are you talking about? And Escobar said, we made a deal with that guy, that we were going to ship weapons to the contras, they were in there flying weapons down to Columbia, we were unloading weapons, we were getting them to the contras, and the deal was, we were supposed to get our stuff to the United States without any problems. And that was the deal that we made. And now he double-crossed us.

So the U.S. Attorney heard this, and he wrote this panicky memo to Washington saying, you know, this man has been very reliable so far, everything he's told us has checked out, and now he's saying that the Vice President of the United States is involved with drug traffickers. We might want to check this out. And it went all the way up -- the funny thing about government documents is, whenever it passes over somebody's desk, they have to initial it. And this thing was like a ladder, it went all the way up and all the way up, and it got up to the head of the Criminal Division at the Justice Department, and he looked at it and said, looks like a job for Lawrence Walsh! And so he sent it over to Walsh, the Iran-contra prosecutor, and he said, here, you take it, you deal with this. And Walsh's office -- I interviewed Walsh, and he said, we didn't have the authority to deal with that. We were looking at Ollie North. So I said, did anybody investigate this? And the answer was, "no." And that thing sat in the National Archives for ten years, nobody ever looked at it.

Voice From the Audience: Is that in your book?

Gary Webb: Yeah.

Voice From the Audience: Thank you.

Audience Member #1: Well, first of all, I'd like to thank you for pursuing this story, you have a lot of guts to do it.[Applause from the audience.]

Gary Webb: This is what reporters are supposed to do. This is what reporters are supposed to do. I don't think I was doing anything special.

Audience Member #1: Still, there's not too many guys like you that are doing it.

Gary Webb: That's true, they've all still got jobs. [Laughter, scattered applause.]

Audience Member #1: I just had a couple of questions, the first one is, I followed the story on the web site, and I thought it was a really great story, it was really well done. And I noticed that the San Jose Mercury News seemed to support you for a while, and then all the sudden that support collapsed. So I was wondering what your relationship is with your editor there, and how that all played out, and when they all pulled out the rug from under you.

Gary Webb: Well, the support collapsed probably after the LA Times... The Washington [Post] came out first, the New York Times came out second, and the LA Times came out third, and they started getting nervous. There's a phenomenon in the media we all know, it's called "piling on," and they started seeing themselves getting piled on. They sent me back down to Central America two more times to do more reporting and I came back with stories that were even more outrageous than what they printed in the newspaper the first time. And they were faced with a situation of, now we're accusing Oliver North of being involved in drug trafficking. Now we're accusing the Justice Department of being part and parcel to this. Geez, if we get beat up over accusing a couple of CIA agents of being involved in this, what the hell is going to happen now? And they actually said, I had memos saying, you know, if we run these stories, there is going to be a firestorm of criticism.
So, I think they took the easy way out. The easy way out was not to go ahead and do the story. It was to back off the story. But they had a problem, because the story was true. And it isn't every day that you're confronted with how to take a dive on a true story.

They spent several months -- honestly, literally, because I was getting these drafts back and forth -- trying to figure out how to say, we don't support this story, even though it's true. And if you go back and you read the editor's column, you'll see that the great difficulty that he had trying to take a dive on this thing. And he ended up talking about "gray areas" that should have been explored a little more and "subtleties" that we should have not brushed over so lightly, without disclosing the fact that the series had originally been four parts and they cut it to three parts, because "nobody reads four part series' anymore." So, that was one reason.

The other reason was, you know, one of the things you learn very quickly when you get into journalism is that there's safety in numbers. Editors don't like being out there on a limb all by themselves. I remember very clearly going to press conferences, coming back, writing a story, sending it in, and my editor calling up and saying, well gee, this isn't what AP wrote. Or, the Chronicle just ran their story, and that's not what the Chronicle wrote. And I'd say, "Fine. Good." And they said, no, we've got to make it the same, we don't want to be different. We don't want our story to be different from everybody else's.

And so what they were seeing at the Mercury was, the Big Three newspapers were sitting on one side of the fence, and they were out there by themselves, and that just panicked the hell out of them. So, you have to understand newspaper mentality to understand it a little bit, but it's not too hard to understand cowardice, either. I think a lot of that was that they were just scared as hell to go ahead with the story.

Audience Member #1: Were they able to look you in the eye, and...

Gary Webb: No. They didn't, they just did this over the phone. I went to Sacramento.

Audience Member #1: When did you find out about it, and what did you...

Gary Webb: Oh, they called me up at home, two months after I turned in my last four stories, and said, we're going to write a column saying, you know, we're not going ahead with this. And that's when I jumped in the car and drove up there and said, what the hell's going on? And I got all these mealy-mouthed answers, you know, geez, gray areas, subtleties, one thing or another... But I said, tell me one thing that's wrong with the story, and nobody could ever point to anything. And today, to this day, nobody has ever said there was a factual error in that story.

[Inaudible question from the audience.]

Gary Webb: The question was, the editors are one thing, what about the readers? Um... who cares about the readers? Honestly. The reader's don't run the newspaper.

[Another inaudible question from the audience regarding letters to the editor and boycotts of the newspaper.]

Gary Webb: Well, a number of them did, and believe me, the newspaper office was flooded with calls and emails. And the newspaper, to their credit, printed a bunch of them, calling it the most cowardly thing they'd ever seen. But in the long run, the readers, you know, don't run the place. And that's the thing about newspaper markets these days. You folks really don't have any choice! What else are you going to read? And the editors know this.

When I started in this business, we had two newspapers in town where I worked in Cincinnati. And we were deathly afraid that if we sat on a story for 24 hours, the Cincinnati Inquirer was going to put it in the paper, and we were going to look like dopes. We were going to look like we were covering stuff up, we were going to look like we were protecting somebody. So we were putting stuff in the paper without thinking about it sometimes, but we got it in the paper. Now, we can sit on stuff for months, who's going to find out about it? And even if somebody found out about it, what are they going to do? That's the big danger that everybody has sort of missed. These one-newspaper towns, you've got no choice. You've got no choice. And television? Television's not going to do it. I mean, they're down filming animals at the zoo! [Laughter and applause.]

Audience Member #2: I assume you have talked to John Cummings, the one that wrote Compromised, that book?

Gary Webb: I talked to Terry Reed, who was the principal author on that, yeah.

Audience Member #2: Well, that was a well-documented book, and I had just finished reading this when I happened to look down and see the headlines on the Sunday paper. And he stated that Oliver North told him personally that he was a CIA asset that manufactured weapons.

Gary Webb: Right.

Audience Member #2: When he discovered that they were importing cocaine, he got out of there. And they chased him with his family across country for two years trying to catch him. But he had said in that book that Oliver North told him that Vice President Bush told Oliver North to dirty Clinton's men with the drug money. Which I assumed was what Whitewater was all about, was finding the laundering and trying to find something on Clinton. Do you know anything about that?

Gary Webb: Yeah, let me sum up your question. Essentially, you're asking about the goings-on in Mena, Arkansas, because of the drug operations going on at this little air base in Arkansas while Clinton was governor down there. The fellow you referred to, Terry Reed, wrote a book called Compromised which talked about his role in this corporate operation in Mena which was initially designed to train contra pilots -- Reed was a pilot -- and it was also designed after the Boland Amendment went into effect to get weapons parts to the contras, because the CIA couldn't provide them anymore. And as Reed got into this weapons parts business, he discovered that the CIA was shipping cocaine back through these weapons crates that were coming back into the United States. And when he blew the whistle on it, he was sort of sent on this long odyssey of criminal charges being filed against him, etcetera etcetera etcetera. A lot of what Reed wrote is accurate as far as I can tell, and a lot of it was documented.

There is a House Banking Committee investigation that has been going on now for about three years, looking specifically at Mena, Arkansas, looking specifically at a drug trafficker named Barry Seal, who was one of the biggest cocaine and marijuana importers in the south side of the United States during the 1980s. Seal was also, coincidentally, working for the CIA, and was working for the Drug Enforcement Administration.

I don't know how many of you remember this, but one night Ronnie Reagan got on TV and held up a grainy picture, and said, here's proof that the Sandanistas are dealing drugs. Look, here's Pablo Escobar, and they're all loading cocaine into a plane, and this was taken in Nicaragua. This was the eve of a vote on the contra aid. That photograph was set up by Barry Seal. The plane that was used was Seal's plane, and it was the same plane that was shot down over Nicaragua a couple of years later that Eugene Hasenfus was in, that broke open the whole Iran-contra scandal.

