Managing a Nightmare: CIA Reveals How It Watched Over Destruction of Gary Webb | Hacker News Reader

Managing a Nightmare: CIA Reveals How It Watched Over Destruction of Gary Webb

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92 pointsetiam34 comments

While the Contra-LA ghetto connection might be controversial, one thing everyone agrees with is that the American invasion of Afghanistan has turned it into the largest producer of heroin in the world. Creating an explosion of heroin addictions in many countries such as in Russia, southern Europe and the middle-east (Vice also did a great documentary on Iran):

> Since NATO began its ‘War on Terror’ in 2001, heroin production in Afghanistan has increased 40-fold, according to the head of Russia’s Federal Drug Control Service. “Afghan heroin has killed more than 1 million people worldwide since ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’ began, and over $1 trillion has been invested in transnational organized crime from drug sales,” Viktor Ivanov said earlier at a conference on the Afghan drug problem in 2013.

http://rt.com/news/156128-afghanistan-drugs-usa-heroin/ http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-24919056

> Such has been the failure to combat the problem that more than 90 per cent of the heroin sold on Britain’s streets is still made using opium from Afghanistan. The United Nations yesterday warned that the situation was out of control.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2102158/Heroin-produ...

The side-effects of instability due to war are massive and severely under-appreciated.

I really can't let this go:

    The side-effects of instability due to war are massive and severely under-appreciated.

Only by the idiots that glibly invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Many people thought either or both of those where terrible ideas, and it sure wasn't because we loved Saddam or the Taliban. Saddam turns out to have been the grenade pin of the middle east...

I've seen a lot of this data - very troubling.

With some familiarity of Gary Webb's work on crack cocaine, it does make me wonder whether the CIA is also allowing exports of opium to fund additional covert ops in Afghanistan.

The NYT had reported back in 2001 - just prior to 9/11 - that the Taliban ban on opium production was a big success:

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/20/world/taliban-s-ban-on-pop...

Think about it - our now sworn enemy, the Taliban, was the only effective government to shut down drug production inside its borders. Sure, among other things, but it does make you think. Karzai's family members are major opium traffickers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/28/world/asia/28intel.html

And, apparently in partnership with the CIA. So perhaps I'm not so crazy after all.

Heroin has won new converts among American youth who used to take oxycontin - effectively a gateway opiod. Oxy was reformulated to reduce its ability to produce a high, and heroin is now cheap and everywhere.

Just another wonderful side effect of our misguided overseas adventures.

There are many compartments within the Central Intelligence Agency, and within the Intelligence Community (IC) [1]. This contributes to the difficulty of applying oversight to the IC.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensitive_Compartmented_Informa...

If you search Wikipedia for "rendition aircraft" you will find a plane that crashed in Mexico in 2007 while carrying multiple tons of cocaine. Do a Google search on the tail number of the aircraft and you'll find a couple sites who did extensive investigation of the aircraft's previous owners (an empty business office) and interesting flight history (Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.)

I'm not so sure about that one, FARC is a marxist group that had ties to Chavez. I can't see the CIA helping them.

It seems more likely that anyone looking at the flight / maintenance logs noticed discrepancies. No legitimate buyer would take it.

Why not? The CIA is a highly compartmentalized organization staffed by people with extremely pragmatic (albeit often relentlessly anti-Bayesian) attitude. As such, they will--and historically have--ally themselves with pretty much anyone if it seems like a plausible way to further their immediate, narrowly-defined mission.

As such, supplying arms to Iran was no big deal for them in the 80's, and helping FARC today is likewise no big deal. You have to understand that the typical CIA operative (or at least the ones who get caught doing something egregiously illegal) has absolutely no moral compass. They are purely interested in the narrowest possible operational goals, and this unfortunate reality is extremely well-documented.

As an intelligence agency, I imagine that it would be highly desirable for the CIA to have contacts close to FARC.

The CIA has a history of funding black ops through drug running, regardless of which side they are supposed to be helping.

[1] Here is another one about a plane in australia they just busted.

The article is a bit all over the place - but it has some really interesting information about how the CIA gets its rendition aircraft.

[1] http://www.madcowprod.com/2014/09/12/mystery-aircraft-busted...

OxyContin wasn't changed to reduce high, it was just made harder to crush, to make it harder to IV. It's still just oxycodone. This was purely in response to pressure in the US from misguided or malicious people.

The change to OC to make it hard to crush only applies in the US (which doesn't seem to stop "abuse" of OC, just makes it far dangerous/expensive). Similarly a liver toxin, acetaminophen (Tylenol) is added to many opiates, purely to damage users that take "too much". Doctors often prescribe as little opiate with as much poison as possible, and slowly move patients over to more pure forms once they've proven themselves (by suffering needlessly).

Heroin is just cheaper and easier to get than OxyContin. This seems mostly caused by the massive increase in difficulty for doctors to prescribe medicine and do their jobs. Addiction to opioids is seen as bad, patients get labelled drug-seekers, and doctors that do help patients end up getting severe penalties.

As you point out, in reality, clamping down on pharmaceutical opiates simply leads to people buying products with low quality control or consistency, and that directly contributes to death. (Though note that opiates by themselves aren't that dangerous, and around 2/3rd of overdoses (according to one Australian study) are due to mixing opiates with other drugs.)

Aaand the Afghanis are making next to nothing off of it. We could do more for stability and democracy by dropping bags of money. We could pay good money for any other crop and it would instantly displace opium.

You don't pay slaves.

There is a book by the girlfriend of a once major LSD manufacturer:

http://www.amazon.com/Lysergic-3rd-Krystle-Cole-ebook/dp/B00...

Its kind of a fun read and mostly irrelevant but contains a few lines about how one manufacturer was encourged by the government to go to Afganistan to open up a supply of heroin.

