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Reporter's Notebook: Randall White

Gary Webb saga continues

Posted by Randall White - April 8, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Just a heads up here… The East Bay Express — long known for its subversion of progressive organizations — came up on the radar this week with the following exchange in the Letters section:

The Cocaine Importing Agency

I found your article to be quite readable and informative. But I take issue on page 21 when you dismiss the idea that the CIA would intentionally spread crack as a "spurious conspiracy theory." There's a lot of documentation that points to it being conspiracy fact, yet you give no reason why you think the allegation is without merit.

A good place to find out why so many people call it the Cocaine Importing Agency is here: http://www.disinfo.com/archive/pages/dossier/id38/ pg1/index.html

Also, North Korea and Mexico are supposedly behind the toxic manufacturing of methamphetamine, but not Ecstasy?

Niles Dolbeare, Point Richmond

EDITOR'S NOTE
The clause you are objecting to was inserted by Express Editor Stephen Buel, who worked at the San Jose Mercury News when it published the stories that first made this assertion. While the Merc proved that two men who supplied cocaine to an LA drug dealer directed some portion of their proceeds to the CIA-backed Contra Rebels, the insinuation that this constituted a government-orchestrated plan to unleash crack in Black America was and still is a "spurious conspiracy theory." It is sad that this notion still lives on despite the utter lack of evidence offered by the Merc's greatly flawed series.
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/Issues/2006-04-05/ne ws/letters.html

The letter was in response to the following quote:

Rosenbaum had always thought of Ecstasy as a sensual, lovey-dovey drug -- nothing like the hardcore, speed-oriented substance callers were describing that night. It seemed as if everyone had a gripping personal testimonial about "somebody who knew somebody who knew somebody who took that stuff and went on a rampage." People spoke of friends who'd "fallen victim to the epidemic." One person who was interviewed asserted: "I'm sure that it got to do with the government flooding our community and it being coordinated," echoing the spurious conspiracy theory that suggests the CIA intentionally spread crack cocaine across black America via Los Angeles.
http://www.eastbayexpress.com/Issues/2006-03-15/ne ws/feature_3.html

I got five bucks that sez that the last sentence was entirely fabricated by Steven Buel. The powers that be are still trying to pretend that the Iran-Contra-Cocaine Scandal never happened.

RAW

About Randall White

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Comments

the limits of assessing intent

Submitted April 9, 2006 - 10:24 pm by Nick Cooper
The level of severity of a crime in our society is often linked to this idea of "intent" which I find very questionable.  If you ask people why they did something, they may well be able to come up with an answer.  But humans aren't computers, the act under the influence of a sum of factors which don't add up to intent.  Things really get crazy when you apply intent to a large organization, and especially to a secretive organization that doesn't have open communication within itself.  Collective intent is a pretty sketchy concept.

It doesn't matter to the victims for others to determine that a government body did or didn't know what it was doing when it committed atrocities.

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