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CIA, crack, Contras CT?

kookbreaker said:
I'd rather read books about zombies.
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Some of those are books written by zombies...

The Politics of Heroin... is the only thing on that list worth reading.

FWIW, whenever you have an empty mode of transhipment, a valuable transportable item and a system of turning blind eyes and not asking questions, monkey business follows.

Coke came back in empty planes. Coke was sold. Who it was sold to and where the money went were the operational decisions of the people bringing in the product, not higher authorities. The whole deal was facilitated by the culture of need-to-know and the institutional culture of not asking anyone questions you didn't know the answer to.

The guys in charge turned blind eyes to what was going on because at their level, the ends justified the means.
 
Has anybody actually read the OP's link? Or is this another one of those JREF threads where everyone assumes they know what everyone else is saying and just fly off the handle about the evils of conspiracy theory blah, blah, blah, blah, blah...

If you actually read the thing, the whole claim is that this no CIA drug link. I shouldn't even waste my time posting the actual text, but if I don't, I know the thread will just continue on as if it did.

All three major U.S. dailies, The Times included, debunked a claim that Webb actually never made -- that the CIA deliberately unleashed the crack epidemic on black America. The controversy over this non-assertion obscured Webb's substantive points about the CIA knowingly doing business south of the border with Nicaraguans involved in the drug trade up north...
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There is no denying that the papers were right on one serious count -- "Dark Alliance" contained major flaws of hyperbole that were both encouraged and ignored by his editors, who saw the story as a chance to win a Pulitzer Prize, according to Mercury News staffers I interviewed...Webb asserted, improbably, that the Blandon-Meneses-Ross drug ring opened "the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles," helping to "spark a crack explosion in urban America." The story offered no evidence to support such sweeping conclusions, a fatal error that would ultimately destroy Webb, if not his editors
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Meanwhile, spurred on by Webb's story, the CIA conducted an internal investigation that acknowledged in March 1998 that the agency had covered up Contra drug trafficking for more than a decade. Although the Washington Post and New York Times covered the report -- which confirmed key chunks of Webb's allegations -- the L.A. Times ignored it for four months, and largely portrayed it as disproving the "Dark Alliance" series. "We dropped the ball on that story," said Doyle McManus, the paper's Washington bureau chief, who helped supervise its response to "Dark Alliance."
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This is just pathetic.

Incidentally, 9/11 CTers hate Nick Schou who write the LA Times article.
Nick Schou, OC Weekly reporter, Lies About 9/11 Evidence & Libels
Citizen Investigation Team
I can understand why. He points out that the whole idea that Dark Alliance actually says anything meaningful is crap. But then you'd actually have to read what Nick wrote to know that.
 
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Just because I know how observant some people on forums are, I feel the need to point out that this thread is 5.5 years old.

I'm not sure why Robert Morrow felt the need to resurrect two threads about the CIA and cocaine (the other one being only 3.5 years old), though.
 
Cl1m, I guess the better question would be why there were TWO threads on CIA drug smuggling. I am just trying to educate where I can.

I guess your real problem is my answer and not the double posting?
 
The CIa has done many things but I do not buy this it is an ultimtely self defeating and stupid strategy, why undermine your own population it is frankly insane
 
"Sanity" has not necessarily been a characteristic of all people in the operations of the CIA.

Some people (GHW Bush, Casey, Oliver North for example) think "national security" gives them carte blanche to do literally *anything* whether it is running drugs, committing a whole variety of crimes, murdering people, etc.
 
Robert Morrow said:
"Sanity" has not necessarily been a characteristic of all people in the operations of the CIA.

Some people (GHW Bush, Casey, Oliver North for example) think "national security" gives them carte blanche to do literally *anything* whether it is running drugs, committing a whole variety of crimes, murdering people, etc.
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Yes, also see the book "The Men Who Stare at Goats" for evidence of very kooky behavior by the CIA and U.S. military agencies.
 
jimtron said:
Yes, also see the book "The Men Who Stare at Goats" for evidence of very kooky behavior by the CIA and U.S. military agencies.
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Not to mention the CIA's mind control programs. There are some people in goverment who put a picture of Joseph Mengele on their bedroom walls like I would Farrah Faucett when I was a kid.

Some people in "intelligence" are either "stupid" or bat **** crazy.

http://www.amazon.com/Terrible-Mist...sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1332133981&sr=8-1-spell

A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA's Secret Cold War Experiments by H.P. Albarelli
 
The one fact that never seems to merit mention whenever the military's and government's historical and formerly-secret "psychic" and "mind control" experiment projects are brought up is the fact that all of these experiments failed entirely and were discontinued as wastes of money.
 
Checkmite said:
The one fact that never seems to merit mention whenever the military's and government's historical and formerly-secret "psychic" and "mind control" experiment projects are brought up is the fact that all of these experiments failed entirely and were discontinued as wastes of money.
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I think that was made clear in the book I just mentioned.
 
Checkmite said:
The one fact that never seems to merit mention whenever the military's and government's historical and formerly-secret "psychic" and "mind control" experiment projects are brought up is the fact that all of these experiments failed entirely and were discontinued as wastes of money.
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And they literally went on for decades and involved tens of thousands of patients, subjects i.e. victims.
 
