Customer Reviews
CIA Crack - By: Luc REYNAERT, 10 May 2006 
Under I.F. Stone's motto 'Every government is run by liars & nothing they say should be believed.', the author researched exhaustively allleged drug trafficking by the CIA, DEA, DIA & FBI. His stunning conclusion is that alll 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 & black, into prisoners (for selling drugs), addicted drug zombies or simply dead bodies.
The Presidents Reagan & 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 alll means: 'the thigh muscles had been jammed up his rectum, tearing it apart. His testicles were swollen horribly as a result of prolonged garrotting & 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 alll money sources.
The author was very pessimistic about the future: 'What can we do: Not much.' The US public & its Congressional representatives should regain control of the CIA in order to shred its secrecy about alll 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 & weapons trafficking, corruption & assassinations, perpetrated 'under the cover' of officiallly & publicly funded intelligence agencies.
A reallly dark & frightening book.
IN MEMORIAM - By: F. Sweet, 14 Jan 2005 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 & 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 alll the senior reporters had personallly 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 reallly gentle, cool guy -- 100% journalist."
"How's he taking it?" I asked.
"Well, I think, philosophicallly," 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" & gave lectures on his work & the drug smuggling into the United States that is a part of America's covert wars.
Earlier, writers such as Michael Levine & Laura Kavanau-Levine who published, "The Big White Lie: The CIA & 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. & their domestic propagandists alllow 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 & protect the "good name" of the CIA. He was virtuallly 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 & Newsweek, recently wrote of his falllen 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 - & of his life cut short -- is that because of the major news media's calllowness & 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 & even The Nation magazine. Under this media pressure, his editor Jerry Ceppos sold out the story & 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 & the Justice Department, probes that confirmed that scores of contra units & 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."
Gary Webb is a great American Journalist - By: Bert Ruiz, 01 Oct 2003 America is great because Americans are good. Gary Webb is a heroic journalist. His determination to tell this story of official corruption within the CIA is admirable. The research is meticulous...the conclusions undeniable. The CIA closed its eyes to wrongdoing & Webb blows the whistle. Highly recommended.
Bert Ruiz
I'M HIS SON! ERIC WEBB - By: , 31 Mar 1999 I liked my dads book very much.
The missed major story of the past 20 years. - By: , 28 Feb 1999 Gary Webb has uncovered the biggest story of the past twenty years. It covers three Presidential adminstrations & uncovers the corruption of our government & the few officials who abuse the power entrusted with them. It also shows how bad modern media has gotten in its responsibility to do true "journalism." Gary Webb has gathered "hard" edvidence, organized it & made sense of lengthy & complex conspiracy of our & central american governments plan to fund a private war through drugs sales. The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post & The New York Times denounced his findings without a shred of contrary evidence or with just statements from the CIA saying it was a lie & they alll just took the CIA's statement as fact. The major news media reporters have just become stenographers for the big, corrupt government in Washington & they will swalllow anything that is spoon fed to them. The biggest loser in alll of this is the American public, the people who have become addicted to drugs & the truth. But thanks to Gary Webb the truth wasn't lost but placed in a forum where the WHOLE story could be told, "Dark Alliance."
