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Title: Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press by Alexander Cockburn, Jeffrey St. Clair, Jeffrey St Clair ISBN: 1-85984-258-5 Publisher: Verso Books Pub. Date: October, 1999 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.36 (33 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: It¿s the Liberal Media, Stupid!
Comment: First published in 1998, "Whiteout" is a meticulously documented account of the CIA's decades long role as an international drug peddler and of the surprising support it received in this capacity from America's purportedly liberal press. Authors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair provide a detailed history of the CIA's drug business and its alliance with organized crime around the globe beginning with its precursor organizations in World War II (Naval Intelligence and the Office of Strategic Services) through the mid nineties.
While the authors span the CIA's fifty-year history of assassination, gruesome torture, and collaboration with evil figures such as drug lords and Nazi war criminals, the principle villain in this book is actually the American liberal press and not the agency itself. To be sure the agency has done some horrific things, but to anyone who has read their history, little of this is new or surprising and believers in "realpolitik" may even find them justifiable according to America's national interest. The latter point is often shallow and difficult to hold up under scrutiny but probably not worth examining here. Perhaps the only readers who'll find this book's portrayal of the CIA offensive are those whose view of the agency has been formed by James Bond movies and popular television shows such as "JAG", "Alias", and "The Agency". Sorry to burst your bubble folks, but don't worry, the tooth fairy isn't real either.
The centerpiece of whiteout is veteran San Jose journalist, Gary Webb who in 1996 broke the story that:
"For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the US Central Intelligence Agency."
Webb had stumbled on this story almost accidentally, but could verify it with irrefutable evidence including the sworn grand jury testimony of one of the drug dealers who was also on the DEA payroll, as well as DEA and FBI documentation. One of the most damning aspects of Webb's story was not so much that the CIA subverted congress by funding a secret war that the legislature had refused to, but that it knowingly-and with great indifference-launched a drug epidemic that ravaged America's inner cities with addiction, violence, and murder.
Despite such hard evidence, which the San Jose Mercury News made available on its Web site, Webb and his paper were hounded mercilessly by liberal publications such as The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. At first Webb's editor supported and encouraged him, but soon he caved in to the mounting pressure from these other publications and subsequently retracted the story. After bravely enduring an unprecedented attack on his work and professional qualifications, and after finally losing the support of his own paper, Web subsequently resigned and went on to publish his findings in book form.
Why, one might ask, would the liberal press go after one of its own instead of picking up the story and perhaps supplementing it with additional research? Cockburn and St. Clair argue that for a variety of reasons the liberal press-its reputation aside-is and always has been extraordinarily cooperative with the CIA. Several senior editors at the Washington Post, for example, make no secret of the fact that for years they have acted as agency "assets" and continue to collaborate with it to this day. Add to this the attitude of individuals such as the Washington Post's Katherine Graham who believe that most Americans are infants whose perceptions need to be managed by self appointed media parents such as herself. (Graham once stated: "We live in a dirty and dangerous world. 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 whether to print what it knows.")
Whether it collaborates directly with the government or simply takes it upon itself to manage our perceptions on its own, the press hardly serves a democratic or informative purpose in matters such as its treatment of Webb's story. And when you factor in the press's complacency regarding the three most important stories of the past few years (The attacks of September 11th, the colonization of Iraq, and the wave of corporate crimes) it becomes evident that the press is a prime contributor to the "dirty" and "dangerous" aspects of the world we live in.
Rating: 5
Summary: Unforgettable, and very important.
Comment: In Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press, authors Alex Cockburn and Jeff St Clair have synthesized a vast amount of information into an easy to read, cogent history of the CIA's involvement in the illicit trafficking of narcotics.
This unforgettable and very important book proves several things. First, that the CIA has been the world's biggest drug trafficker for the past 50 years. Second, that the major newspapers and TV networks have always known about it, but have chosen not to report it, under the aegis of national security. Third, that the end result of CIA drug dealing and the attendant media "whiteout" is the pacification of minority communities in America. And last but not least, Whiteout proves that when independent journalists like Gary Webb report the truth, they are inevitably smeared by the same powerful forces that put this unjust system into motion.
Whiteout is a volatile book and is sure to arouse the wrath of both Big Media and Big Brother. But it has been meticuously researched, and it is so well written that the case it makes is beyond any reasonable doubt. Authors Cockburn and St Clair are to be commended for their courage in providing such a valuable public service. Five stars for covering all the bases.
Rating: 4
Summary: an important book
Comment: a concise, dense, distilled synthesis representing the cumulative result of almost sixty years of investigation and research. an important book to be sure, yet the narrative suffers somewhat due to the ambitious all-encompassing scope of the material.
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Title: Dark Alliance : The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion by Gary Webb ISBN: 1888363681 Publisher: Seven Stories Press Pub. Date: 15 June, 1998 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America by Peter Dale Scott, Jonathan Marshall ISBN: 0520214498 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: April, 1998 List Price(USD): $18.95 |
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Title: The Immaculate Deception: The Bush Crime Family Exposed by Russell S. Bowen ISBN: 0922356807 Publisher: America West Pub Pub. Date: May, 2001 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade by Alfred W. McCoy ISBN: 1556524838 Publisher: Lawrence Hill & Co Pub. Date: 01 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $32.95 |
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Title: Drugs, Oil, and War: The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and Indochina by Peter Dale Scott ISBN: 0742525228 Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield (Non NBN) Pub. Date: May, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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