Killing the messenger over and over again
by digby
Dennis wrote about the new film called “Kill the Messenger” yesterday and made me really want to see the movie. I have been following the Gary Webb story for a long time and it’s good to see it getting into the mainstream. It’s also interesting to see the mainstream media ignore their own complicity.
This story is one that truly opened my eyes to the reality of the political establishment’s continued unwillingness to entertain the notion that the secret intelligence agencies are operating outside of our values and often in ways that are not only illegal but downright destructive and are doing it without any accountability and without even delivering the “protection” they are assigned to deliver. They have been out of control for decades and we have little reason to believe it’s getting any better.
Anyway, Ryan Grim has a great piece up at Huffington Post about the movie and the story that you should read if you aren’t familiar with this. It’s a disgusting low point in our checkered history of disgusting low points: our government was instrumental in creating the crack epidemic of the 1980s and the media helped them cover it up:
Douglas Farah was in El Salvador when the San Jose Mercury News broke a major story in the summer of 1996: The Nicaraguan Contras, a confederation of paramilitary rebels sponsored by the CIA, had been funding some of their operations by importing cocaine into the United States. One of their best customers was a man named Freeway Rick — Ricky Donnell Ross, then a Southern California dealer who was running an operation that the Los Angeles Times dubbed “the Wal-Mart of crack dealing.”
“My first thought was, Holy shit! because there’d been so many rumors in the region of this going on,” said Farah 12 years later. He’d grown up in Latin American and covered it for 20 years for The Washington Post. “There had always been these stories floating around about [the Contras] and cocaine. I knew [Contra leader] Adolfo Calero and some of the other folks there, and they were all sleazebags. You wouldn’t read the story and say, ‘Oh my god, these guys would never do that.’ It was more like, ‘Oh, one more dirty thing they were doing.’ So I took it seriously.”
The same would not hold true of most of Farah’s colleagues, either in the newspaper business in general or at the Post in particular. “If you’re talking about our intelligence community tolerating — if not promoting — drugs to pay for black ops, it’s rather an uncomfortable thing to do when you’re an establishment paper like the Post,” Farah told me. “If you were going to be directly rubbing up against the government, they wanted it more solid than it could probably ever be done.”
Read on. It’s no whacked out conspiracy theory, it’s real. And the mainstream media still won’t cop to its part in it. It’s hard for me to believe that anyone who knows this story could ever treat the clandestine agencies in our government without skepticism again and it’s why I get so nuts at the assurances the political establishment and most of the media offer up whenever another yet another revelation somehow manages to bubble up to the surface. The record is terrible going all the way back to the 1950s and they either just keep pretending it’s not happening or they don’t think it matters. Either way, they are abdicating their responsibility.
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