Comment about Detroit Flight Fire

December 31, 2009 UPDATE
Northwest Bomb Plot 'Oddities'

ORGINAL POST
Thought the following comment on the December 25, 2009, flight from the Netherlands to the USA interesting and probably closer to the truth than what we hear on the mainstream news media:

The NCTC, which has responsibility if any visas are to be pulled over terrorism concerns, then reviewed the information and found it was "insufficient to determine whether his visa should be revoked," Kelly said.

What visa? The accused didn't even have a passport!

Total farce. As more evidence emerges, evidence that this paper is too lazy, or otherwise, to report suggests that this was a false-flag operation.

In a day and age when to hold a job we have to get urine tests, show two forms of ID, and/or thumbprint, to do the simplest things, go through security to enter all manner of buildings, we're suppose to believe someone with no passport, or visa, or luggage, can board an international flight, change planes without help?

Evidence has come forth that this idiot is well connected, his father is a retired bank president, that went to authorities concerned about his son's activities, that a "sharply dressed man" helped the accused to get on the plane pass security, and that another man was calmly filming him the entire flight. This smacks of an intelligence operation all the way, not theirs, ours.

This poor stooge was most likely thinking he was part of an exercise, a total patsy, MK-Ultra style.

And before any of you go off ridiculing me as a conspiracy nut, you better be prepared to tell us that we don't spend 40% of our military budget on black-ops operations, that our government hasn't committed crimes against us in the past, that the Gulf of Tokin wasn't staged, the there were experiments performed on American citizens unbeknown to them, that the USS Liberty wasn't attack by Israel and Lyndon Johnson didn't order that the ship be sunk, that there isn't enough evidence now to conclude that we were totally lied to about events of 9/1*1.

The lies aren't working anymore, too many people know. Wonderful thing, the Internet. One doesn't have to rely on corporate owned media anymore to get the truth.

(source)

sterling providing for the family

so earlier this week sterling killed his first bird! he waited by the door to show amber and then waited again to show me because that's the kind of little dude he is. thanks, homie!

the best meal i've made this month

panko breaded pork chops, orange cous cous, broccolini, and apple sauce. actually my mom made the apple sauce and gave it to us in a jar, but i cooked it with some of the juices from the pork chops. wish i had left overs of this one.

also made some sweet and sour pork but don't have any pictures of that.
amber and i are making latkes with swoopies and ilan as a sequel to hanukkah since we weren't able to do that earlier. will there be pics? time will tell.

News Today | Berita Harian - Pemerkosa Balita, Diancam 9 Tahun Penjara

Berita Harian - ada-ada saja dijaman susah kayak sekarang ini. Berita harian saat ini yaitu tentang kebejatan Seorang Kakek yang menyalurkan nafsu tuanya kepada sang Balita, sebut saja namanya Menik (5) tahun. Pemerkosaan ini terjadi di Dorowati Timur, Desa Mulyoarjo, Kecamatan Lawang, .

Minggu (27/12/2009)saat naasnya sang pelaku bernama Suparman (76), bagaimana tidak, Menik merasa kesakitan saat di mandikan oleh sang nenek Marsiti (57). Pastilah Marsiti (57) sang nenek korban terkejut akan hal ini. pengakuan menik pada sang nenek, dia diperkosa 3 kali.

"Kata Menik alat vitalnya sakit, setelah dimasuki alat vital pelaku. Kalau bilang ke saya telah tiga kali alat kelaminnya dimasuki oleh pelaku," kata Marsiti saat memberikan keterangan kepada petugas di Mapolsek Lawang, Jalan Dr Wahidin, Lawang, Senin (28/12/2009).

Marsiti pun kaget dan bersama orangtua Menik, melaporkan perbuatan Suparman yang notabene masih tetangganya. Usai menerima laporan, bapak tiga anak itu diciduk dan ditahan di Mapolsek Lawang.

"Kami langsung tangani kasus ini dengan meminta visum pada korban, setelah meminta keterangan saksi, tersangka kemudian kami amankan," ungkap Kapolsek Lawang AKP Sulkhan.

Kini Suparman hanya bisa merenungi nasibnya. Masa tuanya dihabiskan di penjara sekitar 9 tahun. Dia dijerat dengan pasal 285 subsider 287 tentang pemerkosaan anak di bawah umur.

Wah, bagi orang tua, agar berhati2 untuk menjaga anak yang msie berumur 5 tahun. Sekarang sangat banyak aksus seperti ini. ingat "Kejahatan terjadi bukan saja karena niat pelakunya, tetapi karena ada kesemaptan"waspadalah......kata bang Navi.

Fox News - Breaking News Live

Al Jazeera English - Breaking News Live

The top 100 most costly EU regulations

Open Europe has today published a list of the top 100 most costly EU regulations, detailing the annual cost of the laws, the cumulative cost of them by 2020, and the article base in the Lisbon Treaty for each regulation . We estimate that these laws will in total cost the UK economy a staggering £184 billion by 2020. To put that figure in context: for the same amount, the UK Government could abolish the country's entire budget deficit and still leave the Exchequer with some £6 bn. All cost estimates are based on the UK Government's own impact assessments so the figures are instructive.

The top four items on the list account for almost £97 billion - or 53% - of the total cost of the 100 regulations by 2020. Looking at these four laws clearly illustrates the enormous, and often overlooked, potential for the UK economy to save money by making a few key regulations less burdensome. Notably, cutting down the costs of these regulations could happen without any of the stated benefits being lost in the process.

1) The Working Time Directive, to cost the UK economy £32.8 bn by 2020: This Directive has been widely criticised for being overprescriptive, impractical and generally out of touch with reality - particularly as it applies to the NHS. Merely changing the on-call time and compensatory rest rules entailed in the WTD could save the UK's public sector millions - if not billions - of punds every year.

2) The EU's Climate Action and Renewable Energy Package, to cost the UK economy £28.2 bn by 2020: As we've argued before, the EU could find a much more cost-effective way to achieve carbon emission reduction by setting overall targets, and then allowing for individual member states to decide for themselves how best to reach them (as opposed to the current micromanaging approach). This would hurt the economy less and provide a more credible alternative to follow for countries outside Europe.

3) Energy Perfomance Certificates for buildings, a.k.a Home Information Packs, to cost the UK economy £20.2 bn by 2020. Again, this cannot possibly be described as the most cost-effective way to achieve reductions in carbon emissions from the residential sector.

4) The Temporary Agencey Workers Directive, to be implemented in 2011 and set to cost the UK economy £15.6 bn by 2020: When he was Business Secretary, John Hutton warned that this Directive could consign "literally thousands of people to benefit dependency" (this was in 2007, before Gordon Brown was outnegotiated in a horsetrading deal involving the UK's opt-out from the EU's 48 hour working week. The Government is now trying to defend the Directive).

Making these laws less burdensome or tailor them to better fit the UK is not easy - but it certainly isn't impossible. Neither is avoiding repeats of these laws. But this does require a far tougher and smarter approach to EU regulations/negotiations than that employed by the current government. See here for our ideas on what such an approach should entail (chapter 5).

An excellent place to start would be for an incoming UK government to opt out altogether from the articles in the EU treaties which give rise to EU's social legislation (articles 151 to 161 as amended by the Lisbon Treaty). With correspondng domestic reforms, this could instantly reduce much of the cost stemming from, for instance, the Working Time Directive and the Temporary Workers Directive.

At a time when every penny is needed to close a massive public deficit, surely cutting the cost of regulation should be a top priority for the next government?

Fun with Friends at the Angeli Home

pics from mexico

Climate agreement sparks anger

Published: December 19, 2009

COPENHAGEN, Denmark - Five countries have reached a non-binding agreement at the Copenhagen climate change summit, but leaders from developing countries have reacted angrily to the deal.

Five countries, including the US and China, forged the agreement on Friday following a day of frenzied talks at the 193-nation global warming summit in Denmark.

Barack Obama, the US president, hailed the agreement as meaningful and said it would provide the framework for future talks. But he also acknowledged that it did not go far enough.

"Today we have made a meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough here in Copenhagen," he said.

"For the first time in history, all major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change.

"This progress did not come easily and we know this progress alone is not enough ... We've come a long way but we have much further to go."

'Nationalist self-interests'

Obama said the US, China, Brazil, India and South Africa had agreed to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius to help meet their new objective.

The deal calls for the participating countries to list specific actions they have taken to control emissions and their commitments to achieve deeper reductions.

The agreement also includes a commitment by the countries to give developing nations $100bn dollars in assistance from 2020 to help them deal with climate change.

The deal includes some progress in helping developing nations cope with climate change, but it falls short of committing any nation to pollution reductions.

But many countries are angry they were excluded from the negotiations and are debating whether or not to approve the deal.

They also criticised the agreement because it was non-binding and set no overall target for curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

"You are going to endorse this coup d'etat against the United Nations," Claudia Salerno Caldera, Venezuela's representative, told Lars Loekke Rasmussen, the Danish prime minister and the conference chairman, in a speech from the floor.

"Those of us who wish to speak have to make a point of order by cutting our hands and drawing blood," she said, opening a red-stained palm.

Opposition to deal

Tuvalu's Ian Fry, whose country is one of the most at risk from global warming, said the deal amounted to a betrayal.

"It looks like we are being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our people and our future," he said.

"Our future is not for sale. I regret to inform you that Tuvalu cannot accept this document."

For any deal to become a UN pact it would need to be adopted unanimously at the 193-nation talks.

Some European leaders have accepted the deal, but Jose Manuel Barroso, the European Commission president, said that it was "clearly below" the goal of the European Union.

"I will not hide my disappointment," he said.

Al Jazeera's Alan Fisher, reporting from the Danish capital, said there were "too many obstacles to overcome" for world leaders to reach a more significant breakthrough.

"There were too many nationalist self-interests to set aside," he said.

"What we got was completely watered-down from what even the most optimistic person would have hoped at the beginning of these discussions 12 days ago.

"There is some anger among [many] ... developing nations. They say that this deal has been done essentially with the Americans, the Chinese, the South Africans and the Brazilians and the Indians and they have had no real input.

