A Musing On America's Dysfunctional Society & Broken Politics

The United States enters the new year a deeply dysfunctional society with a severely fractured political establishment and a dearth of ideas about how to confront either.  Police routinely abuse black men and men of all colors routinely abuse women.   The closing of the racial and gender gaps is a cruel fiction.  The gulf between rich and poor grows ever wider, while the so-called social safety net is in tatters.  It matters little that Barack Obama has been a godsend, because the president has been abandoned by fellow Democrats while Republicans, addicted to dog-whistle obstructionism and fighting old wars, have no clue as to how to help govern a nation out of perpetual crisis even if they wanted to.

Students of American history will find a certain perverse logic in this societal malaise, as well as why there are so many pols from both parties bellying up to the big trough called Capitol Hill where they gorge on the gifts bestowed on them in return doing the bidding of a powerful corporatocracy that has become a shadow government.  You know, Wall Street interests, defense interests, fossil-fuel energy interests, pharmaceutical interests, and so on and so forth.  Besides which, perpetually raising money to run for re-election is a jolly sight better than actually having to do anything to help a struggling middle class, rebuild a crumbling infrastructure and invest in stuff like education. 

Back in the day, the Founding Fathers declared that "All men are created equal," and there was no suggestion that they might have been alluding to the little women they went home to each night to powder their wigs for them after the exhausting job of trying to form a new republic.  In a knock down-drag out fight that has been going on for decades, women have clawed their way to a modicum of equality, even as many have chosen to continue to walk a step or two behind their husbands, and a woman may even become the next president.  Unfortunately for women, today's Republican Party and its handmaiden conservative Supreme Court majority have labored diligently to deny or take away many of the rights that men -- well, white men, anyway -- take for granted.  For them, having double standards is twice as good as having standards.  Meanwhile, Democrats work on perfecting their coward act.

As for blacks, the Founding Fathers struck a wink wink-nod nod deal that anything having to do with racial minorities, which is to say blacks who were routinely indentured, exploited and oppressed, which virtually all of them were at the time, would be ignored because the third-rail issue of slavery would wilt even the most heavily powdered wig and kill any hope of forming that new republic.  In a not dissimilar knock down-drag out fight to that waged by women, blacks also have clawed their way to a modicum of equality, and one is president.  And while overt racism has pretty much crawled into the shadows, a systemic and institutionalized racism persists.  The selfsame GOP and that high court majority, who like Shakespeare's Iago seem to revel in the pain they cause others, have worked hard to whittle away at blacks' achievements.  Meanwhile, Democrats work on perfecting their coward act.

* * * * *

I saw enough bad police behavior to last several lifetimes during the 21 years I worked for one of Philadelphia's two major daily newspapers.  This did not make the unjustified and widely publicized killings of black men by police officers in a St. Louis suburb and on Staten Island in the year past any less vile.  It merely reconfirmed for me that until the police in this country are brought under control, there can be no racial rapprochement.  That also applies to many police officers' lah-di-dah attitude about the abuse of women, something that is deeply enshrined in our culture whether you are white, black, Latino or Asian. 

During my two-plus decades in Philadelphia, officers routinely brutalized criminal suspects and innocents alike with little likelihood of their being sanctioned by their department, let alone charged with criminal offenses.  Efforts to reform the department through blue-ribbon panels, task forces and legislative fiats came and went with the seasons and today, 13 years after I left the City of Brotherly Love, its police department remains deeply corrupt and rogue officers -- taking advantage of a powerful police union, weak laws and compliant district attorneys -- continue to terrorize the communities they are sworn to protect.

What for me deeply complicates matters is that beyond the reality that race has never been easy to discuss in this country, even in the thoroughly integrated newsroom where I toiled in Philadelphia, the murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson and Eric Garner on Staten Island again showed that people find themselves forced to take sides. 

Because Brown had stolen a box of cigarillos from a convenience store, he was fair game for a fusillade of bullets from Officer Darren Wilson's revolver in the yes of many people. Garner died from a chokehold administered by Officer Daniel Panteleo, a clear violation of department regulations, while five other officers looked on, but the lines were no less blurred although Garner's "crime" was selling single cigarettes for a dollar each on the street.  If you were white and empathized with Brown or Garner, you were soft on criminals, or worse, a "nigger lover."  

An overriding lessons from these killings are that they are merely the tip of an immense iceberg, and that the criminal justice system, as we were reminded from the grand jury proceedings in both cases, is hard-wired to disenfranchise victims and their families, especially if they are black and poor, and to protect vested interests.

* * * * *

Isn't it stunning, just stunning, that in America today being a woman and being pregnant means you can be discriminated against by your employer?  Well not really, because we live in an era when the attack on women, whether it be matters of equality or reproductive and employment rights, is relentless.

