During a period when drug coverage reached hysterical proportions, when Oliver North made news by lecturing campus audiences on the evils of drugs and pledging to do anti-drug work in serving out his criminal sentence of hours of community service, most media could not find space to mention the Costa Rica bannings.
Even when President Bush, 17 other heads of state, and many dozens of US reporters journeyed to Costa Rica in October to celebrate " years of democracy," the story failed to attractinterest. It wasn't for lack of knowledge; FAIR provided information about developments in the case to many national media who'd already received the original AP story. Journalists offered no real answers. Typical was the response from Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, who stated, "Just because a congressional commission in Costa Rica says something, doesn't mean it's true.
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We aren't ruling on whether it's true or not. You might also ask your local media. Final action on the bannings by Costa Rica's congress is expected in February. Predictably, she slammed the book, whose central thesis is that the U. In the fall of , Time assigned a staff reporter to assemble any evidence that the Oliver North network supplying guns to the contras was also bringing cocaine into the U. The reporter found serious evidence, and wrote it up.
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As the former Time reporter explained to Extra! If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you'd have no trouble getting it in the magazine. The story of the year? Not according to the New York Times, which has so far ignored the Mercury News' well-documented revelations.
The major TV networks gave it no coverage. But there is little sign that the expose has prompted much digging from other reporters--or much outrage on the nation's editorial pages. Webb's evidence is as persuasive as his conclusions are disturbing. Exhibit A is Oscar Danilo Blandon, a cocaine trafficker and federal informant who told a federal courtroom that " whatever we were running in L.
Sheriff's Department affidavit, a federal parole report, an FBI memo and other official documents. Webb connects Blandon and Norwin Meneses, his boss in the operation, to top contra leaders like Enrique Bermudez and Adolfo Calero "There is a saying that the ends justify the means," Blandon testified.
Bermudez told us in Honduras, OK? But even more startling are the revelations about Blandon's distributor, "Freeway" Ricky Donnell Ross. Ross was no minor drug pusher, but the main supplier of crack for the Crips and Bloods gangs in L. Ross became the dominant supplier in L. Would it have assumed the same epidemic proportions?
In the wake of the Mercury News series, these are open questions--questions that reporters at every major news outlet ought to be trying to answer.
But most major news outlets seem prepared to let the new evidence get thrown away with yesterday's newspapers--the same approach they have taken to past revelations of the contras' involvement in cocaine trafficking. The New York Times, the most powerful paper in the U. The message of these articles was direct, and dishonest: "Investigators, including reporters from major news outlets, have tried without success to find proof of. The "reporters from major news outlets" couldn't have been trying very hard: The Reagan State Department itself acknowledged a year earlier that at least one contra leader had received money and warplanes from a Columbian drug trafficker.
But in a interview, the Times' Schneider revealed that he had more on his mind than journalism when he wrote two of the dismissive stories. But the New York Times still seems to be more worried about shattering republicsthan reporting the truth.
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Postscript: Since the publication of this Extra! The Mercury has refuted some of the other papers' allegations on their website. To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies--all this is indispensably necessary.
But in early autumn, near silence gave way to a roar from the country's three most influential urban dailies--the Washington Post, New York Times and Los Angeles Times--which is still reverberating in the national media's echo chamber. None of the article's dozen paragraphs included any suggestion that the CIA might be a dubious touchstone for veracity. The notion that the CIA's internal probe held a key to unlocking the story's mysteries was to be oft-repeated.
Yet the uproar over the Mercury News series, written by reporter Gary Webb, continued to grow. Denials from the CIA carried little weight with much of the public, particularly African-Americans outraged by the series. Protests mounted in cities from Los Angeles to Washington, and members of the Black Congressional Caucus demanded federal investigations. Times, all of which published lengthy news articles blasting the Mercury News series.
In the process, a number of recurrent debunking themes quickly gained the status of media truisms. Other news organizations were not able to confirm the plot. Still, the rumor mill continued to grind, seemingly unstoppable. Deutch and investigators for several major newspapers have found no evidence to support the conspiracy theory that grew out of a series in the San Jose Mercury News suggesting a CIA role in the spread of crack in America's inner cities.
To a notable degree, the establishment papers relied for their debunking of the Mercury News on the CIA's own obligatory denials. Blandon before he appeared as a central figure in the series in the Mercury News. The Los Angeles Times was on the same track in its lengthy three-day series.
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One of the officials quoted in support of the claim that the CIA had drug-free hands was Vincent Cannistraro--identified by the newspaper only as a "former CIA official. Times could spare none of the article's several thousand words to let readers know--Cannistraro was in charge of the CIA's contra activities during the early s.
If the L. Times had been willing to share such relevant details, it would have provided readers with a much better basis for evaluating Cannistraro's testimonial to CIA integrity: "There's no tendency to turn a blind eye to drug trafficking.
It's too sensitive. It's not a fine line.
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It's not a shaded area where you can turn away from the rules. Times was following in the footsteps of less august media outlets that used a deceptively identified Cannistraro to attack the Mercury News series. These charges are completely illogical. Whose Army? Judging the Mercury News series invalid, the preeminent denouncers frequently berated the newspaper for failing to prove what Webb never claimed.
The Washington Post, for instance, devoted paragraph after paragraph of its Oct.
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Many critics took issue with Webb's references to the contras as "the CIA's army. The army was formed at the instigation of the CIA, its leaders were selected by and received salaries from the agency, and CIA officers controlled day-to-day battlefield strategies. The CIA identifies highly placed foreign hirelings not as 'agents' but as 'assets.
Dubious Debunkings The most potentially damaging charge made by the establishment papers is that Webb greatly exaggerated the amount of crack profits going to the contras, which he reported as being "millions" of dollars. Yet the Mercury News' higher estimates are better sourced than the debunkers' low numbers. In contrast to the Mercury News--which had drawn on sworn grand jury and court testimony to calculate that millions of crack dollars flowed to the contras--the Post and L. In the affidavit, three confidential informants said that Blandon was still sending money to the contras.
Ross was indeed a crack kingpin, he was one of many. Ross now was one of many "interchangeable characters," who was "dwarfed" by other dealers.