"They're concerned that ... this agreement has been taken forward, when there has been no real wider discussion."

'Ambitious action'

Earlier on Friday, world leaders had appeared to mount a last-minute bid to save the pact, but these efforts only achieved agreement on a consensus-driven deal with few specifics that many admitted would fall short of what was needed.

The tense haggling capped two years of deadlock over crafting a new UN treaty from 2013 that would reduce global warming from mortal threat to manageable peril.

But sideline negotiations have revealed deep divisions between rich and poor, entrenched in a textual battlefield over how to curb carbon emissions and muster funds to fight climate change.

Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister, acknowledged the outcome "may well fall short of our expectations" but called for follow-up negotiations to be completed by the end of 2010.

Yukio Hatoyama, the Japanese premier, who has offered nearly $20bn towards a global climate fund, said the summit would deliver a "robust" if "not necessarily perfect" statement on fighting global warming.

But Dmitry Medvedev, the Russian president, said the world community had "clearly underestimated" the task of reaching not just a binding agreement but even a general declaration.

"We still have long and difficult road ahead of us," he said.

Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's president, was bluntest: "The meeting has not been a success - it has failed."

One member of the Maldives delegation, the Indian Ocean archipelago which fears being swallowed up by rising sea levels in a matter of decades, added: "Whatever the outcome, it looks bad for us."

source: http://english.aljazeera.net/

what poster by my desk should i take down so i can put up the beat happening poster joel mailed me

tough decision.

The EU in 2010

As 2009 draws to a close, Open Europe today looks ahead to 2010 and what the EU has in store.

From 1 January 2010, Spain takes over the six-month rotating 'presidency', currently held by Sweden.

The new Lisbon Treaty rules mean that the country holding the Presidency is stripped of its power to 'represent' the EU because of the appointment of a permanent EU President and Foreign Minister. However, Spanish ministers will chair most meetings of the Council of Ministers, and as the first in the next 'trio' of presidencies, Spain gets to lay out an agenda for the EU for the first six months of the year.

In a new briefing note, Open Europe outlines the main priorities for the Spanish EU Presidency, and takes a look ahead to key events and developments in the EU in 2010.

Key things in the pipeline:

- New social legislation to bolster 'European citizenship', including turning the EU into a "factory of rights" Yikes!
- "Common economic governance", including the creation of controversial new EU financial supervisory authorities and new rules for managers of alternative investment funds
- Speedy establishment of the new EU Foreign Service - hoped to become "the biggest diplomatic service in the world"
- Efforts to turn the controversial 'Stockholm Programme' into concrete justice and home affairs legislation

What's clear is that the Spanish government wants to use its Presidency to achieve greater political, social and economic integration in Europe - to work for a more 'unified' EU. This is fundamentally at odds with British priorities for the EU in 2010. Reformist governments must resist moves towards 'building Europe' for the sake of it, and instead concentrate on promoting economic reform.

In particular, the Spanish government's determination to push for new EU social legislation over the next six months and beyond should ring alarm bells at Westminster. The UK Conservatives have said that if they win next year's election, they will fight for control over social and employment policy to be returned to the UK where it can be properly controlled closer the people it affects. This kind of legislation already represents a huge regulatory burden in the UK, and the Spanish government's talk of turning the EU into a 'factory of rights' tells us fundamental reform is more urgent than ever.

Please click here to read the briefing: The EU in 2010 - what to expect from the Spanish Presidency:

http://action.openeurope.org.uk/page/m/4b660976/1ba9f669/85d4f97/7c5561ff/2392946743/VEsH/

Lisbon Treaty = even more cash for MEPs

Amid all thee excitement over the EU bureaucrats' demands for an inflation-busting 3.7% payrise smack in the middle of the worst recession since the 1930s, Bruno Waterfield at the Telegraph brings us news that according to an internal document seen by the paper European Parliament officials have proposed a 9 percent increase in the partliamentary assistance allowance, taking it to £203,000 in 2010. It is also understood that staff expenses will be further increased by another £16,000 in 2011, taking the total annual allowance to almost £220,000.

Why? Because EP officials reckon all the extra cash is needed as a result of the Lisbon Treaty.

Don't forget this is on top of the "general expenditure allowance" worth over £44,000 that MEPs can pocket without having to provide any receipts. While working in Brussels or Strasbourg, MEPs also trouser a £265 cash subsistence payment, worth over £40,000 tax-free every year.

And with the expected 3.7% salary rise, an MEP will earn almost £86,000 a year.

here's one of the best gowns songs.

The Euro: rewarding bad behaviour

There has been no shortage of stories recently about the troubles looming in Eurozone countries Greece and Spain. These problems have now prompted Angela Merkel to call for direct EU intervention in the economic and social policies of highly indebted countries in the Eurozone, thereby marking a highly significant shift in German policy.

As German daily Handelsblatt notes: "until now, Germany had always defended national economic sovereignty and rejected stronger European coordination of economic policy in the Eurozone”. The German Chancellor, says the article, is conscious that any such moves “would diminish the national sovereignty of member states”. Yesterday, the EU followed Merkel as it was reported that “the EU has put its member states on a leash”, referring to how Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has called for binding “quality control” on member states’ budgets.

Only two weeks ago, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard observed that the ECB had begun to turn off the liquidity tap:

"The move to knock away emergency support for banks is likely to hit some countries harder than others, creating intra-EMU tensions between North and South. There are particular worries about Greece and Ireland, where banks have relied massively on ECB support because they cannot raise money cheaply on the open market. The ECB has let them use a wide range of low-grade mortgage debt as collateral for loans. Private markets are unlikely to be so forgiving, raising the risk of a roll-over crisis for weak lenders."

Now, he notes that "the eurozone's weakest link starts to crack", and, "Without wanting to rehearse all the pros and cons of euro membership yet again, or debate whether EMU is a ‘optimal currency area’, there is obviously a problem for countries like Greece that were let into EMU for political reasons before their economies had been reformed enough to cope with the rigours of euro life - over the long run."

However, some countries are not keen on the idea of a cross-border bail-out. Finland and Sweden oppose giving financial support to Greece. “The EU cannot help, that’s part of our rules. They were established to let member states take care of themselves”, said Finnish Finance Minister Matti Vanhanen. And Vanhanen is absolutely correct – as we’ve argued before.

Last week Edward Hugh asked, “How far is it the responsibility of richer and economically healthy states to continually come to the rescue of those who insist on doing nothing to improve their own situation?”

On the wider point about eurozone membership vis-a-vis reform he noted:

"Rather than acting as a stimulus to deep economic reform, Euro membership has rather acted to reward those countries who would get into more and more debt, with ever less sustainable economic models, by supplying them with funding at far cheaper rates of interest than the markets would otherwise make available.”

If you don’t believe him, check out what the EU President himself, Herman Van Rompuy, who was one of the key figures behind Belgium’s entrance into the Eurozone in the nineties, has to say on the issue. Looking back on Belgium's experience with the Euro, he wrote in 2007, in his book "In search of wisdom":

“The monetary pressure in Belgium has fallen away with the disappearance of the Belgian franc. This because the euro is standing far from us and is moreover very strong in recent years. The absence of that external pressure makes it extra difficult for the government to act. Without those sticks behind the door, society easily sinks away in reform fatigue. In a couple of countries around us, economic fate has however hit so hard that fundamental reforms have been carried out. But politics in a democracy needs that pressure. Sad, but it is like this.”

Germ Warfare 1994 in Oakville, Washington Six Times

source

MORE: Sonoma Chemtrails

ETS awards millions in windfall profits to oil companies and heavy industry

As national ministers meet this week in Copenhagen to discuss a new climate change deal, Open Europe has found that under the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), oil and gas companies' operations in the UK were granted a surplus of carbon permits worth €28.6m in 2008. For example, ExxonMobil received €4.3m and Total received €5.4m.

Meanwhile, heavy industrial polluters such as Corus received €47m, while cement firms Hanson and Lafarge received €17.3m and €20.2m.

The EU is keen to be seen to take the lead at the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen and has already announced ambitious targets to reduce its carbon emissions. However, the EU's principle policy for achieving those reductions, the ETS, is fundamentally flawed.

Due to the economic downturn, many heavy polluters, such as oil and gas companies and heavy industrials, have been left with a surplus of carbon permits - essentially a free asset that firms can sell on to bolster their short term profits.

The glut of surplus permits on the market has driven down the price of carbon and led to a sharp increase in the number of permits being traded via carbon exchanges. Open Europe has found that the two largest carbon trading exchanges, European Climate Exchange[1] and Bluenext[2], which includes members such as Barclays Bank, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch and Shell, have earned a combined average of €245,000 a day from the trading of carbon permits so far in 2009, in transaction fees alone. In total, they have made over €57m between them in 2009.

Instead of producing a firm carbon price to encourage investment in greener technologies, the ETS has become a subsidy to some of the UK's biggest polluters and has simply created a new breed of carbon traders, which are cashing in on a policy that is failing to achieve its core objective.

Click here to read more.

my favorite album of 2009

since a few people have asked...



my 2nd favorite was the grass widow record. i think blues control was 3rd. not sure about the rest, really. i also listened to the spiritual singers record that mississippi put out a ton but i think that originally came out in 1980. bob dylan's greatest hits vol. 2 got a bunch of plays as well.

i also bought all the beat happening albums for the third time of my life this year but it was the first time i've bought them on vinyl.

this might be my new favorite youtube video

it's even better than TC LANDOS HOT PIECE! who would have thought?
i'd like to think that if amber and i died (yod forbid), kimmswick and sterling would live with these little dudes.

Operation Paperclip and Mind Control

"After many thousands of Americans died in WW II fighting Nazism, our government’s intelligence agencies (incl. the military intelligence groups) in cooperation with the Illuminati and its people in the Vatican, smuggled 10,000 of the worst Nazi-fascist war criminals into this country. This is on public record now. Part of this was under Operation Paperclip.

"The Rothschilds and Nelson Rockefeller forced the Jewish Zionist leadership in Israel to keep silent about the Nazis who were smuggled into the U.S. after W.W. II. In return for Israel’s silence and the Mossad’s silence about the thousands of high level satanic Nazis who were brought into the U.S., the nation of Israel was allowed. They made a deal, according to high level insiders.