Take the case of Peggy Young, who used to drive for a parcel delivery service.  When she became pregnant, her doctor recommended that she avoid lifting anything heavy.  Her employer responded by placing her on unpaid leave, and she lost her paycheck, disability benefits and pension.  Young's employer was not some mom-and-pop outfit.  It was the United Parcel Service, which has nearly 400,000 employees, raked in nearly $55 billion last year, and is one of the largest corporations in the U.S.  Young sued UPS under the federal Pregnancy Discrimination Act and the case percolated up to the U.S. Supreme Court, where she is almost sure to lose despite the fact that her dismissal was plain wrong, women make up 47 percent of labor force, and 62 percent of women who gave birth in 2013 were in that labor force.

There is ample precedent for the high court telling Young to shut up and go bake cookies because it already has smacked down women in cases involving equal pay, medical leave, abortion and contraception.  Kind of reminds you of one of those gender-obsessed Islamic states, doesn't it?

* * * * *

While a recent poll on Americans’ opinions on economic and financial issues found that only 64 percent of respondents said they still believed in the American Dream, the lowest result in  two decades, the overriding reason for there being a dearth of ideas on how to deal with our societal morass is that many people are deeply in denial.  They not only don't believe their country is in crisis, they still believe it is the best on earth.  This is not to ignore that the national snooze alarm does go off now and then: There were mostly peaceful demonstrations following the Brown and Garner grand jury belly flops and outrage over the Senate Intelligence Committee report detailing CIA depravities.  There does seem to be a new age of activism, although I have to wonder where these people were during the Iraq War.

The U.S. was indeed once an indisputably great country, and in some respects perhaps the greatest country.  I speak not of American Exceptionalism, the belief of neoconservatives and some fundamentalist Christians that God made this nation to spread liberty and democracy to the unwashed masses, in the case of the Iraq war, at point of gun.   I speak of a nation where prosperity and success could be attained through hard work, where there were myriad educational and job opportunities, where no infrastructure improvement, be it a dam, rail line or highway, was too ambitious, and where borders were open to people in pursuit of that American Dream.

But in recent decades America's standing has steadily eroded, and today it is indisputably no longer a great country, ranking at or near the bottom among the 17 industrialized nations in quality-of-life and other social measures.  

America is first by some measures, all of them negative: These include infant mortality, incarceration rates and anxiety disorders, as well as that gulf between the rich and everyone else that accelerated during the Bush Recession as the economy tanked and unemployment soared while CEOs and their corporations pocketed record stock dividends and profits.  (From 2009 to 2012, a mind-blowing 95 percent of new income went to the top 1 percent).  But by other measures, including life expectancy, despite by far the highest health-care costs in the world, as well as obesity, child poverty, commitment to infrastructure development, broadband access and arts funding, America ranks dead last or nearly so. 

How America stands in relation to other so-called civilized countries when it comes to police forces is . . . well, criminal. 

American cops shot and killed at least 450 people last year, a disproportionate number of them black men; no one is sure what the real number is because police departments are notoriously lax when it comes to reporting statistics that don't make them look good.  By comparison, cops in England shot no one last year.  Police forces in the U.S. have taken on a nasty paramilitary edge (what happened to community policing, fellas?), while SWAT team raids rose to 50,000 last year, way up from a mere 3,000 in 1980.  And does anyone believe that police departments need grenade launchers? 

If there is a common thread through all of this societal rot it is a rampant amorality, this in the churchgoing-est nation on Earth.  Would Jesus have tortured?

* * * * *

This hellbent race to the bottom ("We're Number 17! We're Number 17!") has been a group effort, but the three arms of government -- the executive, legislative and judicial branches -- that are supposed to be the custodians of our national interests must shoulder most of the blame, with a big helping left over for a complacent and compliant news media.

Nixon's excesses and Clinton's infidelities aside, the Bush-Cheney interregnum was not merely the darkest chapter in modern American history with its gross distortion of presidential power, it has remained a debilitating presence.  While Obama has suffered his share of self-inflicted wounds, as well as the slings and arrows of cruel Republicans and spineless Democrats, the toxic fallout from the first eight years of the decade has compromised his ability to lead America out of the morass.

Congress deserves the harshest criticism because it is so out of touch with all but the most affluent and powerful Americans, as well as that corporatocracy.  When I recently reread David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, I was struck by how President Johnson and his advisers had to escalate the Vietnam War by stealth because Congress would never have approved massive troop increases and a sustained bombing campaign because the American people would not have supported them.  Contrast that with how Congress has rolled over on gun control again and again in fawning obeisance to the National Rifle Association, America's largest terrorist organization. Never mind that many of us favor toughening weak federal laws and demanded action in the wake of the Sandy Hook and other massacres made possible because of the wide availability of assault weapons, the sole purpose of which is to kill people.  Yes, many of us also recognize that the epidemic of shoot-and-kill incidents by police is a direct consequence of our gun-sick culture.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has become a branch of the Republican Party and the lapdog of the plutocracy, its hackery evident in decisions from Citizens United to enshrining workplace discrimination and validating civil liberties abuses such as voter disenfranchisement, to protecting Big Pharma from liability for killer drugs and medical devices.