I remember when Webb's story came out and the L.A. Times, my hometown paper, scrutinized the story. This was back in 1996 when the LAT had a big investigative staff and was winning prizes at the same rate as the NYT.

The LAT's take on Webb's story was important because South Central LA was an epicenter of the crack wars, and some of the characters in Webb's story were LA dealers.

They basically shot the story down. The recollection of one of the lead LAT reporters rings true:

“As an L.A. Times reporter, we saw this series in the San Jose Mercury News and ... kind of put it under a microscope. And we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California.”

This reaction to a new story is reminiscent of pg's idea of a "middlebrow dismissal" -- spending much energy poking holes in something new, but not really trying to pursue what's interesting about the new idea.

Edited to add: An excellent summary of this story by veteran LA reporter Marc Cooper, on the occasion of Webb's death: http://www.laweekly.com/2004-12-16/news/gary-webb-rip/

So CIA basically tossed some blood, with their "balanced report" and caused sharks to swarm in. And news worry why people don't trust them.

I loved this quote:

    “And then I wrote some stories that made me realize how    
    sadly misplaced my bliss had been. The reason I’d 
    enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long hadn’t been, as 
    I’d assumed, because I was careful and diligent and 
    good at my job,” Webb wrote. “The truth was that, in 
    all those years, I hadn’t written anything important 
    enough to suppress.”

It seems whenever someone does a moral thing in spite of society, he is often persecuted for it. From informants revealing secrets of bad government deals, to leakers, they all seem to be targets.

And it's interesting who often funds the detractors.

It's often useful to remember that the New York Times had Judith Miller and the Los Angeles Times and Newsweek had Joyce Haber. PG spoke about The Submarine - a strategically placed news article. He paid under seventeen thousand.

The problem is the opposite of what they worry about. We all trust news too much. We'll read something in a field we're familiar with, say "what utter nonsense!" and turn the page and read something about a topic we're unfamiliar with.

I suppose you don't have to publish a retraction if you aren't caught.

On December 10, 2004, the journalist was found dead in his apartment, having ended his eight-year downfall with two .38-caliber bullets to the head.

That's certainly interesting. How do you shoot yourself in the head twice?

with a semi-automatic weapon?

A semi-automatic means that when you pull the trigger, a single bullet is fired. Its not a fully auto or anything of the sort. Still doesn't explain how you shoot yourself twice with a weapon that fires one round at a time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_gunshot_suicide

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9539387

It's rare, of course, but apparently happens sometimes. If the first shot doesn't disable, then more may be required.

As far as Gary Webb's case, it sounds like suicide, according to Wikipedia. He was apparently depressed, out of work, had lost his home, left a suicide note, and had his motorcycle stolen.

Apparently the two shots caused a stir at the time. The coroner acknowledges it sounds strange, but based on suicide notes, history of depression, suicidal actions (like getting rid of belongings), and apparent precedent of two shots in a suicide, they still believe that was the cause.

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20080507054818/http://dwb.sacbee....

How many people commit suicide by being able to shoot themselves twice in the head? I'm no doctor or firearms expert, but it seems unlikely.

You're assuming a bullet to the head kills you every time. That is not always the case.

For example, not long ago the actor who played George's boss from Seinfeld survived shooting himself in the head and continued to call 911. http://www.cbsnews.com/news/seinfeld-actor-shoots-self-in-ap...

As someone who survived a couple of bullets to the head over thirty years ago (one penetrating the skull and causing moderate optical cortical brain dameage) I can corroborate this...

5 out of 138 (3.6%) in one study published in a journal. "Incapacitation by a shot to the head is achieved when the bullet penetrates the cerebrum; however, numerous bullet trajectories, including a shot between the eyes, do not achieve this penetration."[0]

I share the suspicion, but it's apparently likely enough, that you can't immediately conclude it wasn't suicide just because there were two shots.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_gunshot_suicide

Well, the other theory would be that 3.6% of suicides are actually murders disguised as suicides.

Yeah, I agree, its just that Webb wasn't any normal suicide-his exposes on the CIA and their ilk just add a ton of fuel to the fire that you wouldn't have with a run of the mill suicide.

Look at the # of people who survive being shot in the head once, and you may see an answer to your confusion. A person can survive being shot in the head once, and if a person is suicidal the chance that they are lucid enough after the first shot to deliver the second is, often enough it seems, quite high.

Dude, that's nothing. Black people can apparently shoot themselves in a police cruiser in the front of their chests... while their hands are handcuffed behind their backs! Tada! Dead black man in a cop car, but it was a suicide [1].

   In a press release issued March 3, the day he died, the Louisiana State 
   Police said Victor White III apparently shot himself in an Iberia Parish 
   police car. According to the police statement, White had his hands cuffed 
   behind his back when he shot himself in the back.
   
   But according to the full final report of the Iberia Parish coroner, which 
   was released nearly six months later and obtained exclusively by NBC News, 
   White was shot in the front, not the back. The bullet entered his right 
   chest and exited under his left armpit. White was left-handed, according to 
   family members. According to the report, the forensic pathologist found 
   gunshot residue in the wound, but not the sort of stippling that a 
   close-range shot can sometimes produce. He also found abrasions on White’s 
   face. [1]

[1] http://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/handcuffed-black-...

I love how people display a "boys will be boys" attitude toward the CIA and media these days. Personally, I find this fucking disgusting.

No comments? Am I brave or stupid?

What about early?

On Reddit, comments are rewarded for appealing to all kinds of human emotions. A quick one liner that doesn't hint at technically savvy might get the most upvotes on Reddit. On Hacker News, comments centering around knowledge and its acquisition tend to be rewarded. While I didn't make your comment any lighter, I'd assume this is why others did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com