"The South American countries, especially Argentina, ruled by the Perons, was connected to both the Illuminati in Germany and the Illuminati in the states. Many Germans went to Argentina, and they simply continued doing what they had done in the past. Satanism working under the veil of Nazism was very strong in Argentina where many of the German Illuminati leaders moved after the war.

"Another place that the Germans loved to move to was Oregon, especially Portland, OR. The head of Hitler’s intelligence was the brilliant Reinhard Gehlen who worked for the CIA after the war. He is Illuminati. His brother was Doe Winters who lived in Pullach after the war.

"Mengele, (the Dr. Black of Monarch Programming, who was an Illuminati Grand Master himself) would occasionally visit Doe Winter’s Pullach residence. To renovate the image of Nazi criminals, they became Anti-communist crusaders. A group of fascists from Asia and Europe were taken by U.S. Intelligence and moulded into the WACL (World Anti-Communist League). And we of the sheppel (sheep) were given more Hegalian dialectics. Those of us who still care about humanity’s freedom, and that human spirit not to be broken by the elite’s total mind control, have got to get beyond labels, and the media’s propaganda, and the false fronts.

"Some programmers are hard-core military men who see any type of "discipline" or "training" as good if the end product produces better obeying soldiers. These hard-core military men have lost any proper boundaries on what is O.K. for training. This explains why the whole apparatus to create mind-controlled slaves is turning out new slaves at an alarming rate. The small number of victims who are painstakingly saved by de-programming and therapy is slight compared to the number of new slaves being created. Over two million Americans have been programmed by trauma-based mind control since 1947, & the CIA admitted its Mind Control publicly in 1970, and yet the existence of the mind-control is still secret to the general public."

source

The CIA is Corrupt to the Core

"The CIA is a front for the Illuminati, and the CIA in turn sets up fronts. Some of those fronts, are elaborate well-staffed, well-equipped programming sites, (such as many of the state mental hospitals, McGill Psychiatric Training Network consisting of 8 Montreal hospitals esp. St. Mary’s, NASA in Huntsville, AL; the Presideo, CA; and NOTS at China Lake, CA, to name a few." Fritz Springmeier (more)




CIA Wars

"Coming to grips with these U.S./CIA activities in broad numbers and figuring out how many people have been killed in the jungles of Laos or the hills of Nicaragua is very difficult. But, adding them up as best we can, we come up with a figure of six million people killed-and this is a minimum figure. Included are: one million killed in the Korean War, two million killed in the Vietnam War, 800,000 killed in Indonesia, one million in Cambodia, 20,000 killed in Angola ... and 22,000 killed in Nicaragua. These people would not have died if U.S. tax dollars had not been spent by the CIA to inflame tensions, finance covert political and military activities and destabilize societies.

"The six million people the CIA has helped to kill are people of the Mitumba Mountains of the Congo, the jungles of Southeast Asia, and the hills of northern Nicaragua. They are people without ICBMs or armies or navies, incapable of doing physical damage to the United States, the 22,000 killed in Nicaragua, for example, are not Russians; they are not Cuban soldiers or advisors; they are not even mostly Sandinistas. A majority are rag-poor peasants, including large numbers of women and children.

"Communists? Hardly, since the dead Nicaraguans are predominantly Roman Catholics. Enemies of the United States? That description doesn't fit either, because the thousands of witnesses who have lived in Nicaraguan villages with the people since 1979 testify that the Nicaraguans are the warmest people on the face of the earth, that they love people from the United States, and they simply cannot understand why our leaders would want to spend $1 billion on a contra force designed to murder people and wreck the country."
Secret Third World Wars by John Stockwell



CIA Gangs

"For the better part of a decade, a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of LA and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerilla army run by the CIA. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America. It is one of the most bizarre alliances in modern history—the union of a US-backed army attempting to overthrow a socialist government and the Uzi-toting “gangstas” of Los Angeles."
P. 297 Gary Webb. Mass Media Cover-up Leading Journalists Expose Major Cover-ups by Media Corporations (read more)



CIA Fake War on Drugs

"And what happened to me was that I met and fell in love with a woman who was a contract CIA agent, a career agent. Now, I come from a CIA family and they had tried to recruit me, so this was not unexpected to me, but I began to see that she was protecting drug shipments and that the Agency was actively involved in dealing drugs......we teach now with From The Wilderness is that it wasn't just CIA dealing some drugs to fund covert operations. It is that drug money is an inherent part of the American economy. It has always been so, as it was with the British in the 1600s when they introduced opium into China to fund the triangular trade with the British East India Company. ...... The CIA has dealt drugs for all 50 years of its existence--50 plus years, even before it was the CIA. And the point is that with 250 billion dollars a year in illegal drug money moved, laundered through the American economy, that money benefits Wall Street. That's the point of having the prohibitive drug trade, which the CIA effectively manages for the benefit of Wall Street."
Mike Ruppert (Wall Street, CIA and the Global Drug Trade)



CIA Money Laundered through Wall Street

"But one guy I talked to was a guy named Rex Nutting, who was the bureau chief of CBS Market Watch--he is the head guy for CBS for the stock market. And we're sitting back in the room--I'm waiting for Huffington to get free--and I'm talking to this guy about the fact that Richard Grasso, the Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, last July went to Colombia and cold-called on the FARC guerrillas and asked them to invest their drug money in Wall Street. And Rex Nutting says: "Well, of course they always go where the money is. It's obvious." The drug money is always going through Wall Street. Wall Street smells money and doesn't care where the money comes from; they'll go for the drug money.

"And we jokingly laughed that the National Security Act that created the CIA in '47 was written by a guy called Clark Clifford, who was a Wall Street banker and lawyer. He's the guy that brought us BCCI. The job of writing the outline for CIA, the design for the Agency, was given to Clark Clifford by John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles--both law partners in the Wall Street law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. In '69 after Nixon came in, the Chairman of SEC [Securities and Exchange Commission] was William Casey--the same guy who was Ronald Reagan's Director of Central Intelligence. And the current Vice President in charge of enforcement for the New York Stock Exchange, Dave Dougherty, is a retired CIA General Counsel. The CIA is Wall Street, and vice versa. When you understand that, and that money is the primary objective, everything else just falls into place."
Mike Ruppert (Wall Street, CIA and the Global Drug Trade)



CIA and Ollie North

"We brought the story into the CIA. And I reported that the CIA had assisted North's operation, despite their denials; that North was using National Security Agency highly-sensitive secret cryptology equipment and had been passing it out like candy to all the people who were working with him - they all had these KL-43's as they were called which could send these secret messages back and forth, and so we'd broken that barrier. We'd broken into the CIA.

"Choice "A" was to tell the truth, to say that the President had violated a variety of laws, committed felonies, and violated our constitutional safeguards about the way we carry out wars in our country, and impeach him. Option A.

"Then there was Option "B" - to tell the truth and have congress sort of say well, it's okay with us, which creates a dangerous precedent for the future, that is, that now President's would say well hey, look at the Reagan example, you know, if he can wage war privately, why can't I? So that was Option "B."

"And then there was Option "C" - to pretend it didn't happen, or to pretend that, say, some Lieutenant Colonel had done it all. So Washington, I guess understandably, settled on Option "C."
[1993] Fooling America. A talk by Robert Parry

MORE CIA QUOTES

Dear Dirk

Last week, we were told by journalists that Dirk Ahner, the Commission's Director-General for regional policy, had apparently sent a letter to the members of the European Parliament's Budgetary Control committee, criticising Open Europe's 50 examples of waste involving EU funds.

Despite the fact that the letter addressed our publication, and cited extensively from it, Mr. Ahner did not send a copy to Open Europe, and has failed to send us one after repeated requests both on the phone and by email.

In the end we managed to get the letter from other sources. You can read it here.

Here's an excerpt from the letter:

As I committed to do, I have asked my services to investigate their claims on the projects in question. However, it is essential to underline to the citizens you represent that, given the shared management system, the European Commission is not responsible for the selection of the projects... Most of the claims are true, in the sense that European money has co-financed the projects mentioned. However, Open Europe seems to take the view that anything related to tourism and culture is a waste of money, regardless of whether the projects create jobs and are part of an overall development strategy. Some statements are misleading or completely incorrect: just to take an example, the Commission will not pay a cent to the mentioned Slovakian bulletin-board tender (project 49).

Well, we don't take the view that anything "related to tourism and culture is a waste of money", but, as we set out here, the structure and nature of the EU budget often facilitate poor project selection, to a greater extent than national spending schemes do. We also wanted to illustrate how having a massive redistribution scheme involving some of the richest countries in the world sending money back and forth via Brussels (at a huge admin cost) is becoming increasingly hard to justify economically. In addition, we wanted to highlight one of the wider problems with the EU budget (the co-financed part in particular, i.e. the Structural Funds and the Rural Development Programme), namely the blurred line between the spending of public money and accountability.

Predictably, Mr. Ahner passes on the responsibility for the project selection to member states, as the Commission usually does (but then goes on to defend the projects, interestingly).

It is true that the managing authorities in the member states select projects - no one is disputing that - but the Commission runs the policy and does have a thing or two to say about the project selection as well - in addition to being one of the staunchest defenders of the Structural Funds. And some of the people on the ground won't let the Commission off the hook that easily. For example, responding to one item on our list - the ‘gender equal’ wood design centre in Sweden - one of the local officials involved in the project defensively wrote, "The gender-part of that project was just a small part, put there to please the EU officials."

So as a taxpayer, if I'm not happy with the way the Structural Funds are ran and spent, who should I approach? As we've said many times before, the Commission could do itself a massive favour by encouraging member states to scrap the Structural Funds in the most well-off member states - say, those with a GDP of 85-90% of average EU GDP or more - where the value-added of the EU funds, on the whole, is negligble at best. None of these issues were addressed by Mr. Ahner. Anyway, here's our open letter to Mr. Ahner:

Open letter to Dirk Ahner, Regional Policy Director-General, European

Dear Mr. Ahner,

We write to you in regards to a letter you sent to members of the European Parliament’s Committee on Budgetary Control (“Subject: OPEN EUROPE 'fraud and waste' list of projects”, REGIO B1/AM D(2009)). Since the correspondence with the MEPs was addressing material published by Open Europe, we thought it appropriate to respond and also to address some of the claims you make in the letter (see attached document).