* * * * *

It was a Come to Jesus, or perhaps a Come to Vladimir moment:

Russian television networks gleefully leading their newscasts with footage from Ferguson as protesters took to the streets, first after the Brown shooting and then after a grand jury was manipulated into the decision to not charge Officer Wilson, some hurtling rocks at riot police, others torching and overturning cars, and still others looting stores.  After absorbing a steady diet of assertions from Washington for years that the Russian government abuses its citizens and denies them fundamental human rights, the shoe was on the other foot. 

And damned if it wasn't a perfect fit.

IMAGE: "TATTERED AND TORN" BY JAMES DAVID FENICIE 
© 2010, IMAGE USED WITH AUTHOR'S PERMISSION

So I Says, This Cruz Is A Horse's Ass And I Oughta Know 'Cause I Got One

NO, THIS POST IS NOT ABOUT THE KNUCKLE DRAGGER FROM TEXAS.
 

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID STRICK

The CIA's Nonpareil 60-Year Record Of Compromising National Security

THE CIA LEARNED OF THE FALL OF THE BERLIN WALL ON CNN

I have long advocated abolishing the Central Intelligence Agency, or as President Kennedy put it after the CIA played an integral role in the Bay of Pigs debacle, smashing it into a thousand pieces and scattering it to the winds.

The CIA survives and prospers, of course, because despite its decades-long history of monumental screw-ups, it has friends in high places: President George H.W. Bush was once CIA director, and we know all about his prodigal son.  These forces were hard at work in watering down and pushing back against the Senate Intelligence Committee's just-released report on the agency's depravities at its system of "black sites," prisons overseas where terror suspects were routinely tortured and sometimes murdered. 

The CIA has had some successes: It accurately predicted the 1967 Six-Day War in the Middle East, waged a successful cyber warfare campaign against a Soviet espionage team in the mid-1980s, and precipitated the exit of the Soviets from Afghanistan, which it then botched by failing to anticipate the rise of the Taliban. 

A brief list of the CIA's nonpareil record in compromising national security, something it is supposed to protect:

* The 1950 Chinese invasion of Korea.

* The 1959 takeover of Cuba by Fidel Castro.

* The 1963 Cuban missile crisis.

* The strength of and support for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong in the 1960s.  

* The 1979 ouster of the Shah, Iranian revolution and rise of the ayatollahs.  

* The 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.  

* The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union.

* Denying in 1990 that Saddam Hussein planned to invade Kuwait.

* The coming of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the global Islamic jihad in the mid-1990s. 

* The 1998 explosion of a nuclear bomb by India, which remade the balance of power.  

* The 9/11 attacks.

* That the pre-2003 invasion claims of Saddam Hussein that he had WMD were false.

Support For Torture Creeps Up, But Many Of Us Remain Ambivalent

HAT TIP TO ANDREW SULLIVAN AT THE DISH

Stick It Up The CIA's Ass: Please Sign This Very Worthy Petition

As I noted in this post, the terrific biopic Kill The Messenger has not exactly been a box office hit although its subject is worthy -- and timely as well because of the just-released Senate Intelligence Committee's report on CIA torture abuses -- and has sunk like a stone.

"This movie starts a conversation about racism, government abuse, and attempts to silence whistleblowers -- a conversation that everyone should be having in our country, and that could not be more relevant and critical to our current society," says one advocate for the film.

There's now a petition drive to get Kill The Messenger back in theaters.  Sign it, okay?

Accountability Goes Bye-Bye As Senate Torture Report Finally Is Released

The release today of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on the CIA's network of secret prisons where terrorism suspects were tortured with the approval of President Bush and his henchmen in violation of American law and the Geneva Conventions is surely one of the greatest anticlimaxes in American history, as well as the last hope of accountability for what I have come to call the Bush Torture Regime.

Virtually nothing in the 524-page summary, while scathing, is new.  Its impact is blunted because it is heavily redacted so as not to identify individual CIA officers and agents, embarrass foreign governments who rolled out the red carpet for Uncle Sam's torturers, as well as a juicy detail here and there. 

As shocking as the revelations that Americans routinely used Nazi torture techniques may have been at one time, and in the absence of evidence that torturing suspects produced valuable information, let alone lead the U.S. to Osama bin Laden, something that the Senate report notes, the steady drip-drip of magazine and newspaper articles, blog posts, International Red Cross reports, lawsuits and the occasional if rare statement by a fearless public official has blunted its impact some 13 years after the 9/11 attacks unleashed these horrors.  Remember Abu Ghraib?  Still revolted by it?  I didn't think so.

Nevertheless, the report still was stomach turning, especially in detailing the CIA's interrogation techniques, which were approved by the agency's medical staff.

