[…] last Lobster has been the CIA-deals-crack story. The Web site at has an enormous amount of information, including an important piece by Robert Parry, ‘Lost History: Contras, Dirty Money and the CIA.’ Another important background piece is Jack Blum’s testimony to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee last year, which is reproduced in Covert […]
[…] George protested to CIA Director William Casey that he was ‘not going to run this guy’, North liked Ghorbanifar’s ‘neat idea’ of diverting arms profits to the contras via Switzerland. And so the deals continued, supervised by only a handful of NSC, CIA and Pentagon aides. The Bank of Credit and Commerce International Ghorbanifar […]
[…] crack cocaine in the San José Mercury News. In this series, reporter Gary Webb made the case that the CIA, through the actions of several drug-dealing Nicaraguan contras it had funded, was involved in the introduction of crack into Los Angeles during the 1980s. Parallel stories have appeared in provincial papers before, and been […]
[…] at the University of California at Berkeley. Two years ago Gary Webb touched off a national controversy with his news stories linking the CIA and the Nicaraguan Contras to the rise of the crack epidemic in Los Angeles and elsewhere. His gripping new book, richly researched and documented, deserves an even wider audience and […]
[…] Iran-Contra fund-raising operations in the US were either designed as frauds or were exploited as frauds; that what began as an attempt to raise money for the Contras pretty quickly developed into a vast series of scams in which – as usual – the US tax-payer got royally screwed. These aren’t vague generalisations; he […]
‘You don’t investigate people for why they think but for what they do.’ – former Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti (1) Introduction If nothing else, the Iran-Contra scandal temporarily illuminated the extent to which ostensibly private organizations have been helping secretive elements within the American government — in this case the core of the executive branch’s … Read more
Robert Parry, The Media Consortium, Arlington, Virginia, USA, 1999 $19.95 (US) $25.00 (Europe) ISBN 1-893517-00-4 Another important book from Parry, author of Trick or Treason about the so-called October Surprise. Parry has two major themes here. The first is the contra-cocaine story which he tried to research as it broke in the 1980s while … Read more
[…] against Nicaragua involved a campaign of terror waged by CIA mercenaries that was nevertheless presented to the world as a liberation struggle. President Ronald Reagan celebrated ‘the contras’ as men in the same mould as the ‘Founding Fathers’ of the United States. This did not stop him trying to subvert the Constitution the Founding […]
[…] trade see Kurger and McKoy. The recent involvement of CIA-connected Cuban exiles in the smuggling of cocaine into the US for the financial benefit of the Nicaraguan contras is only the latest in a long series of such operations. On this see, e.g., Leslie Cockburn pp.100-4, 152-88. See supra, note 37. For confirmation of […]
[…] acknowledging that the CIA had ignored drug smuggling by its Contra allies. (See for example The Independent 7 November 1998, ‘CIA turned a deliberate blind eye to Contras’ drug smuggling’. I say ‘apparently’ above because I have not read the report in question.) There is even a reliable report of evidence implicating a CIA […]