First, it is regrettable that the Commission continues to single out Open Europe for criticism, and has not given us opportunity for the right of reply. You sent the letter to MEPs, without copying to Open Europe, and failed to respond to telephone calls as we sought to find a copy of the letter. Despite repeated requests over the phone and via email, your office has still not sent us a copy of the letter. In fact, Open Europe was not even acknowledged when we tried to get hold of the letter. Instead we have acquired the letter from other sources. Your refusal seems to be in violation of the European Ombudsman’s Code of Good Administrative Behaviour.

Of the 17 Regional Development Fund projects analysed, you seem to be saying that one of them is incorrect, in that EU funds were not in the end used for the purposes mentioned: the ‘Bulletin-board tender’, which Open Europe said was indeed being investigated by the Commission. You claim that the point about Lazarote hotels having illegally received EU funds is “incorrect”, but are only able to clarify that “the Spanish authorities removed the hotels from the ERDF programme. This means that the hotels will not receive any funding from the EU budget.” No evidence is provided to show that the hotels did not receive the money – only that they “will” not receive money in the future – so we remain unconvinced by your claim that this is incorrect.

For all the other projects, you either defend the use of funds, or simply state that the example is correct, such as the fact that the Chairman of Porsche received €2,500 in EU rural development funds for a small estate in Bavaria where he goes hunting in his free time. For one or two you quibble over the amounts spent.

It is most concerning that you have spent so much time piecing together this rebuttal, and sent it to members of the European Parliament with an instruction that they “underline to the citizens you represent that, given the shared management system, the European Commission is not responsible for the selection of the projects funded.” There is no acknowledgement of Open Europe’s wider point which is that the waste is ultimately down to the structure of the EU budget (as Open Europe has set out here, for instance: http://euobserver.com/7/28979 ) - and that the budget in general and the Structural Funds in particular are in need of fundamental reform.

Open Europe maintains that all are examples of the EU wasting money, and an illustration of how the EU budget is spent, which was the objective of our report. Your comments represent a different point of view about how public money should best be spent, which Open Europe is seeking to challenge.

We look forward to a more open dialogue with the European Commission on these issues in the future.

Yours sincerely,

Open Europe

The CIA, Contras, Gangs, and Crack

December 13, 2009 UPDATE


source

ORIGINAL POST:

This 1996 article is very interesting and am posting it since Sonoma has drug and gang problems (i.e. Gang behavior spawns three incidents):

The CIA, Contras, Gangs, and Crack

by William Blum

Volume 1, Number 11
November 1996
source

Written by William Blum, a Washington, DC based writer on foreign policy and intelligence matters. Author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II.

In August 1996, the San Jose Mercury News initiated an extended series of articles linking the CIA's "contra" army to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles.1 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. The series unleashed a storm of protest, spearheaded by black radio stations and the congressional Black Caucus, with demands for official inquiries. The Mercury News' Web page, with supporting documents and updates, received hundreds of thousands of "hits" a day.

While much of the CIA-contra-drug story had been revealed years ago in the press and in congressional hearings, the Mercury News series added a crucial missing link: It followed the cocaine trail to Ross and black L.A. gangs who became street-level distributors of crack, a cheap and powerful form of cocaine. The CIA's drug network, wrote Webb, "opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the 'crack' capital of the world." Black gangs used their profits to buy automatic weapons, sometimes from one of the CIA-linked drug dealers.

CIA Director John Deutch declared that he found "no connection whatsoever" between the CIA and cocaine traffickers. And major media--the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post--have run long pieces refuting the Mercury News series. They deny that Bay Area-based Nicaraguan drug dealers, Juan Norwin Meneses and Oscar Danilo Blandon, worked for the CIA or contributed "millions in drug profits" to the contras, as Webb contended. They also note that neither Ross nor the gangs were the first or sole distributors of crack in L.A. Webb, however, did not claim this. He wrote that the huge influx of cocaine happened to come at just the time that street-level drug dealers were figuring out how to make cocaine affordable by changing it into crack.

Many in the media have also postulated that any drug-trafficking contras involved were "rogue" elements, not supported by the CIA. But these denials overlook much of the Mercury News' evidence of CIA complicity. For example:

1. 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.2 The DEA did nothing, and Castillo was gradually forced out of the agency.

2. When Danilo Blandón was finally arrested in 1986, he admitted to drug crimes that would have sent others away for life. The Justice Department, however, freed Blandón after only 28 months behind bars and then hired him as a full-time DEA informant, paying him more than $166,000. When Blandón testified in a 1996 trial against Ricky Ross, the Justice Department blocked any inquiry about Blandón's connection to the CIA.

3. Although Norwin Meneses is listed in DEA computers as a major international drug smuggler implicated in 45 separate federal investigations since 1974, he lived conspicuously in California until 1989 and was never arrested in the U.S.

4. Senate investigators and agents from four organizations all complained that their contra-drug investigations "were hampered," Webb wrote, "by the CIA or unnamed 'national security' interests." In the 1984 "Frogman Case," for instance, the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco returned $36,800 seized from a Nicaraguan drug dealer after two contra leaders sent letters to the court arguing that the cash was intended for the contras. Federal prosecutors ordered the letter and other case evidence sealed for "national security" reasons. When Senate investigators later asked the Justice Department to explain this unusual turn of events, they ran into a wall of secrecy.

History of CIA Involvement in Drug Trafficking

"In my 30­year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA." -- Dennis Dayle, former chief of an elite DEA enforcement unit.3

The foregoing discussion should not be regarded as any kind of historical aberration inasmuch as the CIA has had a long and virtually continuous involvement with drug trafficking since the end of World War II.

1947 to 1951, France

CIA arms, money, and disinformation enabled Corsican criminal syndicates in Marseille to wrest 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 laboratories were opened in 1951, only months after the Corsicans took over the waterfront.4

Early 1950s, Southeast Asia

The Nationalist Chinese army, organized by the CIA to wage war against Communist China, became the opium baron of The Golden Triangle (parts of Burma, Thailand, and Laos), the world's largest source of opium and heroin. Air America, the CIA's principal proprietary airline, flew the drugs all over Southeast Asia.5

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 GI'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.6

1973 to 1980, Australia

The Nugan Hand Bank of Sydney was a CIA bank in all but name. Among its officers were a network of U.S. generals, admirals, and CIA men--including former 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 dealing. In 1980, amidst several mysterious deaths, the bank collapsed, $50 million in debt.7

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, safe havens for drug cartel officials, and discreet banking facilities. U.S. officials, including then-CIA Director William Webster and several DEA officers, sent Noriega letters of praise for efforts to thwart drug trafficking (albeit only against competitors of his Medellín 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 U.S. invasion.8

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. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter. . . . Senior U.S. policy makers were not immune to the idea that drug money was a perfect solution to the contras' funding problems."9

In Costa Rica, which served as the "Southern Front" for the contras (Honduras being the Northern Front), there were several CIA-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 CIA-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.10 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 U.S. repeatedly thwarted Costa Rican efforts to extradite Hull to Costa Rica to stand trial.11

Another Costa Rican-based drug ring involved a group of Cuban Americans 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 shrimp company, which laundered money for the CIA, to channel cocaine to the U.S.12

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.13 Additionally, the Medellín 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.14

The contras provided both protection and infrastructure (planes, pilots, airstrips, warehouses, front companies, and banks) to these CIA-linked drug networks. At least four transport companies under investigation for drug trafficking received U.S. government contracts to carry nonlethal supplies to the contras.15 Southern Air Transport, "formerly" CIA-owned and later under Pentagon contract, was involved in the drug running as well.16 Cocaine-laden planes flew to Florida, Texas, Louisiana, and other locations, including several military bases. Designated as "Contra Craft," these shipments were not to be inspected. When some authority wasn't apprised and made an arrest, powerful strings were pulled to result in dropping the case, acquittal, reduced sentence, or deportation.17

Mid-1980s to early 1990s, 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's mandate included countering the cocaine trade, though SIN officers themselves engaged in trafficking, a trade aided and abetted by some Haitian military and political leaders.18

1980s to early 1990s, Afghanistan

CIA-supported Moujahedeen rebels engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting the Soviet-supported government, which had plans to reform Afghan society. The Agency's principal client was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leading drug lords and the biggest heroin refiner, who was also the largest recipient of CIA military support. CIA-supplied trucks and mules that 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. U.S. officials admitted in 1990 that they had failed to investigate or take action against the drug operation because of a desire not to offend their Pakistani and Afghan allies.19 In 1993, an official of the DEA dubbed Afghanistan the new Colombia of the drug world.20

Endnotes
1 Gary Webb, "Dark Alliance" series, San Jose Mercury News. Beginning August 18, 1996.

2 Celerino Castillo, Powder Burns: Cocaine, Contras and the Drug War (Mosaic Press, 1994). Los Angeles Times lengthy series of articles, October 20, 21, 22, 1996. Roberto Suro and Walter Pincus, "The CIA and Crack: Evidence is Lacking of Alleged Plot" (Washington Post, October 4, 1996). Howard Kurtz, "Running with the CIA Story" (Washington Post, October 2, 1996). Douglas Farah and Walter Pincus "CIA, Contras and Drugs: Questions on Links Linger" (Washington Post, October 31, 1996). Tim Golden,"Though Evidence is Thin, Tale of CIA and Drugs Has a Life of Its Own" (New York Times, October 21, 1996).

3 Peter Dale Scott & Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991) pp. x-xi.

4 Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York City, New York: Harper & Row, 1972, chapter 2).

5 Christopher Robbins, Air America (New York City, New York: Avon Books, 1985) chapter 9. McCoy, Politics of Heroin.

6 McCoy, Politics of Heroin, chapter 9.

7 Robbins, Air America, p. 128 and chapter 9. Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money and the CIA (New York City, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1987). William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995) p. 420, note 33.

