March 23, 2004
Kerry on Crack
In August of 1996, presidential hopeful John Kerry wasn’t making national headlines. He was, however, surely watching the headlines while reporters foamed at the mouth over a feature just published by the San Jose Mercury News. The contentious report sought to link the CIA and the epidemic du jour, crack cocaine, tracing a trail of money from Washington to South America to Los Angeles’ ghettos. As the scandal played out over the following months, the Mercury would lose its nerve and the national press would mock, distort, and eventually bury the story. Meanwhile Senator John Kerry was busy spearheading a damning investigation into one of our government’s dirtiest secrets.
First off, you may be surprised to learn that journalist Gary Webb’s feature for the Mercury did not claim that the CIA invented and distributed crack to suppress minorities in Los Angeles. Over time, this distorted version of the story came to dominate a sensation-driven media. Average Americans had just wrapped their heads around their President’s probable role in the Iran-Contra scandal, and this new conspiracy theory was too much to take. However, John Kerry had already begun to compile evidence concurring with the actual allegations of Webb’s article, that the CIA had in fact covertly funded known drug traffickers who sold cocaine in Los Angeles to fuel the Contra war.
The accusation is complicated and bears repeating. Kerry’s Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee, established in 1986, ultimately discovered and forced the CIA to admit to the following corruptions of justice: Convicted international drug smugglers, known to the CIA as such, were given state department aid to carry supplies and ammunition to the Contra rebels. An indicted drug smuggler was given clemency on condition that he contribute $250,000 monthly to Contra factions. These traffickers, flying unfettered between the US and South America in planes purchased with US tax dollars, made their profits selling cocaine to an infamous Los Angeles crack kingpin at the height of the city’s crack epidemic.
Published in 1998, long after the San Jose Mercury News issued a partial apology for Gary Webb’s articles and after he resigned in protest, the Kerry Committee report corroborated most of Webb’s claims. Though it did not conclude conspiracy, only colossal bureaucratic bungling, the report was stymied for years. Key informants to the committee were offered sentence reductions to stop cooperating. The finished report was attacked or ignored by the US media. Newsweek called Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff." Kerry’s role in the controversy remains largely unknown to the American public even today. For a more detailed look into this facinating story, I recommend a book called "Cocaine".
Clearly, John Kerry helped uncover some nasty stuff that at best did not help his political career. But what do those actions say about Kerry the presidential candidate? Is John Kerry a maverick watchdog? Where does Kerry stand on the US “war on drugs”? Crack is now a once-was. Cocaine and the “war on drugs” are non-issues this campaign season. Americans want to know what the CIA knew about Bin Laden, not what it knew about the Contras. Yet the players behind government scandals don’t just disappear after outrage dies down and political careers are made over the course of more than one presidential election. We know John Kerry’s record. Now we can only take him at his word.
Posted by mattthew at March 23, 2004 4:41 AM
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Actually, the "war on drugs" has slightly reared its head again with the rather non-sequitur issue of steroid use in professional sports. I was kind of surprised to hear Bush talk about it so emphatically in his State of the Union. But hey, at least it's not Reefer Madness. Yet.
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