Dear People,

Richard Cohen totally missed the mark in his op-ed “Crack and CIA: Why the Story Lives.”

First, he falsely stated that the Mercury News stories linking specific crack dealers and CIA-supported contra leaders were “found ... baseless” by the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. These papers and other mainstream media have attacked straw men, such as an overt and provable CIA-crack link, precisely because the limited claims of the Mercury News articles are so solid.

Second, he suggested that “it makes no sense to whites that the government would do something as vile as have any connection at all to the drug trade.” Has a national poll asked ‘Do you believe the CIA has used and protected large scale drug dealers in some of their operations?’ I believe that millions of white Americans, on the right and left and in the alienated middle, would answer that question with a ‘Yes.’

Third, Cohen insults African-Americans, especially Representative Maxine Waters, by implying their responses to this issue are irrational. Representative Waters “even held a rally.” She has hard evidence that her government did nothing while its paid agent introduced crack literally into her neighborhood. Holding a rally seems like a pretty moderate response.

Cohen correctly notes that history looks very different to Americans of different races. But not only African-Americans question the official truths of the major media. For many Americans of all colors, what he calls “bizarre rumors and myths” are fact-based explanations, deserving full investigation, of events we have long been troubled by in Indochina, Panama, Nicaragua, and at home in our streets.

Larry Yates