"Any hack can safely rail away at foreign powers beyond the sea; but a good writer is a critic of the society he lives in." - Edward Abbey "An open and shut case..." There comes a time when you just have to stand back and take a look at the big picture. This is one of those times. On the morning of December 10th 2004, 49 year old, Gary Webb was found dead in his modest, recently sold Carmichael, California home. Webb allegedly died from two *self-inflicted* gunshot wounds to the head from a .38 caliber pistol. The Sacramento coroner, Mr. Lyons, hastily ruled Webb's death a suicide heralded by his now infamous pronouncement: "It's unusual in a suicide case to have two shots," he said, "but it has been done in the past, and it is in fact a distinct possibility." Which brings up another possibility, as the Gershwin song goes, that "it ain't necessarily so." I'm referring to the lingering and distinct possibility-- no make that probability-- that Gary Webb was murdered. While I agree with Mr. Lyons that it's unusual for a suicide to "have two shots" notice how cleverly Mr. Lyons fails to mention another more important detail such as it's virtually impossible to have a suicide case with two shots to the head via a .38 revolver? Think about that for a moment. Doesn't this deceptive statement make one suspicious that a well orchestrated, top-down cover-up operation is underway? Or is this merely a minor oversight by a government official whose expertise is determining the cause of death? Here's what the iconoclastic, egdy, political commentator Vox had to say on December 23, 2004 about Webb's alleged 'suicide' that had occurred only a few days prior (posted on his website www.voxfux.com). Vox Excerpts "... So we need to know who told the coroner to say it was suicide. The coroner knows who told him to say it was suicide and that person knows who told them to say it was suicide, and so on and so forth until you arrive at the group who ordered the hit. But to claim that after the first shot to the face the guy then re-cocks his pistol, aims and fires a second shot - it is impossible for a thinking person to accept this. And anyone with the skills that webb had would get it right the first time. No, this was a hit job... Either way it is impossible for a thinking person to accept... and that is the point. Since the control mechanisms of human thought have been so completely implemented, there will be no questioning of anything as depicted on the news by the great masses of people, they simply accept, uncritically, that which is broadcast. Yet for the thinking people, the implausibility of the "Two Shot" story being a suicide is PRECISELY the point. They don't want thinking people to accept and believe that it was a suicide, that is precisely WHY they went with the two shot to the face story in the first place... er... third place. It's designed to put a chill in the spines of those with the sensibilities and experience to detect this targeted threat meme. To put a chill in thinking people's spines. by saying, look, we can do what we want, and there is not a thing anyone can do about it. "just look at poor 'nutjob' gary, ha ha ha, imagine what it must have looked like, him getting off that second shot into his own face, ha ha ha." This is how they think. These are the methodologies of the illuminati, this is the very face of evil." (end of excerpts) Or this from Robert Chambers of the UK Independent: "I first heard about Webb eight years ago, ". . . from the Paris-based journalist Paul Moreira. Moreira ­ a senior news producer for Canal Plus ­ has established a reputation for courage and independence of mind in his own foreign reporting, and was recently described by Le Monde as "the Che Guevara of news media." Shortly before I left for Sacramento, Moreira, who knew Webb, had shown me unbroadcast footage which shows the French reporter making a phone call to a media commentator in the US, asking him about Webb's death." " 'I told Gary not to go near this story," his source replies, in an emotional voice. " 'You do not understand the power of these people,' " he adds, referring to the US intelligence services. " 'Do not quote me. Do not quote me on anything. '" "You sound very scared," Moreira remarks. " 'I am scared," the voice replies. ' " 'Look at what happened to Gary Webb. Do something else with your life,' " the voice urges. " ' Like enjoy it.' " http://gnn.tv/headlines/5415/Susan_Bell_a_shameful_secret_history Ted Gunderson: Retired FBI expert in analyzing and reconstructing crime scenes. On Dec. 1, 2005 I spoke with Ted Gunderson about Webb's death. Mr. Gunderson is a retired FBI agent who enjoyed a distinguished career with the FBI that spanned 27 plus years. Prior to his retirement in 1979 Mr. Gunderson was a "senior special agent-in-charge" with a $22 million annual budget at his disposal and over 700 persons under his charge. Mr Gunderson told me, "my expertise is analyzing and