GARY WEBB:
DRUG CONNECTION

AN ELITE SPONSORED DRUG EPIDEMIC DESIGNED SPECIFICALLY TO RENDER THE POOR IMPOTENT INSOFAR AS THEIR ELITE OPPRESSORS ARE CONCERNED! - YOU'VE NEVER HEARD ABOUT THIS BEFORE? Well, it's not much of a secret, and if you haven't heard about it (especially after Gary Webb's sensational expose in the San Jose Mercury News) then it's probably because you have stubbornly chosen not to know anything about it. [Please see our article, "The Drug Epidemic, Viruses, Ebola, and Aids."]

But for those who don't know anything about this, the facts are these: in August 1996, the San Jose Mercury News initiated an extended series of articles by investigative reporter GARY WEBB called "Dark Alliance" that linked the CIA to the importation of crack cocaine into Los Angeles. The series unleashed a storm of protest, spearheaded by black radio stations and the congressional Black Caucus, with demands for official inquiries. The expose documented the CIA's involvement in opening up -

"... the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the 'crack' capital of the world."

PETER KORNBLUH'S ACCOUNT
OF THE WEBB PHENOMENON

Investigative reporter Peter Kornbluh writes:

"The Mercury News series "touched a raw nerve in the (country) ... Webb's tale brought the story home ... To African-American communities, devastated by the scourge of crack and desperate for information and answers, Webb's reporting found ready constituencies. From Farrakhan followers to the most moderate of black commentators, the story reverberated. 'If this is true, then millions of black lives have been ruined and America's jails and prisons are now clogged with young African-Americans because of a cynical plot by a CIA that historically has operated in contempt of the law', wrote Carl T. Rowan, the syndicated columnist.

"The wildfire-like sweep of 'Dark Alliance' was all the more remarkable because it took place without the tinder of the mainstream press. Instead, the story roared through the new communications media of the Internet and black talk radio - two distinct, but in this case somewhat symbiotic, information channels. With the Internet, as Webb put it, 'You don't have be the New York Times or the Washington Post to bust a national story anymore' ...

"As Webb began giving out his story ... the number of hits to the (San Jose Mercury News) Center's website escalated dramatically, some days reaching as high as 1.3 million. Over all, Bob Ryan, who heads Mercury Center, estimates a 15% visitor increase since the stories appeared. 'For us', he says, 'it has certainly answered the question: Is there anyone out there listening'? The demographics of Web traffic are unknown, but some media specialists believe that the rising numbers at Mercury Center in part reflect what the Chicago Tribune syndicated columnist Clarence Page calls an emerging 'black cyber-consciousness'. Online newsletters and other net services made the series readily available to African-American students, newspapers, radio stations, and community organizations. Patricia Turner, author of I Heard it Through the Grapevine, the definitive study on how information travels through black America, suggests that this marked the 'first time the Internet has electrified African-Americans' in this way. 'The black telegraph', noted Jack While, a Time Magazine columnist, referring to the informal word-of: mouth network used since the days of slavery, 'has moved into cyberspace'.

"Black-oriented radio talk shows boosted this phenomenon by giving out the website address. At the same time, the call-in programs themselves became a focal point of information and debate. African-American talk-show hosts used their programs to address the allegations of CIA complicity in the crack epidemic, and the public response was forceful. The power of talk radio was demonstrated when Congresswoman Maxine Waters was a guest on WOL's Lisa Mitchell show in Baltimore on September 10, and announced that the Congressional Black Caucus meeting that week would address the issues raised by 'Dark Alliance'. Two hundred people were expected; nearly two thousand attended.

"Political pressure, organized at the grassroots level around the country and channeled through the Black Caucus in Washington, pushed both the CIA and the Justice Department to initiate internal investigations into the charges of government complicity in the crack trade. In November, John Deutch, then the director of the CIA, even left the secure confines of Langley headquarters to travel to Watts and address a town meeting of concerned citizens on the Mercury News allegations - an unprecedented event.

"By then, the 'Dark Alliance' series had become the journalistic Twister of 1996 ... A common charge emerged on black talk-radio programs: THE U.S. GOVERNMENT HAD CONSPIRED TO USE THE CRACK TRADE TO DELIBERATELY HARM THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN COMMUNITY. 'CIA' now meant 'Crack in America', or as Rep. Cynthia McKinney stated on the floor of Congress, 'Central Intoxication Agency'.

"Thousands of copies of 'Dark Alliance' were handed out at town meetings across the country, playing 'into the deepest fears ... that have haunted the subject of race in America', the Boston Globe editorialized in October. 'We've always speculated about this', said Joe Madison, a Washington talk-show host, who along with the activist Dick Gregory was arrested in front of the CIA in mid-September in an act of civil disobedience. 'Now we have proof'."

MORE INVESTIGATIVE REPORTING: CHRIS STEVENSON

And it wasn't just Webb who in the mid to late 1990s was beginning to put things together insofar as what the elites were doing to the poor concerning the drug epidemic, but countless others as well; the fact is, information regarding the CIA's involvement in the drug trade was simply too pervasive and ubiquitous to be kept buried. For instance, Chris Stevenson, writing in the Buffalo News in Buffalo, New York stumbled on pretty much the same information that Webb had discovered. Stevenson, aghast by what he had found, wrote:

"I first wrote about a plot to funnel drugs into the United States, beginning with the black community, three years ago. Through a process of elimination, I decided that the only real culprit could be the government. Not the Colombian government. Our government, right here in the United States."

Stevenson's link into the drug underworld was Michael Levine, a former Drug Enforcement Administration agent who worked closely with the Central Intelligence Agency. Levine wrote a book called The Big White Lie: The CIA and the Cocaine/Crack Epidemic which documents what he discovered about the elites' effort to swamp the neighborhoods of the poor with drugs and destroy their potential as a "revolutionary" force for change - a potential that the poor (mainly the black community) had almost achieved under Martin Luther King. [Please read our article, "Now Is The Time To Do Something; It May Be Too Late Tomorrow" for the story of how and why the elites made war on Martin Luther King.]

The resultant drug epidemic has also had the concomitant effect of CAGING at one time or another more than one-third of all black males, and an ever increasing number of Hispanic and "poor white trash" males in jail. Moreover, the so-called "three-strikes" law - which evolved out of white indignation for what middle-class Americans consider to be the "animal-like behavior" of the poor - has had the added "benefit" (at least insofar as the elites are concerned) of placing growing numbers of the poor permanently under a kind of modern-day "sword of Domiciles" which has the effect of cowering the poor into submission and rendering huge numbers of them impotent to protest against the injustice of the elites out of fear that they might be "caught up" in a "police sweep" at a protest rally, charged with a "third strike," and "sent up the river" for life. [And believe me, this is the real reason behind the "three strikes" law.]