The CIa has done many things but I do not buy this it is an ultimtely self defeating and stupid strategy, why undermine your own population it is frankly insane
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Oh I think you misjudge the Reagan administration's sense of "ownership" when it comes to dark people, and urban poors generally.
 
Checkmite said:
The one fact that never seems to merit mention whenever the military's and government's historical and formerly-secret "psychic" and "mind control" experiment projects are brought up is the fact that all of these experiments failed entirely and were discontinued as wastes of money.
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Must... resist... Godwin...
 
Robert Morrow said:
And they literally went on for decades and involved tens of thousands of patients, subjects i.e. victims.
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That's not an argument for validity. Christianity, for example, beats those points by orders of magnitude. The 9/11 Truth is also well on its way.
 
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With the new movie "Shoot the Messenger" recently out, what of the Gary Webb suicide? Is it anything like that portrayed in the movie?
 
Listen to your old uncle B, and he'll tell you what happened.

Individuals with experience flying into primitive landing strips in Central America (...) were hired to fly log flights into Costa Rica, Honduras and Salvador for the purpose of delivering material and support to the Contras.

Planes went in full.

Pilots with previous experience in transporting contraband (of the white powder variety) northbound found themselves with empty aircraft, and nature abhors a vacuum.

Said pilots and others capitalized on the lack of oversight and the standard operational procedure of authorities and other operators in not asking questions of individuals involved in government sanctioned covert activities.

The problem that Webb and others faced is that they found plenty of folks that were only too happy to tell them what they wanted to hear, truth be damned, and there was a ready audience that was all too willing to believe in grand C.I.A. conspiracy rather than the actual mundane facts that led to coke coming in under semi-official cover.

There's a great book on the subject of governmental involvement in drug distribution, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Al McCoy. In the revised edition he address the Contra/coke allegations, and I highly recommend it, but Gary Webb unfortunately followed the trail of stories that existed primarily in his own imagination and was led along that path by a bunch of conmen and a few convicted criminals that wanted their particular version of events to be accepted as the true history of events.

Bottom line - drugs entered the U.S. under the cover of a covert operation, but the authors of the criminal acts were the bent players themselves, not somebody sitting in an office at Langley, and even accepting the "drug money for the cause" excuse floated by various people caught with white powder on their hands, if any money went south it didn't go for beans and bullets.
 
G-K-4 said:
Don't forget that the charges that the contras had drug-smuggling ties got to the level of a Senate committee investigation (Kerry, 1987). Webb took things a bit farther, suggesting that this drug-smuggling was what brought crack to L.A.
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This has always been where it veers into CT territory for me - this whole thing is rather well documented, but to act like the drugs brought in this way had the effect of "introducing crack" or being part of what made it so popular in the 80s grants way too much power to these agencies, who - let's be honest - have proven quite useless in their efforts to control drug consumption, drug production and drug distribution.

Someone would have to show that *these particular* drugs represented the majority of all drugs going into the country AND that without these vectors, the "crack trend" would never have occured.

I'm sure the Nation of Islam trafficks in these ideas, and I've seen it in the further corners of the anti establishment left/right - and it suffers from the same over-emphasis of actual CIA/government power that a lot of CTs suffer from.

Except here the kernel of truth is a rather a big one underneath, and there certainly was a genuine conspiracy that not only involved drugs but also terrorist proxy forces for American interests in Central America AND raised some rather fundamental constitutional questions about the limits of executive power that were never fully addressed head on (to our detriment). That should be more than enough meat on the bone without imagining that the so-called crack "epidemic" was an entirely CIA construct.

The drivers for drug trends are far more sociological and inherent to the human condition than anything the CIA could do or not do - the fact we have wider availability, greater purity and lower prices after decades of their efforts shows just how much influence they have on these matters.
 
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Actually this reminds me! The furthest reaches of this CT actually take that note I ended on as a confirming premise - the drug war is futile because they *want* it to be, and the fact we have so many drugs around now is great for them bcause its a great source of black money that the CIA and certain parts of law enforcement need!

My pot dealer specifically referenced the CIA cocaine "proof" from the Contra era as evidence pot will never be legalized - they need the black money too much.

And here you know, if we take a step back, in broad strokes these CTs are kinda closer to the mark than many others. After all, the Drug War has fostered a codependency between the law enforcement juggernaut/prison industrial complex and the criminal entities that all draw their continued sustenance from it. There very well are systemic factors about the way things work today that could leave a reasonable person thinking there may very well be an intention among the powerful to maintain an unending and futile Drug War going forever.

After all, this sustains many careers in many places, licit and illicit both.

But it doesn't quite work the way these guys think it does - and certainly not in the crude formulations that really simplify things overmuch. It also assumes a base human rationality, and I think we should all have learned by now that we are a world of dreamers.

Some people dream that the last bust actually did make a dent and the drug war is winnable - many more feel like they're on "the right side" of the war and have internalized positive value judgments about being the prosecutors of a drug war.

The fact its futile and staring us all in the face doesn't mean we all agree its staring at us - maybe the next 70 billion will push us over the tipping point -- we just havent given it a chance yet!!

The Drug War is still with us much more because of these kinds of dreams, than it is from cynical manipulations and a conscious intent to have a misery factory like that driving cracks through our society every minute of every day. They have rationalized away the damage happening today, are fearful of any other option that isn't prohibition - and all of them think they're on the side of the Angels as they shoot dogs to get a half quarter from a crying family.
 
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