Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion by Gary Webb
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Book Reviews of Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
Book Review: Provocative and compelling...
Summary: 4 Stars
The book is packed with information on an intriguing and eye-opening subject matter. Gary Webb cites what appears to be legitimate references adding credibility to the story's claims. The abundance of information did become overwhelming at times. Although after completing the book I found myself thinking "Right, wrong or indifferent...It all makes perfect sense. There's nothing not to believe about it." Book Review: Very Good expose from Gary Webb
Summary: 4 Stars
Mr Webb's book here ties in with Rodney
Stich's Flying the Unfriendly Skies and
Bo Gritz troika of bokks during this era!
Book Review: Must read for all Americans
Summary: 5 Stars
Every time the news reports a homicide even remotely connected to crack (and this would include most gang related murders, even to this day..), they should mention the international crack trade and its role. This will never happen, obviously, which is why we need people like the late Gary Webb in this country.
My only problem with the book, it goes into detail a bit too extensive for my attention span. But there's an obvious reason for this; the book is primarily written to back up his news story in which the mainstream press vilified him for, accusing him of unsubstantiated claims. The full circle detail is necessary. Fortunately, Webb is a good enough writer where even someone with no more than a high school education, like myself, can hang in there and read the entire book without resorting to skimming over paragraphs. Just when I start to say to myself, "alright, got it, we know these guys are contras, we know they're dope runners...what now?", the question is seemingly answered in the following paragraph. I don't know if a writer could have done a better job balancing the act of exhausting resources and laying all of them into full detail and making the book understandable to a lay person like me.
One of the most important books ever written on government corruption and its effect on it's citizenry. As you're reading this review, crack cocaine is still eating American inner cities alive. Rest in Peace, Gary Webb. And may your courageous reporting echo through this country as long as poor American communities suffer from this pandemic.
Book Review: Dark Alliance
Summary: 5 Stars
This book is outstanding!It's a shame that such a talented investigative
journalist had to lose his life because of it's content.
Book Review: How the "National Security State" Works When "We the People" are not "minding the store."
Summary: 5 Stars
In this rather mind-boggling expose, award winning reporter, Gary Webb, who unfortunately was forced to commit himself to suicide, eventually gave his life to this cause, dots all of the "I's" and crosses all of the "T's" in this Alice in Wonderland journey deep into the bowels of the American national security run state apparatus. The reader gets a healthy dose of how bad a democracy can get when no one is "minding the National Security State." In graphic form, Webb outlines how it can happen that an administration that has declared "war on drugs" can actually end up in bed with the likes of Pablo Escobar, Manuel Noreiga, and the Ochoa brothers.
Spread out before us in excruciating and embarrassing (if not often tedious) details is a picture of what can happen when a "twisted set of means" (using the proceeds of drug sales to finance an ill-advised counterinsurgency) are put to "questionable ideological ends" (overthrowing a Marxist run government to return the much hated Somocitas to power). The book demonstrates that when this illicit "means-end" pair, are allowed to operate under the cover of secrecy; behind the shield of "plausible deniability;" and under the guise of sensible national security policy, it can literally suck all of the oxygen out of a democracy.
In an effort to return the brutal and much hated Somoza regime back to power, by supporting the remnants and holdovers of that deposed regime (a ragtag bunch of crooks, thieves, drug traffickers and murders if there ever was one), reassembled as the Nicaraguan "Contras." The "Just say no to drugs" Reagan administration, ended up in bed with the worse drug traffickers of our times.
But if being in bed with the most notorious drug traffickers in the world was not bad enough, the worse aspect of this foreign policy disaster was sacrificing a whole generation of America's inner city youth to a death sentence as a result of a nation awash in an ocean of "crack" cocaine. America intercity life will never recover from this disaster.
The Story
When the two Boland amendments, prohibiting funding for a U.S. backed "Contra army," were passed, the Reagan White House, at the suggestion of none other than Colonel Oliver North himself, sought to find financing by other more novel means; to wit: North suggested that since various national security agencies were already keeping close tabs on the drug traffickers, why not allow the drug cartels free access to our "inner city drug market," in exchange for them plowing back some of their drug profits into financing the "Contra" army? When this suggestion was made in a high level meeting, most attendees were surprised and embarrassed for North for having made such a stupid idea. However, a new clever strategy had just been born, and the wheels of the national security state began to turn. According to the book (confirmed only by Escobar himself) the then Vice President Bush met with Pablo Escobar personally and "cut the deal" that led to the "crack explosion" of the mid-80s.
The Rest of the Story
Although millions of dollars in weapons and aid from drug proceeds did eventually reach the "Contras," never was there a respectable force fielded sufficient to challenge the Sandinistas. However, in the process of destroying a whole generation of black inner city youth, fueling an internecine war between ghetto street gangs, erecting a string of more than ten thousand crack houses across the nation, and filling up the jails, adoption centers and mental hospitals, the "Contra fiasco" did make a handful of drug dealers such as LA's cocaine Kingpin "Freeway Ricky Ross, rich.
The only drawback to the book is that because of the gravity and nature of the charges against the Reagan administration, it was imperative that every detail be well documented. The main resources are court records retrieved from the many indictments, etc. As a result, getting through the book is slow and tedious. But it is well worth the extra time.