A Disgraceful Newspaper Expose and Its Fans
Carlson, Tucker
A Disgraceful Newspaper Expos? and Its Fans By Tucker Carlson “We’ve been saying this for years,” Rep. Maxine Waters told a crowd of supporters in Los Angeles not long ago, “and now we’ve got...
...Stripped to the bare facts, Ross’s success in the drug business comes off as old-fashioned criminal entrepreneurship, no contras or CIA handlers required...
...Indeed, ample evidence surfaced that CIA officials had worked to remove drug traffickers from the Nicaraguan resistance...
...The East Coast media is very East Coastfocused,” explains Garcia, who is also the city editor of the Mercury News...
...According to Webb, both men were members of the Nicaraguan Democratic Force, a contra group known as the FDN...
...Two days later, at a gathering sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus in Washington, Waters made her point explicit...
...Indeed, in parts of “Dark Alliance,” Webb contradicts his own assertions...
...Webb fails to explain exactly how—or how much—money from the drug sales made it back to contra forces in Honduras and Costa Rica...
...As a senior foreign editor at one prestigious East Coast daily—one of the newspapers that have done their best to ignore the Mercury News series—put it: “More allegations from more drug dealers...
...Try to reach Webb at the newspaper’s headquarters and a recording requests “your name or the name of your organization or show, channel, frequency, audience—including type and size—and date and time of the requested interview or appearance...
...By the second installment, however, Webb has changed his mind...
...Madison himself, a member of the national board of the NAACP, is not one to let a few missing facts stand in the way of a good conspiracy theory, and has become one of Webb’s biggest supporters...
...Before they grow much louder, all involved might take another look at the series that started the outcry...
...Such tales have been a staple of the black press for the better part of a decade, but with the publication of the Mercury News series, they went mainstream...
...The image is superimposed on the official seal of the CIA...
...Thousands of young black men are serving long prison sentences for selling cocaine—a drug that was virtually unobtainable in black neighborhoods before members of the CIA’s army brought it into South-Central in the 1980s at bargain-basement prices,” Webb writes in the first installment...
...Black neighborhoods, he says, were targeted by the CIA simply because they were black neighborhoods...
...In 1986, the Reagan administration itself stated that some contras—or at least individuals on the periphery of the Nicaraguan resistance— had been involved in drug trafficking...
...Even Danilo Blandon, the admitted drug dealer and the person on whom the entire series hangs, is not explicit about a CIA connection...
...So did some of the best investigative reporters in America...
...Within weeks, both CIA director John Deutch and attorney general Janet Reno pledged to look into the matter...
...Webb proves none of it...
...What can I say...
...And why would the CIA want to hurt black people...
...Meneses was Blandon’s supplier...
...Or it may never filter at all...
...Last week, Newt Gingrich conferred with Maxine Waters...
...Other L.A...
...Blandon’s lawyer seems sure his client worked with the knowledge of the CIA, but the only evidence he provides comes from his own gut— from feelings about the “atmosphere of CIA and clandestine activities...
...Whether the CIA tacitly condoned or participated in the drug trafficking is another matter...
...Webb appears to solve the long-standing mystery, making a case that the CIA was indeed involved in bringing cocaine into Los Angeles...
...It’s a disgrace...
...As a matter of fact, to show you how interested they are, one day two Fridays ago I changed subjects...
...In her hand, Waters held a series of articles published by the San Jose Mercury News that seemed to confirm what the congresswoman from South-Central Los Angeles had been claiming all along: that America’s inner-city crack epidemic was manufactured from above, part of an (until now) secret plot to destroy black people...
...It may take a while for it to filter over there...
...Who else but the federal government “has the wherewithal and the immunity to move through our borders and around our borders and get things into this country...
...They didn’t find any...
...Blandon, in turn, sold thousands of pounds of cocaine to a black dealer from South-Central Los Angeles named Ricky “Freeway Rick” Ross...
...Blandon went on to become an informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration...
...It doesn’t move me...
...But McManus, who covered Central America in the 1980s, doesn’t seem to think new facts will come to light...
