The CIA led its contra army to spend the entire decade terrorizing the Nicaraguan people and their Sandinista government, happily allowing the contras to flood Los Angeles and other North American cities with cocaine to fund their efforts. Gary provided extensively documented evidence that while poor communities in L.A. paid the price of the crack explosion—from rampant addiction in their neighborhoods to oppressive law enforcement and jailing with Reagan’s stepped-up ‘war on drugs’—the United States government protected the men moving a great deal of the drugs coming into the city. Local dealers faced life sentences while the bigtime narcos from Washington to Managua went free.

As the Iran-Contra hearings demonstrate, Oliver North and the Reaganites (many who now fill the Bush administration) were into drug dealing—and subsequently addicting and killing thousands of Americans—in a big and profitable way. “On Capitol Hill … Iran-Contra hearings avoided CIA and Contra links to large-scale cocaine smuggling. Yet, congressional panels had access to handwritten notes by Reagan administration official Oliver North, whose notebooks contained 543 pages with references to the drug trade. In one notation about Contra arms supplies, North wrote: ‘$14 million came from drugs.’” writes Norman Solomon for the Creators Syndicate. “Even after such excerpts from North’s notes were made public, most news media bypassed the Contra-CIA-cocaine connection. The detour around the story became more extreme in 1988: The Senate’s subcommittee on terrorism and narcotics, chaired by John Kerry, released an in-depth report that nailed the CIA for cocaine trafficking with the Contras. But media coverage was muddled and fleeting.” In short, Oliver North, now a celebrity with a television show on Fox News, indirectly killed far more people than Tookie Williams ever did, and the corporate media has no interest in underscoring this obvious fact because North is considered a “patriot” and Williams a bottom-feeding gangbanger.

If the state believes Williams deserved to be executed, they should logically conclude Oliver North deserves the fame fate, as would William Casey, head of the Cocaine Import Agency, if he were alive. At minimum, North deserves to be in the same federal lockup with Panama’s former ruler-thug Manuel Noriega. “To earn his pay [Noriega deposited at least $33 million at the Panama City branch of the BCCI bank], Noriega carried out all kinds of dirty activities for his U.S. masters. He supplied pilots, bases and funds to the contra supply operations,” writes the Revolutionary Worker. “Noriega’s close confidant Floyd Carlton Caceres negotiated personally with the top Colombian cocaine smugglers Pablo Escobar and Gustavo Gaviria for the use of Panamanian air bases.” (As a side note, it is indicative that the corporate media will not touch this story with a ten foot pole, instead leaving the investigative work up to Marxists, who have meticulously documented Reaganite involvement in the drug business; see previous link).

The dirty business of dealing with the likes of Pablo Escobar and Gustavo Gaviria rubs off distinctly on Papa Bush, the head of the Bush crime family. “After 1984, the contra operation was overseen by Donald Gregg, a long-time CIA official who was reassigned to be top aide of Vice President George Bush. And within the Reagan White House, Lt. Col. Oliver North of the National Security Council staff (NSC) directed contra supply—under the guidance of William Casey himself. The CIA had kept the operation firmly in tested CIA hands. And at the top, George Bush was given overall command of three key government policy areas: ‘crisis management,’ ‘counterterrorism’ and ‘narcotics policy,’” the latter translating into thousands of crack addicts in America and possibly 30,000 or more dead people in Nicaragua. “It seems likely that then-Vice President George Bush was … closely involved in directing and approving the activities of Oliver North and the CIA agents involved in the contra supply,” the Revolutionary Worker noted in 1996.

So let’s add Bush Senior to the Dead Man Walking roster.