Gary Webb
see webodec: on contras
https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/E212D5AA-EEF5-535C-9D0D-27920B094E45#-8367
gary webbSJMN CIA crack coaine smuggle, Iran-Contra
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https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/capsule-review/1991-09-01/cocaine-politics-drugs-armies-and-cia-central-america
https://www.ucpress.edu/book/9780520214491/cocaine-politics
Cocaine PoliticsDrugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, Updated edition, With a new preface
- by Peter Dale Scott (Author), Jonathan Marshall (Author)
- April 1998
audio kpfa
Peter Dale Scott - Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA (1992)
Original: https://www.pacificaradioarchives.org...PRA Archive #: SZ0684.20
PRA Archive #: SZ0684.20 Description: Ongoing public affairs program which features interviews with people from the world's political, social and economic hot spots. COCAINE POLITICS : DRUGS, ARMIES AND THE CIA IN CENTRAL AMERICA / Peter Dale Scott Interviewed and produced by Sue Supriano. Steppin' out of Babylon no. 105 Dr. Peter Dale Scott, Professor of English at UC Berkeley and author of Cocaine Politics, discusses the background of links between the CIA and the drug trade in the world, as well as the politics in the various situations which effect the drug trade in Burma, Thailand, Latin America and the United States.
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The Reagan administration's support for the Contras continued to stir controversy well into the 1990s.In August 1996, San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb published a series titled Dark Alliance, alleging that the contras contributed to the rise of crack cocaine in California.[70] In his subsequent 1999 book, also titled Dark Alliance, Webb asserted that the Reagan administration helped harbor known drug traffickers, offering political asylum to some, to help raise funds for the rebel effort.[citation needed]
Gary Webb's career as a journalist was subsequently discredited by the leading U.S. papers, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the LA Times, in collusion with the Central Intelligence Agency.An internal CIA report, entitled, "Managing a Nightmare", shows the agency used "a ground base of already productive relations with journalists" to counter what it called "a genuine public relations crisis."[71] In the 1980s, Douglas Farah worked as a journalist, covering the civil wars in Central America for the Washington Post.According to Farah, while it was common knowledge that the Contras were involved in cocaine trafficking, the editors of the Washington Post refused to take it seriously:
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. If you were going to be directly rubbing up against the government, they wanted it more solid than it could probably ever be done.[72]
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omg
https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/how-elliott-abrams-found-himself-at-the-center-of-a-dark-reagan-era-conspiracy-to-spring-a-cia-linked-trafficker/
When U.S. policymakers needed to spring a convicted CIA-connected drug trafficker doing hard time in federal prison, who did they call?
Trump’s infamous appointed special envoy to Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, according to a September 1986 National Security Council email, written by NSC staffer Oliver North.
In a U.S. House Committee hearing on Thursday, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) scorched Abrams for his covering up of the infamous El Mozote massacre and lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra conspiracy in the 1980s.
Her interrogation drew rebuke from Max Boot, the apostate conservative, and a chorus of right-wing media commentators. Boot described Omar’s comments as a “disgraceful ad hominem attack.”
Actually, the impertinent congresswoman from Minneapolis could have gone much further about Abrams’ untrustworthy behavior. One of the most revealing stories comes from an impeccably right-wing source, Oliver North, former Republican senatorial candidate and Fox News talking head.
Bagman
The year was 1986. Abrams served as assistant secretary of state for Latin America under President Reagan. He was a 39-year-old lawyer and foreign policy polemicist who qualified as neoconservative royalty. (His wife was the daughter of Norman Podhoretz, the perfervid editor of Commentary magazine.) Even then his perennial scowl managed to make him look furtive and self-righteous at the same time.
The Iran-Contra conspiracy was in full swing. The conspiracy, permissively labeled “a scandal,” was a Reagan White House plot to subvert the U.S. Congress’ powers of the purse. North was the coordinator of what can fairly be described as an unconstitutional covert operation, while Abrams played the role of bagman.
To bypass the so-called Boland Amendment, Abrams took payments from the Sultan of Brunei, a petroleum potentate from South Asia, and passed them to the leaders of Reagan’s counter-revolutionary army in Nicaragua. When questioned under oath, Abrams lied. He later pleaded guilty to two counts of deceiving Congress.
As part of the conspiracy, Abrams also put in a good word for a convicted drug trafficker, General Jose Bueso Rosa. He was a Honduran general who had helped the U.S. government with “sensitive operations” in Central America. As Murray Waas and I wrote in the Washington Post, North did “a favor for a felon.”
So did Abrams.