...The series, entitled “Dark Alliance: The story behind the crack explosion” and written by a reporter named Gary Webb, was published in August...
...Instead of actual evidence, Webb relies on a series of probably unrelated events to show a conspiracy was afoot...
...Wilbert Tatum, editor of New York’s best-known black newspaper, the Amsterdam News, says the “Dark Alliance” series comports perfectly with explanations he has been hearing for years about why the inner city is falling apart...
...The most important point in the story is the weakest point—it has a hollow core...
...Gary Webb’s stories revolve around the activities of two Nicaraguan exiles living in the United States, Oscar Danilo Blandon and Juan Norwin Meneses...
...Derrick Z. Jackson, a black columnist for the Boston Globe, is equally convinced by the Webb series...
...I don’t see anything to follow up...
...Webb provides no evidence that the CIA knew about the meetings...
...And with that, he says, “I’ve got to go...
...Not all black journalists have been as clumsily blunt...
...THE MERCURY NEWS IS HARDLY SUBTLE: ITS ILLUSTRATION SHOWS A MAN SMOKING CRACK SUPERIMPOSED ON THE OFFICIAL SEAL OF THE CIA...
...Maxine Waters told a crowd of supporters in Los Angeles not long ago, “and now we’ve got this...
...Webb’s series does show that during the time they were dealing drugs, Blandon and Meneses met with Adolfo Calero and Enrique Bermudez, two wellknown contra leaders who had received money from the CIA...
...Most of the provable elements in the story, he points out, came out in print ten years ago...
...Madison and Dick Gregory were recently arrested in front of CIA headquarters in Virginia while protesting “the fact that for over ten years the CIA shipped tons of cocaine into black areas of Southern California...
...Ultimately, both Blandon and Meneses admitted to their roles as cocaine traffickers...
...Bermudez, assassinated five years ago in Managua, is no longer present to tell his side of the story...
...The only problem is, after a year of research, Webb came up with no evidence to support his claim...
...Barry McCaffrey, the Clinton administration’s drug czar, called for a “full and thorough investigation...
...It may have been a stock case of bureaucratic incompetence—dope dealers escape prosecution or skate out on technicalities every day—but Webb doesn’t see it that way...
...John Kerry spent two years and huge amounts of money in the mid-1980s trying to answer the question...
...All had strong motives, both ideological and professional, to prove the CIA had a hand in cocaine smuggling...
...Man, I’ve done this show for three hours a day, five days a week for four straight weeks, and my lines have been filled,” he reports...
...Webb swallows the claim whole, never acknowledging that bumbling cops might have had a motive to blame their failures on a mysterious federal agency...
...This is not a black story, any more than the Holocaust is a Jewish story...
...Noriega, the Gulf War Syndrome, AIDS, the Million Man March—all are, in one way or another, evidence of a government plot to hurt black people, explains Tatum, who says he has recently been in touch with former comedian Dick Gregory on the subject...
...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,” Jackson wrote in one of two September columns about the series...
...Cries of outrage are ringing out at the highest levels across the land...
...Profits from the transactions may have gone to finance the FDN’s war against Nicaragua’s Sandinista government...
...Tatum asks rhetorically...
...His essential point unproved, Webb goes on to make what may be the most inflammatory charge in the series, that Blandon and Meneses “opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles,” and so “helped spark a crack explosion in urban America...
...dealers,” Webb writes, “were selling crack long before” Ricky Ross made contact with his ostensibly CIA-controlled cocaine suppliers...
...Doyle McManus, the Washington bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times, says his paper is now looking into allegations raised by Webb...
...The best Webb can come up with is a quote from Blandon claiming he sold drugs on “orders from other people...
...Rather, he claims Blandon was saved by the intervention of unseen hands...
...The Mercury News is hardly subtle about the point: Accompanying the series is an illustration of a man smoking crack...
...Madison can hardly believe the question is meant seriously...
...A subcommittee headed by Sen...
...A Mercury News Internet site helpfully provides an updated list of Webb’s radio and television appearances...