reconstructing crime scenes." He said, "Gary Webb was MURDERED. "He (Webb) resisted the first shot {to the head that exited via jaw} so he was shot again with the second shot going into the head {brain}." I asked Mr. Gunderson what he thought about the "two shots" to the head suicide theory that posits Webb "simply missed " his brain with the first shot, so he had to shoot himself again, this time successfully hitting the brain with a .38 revolver? Without hesitation Gunderson exclaimed, "impossible!" A colleague and one of Webb's mentors at the "Cleveland Plain Dealer schooled Webb: "The Big One was the reporter's Holy Grail, the tip that led you from the daily morass of press conferences and of cop calls and on to the trail of The Biggest Story You'd Ever Write, the one that would turn the rest of your career into an anticlimax." " The Big One," Webb recollected, "would be like a bullet with your name on it. You'd never hear it coming." Unfortunately Webb's "Big One" turned out to be two bullets to the head. http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3874 Gary Webb speaks at the Narco News School of Authentic Journalism Photo D.R. Jeremy Bigwood 2003 http://www.narconews.com/Issue29/article657.html THE WORLD ACCORDING TO WEBB Gary Webb believed that journalists were revolutionaries. In 2003 Gary shared his radical perspective about journalists with aspiring Journalism students while a guest instructor/editor at The Narco News School of Authentic Journalism in Mexico. Webb exclaimed: "Journalists are revolutionaries and don't let anyone tell you otherwise," Webb continued, "You have to fight to change the world." In a 2004 article entitled "Gary Webb is Dead," the author, Richard Thieme, revealed: "Gary spoke of his work in terms that I used for ministry. He had been mentored by a journalist who taught him that his work was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable." Excerpts from "Gary Webb is Dead" In May 2000, I {Richard Thieme} was exploring a story with some dark edges to it. I was anxious and needed encouragement to persist. I asked Gary about the consequences of his investigation and its impact on his life. Above all, was it worth it? "Yes," he said. "The CIA admitted it. I know it was the truth, and that's what kept me going. I knew I was right. He added, "My eyes were wide open. I knew what I was getting into. My kids suffered but I had the paper behind me - I thought." After his paper withdrew its support, he drew on the energy of people who knew the truth of the streets. "Support came from all sorts of places," he said. "Especially African Americans." And his wife? "She was OK with it," he laughed. "She was used to me getting death threats." (end of excerpts) (http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1214-32.htm) Where Angels Fear to Tread In a 2004 BBC interview titled: "Voters' views: Gary Webb," (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3743580.stm) Webb described himself as as an "author and a responsible anarchist" who, by the way, didn't vote. In other words, Gary had been forced to discard the comforting illusions most of us irrationally continue to harbor, while obsessively clinging to false notions of America as an exemplary, democratic republic with a "free press." It should be clear to most that at the time of his death Gary Webb had evolved into a high profile dissident, a full fledged "enemy of the state." Although it's true Webb wasn't the first journalist to uncover the CIA's extensive involvement in drug trafficking, he was the first mainstream journalist to uncover and publish his well documented findings in a major USA newspaper, revealing to the general public that the CIA's covert participation in drug trafficking had come home to roost in America. Prior to Webb's "Dark Alliance" series there had been some coverage of the Contra drug story. In the beginning stages of researching "Dark Alliance", Webb had a conversation with Jack Blum, the "Washington D.C. attorney who headed the "Kerry investigation" (Dark Alliance p. 14-15). Blum reminded Webb that Associated Press reporters, Robert Parry and Brian Barger had covered the Contra drug story - " but they'd run into the same problems. Their stories were either trashed or ignored." (Dark Alliance p15). Speaking of Kerry, Webb comments that back in 1987-1988 the Contra Cocaine issue surfaced with a vengeance when a Congressional investigation chaired by Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts had "uncovered direct links between the drug dealers and the Contras." Webb explicates, "Kerry and his staff had taken videotaped depositions from Contra leaders who acknowledged receiving drug profits, with the apparent knowledge of the CIA." (Dark Alliance p.14) Shortly after his conversation with Blum, Webb contacted Parry to get Parry's take on his unique story angle: the Contra, cocaine LA. connection. Webb reached him by phone. Parry