Click here to access article by Thomas Gaist from World Socialist Web Site.
Finally we get a correct interpretation of the recently released CIA document entitled "Managing a Nightmare: CIA Public Affairs and the Drug Conspiracy Story" after three weeks since The Intercept and its author Ryan Devereaux offered quite a different interpretation. The fact of this delay and that this source is the only one to provide a correct analysis of the CIA document provides further evidence of the anemic quality of today's critical journalism on the left within the US. Over many years I have found that WSWS offers the most consistently accurate interpretation of events in which the US ruling class had some involvement. However, I also have one major criticism of their coverage, but more on that later.
In my review of Devereaux's take on this CIA document, I viewed his interpretation as excessively friendly to the CIA's position with regard to the sensation caused by Gary Webb's 1996 series of articles in the San Jose Mercury which cited evidence of CIA connections to the proliferation of crack cocaine in US urban areas in the 1980s.
This phenomenon paralleled another US sponsorship of a terrorist organization known as the Contras: this time to destabilize Nicaragua's Sandinista government which threatened by a good example the Empire's domination of the region. Although CIA involvement in the latter leaked out in various media as an exchange of weapons sales to Iran to fund the Contras, it was Webb's articles that really caused a sensation in the US which supposedly was engaged in a War on Drugs. Whereas, the former was treated by US authorities as limited to some out-of-control CIA agents, the Webb's revelations created a huge scandal that had to be covered up.
But because my focus in this blog is to provide access to alternative media and their interpretations of political events, I often do not have time to examine lengthy government documents. Besides my personal life in the 1980s brought me in close contact with the core issues of this issue, and I had complete confidence in my basic understanding of the event.
I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, I managed public housing properties where crack cocaine spread like wildfire, I visited Nicaragua twice during this period and witnessed first hand the results of the Contra's terrorist activities, and I followed alternative media which gave me accurate insights about what was going on.
Thus in my commentary on Devereaux's analysis, I did not directly challenge his analysis of the CIA document by
arguing that there were plenty of other methods that US ruling
class directors could have put pressure on the media to discredit Webb's work--and
this is true. While generally accepting Devereaux's take on this CIA document, I was confident that it was far too friendly toward the activities of our ruling class to discredit Webb's investigations which the latter had only begun.
Now with this analysis by Gaist of the WSWS I felt it my duty to scan the CIA document to see whose interpretation was correct. Gaist's is correct while Devereaux's still looks suspiciously like damage control on behalf of the CIA.
Now, as to my major criticism of WSWS and their journalism, I am constantly irritated by their failure to include links to relevant documents. This is typical of websites directors who do not want readers to wander onto other websites by providing links. This is disrespectful of the intelligence of readers, and is very self-serving. This policy of WSWS seems to assume that people should take everything they state as completely factual. This sort of arrogance is typical of Trotskyist organizations (like WSWS) who tend to believe that they have a monopoly on truth, that they are the vanguard that everyone should unquestioningly follow.