The Banking Committee is supposed to be coming out with a report in the next couple of months looking at the relationship between Barry Seal, the U.S. government and Clinton's folks. Alex Cockburn has done a number of stories on this company called Park-On Meter down in Russellville, Arkansas, that's hooked up with Clinton's family, hooked up with Hillary's law firm, that sort of thing. To me, that's a story people ought to be looking at. I never thought Whitewater was much of a story, frankly. What I thought the story was about was Clinton's buddy Dan Lasater, the bond broker down there who was a convicted cocaine trafficker. Clinton pardoned him on his way to Washington. Lasater was a major drug trafficker, and Terry Reed's book claims Lasater was part and parcel with this whole thing.

Voice From the Audience: Cockburn's newsletter is called Counterpunch, and he's done a good job of defending you in it.

Gary Webb: Yeah, Cockburn has also written a book called Whiteout, which is a very interesting look at the history of CIA drug trafficking. Actually, I think it's selling pretty well itself. The New York Times hated it, of course, but what else is new?

Audience Member #2: Well I just wanted to mention that he states also -- I guess it was Terry Reed who was actually doing the work -- he said Bush was running the whole thing as vice president.

Gary Webb: I think that George Bush's role in this whole thing is one of the large unexplored areas of it.

Audience Member #2: Which is why I think Reagan put him in as vice president, because of his position with the CIA.

Gary Webb: Well, you know, that whole South Florida Drug Task Force was full of CIA operatives. Full of them. This was supposed to be our vanguard in the war against cocaine cartels, and if those Colombians are to be believed, this was the vehicle that we were using to ship arms and allow cocaine into the country, this Drug Task Force. Nobody's looked at that. But there are lots of clues that there's a lot to be dug out.

Audience Member #3: Thank you, Gary. I lost my feature columnist position at my college paper for writing a satire of Christianity some years ago, and...

Gary Webb: That'll do it, yeah. [Laughter from the audience.]

Audience Member #3: And I lost my job twice in the last five years because of my activism in the community, but I got a job [inaudible]. But my question is, I knew someone in the mid-'80s who said that he was in the Navy, and that he had information that the Navy was involved in delivering cocaine to this country. Another kind of bombshell, I'd like to have you comment on it, I saw a video some years ago that said the UFO research that's being done down in the southwest is being funded by drug money and cocaine dealings by the CIA, and that there are 25 top secret levels of government above the Top Secret category, and that there are some levels that even the president doesn't know about. So there's another topic for another book, I just wanted to have you comment...

Gary Webb: A number of topics for another book. [Laughter from the audience.] I don't know about the UFO research, but I do know you're right that we have very little idea how vast the intelligence community in this country is, or what they're up to. I think there's a great story brewing -- it's called the ECHELON program, and it involves the sharing of eavesdropped emails and cell phone communications, because it is illegal for them to do it in this country. So they've been going to New Zealand and Australia and Canada and having those governments eavesdrop on our conversations and tell us about it. I've read a couple of stories about it in the English press, and I read a couple of stories about it in the Canadian press, but I've seen precious little in the American press. But there's stuff on the Internet that circulates about that, if you're interested in the topic. I think it's called the ECHELON program.

Audience Member #4: I'm glad you brought up James Burke and his Connections, because there are a lot of connections here. One I didn't hear too much about, and I know you've done a lot of research on, was how computers and high tech was used by the Crips and Bloods early on. I lived in south LA prior to this, knew some of these people, and you're right, they had virtually no education. And to suddenly have an operation that's computer literate, riding out of Bakersfield, Fresno, on north and then east in a very quick period -- I'm still learning the computer, I'm probably as old as you are, or older -- so I'd like to hear something on that. The whole dislocation of south LA that occurred -- the Watts Festival, the whole empowerment of the black community was occurring beginning in the late '60s and into the early '70s and mid-'70s, and then collapses into a sea of flipping demographics, and suddenly by 1990 it is El Salvadoran-dominated. And that's another curious part of this equation as we talk about drugs.

Gary Webb: Well, that's quite a bevy of things there. As far as the sophistication of the Crips and the Bloods, the one thing that I probably should have mentioned was that when Danilo Blandón went down to South Central to start selling this dope, he had an M.B.A. in marketing. So he knew what he was doing. His job for the Somoza government was setting up wholesale markets for agricultural products. He'd received an M.B.A. thanks to us, actually -- we helped finance him, we helped send him to the University of Bogata to get his M.B.A. so he could go back to Nicaragua, and he actually came to the United States to sell dope to the gangs. So this was a very sophisticated operation.

One of the money launderers from this group was a macro-economist -- his uncle, Orlando Murillo, was on the Central Bank of Nicaragua. The weapons advisor they had was a guy who'd been a cop for fifteen years. They had another weapons advisor who had been a Navy SEAL. You don't get these kinds of people by putting ads in the paper. This is not a drug ring that just sort of falls together by chance. This is like an all-star game. Which is why I suspect more and more that this thing was set up by a higher authority than a couple of drug dealers.

Audience Member #5: Hi Gary, I just want to thank you for going against the traffic on this whole deal. I'm in the journalism school up at U. of O., and I'm interested in the story behind the story. I was hoping you could share some anecdotes about the kind of activity that you engaged in to get the story. For example, when you get off a plane in Nicaragua, what do you do? Where do you start? How do you talk to "Freeway" Ricky? How do you go against a government stonewall?

Gary Webb: The question is, how do you do a story like this, essentially. Well, thing I've always found is, if you go knock on somebody's door, they're a lot less apt to slam it in your face than if you call them up on the telephone. So, the reason I went down to Nicaragua was to go knock on doors. I didn't go down there and just step off a plane -- I found a fellow down in Nicaragua and we hired him as a stringer, a fellow named George Hidell who is a marvelous investigative reporter, he knew all sorts of government officials down there. And I speak no Spanish, which was another handicap. George speaks like four languages. So, you find people like that to help you out.

With these drug dealers, you know, it's amazing how willing they are to talk. I did a series while I was in Kentucky on organized crime in the coal industry. And it was about this mass of stock swindlers who had looted Wall Street back in the '60s and moved down to Kentucky in the '70s while the coal boom was going on, during the energy shortage. The lesson I learned in that thing -- I thought these guys would never talk to me, I figured they'd be crazy to talk to a reporter about the scams they were pulling. But they were happy to talk about it, they were flattered that you would come to them and say, hey, tell me about what you do. Tell me your greatest knock-off. Those guys would go on forever! So, you know, everybody, no matter what they do, they sort of have pride in their work... [Laughter from the audience.] And, you know, I found that when you appeared interested, they would be happy to tell you.

The people who lied to me, the people who slammed doors in my face, were the DEA and the FBI. The DEA called me down -- I wrote about this in the book -- they had a meeting, and they were telling me that if I wrote this story, I was going to help drug traffickers bring drugs into the country, and I was going to get DEA agents killed, and this, that and the other thing, all of which was utterly bullshit. So that's the thing -- just ask. There's really no secret to it.

Audience Member #6: I'd like to ask a couple of questions very quickly. The first one is, if you wouldn't mind being a reference librarian for a moment -- there was the Golden Triangle. I was just wondering if you've ever, in your curiosity about this, touched on that -- the drug rings and the heroin trade out of Southeast Asia. And the second one is about the fellow from the Houston Chronicle, I don't remember his name right off, but you know who I'm talking about, if you could just touch on that a little bit...

Gary Webb: Yes. The first question was about whether I ever touched on what was going on in the Golden Triangle. Fortunately, I didn't have to -- there's a great book called The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, by Alfred McCoy, which is sort of a classic in CIA drug trafficking lore. I don't think you can get any better than that. That's a great reference in the library, you can go check it out. McCoy was a professor at the University of Wisconsin who went to Laos during the time that the secret war in Laos was going on, and he wrote about how the CIA was flying heroin out on Air America. That's the thing that really surprised me about the reaction to my story was, it's not like I invented this stuff. There's a long, long history of CIA involvement in drug traffic which Cockburn gets into in Whiteout.

And the second question was about Pete Brewton -- there was a reporter in Houston for the Houston Post named Pete Brewton who did the series -- I think it was '91 or '92 -- on the strange connections between the S&L collapses, particularly in Texas, and CIA agents. And his theory was that a lot of these collapses were not mismanagement, they were intentional. These things were looted, with the idea that a lot of the money was siphoned off to fund covert operations overseas. And Brewton wrote this series, and it was funny, because after all hell broke loose on my story, I called him up, and he said, "Well, I was waiting for this to happen to you." And I said, "Why?" And he said, "I was exactly like you are. I'd been in this business for twenty years, I'd won all sorts of awards, I'd lectured in college journalism courses, and I wrote a series that had these three little letters C-I-A in it. And suddenly I was unreliable, and I couldn't be trusted, and Reed Irvine at Accuracy In Media was writing nasty things about me, and my editor had lost confidence in me, so I quit the business and went to law school."