8 Scott & Marshall, Cocaine Politics; John Dinges, Our Man in Panama (NY, New York: Random House, 1991); Murray Waas, "Cocaine and the White House Connection", Los Angeles Weekly, Sept. 30-Oct. 6 and Oct. 7-13, 1988; National Security Archive Documentation Packet: The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations (Washington, DC).

9 "Kerry Report": Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, a Report of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, 1989, pp. 2, 36, 41.

10 Martha Honey, Hostile Acts: U.S. Policy in Costa Rica in the 1980s (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 1994).

11 Martha Honey and David Myers, "U.S. Probing Drug Agent's Activities in Costa Rica," San Francisco Chronicle, August 14, 1991.

12 Honey, Hostile Acts.

13 Frank Smyth, "In Guatemala, The DEA Fights the CIA", New Republic, June 5, 1995; Blum, Killing Hope, p. 239.

14 Martha Honey, "Drug Figure Says Cartel Gave Drugs to Contras" Washington Post, June 30, 1987.

15 Kerry report, Drugs.

16 Scott & Marshall, Cocaine Politics, pp. 17-18.

17 Scott & Marshall, Cocaine Politics; Waas, "Cocaine and the White House"; NSA, The Contras.

18 New York Times, Nov. 14, 1993; The Nation, Oct. 3, 1994, p. 346.

19 Blum, Killing Hope, p. 351; Tim Weiner, Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget (New York City, New York: Warner Books, 1990) pp. 151-2.

20 Los Angeles Times, Aug. 22, 1993

Publications
Lorraine Adams, "North Didn't Relay Drug Tips", The Washington Post, Oct. 22, 1994, p. 1.

William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1995).

Celerino Castillo with David Harmon, Powder Burns: Cocaine, Contras and the Drug War (Mosaic Press, 1994).

John Dinges, Our Man in Panama (New York City, NY: Random House, 1991).

Martha Honey, Hostile Acts: U.S. Policy in Costa Rica in the 1980s (Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 1994).

Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Drugs, Law Enforcement and Foreign Policy, December 1988.

Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money and the CIA (New York City, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 1987).

Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1972).

Clarence Lusane, Pipe Dream Blues: Racism and the War on Drugs (Boston: South End Press, 1991).

National Security Archive, Documentation Packet: The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations (Washington, D.C. October 1996).

Christopher Robbins, Air America (New York City, New York: Avon Books, 1985).

Peter Dale Scott & Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley, California: University of CA Press, 1991).

Murray Waas, "Cocaine and the White House Connection", Los Angeles Weekly, Sept. 30-Oct. 6 and Oct. 7-13, 1988.

Tim Weiner, Blank Check: The Pentagon's Black Budget (New York City, New York: Warner Books, 1990).

--- end ---

Aug 22, 1996
Cocaine pipeline financed rebels
Evidence points to CIA knowing of high-volume drug network

by Gary Webb
San Jose Mercury News
source

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, the San Jose Mercury News has found.

This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the "crack" capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America - and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.'s gangs to buy weapons.

It is one of the most bizarre alliances in modern history: the union of a U.S.-backed army attempting to overthrow a revolutionary socialist government and the "gangstas" of Compton and South-Central Los Angeles.

The army's financiers - who met with CIA agents before and during the time they were selling the drugs in L.A. - delivered cut-rate cocaine to the gangs through a young South-Central crack dealer named Ricky Donnell Ross.

Unaware of his suppliers' military and political connections, "Freeway Rick" turned the cocaine powder into crack and wholesaled it to gangs across the country.

Drug cash for the contras

Court records show the cash was then used to buy equipment for a guerrilla army named the Fuerza Democratica Nicaraguense (Nicaraguan Democratic Force) or FDN, the largest of several anti-communist groups commonly called the contras.

While the FDN's war is barely a memory today, black America is still dealing with its poisonous side effects. Urban neighborhoods are grappling with legions of homeless crack addicts. Thousands of young black men are serving long prison sentences for selling cocaine - a drug that was virtually unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the CIA's army brought it into South-Central in the 1980s at bargain-basement prices.

And the L.A. gangs, which used their enormous cocaine profits to arm themselves and spread crack across the country, are still thriving.

"There is a saying that the ends justify the means," former FDN leader and drug dealer Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes testified during a recent cocaine-trafficking trial in San Diego. "And that's what Mr. Bermudez (the CIA agent who commanded the FDN) told us in Honduras, OK? So we started raising money for the contra revolution."

Recently declassified reports, federal court testimony, undercover tapes, court records here and abroad and hundreds of hours of interviews over the past 12 months leave no doubt that Blandon was no ordinary drug dealer.

Shortly before Blandon - who had been the drug ring's Southern California distributor - took the stand in San Diego as a witness for the U.S. Department of Justice, federal prosecutors obtained a court order preventing defense lawyers from delving into his ties to the CIA.

Blandon, one of the FDN's founders in California, "will admit that he was a large-scale dealer in cocaine, and there is no additional benefit to any defendant to inquire as to the Central Intelligence Agency," Assistant U.S. Attorney L.J. O'Neale argued in his motion shortly before Ross' trial on cocaine-trafficking charges in March.

The 5,000-man FDN, records show, was created in mid-1981 when the CIA combined several existing groups of anti-communist exiles into a unified force it hoped would topple the new socialist government of Nicaragua.

Waged a losing war

From 1982 to 1988, the FDN - run by both American and Nicaraguan CIA agents - waged a losing war against Nicaragua's Sandinista government, the Cuban-supported socialists who'd overthrown U.S.-backed dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979.

Blandon, who began working for the FDN's drug operation in late 1981, testified that the drug ring sold almost a ton of cocaine in the United States that year - $54 million worth at prevailing wholesale prices. It was not clear how much of the money found its way back to the CIA's army, but Blandon testified that "whatever we were running in L.A., the profit was going for the contra revolution."

At the time of that testimony, Blandon was a full-time informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration, a job the U.S. Department of Justice got him after releasing him from prison in 1994.

Though Blandon admitted to crimes that have sent others away for life, the Justice Department turned him loose on unsupervised probation after only 28 months behind bars and has paid him more than $166,000 since, court records show.

"He has been extraordinarily helpful," federal prosecutor O'Neale told Blandon's judge in a plea for the trafficker's release in 1994. Though O'Neale once described Blandon to a grand jury as "the biggest Nicaraguan cocaine dealer in the United States," the prosecutor would not discuss him with the Mercury News.

Blandon's boss in the FDN's cocaine operation, Juan Norwin Meneses Cantarero, has never spent a day in a U.S. prison, even though the federal government has been aware of his cocaine dealings since at least 1974, records show.

Meneses - who ran the drug ring from his homes in the Bay Area - is listed in the DEA's computers as a major international drug smuggler and was implicated in 45 separate federal investigations. Yet he and his cocaine-dealing relatives lived quite openly in the Bay Area for years, buying homes, bars, restaurants, car lots and factories.

"I even drove my own cars, registered in my name," Meneses said during a recent interview in Nicaragua.

Meneses' organization was "the target of unsuccessful investigative attempts for many years," O'Neale acknowledged in a 1994 affidavit. But records and interviews revealed that a number of those probes were stymied not by the elusive Meneses but by agencies of the U.S. government.

CIA hampered probes

Agents from four organizations - the DEA, U.S. Customs, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement - have complained that investigations were hampered by the CIA or unnamed "national-security" interests.

One 1988 investigation by a U.S. Senate subcommittee ran into a wall of official secrecy at the Justice Department.

In that case, congressional records show, Senate investigators were trying to determine why the U.S. attorney in San Francisco, Joseph Russoniello, had given $36,000 back to a Nicaraguan cocaine dealer arrested by the FBI.

The money was returned, court records show, after two contra leaders sent letters to the court swearing that the drug dealer had been given the cash to buy weapons for guerrillas.

After Nicaraguan police arrested Meneses on cocaine charges in Managua in 1991, his judge expressed astonishment that the infamous smuggler went unmolested by American drug agents during his years in the United States.

His seeming invulnerability amazed American authorities as well.

A Customs agent who investigated Meneses in 1980 before transferring elsewhere said he was reassigned to San Francisco seven years later "and I was sitting in some meetings and here's Meneses' name again. And I can remember thinking, `Holy cow, is this guy still around?' "

Blandon led an equally charmed life. For at least five years he brokered massive amounts of cocaine to the black gangs of Los Angeles without being arrested. But his luck changed overnight.
On Oct. 27, 1986, agents from the FBI, the IRS, local police and the Los Angeles County sheriff fanned out across Southern California and raided more than a dozen locations connected to Blandon's cocaine operation. Blandon and his wife, along with numerous Nicaraguan associates, were arrested on drug and weapons charges.

The search-warrant affidavit reveals that local drug agents knew plenty about Blandon's involvement with cocaine and the CIA's army nearly 10 years ago.

"Danilo Blandon is in charge of a sophisticated cocaine smuggling and distribution organization operating in Southern California," L.A. County sheriff's Sgt. Tom Gordon said in the 1986 affidavit. "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."

Raids a spectacular failure

Despite their intimate knowledge of Blandon's operations, the police raids were a spectacular failure. Every location had been cleaned of anything remotely incriminating. No one was ever prosecuted.

Ron Spear, a spokesman for Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block, said Blandon somehow knew that he was under police surveillance.

FBI records show that soon after the raids, Blandon's defense attorney, Bradley Brunon, called the sheriff's department to suggest that his client's troubles stemmed from a most unlikely source: a recent congressional vote authorizing $100 million in military aid to the contras.

According to a December 1986 FBI teletype, Brunon told the officers that the "CIA winked at this sort of thing. . . . (Brunon) indicated that now that U.S. Congress had voted funds for the Nicaraguan contra movement, U.S. government now appears to be turning against organizations like this."

That FBI report, part of the files of former Iran-contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, was made public only last year, when it was released by the National Archives at the San Jose Mercury News' request.

