Once again, I attended the Coalition on Political Assassinations conference in Washington, D.C. Once again, I was in our nation's capital when the inaccurately named World Series began, to determine our national sport's champion. Frankly, I was rooting for the Atlanta Braves, and they certainly came on strong. But the Yankees came on stronger.

I hope that is not an omen, since I am about to detail some of the highlights of the COPA conference, particularly with respect to drug smuggling. I don't like the Yanquis style of play in that game, and it seems the umpires have all been bought off.

A special panel at COPA presented federal government and Los Angeles police documents related to the recent expose on CIA-contra crack cocaine sales in L.A. Featured speakers were Peter Dale Scott, John Newman, and Dick Gregory. Covering the issue was an important step for the Coalition, since it dovetails with the interests of COPA in several respects and broadens the base of COPA.

Peter Dale Scott, author of Cocaine Politics, began with remarks about the historical developments of the smuggling problem. To provide some perspective, Scott reminded the audience that Jack Ruby was involved in drug smuggling, as were all the other prominent mobsters connected with the assassination of Kennedy. (Ruby was interrogated about a smuggling operation before he moved to Dallas, and the Warren Commission later made mush of the entire episode.) Tracing the situation since that time, Scott pointed to the sudden and very significant increase in heroin traffic in the U.S. concurrent with U.S. support for rebels in Afghanistan during the Russian occupation. He quoted a senior DEA official responsible for major drug investigations in the Middle East to the effect that every prominent trafficker they identified turned out to be a CIA asset. To bring it into the present, we find that the very people Scott identified years ago are connected to the Los Angeles case now under scrutiny. It appears that one line of trafficking can now be traced from anti-Sandanista Nicaraguans all the way to a specific community.

So, it is an old problem, one that has been with us for decades. It is a powerful impediment to the realization of open and democratic institutions. But Scott insisted that he was optimistic, and this was our best opportunity yet to confront it. Each prior inquiry, however stymied or manipulated, has nevertheless drawn out new information. Getting that information to the public has proven to be another matter. If the best aspects of our system of government are to survive, Scott suggested that it will not be thanks to the New York Times or the Washington Post. According to Scott, after the San Jose Mercury News began its series of articles, its web site took over 625,000 "hits" in one day. It may be the Internet, Scott hopes, which will save our democracy.

Scott cited a "shameful" article in The Washington Post which downplayed the issue, saying that only 5 tons of cocaine were involved --- in a year where importation was estimated to be 230 tons. However, as Scott explained, a careful reading of the article reveals that this is the work of only one small group of Nicaraguans --- the single group in question had brought in only 5 tons. In fact, there were many such operations, run through many locations for obvious purposes of cover. Indeed, sanctioned traffic likely accounted for 50% of the smuggling in the period in question. It requires a pernicious kind of moral cynicism to belittle concern over sanctioned drug traffic because one small branch of the network only brought in 5 tons.

10,000 pounds times 416 grams to the pound times $80-$100 per gram on the street. Looks like $330 to $416 million to me, from just one wing of the operation. What do you think? Do you suppose the Agency restricted sales to L.A.? Or did they have branch offices in New York, Chicago, New Orleans or Saint Louis?

Of federal efforts to examine the problem, Scott said that:

Senator [John] Kerry did, actually, a very valuable study, but if you read the fine print of it you'll see that he was actually staying away from the problem of the CIA, because that was the only way that he could get a mandate to look at [the] problem of the contras and cocaine at all.

Professor John Newman (author of Kennedy and Vietnam and Oswald and the CIA), spoke next, and illustrated his points with quotes from various sources and slides of documents. These included selections from the Kerry hearings, notations from Oliver North's diary, and law enforcement documents. In at least one instance, an alleged participant in the ring was arrested with a quantity of cocaine and related materials, including with automatic weapons. Newman showed that confiscated items (presumably minus the cocaine) were returned to the suspect and no charges were filed against him.

