A shameful secret history (Susan Bell on Gary Webb, CIA, and narcotics)

[struggle4progress]

By Robert Chalmers
Published: 09 October 2005

When the big story arrives, Susan Bell recalls her late husband saying, "it will be like a bullet with your name on it. You won't even hear it coming." It was a remark that Gary Webb overheard early in his career, from an older reporter, and would repeat, ironically, to the point that the phrase "It's the Big One" became a standing joke on his news desk. And yet for Webb, the idea that a journalist could be killed by his own story turned out to be no laughing matter. The only difference in Gary Webb's case was that his life was ended not by one bullet, but two.

We are in the living room of Bell's house just outside Sacramento, California. A perceptive, engaging woman of 48, she has turned an adjoining study into a small shrine to her late husband, who would have celebrated his 50th birthday five weeks ago. The room is decorated with his trophies: a Pulitzer prize hangs next to his HL Mencken award; also on the wall is a framed advertisement for The Kentucky Post. It reads: "There should be no fetters on reporters, nor must they tamper with the truth, but give light so the people will find their own way." When Webb's body was discovered last December, Bell says, this last item had been dumped in the trash.

Webb, one of the boldest and most outstanding reporters of his generation, was the journalist who, in 1996, established the connection between the CIA and major drug dealers in Los Angeles, some of whose profits had been channelled to fund the Contra guerrilla movement in Nicaragua. The link between drug-running and the Reagan regime's support for the right-wing terrorist group throughout the 1980s had been public knowledge for over a decade. What was new about Webb's reports, published under the title "Dark Alliance" in the Californian paper the San Jose Mercury News, was that for the first time it brought the story back home. Webb's pieces were not dealing with nameless peasants slaughtered in some distant republic, but demonstrated a clear link between the CIA and the suppliers of the gangs delivering crack to the ghetto of Watts, in South Central Los Angeles.

His series of articles - which prompted the distinguished reporter and former Newsweek Washington correspondent Robert Parry to describe Webb as "an American hero" - incited fury among the African-American community, many of whom took his investigation as proof that the White House saw crack as a way of bringing genocide to the ghetto. Webb's reports prompted three official investigations, including one by the CIA itself which - astonishingly for an organisation rarely praised for its transparency - confirmed the substance of his findings (published at length in Webb's 1998 book, also entitled Dark Alliance). "Because of Gary Webb's work," said Senator John Kerry, "the CIA launched an investigation that found dozens of connections to drug runners. That wouldn't have happened if he hadn't been willing to stand up and risk it all." <snip>

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article317908.ece

<edit: cut to 4 para>

[Octafish]

1. Gary Webb was a REAL journalist. Here're 3 DEA agents who agree...

DEA Agents Agree: CIA means Cocaine Importation Agency

There’s enough evidence to bust George Herbert Walker Bush and the rest of his right-wing stooges under the RICO Act (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act).

http://www.ricoact.com /

Still. Don’t take my word for it. Let’s hear what the brave agents of the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) have to say.

Celerino “Cele” Castillo III

Celerino "Cele" Castillo, 3rd
Ex-DEA Agent
May 17, 2005

For over a century, our government has made sure that we are never to be told the truth about anything that we have done to other people in third world countries, especially in Latin America. With the creation of the School of the Americas, a breeding ground for assassins, and the death squads, we have become the greatest human rights violators in the world.

We have become the most hated country in the world, not because we practice democracy or value our freedom. We are hated because our government denies these basic principles to these people. The hate has come back to haunt us in the form of terrorism, and as they say, once again, "the chickens have come home to roost" with our own homegrown American made terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles.

When I was posted in Central America as a DEA agent I saw Luis Posada and Felix Rodriguez, another American terrorist, at Illopango airport base in El Salvador. Joining them was a CIA asset Venezuelan advisor Victor Rivera. They had become part of what was known as a CIA apparatus that did not have to answer to anyone. They were involved in everything from drug trafficking to kidnapping to the training of the death squads. It was at the height of the Iran-Contra investigation that I had documented these atrocities to my government. I could not understand how our government had assisted in having Posada escape from a Venezuelan prison, and then placed him at Illopango airport as a CIA asset under the new name of Ramon Medina. He was now working hand in hand with then U. S. Lt. Col. Oliver North.

When I asked about Posada's presence at Illopango, I was once again told that it was a covert operation being run by the White House. I started to learn real fast that just about every time I questioned illegal action, I would be told that it was "a covert operation being run by the White House." And as we found out later, my allegations were facts; that became especially clear when, in 1990, President Bush Sr. pardoned another American-made terrorist, Posada's partner in crime: Orlando Bosch. To the degree that the "war on terror" is a response to actual terrorism, that terrorism is retaliation: the U.S. has exported death and violence to the four corners of the Earth with individuals like Posada and Bosch.

