How To Make Millions Selling Drugs Under the CIA (story of Barry Seal and Gary Webb)

I love this documentary! If you want to learn an interesting story and laugh like hell, watch it. This documentary is about the CIA selling drugs in the US and tells the same stories to those in the Hollywood movies American Made and Kill the Messenger. These movies depict the stories of Barry Seal and Gary Webb, and Gary Webb is one of my heroes. This documentary is so well-made that I laughed all evening while watching it. However, it is also very informative and reveals many things, including how Western media gaslights and obstructs the truth. You got Nixon, Bush and Clinton mentioned. Something I disagree with in this documentary is the idea of Gary Webb killing himself which I am not so sure of.

“Seal’s trunk the day he was killed contained George H.W. Bush’s personal phone number. This is hard to verify as the contents of his trunk were immediately confiscated by the FBI, according to Louisiana police who were on the scene.

After his death, Barry Seal’s lawyer, Lewis Unglesby, allegedly told Richard Sharpstein, a lawyer representing one of the Colombians involved in Barry Seal’s murder, that he had once argued with Barry because he felt Barry wasn’t being completely open about his dealings. Unglesby said Barry placed a phone call to Vice President Bush directly and argued with him, saying, “If you don’t get these IRS [expletive] off my back, I’m going to blow the whistle on the Contra scheme.” Three weeks later, he was dead.”

“One month later, a Lebanese magazine published a bombshell report uncovering that the Reagan administration had secretly been selling arms to Iran in direct violation of an official embargo. The secret arms sale aimed to achieve two things: facilitate the release of American hostages held in Lebanon and generate untraceable funds to support the Contras in Nicaragua. The Reagan administration hoped to use the proceeds from these sales to circumvent the Boland Amendment. If Congress didn’t know about the sales, they wouldn’t ask about the money.

Three weeks after the magazine’s release, Attorney General Edwin Meese held a press conference where he confirmed for the first time publicly that money from the arms sale was diverted to the Nicaraguan Contras. He stated, “Certain monies were taken and made available to the forces in Central America opposing the Sandinista government there.”

When asked about the amount, he responded, “We don’t know the exact amount yet. Our estimate is that it is somewhere between $1 and $30 million.”

The same day, Reagan’s National Security Adviser John Poindexter resigned amid the scrutiny, and President Reagan fired Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who had just spent the last few days shredding so many important documents that he broke the government shredder.”

“On the first day of the hearings, which were broadcast nationally, the intricate details of the secretive U.S. operations were brought to light. Witnesses, including key figures from the Reagan administration, testified over the course of several months. The most notable of these testimonies was from Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who made several statements that were highly controversial and contributed significantly to the Iran-Contra notoriety. He admitted under oath to misleading Congress, destroying evidence, and falsifying records to hide the administration’s support for the Nicaraguan rebels.

In a memorable moment, North stated, “That’s why the government of the United States gave me a shredder,” and famously declared, “I lied every time I met the Iranians.” On the 25th day of Congressional hearings, two protesters from Baltimore began shouting, “Ask about the cocaine!””

“In the months leading up to the Iran-Contra scandal, Oliver North admitted that he was telling his friends that the Reagan administration was getting ready to use him as the fall guy. And fall he did. Under immunity, North took the blame for almost everything involving the scandal, absolving both President Reagan and Vice President Bush of any significant fault. Due to the nationwide notoriety his testimony garnered, his subsequent criminal conviction was overturned because it was deemed impossible for him to get a fair trial.

It wasn’t until North’s 1991 memoir that he finally asserted that President Reagan was fully aware of the Iran-Contra operations—a revelation that came too late to alter the narrative. Additionally, it wasn’t until 1993 that North’s personal notebooks were made public. While heavily censored, the notebooks revealed many things, most importantly several references to a Freddy Vaughn, including a July 6, 1984, entry: “Freddy coming in late July.” This entry came just 11 days after Barry Seal went on a sting operation and captured photos of an apparent Sandinista official loading cocaine onto his airplane, named Frederico Vaughn.

Following the reversal of Oliver North’s conviction and Vice President Bush’s ascension to the presidency, the legal consequences for those implicated in the scandal were minimal. Presidential pardons and granted immunity became common.

The only significant player in the Iran-Contra affair who served any time at all was Thomas G. Clines, a CIA officer sentenced to 16 months in prison for tax evasion.

Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh noted that there was a pattern of deception and obstruction by Bush and other senior Reagan administration officials. In issuing the pardons, President Bush appeared to have been preemptively protecting himself from being implicated by evidence that might come to light during subsequent trials. Now that everybody was pardoned, whatever evidence there was that Bush was involved disappeared.”

“Dr. Malik had a history of giving strange rulings, including one instance where he ruled a decapitated man’s death as natural causes due to complications with a stomach ulcer, even though no head was found at the scene. Dr. Malik claimed the man’s dog ate his head, stating he tested the dog’s vomit and found pieces of the man’s brain and skull. The head was later found in a trash can a few blocks away.

Another instance involved a woman who had been hit in the face with a piece of concrete after yelling racial slurs and throwing a beer can at a Black man. She died during her reconstructive surgery. The concrete had damaged her teeth and nose but didn’t cause any life-threatening injuries. During the surgery, however, the nurse anesthetist had issues transferring breathing tubes, causing the woman to lose oxygen and ultimately leading to a heart attack. Dr. Malik ruled this death a homicide by blunt force trauma, leading to the man who threw the concrete being tried for murder and exonerating the nurse from any malpractice. That nurse was Bill Clinton’s mother.”

This is so ridiculous that I laugh like hell watching it.

After hearing about his resignation, Robert Perry wrote Gary Webb a letter of condolence:

“Like you, I grew up in this business thinking our job was to really tell the public the truth. But something very bad happened to the news media in the 1980s. Part of it was the public diplomacy pressures from the outside, but part of it was the smug, snotty, sophomoric crowd that came to dominate the national media from the inside. These characters fell in love with their power to define reality, not their responsibility to uncover the facts. By the 1990s, the media had become the monster.”

“The U.S. government, working with the combined resources and influence of the three most powerful newspapers in America, orchestrated a campaign to shatter the life and career of a single journalist to the extent that it caused that man, years later, to take his own life. In the wake of his death, he continued to be attacked by newspapers such as the LA Times, which labeled him as a discredited journalist even in his obituary.

When the story of Gary Webb was being told in the 2014 film Kill the Messenger, Washington Post assistant editor Jeffrey Leen took it upon himself to get out ahead of any empathy the film might garner, writing, “Gary Webb was no journalism hero. Despite what Kill the Messenger says, the Hollywood version of his story—a truth-teller persecuted by the cowardly and craven mainstream media—is pure fiction.”

In the words of Gary Webb, “Whether it’s through premeditated murder or manslaughter does not change the fact that you have a body on the floor.” Regardless of how it was spun, the CIA was complicit in the distribution of cocaine to fund the Nicaraguan Contras. The American government, working directly with drug traffickers, allowed the streets of America to be flooded with crack cocaine, leading to the destruction of America’s inner cities. Additionally, they collaborated with major media companies to destroy the life of the journalist who threatened to expose this information.”