Reply #6: HEY!!! LaTimes too little, tooo late you assholes - [View All]

[Cell Whitman]

The LaTimes can bite my ass!!

this is a long excerpt, as you can tell by the tone, I am guessing Mr. Parry would actually like the whole the article posted.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2005/120905.html

One year ago, reporter Gary Webb – his life in ruins – killed himself with a handgun. The tragedy made him the final victim of a long-running cover-up protecting the Reagan-Bush administration’s tolerance of drug trafficking by its client army, the Nicaraguan contras.

But Webb’s death also could be blamed on the fecklessness of modern American journalism. The nation’s leading newspapers had driven the 49-year-old father of three to his desperate act rather than admit that they had bungled one of the biggest stories of the Reagan-Bush era – the contra-cocaine scandal.

Webb might be alive today if the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times had shown the decency to explain the importance of what the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general acknowledged in a two-volume report in 1998.

.....

Though insisting that the CIA didn’t authorize the contra-cocaine trafficking, Hitz’s report revealed that the criminality was even more pervasive than Webb believed (his series had focused on only one contra-cocaine pipeline into California). Hitz’s investigation found more than 50 contras and contra entities implicated in the drug trade.

Hitz also was told by CIA officers that the motive for the cover-up was that they put their mission of overthrowing Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinista government ahead of law enforcement that might have disrupted or discredited the contra operation.

A careful explication of the CIA’s extraordinary admissions in 1998 would have largely vindicated Webb, who had been driven out of the Mercury-News after the Big Three newspapers and other national publications ganged up on Webb and his story.

Revisiting the scandal in a serious way also would have recognized the brave work on the issue by Sen. John Kerry in the latter half of the 1980s – and corroborated the initial contra-cocaine article that I co-wrote with Brian Barger for the Associated Press in 1985.

......

Webb then shot himself in the head, though the first shot was not lethal, so he fired once more. His body was found the next day after movers arrived and followed the instructions from the note on the door.

Webb’s suicide offered the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times one more opportunity to set matters right, to revisit the CIA’s admissions in 1998 and to exact some accountability on the Reagan-Bush officials implicated in protecting the contra crimes.

But all that followed Gary Webb’s death was more trashing of Gary Webb. The Los Angeles Times ran a graceless obituary that treated Webb like a low-life criminal, rather than a journalist who took on a tough story and paid a high price. The Times obituary was republished in other newspapers, including the Washington Post.

Later, on March 16, 2005, Los Angeles Times writer Tina Daunt produced a lengthy feature piece about Webb’s death, covering three pages. But again the tone was derisive of Webb personally and dismissive of his work.

While going into detail about Webb’s suicide and into criticism of Webb’s career, the article showed no indication that Daunt had read either the CIA’s two-volume report or another report by the Justice Department’s inspector general. Both reports took swings at Webb, but contained stunning disclosures about both the government’s knowledge of contra-cocaine trafficking and obstructions of drug investigations.

No evaluation of Webb’s work could be complete – or fair – without explaining the CIA’s findings.

For instance, if Daunt had cited the CIA’s conclusion that scores of contra operatives and drug lords had exploited their cozy relationship with the Reagan-Bush administration to smuggle cocaine into the United States, then carping about details of Webb’s original series would seem absurd and even offensive.

Or, if Daunt wanted to mount a serious critique of Webb’s work, she still would have needed to evaluate what was in the government reports, particularly the most exhaustive part known as Volume II of the CIA’s contra-cocaine investigation.

Instead, Daunt devoted just one paragraph to the CIA report and then misrepresented the findings. She wrote: “Almost as a postscript, the CIA concluded a 17-month investigation in 1998, stating that it found no evidence that the U.S.-supported Nicaraguan rebels of the 1980s received significant financial support from drug traffickers.”

So, with that inaccurate description of the CIA’s own admissions, the Los Angeles Times pulled a final curtain around Gary Webb’s work and life. But the curtain was just as much a way to conceal an ugly chapter of modern American history and of the Big Three’s failure to fulfill their duty to the public.....

Though Hitz’s report was an extraordinary admission of institutional guilt by the CIA, it passed almost unnoticed by the big newspapers.

Two days after Hitz’s report was posted at the CIA’s Internet site, the New York Times did a brief article that continued to deride Webb’s work, while acknowledging that the contra-drug problem may indeed have been worse than earlier understood. Several weeks later, the Washington Post weighed in with a similarly superficial article. The Los Angeles Times never published a story on the release of the CIA’s Volume Two.

Parry's "Contra Crack" series

http://www.consortiumnews.com/archive/crack.html


and here is Webb and Parry discussing Hitz's report:

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=03/04/07/0343224

Last week, the New York Times reported the CIA's own investigation of its activities revealed that agency officials knew that the Nicaraguan contras they were working with were running drugs. The new report is the long-delayed second volume of the CIA's internal investigation into possible connections between the Contras and Central American drug traffickers. The investigation was originally prompted by a 1996 series in the San Jose Mercury News which asserted that a "dark alliance" between the CIA, the contras, and drug traffickers had helped finance the contra war with profits from drug smuggling.

The first volume of the CIA report was released in January. It confirmed that the CIA had blocked federal criminal investigations of contra-drug activities in California. Volume two, a broader look at the problem, is considered far more damaging to the CIA. It is said to reveal a large drug network and direct tie-ins to Reagan administration officials. Journalist Bob Parry spoke with sources within the agency who saw the classified report.

Guests:

Bob Parry is the editor of "Consortium" and a former reporter for Associated Press and Newsweek who broke the Iran-Contra story.

Gary Webb is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, formerly of the San Jose Mercury News, and the author of "Dark Alliance; The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion", published by Seven Stories Press.