Posada admitted to a New York Times reporter that he organized a wave of bombings in Cuba in 1997 that killed an Italian tourist and injured others. However, he is best known as the prime suspect in the bombing of a Cuban Airlines flight in Barbados in October 1976. All 73 crewmembers and passengers including teenaged members of Cuba's national fencing team were killed.

CONTINUED…

http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/hall/contra1.html

Additional resources:

http://www.albionmonitor.com/9612a/ciacontra.html

http://www.drugwar.com/castillonorthmay1104.shtm

www.powderburns.org

Well. Here’s to “Conspiracies In Action.”

Here’s what Michael Levine, DEA had to say about the organization started by Allen Dulles has brought tons of cocaine into the United States of America. Don’t worry, Mr. Conservative. It was at a profit.

Speaking of Capitalism’s Invisible Army:

Michael Levine Interview

by Paul DeRienzo
from THE SH@DOW - box 20298 - NY, NY 10009

Michael Levine is a veteran of 26 years of undercover work for four federal agencies. He is the recipient of many Justice and Treasury Department awards for hi s work undercover, including the International Narcotics Enforcement Officer Association's Octavio Gonzales Award. He is also the subject of Donald Goddard's book Undercover: The Secret Lives of a Federal Agent (Dell, 1990).

Joining the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) after discovering his brother's heroin addiction which eventually killed his brother, Levine was the most successful agent in DEA history. By 1977, he had made 3,000 drug arrests going undercover to set up buy and bust operations against New York City heroin and cocaine dealers. This led to his assignment as DEA station chief in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

By 1989, after having several of his operations stopped by higher ups who allowed his targets to get away, Levine quit the DEA in disgust. Levine then wrote the book Deep Cover (1990, Delacorte Press), describing his experiences that led to his leaving the DEA, exposing the government's phony "War on Drugs".

Levine tells a chilling story of treachery by members of his own agency, and the CIA, men Levine calls the ":suits" who he says use the War on Drugs as a cynical cover for covert foreign policy adventures. Levine says that since he began speaking out against the War on Drugs he has been threatened by high level DEA agents and has been the target of campaigns meant to discredit him.

CONTINUED…

http://www.totse.com/en/conspiracy/institutional_analysis/deajive.html

Additional resources:

http://www.serendipity.li/wod/levine.html

http://www.physicaldream.com/Eyeonsam/Is%20Anyone%20Apologizing%20to%20Gary%20Webb%20by%20Mike%20Levine.htm

So. There we have it. No evidence of conspiracy, as importing cocaine is a matter of national policy.

Well. Hector Berrellez would arrest these drug-running turds if the government would let him catch them. He’s another good guy.

Gary Webb

(1955-2005)

EXCERPT…

I had been thinking about looking into the claim that during the civil war in Nicaragua in the eighties, the CIA helped move dope to the United States to buy guns for the contras, who were mounting an insurrection against the leftist Sandinistas. So I called up Hector Berrellez, a guy who worked under Mike Holm in Los Angeles, a guy known within the DEA as its Eliot Ness, and he said, "Look, the CIA is the best in the world. You're not going to beat them; you're never going to get a smoking gun. The best you're going to get is a little story from me."

SNIP…

After a while, the San Jose Mercury News series disappeared except on a few byways of the Internet, Gary Webb was ruined, and things went back to normal. Things like Oliver North's diary entry linking dope and guns for the contras, like Carlos Lehder, a big Colombian drug dealer, testifying as a prosecution witness in federal court during the Noriega trial about the Medellín cartel's $10 million donation to the contras, like the entire history of unseemly connections between the international drug world and the CIA--all this went away, as it has time and time again in the past. A kind of orthodoxy settled over the American press that assumed Webb's work had been thoroughly refuted. He became the Discredited Gary Webb.

SNIP…

HECTOR BERRELLEZ STUMBLED ONTO GARY WEBB'S STORY YEARS before Gary Webb knew a thing about it. ….
In September 1986, Sergeant Tom Gordon of the Los Angeles sheriff's narcotics strike force pieced together intelligence about a big-time drug ring in town run by Danilo Blandón. A month later, on October 23, Gordon went before a judge with a twenty-page detailed statement documenting that "monies gained from the sales of cocaine are transported m Florida and laundered.,.. The monies are filtered to the contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua." He got a search warrant for the organization's stash houses. On Friday, October 24, there was a briefing of more than a hundred law-enforcement guys from the sheriff's office, the DEA, the FBI. That was the same day that President Ronald Reagan, after months of hassle, signed a $100 million aid bill that reactivated a licit cash flow to the beleaguered contras. And on Monday, October 27, at daybreak, the strike force simultaneously hit fourteen L. A. area stash houses connected with Blandón.

