From............ Daily News MIner Fairbanks,AK

6 October 1996, page A-9

The Associated Press

CHICAGO - It isn't easy to indict your own government. But for two civic activists in a downtown restaurant, and many others in black America, reports of a possible CIA link to crack cocaine sales in their neighborhoods leave them no alternative.

"I don't think the word conspiracy is too strong," the Rev. Jeffery Haynes said over breakfast. "The plan is to keep minorities from progressing. And we are so gullible, we fall for it."

Haynes' breakfast partner, Eric A. Illidge, chimed in: "Systematic genocide."

"Drugs, AIDS, weapons, prisonsÑit's all a new form of slavery for us," Illidge said.

Sentiments like those usually are aired informally or in the blacks' most radical forums such as The Final Call, newspaper of the Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam.

But the CIA-drug allegation has breathed new life into long held opinions among many that a wide-ranging government conspiracy must be behind the manifold ills of black Americans.

From barber shops to black radio talk shows, the argument goes like this: A government that once allowed its black citizens to be enslaved with shackles would use drugs, weapons and diseases to hold them down today.

Evidence is anecdotal at best, yet it evokes a strong emotional chord.

Some believe AIDS, which kills minorities at disproportionately high rates, is a manmade disease designed to keep down the black population.

They view it as a more sinister offshoot of unethical medical studies conducted on blacks like the Tuskegee syphilis study. Conducted from 1932 to 1972, the U.S. government withheld treatment from 399 poor black men with syphilis in order to trace the natural course of the untreated disease.

Some question bank lending patterns and wonder why recent foreign immigrants can rapidly develop thriving stores in the heart of black communities across America.

Some ask why young black men are fodder for the nation's booming prison industry when they don't import drugs nor manufacture the guns that deluge the inner city.

Few images provoke more anger among blacks than that of nonblacks supplying drugs to the local community.

Organized crime injected large quantities of heroin for sale into New York's bustling Harlem district in the 1920s and 1930s. Some say government agents knew about and ignored the trafficking.

For years, rumors have swirled about body bags of black GIs being sent home laden with opium to resupply drug sellers of the ghetto.

Now comes the CIA-drug story. Published in August in the 'San Jose Mercury News,' the series of articles related how a Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the street gangs of South-Central Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a CIA-run guerrilla army in Nicaragua.

The Justice Department, CIA and Congress are investigating but so far have been unable to confirm or refute the newspaper series' implications.

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