cheese it, the cops!

i'm messing around with john bolton for my column this week.  here is an excellent source of info. who'dathunk that, like negroponte, he has roots firmly planted in iran/contra/crack?

When he worked as an assistant attorney general under Edwin Meese, Bolton thwarted the Kerry Commission’s efforts to obtain documentation, including Bolton’s personal notes, about the Iran-Contra affair and alleged Contra drug smuggling. Working with congressional Republicans, Bolton also stonewalled congressional demands to interview deputies of then-Attorney General Edwin Meese regarding their role in the affair.

it's a reasonable assumption that john negroponte was point man in the region for the reagan admin's attempt to defy the congressional ban on contra funding by finding various illegal sources of funds as well as offering honduras as a staging area. part of the effort involved winking at the honduras dictatorship's murders while praising its "democracy." but other parts involved massive drug trans-shipments that fueled the crack epidemic in southern cali, and arms sales to the axis of evil. a high-ranking diplomatic official in the reagan admin once told me she was sure that the iran/contra idiocy had been run of of george h.w. bush's office: "it reeked of him." these people - with their toxic combination of evil and sheer incompetence - arfe running the damn place again.

i can't help thinking: what if, instead of sending arms to iran and using the money to fund the contras while simultaneously running cheap cocaine into southern california for the same purpose, ollie north , john negroponte , and their co-conspirators had sent the cocaine to iran to ransom the hostages, while shipping arms to the crips and the bloods. then we'd have weakened the axis of evil even as we defended decent americans against the lapd.

iran.contra.crack again

check this  from l.a. weekly/alternet.  it really is a sad tale, and the "investigations by the post/la/nytimes were really simply parrotings-back of the views of the people webb had investigated. pathetic.

iran/contra/crack 6

i'm reading the washington post "investigation" that led to the mercury-news's "retraction."

first off, it argues that the cocaine that fueled the crack epidemic had many sources. ok. but it argues that oscar danilo blandon "only" handled about five tons of cocaine in his career, an estimate based on blandon's own accounts. um. and there were of course other contra/cia/drug runners involved, including possibly much higher amounts shipped by norwin meneses.

the post says

Although Nicaraguans took part in the drug trade of that era, most of the cocaine trade then can be attributed to Colombian and Mexican smugglers, and distributors within the United States including Jamaicans, Dominicans, Haitians and Americans of varying backgrounds, according to widely accepted evidence from government reports and academic studies.

but this misses the point: nicaraugua was a safe transhipment point for these very colombians and mexicans, because not only did the contras control the areas of nicaragua they were flying into, but the cia protected the planes that were coming into cali with coke and going back to nic with arms. the situation was a smuggler's dream. nevertheless the main weakness of the webb stories was certainly an oversimplification of the origins of crack.

the claims that blandon worked for the cia and that the cia knew of drug trafficking are refuted by the post on the basis of assertions by blandon himself. the claims that blandon was was ricky ross's main dealer (ross is credited by webb with flooding southern cal with cheap coke in the early 80s) and that blandon was throughout the eighties sending money back to the contras are attacked, again, only on the testimony of blandon himself.

in other words, this is no refutation. and even everything it says is true, it leaves many of the basic assertions of webb undisturbed.

the post by this time had become much more a spokesman for the cia than the paper that prosecuted watergate.

iran/contra/crack5

excellent piece by georg hodel, who supplied reporting from nicaragua.

archive of relevant material, though the site has a conspiracy-theory quality.

hahaha

an account of cia's history of drug running, by william blum

extremely responsible evaluation of the stories and the attack on them, by two profs.

iran/contra/crack 4

now, were i trying to write a story like this now, i'd be writing about the connections of u.s.-backed forces in afghanistan to the opium trade (worldnet story). the taliban had succeeded in almost destroying opium cultivation, which has gone through the roof (u.n. report) since the victory of u.s.-led forces. this is massively ironic given the propaganda campaign designed to link the drug trade to terrorism.

iran/contra/crack 3

read the original series by gary webb here.

iran/contra/crack 2

the howard kurtz story  story is liable to be pretty standard. it runs on the assumption that web's work had been proven false in its entirety. the kurtz piece is titled "web of lies," and this is obviously meant to refer to webb's work:

Webb acknowledged to me that he had no proof the CIA knew about this and that others were going beyond what he had written. But what he had written had serious problems, as subsequent investigations by The Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times found. Webb, meanwhile, began making the talk-show rounds with wilder charges. "The evidence is growing stronger day by day that there was some CIA involvement," he told Montel Williams. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) declared that "people in high places were winking and blinking, and our children were dying." Boston Globe columnist Derrick Jackson wrote: "The only conclusion is that Ronald Reagan said yes to crack and the destruction of black lives at home to fund the killing of commies abroad."

The Mercury News, after defending the series, wound up backing off, with then-editor Jerry Ceppos saying Webb's articles were "oversimplified," left out contradictory evidence and "fell short of my standards." When I called Webb, he called his boss's reaction "bizarre," "misleading" and "nauseating." He was transferred to a suburban bureau, left the paper and turned his charges into a book before joining the staff of the California legislature.

The lesson, which has been proven many times since then, is that just because a news outlet makes sensational charges doesn't make them true, and just because the rest of the media challenge the charges doesn't make them part of some cover-up.

what's amazing is how mild the retraction was: not at all based on the substance of webb's reporting. and the supposed refutations by the wash post, nytimes, and latimes (um, they really, really wanted this to turn out to be false) also left the thing mostly intact, if you get me. i will try to document alll this with links as the day goes on.

iran/contra/crack

gary webb, who broke an amazing story about cia/contra/crack connections in the san jose mercury-news, has killed himself. the mercury-news eventually disowned the story. but the reporting was right. the only problem with it was slight -ver-generaliztion or a couple of too-strong assertions. the mercury-news and every damn news organization folded under republican/intelligence pressure. here's a piece i wrote afterwards, but couldn't get printed. i'll be updating this post with links throughout the day; i have to run.