That's where just another day in the life of Hector Berrellez got weird. Generally, at that early hour, good dopers are out cold; the work tends toward long nights and sleeping in. As Berrellez remembers, "We were expecting to end up with a lot of coke." Instead, they got coffee and sometimes doughnuts. The house he hit had the lights on, and everyone, two men and a woman, was up. The guy who answered the door said, "Good morning; we've been expecting you. Come on in." The house was tidy, the beds were already made, and the damn coffee was on. The three residents were polite, even congenial. "It was obvious," says Berrellez, "that they were told." The place was clean; all fourteen houses were clean. The only thing Berrellez and the other guys found in the house was a professional scale.
But there was a safe, and Berrellez got one of the residents to open it reluctantly. Inside, he found records of kilos matched with amounts of money, an obvious dope ledger, a photograph of a guy in flight dress in front of what looked to be a military jet, and photographs of some guys in combat. Hector asked the guy who the hell the people in the photographs were, and the guy said, "Oh, they are freedom fighters."

CONTINUED…

http://www.esquire.com/features/articles/2004/041217_mfe_webb_1.html

Additional resources:

http://www.ckln.fm/~asadismi/whiteout.html

http://www.csun.edu/CommunicationStudies/ben/news/cia /

And these guys knew Gary Webb, DUers may remember the Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter who was lauded for his groundbreaking series detailing how Contra-connected dealers got the inside track on the dope that eventually created the crack cocaine epidemic. Too bad what the government chose to “crack” down on was honest journalism, as protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Then it was only a matter of time before the rest of the Establishment press corpse piled on.

Interesting expression: Kill a few birds with one stone.

Is that something? Three DEA agents who never knew of one another’s existence while they worked together in the federal government. There were united by something else, though. Each, after reporting drug dealing by Contras and other “protected organizations,” were left out to hang.

That’s un-American. Drug dealing to fund illegal wars? Gee.
That’s Treason.

What are the names of those involved? We know a few: George Herbert Walker Bush, John Poindexter, Oliver North, Elliott Abrams, John Negroponte, Ted Shackley, to name a few. What's needed is a Grand Jury to investigate the actions of these drug-dealing, warmongering conspirators, for starters.

[struggle4progress]

2. Thanks for the work putting that together. eom

[pauldp]

3. Amazing article. thank you. n/t

[DemReadingDU]

4. recommended

[mopinko]

5. i need a bigger tinfoil hat

:puke:

[struggle4progress]

6. " ... The CIA Inspector General's report, commissioned in response ..

.. to the allegations in 'Dark Alliance' ... found .. CIA officials ignored information about possible Contra drug dealing; that they continued to work with Contra supporters despite allegations that they were trafficking drugs, and further asserted that officials from the CIA instructed Drug Enforcement Agency officers to refrain from investigating alleged dealers connected with the Contras ..."

This, incidently, was already known in the mid-1980s ...

[Kailassa]

7. Slavery and drugs

seem to have been the basis for many fortunes in America. And as getting people addicted to drugs can turn them into a type of slave, one could say they still are.

Has anyone else been thinking that the reason the feds are so heavily into keeping drugs illegal is the same reason as keeping the unlicenced sale of tobacco illegal?. To keep the prices high?

[crispini]

8. kicked and nominated

because everyone should read this.

The significant legacy of the Webb case, "the reason this whole affair remains so significant today," Blum says, "is this: the knowledge that, if one individual dares raise such serious issues, they risk confronting a tremendous apparatus that is prepared to whack them hard, and there is very little they can expect by way of support. Look at the way the US press reports on Iraq. The complete lack of desire to ask the difficult questions makes me want to scream."

[mirandapriestly]

9. Maybe this is why Kerry said nothing about election fraud

or anything too revealing about bush. From the article:

"... But the report was correct. It was truthful. It was accurate. And it was ignored by the US media, for all of those reasons. We were dismissed as a bunch of nuts." Newsweek called Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff".

"I think Kerry learnt a lesson from all this," reporter Robert Parry says. "Which was that, if he wanted a future within the political establishment of the United States, then he should concentrate on other aspects of life."

[StClone]

10. Jack Webb murdered?

Lots of people believe so you can listen to this audio:


http://www.prisonplanet.tv/audio/141204webbmurdered.htm

[Kralizec]

11. Here's another link to the article. No registration required...

Thanks to Struggle4Progress on helping me out.

Common Dreams:
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1009-05.htm

Enjoy.

[Wind Dancer]

12. Excellent article.

Thanks for posting.