Kill the Messenger: The Tragic Life of Gary Webb

[pberq]

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/42882/

Kill the Messenger: The Tragic Life of Gary Webb

By Doug Ireland, In These Times. Posted October 13, 2006.

Reviewed:"Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb" by Nick Schou, Charles Bowden (Nation Books, 2006).

With Kill the Messenger (Nation Books/Avalon), Nick Schou, an editor at Orange County Weekly, provides a meticulous, balanced account of the life of Gary Webb, the former San Jose Mercury News reporter who, despite minor errors, basically got it right when he wrote the biggest story of his career. That story lifted the rug on a historical episode the mainstream media didn't want to touch: how the Central Intelligence Agency turned a blind eye to drug dealing in furtherance of its covert support for the Nicaraguan contras. For his efforts, Webb was hounded out of journalism after a ferocious assault from America's most prestigious newspapers, which Schou documents in painstaking and shameful detail. When Webb -- who had once shared a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting -- committed suicide in December 2004, it was the last chapter in a real-life American tragedy.

Webb was not the first one on to the story. AP reporter Robert Parry had been forced out of his job at the wire service for pursuing it. The U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Narcotics and Terrorism, chaired by Sen. John Kerry, conducted an investigation into the contras' drug trafficking in 1987-88 that had documented (among other things) how CIA cargo planes ferried arms to the contras and then carried cocaine back to military bases and remote airfields on the return flights. But, as Schou notes, "Because of its sensitive nature, the committee … sealed most of the testimony, and Kerry's investigation got scant play in the national news media."

The Kerry investigation was mainly concerned with cocaine coming into the U.S. East Coast. Webb's 1996 series for the Mercury News, based on a year-long investigation, looked at the cocaine traffic in Los Angeles, which was then known as "the crack capital of the world." Webb detailed how "Freeway" Ricky Ross, the first '80s crack millionaire and a crack kingpin in L.A.'s South Central neighborhood, had been supplied with crack cocaine by Nicaraguan exiles and contra supporters with CIA connections. Webb discovered an affidavit from the L.A. County Sheriff's Department that said that the coke profits of Ross's suppliers "are transported to Florida and laundered through … a chain of banks in Florida. …From this bank the monies are filtered to the Contra rebels to buy arms in the war in Nicaragua."

(more at link . . .)

[jarnocan]

1. so much sad history as well as present conditions

associated with Bush and Iran contra

[Raster]

2. Drugs, guns and oil.

http://www.steamshovelpress.com/altmedia18.html

[pberq]

4. Thanks - another hero for truth

[Judi Lynn]

3. Thank you for this article. More people need to know what Webb did,

and who he was.

Small biographical sketch:
http://www.nndb.com/people/523/000084271/

[pberq]

5. You're welcome. Here's some more on Gary Webb

First, here's one by Robert Parry, who also suffered for writing this story:

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2004/121304.html

America's Debt to Journalist Gary Webb

By Robert Parry
December 13, 2004

<snip>
In 1996, journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles that forced a long-overdue investigation of a very dark chapter of recent U.S. foreign policy – the Reagan-Bush administration’s protection of cocaine traffickers who operated under the cover of the Nicaraguan contra war in the 1980s.

For his brave reporting at the San Jose Mercury News, Webb paid a high price. He was attacked by journalistic colleagues at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the American Journalism Review and even the Nation magazine. Under this media pressure, his editor Jerry Ceppos sold out the story and demoted Webb, causing him to quit the Mercury News. Even Webb’s marriage broke up.

On Friday, Dec. 10, Gary Webb, 49, was found dead of an apparent suicide, a gunshot wound to the head.

Whatever the details of Webb’s death, American history owes him a huge debt. Though denigrated by much of the national news media, Webb’s contra-cocaine series prompted internal investigations by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department, probes that confirmed that scores of contra units and contra-connected individuals were implicated in the drug trade. The probes also showed that the Reagan-Bush administration frustrated investigations into those crimes for geopolitical reasons.