Brewton wrote a book called George Bush, CIA and the Mafia. It's hard to find, but it's worth looking up if you can find it. It's all there, it's all documented. See, the difference between his story and my story was, we put ours out on the web, and it got out. Brewton's story is sort of confined to the printed page, and I think the Washington Journalism Review actually wrote a story about, how come nobody's writing about this, nobody's picking up this story. Nobody touched this story, it just sort of died. And the same thing would have happened with my series, had we not had this amazing web page. Thank God we did, or this thing would have just slipped underneath the waves, and nobody would have ever heard about it.

Audience Member #7: I'm glad you're here. I guess the CIA, there was something I read in the paper a couple of years ago, that said the CIA is actually murdering people, and they admitted it, they don't usually do that.

Gary Webb: It's a new burst of honesty from the new CIA.

Audience Member #7: They'll murder us with kindness. In the Chicago police force, there were about 10 officers who were kicked off the police force for doing drugs or selling drugs, and George Bush or something... I heard that he had a buddy who had a lot of money in drug testing equipment, so that's one reason everybody has to pee in a cup now... [Laughter from the audience.] The other thing I found, there was a meth lab close to here, and somebody who wasn't even involved with it, he was paralyzed... And as you know, we have the "Just Say No to Drugs" deal... What do you think we can do to stop us, the People, from being hypnotized once again from all these shenanigans, doing other people injury in terms of these kinds of messages, at the same time they're selling. Because all this money is being spent for all this...

Gary Webb: I guess the question is, what could you do to keep from being hypnotized by the media message, specifically on the Drug War? Is that what you're talking about?

Audience Member #7: Yeah, or all the funds... like, there's another thing here with the meth lab, they say we'll kind of turn people in...

Gary Webb: Oh yeah, the nation of informers.

Audience Member #7: Yeah.

Gary Webb: That's something I have to laugh about -- up until I think '75 or '76, probably even later than that, you could go to your doctor and get methamphetamine. I mean, there were housewives by the hundreds of thousands across the United States who were taking it every day to lose weight, and now all the sudden it was the worst thing on the face of the earth. That's one thing I got into in the book, was the sort of crack hysteria in 1986 that prompted all these crazy laws that are still on the books today, and the 100:1 sentencing ratio... I don't know how many of you saw, on PBS a couple of nights back, there was a great show on informants called "Snitch." [Murmurs of recognition from the audience.] Yeah, on Frontline. That was very heartening to see, because I don't think ten years ago that it would have stood a chance in hell of getting on the air.

What I'm seeing now is that a lot of people are finally waking up to the idea that this "drug war" has been a fraud since the get-go. My personal opinion is, I think the main purpose of this whole drug war was to sort of erode civil liberties, very slowly and very gradually, and sort of put us down into a police state. [Robust burst of applause from the audience.] And we're pretty close to that. I've got to hand it to them, they've done a good job. We have no Fourth Amendment left anymore, we're all peeing in cups, and we're all doing all sorts of things that our parents probably would have marched in the streets about.

The solution to that is to read something other than the daily newspaper, and turn off the TV news. I mean, I'm sorry, I hate to say that, but that's mind-rot. You've got to find alternative sources of information. [Robust applause.]

Voice From the Audience: How can you say that it was all a chain reaction, that it was not done deliberately, and on the other hand say it has at the same time deliberately eroded our rights?

Gary Webb: Well, the question was, how can I say on one hand it was a chain reaction, and on the other hand say the drug war was set up deliberately to erode our rights. I mean, you're talking about sort of macro versus micro. And I do not give the CIA that much credit, that they could plan these vast conspiracies down through the ages and have them work -- most of them don't.

What I'm saying is, you have police groups, you have police lobbying groups, you have prison guard groups -- they seize opportunities when they come along. The Drug War has given them a lot of opportunities to say, okay, now let's lengthen prison sentences. Why? Well, because if you keep people in jail longer, you need more prison guards. Let's build more prisons. Why? Well, people get jobs, prison guards get jobs. The police stay in business. We need to fund more of them. We need to give bigger budgets to the correctional facilities. This is all very conscious, but I don't think anybody sat in a room in 1974 and said, okay, by 1995, we're going to have X number of Americans locked up or under parole supervision. I don't think they mind -- you know, I think they like that. But I don't think it was a conscious effort. I think it was just one bad idea, after another bad idea, compounded with a stupid idea, compounded with a really stupid idea. And here we are. So I don't know if that answers your question or not...

Audience Member #8: To me, the Iran-contra story was one of the most interesting and totally frustrating things. And the more information, the more about it I heard -- we don't know anything about it, I mean, if you look for any official data, they deny everything. And to see Ollie North, the upstanding blue-eyed American, standing there lying through his teeth, and we knew it... [Inaudible comment, "before Congress and the President"?] What galls me is that these people who are guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors are now getting these enormous pensions, and we have to pay for these bums. It sickens me!

Gary Webb: Right.

Audience Member #8: And I actually have a question -- this is my question, by the way, I know you have a thousand other questions [laughter from the audience] -- but the one that stays with me, and has always bothered me, was the Christic Institute, and I thought it was fantastic. And they were hit with this enormous lawsuit, and they had to bail out. This needs to be ["rehired"?] because they knew what they were doing, they had all the right answers, and they were run out of office, so to say, in disgrace, because of this lawsuit.

Gary Webb: The question was about the Christic Institute, and about how the Iran-contra controversy is probably one of the worst scandals. I agree with you, I think the Iran-contra scandal was worse than Watergate, far worse than this nonsense we're doing now. But I'll tell you, I think the press played a very big part in downplaying that scandal. One of the people I interviewed for the book was a woman named Pam Naughton, who was one of the best prosecutors that the Iran-contra committee had. And I asked her, why -- you know, it was also the first scandal that was televised, and I remember watching them at night. I would go to work and I'd set the VCR, and I'd come home at night and I'd watch the hearings. Then I'd pick up the paper the next morning, and it was completely different! And I couldn't figure it out, and this has bothered me all these years.

So when I got Pam Naughton on the phone, I said, what the hell happened to the press corps in Washington during the Iran-contra scandal? And she said, well, I can tell you what I saw. She said, every day, we would come out at the start of this hearings, and we would lay out a stack of documents -- all the exhibits we were going to introduce -- stuff that she thought was extremely incriminating, front page story after front page story, and they'd sit them on a table. And she said, every day the press corps would come in, and they'd say hi, how're you doing, blah blah blah, and they'd go sit down in the front row and start talking about, you know, did you see the ball game last night, and what they saw on Johnny Carson. And she said one or two reporters would go up and get their stack of documents and go back and write about it, and everybody else sat in the front row, and they would sit and say, okay, what's our story today? And they would all agree what the story was, and they'd go back and write it. Most of them never even looked at the exhibits.

And that's why I say it was the press's fault, because there was so much stuff that came out of those hearings. That used to just drive me crazy, you would never see it in the newspaper. And I don't think it's a conspiracy -- if anything, it's a conspiracy of stupidity and laziness. I talked to Bob Parry about this -- when he was working for Newsweek covering Iran-contra, they weren't even letting him go to the hearings. He had to get transcripts messengered to him at his house secretly, so his editors wouldn't find out he was actually reading the transcripts, because he was writing stories that were so different from everybody else's.

Bob Parry tells a story of being at a dinner party with Bobby Inman from the CIA, the editor of Newsweek, and all the muckity-mucks -- this was his big introduction into Washington society. And they were sitting at the dinner table in the midst of the Iran-contra thing, talking about everything but Iran-contra. And Bob said he had the bad taste of bringing up the Iran-contra hearing and mentioning one particularly bad aspect of it. And he said, the editor of Newsweek looked at him and said, "You know, Bob, there are just some things that it's better the country just doesn't know about." And all these admirals and generals sitting around the table all nodded their heads in agreement, and they wanted to talk about something else.

That's the attitude. That's the attitude in Washington. And that's the attitude of the Washington press corps, and nowadays it's even worse than that, because now, if you play the game right, you get a TV show. Now you've got the McLaughlin Group. Now you get your mug on CNN. You know. And that's how they keep them in line. If you're a rabble rouser, and a shit-stirrer, they don't want your type on television. They want the pundits.

The other question was about the Christic Institute. They had it all figured out. The Christic Institute had this thing figured out. They filed suit in May of 1986, alleging that the Reagan administration, the CIA, this sort of parallel government was going on. Oliver North was involved in it, you had the Bay of Pigs Cubans that were involved in it down in Costa Rica, they had names, they had dates, and they got murdered. And the Reagan administration's line was, they're a bunch of left-wing liberal crazies, this was conspiracy theory. If you want to see what they really thought, go to Oliver North's diaries, which are public -- the National Security Archive has got them, you can get them -- all he was writing about, after the Christic Institute's suit was filed, was how we've got to shut this thing down, how we have to discredit these witnesses, how we've got to get this guy set up, how we've got to get this guy out of the country... They knew that the Christic Institute was right, and they were deathly afraid that the American public was going to find out about it.

