It was CIA's job to know about contras

Oh, how selective we Americans are in choosing our villains!

Glenn Sheller, of Pickerington, Ohio, sees no villainy on the CIA's part if charges are true that it sanctioned a group of contras smuggling cocaine into South Central Los Angeles.

"The CIA could put a mountain of crack cocaine in my back yard and it would not cause me to become an addict," Sheller wrote. "Unless the CIA actually forced a crack pipe into my mouth, I wouldn't touch the stuff."

This is a line of "reasoning" I've been getting since my two columns about the CIA's alleged involvement in cocaine trafficking appeared. One caller suggested that I had lost my mind, but that even if the CIA was guilty as charged the agency is not accountable because those folks who used the crack chose to do it.

"What about personal responsibility?" the caller asked.

Sheller seems pretty big on personal responsibility himself. His brief letter is worth printing in its entirety.

"Since no one has alleged that the CIA forced a crack pipe into anybody's mouth, we have to presume that the inhabitants of America's inner cities chose to do it to themselves. Do you believe that blacks lack the character and willpower to resist such temptation? If so, isn't that a racist view?

"If you do not take this view, then how can you portray the coke-addicted inhabitants of the inner city as 'victims' of the alleged CIA drug-smuggling? Why is it that the CIA is expected to behave responsibly, but the inhabitants of American's inner cities are excused from this obligation? I look forward to the column in which you explain all this."

Be careful what you ask for, the saying goes, because you may get it. Not once in my columns did Sheller read that I said people who choose to smoke crack were victims. That's simply an incorrect inference he made. But there are some legitimate victims of America's drug epidemic.

Before we get to them, let's return to the real world, where -- Sheller's blinders notwithstanding -- drug smuggling by anyone is still illegal. It's illegal for a reason. Drugs -- cocaine, heroin, etc. -- are classified as "controlled dangerous substances." That means those stupid enough to use them might -- in a drug-induced state -- do harm to themselves or others.

The victims of drug use are those who have been robbed so some addict can get money for his fix; the hard-working taxpayers who have had their homes burglarized; the children who were born to crack-addicted mothers or who have died in drive-by shootings over drug dealers' turf wars.

Let's take this to its logical conclusion. If it's acceptable for the CIA to smuggle drugs, it's acceptable for street-level drug dealers to sell them. Using this logic -- which seems to be the logic Sheller and my caller are using -- we'd have to release every drug dealer now in prison for selling drugs. Every street-level inner-city drug dealer -- the ones our government seems so eager to lock up and assumes are the only enemy in what is cynically called the "war on drugs" -- should be cut loose.

The only guilty ones, Sheller's reasoning implies, are the drug users who show a total lack of personal responsibility by using drugs. Odd that Sheller should bring up the word "responsibility," because that is exactly what is at issue in the CIA/contra/crack story.

On Marc Steiner's WJHU radio show broadcast from downtown Baltimore yesterday, Washington Weekly Standard reporter Tucker Carlson railed against CIA critics because there has been no evidence that the CIA knew that contras Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses were selling cocaine to South Central Los Angeles drug dealer "Freeway" Ricky Ross.

But that's the point. The CIA should have known. To use that DTC word that has only been applied to black, inner-city drug users in the past month, it was the CIA's responsibility to know. As backer and funder of the contras, the CIA should have known what Blandon and Meneses were up to 24 hours a day, seven days a week -- from what they ate to what kind of toothpaste they were using to what color underwear they were wearing.

The CIA-sponsored contra war in Nicaragua was a covert operation. Since when is the CIA not responsible for not knowing every detail of its covert operations?

Well, since we folks in middle America said so, apparently. We don't want to be bothered with minor details that might wake us from the dream world we've so carefully constructed. It is in this world that the only crack users are inner-city blacks, the other countries in the world we don't like are the bad guys and we -- including our beloved CIA -- are the good guys.

And a pox on anyone who dares try to wake us.

Pub Date: 10/30/96