Crack Reporting
It was an unprecedented scene: 300 African-Americans filling a Capitol Hill hearing room for a session of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The subject was the allegation unleashed by the San Jose Mercury News that a California drug ring operated by Nicaraguan exiles "helped spark" the "crack explosion in urban America" and "funneled millions in drug profits" to the C.I.A.-backed contras. The atmosphere reflected the intense reaction to the story in black communities nationwide. On talk radio, in local forums and on the Internet, many citizens have voiced outrage, some mischaracterizing the series as proving that the C.I.A. engineered the crack epidemic. On the other side of the looking glass, the establishment media (mostly The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times) rushed to debunk the stories or declare them nothing new. At the hearings -- called to examine the pending investigations of the inspectors general of the C.I.A. and the Justice Department -- committee chairman Arlen Specter and ranking Democrat Bob Kerrey seemed flummoxed. At times they defended the honor of the C.I.A. and the Justice Department, then expressed skepticism that the I.G.s -- who can subpoena documents but not testimony -- could do their job. The turbulence in all precincts seems natural. The series has forced Congress to consider a matter it would rather not, motivated a scoop-envying establishment press to come to the partial defense of the national security elite and led a public too often deceived to think the worst.
The Mercury News has conceded that portions of its series by Gary Webb were miscast. Webb had a good story about two drug dealers loosely connected to the contras in the early 1980s -- an item to add to the list of evidence linking contras and cocaine trafficking. But the paper went too far, claiming without solid proof that "millions" flowed from these mid-level dealers to the contras -- it may have been $50,000 -- and in tying these traffickers to the rise of crack, a phenomenon bigger than a mere two pushers. Yet debunking and conspiracy-hawking distract from the real scandal: the warped priorities of Washington. In the contra years, the national security gang perverted law and decency. (Recall Oliver North's desire to help Manuel Noriega rehabilitate his drug-tainted image in return for Noriega's sponsoring terrorism inside Nicaragua.) And Washington prosecuted the cold war with an urgency never applied to the devastation at home. People who live in America's domestic war zones have every right to be angry.
Understandably, the Mercury News stories triggered a mobilization -- sadly, some of it channeled in dubious directions, such as the celebration of convicted trafficker "Freeway" Ricky Ross, an L.A. street dealer in league with the Nicaraguans, as the victim of a C.I.A. setup. An anti-C.I.A. popular uprising propelled by partial misinformation is too easily countered. Prestigious newspapers, deferentially quoting former C.I.A. officials, report that no C.I.A.-crack conspiracy existed. And they disingenuously proclaim contra drug-trafficking old hat, a story covered in the 1980s. Yet back then, most media bigfoots paid scant attention to the subject. When Senator John Kerry released a thick report in 1989 finding "substantial evidence" that contras and their supporters peddled drugs and that U.S. officials knew it, The New York Times didn't cover it. The Washington Post published a short, back-of-the-section article that focused on the infighting surrounding the document. A decade ago, the national media low-balled the contra-drug story. Now it's, Been there, done that.
At the hearings, Jack Blum, once Kerry's counsel, reaffirmed that U.S. officials ignored contra drug-dealing, that Justice Department officials blocked Kerry's investigation and that this was consistent with the history of covert operations. One measure of the harm done at home by covert operations, Blum asserted, is "how ready the public is to believe Freeway Ricky's fable about his role as an arm of the C.I.A. in promoting crack in Los Angeles."
Some good might emerge from the Mercury News ruckus. The I.G.s appear to be investigating not just the specific allegations but the wider subject of contra drug-dealing. (Justice Department I.G. Michael Bromwich, who worked for Iran/contra counsel Lawrence Walsh, recently attended a community forum on the C.I.A.-crack allegations in South Central Los Angeles.) But they're unlikely to lead to the sort of fundamental reappraisal of the clandestine community that Blum would like. And until that happens, many Americans will remain distrustful of the spooks (as they should be) and receptive to conspiracy theories that come with or without proof.
Linkage:
From the San Jose Mercury News:
Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion by Gary Webb, San Jose Mercury News staff writer.
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