Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
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Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion description
In July 1995, San Jose Mercury-News reporter Gary Webb found the Big One--the blockbuster story every journalist secretly dreams about--without even looking for it. A simple phone call concerning an unexceptional pending drug trial turned into a massive conspiracy involving the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, L.A. and Bay Area crack cocaine dealers, and the Central Intelligence Agency. For several years during the 1980s, Webb discovered, Contra elements shuttled thousands of tons of cocaine into the United States, with the profits going toward the funding of Contra rebels attempting a counterrevolution in their Nicaraguan homeland. Even more chilling, Webb quickly realized, was that the massive drug-dealing operation had the implicit approval--and occasional outright support--of the CIA, the very organization entrusted to prevent illegal drugs from being brought into the United States. Within the pages of Dark Alliance, Webb produces a massive amount of evidence that suggests that such a scenario did take place, and more disturbing evidence that the powers that be that allowed such an alliance are still determined to ruthlessly guard their secrets. Webb's research is impeccable--names, dates, places, and dollar amounts gather and mount with every page, eventually building a towering wall of evidence in support of his theories. After the original series of articles ran in the Mercury-News in late 1996, both Webb and his paper were so severely criticized by political commentators, government officials, and other members of the press that his own newspaper decided it best not to stand behind the series, in effect apologizing for the assertions and disavowing his work. Webb quit the paper in disgust in November 1997. His book serves as both a complex memoir of the time of the Contras and an indictment of the current state of America's press; Dark Alliance is as necessary and valuable as it is horrifying and grim. --Tjames Madison |
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Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥
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How the "National Security State" Works When "We the People" are not "minding the store."
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In this rather mind-boggling expose, award winning reporter, Gary Webb, who unfortunately was forced to commit himself to suicide, eventually gave his life to this cause, dots all of the "I's" and crosses all of the "T's" in this Alice in Wonderland journey deep into the bowels of the American national security run state apparatus. The reader gets a healthy dose of how bad a democracy can get when no one is "minding the National Security State." In graphic form, Webb outlines how it can happen that an administration that has declared "war on drugs" can actually end up in bed with the likes of Pablo Escobar, Manuel Noreiga, and the Ochoa brothers.
Spread out before us in excruciating and embarrassing (if not often tedious) details is a picture of what can happen when a "twisted set of means" (using the proceeds of drug sales to finance an ill-advised counterinsurgency) are put to "questionable ideological ends" (overthrowing a Marxist run government to return the much hated Somocitas to power). The book demonstrates that when this illicit "means-end" pair, are allowed to operate under the cover of secrecy; behind the shield of "plausible deniability;" and under the guise of sensible national security policy, it can literally suck all of the oxygen out of a democracy.
In an effort to return the brutal and much hated Somoza regime back to power, by supporting the remnants and holdovers of that deposed regime (a ragtag bunch of crooks, thieves, drug traffickers and murders if there ever was one), reassembled as the Nicaraguan "Contras." The "Just say no to drugs" Reagan administration, ended up in bed with the worse drug traffickers of our times.
But if being in bed with the most notorious drug traffickers in the world was not bad enough, the worse aspect of this foreign policy disaster was sacrificing a whole generation of America's inner city youth to a death sentence as a result of a nation awash in an ocean of "crack" cocaine. America intercity life will never recover from this disaster.
The Story
When the two Boland amendments, prohibiting funding for a U.S. backed "Contra army," were passed, the Reagan White House, at the suggestion of none other than Colonel Oliver North himself, sought to find financing by other more novel means; to wit: North suggested that since various national security agencies were already keeping close tabs on the drug traffickers, why not allow the drug cartels free access to our "inner city drug market," in exchange for them plowing back some of their drug profits into financing the "Contra" army? When this suggestion was made in a high level meeting, most attendees were surprised and embarrassed for North for having made such a stupid idea. However, a new clever strategy had just been born, and the wheels of the national security state began to turn. According to the book (confirmed only by Escobar himself) the then Vice President Bush met with Pablo Escobar personally and "cut the deal" that led to the "crack explosion" of the mid-80s.
The Rest of the Story
Although millions of dollars in weapons and aid from drug proceeds did eventually reach the "Contras," never was there a respectable force fielded sufficient to challenge the Sandinistas. However, in the process of destroying a whole generation of black inner city youth, fueling an internecine war between ghetto street gangs, erecting a string of more than ten thousand crack houses across the nation, and filling up the jails, adoption centers and mental hospitals, the "Contra fiasco" did make a handful of drug dealers such as LA's cocaine Kingpin "Freeway Ricky Ross, rich.
The only drawback to the book is that because of the gravity and nature of the charges against the Reagan administration, it was imperative that every detail be well documented. The main resources are court records retrieved from the many indictments, etc. As a result, getting through the book is slow and tedious. But it is well worth the extra time. |
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