admitted that as far as he knew Webb had stumbled across a fresh story angle, and he explained that the scope of his {Parry} Contra cocaine investigation had pretty much been limited to the "Costa Rica end of things." Webb pressed Parry for any advice or guidance he could offer him since Webb had never reported on a story like this before. Prophetically, like an old gypsy fortune teller, Parry warned Webb that his pursuit of the Contra cocaine story would most likely expose Webb to dangerous, dark undercurrents of power and deception. Parry proceeded to illustrate his prediction with a personally painful cautionary tale that Webb reconstructs in "Dark Alliance." Parry excerpt: There was a short silence on the other end of the phone. "How well do you get along with your editors?" Parry finally asked. (Webb) "Fine. Why do you ask?" "Well when Brian and I were doing these stories we got our brains beat out." Parry sighed. "People from the adminstration were calling our editors, telling them we were crazy, that our sources were no good, that we didn't know what we were writing about. The Justice Department was putting out false press releases saying there was nothing to this, that they'd investigated and could find no evidence. We were being attacked in the Washington Times. The rest of the Washington press corps sort of pooh-poohed the whole thing, and no one else would touch it. So we ended up being out there all by ourselves, and eventually our editors backed away completely, and I ended-up quitting the AP. It was probably the most difficult time of my career." (Dark Alliance p.15) (end of excerpt) Another Bad Omen Ainsworth excerpt: Webb tracked down Dennis Ainsworth, a San Franscisco Contra supporter who had been interviewed by the FBI back in 1987. Here's what Ainsworth bluntly told Webb: "Nobody in Washington wanted to look at this. Republican, Democrat, nobody. They wanted this story buried and anyone who looked any deeper into it go buried along with it, " Ainsworth said. "You're bringing up a very old nightmare. You have no idea what your touching on here, Gary, No idea at all." "I think I've got a pretty good idea," I {Webb} said. "Believe me, " he {Ainsworth} said patiently, "you don't understand." I almost got killed. I had friends in Central America who were killed. There was a Mexican Reporter who was looking into one end of this, and he wound up dead. So don't pretend you know." (Dark Alliance p.17) (end of excerpt) Of course, as we all know Webb listened politely and continued undaunted on "the road less travelled." The Mighty Wurlitzer (CIA term for controlled media apparatus) and Plutocracy Former CIA Director William Colby bragged that the CIA "owns everyone of any major significance in the major media." http://www.alexconstantine.50megs.com/the_cia_and.html

(MOCKINGBIRD - The Subversion Of The Free Press By The CIA) Plutocratic Elite Owned Media And this from the American Free Press: "In the old Soviet Union, the government controlled the media. Not a word of substance could be published without prior approval from the Bolshevik commissars. Today, in the United States, the situation is starkly similar. But most Americans don't even know it." "In the United States today, it is a select handful of super-rich families and tightly-knit financial interests-a plutocratic elite-who own the Big Media and who control the government through their ownership of that media. . . ." "Every single one of the major media outlets is controlled by this powerful interlocking combine." "ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune-even such "regional" giants as The New Orleans Times-Picayune, The Miami Herald, The San Diego Herald-Tribune. . . . The list goes on and on." "The so-called "mainstream" media is very much a "closed shop" and only those willing to do the bidding of the global power elite need apply. Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather and Peter Jennings and other puppets are just the public faces that the American people see." (end of excerpts) http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/about_us.html Call me naive or hopelessly romantic, but I don't think Gary Webb was pining to be a mainstream Poodle reporter for the global elite. He had long ago disqualified himself from the corporate brand of cowed, careerist, narcissistic, and mediocre drivel that impersonates as authentic journalism. Those in the know understood that Webb's courage, integrity, and investigative prowess, as illustrated by the "Dark Alliance" series, posed a formidable threat to the invisible power structure, the fascist global network behind the scenes that controls the USA solely to enhance their bottom line and to advance their neo-feudal, globalization agenda at great expense to the American people and the entire world, albeit unknown to most. So, do you really believe Webb killed himself because he couldn't get another job at major newspaper? Webb