Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #321972 in Books
• Published on: 1999-07-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

Customer Reviews

IN MEMORIAM
On December 16, 2004, Editor & Publisher reported, "Gary Webb, former San Jose Mercury News reporter, was found dead in his Carmichael, Calif. home on Friday morning, December 10, 2004. 'The cause of death was determined to be self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head,' said a statement issued by the Sacramento County Coroner's Office. Information and evidence gathered at the scene of death, including a handwritten note indicating an intention on the part of the decedent to take his own life, resulted in 'suicide' as the determined manner of death.

I never met Gary Webb, but my daughter Cassandra did. As a fledgling investigative reporter for the Associated Press, she conducted the last interview with him for AP just before he left the San Jose Mercury News. She had been the most junior reporter at AP's Sacramento office where all the senior reporters had personally known Webb too well to prepare an impartial story. So they sent the "new kid." After Cassandra had filed her report, I asked her what Webb was like. "Oh, he's a really gentle, cool guy -- 100% journalist."

"How's he taking it?" I asked.

"Well, I think, philosophically," she replied. "He told me that's sometimes the price good journalists have to pay for getting the truth out. They can lose their jobs."

Thereafter, Webb wrote "Dark Alliance" and gave lectures on his work and the drug smuggling into the United States that is a part of America's covert wars.

Earlier, writers such as Michael Levine and Laura Kavanau-Levine who published, "The Big White Lie: The CIA and the Cocaine/Crack Epidemic" or Alfred W. McCoy who wrote "The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade," seemed to have come through it unscathed. Maybe the C.I.A. and their domestic propagandists allow historians to "get away with it. " That was then, but Gary Webb had written about them about now. Webb's serialized exposé in the San Jose Mercury News, where his book's title originated, caused such a public outcry that his reports simply couldn't be ignored. Indeed, when Webb's stories first broke one drug gang-infested Los Angeles community became so enraged that the then CIA Director Deutsch was obliged to visit the public in a futile attempt to calm them and protect the "good name" of the CIA. He was virtually run out of town -- shown on national televison.

Investigative journalist Robert Parry, Gary Webb's comrade in arms who broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek, recently wrote of his fallen colleague:

"At Webb's death, however, it should be noted that his great gift to American history was that he -- along with angry African-American citizens -- forced the government to admit some of the worst crimes ever condoned by any American administration: the protection of drug smuggling into the United States as part of a covert war against a country, Nicaragua, that represented no real threat to Americans.

"But the real tragedy of Webb's historic gift - and of his life cut short -- is that because of the major news media's callowness and cowardice, this dark chapter of the Reagan-Bush era remains largely unknown to the American people."

Robert Parry perhaps put it best when he wrote:

"For his brave reporting at the San Jose Mercury News, Webb paid a high price. He was attacked by journalistic colleagues at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The American Journalism Review and even The Nation magazine. Under this media pressure, his editor Jerry Ceppos sold out the story and demoted Webb, causing him to quit the Mercury News. Even Webb's marriage broke up.

"On Friday, Dec. 10, Gary Webb, 49, died of an apparent suicide, a gunshot wound to the head. Whatever the details of Webb's death, American history owes him a huge debt. Though denigrated by much of the national news media, Webb's contra-cocaine series prompted internal investigations by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department, probes that confirmed that scores of contra units and contra-connected individuals were implicated in the drug trade. The probes also showed that the Reagan-Bush administration frustrated investigations into those crimes for geopolitical reasons."

Absolutely superb investigative reporting!
This book takes us back to the 1980's, the dark days of Oliver North's "neat idea," Reagan's Freedom Fighters, and the crack cocaine explosion. The evidence is overwhelming that agencies of the U.S. government were complicit in the importation of cocaine, and Oliver North was even more deserving than I originally believed of a long-term stay in a prison cell (too bad Alcatraz is no longer a federal prison - it's where Ollie belongs!).

We probably can never know the extent of CIA involvement as then U.S. Attorney General William French Smith exempted the CIA on behalf of then CIA Director William Casey from having to report illegal drug activities. If you don't have to report it, you don't have to keep records - therefore, there are no records and the Inspector General's report can truthfully say - "We can find no records."

Thank you Gary Webb for writing this book. I am truly sorry this cost you your job at the San Jose Mercury News.

CIA Crack
Under I.F. Stone's motto 'Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.', the author researched exhaustively alleged drug trafficking by the CIA, DEA, DIA and FBI. His stunning conclusion is that all these agencies knew about drug trafficking, either as a part of it or turning a blind eye on it. In an effort to fund the Contras in Nicaragua they turned many people, most of them poor and black, into prisoners (for selling drugs), addicted drug zombies or simply dead bodies.

The Presidents Reagan and Bush Sr. didn't see the populist uprising in Nicaragua as a reaction against a corrupt dictatorship, but as another Cuba taking root in the US backyard, another clique of Communists who would spread their noxious seeds throughout the region. The Contras were for them freedom fighters, not the remnants of the former president Somoza's brutal or murderous death squads.
The end (oust the Sandinista government) justified all means: 'the thigh muscles had been jammed up his rectum, tearing it apart. His testicles were swollen horribly as a result of prolonged garrotting and while he was still alive, his head had been sawed off with a butcher's knife'.

The man in charge of the Contras operations, Oliver North, dealt directly with the director of the CIA, William Casey. They sustained the Contras through a network of offshore bank accounts in order to conceal all money sources.

The author was very pessimistic about the future: 'What can we do: Not much.' The US public and its Congressional representatives should regain control of the CIA in order to shred its secrecy about all Crimes of state. But the media are gagged by, or afraid of, the powerful. They prefer to make their own reality instead of to uncover the facts.

This book is a real horror story about money laundering, drugs and weapons trafficking, corruption and assassinations, perpetrated 'under the cover' of officially and publicly funded intelligence agencies.
A really dark and frightening book.