I am convinced that the judge who was hearing the case was part and parcel to the problem. He threw the case out of court and fined the Christic Institute, I think it was $1.3 million, for even bringing the lawsuit. It was deemed "frivolous litigation." And it finally bankrupted them. And they went away.

But that's the problem when you try to take on the government in its own arena, and the federal courts are definitely part of its own arena. They make the rules. And in cases like that, you don't stand a chance in hell, it won't happen.

Voice From the Audience: But if you cannot get the truth in the courts, if you cannot write it in the papers, then what do you do?

Gary Webb: You do it yourself. You do it yourself. You've got to start rebuilding an information system on your own. And that's what's going on. It's very small, but it's happening. People are talking to each other through newsgroups on the Internet. People are doing Internet newsletters.

Voice From the Audience: Do you have a website?

Emcee: Let's use the mike, let's use the mike.

Gary Webb: The question is, do I have a website. No, I don't, but I'm building one. [Inaudible question from the audience.]

Gary Webb: Well, let's let these people who have been standing in line...

[Commotion, murmuring. Someone calls out, "Please use the mike."]

Audience Member #9: When you mentioned prisons a moment ago, I couldn't help but remember that it is America's fastest-growing industry, the "prison industry" -- which is a hell of a phrase unto itself. But it seems that the CIA had people aligned throughout Central America at one point, and El Salvador, with the contras, and in Honduras and Nicaragua, and in Panama, Manuel Noriega...

Gary Webb: Our "man in Panama," that's right.

Audience Member #9: Yeah. But something went wrong with him, and he got pinched in public. And I'm interested to know what you think about that.

Gary Webb: The question is about Manuel Noriega, who was our "man in Panama" for so many years. What happened to Noriega is that -- I don't think it had anything to do with the fact that he was a drug trafficker, because we knew that for years. What it had to do with was what is going to happen at the end of this year, which is when control of the Panama Canal goes over to the Panamanians. If you read the New York Times story that Seymour Hersh wrote back in June of 1986 that exposed Noriega publicly as a drug trafficker and money launderer, there were some very telling phrases in it. All unsourced, naturally, you know -- unattributed comments from high-ranking government officials -- but they talked about how they were nervous that Noriega had become unreliable. And with control of the Panama Canal reverting to the Panamanian government, they were very nervous at the idea of having somebody as "unstable" as Noriega running the country at that point. And I think that was a well-founded fear. You've got a major drug trafficker controlling a major maritime thoroughway. I can see the CIA being nervous about being cut out of the business. [Laughter from the audience.]

But I think that's what the whole thing with Noriega was about -- they wanted him out of there, because they wanted somebody that they could control a little more closely in power in Panama for when the canal gets reverted back to them.

Audience Member #9: Was there much of a profit difference between Nicaragua and Panama as far as the drugs went?

Gary Webb: Well, what Noriega had done was sort of create an international banking center for drug money. That was his part of it. Nicaragua was nothing ever than just a trans-shipment point. Central America was never anything more than a trans-shipment point. Columbia Peru and Bolivia were the producers, and the planes needed a place to refuel, and that's all that Central America ever was. The banking was all done in Panama.

Audience Member #10: You talk about how they sat on their stories, the newspapers? Why did they suddenly decide to pursue the stories?

Gary Webb: Which stories are these?

Audience Member #10: The stories about the crack dealing and the CIA. Why did they suddenly decide that, well, actually...

Gary Webb: The question was -- correct me if I'm wrong -- the question raised the fact that the other newspapers didn't do anything about this story for a while, and then after I wrote it they came after me. Is that what you're asking?

Audience Member #10: Well, yeah, and then eventually the CIA admitted it... and I mean, why are people asking, it sat for a long time, and then suddenly everyone was on it. What was the turning point that made them decide to pursue it?

Gary Webb: The turning point that made them decide to pursue the story was the fact that it had gotten out over the Internet, and people were calling them up saying, why don't you have the story in your newspaper? You know, I don't think the subject matter frightened the major media as much as the fact that a little newspaper in Northern California was able to set the national agenda for once. And people were marching in the streets, people were holding hearings in Washington, they were demanding Congressional hearings, you had John Deutch, the CIA director, go down on that surreal trip down to South Central to convince everyone that everything was okay... [Laughter from the audience.] And all of this was happening without the big media being involved in it at all. And the reason that happened was because we had an outlet -- we had the web. And the people at the Mercury News did a fantastic job on this website.

And so, news was marching on without them. There's a professor at the University of Wisconsin who's done a paper on the whole "Dark Alliance" thing, and her thesis is that this story was shut down more because of how it got out than for what it actually said. That it was an attempt by the major media to regain control of the Internet, and to suggest that unless they're the ones who are putting it out, it's unreliable. Which I think you see in a lot of stories. The mainstream press gladly promotes the idea that you can't believe anything you read on the Internet, it's all kooks, it's all conspiracy theorists... And there are, I mean, I admit, there are a lot of them out there, but it's not all false. But the idea that we're being taught is, unless it's got our name on it, you can't believe it. So they can retain control of the means of communication anyway.

Audience Member #11: You mentioned Iran-contra, which was private foreign policy in defiance of Congress, which means it was a high crime. From there, we get more drugs, we get erosion of civil liberties and the loss of the Fourth Amendment, which you mentioned. And we have to get that back, because without it, we're just commodities to one another. So what I'd like to ask you is, what are you working on now? And do you have your own journalistic chain of reaction? Are you going to be doing something that connects back to this?

Gary Webb: The question is what am I doing now -- believe it or not, I'm working for the government. [Laughter from the audience.] I work for the California legislature, and I do investigations of state agencies. I just wrote a piece for Esquire magazine which should be out in April on another fabulous DEA program that they're running. Actually, part of it's based here in Oregon, called Operation Pipeline. That story is coming out in April, and Esquire told me they want me to write more stuff for them, they want me to do some investigative reporting for them, so I'll be working for them. And I'm putting together another book proposal, and a couple of other things. I'm not going to work for newspapers any more, I learned my lesson.

Audience Member #12: A year ago the editor of your newspaper was here to speak, sponsored by the University of Oregon School of Journalism. Before I got up here, I took a casual look around -- I don't know all of the members of the journalism faculty, but I didn't recognize any. We did have a student here who got up and asked a question. That leads to this question: I'd like, if you don't mind, to ask if there is someone from the University of Oregon journalism faculty here, would they mind being acknowledged and raising their hand?

Gary Webb: All right, there's one back there.

Audience Member #12: There is one. Okay. [Applause from the audience.] I'm pleased to see it. There is that one person. My point is, I think much of what you've said this evening constitutes an indictment -- and a valid indictment -- of the university journalism programs in this country. [Applause.] Most Americans and I believe -- and I'm interested in your reaction -- that it reinforces that indictment when we see, to that person's credit, that she is the only faculty member from our school of journalism to hear you tonight.

Gary Webb: I think the general question was about the state of the journalism schools. The one thing journalism schools don't teach, by and large, is investigative reporting. They teach stenography very well. That's why I consider most of journalism today to be stenography. You go to a press conference, you write down the quotes accurately, you come back, you don't provide any context, you don't provide any perspective, because that gets into analysis, and heavens knows, we don't want any analysis in our newspapers.

But you report things accurately, you report things fairly, and even if it's a lie you put it in the newspaper, and that's considered journalism. I don't consider that journalism, I consider that stenography. And that is the way they teach journalism in school, that's the way I was taught. Unless you go to a very different journalism school from the kinds that most kids go to, that's what you're taught. Now, there are specialized journalism schools, there are master's programs like the Kiplinger Program at Ohio State, that's very good.