Beyond waterboarding, to which many more detainees were subjected than the mere three the CIA claimed, detainees were imprisoned in small boxes, slapped and punched, deprived of sleep for as long as a week and were sometimes told that they would be killed, their children maimed and their mothers sexually assaulted.  Some were subjected to medically unnecessary "rectal feeding" -- a technique that the C.I.A.'s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert "total control over the detainee."

The report, which was compiled by Democratic staff members of the Intelligence Committee with no Republican help after its initial stages, further confirms that the CIA was beset by infighting, dysfunction and deception. The torture was so extreme at times that some CIA personnel tried to put a halt to the techniques, but were told by senior agency officials to mind their own business and carry on even after one detainee was murdered.

Forget about Bush, Vice President Cheney and the government minions who sought to put a veneer of respectability on the use of brutal interrogation techniques when, the report notes, they were completely out of the loop, then denied their use and scrambled to distance themselves from the legal jabberwocky they concocted to justify these techniques, being called to account.

As recently as Monday, Cheney defended torture as "absolutely, totally justified." Republicans with a few exceptions, notably Senator John McCain, who himself was tortured for years in a North Vietnamese prison, say the report is a partisan hack job while the right-wing media machine swung into action, acting as though the report and not the torture itself was bad for America, as well as claims that the report would "alienate" America's much-needed allies.  

Bush was roused from his post-presidential somnambulance to join former intelligence officials in challenging the report's conclusions even before it was released although those conclusions are beyond reasonable dispute. And if they and Cheney had no problem with torture and actually believed it to be "humane," as the former president famously put it, why do they now have a problem with releasing the report?  Of what are they so afraid?

Meanwhile, Attorney General Holder was instructed by President Obama to consider prosecuting only those who actually tortured since its use had been approved by CIA leaders and the Bush administration.  No criminal charges were brought.

Why have I and everyone else who has closely followed the torture regime and its fallout correctly assumed that no one of consequence would be held accountable for this darkest of eras?

Because anyone who thought that Obama, having said boo about torture while campaigning for president in 2008, would denounce it after taking office was engaging in fuzzy-wuzzy liberal thinking.  For one thing, the new president understood that denouncing, let alone going after Bush and his enablers for their crimes, would scuttle any chance he had of forging a bipartisan consensus for his ambitious first-term agenda.  But even this Obama supporter is deeply disappointed at how unwilling the president has been to lay bare the regime's excesses even if stopping short of even suggesting its architects should be prosecuted.

Obama's endorsement, by his silence, of the CIA's lengthy obstruction of the Senate Intelligence Committee's release of a report without redactions is nothing less than protecting the perpetrators and legitimization of that agency's vile practices.  His defense of CIA Director John Brennan, who led the campaign to stymie release of the report while tacitly approving the rogue agency's own spying on the Senate committee, makes farcical the president's statements that he believes that the U.S. should hew to international law, including the Geneva Conventions.

America's moral standing in the world community was squandered during the Bush interregnum.  That Obama has allowed the release of a report that has been watered down by some of the perps themselves, puts that standing beyond repair.  Yes, some of the men tortured by the CIA were dangerous -- very dangerous --  but the CIA's gruesome tactics have provided a ready recruiting tool for terrorists and further exposed American soldiers, journalists and others to the enmity that our refusal to come to terms with these depravities will provoke.

'Just Because They're Dead Don't Mean They're Republicans'

In the opening pages of William Kennedy's Roscoe: A Novel, Felix Conway, the éminence grise of the fabled Albany, New York, Democratic machine, advises Roscoe Conway on how the game is played.  It is 1945:

