IS ANYONE APOLOGIZING TO GARY WEBB?
by Michael Levine
July, 1998

(Note: the below article was read by Kristina Borjesson at Gary Webb's funeral. Webb committed suicide in 2004.)

Gary Webb, just in case you've already forgotten him, was the journalist who, in a well researched, understated article entitled "The Dark Alliance," linked the CIA supported Contras to cocaine and weapons being sold to a California street gang and ended up literally being hounded out of journalism by every mainstream news peddling organization in the Yellow Pages. Even his own employer The San Jose Mercury piled on for the kill.

And guess what? The CIA finally admitted, yesterday, in the New York Times no less, that they, in fact, did "work with" the Nicaraguan Contras while they had information that they were involved in cocaine trafficking to the United States. An action known to us court qualified experts and federal agents as Conspiracy to Import and Distribute Cocaine—a federal felony punishable by up to life in prison.

To illustrate how us regular walking around, non CIA types are treated when we violate this law, while I was serving as a DEA supervisor in New York City, I put two New York City police officers in a federal prison for Conspiracy to distribute Cocaine when they looked the other way at their friend's drug dealing. We could not prove they earned a nickel nor that they helped their friend in any way, they merely did not do their duty by reporting him. They were sentenced to 10 and 12 years respectively, and one of them, I was recently told, had committed suicide.

I have spent three decades as a court qualified expert and federal agent and am not aware of any class of American Citizen having special permission to violate the law that we have been taxed over $1 trillion in the past two decades to enforce; the law that every politician, bureaucrat and media pundit keeps telling us protects us against the most serious danger to American security in our history.

The interesting thing to me, about the Webb article is that the CIA is provably (and now admittedly) responsible for much larger scale drug trafficking than Webb alleged or even imagined in his report. In fact, according to a confidential DEA report entitled "Operation Hun, a Chronology" that I used as part of the proof to back up the undercover experiences detailed in my book The Big White Lie, (optioned for a movie by Robert Greenwald Productions) the CIA was actively blocking DEA from indicting many members of the ruling government of Bolivia, from, 1980-83—during a time period that these same people were responsible for producing more than 90 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States.

As CIA Inspector General Hitz himself stated before congress, it was during this time period that Nicraguan Contra supporters were buying large amounts of cocaine from these same CIA protected Bolivians.
Do you think Congress wants to see this proof?

The gang that can't spy straight, as they are known to my listeners and about whom President Lyndon Johnson once said, "When Rich folks don't trust their sons with the family money they send them on down to the CIA," certainly did a lot more damage to this nation than, for example, computer company owner Will Foster who was sentenced to 93 years in prison for possession of 70 marijuana plants for medicinal use.
Of course, true to their shifty, sleazy form, while admitting that they did aid and abet Contra drug trafficking, they are now refusing to release their own final investigative report which details the damning proof. The same report that CIA Inspector General Fredrick Hitz, during February, 1998, had promised congress and the American people was forthcoming "shortly", because, as CIA Director George Tenet now claims, CIA does not have enough money in its budget to properly classify it.

You believe that then I know an old guy with a beard named Fidel, wandering the streets of South Miami with an Island about 90 miles off the coast for sale. He says the money is for his retirement.
How, you ask, do they get away with it?

Well for one thing, mainstream media, the so-called Fourth Estate, does all it can to help. During the Iran-contra hearings, when Senators Kerry and D'amato were making pronouncements before the Senate indicating that the CIA was involved with drug trafficking, Katherine Graham the owner of The Washington Post addressed a class of CIA recruits at CIA's Langley headquarters in Novemeber, 1988, by saying:
"There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets, and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows.."

Apparently CIA protection of drug trafficking was among those secrets Thus, it should have been no surprise to those CIA agent recruits when Washington Post reporter and drug expert Michael Itsikoff wrote that there was "no credible evidence" linking the CIA supported contras to cocaine trafficking at the same time very credible evidence was being heard by Senator Kerry's committee indicating that the Contras may have been the top purveyors of drugs to Americans in our history.

Neither should it have been a surprise to anyone who heard her statement when mainstream media refused to print the news that Oliver North, US Ambassador to Costa Rica, Lewis Tambs and various top level CIA officers were banned from ever entering Costa Rica by Nobel Prize winning President Oscar Arias, for drug running. The drugs, by the way, all going to us.

Nor should it have been a surprise when Gary Webb was destroyed by mainstream media, for doing nothing more or less than telling the truth as he found it. And now, while CIA admits their felonies to the press but refuses to release the proof, and, Janet Reno, the head of the Obstruction of Justice Department has done the unprecedented by classifying her own department's investigation into CIA drug trafficking, the partnership for a Drug Free America is spending $2 billion of our tax money on already-proven-fruitless anti-drug ads.

And where do you think the money goes?

Answer: to every major media corporation on the big board.

Gary Webb, my friend, you are owed a huge apology. But I doubt that you'll get it. Not in this lifetime.