So, I'm not saying that all journalism schools are bad, but they don't teach you to be journalists. They discourage you from doing that, by and large. And I don't think it's the fault of the journalism professors, I just think that's the way things have been taught in this country for so long, that they just do it automatically. I'd be interested in hearing the professor's thoughts about it, but that's sort of the way I look at things. I spent way too many years in journalism school. I kind of got shed of those notions after I got out in the real world.
[End of transcript.]

http://www.parascope.com/mx/articles/garywebb/garyWebbSpeaks.htm
   ____________________________________
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua

Nicaraguan Revolution (1960s–1990)

United States–supported anti-Sandinista "Contra" rebels (ARDE Frente Sur) in 1987
In 1961, Carlos Fonseca looked back to the historical figure of Sandino, and along with two other people (one of whom was believed to be Casimiro Sotelo, who was later assassinated), founded the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN).[63] After the 1972 earthquake and Somoza's apparent corruption, the ranks of the Sandinistas were flooded with young disaffected Nicaraguans who no longer had anything to lose.[80]

In December 1974, a group of the FSLN, in an attempt to kidnap U.S. ambassador Turner Shelton, held some Managuan partygoers hostage (after killing the host, former agriculture minister, Jose Maria Castillo), until the Somozan government met their demands for a large ransom and free transport to Cuba. Somoza granted this, then subsequently sent his national guard out into the countryside to look for the kidnappers, described by opponents of the kidnapping as "terrorists".[81]

On January 10, 1978, Pedro Joaquín Chamorro Cardenal, the editor of the national newspaper La Prensa and ardent opponent of Somoza, was assassinated.[82] It is alleged that the planners and perpetrators of the murder were at the highest echelons of the Somoza regime.[82]

The Sandinistas forcefully took power in July 1979, ousting Somoza, and prompting the exodus of the majority of Nicaragua's middle class, wealthy landowners, and professionals, many of whom settled in the United States.[83][84][85] The Carter administration decided to work with the new government, while attaching a provision for aid forfeiture if it was found to be assisting insurgencies in neighboring countries.[86] Somoza fled the country and eventually ended up in Paraguay, where he was assassinated in September 1980, allegedly by members of the Argentinian Revolutionary Workers' Party.[87]

In 1980, the Carter administration provided $60 million in aid to Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, but the aid was suspended when the administration obtained evidence of Nicaraguan shipment of arms to El Salvadoran rebels.[88] Most people sided with Nicaragua against the Sandinistas.[89] In response to the coming to power of the Sandinistas, various rebel groups collectively known as the "Contras" were formed to oppose the new government. The Reagan administration authorized the CIA to help the Contra rebels with funding, weapons and training.[90] The Contras operated from camps in the neighboring countries of Honduras to the north and Costa Rica to the south.[90]

10th anniversary of the Nicaraguan revolution in Managua, 1989

They engaged in a systematic campaign of terror among rural Nicaraguans to disrupt the social reform projects of the Sandinistas. Several historians have criticized the Contra campaign and the Reagan administration's support for the Contras, citing the brutality and numerous human rights violations of the Contras. LaRamee and Polakoff, for example, describe the destruction of health centers, schools, and cooperatives at the hands of the rebels,[91] and others have contended that murder, rape, and torture occurred on a large scale in Contra-dominated areas.[92] The U.S. also carried out a campaign of economic sabotage, and disrupted shipping by planting underwater mines in Nicaragua's port of Corinto,[93] an action condemned by the International Court of Justice as illegal.[94] The court also found that the U.S. encouraged acts contrary to humanitarian law by producing the manual Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare and disseminating it to the Contras.[95] The manual, among other things, advised on how to rationalize killings of civilians.[96] The U.S. also sought to place economic pressure on the Sandinistas, and the Reagan administration imposed a full trade embargo.[97]

 •── The U.S. also carried out a campaign of economic sabotage, and disrupted shipping by planting underwater mines in Nicaragua's port of Corinto,[93]
      ([ did this work?  was shipping disrupted?  did any ship got blowed up by the mine?  how did they demined the habour?  How was this found out by the public?  A ship got blow up? ])
      ([ what if there an economic sabotage happening inside the the u.s.?; how would you determine this?;  would afford ability, avail ability, access ability, plenty of housing, jobs, and education be considered as  economic sabotage or is that competition or the nature of ... ])
 •── The U.S. also sought to place economic pressure on the Sandinistas, and the Reagan administration imposed a full trade embargo.[97]

The Sandinistas were also accused of human rights abuses including torture, disappearances and mass executions.[98][99] The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights investigated abuses by Sandinista forces, including an execution of 35 to 40 Miskitos in December 1981,[100] and an execution of 75 people in November 1984.[101]

In the Nicaraguan general elections of 1984, which were judged by at least one visiting 30-person delegation of NGO representatives to have been free and fair,[102] the Sandinistas won the parliamentary election and their leader Daniel Ortega won the presidential election.[103] The Reagan administration criticized the elections as a "sham" based on the claim that Arturo Cruz, the candidate nominated by the Coordinadora Democrática Nicaragüense, comprising three right wing political parties, did not participate in the elections. However, the administration privately argued against Cruz's participation for fear that his involvement would legitimize the elections, and thus weaken the case for American aid to the Contras.[104] According to Martin Kriele, the results of the election were rigged.[105][106][107][108]

In 1983 the U.S. Congress prohibited federal funding of the Contras, but the Reagan administration illegally continued to back them by covertly selling arms to Iran and channeling the proceeds to the Contras in the Iran–Contra affair, for which several members of the Reagan administration were convicted of felonies.[109] The International Court of Justice, in regard to the case of Nicaragua v. United States in 1986, found, "the United States of America was under an obligation to make reparation to the Republic of Nicaragua for all injury caused to Nicaragua by certain breaches of obligations under customary international law and treaty-law committed by the United States of America".[110] During the war between the Contras and the Sandinistas, 30,000 people were killed.[111]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua
   ____________________________________
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking

Central Intelligence Agency

A number of writers have alleged that the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was involved in the Nicaraguan Contras' cocaine trafficking operations during the 1980s Nicaraguan civil war. These claims have led to investigations by the United States government, including hearings and reports by the United States House of Representatives, Senate, Department of Justice, and the CIA's Office of the Inspector General which ultimately concluded the allegations were unsupported. The subject remains controversial.

A 1986 investigation by a sub-committee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (the Kerry Committee), found that "the Contra drug links included", among other connections, "[...] payments to drug traffickers by the U.S. State Department of funds authorized by the Congress for humanitarian assistance to the Contras, in some cases after the traffickers had been indicted by federal law enforcement agencies on drug charges, in others while traffickers were under active investigation by these same agencies."[1]  ([ the us state department were paying drug traffickers for humanitarian assistance to the Contras, because they were transporting firearms, ammo, and other things - also known as humanitarian assistance - to the Contras; and ... ])

The charges of CIA involvement in Contra cocaine trafficking were revived in 1996, when a newspaper series by reporter Gary Webb in the San Jose Mercury News claimed that the trafficking had played an important role in the creation of the crack cocaine drug problem in the United States. Webb's series led to three federal investigations, all of which concluded there was no evidence of a conspiracy by CIA officials or its employees to bring drugs into the United States.[2][3][4]  ([ arms, ammo, equipment, food, supply, and money were being shipped to the Contra; the planes were flying back empty; rather than letting the plane flying back empty, they put cocaine drug in the empty cargo; the CIA handlers turned a blind eye. ]) However, in the CIA report, it was also found that CIA assets had been trafficking narcotics to fund the Contra rebels.[5] The agency was aware of this trafficking, and (in some cases) dissuaded the DEA and other agencies from investigating the Contra supply networks involved.[6]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking
   ____________________________________
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_trafficking

United States

U.S. Government Officials said in 1990 the Anti-Drug Unit of the C.I.A. "accidentally" shipped a ton of cocaine into the United States from Venezuela as part of an effort to infiltrate and gather evidence on drug gangs. The cocaine was sold on the streets in the United States. No criminal charges were made in this incident, however C.I.A. officer Mark McFarlin resigned and another C.I.A. officer was disciplined. The CIA issued a statement on the incident saying there was "poor judgment and management on the part of several C.I.A. officers".[13]

Mark McFarlin

During a PBS Frontline investigation, DEA field agent Hector Berrellez said, "I believe that elements working for the CIA were involved in bringing drugs into the country."

"I know specifically that some of the CIA contract workers, meaning some of the pilots, in fact were bringing drugs into the U.S. and landing some of these drugs in government military air bases. And I know so because I was told by some of these pilots that in fact they had done that."[14]


Venezuela

A failed CIA anti-drug operation in Venezuela resulted in at least a ton of cocaine being smuggled into the United States and sold on the streets. The incident, which was first made public in 1993, was part of a plan to assist an undercover agent to gain the confidence of a Colombian drug cartel. The plan involved the unsupervised shipment of hundreds of pounds of cocaine from Venezuela. The drug in the shipments was provided by the Venezuelan anti-drug unit which was working with the CIA, using cocaine seized in Venezuela. The shipments took place despite the objections of the U.S. DEA. When the failed plan came to light, the CIA officer in charge of the operation resigned, and his supervisor was transferred.[28]


Mexico

In October 2013, two former federal agents and an ex-CIA contractor told an American television network that CIA operatives were involved in the kidnapping and murder of DEA covert agent Enrique Camarena, because he was a threat to the agency's drug operations in Mexico in the 1980s. According to the three men, the CIA was collaborating with drug traffickers moving cocaine and marijuana to the United States, and using its share of the profits to finance Nicaraguan Contra rebels attempting to overthrow Nicaragua's Sandinista government. The CIA spokesman responding to the allegation called it "ridiculous" to suggest that the agency had anything to do with the murder of a US federal agent or the escape of his alleged killer.[23]


Panama

The U.S. invasion of Panama after which president Manuel Noriega was captured.