"How do you get the money, boy? If you run 'em for office and they win, you charge 'em a year's wages.  Keep taxes low, but if you have to raise 'em, call it something else.  The city can't do without vice, so pinch the pimps and milk the madams.  Anybody that sells the flesh, tax 'em.  If anybody wants city business,, thirty percent back to us.  Maintain the streets and sewers, but don't overdo it.  Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.  If they play craps, poker, or blackjack, cut the game.  If they play faro or roulette, cut it double.  Opium is the opiate of the depraved, but if they want it, see that they get it, and tax those lowlife bastards.  If they keep their dance halls open twenty-four hours, tax 'em twice.  If they run a gyp joint, tax 'em triple.  If they send prisoners to our jail, charge 'em rent, at hotel prices.  Keep the cops happy and let 'em have a piece of the pie.  A small piece.  Never buy anything that you can rent forever.  If you pave a street, a three-cent brick should be worth thirty cents to the city.  Pave every street with a church on it.  Cultivate priests and acquire the bishop.  Encourage parents to send their kids to Catholic schools, it lowers the public-school budget.  When in doubt, appoint another judge, and pay him enough so's he don't have to shake down the lawyers.  Cultivate lawyers.  They know how its done and will do it.  Control the district attorney and never let him go; for he controls the grand juries.  Make friend with millionaires and give 'em what they need.  Any traction company is a good traction company, and the same goes for electricity.  If you build a viaduct, make the contractor your partner.  Whenever you confront a monopoly, acquire it.  Open an insurance company and make sure anybody doing city business buys a nice policy.  If you don't know diddle about insurance, open a brewery and make 'em buy your beer.  Give your friends jobs, but at a price, and make new friends every day.  Let the sheriff buy anything he wants for the jail.  Never stop a ward leader from stealing; it's what keeps him honest.  Keep your plumbers and electricians working, and remember it takes three men to change a wire.  Republicans are all right as long as they're on our payroll.  A city job should raise a man's dignity but not his wages.  Anybody on our payroll pays us dues, three percent of the yearly salary, which is nice.  But if they're on that new civil service and won't pay and you can't fire 'em, transfer 'em to the dump.  If you find people who like to vote, let 'em.  Don't be afraid to spend money for votes on Election Day.  It's a godsend to the poor, and good for business; but make it old bills, ones and twos, or they get suspicious.  And only give 'em out in the river wards, never uptown.  If an uptown voter won't register Democrat, raise his taxes.  If he fights the raise, make him hire one of our lawyers to reduce it in court.  Once it's lowered, raise it again next year.  Knock on every door and find out if they're sick or pregnant or simpleminded, and vote 'em.  If they're breathing, take 'em to the polls.  If they won't go, threaten 'em.  Find out who's dead and who's dying, which is as good as dead, and vote 'em.  There's a hell of a lot of dead and they never complain.  The opposition might cry fraud but let 'em prove it after the election.  People say voting the dead is immoral, but what the hell, if they're alive they'd all be Democrats.  Just because they're dead don't mean they're Republicans."

Do you think things have really changed all that much?

From Roscoe: A Novel © 2002 by William Kennedy

Bobby Keyes (1943-2014)

MORE HERE.

PHOTOGRAPH FROM ABC7.COM

Lewis Baltz (1945-2014)

MORE HERE.

Give Some Nostalgia With A Signed Copy Of 'There's A House'

Need a unique gift for that literate special someone who was around for the 1970s but can't remember a danged thing about them? Want a way to gently break

to your grandkids, grumpy boss or probation officer what was really going on back in the day?

We're offering signed copies of THERE'S A HOUSE IN THE LAND for $12 each, which includes a refrigerator magnet-worthy postcard from the beyond memorable September Book Signing & Snakegrinder Reunion at the Blue Crab Grill in Newark, Delaware, and postage is included.

Here's how to get yours: Send us a check or money order made out to the author with a note to whom you want the book signed and your mailing address.  Orders for multiple copies are welcome, but there are only a limited number so don't procrastinate.

Here's our mailing address:

There's A House
c/o Shaun Mullen
338 Poplar Valley Road West
Stroudsburg, PA 18360-7293

If you'd prefer to give Kindle editions as gifts, click here. 

We aren't L.L. Bean, so orders must be received by December 15 to guarantee holiday delivery.

A Dark Alliance & A Lasting Shame: Remembering Reporter Gary Webb

Kill the Messenger is currently playing at mostly empty theaters, which is a pity, because it's an important movie about a real-life story: A reporter who becomes the target of a vicious smear campaign that drives him to suicide after he exposes the CIA's role in arming Contra rebels in Nicaragua and importing cocaine into Southern California.  That reporter is Gary Webb, played on the big screen by Jeremy Renner of The Bourne Legacy fame.  This is what I wrote in December 2007 about Webb's expose and investigative journalism in general, with a few embellishments and a new footnote added:

I worked with a goodly number of great investigative journalists over the years, men and women who risk career, life and limb to get the story, and I can say with some satisfaction that this bunch usually did.

But beyond the glamor of the Woodward and Bernstein portrayed by Redford and Hoffman in All the President's Men is a dark side: Investigative reporters and their editors can be an intensely jealous lot, and except for the biggest stories (like the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and the My Lai Massacre) rival papers are more apt to ignore an investigative story than mention it in their own pages, and sometimes even dump on it.

This brings me to one of the greatest investigative coups and most shameful episodes in modern American journalism -- the August 1996 publication of "Dark Alliance," a three-part series by reporter Gary Webb (above) in the pages of the San Jose Mercury News and what then transpired.

I didn't know Webb professionally, although I did spend an evening with him drinking beer and listening to a zydeco band at a music club while attending a conference for investigative reporters and editors. But I knew him by reputation to be an ace reporter, so it was no surprise when the Mercury News rolled out his extraordinary series linking the CIA and Nicaragua's Contras to the crack cocaine epidemic in South Los Angeles in the 1980s.