Blandon has also implied that his cocaine sales were, for a time, CIA-approved. He told a San Francisco federal grand jury in 1994 that once the FDN began receiving American taxpayer dollars, the CIA no longer needed his kind of help.

None of the government agencies known to have been involved with Meneses and Blandon would provide the Mercury News with any information about them, despite Freedom of Information Act requests.

Blandon's lawyer, Brunon, said in an interview that his client never told him directly that he was selling cocaine for the CIA, but the prominent Los Angeles defense attorney drew his own conclusions from the "atmosphere of CIA and clandestine activities" that surrounded Blandon and his Nicaraguan friends.

"Was he involved with the CIA? Probably. Was he involved with drugs? Most definitely," Brunon said. "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."

That very topic arose during the sensational 1992 cocaine-trafficking trial of Meneses after he was arrested in Nicaragua in connection with a staggering 750-kilo shipment of cocaine. His chief accuser was his friend Enrique Miranda, a relative and former Nicaraguan military intelligence officer who had been Meneses' emissary to the cocaine cartel of Bogota, Colombia. Miranda pleaded guilty to drug charges and agreed to cooperate in exchange for a seven-year sentence.

In a long, handwritten statement he read to Meneses' jury, Miranda revealed the deepest secrets of the Meneses drug ring, earning his old boss a 30-year prison sentence in the process.

"He (Norwin) and his brother Luis Enrique had financed the contra revolution with the benefits of the cocaine they sold," Miranda wrote. "This operation, as Norwin told me, was executed with the collaboration of high-ranking Salvadoran military personnel. They met with officials of the Salvadoran air force, who flew (planes) to Colombia and then left for the U.S., bound for an Air Force base in Texas, as he told me."

Meneses - who has close personal and business ties to a Salvadoran air-force commander and former CIA agent named Marcos Aguado - declined to discuss Miranda's statements during an interview at a prison outside Managua in January. He is scheduled to be paroled this summer, after nearly five years in custody.

U.S. General Accounting Office records confirm that El Salvador's air force was supplying the CIA's Nicaraguan guerrillas with aircraft and flight support services throughout the mid-1980s.
The same day the Mercury News requested official permission to interview Miranda, he disappeared.

While out on a routine weekend furlough, Miranda failed to return to the Nicaraguan jail where he'd been living since 1992. Though his jailers, who described him as a model prisoner, claimed Miranda had escaped, they didn't call the police until a Mercury News correspondent showed up and discovered he was gone.

He has not been seen in nearly a year.

--- end ---

THE MIGHTY WURLITZER PLAYS ON

by Gary Webb
source

Chapter 14 from In the Buzzsaw edited by Kristina Borjesson

Webb was an investigative reporter for nineteen years focusing on government and private sector corruption and winning more than thirty journalism awards. He was one of six reporters at the San Jose Mercury News to win a 1990 Pulitzer Prize for general news reporting for a series of stories on Northern California's 1989 earthquake. He also received the 1997 Media Hero Award from the 2nd Annual Media & Democracy Congress, and in 1996 was named Journalist of the Year by the Bay Area Society of Professional Journalists. In 1994, Webb won the H. L. Mencken Award given by the Free Press Association for a series in the San Jose Mercury News on abuses in the state of California's drug asset forfeiture program. And in 1980, Webb won an Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) Award for a series that he coauthored at the Kentucky Post on organized crime in the coal industry. Prior to 1988, Webb worked as a statehouse correspondent for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and was a reporter for the San Jose Mercury News where the "Dark Alliance" series broke in 1996. Months later, Webb was effectively forced out of his job after the San Jose Mercury News retracted their support for his story. He is now a consultant to the California State Legislature's Joint Audit Committee.

If we had met five years ago, you wouldn't have found a more staunch defender of the newspaper industry than me. I'd been working at daily papers for seventeen years at that point, doing no-holds barred investigative reporting for the bulk of that time. As far as I could tell, the beneficial powers the press theoretically exercised in our society weren't theoretical in the least. They worked.

I wrote stories that accused people and institutions of illegal and unethical activities. The papers I worked for printed them, often unflinchingly, and many times gleefully. After these stories appeared, matters would improve. Crooked politicians got voted from office or were forcibly removed. Corrupt firms were exposed and fined. Sweetheart deals were rescinded, grand juries were impaneled, indictments came down, grafters were bundled off to the big house. Taxpayers saved money. The public interest was served.

It all happened exactly as my journalism-school professors had promised. And my expectations were pretty high. I went to journalism school while Watergate was unfolding, a time when people as distantly connected to newspapering as college professors were puffing out their chests and singing hymns to investigative reporting.

Bottom line: If there was ever a true believer, I was one. My first editor mockingly called me "Woodstein," after a pair of Washington Post reporters who broke the Watergate story. More than once I was accused of neglecting my daily reporting duties because I was off "running around with your trench coat flapping in the breeze." But in the end, all the sub rosa trench coat-flapping paid off. The newspaper published a seventeen-part series on organized crime in the American coal industry and won its first national journalism award in half a century. From then on, my editors at that and subsequent newspapers allowed me to work almost exclusively as an investigative reporter.

I had a grand total of one story spiked during my entire reporting career. That's it. One. (And in retrospect it wasn't a very important story either.) Moreover, I had a complete freedom to pick my own shots, a freedom my editors wholeheartedly encouraged since it relieved them of the burden of coming up with story ideas. I wrote my stories the way I wanted to write them, without anyone looking over my shoulder or steering me in a certain direction. After the lawyers and editors went over them and satisfied themselves that we had enough facts behind us to stay out of trouble, they printed them, usually on the front page of the Sunday edition, when we had our widest readership.

In seventeen years of doing this, nothing bad had happened to me. I was never fired or threatened with dismissal if I kept looking under rocks. I didn't get any death threats that worried me. I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, and judging journalism contests.

So how could I possibly agree with people like Noam Chomsky and Ben Bagdikian, who were claiming the system didn't work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? Hell, the system worked just fine, as far as I could tell. It encouraged enterprise. It rewarded muckraking.

And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. It turned out to have nothing to do with it. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress.

In 1996, I wrote a series of stories, entitled Dark Alliance, that began this way:

For the better part of a decade, a 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 guerilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found.

This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the "crack" capital of the world. The cocaine that flooded in helped spark a crack explosion in urban America -- and provided the cash and connections needed for L.A.'s gangs to buy
automatic weapons.

It is one of the most bizarre alliances in modern history: the union of a U.S. backed army attempting to overthrow a revolutionary socialist government and the Uzi-toting "gangstas" of Compton and South Central Los Angeles.

The three-day series was, at its heart, a short historical account of the rise and fall of a drug ring and its impact on black Los Angeles. It attempted to explain how shadowy intelligence agencies, shady drugs and arms dealers, a political scandal, and a long-simmering Latin American civil war had crossed paths in South Central Los Angeles, leaving behind a legacy of crack use. Most important, it 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.

And so Dark Alliance was about them -- the three cocaine traffickers who supplied the South Central market with literally tons of pure cocaine from the early 1980s to the early 1990s. What made the series so controversial is that two of the traffickers I named were intimately involved with a Nicaraguan paramilitary group known as the Contras, a collection of ex-military men, Cuban exiles, and mercenaries that the CIA was using to destabilize the socialist government of Nicaragua. The series documented direct contact between the drug traffickers who were bringing the cocaine into South Central and the two Nicaraguan CIA agents who were administering the Contra project in Central America. The evidence included sworn testimony from one of the traffickers -- now a valued government informant -- that one of the CIA agents huddled in the kitchen of a house in San Francisco with one of the traffickers and had interviewed the photographer, who confirmed its authenticity. Pretty convincing stuff, we thought.

Over the course of three days, Dark Alliance advanced five main arguments: First, that the CIA-created Contras had been selling cocaine to finance their activities. This was something the CIA and the major media had dismissed or denied since the mid-1980s, when a few reporters first began writing about Contra drug dealing. Second, that the Contras had sold cocaine in the ghettos of Los Angeles and that their main customer was L.A.'s biggest crack dealer. Third, that elements of the U.S. government knew about this drug ring's activities at the time and did little if anything to stop it. Fourth, that because of the time period and the areas in which it operated, this drug ring played a critical role in fueling and supplying the first mass crack cocaine market in the United States. And fifth, that the profits earned from this crack market allowed the Los Angeles-based Crips and bloods to expand into other cities and spread crack use to other black urban areas, turning a bad local problem into a bad national problem. This led to panicky federal drug laws that were locking up thousands of small-time, black crack dealers for years but never denting the crack trade.

It wasn't so much a conspiracy that I had outlined as it was a chain-reaction--bad ideas compounded by stupid political decisions and rotten historical timing.

Obviously this wasn't the kind of story that a reporter digs up in an afternoon. A Nicaraguan journalist and I had been working on it exclusively for more than a year before it was published. And despite the topic of the story, it had been tedious work. Spanish-language undercover tapes, court records, and newspaper articles were laboriously translated. Interviews had to be arranged in foreign prisons. Documents had to be pried from unwilling federal agencies, or specially declassified by the National Archives. Ex-drug dealers and ex-cops had to be tracked down and persuaded to talk on the record. Chronologies were pieced together from heavily censored government documents and old newspaper stories found scattered in archives from Managua to Miami.

In December 1995, I wrote a lengthy memo to my editors, advising them of what my Nicaraguan colleague and I had found, what I thought the stories would say, and what still needed to be done to wrap them up. It also helped my editor explain our findings to her bosses, who had not yet signed off on the story, and most of whom had no idea I'd been working on it.

**Two months ago, in an unheard-of response to a Congressional vote, black prison inmates across the country staged simultaneous revolts to protest Congress' refusal to make sentences for crack cocaine the same as for powder cocaine. Both before and after the prison riots, some black leaders were openly suggesting that crack was part of a broad government conspiracy that has imprisoned or killed an entire generation of young black men.

Imagine if they were right. What if the US government was, in fact, involved in dumping cocaine into California -- selling it to black gangs in South Central Los Angeles, for instance -- sparking the most destructive drug epidemic in American history?

That's what this series is about.

