BY JON HILLSON AND OLLIE BIVINS

LOS ANGELES, California - Outrage over revelations of CIA complicity in massive cocaine dealing in this city's Black community exploded as 2,500 angry residents massed at the Vision theater in Leimert Park, September 28. The overwhelmingly Black crowd cheered calls for getting to the bottom of the charges and prosecuting guilty government officials involved in the 1980s drug trade.

The "Town Hall" meeting was sponsored by KJLH-FM, the most widely listened to radio station in the Black community, and co-hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus. At least 1,000 attending listened to the event outside the jammed theater.

The mounting scandal erupted in August with the publication of a three-part series by Gary Webb in the San Jose Mercury News. The articles document connections between CIA operatives in the U.S.-organized Nicaraguan mercenary contra army and a huge cocaine smuggling operation they used to raise funds for guns, supplies, and personal use in the mid-1980s. Direct U.S. aid to the hired counterrevolutionary marauders was prohibited by a congressional ban at the time.

The Webb series fills in gaps with spectacular news about how this cocaine, turned into crack, first made its way into the Black communities of South Central, Watts, and Compton, devastating whole sections of the Black community, the consciously targeted market of the contra drug wholesalers. Thousands of Latinos also became addicted to the cheap available drug.

"They want us to be tough on crime? Okay, we're tough on crime," said Danny Bakewell, leader of the Brotherhood Crusade, "wherever it is, including the U.S. government, no matter how high it goes.

"And we want them prosecuted, in jail, in jail!" Bakewell said, to shouts and cheers.

Other speakers, including Los Angeles County supervisor Yvonne Brathwaite-Burke; Percy Pinkney, senior advisor to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein; Los Angeles City Councilman Nate Holden; and Compton mayor Omar Bradley backed calls for a federal investigation.

California State senator Thomas Hayden detailed CIA involvement in the drug trade in Burma and Thailand during the Vietnam war, with Pakistan during U.S. support to Afghan guerrillas, as well as in Central America. "In one sense, this is nothing new," Hayden said, "but what is new is how much cocaine was sent into South Central. How could it be an accident, if penalties for crack possession are five times worse than for the white powder used on the [affluent] West Side [of Los Angeles], and the jails are piled up with Blacks and Latinos?"

Maxine Waters, the South Central Democratic member of Congress, was greeted with a standing ovation. Her office prepared more than 2,000 copies of a 53-page reproduction of the Mercury News series and related documents for the audience.

"I want you to read this," she said, "so you can defend the allegations in it." The upcoming congressional investigation will be "a long haul. We'll see what they come back with," she said, urging the audience to "be disciplined. We may have to have 10,000 people on the steps of every federal building in the country at the right time."

Many in the audience thought now was the "right time" to do something, while the issue is hot. In a brief question period, after five hours of speeches from the stage, the several people who got to microphones were critical that nothing concrete was projected.

Outside, after the event, a young Black woman who works at the Los Angeles Times expressed a common sentiment. "We've got to hit the streets. We need some mass action, now. And we need to do it," she said, "with everybody, from every community. This is a human issue."

The Brotherhood Crusade announced a candlelight vigil on October 3 at Martin Luther King Hospital to protest the CIA cocaine connection. Many crack victims, including infants, are treated there.

At least 10 workers from the big McDonnell Douglas plant in Lakewood attended the forum. Black workers in the plant began passing around copies of the Mercury News series after downloading it from the Internet.

Supporters of the fascist outfit headed by Lyndon LaRouche distributed hundreds of copies of their newspaper, The New Federalist, to those attending the meeting, and staffed a literature table behind a big banner which read, "Jail the Drug Kingpin Bush."

In a related development, new attention has been focused on a 1990 court motion seeking information on the 1986 bust of an alleged money launderer, who told cops he was a CIA agent. The suspect, LA Country sheriff's deputy Daniel Garner, was allowed by the officers to notify the spy agency as the police executed a search warrant of his house. Garner later served time in federal custody.

The cops concluded he was working with the Blandon family. Danilo Blandon, the CIA operative, contra fund-raiser, and top cocaine kingpin at the center of the Mercury News article, is currently an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

In his motion, Garner's lawyer stated "all records of the search, seizure and property also `disappeared' from the Sheriff's Department."

Ollie Bivins is a member of United Auto Workers Local 148 at McDonnell Douglas in Lakewood, California.  
 
 
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