. . . (more at link)

And here's a different angle from Jeff Cohen:

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1213-31.htm

Published on Monday, December 13, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
R.I.P. Gary Webb -- Unembedded Reporter
by Jeff Cohen


Gary Webb, a courageous investigative journalist who was the target of one of the most ferocious media attacks on any reporter in recent history, was found dead Friday after an apparent suicide.

In August 1996, Webb wrote one of the first pieces of journalism that reached a massive audience thanks to the Internet: an explosive 20,000 word, three-part series documenting links between cocaine traffickers, the crack epidemic of the 1980s and the CIA-organized right-wing Nicaraguan Contra army of that era. The series sparked major interest in the social justice and African-American communities, leading to street protests, constant discussion on black-oriented talk radio and demands by Congressional Black Caucus members for a federal investigation. But weeks later, Webb suffered a furious backlash at the hands of national media unaccustomed to seeing their role as gatekeepers diminished by the emerging medium known as the WorldWideWeb.

Webb's explosive San Jose Mercury News series documented that funders of the Contras included drug traffickers who played a role in the crack epidemic that hit Los Angeles and other cities. Webb's series focused heavily on Oscar Danilo Blandon, a cocaine importer and federal informant, who once testified in federal court that "whatever we were running in L.A., the profit was going to the Contra revolution." Blandon further testified that Colonel Enrique Bermudez, a CIA asset who led the Contra army against Nicaragua's leftwing Sandinista government, knew the funds were from drug running. (Bermudez was a colonel during the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua.)

. . . (more at link)

[Judi Lynn]

7. Reading these two links tells me I've got to get busy and find out

as much as I am able to read on this subject. The first article mentions in closing that " because of the major news media’s callowness and cowardice, this dark chapter of the Reagan-Bush era remains largely unknown to the American people."

The story is so huge, it seems impossible the three big papers, the N.Y. Times, Washington Post, and L.A. Times would have ever gone so far to both surpress the story and to savage the reporter, oh, yes, and also to protect illegal government activities in a war against a country which presented no threat whatsoever to the U.S.

It's the ACCUMULATION by now that gives stories like this a lot more sting, for anyone who was inclined to overlook it, just as the right-wing government intended, in the first place. Now we are seeing the pattern repeating very clearly.

It's also worth noting that these sources point out that John Kerry was made a target through his effective investigation of the Iran-Contra problem, and that the press started attacking him that far back. I didn't know about this.

I'm going to be very determined to save these articles you've linked and share them with others. Thanks for taking the time to post them here.

[yurbud]

6. this stuff sounds wacky to people until you remind them of the Opium War

when Britain fought to sell opium in China. Now this stuff is done under the table and off the books, but by people at the same level.

[teryang]

8. Mena Arkansas' anthrax victim

this is an old download from Daniel Hopsicker's madcowprod.com website:

Anthrax and the Politics of Terror

Daniel Hopsicker

Madcow morning news Jan.7 (2002)


<And that’s when we remembered Russell Welch, an investigator for the Arkansas State Police who had been trying to blow the whistle a dozen years ago on the massive cocaine smuggling scandal unfolding in front of him in Mena, Arkansas.

What does an obscure state cop in an obscure state have to do with today’s bio-terror?

Russell Welch was exposed to weaponized anthrax over a decade ago when he opened a letter which released electrostatically charged floating spores in his face...

"Prompt diagnosis saved Welch’s life, if not his health. As Welch can tell you, anthrax is extremely nasty stuff...

The doctor told Welch, "I think you’ve been poisoned with anthrax. Somebody did this to you."

Later his doctor's office was burglarized, and test results and correspondence with Center for Disease Control officials in Atlanta were stolen.

No one has fingered Al Qaeda for the burglary of Russell Welch’s doctor’s office. So clearly, some other organization must have been involved...

Anthrax was used to silence Welch, and stop him from investigating the CIA cocaine smuggling operation associated with Barry Seal at the infamous Mena Arkansas airport.

[bobthedrummer]

9. kick

[happydreams]

10. Kick. Webb is an unsung hero.