With the help of recently declassified documents, FBI reports, DEA undercover tapes, secret grand jury transcripts and archival records from both here and abroad, as well as interviews with some of the key participants, we will show how a CIA-linked drug and stolen car network -- based in, of all places, the Peninsula -- provided weapons and tons of high-grade, dirt cheap cocaine to the very person who spread crack through LA and from there into the hinterlands.

A bizarre -- almost fatherly -- bond between an elusive CIA operative and an illiterate but brilliant car thief from LA's ghettos touched off a social phenomenon -- crack and gang-power -- that changed our lives in ways that are still to be felt. That day these two men met was literally ground zero for California's crack explosion, and the myriad of calamities that have flowed from it (AIDS, homelessness, etc.)

This is also the story of how an ill-planned and oftentimes irrational foreign policy adventure -- the CIA's "secret" was in Nicaragua from 1980 to 1986 -- boomeranged back to the streets of America, in the long run doing far more damage to us than to our supposed "enemies" in Central America.

For, as this series will show, the dumping of cocaine on LA's street gangs was the "back-end" of a covert effort to arm and equip the CIA's ragtag army of anti-Communist "Contra" guerrillas. While this has long been solid -- if largely ignored -- evidence of a CIA-Contra-cocaine connection, no one has ever asked the question: "Where did all the cocaine go once it got here?"

Now we know.

Moreover, we have compelling evidence that the kingpins of this Bay Area cocaine ring -- men connected to the assassinated Nicaraguan dictated dictator Anastasio Somoza and his murderous National Guard -- enjoyed a unique relationship with the U.S. government that has continued to this day.

*In a meeting to discuss the memo, I recounted to my editors the sorry history of how the Contra-cocaine story had been ridiculed and marginalized by the Washington press corps in the 1980s, and that we could expect similar reactions to this series. If they didn't want to pursue this, now was the time to pull back, before I flew down to Central America and started poking around finding drug dealers to interview. But if we did, we needed to go full-bore on it, and devote the time and space to tell it right. My editors agreed. My story memo made the rounds of the other editors' offices and, as far as I know, no one objected. I was sent to Nicaragua to do additional reporting, and the design team at Mercury Center -- the newspaper's online edition -- began mapping out a Web page.

At the end of my memo, I'd suggested to my editors that we use the Internet to help us demonstrate the story's soundness and credibility which, based on past stories critical of the CIA, was sure to come under attack by both the government and the press.

**I have proposed to Bob Ryan [director of Mercury Center] that we do a special Merc Center/World Wide Web version of this series. The technology is extant to allow readers to download the series' supporting documentation through links to the actual text. For example, when we are quoting grand jury testimony, a click of the mouse would allow the reader to see and/or download the actual grand jury transcript.

Since this whole subject has such a high unbelievability factor built into it, providing our backup documentation to our readers -- and the rest of the world over the Internet -- would allow them to judge the evidence for themselves. It will also make it all the more difficult to dismiss our findings as the fantasies of a few drug dealers.

To my knowledge, this has never been attempted before. It would be a great way to showcase Merc Center and, at the same time use computer technology to set new standards for investigative reporting.

* The editors jumped at the idea. From our perch as the newspaper of Silicon Valley, we could see the future the World Wide Web offered. Newspapers were scrambling to figure out a way to make the transition to cyberspace. The Mercury's editors were among the first to do it right, and were looking for new barriers to break. A special Internet version of Dark Alliance was created as a high-profile way of advertising the Mercury's Web presence and bringing visitors into the site. Plus, the newspaper could boast (and later did) that it had published the first interactive online expose in the history of American journalism.

I remember being almost giddy as I sat with Merc Center's editors and graphics designers, picking through the pile of once-classified information we were going to unleash on the world. We had photos, undercover tape recordings, and federal grand jury testimony. In addition, we had interviews with guerrilla leaders, tape-recorded Supreme Court files, Congressional records, and long-secret documents unearthed during the Iran-Contra investigation. For the first time, any reader with a computer and a sound card could see what we'd found -- could actually read it for themselves -- and listen in while the story's participants plotted, scheme, and confessed. And they could do it from anywhere in the world, even if they had no idea where San Jose, California, was.

After four months of writing, rewriting, editing, and reediting, my editors pronounced themselves satisfied and signed off. The first installment of Dark Alliance appeared simultaneously on the streets and on the Web on August 18, 1996.

The initial public reaction was dead silence. No one jumped up to deny any of it. Nor did the news media rush to share our discoveries with others. The stories just sat there, as if no one seemed to know what to make of them.

Admittedly, Dark Alliance was an unusual story to have appeared in a mainstream daily newspaper, not just for what it said, but for what it was. It wasn't a news story per se; nearly everything I wrote about had happened a dozen years earlier. Because my editors and I had sometimes vehemently disagreed about the scope and nature of the stories during the writing and editing process, the result was a series of compromises, an odd mixture of history lesson, news feature, analysis, and expose. It was not an uplifting story; it was a sickening one. The bad guys had triumphed and fled the scene unscathed, as often happens in life. And there was very little anyone could do about it now, ten years after the fact.

So, I wasn't really surprised that my journalistic colleagues weren't pounding down the follow-up trail. Hell, I thought it was a strange story myself.

Had it been published even a year of two earlier, it likely would have vanished without a trace at that point. Customarily, if the rest of the nation's editors decide to ignore a particular story, it quickly withers and dies, like a light-starved plant. With the exception of newspapers in Seattle, some small cities in Northern California, and Albuquerque, Dark Alliance got the silent treatment big time. No one would touch it.

But no one had counted on the enormous popularity of the Web site. Almost from the moment the series appeared, the Web page was deluged with visitors from all over the world. Students in Denmark were standing in line at their college's computer waiting to read it. E-mails came in from Croatia, Japan, Colombia, Harlem, and Kansas City, dozens of them, day after day. One day we had more than 1.3 million hits. (The site eventually won several awards from computer journalism magazines.)

Once Dark Alliance became the talk of the Internet (in large part because of the technical wizardry and sharp graphics of the Web page), talk radio adopted the story and ran with it. For the next two months, I did more than one hundred radio interviews, in which I was asked to sum up what the three-day long series said in its many thousands of words. Well, I would reply, it said a lot of things. Take your pick. Usually, the questions focused on the CIA's role, and whether I was suggesting a giant CIA conspiracy. We didn't know the CIA's exact role yet, I would say, but we have documents and court testimony showing CIA agents were meeting with these drug traffickers to discuss drug sales and weapons trafficking. And so, figure it out. Did the CIA know or not? The response would come back --So you're saying that the CIA "targeted" black neighborhoods for crack sales? Where's your evidence of that? And it would go on and one.

There were other distractions as well. Film agents and book agents began calling. One afternoon Paramount Studios whisked me down to have lunch with two of the studio's biggest producers, the men who brought Tom Clancy's CIA novels to the screen, to talk about "film possibilities" for the still-unfolding story. This was about the time I realized the wind speed of the shit storm I had kicked up.

The rumbles the series was causing from black communities was unnerving a lot of people. College students were holding protest rallies in Washington, D.C., to demand an official investigation. Residents of South Central marched on city hall and held candlelight vigils. The Los Angeles City Council soon joined the chorus, as did both of California's U.S. senators, the Oakland city council, the major of Denver, the Congressional Black Caucus, Jesse Jackson, the NAACP, and at least a half dozen congressional members, mostly African American women whose districts included crack-ridden inner cities. Black civil rights activists were arrested outside the CIA after sealing off the agency's entrance with yellow crime scene tape. The story was developing a political momentum all of its own, and it was happening despite a virtual news blackout from the major media.

Some Washington journalists were alarmed. Where is the rebuttal? "Why hasn't the media risen in revolt against this story?" CNN's Reliable Sources, Kalb expressed frustration that the story was continuing to get out despite the best efforts of the press to ignore it. "It isn't a story that simply got lost" Kalb complained, during the show, "It, in fact, has resonated and echoed and echoed and the question is, Where is the media knocking it down?"

It was an interesting comment because it foretold the way the mainstream press finally did respond to Dark Alliance. A revolt by the biggest newspapers in the country, something columnist Alexander Cockburn would later describe in his book White Out as "one of the most venomous and factually insane assaults...in living memory."

I remember arguing with a producer at a CNN news show shortly before I was to go on the air that I didn't want him asking me to explain "my allegations" because these stories weren't my allegations. I was a journalist reporting events that had actually occurred. You could document them, and we had.

"Well, you got to understand my position," he mumbled. "The trafficking, CNN's position is that these events may not have happened." I snapped, "What the fuck is that? When did we give the CIA the power to define reality?"

After nearly a month of silence, the CIA responded. It admitted nothing. It was confident that its agents weren't dealing drugs. But to dispel all the rumors and unkind suggestions my series had raised, the agency would have its inspector general take a look into the matter.

The black community greeted this pronouncement with unconcealed contempt. "You think you can come down here and tell us that you're going to investigate yourselves, and expect us to believe something is actually going to happen?" one woman yelled at CIA director John Dutch, who appeared in Compote, California, in November 1996 to personally promise the city a thorough investigation. "How stupid do you think we are?"

The conservative press and right-wing political organizations were equally hostile to the idea of a CIA crack investigation, but for different reasons. It meant the story was gaining legitimacy, and might lead to places that supporters of the Reagan and Bush administrations would rather not see it go. John Dutch was blasted on the front page of the Washington Times (which had also helped finance the Contras, hosting fundraisers and speaking engagements for Contra leaders while supporting their cause editorially) as a dangerous liberal who was undermining morale at the CIA by even suggesting there might be truth to the stories.

Ultimately, it was public pressure that forced the national newspapers into the fray. Protests were held outside the building by media watchdogs and citizens groups, who wondered how the Times could continue to ignore a story that had such an impact on the city's black neighborhoods. In Washington, black media outlets were ridiculing the Post for its silence, considering the importance the story held for most of Washington's citizens.

When the newspapers of record spoke, they spoke in unison. Between October and November, the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times published lengthy stories about the CIA drug issue, but spent precious little time exploring the CIA's activities. Instead, my reporting and I became the focus of their scrutiny. After looking into the issue for several weeks, the official conclusion reached by all three papers: Much ado about nothing. No story here. Nothing worth pursuing. The series was "flawed," they contended. How?