In 1989, the United States invaded Panama as part of Operation Just Cause, which involved 25,000 American troops. General Manuel Noriega, head of Panama's government, had been giving military assistance to Contra groups in Nicaragua at the request of the U.S.—which, in exchange, allowed him to continue his drug-trafficking activities—which they had known about since the 1960s.[26][27] When the DEA tried to indict Noriega in 1971, the CIA prevented them from doing so.[26] The CIA, which was then directed by future president George H. W. Bush, provided Noriega with hundreds of thousands of dollars per year as payment for his work in Latin America.[26] However, when CIA pilot Eugene Hasenfus was shot down over Nicaragua by the Sandinistas, documents aboard the plane revealed many of the CIA's activities in Latin America, and the CIA's connections with Noriega became a public relations "liability" for the U.S. government, which finally allowed the DEA to indict him for drug trafficking, after decades of allowing his drug operations to proceed unchecked.[26]

Eugene Hasenfus (CIA pilot)

Afghanistan

For eight years, (until October 2009), Ahmed Wali Karzai, brother of the then-newly elected President of Afghanistan Hamid Karzai, was on the payroll of the CIA - but is also alleged to have been involved in opium trafficking in the Middle East.[31][32]

Alfred McCoy has argued that the CIA had fostered heroin production in Afghanistan for decades to finance operations aimed at containing the spread of communism, and later to finance operations aimed at containing the spread of the Islamic state.[33] McCoy alleges that the CIA protects local warlords and incentivises them to become drug lords. In his book "Politics of Heroin",[34] McCoy alleges CIA complicity in the global drug trade in Afghanistan, Southeast Asia, Central America, Columbia, argueing that the CIA follows a similar pattern in all their drug involvement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_drug_trafficking
   ____________________________________

an old file, unverify, as is

http://www.csun. edu/coms/ ben/news/ cia/970504. hist.html
from:
Slinshot
Early Spring 1997

Berkely California
-------
The Real Drug Lords

A brief history of CIA involvement in the Drug Trade

by William Blum

1947 to 1951, FRANCE
  According to Alfred W. McCoy in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, CIA arms, money, and disinformation enabled Corsican criminal syndicates in Marseille to wrestle control of labor unions from the Communist Party. The Corsicans gained political influence and control over the docks -- ideal conditions for cementing a long-term partnership with mafia drug distributors, which turned Marseille into the postwar heroin capital of the Western world. Marseille's first heroin laboratones were opened in 1951, only months after the Corsicans took over the waterfront.

 EARLY 1950s, SOUTHEAST ASIA
  The Nationalist Chinese army, organized by the CIA to wage war against
Communist China, became the opium barons of The Golden Triangle (parts of
Burma, Thailand and Laos), the world's largest source of opium and heroin.
Air America, the ClA's principal airline proprietary, flew the drugs all  
over Southeast Asia. (See Christopher Robbins, Air America, Avon Books, 1985, chapter 9 )

1950s to early 1970s, INDOCHINA
  During U.S. military involvement in Laos and other parts of Indochina,  
Air America flew opium and heroin throughout the area. Many Gl's in Vietnam became addicts. A laboratory built at CIA headquarters in northern Laos was used to refine heroin. After a decade of American military intervention, Southeast Asia had become the source of 70 percent of the world's illicit opium and the major supplier of raw materials for America's booming heroin market.

 1973-80, AUSTRALIA
  The Nugan Hand Bank of Sydney was a CIA bank in all but name. Among its
officers were a network of US generals, admirals and CIA men, including
fommer CIA Director William Colby, who was also one of its lawyers. With
branches in Saudi Arabia, Europe, Southeast Asia, South America and the  
U.S., Nugan Hand Bank financed drug trafficking, money laundering and  
international arms dealings. In 1980, amidst several mysterious deaths, the bank collapsed, $50 million in debt. (See Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money and the CIA, W.W. Norton & Co., 1 987.)

1970s and 1980s, PANAMA
  For more than a decade, Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega was a highly
paid CIA asset and collaborator, despite knowledge by U.S. drug authorities as early as 1971 that the general was heavily involved in drug trafficking and money laundering. Noriega facilitated ''guns-for-drugs" flights for the contras, providing protection and pilots, as well as safe havens for drug cartel otficials, and discreet banking facilities. U.S. officials, including then-ClA Director William Webster and several DEA officers, sent Noriega letters of praise for efforts to thwart drug trafficking (albeit only against competitors of his Medellin Cartel patrons). The U.S. government only turned against Noriega, invading Panama in December 1989 and kidnapping the general once they discovered he was providing intelligence and services to the Cubans and Sandinistas.
Ironically drug trafficking through Panama increased after the US invasion. (John Dinges, Our Man in Panama, Random House, 1991;
National Security Archive Documentation Packet The Contras, Cocaine, and
Covert Operations.)

1980s, CENTRAL AMERICA
  The San Jose Mercury News series documents just one thread of the
interwoven operations linking the CIA, the contras and the cocaine cartels.  Obsessed with overthrowing the leftist Sandinista government in Nicaragua, Reagan administration officials tolerated drug trafficking as long as the traffickers gave support to the contras. In 1989, the Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations (the Kerry committee) concluded a three-year investigation by stating: "There was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zones on the part of individual Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots mercenaries who worked with the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout the region.... U.S. officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua... . In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. govemment had intormation regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter.. .. Senior U S policy makers were nit immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution to the Contras' funding problems." (Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, a Report of  the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and Intemational Operations, 1989)

   In Costa Rica, which served as the "Southern Front" for the contras
(Honduras being the Northern Front), there were several different  
ClA-contra networks involved in drug trafficking. In addition to those servicing the Meneses-Blandon operation detailed by the Mercury News, and Noriega's operation, there was CIA operative John Hull, whose farms along Costa Rica's border with Nicaragua were the main staging area for the contras. Hull and other ClA-connected contra supporters and pilots teamed up with George Morales, a major Miami-based Colombian drug trafficker who later admitted to giving $3 million in cash and several planes to contra leaders. In 1989, after the Costa Rica government indicted Hull for drug trafficking, a DEA-hired plane clandestinely and illegally flew the CIA operative to  Miami, via Haiti. The US repeatedly thwarted Costa Rican efforts to extradite Hull back to Costa Rica to stand trial.
   Another Costa Rican-based drug ring involved a group of Cuban Amencans
whom the CIA had hired as military trainers for the contras. Many had long
been involved with the CIA and drug trafficking They used contra planes  
and a Costa Rican-based shnmp company, which laundered money for the CIA, to move cocaine to the U.S.
   Costa Rica was not the only route. Guatemala, whose military  
intelligence service -- closely associated with the CIA -- harbored many drug traffickers, according to the DEA, was another way station along the cocaine highway.
Additionally, the Medell!n Cartel's Miami accountant, Ramon Milian  
Rodriguez, testified that he funneled nearly $10 million to  Nicaraguan contras through long-time CIA operative Felix Rodriguez, who was based at Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador.
   The contras provided both protection and infrastructure (planes, pilots, airstrips, warehouses, front companies and banks) to these ClA-linked drug networks.  At least four transport companies under investigation for drug trafficking received US govemment contracts to carry non-lethal supplies to the contras. Southern Air Transport, "formerly" ClA-owned, and later under Pentagon contract, was involved in the drug running as well. Cocaine-laden planes flew to Florida, Texas, Louisiana and other locations, including several militarv bases Designated as 'Contra Craft,'' these shipments were not to be inspected. When some authority wasn't clued in and made an arrest, powerful strings were pulled on behalf of dropping the case, acquittal, reduced sentence, or deportation.

1980s to early 1990s, AFGHANISTAN
  ClA-supported Moujahedeen rebels engaged heavily in drug trafficking  
while fighting against the Soviet-supported govemment and  its plans to reform the very backward Afghan  society. The Agency's principal client was  Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leading druglords and leading heroin refiner. CIA supplied trucks and mules, which had carried arms into Afghanistan, were used to transport opium to laboratories along the Afghan Pakistan border. The output provided up to one half of the heroin used annually in the United States and three-quarters of that used in Western Europe. US officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the drug operabon because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies. In 1993, an official of the DEA called Afghanistan the new Colombia of the drug world.

MlD-1980s to early 199Os, HAITI
  While working to keep key Haitian military and political leaders in  
power, the CIA turned a blind eye to their clients' drug trafficking. In 1986, the Agency added some more names to its payroll by creating a new Haitian organization, the National Intelligence Service (SIN). SIN was purportedly created to fight the cocaine trade, though SIN officers themselves engaged in the trafficking, a trade aided and abetted by some of the Haitian military and political leaders.

