Last week’s Senate hearing on the alleged links between the CIA, the contras, and drug-dealing in inner-city Los Angeles saw the return of one of Washington’s peskiest, and most partisan, investigators: Jack Blum. Described by the New York Times a few years ago as a “doggedly liberal Democratic muckraker,” Blum first made a name for himself while serving as a special counsel to the Foreign Relations Committee, investigating drug smuggling and money laundering in Nicaragua. His investigation was distinguished by a single-minded focus on the contras, with little attention given to charges that Sandinista leaders were part of a drug-distribution network. A few years later, Blum turned his attention to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), and he charged — incorrectly — that BCCI was the ” original banker” for Oliver North’s arms network. He also claimed — again incorrectly — that the Federal Reserve was covering up evidence of BCCI bribes paid to American officials. Blum’s testimony last week discounted the links between the CIA, the contras, and an innercity drug network, which does him credit, but he also used the occasion to try and boost the reelection prospects of his former boss, Massachusetts senator John Kerry. Blum charged that Kerry’s opponent, William Weld, was responsible for the Justice Department’s “absolute stonewall” of investigations into CIA-contra links when he was deputy attorney general during the Reagan years. There is, apparently, nothing people like Blum will not say, given the chance, and there is no excuse for such a discredited investigator’s getting to spend hours before a Senate committee trying to revive yet another leftist conspiracy theory from the 1980s.