Well, there was no evidence the CIA knew anything about it, according to unnamed CIA officials the newspapers spoke to. The drug traffickers we identified as Contras didn't have "official" positions with the organization and didn't really give them all that much drug money. This was according to another CIA agent, Adolfo Calero, the former head of the Contras, and the man whose picture we had just published on the Internet, huddled in a kitchen with one of the Contra drug traffickers. Calero's apparent involvement with the drug operation was never mentioned by any of the papers; his decades-long relationship with the CIA was never mentioned either.

Additionally, it was argued, this quasi-Contra drug ring was small potatoes. One of the Contra traffickers had only sold five tons of cocaine during his entire career, the Washington Post sniffed, badly misquoting a DEA report we'd posted on the Web site. According to the Post's analysis, written by a former CIA informant, Walter Pincus, who was then covering the CIA for the Post, this drug ring couldn't have made a difference in the crack market because five tons wasn't nearly enough to go around. Eventually, those assertions would be refuted by internal records released by both the CIA and the Justice Department, but at the time they were classified.

"I'm disappointed in the 'what's the big deal' tone running through the Post's critique," Mercury News editor Jerry Ceppos complained to the Post in a letter it refused to publish. "If the CIA knew about these illegal activities being conducted by its associates, federal law and basic morality required that it notify domestic authorities. It seems to me that this is exactly the kind of story that a newspaper should shine a light on." Ceppos posted a memo on the newsroom bulletin board, stating that the Mercury News would continue "to strongly support the conclusions the series drew and will until someone proves them wrong." It was remarkable, Ceppos wrote, that the four Post reporters assigned to debunk the series "could not find a single significant factual error."

Privately, though, my editors were getting nervous. Never before had the three biggest papers devoted such energy to kicking the hell out of a story by another newspaper. It simply wasn't done, and it worried them. They began a series of maneuvers designed to deflect or at least stem the criticism from the national media. Five thousand reprints of the series were burned because the CIA logo was used as an illustration. My follow-up stories were required to contain a boilerplate disclaimer that said we were not accusing the CIA of direct knowledge, even though the facts strongly suggested CIA complicity. But those stunts merely fueled the controversy, making it appear as if we were backing away from the story without admitting it.

Ironically, the evidence we were continuing to gather was making the story even stronger. Long-missing police records surfaced. Cops who had tried to investigate the Contra drug ring and were rebuffed came forward. We tracked down one of the Contras who personally delivered drug money to CIA agents, and he identified them by name, on the record. He also confirmed that the amounts he'd carried to Miami and Costa Rica were in the millions. More records were declassified from the Iran-Contra files, showing that contemporaneous knowledge of this drug operation reached to the top levels of the CIA's covert operations division, as well as into the DEA and the FBI.

But the attacks from the other newspapers had taken the wind out of my editors' sails. Despite the advances we were making on the story, the criticism continued. We were being "irresponsible" by printing stories suggesting CIA complicity without any admissions or printing stories suggesting CIA complicity without any admissions of "a smoking gun." The series was now described frequently as "discredited," even though nothing had surfaced showing that any of the facts were incorrect. At my editor's request, I wrote another series following up on the first three parts: a package of four stories to run over two days. They never began to edit them.

Instead, I found myself involved in hours-long conversations with editors that bordered on the surreal.

"How do we know for sure that these drug dealers were the first big ring to start selling crack in South Central?" editor Jonathan Krim pressed me during one such confab. "Isn't it possible there might have been others before them?"

"There might have been a lot of things, Jon, but we're only supposed to deal in what we know," I replied. "The crack dealers I interviewed said they were the first. Cops in South Central said they were the first. and that they controlled the entire market. They wrote it in reports that we have. I haven't found anything saying otherwise, not one single name, and neither did the New York Times, the Washington Post or the L.A. Times. So what's the issue here?"

"But how can we say for sure they were the first?" Krim persisted. "Isn't it possible there might have been someone else and they never got caught and no one ever knew about them? In that case, your story would be wrong."

I had to take a deep breath to keep from shouting. "If you're asking me whether I accounted for people who might never have existed, the answer is no," I said. "I only considered people with names and faces. I didn't take phantom drug dealers into account."

A few months later, the Mercury News officially backed away from Dark Alliance, publishing a long column by Jerry Ceppos apologizing for "shortcomings" in the series. While insisting that the paper stood behind its "core findings," we didn't have proof that top CIA officials knew about this, and we didn't have proof that millions of dollars flowed from this drug ring, Ceppos declared, even though we did and weren't printing it. There were gray areas that should have been fleshed out more. Some of the language used could have led to misimpressions. And we "oversimplified" that outbreak of crack in South Central. The New York Times hailed Ceppos for setting a brave new standard for dealing with "egregious errors" and splashed his apology on their front page, the first time the series had ever been mentioned there.

I quit the Mercury News not too long after that.

When the CIA and Justice Department finished their internal investigations two years later, the classified documents that were released showed just how badly I had fucked up. The CIA's knowledge and involvement had been far greater than I'd ever imagined. The drug ring was even bigger than I had portrayed. The involvement between the CIA agents running the Contras and the drug traffickers was closer than I had written. And agents and officials of the DEA had protected the traffickers from arrest, something I'd not been allowed to print. The CIA also admitted having direct involvement with about four dozen other drug traffickers or their companies, and that this too had been known and effectively condoned by the CIA's top brass.

In fact, at the start of the Contra war, the CIA and Justice Department had worked out an unusual agreement that permitted the CIA not to have to report allegations of drug trafficking by its agents to the Justice Department. It was a curious loophole in the law, to say the least.

Despite those rather stunning admissions, the internal investigations were portrayed in the press as having uncovered no evidence of CIA involvement in drug trafficking and no evidence of a conspiracy to send crack to black neighborhoods, which was hardly surprising since I had never said there was. What I had written -- that individual CIA agents working within the Contras were deeply involved with this drug ring -- was either ignored or excised from the CIA's final reports. For instance, the agency's decade-long employment of two Contra commanders --Colonel Enrique Bermudez and Adolfo Calero--was never mentioned in the declassified CIA reports, leaving the false impression that they had no CIA connection. This was a critical omission, since Bermudez and Calero were identified in my series as the CIA agents who had directly involved with the Contra Drug pipeline. Even though their relationship with the agency was a matter of public record, none of the press reports I saw celebrating the CIA's self-absolution bothered to address this gaping hole in the official story. The CIA had investigated itself and cleared itself, and the press was happy to let things stay that way. No independent investigation was done.

The funny thing was, despite all the furor, the facts of the story never changed, except to become more damning. But the perception of them did, and in this case, that is really all that mattered. Once a story became "discredited," the rest of the media shied away from it. Dark Alliance was consigned to the dustbin of history, viewed as an Internet conspiracy theory that had been thoroughly disproved by more responsible news organizations.

Why did it occur? Primarily because the series presented dangerous ideas. It suggested that crimes of state had been committed. If the story was true, it meant the federal government bore some responsibility, however indirect, for the flood of crack that coursed through black neighborhoods in the 1980s. And that is something no government can ever admit to, particularly one that is busily promoting a multibillion-dollar-a-year War on Drugs.

But what of the press? Why did our free and independent media participate with the government's disinformation campaign? It had probably as many reasons as the CIA. The Contra-drug story was something the top papers had dismissed as sheer fantasy only a few years earlier. They had not only been wrong, they had been terribly wrong, and their attitude had actively impeded efforts by citizens groups, journalists, and congressional investigators to bring the issue to national attention, at a time when its disclosure may have done some good. Many of the same reporters who declined to write about Contra drug trafficking in the 1980s -- or wrote dismissively about it -- were trotted out once again to do damage control.

Second, the San Jose Mercury News was not a member of the club that sets the national news agenda, the elite group of big newspapers that decides the important issues of the day, such as big newspapers that decides the important issues of the day, such as which stories get reported and which get ignored. Small regional newspapers aren't invited. But the Merc had broken the rules and used the Internet to get in by the back door, leaving the big papers momentarily superfluous and embarrassed, and it forced them to readdress an issue they'd much rather have forgotten. By turning on the Mercury News, the big boys were reminding the rest of the flock who really runs the newspaper business, Internet or no Internet, and the extends to which they will go to protect that power, even if it meant rearranging reality to suit them.

Finally, as I discovered while researching the book I eventually wrote about this story, the national news organizations have had a long, disappointing history of playing footsie with the CIA, printing unsubstantiated agency leaks, giving agents journalistic cover, and downplaying or attacking stories and ideas damaging to the agency. I can only speculate as to why this occurs, but I am not naive enough to believe it is mere coincidence.

The scary thing about this collusion between the press and the powerful is that it works so well. In this case, the government's denials and promises to pursue the truth didn't work. The public didn't accept them, for obvious reasons, and the clamor for an independent investigation continued to grow. But after the government's supposed watchdogs weighed in, public opinion became divided and confused, the movement to force congressional hearings lost steam and, once enough people came to believe the stories were false or exaggerated, the issue could safely be put back at the bottom of the dead-story pile, hopefully never to rise again.

Do we have a free press today? Sure we do. It's free to report all the sex scandals it wants, all the stock market news we can handle, every new health fad that comes down the pike, and every celebrity marriage or divorce that happens. But when it comes to the real down and dirty stuff -- stories like Tailwind, the October Surprise, the El Mozote massacre, corporate corruption, or CIA involvement in drug trafficking -- that's where we begin to see the limits of our freedoms. In today's media environment, sadly, such stories are not even open for discussion.

Back in 1938, when fascism was sweeping Europe, legendary investigative reporter George Seldes observed (in his book, The Lords of the Press) that "it is possible to fool all the people all the time -- when government and press cooperate." Unfortunately, we have reached that point.

Gary Webb
©1995 - 2004

--- end ---

Gary Webb (1955-2004)


On December 10, 2004, Gary Webb was found dead from two gunshot wounds to the head and Sacramento County coroner Robert Lyons determined that it was suicide.