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White-out: CIA, Drugs and the Press
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19 new or used available from £11.99
Average customer review:
Product Description
An expose of the CIA's involvement in the drug trade and the media's silence on the issue.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #354819 in Books
- Published on: 1999-12-02
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 418 pages
Editorial Reviews
Review
"Cockburn and St. Clair present a litany of CIA misdeeds, from the recruitment of Nazi scientists after WWII to the arming of opium traffickers in Afghanistan. All of this is extremely well documented ... a chilling history that many will take issue with of what the CIA has been up to in the past 50 years." - Kirkus "A solid, pitiless piece of muckraking, ... Cockburn and St. Clair raise troubling questions about the role of a largely secretive government agency in a democratic society." -- San Diego Union Tribune "A probing examination of the CIA's chilling history of coddling major drug traffickers, gangsters and Nazi psychopaths." -- Philadelphia Tribune "A convincing, well-researched, comprehensive condemnation of the CIA." -- Maximum Rock 'n Roll
About the Author
Alexander Cockburn is a columnist for The Nation, New York Press and a range of other newspapers. He is the author of Corruptions of Empire, Fate of the Forest (with Susanna Hecht), and The Golden Age Is In Us, all from Verso. Jeffrey St. Clair has written for The Nation and contributes to the newsletter CounterPunch. He is the publisher of Wild Forest Review.
Customer Reviews
Devastating critique of US drug-running
This fascinating book describes an international criminal conspiracy specialising in drug-running, union-busting and murder, the Central Intelligence Agency. The Agency is directly controlled by the US Government, starting with the Presidency, so the CIA's story reveals much of the USA's real foreign policy.
The authors document many CIA activities, including the following. In 1945, the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's predecessor, got Mafioso 'Lucky' Luciano, the USA's premier gangster and drug trafficker, released from jail and protected him while he organised an enormous increase in the global heroin trade. The CIA then worked with the Mafia to break trade unions in the USA, Italy and France.
From the 1940s, CIA planes flew opium from Chiang Kai-Shek's Burmese bases for export to the USA. Protected by the CIA, the Burmese military dictatorship has turned Burma into the world's top producer of high-grade opium.
The CIA also organised drug smuggling from Latin America into the USA, using the services of, among others, Klaus Barbie, the Nazi 'Butcher of Lyons', whom they protected until 1983. In the 1980s, as part of Reagan's war against Nicaragua, the CIA protected the Contra supporters running the biggest drug sales operation in California, selling crack to buy weapons for the Contras. Recently the CIA created, and still fund, the heroin-producing and trafficking organisation, Taliban, who have turned Afghanistan into the world's leading supplier of raw opium.
In 1989, British Customs reported to British Intelligence allegations from several sources that the husband of Pakistan's Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto funded large heroin shipments from Pakistan to Britain and the USA. The Thatcher Government did nothing. The authors also document CIA attempts to murder, among others, Castro and Gadaffi. Of course, the British 'intelligence' agencies, official and unofficial, that work hand in glove with their US colleagues across the world never had anything to do with any of these illegal activities.
Disturbing
"Down the decades the CIA has approached perfection in one particular art, which we might term the 'uncover-up.' This is a process whereby, with all due delay, the Agency first denies with passion, then concedes in profoundly muffled tones, charges leveled against it. Such charges have included the Agency's recruitment of Nazi scientists and SS officials; experiments on unwitting American citizens; efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro; alliances with opium lords in Burma, Thailand and Laos; an assassination program in Vietnam; complicity in the toppling of Salvador Allende in Chile; the arming of opium traffickers and religious fanatics in Afghanistan; the training of murderous police in Guatemala and El Salvador; and involvement in drugs-and-arms shuttles between Latin America and the US.... Charges are raised against the CIA. The Agency leaks its denials to favored journalists, who hasten to inform the public that after intense self-examination, the Agency has discovered that it has clean hands. Then, when the hubbub has died down, the Agency issues a report in which, after patient excavation the resolute reader discovers that, yes, the CIA did indeed do more or less exactly what it had been accused of."
Alexander Cockburn and
Jefferey St. Clair
WHITEOUT: THE CIA, DRUGS AND THE PRESS
From Chapter 15: "The Uncover-up"
A strange feeling came over me as I finished this book, which I could not put down when I picked it up until I spent an entire weekend devouring and digesting its contents until my eyes hurt. First was a complete and total numbing. No matter how far to the left--or simply politically cynical--you think you are, the contents of this book will kick you in the stomach repeatedly to the same degree the plethora of published and government sources in each chapter bibliographies and annotated index proving the historical assertions of the authors will bruise the guts of anyone leaning to the right.