stated during a January 19,1999 Q & A session: "AND I'M PUTTING TOGETHER ANOTHER BOOK PROPOSAL, AND A COUPLE OF OTHER THINGS. I'M NOT GOING TO WORK FOR NEWSPAPERS ANYMORE. I LEARNED MY LESSON." Besides I can't imagine Webb didn't know that he was persona non grata as far as mainstream, investigative reporting was concerned. http://www.parascope.com/mx/articles/garywebb/garyWebbSpeaks.htm Myth of the Free Press Webb's comment: "Do we have a free press today? Sure. It's free to report all the sex scandals, all the stock market news, [and] every new health fad that comes down the pike. But when it comes to the real down and dirty stuff, stories like Tailwind, the October Surprise, the El Mozote massacre, corporate corruption, or CIA involvement in drug trafficking -- that's where we begin to see the limits of our freedoms. In today's media environment, sadly, such stories are not even open for discussion." (from the book "Into the Buzzsaw" edited by Kristina Borjesson) Paradise found following your bliss Webb: " In seventeen years of doing this, nothing bad had happened to me. I was never fired or threatened with dismissalif I kept looking under rocks I was winning awards, getting raises, lecturing college classes, appearing on TV shows, So how could I possibly agree with people who were claiming the system didn't work, that it was steered by powerful special interests and corporations, and existed to protect the power elite? Hell, the system worked just fine, as (far as) I could tell" Paradise lost following your bliss Webb continues, "... And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I'd enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. It turned out to have nothing to do with it. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress." (Webb, 'The Mighty Wurlitzer Plays On', in Kristina Borjesson, ed., Into The Buzzsaw - Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, Prometheus, 2002, pp.296-7) Gary Webb's First Typewriter HUMBLE START Gary Webb was born August 31, 1955 into a conservative, Catholic military family (his father was a Marine) in Corona, California. He had only one sibling a younger brother: Kurt. After Gary's father retired from the Marines he found work as a security guard in Indiana. So the family relocated to a blue collar neighborhood in Indianapolis. That's when Gary began writing editorials for his school newspaper. It was at the tender age of around 15 that Webb discovered the truth behind the cliched saying " the pen is mightier than the sword" along with his lifelong love of controversy and truth telling. BACK TO THE FUTURE Webb shares an episode from his younger days that reveals his initiation into the warrior writer caste, while speaking to a live audience (approximately 300) in Eugene, Oregon on January 16, 1999 : Gary recalled: "I think I was fifteen (1970 or 1971), I was working for my high school paper, and I was writing editorials. This sounds silly now that I think about it, but I had written an editorial against the drill team that we had for the high school games, for the football gamesthey thought it was a cool idea to dress women up in military uniforms and send them out there to twirl rifles and battle flags at halftime. And I thought it was sort of outrageous and I wrote an editorial saying I thought it was one of the silliest things I'd ever seen..." The editorial caused a brouhaha with the drill team girls who angrily demanded an apology. Naturally Gary refused even after a face to face meeting with the disgruntled ladies. Even after being threatened Gary stood his ground. "And my newspaper advisor called me the next day and said, "Gosh, that editorial you wrote has really prompted a response." And I said, "Great, that's the idea, isn't it?" And she said, "Well, it's not so great, they want you to apologize for it." [Laughter from the audience.] I said, "Apologize for what?" And she said, "Well, the girls were very offended." And I said, "Well, I'm not apologizing because they don't want my opinion. You'll have to come up with a better reason than that." And she said, "Well, if you don't apologize, we're not going to let you into Quill & Scroll," which is the high school journalism society. And I said, "Well, I don't want to be in that organization if I have to apologize to get into it." [More laughter from the audience, scattered applause.] Webb's adamant refusal to apologize, under intense peer pressure, to the the girls drill team foreshadowed his refusal decades later to recant, under even more intense pressure, for exposing the truth about the CIA, Contras, and crack/cocaine epidemic with his 1996 "Dark Alliance" series as an investigative journalist for the San Jose Mercury Newspaper. Webb's anecdotal story clearly demonstrates that his core career values never wavered, nor did his stubborn refusal to bow down to authoritative and politically correct dogma, regardless of the consequences. Not only did Gary