http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/10/25/contra/print.html<>In early 1986, the
42-year-old Massachusetts Democrat stood almost alone in the U.S. Senate demanding answers about the emerging evidence that CIA-backed Contras were filling their coffers by collaborating with drug traffickers then flooding U.S. borders with cocaine from South America.
The Reagan administration did everything it could to thwart Kerry's investigation, including attempting to discredit witnesses, stonewalling the Senate when it requested evidence and assigning the CIA to monitor Kerry's probe. But it couldn't stop Kerry and his investigators from discovering the explosive truth: that the Contra war was permeated with drug traffickers who gave the Contras money, weapons and equipment in exchange for help in smuggling cocaine into the United States. Even more damningly,
Kerry found that U.S. government agencies knew about the Contra-drug connection, but turned a blind eye to the evidence in order to avoid undermining a top Reagan-Bush foreign policy initiative.
The Reagan administration's tolerance and protection of this dark underbelly of the Contra war represented one of the
most sordid scandals in the history of U.S. foreign policy. Yet when Kerry's
bombshell findings were released in 1989, they were
greeted by the mainstream press with disdain and disinterest. The New York Times, which had long denigrated the Contra-drug allegations, buried the story of Kerry's report on its inside pages, as did the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. For his tireless
efforts, Kerry earned a reputation as a reckless investigator.
Newsweek's Conventional Wisdom Watch dubbed Kerry a
"randy conspiracy buff."But almost a decade later,
in 1998, Kerry's trailblazing investigation was vindicated by the CIA's own inspector general, who found that scores of Contra operatives were implicated in the cocaine trade and that
U.S. agencies had looked the other way rather than reveal information that could have embarrassed the Reagan-Bush administration. Even after the CIA's admissions,
the national press corps never fully corrected its earlier dismissive treatment. That would have meant the New York Times and other leading publications
admitting they had bungled their coverage of one of the worst scandals of the Reagan-Bush era.more...