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Cockburn,
Alexander and St. Clair, Jeffrey "White
Out : The CIA, Drugs and the Media". London:Verso, 1999, £10
Much
has been written about the role of the Central Intelligence Agency in the global
drugs trade but this is the first book that actually brings it all together in
one place. The authors haven’t exposed much that is new, instead they have
taken all the previous stories and strung them together to make a damning
indictment of the CIA. All your favourite stories are in here, from Gary
Webb’s breakthrough piece chronicling the links between the CIA the Contras
and the crack cocaine explosion in
Los Angeles; through
the CIA’s use of psychedelics, ex-Nazi scientists and mind control, into
the murky worlds of Indo-China; and then, via a chapter on Afghanistan, back to
the United States and the cocaine connections to Arkansas and ex-prez Clinton.
As
the title implies, the role of the American press in suppressing (or selectively
reporting) this story is also told. Each chapter has a page or two of
bibliography for those wishing to follow-up the stories in more depth. So if you
haven’t investigated this area yet (maybe you thought it was just conspiracy
theory?) and want an excellent introduction to it, I can thoroughly recommend
this title.
The
current war on Afghanistan makes this an especially timely read. Not only is
there much useful background to the heroin trade in that country, there is an
account of the ‘humanitarian’ assistance in the Contras war with the
Sandinistas. In Central America ‘humanitarian’ assistance was a euphemism
for ‘guns in and drugs out’. We shall see if things are different this time
round.
Recommended
8/10
Richard Alexander