stand by his "Dark Alliance" series while at the San Jose Mercury, he eventually went a step further. After having been roundly criticized and eventually ostracized by virtually all the mainstream media pundits, his own newspaper turned against him, underscored by his editor's public denouncement of the series. As a result, Webb was forced to resign from the San Jose Mercury. On his own, Webb expanded his 3 part "Dark Alliance" series into a 500 page plus book, his tour de force : "Dark Alliance", published in 1998. There have been reports from reliable sources that, prior to his death, Webb had uncovered even more material related to his original "Dark Alliance'" investigations, and that he was in the process of completing another book about drug trafficking and the CIA. I believe the primary motive behind Webb's likely murder was to stop him from publishing his next investigative expose'. TRANSFORMING ADVERSITY INTO SUCCESS After High School (1978-1979) Webb enrolled in Northern Kentucky University as a journalism major. He worked on the staff of the "Northern," the school newspaper. Unfortunately, he was forced by circumstances, specifically due to his father's skipping out on the family, to leave college early in order to help support his mother and younger brother, Kurt. At the time, Gary was living with his girlfriend and former high school sweetheart, Sue Bell. They were living in her parent's basement. Not surprisingly, Gary had a writing gig, at the time, reporting on the rock n' roll beat for a local, weekly rag. Shortly thereafter, Gary and Sue were married in a Unitarian Service. She was just 21 and he was 24. Together they went on to raise three children, two sons, Ian and Eric; and a daughter, Christine. Their marriage lasted an unbelievable, by todays standards, 21 years. Until Sue Bell divorced Webb in 2000. Gary Webb's career track from the beginning was silky smooth, straight forward, and stunning. His first major career break was landing a job at the Kentucky Post. Early on Webb earned a reputation as an indefatigable researcher who dispensed truth and exposed corruption in a sincere effort to help restore the natural order of good triumphing over evil. Webb's next big break was working as a statehouse correspondent for the Cleveland Plain Dealer where he was nicknamed "the Carpenter", based on his superior ability to nail the facts down. Then circa 1987, Gary hit the big one, a staff position at the San Jose Mercury News, considered one of the top ten daily newspapers in the country. The rest is history, as they say. http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3874 http://www.narconews.com/Issue29/article657.html Some of Gary Webb's Many Prestigious Awards: * (1997) Media Hero Award, from the 2nd Annual Media & Democracy Congress. * (1996) Journalist of the Year, Bay Area Society of Professional Journalists. * (1994) H.L. Mencken Award, by The Free Press Association for the series in the San Jose Mercury News on abuses in the state of California's drug asset forfeiture program. * (1990) Pulitzer Prize, in General News Reporting, awarded to the Staff of the San Jose Mercury News for its detailed coverage of the October 17, 1989, Bay Area earthquake and its aftermath. Webb worked with a team of 6 reporters including himself, on the Loma Prieta earthquake. * (1980) Investigative Reporters and Editors Award (IRE), for co-authoring a 17-part series at the Kentucky Post in Covington, KY with Tom Scheffey on organized crime in the American coal industry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Webb BACK STORY http://www.narconews.com/darkalliance/ Introduction to the original Dark Alliance website, August, 1996: "For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found. "This drug network opened 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." Note: For those not familiar with the "Dark Alliance" series you can read it here: http://www.narconews.com/darkalliance/drugs/start.htm The "Dark Alliance" series turned into an explosive, lightning rod of intense controversy "Protesters demonstrated at CIA headquarters. The Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP and comedian and activist Dick Gregory demanded an explanation from the CIA, whose spokesman declared the idea of the agency condoning drug operations "ludicrous". http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3874 "It was remarkable to think journalism could have this kind of effect on people," he said, "that people were out marching in the streets because of something you'd written." -Webb (as quoted in the L.A. Times) "The day I will never forget was the day he told me about this link between cocaine traffickers and the crack epidemic of the '80s and the CIA's organized, right wing, Contra army of that era," Sue Bell, Gary's wife at the time said. "He was as amazed as all of us when he discovered the link. He threw himself into the story, doing what he