Copyright 1998 Stern Publishing, Inc.  
                                   OC Weekly
                                June 12, 1998
SECTION: News; Pg. 10 Fine Print
LENGTH: 1676 words
HEADLINE: RAGE AGAINST THE WEBB
 BODY:

	"Bring on Gary!" I was only 20 seconds into my introductory
	speech on behalf of Gary Webb, author of Dark Alliance, the 1996
	San Jose Mercury News series that detailed how a drug ring with
	ties to the Nicaraguan contras helped fuel the explosion of
	crack cocaine in America's inner cities. I finished my
	three-minute speech amid a deafening roar of KPFK listeners,
	activists with the Crack the CIA coalition, and even a few
	average-looking Middle Americans as Webb took the podium at the
	Midnight Special bookstore in Santa Monica. Here was a man who
	had quit his job with the weak-kneed Mercury News to get his
	story out to the world. He had even flown down from Sacramento
	to sign a few copies of his new book without asking for anything
	in return--save money to pay for his plane ticket. And now, just
	five minutes into his speech, some nut case was strolling in
	front of the podium, passing out political leaflets. "Can't you
	do that later?" someone screeched in a nasal whine. When that
	didn't work, someone else weighed in: "Stop the pamphlets or
	stop the speech, one or the other!" "I'll be quick," Webb
	promised, and he kept talking. Fortunately, the pamphleteer
	retreated. That's when a serious-looking young African-American
	woman in the audience decided to tell Webb that he was wrong
	about the origins of crack cocaine. "The police invented crack,"
	the young woman shouted in the middle of Webb's sentence--namely
	that the CIA hadn't targeted African-Americans with crack but
	had protected the drug dealers in Webb's book because of their
	ties to the Nicaraguan contras. The woman sprang to her feet and
	folded her arms defiantly. "No, they didn't," responded Webb,
	looking down at his notes, struggling to regain his stream of
	thought. "What happened was this drug ring, which the CIA has
	now admitted it protected, arrived in South-Central at a
	particularly bad time, in 1982. It hooked up with the gangs
	right when people in South-Central were learning how to turn
	powder cocaine into crack. . . ." "Don't try to tell us that!"
	the woman responded, her voice rising in frustration. "The
	police invented that drug." The woman claimed that undercover
	police informants broke into her house and fed her intravenous
	drugs "so they can turn me into another statistic." Like former
	CIA Director John Deutsch, who defended his agency to a
	similarly irate crowd in South-Central shortly after Webb's
	story appeared, the author did his best to push through with his
	speech. But the more he talked, the angrier people got. It
	wasn't necessarily that anyone disagreed with what Webb was
	saying. It was more the fact that many in the audience hadn't
	arrived to hear Webb talk about the CIA, but to bury the spy
	agency with their own words. "I think we all appreciate what
	you've done, but we just want you to tell the whole truth about
	the CIA," one of the audience members helpfully explained,
	stopping Webb's speech to launch into a diatribe about the
	agency's genocidal plot to wipe out black America. Suddenly, the
	audience began screaming and cheering in unison. At first, it
	seemed as if a fight had somehow broken out. But it was none
	other than U.S. Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-South-Central),
	who had arrived just in time for the end of Webb's speech. Like
	a descending angel of mercy, she strode straight up to the
	podium and embraced the beleaguered author, drawing an impromptu
	round of applause from the audience, many of whom seemed
	stunned. In a single hug from Waters, Webb was forgiven. The
	rage of decades of distrust between African-Americans and the
	CIA, which seemed ready to devour even this brave reporter just
	moments earlier, subsided. (Nick Schou)

This document resides at http://speech.csun.edu/ben/news/cia/980612.shou.html