The media's behaviors with regard to Gary Webb (and more recently the CNN producers who did a report on nerve gas used on American defectors) tell us that what is at stake is less 'censorship'/suppressing the truth than the production of 'open secrets'--what everyone knows but shouldn't bother to think much about--in part through spectacles of punishment selectively meted out to those who 'crossed the line.'
Yoshie
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Report Says CIA Knew of Contra Drug Links: Agency Continued Work with Suspects Los Angeles Times/published in Hartford Courant Saturday, July 18, 1998
WASHINGTON - The Central Intelligence Agency had indications that about 50 members of Nicaraguan rebel organizations may have been involved in narcotics trafficking during the 1980s but CIA personnel continued working with almost two dozen of the suspected figures, U.S. intelligence officials said Friday.
An internal CIA study found that none of the suspected drug traffickers were in the top leadership of the rebels known as contras and that no one in the agency aided or abetted the narcotics trade, the officials said.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, briefed reporters about the contents of a still-secret CIA report on charges that the agency turned a blind eye to drug trafficking among the contras, who fought a U.S. financed war against Nicaragua's leftist government from 1981-1989.
"In some cases, we knew that the people we were dealing with would not qualify as Vienna choirboys, but we dealt with them nonetheless because of the value they brought," one official said. "In other cases, the allegations appear simply to have dropped through cracks in the bureaucracy."
This week's report by the CIA inspector general was the second of two volumes produced in response to a 1996 series of articles in the San Jose Mercury-News alleging that the contras, with support from the U.S. government, introduced crack cocaine to the black neighborhoods of South-Central Los Angeles.
The first volume of the CIA report, released publicly last year, said that he newspaper's charges were unfounded. The Mercury- News articles had touched off nationwide outrage.
The new volume did not turn up any significant new allegations of misconduct by either contras or CIA personnel, but echoed earlier findings, the officials said.
A U.S. official who had read the new report said that it largely confirmed the findings of the a 1989 Senate investigation led by Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass. ***********************************************************