...Moreover, Webb offers no quotes from CIA employees, on or off the record, no government cables or memos or written instructions that show the agency had any knowledge of what Blandon and Meneses were doing...
...Conspiracies are very hard to prove in direct, hard, cold fact...
...The fact that people associated with the contras (as well as, for that matter, officials in the Sandinista government) ran drugs has been a matter of consensus in the United States for more than a decade...
...It was already rumored that crack cocaine and heroin was a CIA deal...
...He presents no proof that drug trafficking was ever discussed during them...
...These are the essential, uncontested facts in the series, all of which are news only to those with short memories...
...Reagan’s general attitude toward African Americans during his presidency certainly leaves him open to all kinds of possibilities,” Jackson explained in an interview...
...For all the attention “Dark Alliance” has received in the black press and on Capitol Hill, few major media outlets have validated the series by reporting on its charges in any detail...
...Madison says listeners have been transfixed by Webb’s allegations, which he has discussed almost continuously since “Dark Alliance” first appeared...
...But that, essentially, is it...
...This is America,” he explains, exasperated...
...It didn’t need to—informed people can fill in the blanks...
...It is a jarring thesis, one that places blame for the presence of crack and its attendant evils in the inner city squarely on a government conspiracy...
...Many journalists outside of San Jose seem to have taken a skeptical view of Webb’s story...
...As hundreds of people cheered, she thanked those present “for having the audacity to be outraged . . . that the government put drugs in our communities...
...Both Meneses and Blandon seem to have engaged in drug trafficking in the United States for a number of years before being brought to trial...
...Webb has found a particularly receptive audience on the Joe Madison show, a lunchtime talkradio program broadcast out of Washington on a 50,000-watt signal from West Virginia to Pennsylvania...
...Both also were active in the drug trade...
...The cops always believed that investigation had been compromised by the CIA,” he quotes a local public defender as saying...
...In 1986, for instance, federal agents raided Blandon’s properties looking for evidence of his involvement with drugs...
...In light of this, Tatum says he considers the notion that the CIA sent cocaine into the ghetto “entirely plausible...
...I don’t know if every word of Webb’s story is true,” Reed wrote, “but the weight of the evidence gives credence” to conspiracy theories prevalent in black America...
...When I saw these names, I thought, ‘Gee, I’ve seen this before.’” Meanwhile, Gary Webb has been doing his best over the past month to drum up attention for his series, appearing on television and talk radio around the country, evidently with the blessing of his employer...
...Despite its at times overheated tone, even the Mercury News series never accused Ronald Reagan of deliberately conspiring to kill black people...
...It purports to show how in the 1980s CIA-supported drug dealers flooded poor sections of Los Angeles with inexpensive cocaine, thereby turning the city into the “crack capital of the world...
...This apparent indifference clearly baffles Dawn Garcia, Gary Webb’s editor on the stories...
...None was able to...
...What we have here is an American tragedy...
...Black drug dealers, Jackson concluded, are “political prisoners, considering the government’s role in placing the crack in their hands...
...I’ve got Dick Gregory on the other line...
...And we received 50 calls at the station: What the hell was I doing...
...The more savvy—like novelist Ishmael Reed, writing in the Washington Post’s Outlook section recently—have taken up what might be called the Tawana Brawley defense: Maybe it didn’t happen in this specific case, but things like this do happen...
...I’m telling you that Gary Webb, myself, Dick Gregory, and a few other people that we’re working with know that the CIA had knowledge that the contras were dealing in drugs,” he says heatedly...
...Shaky though it is, Webb’s story seems to confirm conspiracy theories already rampant in black neighborhoods and the media that circulate within them...
...Do not stop talking about this.’” According to Madison, the Mercury News series didn’t tell the whole story...
...But it seems to me that if you line up all the dots in sort of a dots kind of game, it seems pretty clear...
...How did Jackson reach such a conclusion...
...The head of the CIA’s Central American Task Force, in public testimony before Congress in 1987, said the same thing...
Vol. 2 • September 1996 • No. 3