William Blum is author of Killing Hope: U.S Military and CIA Interventions
Since World War ll available from Common Courage Press, P.O. Box 702,  
Monroe, Maine, 04951, USA; tel: (207) 525-0900; fax: (207) 525-3068
-------
   ____________________________________

First thing is we need the names of all front companies limited partnerships, LLCs, and all that mess.
 - LLCs?
 - Limited liability corporations.
Start with the night club which Barksdale owns.
Look up Orlando's, by address, you match it, and you see it's owned by who?
It's on Baltimore street, right?
Got it. D & B enterprises.
Hand it over to Prez, who's going to get off his ass and walk on over to the state office buildings on Preston street.
 - Preston street?
 - corporate charter office.
corporate who?
They have the paperwork on every corporation and LLC licensed to do business in the state.
You look up D & B enterprise on the computer.
You're going to get a little reel of microfilm.
Pull the corporate charter papers that way ...
write down every name you see:
corporate officers, shareholders, or more importantly
the resident agent on the filing who is usually a lawyer.
While they use front names, you know, as corporate officers, they'll usually use the same lawyer to do the charter filing.
Find that agent's name, run it through the computer ...
find out what other corporations he's done the filing for ...
and that way we find other front companies.
While he's doing that, what do I do?
You're going to keep your head in this assessment book.
Look up any properties that you can connect to Barksdale.
How do you know it connects to Barksdale, right?
You work off of what Prez gets you from the corporate charter documents.
Whatever companies he links to Barksdale or people connected to Barksdale, you look for those companies in the city land records.
For examples:  McNulty said that he heard that Barksdale owned an apartment building up on Druid park lake.
You look up all the blocks on Reservior hill.
See if there's anything owned by D & B enterprises or any other company that Prez finds through corporate charter or anything similar.
If you find something that fits, you write down the folio number so that you can look it up later at the court house.
You don't find anything ...
just take the names of all the corporate listings for the multi-units near the lake.
You call that list over to Prez, who pulls the charter papers and he'll look for connections.
 - It's like a scavenger hunt.
 - But what if Barksdale is careful?
I mean, what if we can't find his name on anything?
In this country somebody's name has got to be on a piece of paper.
A cousins, a girlfriend, a grandmother, a lieutenant he can trust, somebody's name is on a piece of paper.
And here's the rub:  You follow drugs, you get drug addicts and drug dealers.
But you start to follow the money and you don't know where the fuck it's going to take you.
While we're running around on this, what are you going to do?
 - You need something?
 - Yeah.
Let me get the campaign financial reports for the western districts and actually, any city wide race.
You want quarterly reports or individual donor lists?
 - Both, please.
 - It'll be a couple hundred pages.
Really?  I'll take all of it.
   

source:
        The wire (2002-2004) (2006-2008)
        HBO (home box office)
        David Simon
        episode 9, game day          
   ____________________________________
Sharon Weinberger, The imagineers of war : the untold history of DARPA, the pentagon agency that changed the world, 2017

pp.290-291
p.290
White House of National Drug Control Policy in the mid-1990s funded DARPA's simulation experts to create a model of drug tafficking to see if there might be ways of cutting off the drug cartels in South America.

p.291
“The big issue was and still is the movement of cocaine from Central and South America into the United States”, explained Dennis McBride, who was in charge of the effort.  He named the project after Iolaus, who in Greek mythology had helped Heracles battle Hydra.  The name ended up more appropriate than he had imagined.

p.291
  “We built this incredible complex end-to-end model from seed planting down in South America through the changing to a product at a wholesale level, the transportation across myriad modes of transportation, ultimately into warehouses in the United States of America”, McBride said.  Yet the more DARPA modeled the problem, the worse it looked.  If one cartel was defeated, it ended up just strengthening another cartel.  Like the Greek Hydra, if you cut off one head, two more rose in its place.  DARPA came up with answers, but the answers did not fit what the White House wanted.  If the Drug Enforcement Administration put more aircraft in the air, it did not help, because the cartels still had more planes.  No matter which way DARPA modeled the drug war, it could not come up with a scenario that cut off the supply.  “We built this very big model. We played with it every way we could. We said, ‘Let's do this’, and ‘Let's do that’. At the end, this huge model would say here's the result and it was not good news.”

p.291
  The simulation showed the limits of technology to solve what was essentially a policy problem:  simulation was not going to teach anyone how to win the drug war, it could only demonstrate that it was unwinnable, and that was not a message the government wanted to hear.  The reaction was denial:  law enforcement would just have to try harder.  “I don't know if we're a hell of a lot better off that we now kind of understand the problem because we have the simulation”, McBride reflected. “It's like a massive wounds all over the body; blood is pouring out from everywhere. We can understand that, but there is nothing we can do about it.”

p.291
  The counter-drug simulation failed because technology hit up against the limits of policy.

  (The imagineers of war : the untold story of DARPA, the Pentagon agency that changed the world / by Sharon Weinberger., New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2017, united states. defense advanced research projects agency──history. | military research──united states. | military art and science──technological innovations──united states. | science and state──united states. | national security──united states──history. | united states──defenses──history., U394.A75 W45 2016 (print) | U394.A75 (ebook) | 355/.040973, 2017, )
   ____________________________________
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blind_men_and_an_elephant

While one's subjective experience is true, it may not be the totality of truth.[4][7]

The parable has been used to illustrate a range of truths and fallacies; broadly, the parable implies that one's subjective experience can be true, but that such experience is inherently limited by its failure to account for other truths or a totality of truth.


Seven blind men and an elephant parable at a Jain temple

The medieval era Jain texts explain the concepts of anekāntavāda (or "many-sidedness") and syādvāda ("conditioned viewpoints") with the parable of the blind men and an elephant (Andhgajanyāyah), which addresses the manifold nature of truth. This parable is found in the most ancient Jain agams before 5th century BCE. Its popularity remained till late. For example, this parable is found in Tattvarthaslokavatika of Vidyanandi (9th century) and Syādvādamanjari of Ācārya Mallisena (13th century). Mallisena uses the parable to argue that immature people deny various aspects of truth; deluded by the aspects they do understand, they deny the aspects they don't understand. "Due to extreme delusion produced on account of a partial viewpoint, the immature deny one aspect and try to establish another. This is the maxim of the blind (men) and the elephant."[10]

anekāntavāda (or "many-sidedness") and
    syādvāda ("conditioned viewpoints")

anekāntavāda (or "many-sidedness") and
    syādvāda ("conditioned viewpoints")
   ────────────────────────────────────
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anekantavada

Syādvāda is a theory of qualified predication, states Koller. It states that all knowledge claims must be qualified in many ways, because reality is many-sided.[4] It is done so systematically in later Jain texts through saptibhaṅgīnaya or "the theory of sevenfold scheme".[4] These saptibhaṅgī seem to have been first formulated in Jainism by the 5th or 6th century CE Svetambara scholar Mallavadin,[31] and they are:[30][32][33]

  1. Affirmation: syād-asti—in some ways, it is,
  2. Denial: syān-nāsti—in some ways, it is not,
  3. Joint but successive affirmation and denial:
        syād-asti-nāsti—
        in some ways, it is, and it is not,
  4. Joint and simultaneous affirmation and denial:
        syāt-asti-avaktavyaḥ—
        in some ways, it is, and it is indescribable,
  5. Joint and simultaneous affirmation and denial:
        syān-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ—
        in some ways, it is not, and it is indescribable,
  6. Joint and simultaneous affirmation and denial:
        syād-asti-nāsti-avaktavyaḥ—
        in some ways, it is, it is not, and it is indescribable,
  7. Joint and simultaneous affirmation and denial:
        syād-avaktavyaḥ—
        in some ways, it is indescribable.
   ────────────────────────────────────
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaina_seven-valued_logic

The Saptabhangivada, the seven predicate theory may be summarized as follows:[4]

The seven predicate theory consists in the use of seven claims about sentences, each preceded by "arguably" or "conditionally" (syat), concerning a single object and its particular properties, composed of assertions and denials, either simultaneously or successively, and without contradiction. These seven claims are the following.

  1. Arguably, it (that is, some object) exists (syad asty eva).
  2. Arguably, it does not exist (syan nasty eva).
  3. Arguably, it exists; arguably, it doesn't exist (syad asty eva syan nasty eva).
  4. Arguably, it is non-assertible (syad avaktavyam eva).
  5. Arguably, it exists; arguably, it is non-assertible (syad asty eva syad avaktavyam eva).
  6. Arguably, it doesn't exist; arguably, it is non-assertible (syan nasty eva syad avaktavyam eva).
  7. Arguably, it exists; arguably, it doesn't exist; arguably it is non-assertible (syad asty eva syan nasty eva syad avaktavyam eva).

