Gary Webb (San Jose Mercury News)
With the release of the film Kill The Messenger this week, there is bound to be an uptick in media discussions about Gary Webb, the crusading investigative journalist whose 1996 Dark Alliance series forms the basis of the movie.
Webb’s reporting for the San Jose Mercury News cast a harsh light on the links between the CIA-backed Contras in Nicaragua and drug trafficking in the United States, particularly the crack cocaine boom of the 1980s.
At the end of 1996, CounterSpin aired a special broadcast about Webb’s reporting. Part 2 of that special, here online for the first time, featured excerpts from a December 1996 talk Webb gave alongside reporter Robert Parry, who published the first reports of Contra cocaine-smuggling a decade earlier for the Associated Press.
The special episode closes with an interview with FAIR associate Norman Solomon discussing his “Snow Job” report (Extra!, 1/97), which documented the inaccuracies and distortions in the establishment media attacks on Webb.
Listen to the whole program, or download it here.
At this very moment (Tuesday, 12:30 pm), Gary Null on WBAI has turned over a lot of time to Robert Parry to explain the entire story. It’s a great and blistering critique. Please give it a listen via wbai.org .
Somewhere in my vast collection, I have the original newspaper story that was printed by the San Jose Mercury News with Gary’s whole expose in it. It went on for pages and pages.
I was following Gary’s reporting very closely. I also heard Maxine Waters speak on the radio at a community meeting of progressives in Los Angeles. She was saying out loud and proud that the CIA or whomever, if they ever came after her for helping to expose the drugs coming into LA by these clandestine efforts….that “They had better shoot straight, because, there is nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal”. Hooyah! That made Maxine, my hero forever.
I have always wondered if Gary’s suicide was a suicide. I have learned very late in my life that telling the truth has much harsher consequences than being dishonest or stated plainly just lying.
U.S. media that do cover this story tend to treat it as a primarily domestic scandal about a rogue agency that misbehaved due to lack of oversight and internal diligence. While that is true, and Contragate’s effects on the streets of Los Angeles (and elsewhere) were significant, the story is bigger: how Uncle Sam avoided domestic scrutiny and international opposition to recruit, arm and direct a mercenary army to cut down a popular government that had ousted a pro-U.S. dictator. Thousands of deaths and much destruction ensued.
The active complicity of WaPo, the LA and NY Times in these war crimes and this aggressive war foreshadowed, it could be said, their enabling of illegal wars to follow (hello, Judy Miller).
Gary Webb was correct. In the book written prior to his disclosures, Drugging America (Now called America’s Corrupt War on Drugs) numerous former CIA and DEA agents, and former drug smugglers working for CIA and DEA agents, provide details and documentation on multiple areas of drug smuggling. Author was Captain Rodney Stich, confidant of these sources. Decades of media cover-ups are addressed.
Maybe some of you who think they understand, or think they do not understand or don’t care about this issue could all agree that the problem is that there is no “channel” of reality to the citizens. There is no better “social infrastructure” today than there was in previous human history and maybe less when we look at societies like the ancient democratic Greek societies. We can not have democracy or even a representative system unless people are able to really know and discuss what is going on. We have the Disneyland version of this system, lies and fairy tales like kids are fed on.
For a very in-depth piece on this topic please see:
http://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2014/10/02/the-intercepts-ryan-devereaux-is-no-gary-webb/
While this post is critical of work done by First Look, it is more important to see the detail that Tarzie put into it. Needless to say, the work done by the folks at the intercept is lacking to say the least, and wholly misdirected and propagandizing on behalf of the CIA at the middle.