As an example of one method employed to foreclose recognition of CIA participation at a higher level, Newman quoted a passage from the encounter between Senator Kerry and a lawyer for an imprisoned pilot. The lawyer challenged Kerry for raising the question of the CIA. Kerry disputed that:

...let me just say to you that I have been very, very careful here, very careful here. I have discussed this with Senator Boren [Republican head of the Senate intelligence committee at the time]. I have stayed away from naming any companies that are [CIA] proprietaries. I have elicited two brief mentions, but I think you know very well, counsel, and I know Mr. Palmer knows, that I could have gone further with respect to some of those questions.

When invited by the lawyer to proceed, Kerry continued, "No, because I have an agreement with Senator Boren that I will not. And I do not intend to do that..."

Agency proprietaries were compartmentalized out of the inquiry, allowing politicians to insist that the allegations of contra trafficking had been investigated and no connection to the CIA was found. That interpretation is deceptive at best. As constrained as the Kerry investigation was, it nevertheless concluded that elements of the government knew cocaine money was behind the contra effort. Newman suggested to interested parties that if they do nothing else with the Kerry report, they should read the first page; and he proceeded to do so:

The subcommittee uncovered considerable evidence. On the basis of this evidence, it is clear that individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking. The supply network of the contras was used by drug trafficking organizations and elements of the contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers. In each case, one or another agency of the U.S. government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring or immediately thereafter.

So they knew. Seeing that, and Kerry's clear prior agreement to keep CIA proprietaries out of the record, I was reminded of my encounter with former Vice-President Dan Quayle when he spoke at Loyola University in 1995. I asked him about the impact upon family values produced by the sale of cocaine to fund the contras, and he became quite agitated. He said that the Kerry hearings had looked into all that and had found nothing. The preceding paragraph, as Newman said, shows us what "nothing" looks like.

Newman concluded with a stirring call for a civilian panel, modeled on the ARRB, to review and declassify documents in the case. Addressing the intelligence community, he said that

...we are not the KGB, we're not foreign intelligence agents. We're not terrorists; we're not saboteurs; we are not criminals. We're the people, that's who we are. We're not looking for neutering agents in our soda pop; we're not looking for CIA agents on street corners with crack in their pockets. We're not looking for scapegoats or any monster plots. We're looking for your files. We're looking for your memos, your reports, your cables, your minutes, your e-mail, and all of your directives --- all of it, we want it all. And we won't stop until we have it for us to see, for us to verify, for us to read, for us to copy, for us to analyze, and for us to make up our own minds.

He got a lot of applause, though you might not find that out if you read the papers. No one from the New York Times attended the press conference. No one from the Washington Post showed up. No one from the Washington bureau of either Chicago paper arrived to see any of Newman's slides. So, for more on the CIA-contra cocaine sales, you'll have to look elsewhere. See http://www.sjmercury.com/drugs and go from there. You can find the Mercury News series of articles by Gary Webb, and a host of other materials and links. Another interesting and related site is http://www.federal.com/menascandal.html. A subscription is required to read the articles there, but the titles tell a big story all by themselves.

He's black and he's 65 years old, so he ought to know better! But comedian and activist Dick Gregory got himself arrested again, and he was invited to the COPA conference to talk about it. He tried to talk to the CIA about the San Jose Mercury News articles which ignited the controversy. The Agency apparently doesn't take the Mercury News. The Washington Post, a more acceptable paper, reported on the fact of Gregory's arrest --- in a Style section gossip bit --- and somehow neglected to state why he sought to get arrested.

Gregory addressed the COPA members on Friday and Saturday, and he was upbeat and funny. He did not concentrate on the specifics of the situation in Los Angeles, but talked instead about the history of which he was a part. After all, his arrest was just one more action in a lifetime of work.