‘Sensitive Operations’
As an episode of CIA-sanctioned drug trafficking, the Bueso story was typical. Bueso, it turns out, had helped put together a CIA-trained military intelligence unit known as Battalion 316, which served as death squad for U.S. policymakers. A Honduran government investigation found that Battalion 316 had captured, tortured and executed some 200 suspected leftists.
Bueso had also trafficked multi-kiloton shipments of cocaine. As CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz documented in Volume 2 of his report on contra drug trafficking, the agency did business with more than 50 suspected drug traffickers in the 1980s.
(Lazy reporters sometimes say that the CIA was cleared of the allegation. They didn’t bother to read the Sections 800-1148 of Hitz’s report, which detailed how the agency took no action against four dozen suspected traffickers who aided Reagan’s—and Abrams’—anticommunist crusade.)
Investigating the story for the Post, I spoke on background with law enforcement officials familiar with Bueso’s case. A wiretap had picked up Bueso repeatedly talking about shipments of “flour” into central Florida, they said. Given Bueso’s connections, no one in the Reagan Justice Department cared to make a big deal of his cocaine shipments, no matter how hefty. They just wanted a conviction that would put him out of business. Bueso got a generous plea bargain. He would only have to serve five years.
Bueso, however, was led to believe his American friends would save him from serving any time all.
In his September 1986 email, later uncovered by Iran-Contra investigators, North worried Bueso might “break his longstanding silence.” He might disclose unpleasant truths about death squads and CIA drug trafficking.
So North “cabal[led] quietly” with Abrams, as well as top Pentagon, CIA and Justice Department officials. A presidential pardon was out of the question, but transfer to a comfortable “Club Fed” facility was arranged.
As time when U.S. prosecutors meted out 10-year sentences to young black men for the possession of a few ounces of cocaine, Abrams was part of a gang that thought a multi-kiloton trafficker should be treated leniently. Such was his advocacy of “human rights.”
Bueso got out of prison early—for “good behavior.” Abrams went on to a long career in U.S. foreign policy. Hundreds of thousands of black men remained in jails for years, if not decades.
Question
Rep. Omar could have asked an even tougher question of Abrams, namely, “Does Trump’s policy toward Latin America today involve protection of drug traffickers as Reagan’s policy did in the 1980s?”
...
The contras (some references use the capitalized form, "Contras") is a label given to the various U.S.-backed and funded right-wing militant groups that were active from 1979 to the early 1990s in opposition to the left-wing, socialist Sandinista Junta of National Reconstruction government in Nicaragua. Among the separate contra groups, the Nicaraguan Democratic Force (FDN) emerged as the largest by far. In 1987, virtually all contra organizations were united, at least nominally, into the Nicaraguan Resistance.
From an early stage, the rebels received financial and military support from the United States government, and their military significance decisively depended on it. After US support was banned by Congress, the Reagan administration covertly continued it. These covert activities culminated in the Iran–Contra affair.
The term "contra" comes from the Spanish contra, which means against but in this case is short for la contrarrevolución, in English "the counter-revolution". Some rebels disliked being called contras, feeling that it defined their cause only in negative terms, or implied a desire to restore the old order. Rebel fighters usually referred to themselves as comandos ("commandos"); peasant sympathizers also called the rebels los primos ("the cousins"). From the mid-1980s, as the Reagan administration and the rebels sought to portray the movement as the "democratic resistance," members started describing themselves as la resistencia.
During their war against the Nicaraguan government, the Contras committed a large number of human rights violations and used terrorist tactics,[1][2][3][4][5] carrying out more than 1300 terrorist attacks.[6]These actions were frequently carried out systematically as a part of the strategy of the Contras. Supporters of the Contras tried to minimize these violations, particularly the Reagan administration in the US, which engaged in a campaign of white propaganda to alter public opinion in favor of the contras.[7]
...
wackos
hmmn
http://winsipcuster.blogspot.com/2016/10/james-comeys-feud-with-joseph-digenova.html
quote by digen]
An Interview with Lowell P. Wigglesworth
by Fabian Colbachi CPW News Service
The conservative Judicial Watch assembled a panel of five to review the recent developments in the Hillary Clinton email scandal.
Moderated by Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, the panel included Paul Schweizer the author of Clinton Cash,Jerome Corsi,author of Partners In Crime: The Clinton's Scheme to Monetize the White House for Personal Profit,
Christopher J. Farrell, a member of the OSS Societyand Investigative Reporters and Editorswhose 1996 debate between Gary Webb and the Washington Post's Jeff Leen was moderated by the University of Missouri's Professor Emeritus of Journalism, Steve Weinberg, attempted to skewer Webb's reporting for the San Jose Mercury Newsand his book Dark Alliance. Also on the panel was former U.S. Attorney in Washington D.C. and founding partner of the K Street legal firm of DiGenova & Toensing, Joseph E. DiGenova....