THE EXPERT WITNESS RADIO SHOW
WBAI  99.5 FM
New York City, New York
Tuesdays  7-8pm
212-209 2800  - Voice  2970

Host:  Michael Levine, 25 year veteran federal agent
and author of NY Times best seller DEEP COVER, (soon to be a movie)
THE BIG WHITE LIE and (now in paperback) TRIANGLE OF DEATH.

Web Sites:  www.radio4all.org/expert


IS ANYONE APOLOGIZING TO GARY WEBB?
by
Michael Levine

Gary Webb, just in case you've already forgotten him, was
the journali st 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 age nt 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, wan dering 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, do es 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 wh ether 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.