Gregory co-authored a book with Mark Lane on the murder of Dr. Martin Luther King. So, after his remarks, I asked him why there had not been more support among black leaders for the release of information on the murder of Martin Luther King. And he said, essentially, that he had always advised against it. Blacks understood very well the great risks involved in taking on agencies which are prepared to frame you or kill you. Blacks had been framed and killed, without exposure of the perpetrators, for years; they didn't need further convincing. He repeatedly applauded the efforts of COPA and past assassination researchers, and the successes of the declassification process. Because of the unsung work of these researchers, it is a safer environment today in which to criticize, or even to recognize, domestic covert operations.

It should be recalled here that Gregory was involved in his own sort of declassification process with respect to the assassination of President Kennedy. When Robert Groden acquired the Zapruder film, he got in touch with Dick Gregory because of Gregory's media connections. It was Gregory who contacted Geraldo Rivera and arranged for the film to be shown on Good Night America in 1975. A video tape of that show was run at the conference on Saturday night. Rivera warned his viewers that what they were about to see was horrific, and they apparently found it so. I can still hear the gasp from the audience when they saw the President's skull hit.

The featured speaker following the Saturday night dinner was Patricia Davis, a representative of the Guatemalan Human Rights Commission. Davis detailed the murder of Jennifer Harbury's husband, Efram Bamaca Velasquez, in Guatemala, and Harbury's difficult struggle for disclosure. The last exhibit she displayed was a document proving the government knew of Efram's death two years before admitting it to his widow. In those two years, the Agency operative who orchestrated the killing was "fired" so that if the story reached wider circulation, the Guatemalan colonel could be described as "ex-CIA". He was also given a year's severance pay of $42,000. Your tax dollars at work. Then again, maybe it wasn't your tax dollars at all. Maybe it was crack money.

The COPA conference, of course, was also concerned with developments in assassination investigations. Here is some of it:

Under the John F. Kennedy Records Act of 1992, an agency may appeal a disclosure decision by the Assassination Records Review Board to the President. The Act gives the President 30 days to rule on the appeal. The FBI simply began routinely appealing any decision by the ARRB. And the President has begun routinely avoiding decision. At this point, President Clinton is 7 months behind, and in fact, is in non-compliance with the Act. Call the White House ((202) 456-1111) and remind Mr. Bill that the purpose of the JFK Records Act was to help restore public confidence in government by exhibiting good faith in declassification of information. If information is withheld in violation of the law, by the President himself, good faith is not demonstrated.

Since the suppressed medical materials from the House Select Committee on Assassinations have been released, it is clear that virtually all the witnesses at Parkland and Bethesda, including doctors, nurses, radiologists, FBI agents and Secret Service agents and others --- over 40 people --- agree that the EXIT wound was in the BACK of Kennedy's head. Only Humes, Boswell, and a couple of others still insist upon the official myth.

This brings us back to the position and fate of the ARRB. If disclosure of the Board's questioning of Drs. Humes and Boswell earlier this year is appealed, and President Clinton does nothing, will we ever see the transcript? The Board has one year left in which to conduct its work. Some agencies still stand in non-compliance and have turned over no documents. The FBI appeals everything, and now the President is holding up the process. If such delays continue until the Board expires, much of the Board's work will have been in vain. Our society will have lost a priceless opportunity to address the disparities between our model of government and the government we truly have.

The defense in the Martin Luther King assassination will have the opportunity to test the alleged murder weapon for the first time. William Pepper, author of a book on the case called Orders to Kill, has successfully maneuvered Ray's case back on track, and a hearing is set for December 5 of this year. It may well be that next year, James Earl Ray, for the first time ever, will finally be allowed to establish his innocence. Stay tuned.

Pepper explained that he originally had an agreement with another publisher. But the publisher insisted that Pepper remove chapter 30, on the role and selection of military sharpshooters as back-ups for the forward team. Pepper would not do that, and was forced to seek another publisher. Moreover, Pepper has acquired evidence that the assassination was photographed by intelligence operatives stationed on the roof of the fire house near the Lorraine Motel, where King was shot. They photographed the actual assassin, and his escape. The operator of the grill below the rooming house where Ray stayed has offered to testify in exchange for immunity. Finally, it appears that not only has the mysterious "Raoul" been identified, but that the attorney who arranged Ray's "confession" also knew Raoul. My, my ... It's a small world, isn't it?