As Nick Shou wrote in 2006 in a long overdue Los Angeles Times piece (link not available):

"Most of the nation's elite newspapers at first ignored the story. A public uproar, especially among urban African Americans, forced them to respond. What followed was one of the most bizarre, unseemly and ultimately tragic scandals in the annals of American journalism, one in which top news organizations closed ranks to debunk claims Webb never made, ridicule assertions that turned out to be true and ignore corroborating evidence when it came to light."

Many reporters had tried to unravel the connection between the CIA's anti-communism efforts in Central America and drug trafficking, a lynchpin of the Iran-Contra Scandal during the Reagan administration, and I led a team of reporters in the late 1980s trying to do just that.  (The CIA also had been deeply involved in heroin trafficking in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.)  But Webb was the first to provide a solid link between the spy agency and the U.S. crack cocaine market in the 1980s by detailing the relationship between two Contra sympathizers and narcotics suppliers, Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses, and L.A.'s biggest crack dealer, "Freeway" Ricky Ross.

Wrote Shou:

"Two years before Webb's series, The Los Angeles Times estimated that at its peak, Ross' 'coast-to-coast conglomerate' was selling half a million crack rocks per day. '[I]f there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles' streets with mass-marketed cocaine,' the article stated, 'his name was Freeway Rick.'

"But after Webb's reporting tied Ross to the Nicaraguans and showed that they had CIA connections, The Times downgraded Ross' role to that of one 'dominant figure' among many. It dedicated 17 reporters and 20,000 words to a three-day rebuttal to 'Dark Alliance' that also included a lengthy musing on whether African Americans disproportionately believe in conspiracy theories."

The New York Times and Washington Post joined the L.A. Times in attacking Webb for a claim that he never made — that the CIA deliberately unleashed the crack epidemic on black America.  This controversy overshadowed the central focus of the series, which was that the CIA was knowingly dealing with people who were feeding the U.S. crack epidemic.  The papers also found a number of non-fatal errors in the series while unsuccessfully trying to undercut that central focus.

At first, the Mercury News defended the series, but after nine months, its executive editor wrote a letter to readers that tepidly defended "Dark Alliance" while acknowledging the errors. As Webb had feared, the letter was widely misperceived as a retraction, and he publicly accused the paper of cowardice.  In return, he was exiled to a remote news bureau, resigned a few months later and left journalism.

Depressed and broke, Webb killed himself eight years later. The final indignity was the brief obituaries that the L.A. Times and New York Times published which dismissed him as the "discredited" author of the series.

Let me be clear: As terrific as the "Dark Alliance" series was, I do not believe Webb found the smoking gun, just a lot of smoke, although very important smoke it was.  But setting the record straight on "Dark Alliance" is important for another reason.

Investigative reporting is a dying field. It is dying because too many newspapers have become controversy averse, while others cannot justify assigning a reporter to chase potentially litigious stories for months on end when there is no guarantee that they'll ever see the light of day and every guarantee that they'll piss people off. 

ABOUT THAT FOOTNOTE

In chasing down reports that the CIA was using out-of-the-way airstrips in Northeastern Pennsylvania to fly in shipments of cocaine to raise money for the Contras, I was driven to Birchwood-Pocono Air Park by a government insider turned informant on a cold winter day in 1988.  This, it turns out, is where state trooper killer Eric Frein was apprehended late last month after a 48-day manhunt.

Despite over a year of digging, my colleagues and I never amassed enough evidence regarding the Poconos angle -- some smoke but no smoking gun -- to justify writing a story.

§  

The original "Dark Alliance" series can be found here. Meanwhile, journalist Eric Umanski aggressively covered the CIA-Contra-crack connection for Mother Jones and asserted here in a 1998 story that the connection was well established long before "Dark Alliance."

From Richards To Rivers: A Dozen Great Books For Holiday Gift Giving

Your Faithful Reviewer plowed through another 30 or so books in the course of 2014, some new, some not so old and a couple of classics that I had not gotten around to reading.  Here are the best dozen of the bunch, actually the best 14 because one offering is a trilogy.  All are great holiday gifts for a literary inclined spouse, other family member or friend, and all are available online in paperback.

AMERICA IN THE KING YEARS (Taylor Branch, 1988, 2006, 2012) This three volume biography of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. runs to some 1,600 pages and is the definitive retelling of the great civil rights leader's life from his birth in Atlanta to his assassination in Memphis at the age of 39.  Branch does not pull any punches, confirming that as great as King was, he was a profligate philanderer who could be his own worst enemy.

THE BARBAROUS YEARS: THE PEOPLING OF BRITISH NORTH AMERICA (Bernard Bailyn, 2012) Establishment of British, Dutch and Swedish colonies in America in the early 17th century would seem to be well-trod ground, but Bailyn sheds often fascinating light on the socio-economic aspects of colonization, as well as the brutal encounters between the Europeans and native peoples.

