Why bother buying something you already own?

Along with Walter Pincus, Howard Kurtz also took the lead in the pre-emptive "debunking" of the late Gary Webb's San Jose Mercury-News series documenting the Casey-North Enterprise protection of the trafficking of mass quantities of cocaine by Central American supporters of the clandestine Contra effort, in the 1980s. It was a series that the Washington Post never even ran in the first place.

The series was overwhelmingly accurate, but the facts got lost in the media mischaracterizations of the thematic content of the stories, misdirections that led to the topic being seen as a concern only relevant to the "black ghetto", and the character assassination of Gary Webb.

San Jose Mercury News editor Jerry Ceppos folded- without providing any detailed referencing of why he was backing down on a series that he had previously approved- and Webb was subsequently made to feel unwelcome enough at the Mercury-News that he filed a suit against them for wrongful employment action, which was settled out of court in Webb's favor, for an undisclosed amount of compensation.

But Webb was effectively blacklisted as a reporter by every major daily in the USA. He eventually committed suicide.

Those stories were accurate, and they remain relevant and important. Some of us were his friends, and we haven't forgotten.

A few of the lesser-known facts:

Danilo Blandon, a former vice-president of the Bank of America in Nicaragua, with an MBA from Harvard, became the main supplier to the Hoover Crips of South Central Los Angeles, because he was able to offer his buyer, Ricky Ross, cocaine at a price less than 1/2 what he was formerly paying. By the end, Ross was getting his cocaine in kilogram quantities for $12,000 a kilo, the equivalent of $12 a gram. Ross was moving 100 kilos every week, and had worked out a deal with Blandon enabling him to obtain up to 25 kilos in advance of mentary payment.

Danilo Blandon's supplier was Norwin Meneses, the "King of cocaine" in Nicaragua, a man who was brother of 2 of the generals in Somoza's Guardia Nacionale- the core of the Somocista Contra force who later became the FDN, initially with the aid of the right-wing Argentine junta.

This was no small operation- although the public Congressional hearings dwelt at length on paltry sums of money, almost completely avoiding any mention of the FDN Contra group in the process.

Danilo Blandon eventually earned over $100,000 and a get-out-of-jail card from the FBI as a paid informant, in return for becoming a prosecution witness against the cocaine trafficking gangs that he had originally empowered and supplied.

Read the book Dark Alliance. Don't listen to Howard Kurtz.

Can anyone offer a detailed explanation to me on how pervasive data mining, wiretapping, legalized kidnapping by the State, and torture would have foiled the hijacking plots on Sept. 11, 2001, rather than simply relying on sustained attention by competent law enforcement agencies, using procedures already legally available?

kd6rxl, what's the necessity for professionally trained terrorists to "phone Waziristan"- or anywhere- for instructions?

Is there any evidence that the 9/11 hijacking crews relied on intercontinental telephonic communication to carry out their plans?

It's well-known in intelligence and law enforcement circles that there's such a thing as casting too wide of a net, and swamping out important information with clutter...in regard to Waziristan, say- how many Pashto translators do we have, to make sense of the increased volume of intercepted calls? Are they fluent in the Pashto dialects and colloquialisms of Waziristan?

Or is this about something else?

There was plenty of evidence available to law enforcement and intelligence agencies on the identities and possible doings of the 9/11 hijackers, the vast majority of it available through legal means that preceded "USA-PATRIOT." The data was there, it wasn't connected. The answer to that problem doesn't reside in trashing the U.S. Constitution.

( Note: See the 9/11 timeline at Complete 911 Timeline/Warning Signs: Specific Cases http://cooperativeresearch.org. )

Meanwhile- How many of our jetliners have reinforced bulkheads and sky marshals, 6 years after Sept. 11, 2001?

Yours truly, a "non-leftist"...

Anadromous freshwater, and estuarine fisheries all over the US have been decimated, depleted, or driven to extinction by the following factors:

1)factory farming for meat, especially poultry and hogs, which produce tremendous amounts of pollution from manure that runs off into streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, and estuaries, eventually comprising a large portion of the nutrient suffocation responsible for "dead zones" like the one presently found in the Gulf Of Mexico.

2) the long-term neglect of the public works in the USA that has led to under-funded, outdated, and over-capacity municipal sewage treatment facilities becoming the #1 point-site polluters in the country today (Hawaii's Wakkiki Beach was closed to swimming due to sewage pollution for more than week last year- did you know that?) The most recent American Society of Civil Engineers reports have given this country a D- in water treatment for several years in succession. How much longer until it flunks?

http://www.asce.org/reportcard/2005/page.cfm?id=103

3) massive irrigation projects, particularly on the West Coast, often for water-hungry crops like alfalfa for animal feed, or even non-food crops like cotton (along with the looming "ethanol" con game), that starve the riverine ecosystems of water and deplete the aquifers and the springs.

Plentiful fish runs in clean rivers are like free protein- all that's required is to maintain sufficient habitat, and to harvest the fish when they run upriver, in quantities sufficient to allow healthy and sustainable spawning populations of salmon, steelhead trout, shad, striped bass, perch, herring...and estuaries full of crabs, clams, oysters, and shellfish.

But the money power now lies with the factory farms, and massive petrochemical agribusiness irrigated plantations, and cotton, and sugar cane- along with bought and paid-for politicians who mortgage the future in the name of "lower taxes" while the country falls apart...what next, a cholera epidemic?