Here is my highly truncated account of King's murder. A rifleman fired from the bushes behind Jim's Grill, below the rooming house where Ray was staying and across the street from the Lorraine Motel. The rifle was passed to the owner of the grill, who was seen with the rifle by a waitress and another person. The killer left the embankment by jumping off the retaining wall to street level and walking away. He was photographed from the fire station roof. Raoul was the man seen leaving the Rebel Motel and it was Raoul who dropped the bundle containing Ray's effects outside Canipes. Raoul drove away in the second white Mustang seen by different witnesses. Ray was in the first white Mustang, trying to get its spare tire fixed when King was killed. He returned to the area of the Rebel Motel, but found it filled with police. He heard of the King shooting over the radio while he was in the car after he left Memphis.

In a question and answer period later, Pepper deflated speculation that Raoul was "Frenchy", the shortest of the tramps and hobos arrested in the rail yard north of Dealey Plaza when Kennedy was killed. Pepper says that he has met Raoul and is convinced that Raoul is not that tramp. Of the three men in those famous photos, "Frenchy" remains the most enigmatic of them all.

Scott Enyart was 15 years old when he followed Senator Robert Kennedy into the pantry way of the Ambassador Hotel in 1968. Enyart brought a camera and took the only known photographs of the assassination sequence. His film was seized as evidence, and the evidence was subsequently withheld from the public for twenty years. When Enyart was 35, he sought to recover his pictures and was told that they had been destroyed in a hospital incinerator three weeks before the trial of alleged assassin Sirhan Sirhan --- along with 2,400 other pictures taken in and around the hotel on the night of the killing. You read that right --- before the trial.

Enyart sued, and a merry chase began. L.A. denied that the film had been destroyed, and conducted a search for it. The negatives, of course, are crucial in proving the type of film used and establishing identifying characteristics of the camera used as well. The film was then "found" in the state archives in Sacramento, and a courier was sent to bring it to Los Angeles. The courier rented a car to drive from the airport into the city. But alas, he had a flat tire. And while he was at a gas station having the tire fixed, while he was sitting in the driver's seat and facing out the open door on the driver's side, the right back seat door was opened and his coat and his briefcase, containing the Enyart photos, were stolen. It would appear the very Fates themselves did not wish that film to survive.

According to Philip Melanson, who was instrumental in securing the release of documents in the RFK murder and who has been following developments for years, the jury has awarded Enyart over $600,000 in damages. The city plans to appeal. Stay tuned.

What are the prospects for citizen review and disclosure of classified documents, and revision of the classification process itself? With respect to the assassination of President Kennedy, we face possible renewed political interference, of the sort which undermined previous federal inquiries. The ARRB members were to have no affiliation with the government. But the chairman has been offered, and has accepted, a seat on a federal court. Now a second figure has reportedly left the ARRB for a better job. The most powerful disclosure process yet devised in this case, or any case, could still be defeated by bureaucratic resistance. If we cannot achieve disclosure in a case three decades old, what hope have we of uncovering covert operations run against our own populace in the more recent past, or of withstanding those in the future?

In Deep Politics, Scott writes that people often have difficulty recognizing corruption at the federal level, analogous to local corruption, because to do so forces them to reconsider their conscious relations with their government. This is an uncomfortable prospect for those who have never confronted political power or had their responsibilities as citizens seriously challenged. It is often easier to disempower one's self by characterizing the problem as overwhelming, or by underestimating the possibilities for response.

I seem to be pessimistically optimistic. I think we may yet see the day when enough people are sufficiently politically sophisticated to reduce the range and power of such corruption.

John Dean had a conversation with President Richard Nixon wherein Dean warned of a cancer on the presidency. These days, I have a few problems with John Dean's story. But I suspect that part of it is still true.

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