The next feeling that comes however, is similar to the feeling of spending time in a foreign country and beginning to learn the language by pure rote and exposure; the feeling of hearing familiar words and sounds and piecing together their meaning and social context. Only it is even more subtle. It is like traveling to England or Scotland, and hearing people speak English, but not an English with which you are familiar... realizing that a "fag" for them is a cigarette and a "shag" is anything but a carpet...knowing these familiar words and phrases mean something totally different to what you are accustomed to making them mean. After reading WHITEOUT; THE CIA, DRUGS AND THE PRESS you will listen to the rhetoric of politicians and the catch phrases that dominate the airwaves like "War on Drugs," "War on Terrorism," "Fight for Freedom" and know that you are not just being lied to, *a familiar sounding but totally different language is being spoken to you*. Politicians and the CIA don't just simply tell lies. They *SPEAK the LANGUAGE *lie*. And though it as a language sounds like English, without a book of definitions and catch phrases the likes of which you would buy for your trip through Italy or France, this dialect of English would never reveal itself. "War on Drugs, " for example, is a catch phrase for social control, through socio-economic and racial lines...created by the most powerful drug dealers on earth.
"This is largely a story of criminal conduct, much of it by the Central Intelligence Agency. It is a story of how many in the US press have been complicit in covering the Agency's tracks. When compelled to concede the Agency's criminal activities such journalists often take refuge in the notion of 'rogue agents' or, as a last resort, of a 'rogue agency.' we do not accept this separation of the CIA's activities from the policies and directives of the US government. Whether it was Truman's meddling in China, which created the Burmese opium kings; or the Kennedy brothers' obsession with killing Fidel Castro; or Nixon's command for 'more assassinations' in Vietnam, the CIA has always been the obedient executor of the will of the US government, starting with the White House."
From the Preface
Chapter One of WHITEOUT sets the theme and tone of the entire book via describing the career assassination attempts on Gary Webb, an investigative journalist for the San Jose Mercury News newspaper who uncovered unavoidable proof of the CIA's involvement in the Nicaraguan Contra (as in Ronald Reagan's Iran/Contra) drug trade, which deliberately planted tons of drugs into the Black communities of Los Angeles in the early 1980's--ushering in the Crack era from which the whole of Black America has never recovered. The leading newspapers of our nation, as opposed to supporting his work, attacked him, purposely ignoring his evidence and his sources proving the validity of his findings. From there journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jefferey St. Clair give a fifty year history of the CIA that redefines both world history and current events and becomes more and more disturbing--even stomach turning--with every page. Collusion with and protection of Nazis; drug trading throughout the world; partnerships with the Mafia; leader assassinations and destabilizations of democracies that didn't support US interests; efforts at mind control and the testing of chemical/biological weapons on prisoners of war AND unknowing US citizens; and more. This book in fact obliterates so many Pollyanna views of history since World War Two that the views themselves are revealed to be just more catch phrases and ideas in the language of lies; phrases meant only to be defined according to the propagandistic symbolism of the secret society for which they were actually developed, at the expense of the common people, and democracy.
This book is not for the faint of heart--and that includes more people than you think. And because of it, and the painstaking, probably dangerous research these journalists took on to write this, I cannot recommend it enough.
I take my cap off to both Cockburn and St. Clair
This book is fantastic, though very disturbing. Before reading this book, I always knew that the CIA was an organisation that lied to it's citizens and to the whole world, for that matter, but this book truly reveals the vile nature of this relatively secretive U.S. agency.
The CIA after WW2 recruited Nazi scientists such as Werner von Braun (the architect of the V-2 rocket), the SS monster Klaus Barbie, known as "The Butcher of Lyon", wanted for his sadistic torture techniques and many others. The CIA worked tirelessly to bring misery and poverty to the people of Latin America by organising coups which installed right-wing dictators who raked in millions of dollars from selling cocaine and heroin, while 95% of the population was struggling to survive. All in the name of "protecting the world against the Commies". And of course they worked in close co-operation with the Sicilian Mafia, asking the mobsters to do their dirty work.
Using drug money made by selling "crack" cocaine on the streets of South Central Los Angeles by Nicaraguan and local drug-lords to fund the Contra rebels in Honduras, etc.
Oh, and of course we then have all of the "scientific" experiments carried out against mostly African-Americans up until the 1970's, where subjects were exposed to radiation and many types of experimental drugs. They even carried out experiments against U.S. soldiers in the South Pacific, for heaven's sake! After all these immoral experiments were carried out against the African-American population, it is no wonder that many do not trust the CIA or the U.S. government. Major U.S. newspapers and other media then have the NERVE to describe their perfectly understandable fear as "black paranoia!"
