Gary Webb dead and still discredited.

Today the L.A. Times reported on the death of Gary Webb author of "Dark Alliance" a book investigating the Contra/CIA/cocaine connection during the eighties.

The Times said:

"His 1996 San Jose Mercury News series contended that Nicaraguan drug traffickers had sold tons of crack cocaine from Colombian cartels in Los Angeles' black neighborhoods and then funneled millions in profits back to the CIA-supported Nicaraguan Contras.

Three months after the series was published, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department said it conducted an exhaustive investigation but found no evidence of a connection between the CIA and Southern California drug traffickers. [Well, there you go, case closed!]

Major newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and Washington Post, wrote reports discrediting elements of Webb's reporting.

"But the available evidence, based on an extensive review of court documents and more than 100 interviews in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington and Managua, fails to support any of those allegations," The Times reported." [All bow down to the TIMES!]

Because of Webb's reports in the San Jose Mercuriy News, from which he left after they demoted him, the CIA's Inspector General launched an investigation about which Robert Parry writes at consortiumnews.com:

"In secret congressional testimony, senior CIA officials admitted that the spy agency turned a blind eye to evidence of cocaine trafficking by U.S.-backed Nicaraguan contra rebels in the 1980s and generally did not treat drug smuggling through Central America as a high priority during the Reagan administration.

"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," CIA Inspector General Britt Snider said in classified testimony on May 25, 1999.

He conceded that the CIA did not treat the drug allegations in "a consistent, reasoned or justifiable manner."

Still, Snider and other officials sought to minimize the seriousness of the CIA's misconduct - a position echoed by a House Intelligence Committee report released in May and by press coverage it received. In particular, CIA officials insisted that CIA personnel did not order the contras to engage in drug trafficking and did not directly join in the smuggling.

Deep in the report, the House committee noted 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."

Parry's interview on democracynow.org

The CIA Inspector General said more than 50 Contras and Contra units were implicated in the cocaine trade, that the CIA knew about it in real time, that it hid the evidence, that it obstructed justice. All of these things were admitted by the CIA itself, by 1998, in response to Webb's series.

The great tragedy, I suppose, of the personal tragedy and professional, is that despite these admissions, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times still refused to deal with the facts. It seemed almost like the editors had more of a stake in covering up the truth than the CIA did. So, Gary Webb's career was allowed to be ruined.

The people who were involved in these -- in protecting the CIA from those major papers, their careers blossomed. Jerry Seapost, the executive editor of the San Jose Mercury News, who sold out Webb and his series received an award from the Society of Professional Journalists for ethics because of what he did.

So, it seemed like all of the people that did the wrong thing got the benefits, and Gary Webb and people who -- including John Kerry, who did honorable work on this topic, received no benefits at all, and in fact were damaged."

It should also be noted at the time when all the media was gunning for Webb the major papers like the New York Times and the L.A. Times were writing about blacks like they were some sort of idiots for believing the government was behind crack.

See This Modern World's take on this issue. Very funny!

Crazy blacks! It's not like General Claire Chennault, of the famous WWII "Flying Tigers" wasn't flying heroin out of China and flying prostitues back in. And it's not like he had anything to do with CIA airlines during Vietnam, flying heroin out in body bags.

See Drug Fallout: by Alfred McCoy for more on this.

Also, includes background on our involvment with the opium trade in Afghanistan in the Soviet invasion era. God knows what they're up to now.

I'm sure we're doing our best to irradicate that scurge! That's why Afghani opium is the #1 source of heroin in Europe.