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By Root 784 0

Gary Webb that he’d been researching for more than a year. It described a pipeline between Colombian cartels, middlemen, and street gangs in South Central L.A. that involved tons of crack cocaine. Webb’s article featured Oscar Danilo Blandón, a drug importer and informant who’d testified in federal court that “whatever we were running in L.A., the profit was going to the Contra revolution.” Blandón also said that Colonel Enrique Bermudez, the CIA asset leading the Contra army against the Sandinista government, was aware that these funds came from drug running. Except the CIA had squelched a federal investigation into Blandón in the name of “national security.” The crack was being funneled to a young new-millionaire named “Freeway” Ricky Donnell Ross, who supplied it to the Crips and Bloods and beyond. When Ross got nailed and went to trial in 1996, the prosecutors obtained a court order to prevent the defense from questioning Blandón about his CIA connections. All of which raised a huge question: how involved was the CIA in the crack epidemic then raging across our country?22

Well, you’d think Gary Webb should have gotten a Pulitzer. Instead, he got torn apart by the big media. In page-one articles, the Washington Post, New York Times, and L.A. Times insisted that Contra-cocaine smuggling was minor, and that Webb was blowing it all out of proportion. They made it look like Webb was targeting the poor CIA, when he’d never said that the CIA, per se, was arranging the drug deals, only that it was protecting the Contra dealers.

In 2009, a new book came out that makes my blood boil. It’s called This Is Your Country on Drugs, and among other revelations, it tells of how the Washington Post “had facts at its disposal demonstrating that the [Webb] story was accurate,” except they ended up on the editing-room floor. That’s because National Security correspondent Walter Pincus made sure they would. Pincus, it turns out, had “flirted with joining the CIA and is routinely accused of having been an undercover asset in the ’50s,” a charge the journalist once called “overblown.”23

Here’s another example of the media’s role in the cover-up: the L.A. Times, two years earlier, had profiled “Freeway” Ricky as South Central’s first millionaire crack dealer. But, two months after Webb’s series tied Ross into the Contra network, the Times turned to a whole new slant. Ross, the paper said, was but one of a number of “interchangeable characters.”24

So Gary Webb was basically drummed out of journalism by his “brethren” at the larger papers. Who gives our media these mandates to arbitrarily destroy someone’s credibility, blackball them because they’ve written something controversial? I guess people forget the simplicity of the First Amendment—it’s there to protect unpopular speech. Because popular speech doesn’t need protecting.

In 2004, Gary Webb’s body was found and it was ruled a suicide. I call this a tragedy that should weigh heavily on the consciences of those who intentionally destroyed his reputation. Or maybe it was actually murder: Webb was shot twice in the head with a vintage revolver—meaning he would have had to have cocked the hammer of the revolver back after being shot in the head at point-blank range with a .38.

It’s a proven fact that the CIA’s into drugs, we even know why. It’s because they can get money to operate with, and not have to account to Congress for what they’re doing. All this is justified because of the “big picture.” But doesn’t it really beg for a massive investigation and trials and a whole lot of people going to jail? This includes the big banks that allow the dirty money to be laundered through them.

Let’s take a longer look at the Bank of Credit and Commerce International—or, as our current defense secretary Robert Gates once called BCCI, the Bank of Crooks and Criminals.25 As CIA deputy director twenty years ago, Gates was in position to know. But when US Customs Commissioner William von Raab was getting ready to arrest some folks involved with drug money laundering at a BCCI subsidiary in Florida, “Gates