​ A CONSPIRACY OF FAITH (Jussi Adler-Olsen, 2013) Adler-Olson's Department Q murder mysteries are the latest Arctic Noir sensations, and deservedly so.  A Conspiracy of Faith is the second of five starring Copenhagen Detective Carl Mørck and his sidekicks, Assad and Rose, who take on the coldest of cold cases, Department Q's specialty, this one involving the double murder of a brother and sister two decades earlier.

THE GOLDFINCH (Donna Tartt, 2013) This is the best book, fiction or nonfiction, that I have read in a very long time.  The improbable plot works, sometimes despite itself, gripping me on an intellectual and emotional level.  While its length (771 pages, count 'em) seem to be daunting, the adventure therein -- at its core a dissection of the screwed up-edness of the human condition in the guise of a coming-of-age story -- is nothing short of amazing.​

THE HUMAN STAIN (Phillip Roth, 2000) Roth, as usual, magnificently interweaves American history in this tour de force about Coleman Silk, a classics professor, who is forced to retire when his colleagues decide that he is a racist.  He is not, and the real truth as conveyed by narrator Nathan Zuckerman (who also appears in Roth's American Pastoral and I Married a Communist) is incredible.

IRONWEED (William Kennedy, 1984) This final book of the so-called Albany Cycle is the best of the three because Kennedy really fires on all of his writerly cylinders in telling the story of Francis Phelan, a once great ballplayer turned drunk who has come home to make peace with his sometimes violent past -- he has hallucinations of three of the people he killed in the past --and rekindle his relationship with the only woman he truly loved.​

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LAST CALL: THE RISE AND FALL OF PROHIBITION (Daniel Okrent, 2010) The 18th Amendment ostensibly addressed the single subject of intoxicating beverages, spawning the 13-year Prohibition, but this delightfully trenchant book reveals that it did much more, including enormous changes in international trade, speedboat design and marketing, as well as the establishment of national crime syndicates and even women's rights.

THE LIES OF SARAH PALIN: THE UNTOLD STORY BEHIND HER RELENTLESS QUEST FOR POWER (Geoffrey Dunn, 2011)  I read a half dozen or so books about or by Palin in the last year for a research project, and if you're going to read only one about the Killah from Wassila, this is it.  Dunn more than makes the case that the right-wing darling is a pathological liar and, when in positions of power, is downright dangerous.

LIFE (Keith Richards and James Fox, 2011)  Okay, like most folks I had low expectations for an autobio by this Rolling Stones' founding member, but the cat can write almost as well as he can play -- and survive drug binges and busts.  In fact, the beyond endless accounts of his over-the-top embrace of hard drugs are the only downers, while his confirmation that Mick Jagger is an asshole, albeit an extraordinarily talented one, is affirming.

THE MARSH ARABS (Wilfred Thesiger, 1964) It was a big year for travel books (see The Road to Oxiana below), but Thesiger's account of living among the fiercely independent tribal Marsh Arabs of Southern Iraq is as much a magnificent and moving account of a people whose lives changed little for many centuries, untouched by the modern world, as a traditional travelogue.   

THE ROAD TO OXIANA (Robert Byron, 1937) Historian Paul Fussell calls this delightful and sometimes downright zany travel book what Ulysses is to the novel and The Waste Land is to poetry.  A bestseller upon its publication, it chronicles a fascinating journey through the Middle East to the land of the Oxus, the ancient name for the river Amu Darya on the border between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union.

​THE SECRET RIVER (Kate Grenville, 2005) The story of early colonial Australia has never been told better than in this magnificent work of historical fiction, which tells the story of William Thornhill, an illiterate English bargeman who is deported, along with his beloved wife, Sal, to the New South Wales colony where they are confronted with having to forcibly take land from the Aborigines who came before them if they are to survive and prosper.

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Meanwhile, here's my list for last year, as well as a list from 2012 of the books that have most influenced me.

In Gridlock We Trust: Do-Nothing Republicans Take Control Of Senate

Long story short: I do not so much praise the Republican Party for their victories yesterday as blame the Democratic Party for their defeats.  At a pivotal time in American history, a time when the bedrock principles of our society are under attack and it was imperative to move ahead and not stand still, let alone turn back, Democrats revealed themselves to be cowards in campaign after campaign. 

The day already is being referred to as the Seinfeld Election because it was pretty much about nothing, although it is some comfort that the substantial Republican gains will mean little for the 2016 presidential race.  (And ain't it a kick that the states benefiting most from the Affordable Care Act, that GOP bogeyman of bogeymen, elected Republicans?)  

Voter turnout will spike in 2016, the most competitive Senate races will be in liberal-leaning states and the GOP's continued unwillingness to connect with black, Hispanic and Asian voters will mean likely defeat nationally no matter whom they nominate.  Oh, and Republicans won't have Barack Obama to run against and will be faced -- for the first time in several elections -- with actually having to stand for something.

