Word: cracking
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Most explosively, the series suggested CIA complicity in, or at least knowledge of, the operation. Hyped by provocative headlines (the series was titled "Dark Alliance") and splashed over the Internet (accompanied by a logo that superimposed the CIA's insignia on the image of a crack smoker), the story was perfect fodder for persistent suspicions in the African-American community of a government conspiracy against blacks. The outrage percolated on talk radio and on the Internet until Jesse Jackson and other black leaders began demanding a full accounting. The CIA conducted an internal review; congressional hearings were convened...
...extraordinary backlash in the press. The New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times all eventually ran lengthy investigative pieces or multipart series that disputed major points in the Mercury News story, especially its implication that the CIA was a party to getting poor blacks hooked on crack. After defending the series with diminishing resolve, Mercury News executive editor Jerry Ceppos finally confessed in an extraordinary Sunday editorial last week that he too found the story flawed...
After an internal re-examination of the piece by seven reporters and editors, Ceppos concluded that the series "did not meet our standards" in several respects. The story fingered Nicaraguan drug supplier Oscar Danilo Blandon Reyes as the pivotal figure who funneled money from the L.A. crack trade to the contras, but failed to note that Blandon (who later became a U.S. government informant) testified that he stopped sending money to the contras in 1982, well before he began trafficking drugs in L.A. Moreover, Ceppos admitted, the assertion that "millions in profits" from drug dealing went to the contras...
...editor also acknowledged that the story's contention that crack smoking in the inner city can be traced to a single Nicaraguan drug ring (Blandon was called "the Johnny Appleseed of crack") was an "oversimplification" and ignored evidence that the crack epidemic was a "complex phenomenon that had more than one origin." Finally, Ceppos admitted, the Mercury News "did not have proof" that top CIA officials knew the contras were getting money from the L.A. drug connection. "If we were to publish 'Dark Alliance' today," he said, "it would be edited differently. It would state fewer conclusions as certainties...
...paper's mea culpa likely to change the minds of those who want to believe that the U.S. government was behind the introduction of crack into the inner city. Los Angeles Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who was among the first to take up Webb's reporting as a political cause, has reaffirmed her belief that the basic story is sound and has vowed to continue pressing for congressional hearings. Says Los Angeles city councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas: "There is a lot of suspicion that there was some truth associated with the claims in the story. Frankly, those suspicions will...