loved to do best, exposing the truth." Sue Bell (http://www.narconews.com/Issue35/article1154.html) The unexpected public reaction was the result of a year long investigative effort by Webb while working for the San Jose Mercury News in 1995 and 1996, culminating in the three-part expose' called the "Dark Alliance Series." Webb had uncovered the dark alliance between the CIA, the Nicaraguan Contras and the etiology of the 80's crack, cocaine epidemic in America that initially manifested in and devastated California's South-Central Los Angeles African American community. "The 20,000-word investigative series claimed that Nicaraguan drug traffickers based in San Francisco had sold tons of cocaine in Los Angeles ghettos during the 1980s and used the profits to fund the CIA-supported Nicaraguan Contras. Webb never accused the CIA of aiding the drug dealers, but he implied that the Agency was aware of the transactions." http://www.blogofdeath.com/archives/2004_12.html At first the newspaper version of the story was pretty much ignored by the mainstream national press, "a deafening silence" prevailed. Their stance seemed to be characterized by a cautious wait and see attitude, or first ignore the story then attack if need be. Isn't it conceivable that the public's interest in the story was carefully monitored by the establishment? Then, armed with the public's reaction, and given the time necessary, Webb's series could be dissected and its weakest points found and attacked, enabling the power elite to discredit the entire story. That is the perfect way to cast aspersions on the entire piece's unassailable basic premise while pretending to be objective. The Dark Alliance series had also been posted on the Mercury News website, where like a volcano, the story eventually exploded across America and the world via the internet. Its aftershocks rumbled through the mainstream media. It had quickly become a virtual cause celebre; in only a matter of weeks the website was receiving up to 3.1 million hits in one day! Webb did enjoy a brief period of support, celebrity, and positive feedback. But that was short lived, and soon replaced by a devastating public crucible. The CIA 's "Mighty Wurlitizer" and its media mouthpieces had begun impugning the truth that Webb had so thoroughly documented. In November of 1996, John Deutch, the director of the CIA at the time made an unprecedented appearance at a town hall meeting in Watts to denounce the allegations in Webb's Dark Alliance series and to publicy disavow the CIA's alleged connection to drug trafficking by the Contras and the ensuing crack explosion. ( http://www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=3874) Ministry of Truth The "Dark Alliance" series, along with Webb, was now in the cross hairs of the Mighty Wurlitzer, the CIA's version of The Ministry of Truth (from Orwell's 1984). Webb's series had to be neutralized in order to maintain the matrix like status quo. Decades of carefully constructed government propaganda and Tavistock inspired social engineering concerning the role of the CIA and the phony war on drugs were suddenly in jeopardy. So within two months of publication, the CIA infested American Press (Mighty Wurlitzer) unfairly launched an unprecedented "piling on" and brutally attacked Webb's "Dark Alliance"series en masse. Webb was blind-sided. He undeservedly found himself the recipient of a growing chorus of unfounded and malicious attacks on his journalistic integrity and impeccable investigation. The loudest voices in the chorus were from the mainstream, CIA riddled big troika: L.A. Times, Washington Post and New York Times. This, of course, was part of a well orchestrated plan initiated by the secret government's "Ministry of Truth", designed to professionally assassinate Webb by questioning his journalistic integrity, thereby casting doubt in the general public's mind regarding the veracity of his charges. This campaign was an effort to quickly derail the embarrassing revelations that Webb's "Dark Alliance"Series had so unabashedly and adroitly exposed. But, fortunately the power elite and their mainstream whore media mouthpieces failed to conclusively discredit Webb's expose. "Dark Alliance" had already inspired a groundswell of grass roots outrage, especially among African Americans, which in turn led to no less than three "official" federal inquiries: two by the CIA and one by the Justice Department. U. S. CONGRESSWOMAN MAXINE WATERS LEADS THE CHARGE The Congresswoman for South-Central Los Angeles, Maxine Waters led the charge. In an August 30th, 1996 letter to Attorney General Janet Reno she demanded an independent investigation of the CIA's alleged role in cocaine trafficking. She wrote, "As a U.S. Representative of South-Central Los Angeles, one of the communities most ravaged by crack cocaine, I have a keen desire to get answers to the many questions that have been raised by the San Jose Mercury News