There are three basic truth values, namely, true (t), false (f) and unassertible (u).
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Monday, May 17, 2021
reify (Michael Schwalbe)
 reify (Michael Schwalbe)

1.  Michael Schwalbe, 'The sociologically examined life' (reify)      [ ]
 “reify”
 “”
reify [< L. res, thing (see REAL) + FY] to treat (an abstraction) as substantially existing, or as a concrete material object--reification n.

Alfred Korzybski's work maintained that human beings are limited in what they know by
     (1) the structure of their nervous systems, and
     (2) the structure of their languages.

[pp.21-23]
It is not easy to become and remain mindful of the social world as humanly made.  For many reason the social world seems to be "just there," as if no one were responsible for making it.  So what?  What difference does it make if we forget that the social world is a human invention?  The difference it makes is like that between using one's tools with an awareness of what they are good for and letting those tools--as if they had minds and will of their own--take charge.
    The failure to see the world as humanly made is called reification, which can also be defined as the tendency to see the humanly made world as having a will and force of its own, apart from human beings.  For example, someone might say, “Computer technology is the major force behind changes in our economy today.”  In this statement, computer technology is reified because it is spoken of as having a will of its own, independent of human beings.  It is technology that appears to make things happen.
    "Computer technology," however, is only metal and plastic.  People forget these materials, turn them into computers and other devices, and then decide how to put such tools to work.  All along the way there are people who choose what to build and how to use the results.  But if we talk about technology as if it were a force in its own right, the people who do the building ([designing  lobbying  consulting  planning  executing  inter-acting  influencing  'controlling the access']) and choosing disappear.  It thus seems as if technology is like gravity or the wind--a natural force about which we can do nothing.
    Reification keeps us from seeing that the force attributed to technology comes from PEOPLE choosing to do things together in certain ways.  If we don't see this, we may forget to ask important questions, such as, Who is choosing to build what kinds of devices?  Why?  How will our society be changed?  Who stands to benefit and who stands to lose because of these changes?  Should we avoid these changes?  Who will be held accountable if these changes hurt people?  Should we decide to use technology in some other ways?
    Here is another example of reification: “The market responded with enthusiasm to today's rise in interest rates, although economists predict that this could have unfavorable consequences for employment.”  You've probably heard this kind of statement before.  It sounds like a report about a flood or some other natural disaster.  Yet a market is just a lot people doing things together in a certain way; interest rates established by people; and employment results from choices by employers.  Reification makes these people and their choices disappear.
    In a large complex society the tendency to reify is strong because it can be hard to see where, how, and by whom decisions are made.  And so it is easier to say that technology, the market or a mysterious THEY is making things happen.  Even people who ought to know better get caught up in this.  When sociologists say things like “Trends in inner-city industrial development are causing changes in family structure,” they too are guilty of reification.  Such language again makes it seem as if no one is responsible for choosing to act in a way that hurts or helps others.
    Reification thus keeps us from seeing who is doing what to whom, and how, such that certain consequences arise.  This makes it hard to hold anyone accountable for the good or bad results arising from their actions.  Usually it is powerful people whose actions are hidden and who get off the hook.
    Reification can also make us feel powerless because the social world comes to seem like a place that is beyond human control.  If we attribute independent force to abstractions such as "technology," "the market," "government," "trends," "social structure," or "society," then it can seem pointless even to try to intervene and make things happen differently.  We might as well try to stop the tides.  People who think this way are likely to remain passive even when they see others being put out of work, living in poverty, or caught up in war, because they will feel that nothing can be done.
    When we reify the social world we are confusing its reality with that of stars and trees and bacteria.  These things indeed exist (as material entities) independent of human ideas and action.  But no part of the social world does.  To reify is to forget this; it is to forget to be mindful of the social world as a humanly made place.  As a result, we forget that it is within our collective power to re-create the world in a better way.  If we are sociologically mindful, we recognize that the social world as it now exists is just one of many possibilities.

  (Schwalbe, Michael, 1956-, The sociologically examined life: pieces of the conversation, copyright © 2008, 2005, 2001, 1998
)
(The sociologically examined life: pieces of the conversation / Michael Schwalbe.--4th ed., 1. sociology--methodology., 2. sociology--philosophy., pp.21-23 )
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C. West Churchman, The System Approach, 1968, 1979                          [ ]

pp.227-229
   When I began to write this book on a request from the publisher, I thought of it more or less as a popular text on the systems approach in which I would discuss many of the scientist's techniques and methods. But as I started to write in earnest, I began to see how difficult it was simply to describe to the reader how the management scientist behaves and persuade him that this behaviour has some real benefit. In a way the very writing of the book forced me into the debate. The only tolerable way to write a book of this kind was to inject the criticism into the very context in which a technique was being discussed. Indeed, if I were to think of one theme that has been in the back of my mind as I wrote these chapters, it is the theme of deception. You see, the management scientist at the outset felt that the efficiency expert was deceived. The efficiency expert, he said, believes that, when he sees idleness and slack in the system, he is looking at a reality. From the management scientist's point of view, he is looking at an illusion. He is tricked by his perceptions. But then the management scientist, when he becomes very serious about his own models, in which “all” of the objectives are represented and a “proper” compromise is created, also is deceived. In the straight-faced seriousness of his approach, he forgets many things: basic human values and his own inability really to understand all aspects of the system, and especially its politics.
   I came to this notion of deception in a brief experience with extrasensory perception. I was amazed to see how many psychologists had taken extrasensory perception so seriously.  ...
   Carrying over this experience of extrasensory perception to the systems approach, I arrive at the conclusion that however a system is solved -- by planner, scientist, politician, anti-planner, or whomever -- the solution is wrong, even dangerously wrong. There is bound to be deception in any approach to the system.
   And yet when one looks at the solution and sees its wrongness, one is also deceived, because, in searching for the wrongness, one misses the progressive aspect of the solution. We have to say that the advocate of the solution both deceives and perceives. We have to say that the solution is ridiculous and serious. We have to maintain the contradiction or else we allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the consistent.

pp.229-230
   The ultimate meaning of the systems approach, therefore, lies in the creation of a theory of deception and in a fuller understanding of the ways in which the human being can be deceived about his world and in an interaction between these different viewpoint.

p.230
   In the beginning I listed some things the world could very well afford to do: feed and clothe its poor, for example. But each person looks at this problem in such a one-sided way that the systems approach is lost.
   Hence, I, too, am biased and deceived. It's naïve to think that one can really open up for full discussion the various approaches to systems. People are not apt to wish to explore problems in depth with their antagonists. Above all, they are not apt to take on the burden of really believing that their antagonist may be right. That's simply not in the nature of the human being.

pp.230-231
It's not as though we can expect that next year or a decade from now someone will find the correct systems approach and all deception will disappear. This, in my opinion, is not in the nature of systems. What is in the nature of systems is a continuing perception and deception, a continuing re-viewing of the world, of the whole system, and of its components. The essence of the systems approach, therefore, is confusion as well as enlightenment. The two are inseparable aspects of human living.

    ( THE SYSTEMS APPROACH, by C. West Churchman, 1968, 1979, A Delta Book, (paperback), Eighth Printing, SCIENCE/TECHNOLOGY, DELL PUBLISHING CO., INC./PRINTED IN U.S.A., HD 20. 5 C47, )
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when in doubt, follow the money
it is much harder to lie with money
   how did the money get there
   what is the source of the money
it is also much easier to frame someone with money (if you've got the money)
   first you have to get the money
   then, you probably should laundered the money to make it difficult to trace the original source of the fund
   financial transaction
      associated with a person
      associated with an activity (project based) (program)

additional methods
   follow the paper trail
   follow routine communication traffic
   follow material flow or supply traffic (food, water, waste, air, ... )
   follow the person (in many cases with the mobile phone, assuming the person is always using the same deviceID# [[International Mobile Subscriber Identity (IMSI) numbers and Electronic Serial Number (ESN),[14]]] and ..., the roaming signal and the phone traffic can be proxy for the actual person; with technical sophistication, the deviceID# can probably be ghost, roaming data log be manipulated, and specific database entry can be modified, ( added, or deleted); signal vaccuum device, stingray, a linux box running a software acting as a cell tower; ... ...)

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker

The StingRay is an IMSI-catcher, a cellular phone surveillance device, manufactured by Harris Corporation.[2] Initially developed for the military and intelligence community, the StingRay and similar Harris devices are in widespread use by local and state law enforcement agencies across Canada,[3] the United States,[4][5] and in the United Kingdom.[6][7] Stingray has also become a generic name to describe these kinds of devices.[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stingray_phone_tracker  
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who took the land
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