Obama has had a troubled presidency primarily because of Republican obstructionism and a suffocating racism that never lurks far from the surface, but also because of his own failings as a leader.  But he has been the president America needs and history will remember him as being very good if not very great under enormously difficult circumstances.  Yet Democrats abandoned him.

Shame on the Democratic Party.  And shame on America.  

IMAGE COURTESY OF THE DAILY SHEEPLE

Despite Pennsylvania Cop Killer's Capture, A Very Big Question Remains

The surrender of cop killer Eric Frein on Thursday after an excruciating 48-day manhunt in the dense woodlands of the Pennsylvania Poconos is not the end of the story.  It is the end of the prologue to a very big question that demands to be asked -- and answered: What prompted this wily survivalist to shoot dead a particular state trooper and critically wound another?  To suggest that the shootings were random begs credulity, although the revelation as to why Frein chose these targets might be embarrassing to a law-enforcement agency that has limped from scandal to scandal and did not acquit itself particularly well during the manhunt.

Prosecutors have, of course, said that the death penalty will be sought.  But it would not be surprising if 31-year-old Frein (pronounced Freen) is allowed to plea bargain a life sentence without the messiness of a trial where the question of why he chose to lurk in the woods outside the Blooming Grove, Pike County, police barracks on the night of September 12 with a high-powered rifle, killing Corporal Bryon Dickson and wounding Trooper Alex Douglass, and not one of many other potential law-enforcement targets is a question that is sure to be raised.

Early in the manhunt, rumors abounded that Frein's sister had a relationship with Trooper Douglass.  A state police spokesman initially denied they had "an inappropriate relationship," an explanation that ginned up the rumor mill even more.  The spokesman later tried to clarify matters by stating they had not had any kind of a relationship and did not even know one another, but the impression lingers that despite Frein's well-known hatred of police, he may not have chosen Dickson and Douglass at random.

Indeed, little light has been shed on why Frein, who had a fondness for all things military, dressed in Serbian army uniforms and played Cold War-style war games, hated police.  Except for a remark from Frein's father in the wake of the attack that his self-trained backwoods survivalist son "never missed" when he had a weapon in his hands, his parents remained conspicuously silent during the manhunt, although they are said to have cooperated with investigators.  It is puzzling why they never were asked to go public and urge their son to surrender, or if they were, did not do so.

Frein crashed his Jeep after fleeing Blooming Grove, which is about 20 miles north of his parents' house in the village of Canadensis in Monroe County.  He is believed to have hiked through nearly unspoiled forest to an area near Canadensis that provides many hiding places not visible from the air, let alone on the ground a hundred yards away. 

The state police kept overplaying their hand, at least in the first weeks of the manhunt, by repeatedly claiming they had Frein surrounded and taunting the fugitive to surrender, although they did find food caches, an incriminating journal, two pipe bombs and other signs of him.  Frein seemingly taunted the state police back as he repeatedly eluded capture despite numerous reported sightings.  (Documents filed with the court by the state police indicate he may have used a laptop computer with wireless access to keep up with reports on the manhunt.)

In recent days, Frein continued to elude a dragnet of state police, FBI and ATF agents, U.S. Marshals Service trackers and regional and local police that has at times reached 1,000 officers as he trekked into more populated areas.  Unarmed, gaunt and bedraggled, he surrendered to marshals on Thursday afternoon after being spotted in a field at an abandoned rural airport that previously had been searched.  The airport had been part of one of the honeymoon resorts that were a mainstay of the Poconos tourist industry in the decades after World War II.

Frein was turned over to state police, who ceremoniously slapped slain officer Dickson's handcuffs on him and put him in the back seat of Dickson's police cruiser for transport back to Blooming Grove.  A rifle and pistol were found in a nearby hangar where the fugitive apparently had been hiding.

The search, which cost nearly $1.5 million a day according to one analysis, exacted a steep toll on the Poconos, which has not recovered from the Bush Recession.  Deer hunting was called off in several Pike and Monroe townships, schools in the vicinity of the manhunt were closed, reopened and sometimes closed again, football games, Halloween parades and other outdoor events were cancelled, and the tourist industry took a big hit amidst one of the most beautiful displays of fall foliage in years.

A PERSONAL NOTE

Ironically, I was driven to Birchwood-Pocono Air Park, the abandoned airport near Tannersville where Frein was apprehended, by a government insider turned informant on my first visit to the Poconos in 1986.  As an investigative journalist, I was chasing down reports that the CIA was using the disused airport, as well as other out-of-the-way airstrips in Northeastern Pennsylvania, to fly in shipments of cocaine being sold in New York and Philadelphia to raise money for the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

This was one of the extra-legal aspects of what became known during the Reagan administraiton as the Iran-Contra Affair.  Despite over a year of digging, my colleagues and I never amassed enough evidence regarding the Poconos angle to justify writing a story.  Whether it is established why Frein chose to be at a particular state police barracks on a particular night as his victims changed shifts remains to be seen.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK MAKELA/REUTERS