expose. As you know, in the late 1980s, Congress held extensive hearings on the connection between foreign policy, narcotics, and law enforcement. Those hearings produced damning evidence of wrongdoing. However, due to continual obstruction, from many different sources -- including federal law enforcement agencies -- those hearings were not able to establish as precise a trail of guilt as the recent San Jose Mercury News article has, at least as it pertains to the origin of the crack cocaine trade in the U.S." (...) "The impact and the implications of the Meneses/Blandon/Ross Contra CIA crack cocaine connection cannot be understated. We all have an obligation to get to the very bottom of the origin, development, and implementation of this seedy enterprise." http://www.narconews.com/darkalliance/drugs/library/32.htm Gary Webb's painstaking investigation and the incindiary conclusions he drew from it were based mostly on public records, as detailed in the "notes on sources" section in "Dark Alliance", including: undercover audio tapes, declassified government documents from the CIA, DEA, FBI, L.A. Sheriff's Department, files from the Iran-Contra investigation, eyewitness accounts, and numerous court records. This is why Webb was able to authortatively substantiate in stunning detail the methodology employed by the "secret government" to finance the Contras via large shipments of cocaine that were flown from Columbia into California and then sold to the locals, who in turn converted the cocaine into the the lucrative, more affordable and more addictive substance known as crack cocaine. Crack was the "McDonald-ization" of cocaine. Webb explained, "The reason crack became so popular in South Central and elsewhere was that it only cost a few bucks to become a customer. Crack normally sold in $25 hits, but you could find tiny rocks for as little as $5. (Dark Alliance, p.142) Amazingly to this day, Webb's critics and detractors (mainstream media and CIA) insist that Webb's "Dark Alliance" premise was based more on speculative leaps of logic than rock solid evidentiary reasoning. On the other hand, many of us who have researched the CIA's drug running history felt that Webb's conclusions, while accurate and solidly based on his evidence, seemed conservative. It's likely that to many Americans the story was tabloid sensationalism, like something one reads from the National Enquirer while waiting in a supermarket checkout line. KEY SOURCE FOR WEBB'S "DARK ALLIANCE" SERIES "Freeway" Ricky Ross, was the "leader of South Central's first major crack distribution ring. In the space of four years Ross went from selling fractions of an ounce to shipping multimillion-dollar cocaine shipments across America. Convicted of cocaine trafficking in 1996, he is currently serving life without the possibility of parole." ( Dark Alliance, xx) "You know how some people feel that God put them down here to be a preacher? I felt that He had put me down [here] to be the cocaine man.''- Rickey Ross And the enormous drug profits generated by crack were used by street gangs such as the Cryps and the Bloods to not only subsidize and enrich themselves, but also to expand their territory and their burgeoning drug business. In an effort to increase their profit margins even more, the local drug dealers set up assembly line crack manufacturing plants in their neighborhood owned "cook houses." As reported by Rachel's Weekly, "Ross had 5 "cook houses" turning cocaine into crack. A former crack dealer described for the MERCURY NEWS one of Ross's cook houses where huge steel vats of cocaine were being stirred with canoe paddles atop restaurant-sized gas ranges. At his recent drug trial, Ross testified that it was not unusual to take in between $2 and $3 million in one day. "Our biggest problem had got to be counting the money," Ross told the court. http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/secret_war.html Additionally, the Contra/CIA black-op agents also sold guns to these same street gangs along with tons of cocaine. Quite an explosive cocktail guaranteed to cause maximum harm to the many, while providing maximum profits for the few. Presumably, this elaborate CIA black operation was contrived to circumvent the Boland Amendment. Rachel's weekly reported: "After passage of the Boland amendment, the Contras desperately needed a new source of funds." This was before Oliver North set up his Iran connection for arms sales to divert money from those sales to the Contras. According to a year-long investigation by the SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS based on court records, recently declassified documents, undercover audio tapes, and files retrieved via the Freedom of Information Act, the FDN ((Nicaraguan Democratic Forces a.k.a Contras) solved its problem by opening the first pipeline from the Colombian cocaine cartels to black gangs -- the Crips and the Bloods -- on the streets of Los Angeles."