Politics

Berkeley 101: Breaking the Limits of Free Speech

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=5494">Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News</a>

Sunday, 05 October 2014 13:12

Weissman writes: "Fifty years ago this coming December 2, a wonderfully charismatic Mario Savio made one of the most powerful speeches in the history of American protest."

Mario Savio at a victory rally at the University of California, Berkeley in 1964. (photo: AP)

Berkeley 101: Breaking the Limits of Free Speech

By Steve Weissman, Reader Supported News

05 October 14

ifty years ago this coming December 2, a wonderfully charismatic Mario Savio made one of the most powerful speeches in the history of American protest.

�There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious � makes you so sick at heart � that you can�t take part,� he told his fellow students on the Berkeley campus of the University of California. �You can�t even passively take part. And you�ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you�ve got to make it stop. And you�ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you�re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.�

Mario�s existential cry of anguish led into the sweet song of Joan Baez and a deeply felt rendition of �We Shall Overcome,� after which some 2,000 of us in the Free Speech Movement (FSM) began a massive sit-in of the university�s administration building, Sproul Hall. But Mario�s eloquence and Joan�s call to �muster up as much love as you possibly can, and as little hatred and as little violence, and as little �angries� as you can,� blurred an equally telling dynamic that was already in play.

Toward the end of the week before, the FSM�s Graduate Coordinating Committee took a fateful step that few participants remember. The administration had just announced disciplinary measures against Mario and three others, and we knew that the Sproul Hall sit-in would draw large numbers of student activists. We had, after all, been fighting since mid-September to secure the same free speech rights on campus that we enjoyed beyond the confines of the university.

We also knew that the authorities would likely call in outside police, which would only swell our ranks and spur the outrage of the generally career-oriented and cautious graduate students and teaching assistants whom we represented.

Most, though by no means all, of the GCC�s leaders came from the Left, and we jokingly called ourselves �the Soviet of Graduate Student Deputies.� But, whatever our individual politics, we had systematically organized a base in dozens of university departments and had a firmly grounded, day-to-day understanding of what our less-involved fellow grads were thinking. Much to the anger of Mario and a majority of the FSM steering committee, we had even forced the aborting of an earlier sit-in because we knew our troops were not yet ready. Now, with the administration�s disciplinary moves and the prospect of �cops on campus,� we felt the time was right.

Seeing all this about to unfold, a jam-packed meeting of the GCC unanimously passed a bare-bones resolution asking our base throughout the university to call their students and teaching assistants out on strike the following week �if conditions warrant.� As chair of the group, I probably put together those weasel words. I don�t really remember. But the phrase took on life when California�s liberal Democratic governor Edmund G. �Pat� Brown, father of the current incumbent, ordered in the police, who dragged over 800 students out of Sproul Hall, often with blatant brutality.

The strike succeeded far beyond anything we could have expected, and in the following few days the graduate students led the way in convincing hesitant faculty members to listen to our simple First Amendment arguments and vote against the administration. That was how we won a famous victory for free speech. But what did it mean in the real world?

Critics will tell you that that the biggest outcome was the election of the extremely conservative Ronald Reagan as governor and then as president. They have a point, though I would blame Reagan�s victories more on the failures of half-a-loaf liberalism with its support of an imperial foreign policy and its commitment to the Cold War. You can�t beat the Right by framing the political debate in �almost, but not quite� the same terms as they do, a blunder that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are now making with their sure-to-fail crusade against Islamic State.

One of our biggest successes was that we did not take our fight to court or listen to the high priests of First Amendment thinking, especially in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which refused to support our demands. We saw free speech as a fundamental human right that we had every right to seize for ourselves with our own direct action. Use it or lose it.

We similarly refused to let red-baiting dissuade, divert, or divide us. Like the rest of the New Left, we practiced a dogged anti-anti-communism, an apostasy that Cold War liberals never understood and never forgave.

Our thinking had little to do with the Soviet Union or the small Leninist vanguards that irritatingly claimed to act in the name of �the masses.� As young as we were, we had seen how anti-communists had smeared Martin Luther King to slow down integration, red-baited then-senator Claude Pepper to quash universal health care, investigated �Communist influence� to smash unions, and hyped the Red Menace to sell tanks, planes, and U.S. intervention everywhere from Guatemala to Vietnam.

This was not a game we were willing to play. Instead we made Bettina Aptheker, the daughter of a highly visible American Communist, one of our most visible leaders, loudly proclaiming that free speech has to be for everyone, including Communists.

Closely related, our victory opened the campus to become a staging ground for a growing anti-war movement. While most FSM leaders saw ourselves protecting the right to use the campus to organize civil disobedience against racist businesses in Oakland, San Francisco, and other nearby communities, Lyndon Johnson�s escalation of the war Eisenhower and Kennedy had started in Southeast Asia forced us to change our priorities. We would now use the campus to organize teach-ins, stop troop trains, march on the Oakland Army Terminal, and disrupt the draft.

This same opening took place all over the country, as college administrators everywhere dropped their speech restrictions and in loco parentis rules in an effort to preclude having their own student revolts. I�m proud to say that I helped spread the fear, going to work for the Students for a Democratic Society and traveling to campuses large and small to tell the Berkeley story and build support for the SDS anti-war March on Washington.

Also part of the picture, Berkeley marked the transition from the Gandhian nonviolence of Dr. King and Joan Baez to a more strategic, less religious or philosophic use of nonviolent direct action. I�ve written about this at length, especially about how Professor Gene Sharp and the Defense Intelligence Agency�s Col. Robert Helvey turned what we had practiced into a weapon that Washington used in its �color revolutions� from Venezuela to Iran to the borderlands of the former Soviet Union. Hopefully, if my chronically poor health ever permits, I will write more about how we can use it against �Big Money.�

In the meantime, one quick caveat. Free speech is an end in itself, for which progressives everywhere should fight. But it can never be a sufficient strategy for radical social change. Telling truth to power, petitioning for redress of grievances, and protesting injustice will not significantly change the balance of power between the 99% and the fraction of 1% that increasingly rules the roost. Changing that will take something more and different, and it will never be done by those who keep telling us how impossible a job it would be.

A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France, where he is researching a new book, "Big Money and the Corporate State: How Global Banks, Corporations, and Speculators Rule and How to Nonviolently Break Their Hold."

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

15 comments

The Incarceration of the American Consumer

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=23303">Ralph Nader, The Nader Page</a>

Sunday, 05 October 2014 13:10

Nader writes: "How do corporate attorneys sleep at night considering that with the power of their large corporate clients, they often crush the freedoms of workers, consumers and small communities who are trying to break out of a complex web of shackles?"

Ralph Nader. (photo: Guardian UK)

The Incarceration of the American Consumer

By Ralph Nader, The Nader Page

05 October 14

ow do corporate attorneys sleep at night considering that with the power of their large corporate clients, they often crush the freedoms of workers, consumers and small communities who are trying to break out of a complex web of shackles?

These highly paid power lawyers expertly weave an intricate system of controls into one-sided contracts enforced by laws garnished with the muscle of big business to wear down all but the most intrepid shoppers.

I am not only referring to the mass marketing scams, crams, deceptions and hidden frauds. Who can keep track of this proliferation in the credit, lending, insurance, cell phone, car, health care, home repair and mortgage businesses? Every year, books and manuals come out to show consumers how they can smartly protect themselves and their money. They are written in a clear, detailed and graphic manner, but they almost never become best sellers.

Vendors are trained to rip people off from a distance and make them feel good at the same time. That is one of the purposes of advertisements and packaging. Ripping off consumers is made easier because elementary and high schools neglect this subject. After twelve years of education, millions of students are unequipped with the needed knowledge that can enable them to make astute purchases and pursue remedies if they are cheated.

We need to focus on the incarcerating infrastructure that corporate attorneys build year after year to insulate their corporate paymasters from structural accountability under the rule of law.

Take the two main pillars of American law�contracts and torts. For half a century, power lawyers, backed by corporate campaign cash for legislators, have hacked at the roots of the legal protections for shoppers and for wrongfully injured people. Fine print contracts�called �mice print� by Senator Elizabeth Warren�block consumers from going to court and mandate compulsory arbitration. Other fine print lets the vendors change the contract any time without getting specific consent of the buyers. Internet fine print amounts to simply �clicking� and being instantly bound by a matrix of contract peonage. This victory for corporate lawyers is a defeat for the American people who lose their freedom of contract�a servitude that should arouse conservatives and liberals alike.

And, the other freedom to have safe products, services and environments is stripped away by �tort deform,� euphemistically called tort reform by the insurance lobby and its corporate clients. Tort law is supposed to award adequate compensation for negligently or intentionally inflicted injuries upon innocent people. Shrinking by the decade in favor of the wrongdoers, tort law has been twisted to block the courtroom door for the most vulnerable of our population.

Corporate lobbyists have swarmed over state legislatures to pass rules that require courts to limit compensation by an arbitrary cap, restrict the evidence that juries can weigh, pulverize class actions and tie up the judges and juries who are the only ones actually receiving and evaluating the evidence.

An added burden is created by the domination of the credit economy that harnesses the rights of consumers by the unbridled controls known as secret credit ratings, the iron collar of credit scores and the very personal information collected on people in the computer age.

The credit economy also undermines peoples� control of their own money, thus facilitating an array of penalties and fees imposed by credit firms, banks, and pay day loan shops, along with growing charges for services unasked and unused by consumers known as cramming.

As if these and other controls over consumers are not enough, corporate lawyers are the architects of these notorious trade agreements such as NAFTA and GATT, which created the World Trade Organization (WTO). Americans are learning that these transnational autocratic forms of governance subordinate their labor, consumer and environment rights to the supremacy of international commerce. The WTO bypasses our domestic courts and agencies by processing disputes between nations before secret tribunals in Geneva, Switzerland (see http://www.citizen.org/trade/ for more information).

So if consumer safety or labeling standards in the U.S. are viewed as trade restrictive by nations that export such non-conforming products to the U.S., they can bring the case to Geneva where we will likely lose. These �pull down� trade agreements punish those nations that treat their workers fairly, safeguard their environments and protect their consumers, instead of going after the nations that sell unsafe products.

The patsy U.S. government under President Clinton even went along with allowing foreign companies to sue our government to compensate them for regulations such as chemical standards that might reduce their sales and profits.

The mounting privilege and immunities of giant global corporations go well beyond tax escapes, loan guarantees, and other abuses using our government to rig the market. Right wingers condemn these actions and refer to them as �crony capitalism.� For example, patients pay higher drug prices because companies rig patent extensions through Congress or bring harassing law suits against competitors.

The political power of the �military-industrial complex� leads to sweetheart, single source contracts and the wholesale and expensive outsourcing of what were once governmental functions, such as feeding soldiers and providing health insurance under contract.

Corporations have succeeded in blocking, delaying or diluting long overdue regulation of corporate crime, fraud and abuse. They have made Congress keep law enforcement budgets so paltry, for example, that billing fraud in the health care industry alone amounts to about $270 billion a year, according to fraud expert Malcolm Sparrow of Harvard University (author of License to Steal).

It is the external infrastructure�trade agreements, credit scores, credit ratings, and the privatization of contract law and weakened dispute resolution�that strips consumers of control over their own money and purchases and make it difficult for such consumers to fight back in court.

Stay tuned. It is only going to get worse unless consumer groups rethink and regroup to move systemic shifts of power from sellers to buyers through community-based economies, group buying, cooperatives, and political power leading to updated law and order. (See http://www.yesmagazine.org/ and http://www.ilsr.org/ for more information.)

Encouraging schools to adopt experiential instruction in detecting consumer fraud and using small claims court to secure inexpensive justice is an easy first step on the long march to consumer justice.

14 comments

Why War? It's a Question Americans Should Be Asking

Sunday, 05 October 2014 13:07

Daddis writes: "As the United States charges once more into war, little debate has centered on the actual utility of war. Instead, policymakers and pundits have focused their comments on combating the latest danger to our nation and its interests as posed by Islamic State militants."

President Barack Obama. (photo: AP)

Why War? It's a Question Americans Should Be Asking

By Gregory Daddis, The Los Angeles Times

05 October 14

s the United States charges once more into war, little debate has centered on the actual utility of war. Instead, policymakers and pundits have focused their comments on combating the latest danger to our nation and its interests as posed by Islamic State militants.

In late August, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel claimed Islamic State was an �imminent threat to every interest we have� and that the sophisticated group was �beyond anything we've seen.� With few dissenting voices, either in Congress or in the American media, U.S. air forces plunged again into the unstable region of the Middle East. The only remaining deliberation, it seemed, was whether �boots on the ground� were necessary to dismantle and defeat this new threat to democracy and freedom.

For well over a decade � one might suggest over multiple decades � the United States has been engaged in war, yet so few in the public sphere seem willing to ask, as a Vietnam-era hit song did: �War, what is it good for?�

It seems plausible to argue that war is a phenomenon increasingly serving itself rather than any durable political goals. Military theorists from an earlier age sought to place war firmly in its political context. In the early 1800s, Carl von Clausewitz, while acknowledging that war's results should never be regarded as final, still spoke of war performing a political purpose. A century later, Britain's Basil Liddell Hart suggested that strategists should look beyond war to the �subsequent peace.�

But what if peace never comes? What if war only engenders new enemies and new threats?

Moreover, war, as an instrument of policy, seems increasingly to be losing its decisive edge. This is not to suggest that U.S. military forces should concentrate on battle alone as a means for solving contemporary political problems. Even Napoleon found successful battles like Austerlitz ephemeral for maintaining peace on the European continent.

But for American purposes, war as a political tool has more and more demonstrated its inability to deliver. In truth, decisiveness in war has historically been elusive, especially in the decades following the end of World War II. Despite aims of containing communism abroad (all while confronting the hyped communist threat at home) or bringing stability to a new world order, the Americans who deployed to Korea, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, Cambodia, Grenada, Libya, Panama, El Salvador, Lebanon, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo and Somalia never seemed to achieve any sense of lasting peace. Even when the reviled communists had been �defeated,� new threats emerged that required ever more deployments of U.S. soldiers.

This persistent state of war, however, has not stimulated any deeper reconsideration of how we view peace and war. As historian Mary Dudziak has artfully suggested, �Military conflict has been ongoing for decades, yet public policy rests on the false assumption that it is an aberration.�

Of course, some will argue that our nation was born of war, both revolutionary and civil, and events such as 9/11 require a response to assuage the passion of a people seeking revenge. Thus, war has purpose. It not only unites but, as journalist Chris Hedges argues, gives us meaning. Victory in war somehow makes us �feel� more American.

Yet such generally accepted hypotheses of war and victory seem increasingly invalid. If war provides meaning, why, as Dudziak asks, does military engagement no longer require �the support of the American people but instead their inattention�? If a theory of forward defense, of fighting on someone else's shores rather than our own, is the rationale for constant war, when will we achieve a sense of national security that no longer requires constant battle?

The key seems to be to ask more meaningful questions about the difficulties of imposing one's will on others through the use of military force. Much of war is the art of balancing the possible with the acceptable. If our political purpose is stability, security and promoting the spread of American ideals (and economic access), then civilian policymakers and military leaders seemingly need to ask how war can, in fact, further those political goals.

But war has not offered predictability, it has not assuaged our fears of vulnerability, it has not left us with a more stable international environment. And it seems increasingly incapable of deterring future war.

So we come back to that song's question: �War, what is it good for?� And we have to at least consider the song's answer: �Absolutely nothing.�

14 comments

The Church's Gay Obsession

Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=7261">Frank Bruni, The New York Times</a>

Sunday, 05 October 2014 13:06

Bruni writes: "Catholic officials here have elected to focus on this one issue and on a given group of people: gays and lesbians. Their moralizing is selective, bigoted and very sad."

Throughout Lent, Catholics for Marriage Equality held vigils outside the Cathedral of St. Paul. (photo: Catholics for Marriage Equality)

The Church's Gay Obsession

By Frank Bruni, The New York Times

05 October 14

epeatedly over the last year and a half, I�ve written about teachers in Catholic schools and leaders in Catholic parishes who were dismissed from their posts because they were in same-sex relationships and � in many cases � had decided to marry.

Every time, more than a few readers weighed in to tell me that these people had it coming. If you join a club, they argued, you play by its rules or you suffer the consequences.

Oh really?

4 comments

FOCUS | NYT's Belated Admission on Contra-Cocaine

Sunday, 05 October 2014 12:47

Parry writes: "Nearly three decades since the stories of Nicaraguan Contra-cocaine trafficking first appeared in 1985, the New York Times has finally, forthrightly admitted the allegations were true, although this belated acknowledgement comes in a movie review buried deep inside Sunday�s paper."

The unveiling of the Ronald Reagan statue at Reagan National Airport. (photo: T.J. Kirkpatrick/The Washington Times)

NYT's Belated Admission on Contra-Cocaine

By Robert Parry, Consortium News

05 October 14

early three decades since the stories of Nicaraguan Contra-cocaine trafficking first appeared in 1985, the New York Times has finally, forthrightly admitted the allegations were true, although this belated acknowledgement comes in a movie review buried deep inside Sunday�s paper.

The review addresses a new film, �Kill the Messenger,� that revives the Contra-cocaine charges in the context of telling the tragic tale of journalist Gary Webb who himself revived the allegations in 1996 only to have the New York Times and other major newspapers wage a vendetta against him that destroyed his career and ultimately drove him to suicide.

The Times� movie review by David Carr begins with a straightforward recognition of the long-denied truth to which now even the CIA has confessed: �If someone told you today that there was strong evidence that the Central Intelligence Agency once turned a blind eye to accusations of drug dealing by operatives it worked with, it might ring some distant, skeptical bell. Did that really happen? That really happened.�

Although the Times� review still quibbles with aspects of Webb�s �Dark Alliance� series in the San Jose Mercury-News, the Times appears to have finally thrown in the towel when it comes to the broader question of whether Webb was telling important truths.

The Times� resistance to accepting the reality of this major national security scandal under President Ronald Reagan even predated its tag-team destruction of Webb in the mid-1990s, when he was alternately pummeled by the Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. The same Big Three newspapers also either missed or dismissed the Contra-cocaine scandal when Brian Barger and I first disclosed it in 1985 for the Associated Press � and even when an investigation led by Sen. John Kerry provided more proof in 1989.

Indeed, the New York Times took a leading role in putting down the story in the mid-1980s just as it did in the mid-1990s. That only began to change in 1998 when CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz conducted the spy agency�s first comprehensive internal inquiry into the allegations and found substantial evidence to support suspicions of Contra-cocaine smuggling and the CIA�s complicity in the scandal.

Though the Times gave short-shrift to the CIA�s institutional confession in 1998, it did at least make a cursory acknowledgement of the historic admissions. The Times� co-collaborators in the mugging of Gary Webb did even less. After waiting several weeks, the Washington Post produced an inside-the-paper story that missed the point. The Los Angeles Times, which had assigned 17 journalists to the task of destroying Webb�s reputation, ignored the CIA�s final report altogether.

So, it is perhaps nice that the Times stated quite frankly that the long-denied scandal �really happened� � even though this admission is tucked into a movie review placed on page AR-14 of the New York edition. And the Times� reviewer still can�t quite face up to the fact that his newspaper was part of a gang assault on an honest journalist who actually got the story right.

Still Bashing Webb

Thus, the review is peppered with old claims that Webb hyped his material when, in fact, he understated the seriousness of the scandal, as did Barger and I in the 1980s. The extent of Contra cocaine trafficking and the CIA�s awareness � and protection � of the criminal behavior were much greater than any of us knew.

The Times� review sums up the Webb story (and the movie plot) this way: ��Kill the Messenger,� a movie starring Jeremy Renner due Oct. 10, examines how much of the story [Webb] told was true and what happened after he wrote it. �Kill the Messenger� decidedly remains in Mr. Webb�s corner, perhaps because most of the rest of the world was against him while he was alive.

�Rival newspapers blew holes in his story, government officials derided him as a nut case and his own newspaper, after initially basking in the scoop, threw him under a bus. Mr. Webb was open to attack in part because of the lurid presentation of the story and his willingness to draw causality based on very thin sourcing and evidence. He wrote past what he knew, but the movie suggests that he told a truth others were unwilling to. Sometimes, when David takes on Goliath, David is the one who ends up getting defeated. �

�Big news organization like The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The Washington Post tore the arms and legs off his work. Despite suggestions that their zeal was driven by professional jealousy, some of the journalists who re-reported the story said they had little choice, given the deep flaws.

�Tim Golden in The New York Times and others wrote that Mr. Webb overestimated his subjects� ties to the contras as well as the amount of drugs sold and money that actually went to finance the war in Nicaragua.�

The reviewer gives Golden another chance to take a shot at Webb and defend what the Big Papers did. �Webb made some big allegations that he didn�t back up, and then the story just exploded, especially in California,� Golden said in an email. �You can find some fault with the follow-up stories, but mostly what they did was to show what Webb got wrong.�

But Golden continues to be wrong himself. While it may be true that no journalistic story is perfect and that no reporter knows everything about his subject, Webb was if anything too constrained in his chief conclusions, particularly the CIA�s role in shielding the Contra drug traffickers. The reality was much worse, with CIA officials intervening in criminal cases, such as the so-called Frogman Case in San Francisco, that threatened to expose the Contra-related trafficking.

The CIA Inspector General�s report also admitted that the CIA withheld evidence of Contra drug trafficking from federal investigators, Congress and even the CIA�s own analytical division. The I.G. report was clear, too, on the CIA�s motivation.

The inspector general interviewed senior CIA officers who acknowledged that they were aware of the Contra-drug problem but didn�t want its exposure to undermine the struggle to overthrow Nicaragua�s Sandinista government. According to Inspector General Hitz, the CIA had �one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government. . . . [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the Contra program.� One CIA field officer explained, �The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war.�

In 2000, the Republican-controlled House Intelligence Committee grudgingly acknowledged that the stories about Reagan�s CIA protecting Contra drug traffickers were true. The committee released a report citing classified testimony from CIA Inspector General Britt Snider (Hitz�s successor) admitting that the spy agency had turned a blind eye to evidence of Contra-drug smuggling and generally treated drug smuggling through Central America as a low priority.

�In the end the objective of unseating the Sandinistas appears to have taken precedence over dealing properly with potentially serious allegations against those with whom the agency was working,� Snider said, adding that the CIA did not treat the drug allegations in �a consistent, reasoned or justifiable manner.�

The House committee still downplayed the significance of the Contra-cocaine scandal, but the panel acknowledged, deep inside its report, that in some cases, �CIA employees did nothing to verify or disprove drug trafficking information, even when they had the opportunity to do so. In some of these, receipt of a drug allegation appeared to provoke no specific response, and business went on as usual.�

Yet, like the Hitz report in 1998, the admissions by Snider and the House committee drew virtually no media attention in 2000 � except for a few articles on the Internet, including one at Consortiumnews.com.

Space for Ceppos

The Times� review also gives space to Webb�s San Jose Mercury-News editor Jerry Ceppos, who caved after the Big Media attacks, shut down Webb�s ongoing investigation and rushed to apologize for supposed flaws in the series.

In the Times� review, Ceppos is self-congratulatory about his actions, saying good news organizations should hold themselves accountable. �We couldn�t support some of the statements that had been made,� Ceppos said. �I would do exactly the same thing 18 years later that I did then, and that is to say that I think we overreached.�

Despite acknowledging the truth of the Contra-cocaine scandal, the review was short on interviews with knowledgeable people willing to speak up strongly for Webb. I was one of Webb�s few journalistic colleagues who defended his work when he was under assault in 1996-97 and � every year on the anniversary of Webb�s death � have published articles about the shameful behavior of the mainstream media and Ceppos in destroying Webb�s life.

I was e-mailed by an assistant to the Times� reviewer who asked me to call to be interviewed about Webb. However, when I called back, the assistant said she was busy and would have to talk to me later. I gave her my cell phone number but never heard back from her.

But the review does note that �Webb had many supporters who suggested that he was right in the main. In retrospect, his broader suggestion that the C.I.A. knew or should have known that some of its allies were accused of being in the drug business remains unchallenged. The government�s casting of a blind eye while also fighting a war on drugs remains a shadowy part of American history.�

The review also notes that when the Kerry report was issued, �major news outlets gave scant attention to the report� and that: �Mr. Webb was not the first journalist to come across what seemed more like an airport thriller novel. Way back in December 1985, The Associated Press reported that three contra groups had �engaged in cocaine trafficking, in part to help finance their war against Nicaragua.� In 1986, The San Francisco Examiner ran a large expos� covering similar terrain.

�Again, major news outlets mostly gave the issue a pass. It was only when Mr. Webb, writing 10 years later, tried to tie cocaine imports from people connected to the contras to the domestic crisis of crack cocaine in large cities, particularly Los Angeles, that the story took off.�

Despite recognizing the seriousness of the Contra-cocaine crimes that Webb helped expose, the review returns to various old saws about Webb�s alleged exaggerations.

�The headline, graphic and summary language of �Dark Alliance� was lurid and overheated, showing a photo of a crack-pipe smoker embedded in the seal of the C.I.A,� the review said. However, in retrospect, the graphic seems apt. The CIA was knowingly protecting a proxy force that was smuggling cocaine to criminal networks that were producing crack.

Yet, despite this hemming and hawing � perhaps a reflexive attempt to not make the New York Times look too bad � the review ends on a strong note, concluding: �However dark or extensive, the alliance Mr. Webb wrote about was a real one.�

[To learn more about the Contra-cocaine scandal and how you can hear a December 1996 joint appearance at which Robert Parry and Gary Webb discuss their reporting, click here.]

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