On this date in 1969, "Monty Python's Flying Circus" debuted and ran for 45 episodes until 1974. Here we see what arguing was like in the days before the internet.
At Common Dreams, Robert Parry writes NYT’s Belated Admission on Contra-Cocaine. An excerpt:
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 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. [...]
[T]he 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.
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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—Blackwater US Uh Oh:
Two days after Blackwater USA employees opened fire and killed as many as 11 Iraqi civilians whose only crime was getting in the "security contractors" way, Blackwater's employee, the State Department said:
It's also important to remember that this convoy was attacked...
There was -- the basic fact is that there was an attack on the convoy.
I understand that the convoy was attacked and that there was a response. |
And a Blackwater USA spokesman claimed:
Blackwater regrets any loss of life, but this convoy was violently attacked by armed insurgents, not civilians, and our people did their job to defend human life. |
And what reason would the State Department and Blackwater have had to lie? I mean, besides the nearly 200 times Blackwater had fired on Iraqi civilians in the past, or the time a drunk Blackwater employee murdered a bodyguard of the Iraqi Vice President, or the more than $1 billion dollars in contracts Blackwater has received from this administration. |
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