Contra-Cocaine Was a Real Conspiracy
By Robert Parry, Consortium News
04 December 13
................................ The Contra-cocaine scandal began ............with a 1985 article that Brian Barger and I wrote for the Associated Press.
Our article cited documentary evidence and witnesses - both inside the Contra movement and inside the U.S. government - implicating nearly all the Contra groups fighting in Nicaragua under the umbrella of Ronald Reagan's CIA.
Our Contra-cocaine article was followed up by a courageous Senate investigation led by Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts who further documented the connections between cocaine traffickers, the Contras and the Reagan administration in a report issued in 1989.
Yet, part of the scandal always was how the Reagan administration worked diligently to undercut investigations of the President's favorite "freedom fighters" whether the inquiries were undertaken by the press, Congress, the Drug Enforcement Administration or federal prosecutors. Indeed, a big part of this cover-up strategy was to mock the evidence as "a conspiracy theory," when it was anything but.
Big Media's Complicity
Most of the mainstream news media played along with the Reagan administration's mocking strategy, although occasionally major outlets, like the Washington Post, had to concede the reality of the scandal.
For instance, during the drug-trafficking trial of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega in 1991, U.S. prosecutors found themselves with no alternative but to call as a witness Colombian Medellín cartel kingpin Carlos Lehder, who - along with implicating Noriega - testified that the cartel had given $10 million to the Contras, an allegation first unearthed by Sen. Kerry.
"The Kerry hearings didn't get the attention they deserved at the time," a Washington Post editorial on Nov. 27, 1991, acknowledged. "The Noriega trial brings this sordid aspect of the Nicaraguan engagement to fresh public attention."
Yet, despite the Washington Post's belated concern about the mainstream news media's neglect of the Contra-cocaine scandal, there was no serious follow-up anywhere in Big Media - until 1996 when Gary Webb disclosed the connection between one Contra cocaine smuggler, Danilo Blandon, and the emergence of crack cocaine via Ricky Ross.
But the premier news outlets - the likes of the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times - didn't take this new opportunity to examine what was a serious crime of state. That would have required them to engage in some embarrassing self-criticism for their misguided dismissal of the scandal. Instead, the big newspapers went on the attack against Gary Webb.
Their attack line involved narrowing their focus to Blandon - ignoring the reality that he was just one of many Contras involved in cocaine smuggling to the United States - and to Ross - arguing that Ross's operation could not be blamed for the entire crack epidemic that ravaged U.S. cities in the 1980s. And the newspapers insisted that the CIA couldn't be blamed for this cocaine smuggling because the agency had supposedly examined the issue in the 1980s and found that it had done nothing wrong.
Because of this unified assault from the major newspapers - and the corporate timidity of the San Jose Mercury-News editors - Webb and his continuing investigation were soon abandoned. Webb was pushed out of the Mercury-News in disgrace.
That let the mainstream U.S. media celebrate how it had supposedly crushed a nasty "conspiracy theory" that had stirred up unjustified anger in the black community, which had been hit hardest by the crack epidemic. The newspapers also could get some brownie points from Republicans and the Right by sparing President Reagan's legacy a big black eye.
But Webb's disclosure prompted the CIA's Inspector General Frederick Hitz to undertake the first real internal investigation of the ties between the Contra-cocaine smugglers and the CIA officers overseeing the Contra war in Nicaragua.
The CIA's Confession
When Hitz's final investigative report was published in fall 1998, the CIA's defense against Webb's series had shrunk to a fig leaf: that the CIA did not conspire with the Contras to raise money through cocaine trafficking. But Hitz made clear that the Contra war had taken precedence over law enforcement and that the CIA withheld evidence of Contra drug-smuggling crimes from the Justice Department, Congress, and even the CIA's own analytical division.
Besides tracing the extensive evidence of Contra trafficking through the entire decade-long Contra war, the inspector general interviewed senior CIA officers who acknowledged that they were aware of Contra-drug smuggling but didn't want its exposure to undermine the struggle to overthrow Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.
According to Hitz, the CIA had "one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government. . . . [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the Contra program." One CIA field officer explained, "The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war."
Hitz also recounted complaints from CIA analysts that CIA operations officers handling the Contras hid evidence of Contra-drug trafficking even from the CIA's analysts. Because of the withheld evidence, the CIA analysts incorrectly concluded in the mid-1980s that "only a handful of Contras might have been involved in drug trafficking." That false assessment was passed on to Congress and to major news organizations - serving as an important basis for denouncing Gary Webb and his disclosures in 1996.
Although Hitz's report was an extraordinary admission of institutional guilt by the CIA, it went almost unnoticed by the big American newspapers. On Oct. 10, 1998, two days after Hitz's final report was posted on the CIA's Web site, the New York Times published a brief article that continued to deride Webb but acknowledged the Contra-drug problem may have been worse than earlier understood.
Several weeks later, the Washington Post weighed in with a similarly superficial article. The Los Angeles Times never published a story on the contents of Hitz's findings though Los Angeles had been "ground zero" of the Ross-Blandon connection.
In 2000, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee grudgingly acknowledged that the stories about Reagan's CIA protecting Contra drug traffickers were true. The committee released a report citing classified testimony from CIA Inspector General Britt Snider (Hitz's successor) admitting that the spy agency had turned a blind eye to evidence of Contra-drug smuggling and generally treated drug smuggling through Central America as a low priority.
"In the end the objective of unseating the Sandinistas appears to have taken precedence over dealing properly with potentially serious allegations against those with whom the agency was working," Snider said, adding that the CIA did not treat the drug allegations in "a consistent, reasoned or justifiable manner."
The House committee's majority Republicans still downplayed the significance of the Contra-cocaine scandal, but the panel acknowledged, deep inside its report, that in some cases, "CIA employees did nothing to verify or disprove drug trafficking information, even when they had the opportunity to do so. In some of these, receipt of a drug allegation appeared to provoke no specific response, and business went on as usual."
Like the release of Hitz's report in 1998, the admissions by Snider and the House committee drew virtually no media attention in 2000 - except for a few articles on the Internet, including one at Consortiumnews.com. Because the confirmation of the Contra-cocaine scandal received so little mainstream media coverage, Gary Webb remained a pariah in his profession of journalism, making it next to impossible for him to land a decent-paying job and contributing to his suicide in 2004. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com's "The Warning in Gary Webb's Death.<http://consortiumnews.com/2012/12/09/the-warning-in-gary-webbs-death-2/>"].....................................................................................................
...............................................................................................................................
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the "USA-Africa Dialogue Series" moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin.
For current archives, visit http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
For previous archives, visit http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue-
unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "USA Africa Dialogue Series" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to usaafricadialogue+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment