Who killed Gary Webb?

[stonefruit]

ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGBNTHRXN2E.html

He was murdered. This country is utterly doomed.

[Moses]

Thank you for posting this. So many suicides these days of investigative reporters-- and so many die from self-inflicted multiple gunshot wounds, etc. It's an epidemic.

[Moses]

David Corn says:

Gary Webb is dead.

He was the journalist who wrote a famous--or infamous--1996 series for the San Jose Mercury News that maintained a CIA-supported drug ring based in Los Angeles had triggered the crack epidemic of the 1980s. On Friday, the 49-year-old Webb, who won a Pulitzer Prize for other work, apparently shot himself. His "Dark Alliances" articles spurred outrage and controversy. Leaders of the African-American community demanded investigations. Mainstream newspapers--including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times--questioned his findings. And nearly a year after the pieces appeared, the Mercury News published a criticism of the series; Webb was demoted and soon left the newspaper. Two years later, he published a book based on the series.

Webb's tale is a sad one. He was on to something but botched part of how he handled it. He then was blasted and ostracized. He was wrong on some important details but he was, in a way, closer to the truth than many of his establishment media critics who neglected the story of the real CIA-contra-cocaine connection. In 1998, a CIA inspector general's report acknowledged that the CIA had indeed worked with suspected drugrunners while supporting the contras. A Senator named John Kerry had investigated these links years earlier, and the media had mostly ignored his findings. After Webb published his articles, the media spent more time crushing Webb than pursuing the full story. It is only because of Webb's work--as flawed as it was--that the CIA IG inquiry happened. So, then, it is only because of Webb that US citizens have confirmation from the CIA that it partnered up with suspected drug traffickers in the just-say-no years and that the Reagan Administration, consumed with a desire to overthrow the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, allied itself with drug thugs.

As the news of Webb's death circulated across the Internet, some of his fans took the opportunity to demand that I issue a posthumous apology to him. Why? Because I had been critical of his series and book. But my criticism was different from that of the mainstream press. I maintained he had overstated the case and had not proven his more cinematic allegations. But I also credited him for forcing the issue and prodding the CIA to come clean. No one at the Times (New York or Los Angeles) or the Post managed to do that. And though there were problems with Webb's work, it is a pity that he was so brutally hounded.

His death is a dark end to a dark story.

For those of you who want more details on Webb, below I have posted some of my previous comments on him and his "Dark Alliance" work.

[Moses]

POSTED ON AUGUST 20, 1998:  

Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" Ignored by Dailies

Alternatives Sole Source for Continued Investigation of the CIA/Contra/crack connection.

By Cory Zurowski

Gary Webb's Woodward-esque stint was fleeting.

In the months following the publication of his series "Dark Alliance" in the San Jose Mercury News in August 1996, Webb saw his stock fall from giant slayer to sewer rat inside the pages of the daily papers.

Led by the big three -- Washington Post, New York Times, Los Angeles Times -- Webb's "Dark Alliance," which suggested that the CIA helped Nicaraguan Contras introduce crack cocaine to South Central Los Angeles, was dissected and d**ned. His own paper didn't take the heat well. Mercury News editors were quick to disown Webb's story. He eventually quit the paper.

Two years later, Webb has re-emerged. His book, "Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion" was released in June.

But you wouldn't know about it by reading the dailies. When it comes to Gary Webb or the feds-as-drug-dealing-enablers story, daily papers have shown little interest and few column inches.

In contrast, Webb's book -- and the continuing CIA/Contra/crack story -- have garnered plenty of ink in the country's alternative papers such as the San Francisco Bay Guardian, LA Weekly and Sacramento News & Review.

Why the disparity?

"When the controversy surrounding Webb's series started, the Mercury News wimped out," says Dan Pulcrano, executive editor of San Jose's Metro. "The big three papers began to poke holes in the articles, and all the paper has done since is repeatedly discredit Webb's reporting. Every time the CIA does a study absolving themselves of being connected to drug dealers, [the Mercury News and other dailies] run the story on the front page ...

"I think the reason you see a difference in coverage is that alternatives -- unlike the dailies -- don't need the government insiders for stories -- especially when it comes to a beat like the CIA. The dailies don't want to burn bridges with their sources. Because of that, the CIA has been able to use their spin machine on the establishment media."

Riverfront Times writer C.D. Stelzer is working on a local angle to the CIA/Contra/crack connection, interviewing a St. Louis private investigator who has also dabbled as a federal informant and Costa Rican drug henchman. Stelzer thinks dailies were quick to stamp Webb's work "conspiracy bullnuts" because the folks in Langley, VA wouldn't allow it to be reported any other way.

"The group of people covering this stuff everyday never discredit the CIA," he says. "I guess they value their careers more then what they're supposed to do as reporters."

Of the three major dailies, only the Washington Post has reviewed Webb's book. Nancy Martinez of the New York Times Book Review says, "I can't really tell you if we're going to review it. We haven't made a decision." Ethel Alexander at the Los Angeles Times says "Dark Allianc" has been assigned to a reviewer, but "I don't know when it's going to run." Even the Sacramento Bee, which has a reputation of supporting local authors, has yet to mention "Dark Alliance," according to Webb, who spoke to AAN News from his home in Sacramento.

"And the Bee usually does lavish spreads on local authors ... My old paper [the Mercury News] hasn't said a word about the book either," he says. "I'm not surprised by it. It's not in their best interests to make the story legitimate. The Reagan administration had a hold on the mainstream press -- which was the absolute worst thing to have. The Contras were anathema to the Reagan administration; the mainstream press was made to believe they were freedom fighters ... By admitting there's a [CIA/drug] connection, the Washington press corps admits they f**ked up. It's easier for them to report what the government tells them and not challenge it."

But the dailies' aversion goes beyond Webb's book. It appears that minimal coverage is the status quo anytime the CIA/Contra/crack connection is mentioned.

While the New York Times ran a front page story July 17 publicizing a CIA study that said the agency had associated with Nicaraguan coke-dealing rebels, other dailies' coverage that same day was marginal: "Study Questions CIA Contacts in '80s," appeared on A13 of the Orlando Sentinel; likewise, the Bee buried a few hundred words on the story deep in the paper.

The Post -- which shot down Webb's series in October '96 with the A1 headline: "The CIA and Crack: Evidence Is Lacking of Alleged Plot" -- has run three stories about the CIA's "alleged" ties to drug traffickers in the past 12 months, according to a search of the paper's archives.

The paper's Walter Pincus, who co-authored the Post's '96 dismissal of "Dark Alliance," wrote a story in March about the CIA inspector general's admission that the agency knowingly cavorted with cocaine merchants.

The story got 500 words on A12.

Scant coverage of stories showing links between CIA-backed jungle patriots and drug trafficking is old news, says David Corn, The Nation editor and New York Press columnist who reviewed "Dark Alliance" for the Washington Post and said the book "has flaws," but also called it "an important piece of recent history."

"Over 10 years ago, [AP reporters] Bob Parry and Brian Barger did a bunch of stories about the government and Contra drug dealers," says Corn. "[Senator] John Kerry's subcommittee that came out a few years later also had evidence connecting the Contras and drugs. In both instances, it was treated as too unbelievable to be mainstream by the Washington press corp. They took and printed what the government wanted and didn't think there was any basis to look anymore into the subject.

"I assume the alternative press is covering this because they're doing their jobs. They're looking into subjects the mainstream media has ignored or hasn't caught onto yet ... If the Washington Post or New York Times had done their job back in the '80s, we wouldn't be talking about this now."

[Moses]

R.I.P. Gary Webb -- Unembedded Reporter  <br>by Jeff Cohen
www.dissidentvoice.org
December 13, 2004


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.  <br>
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.)

Webb reported that U.S. law enforcement agents complained that the CIA had squelched drug probes of Blandon and his partner Norwin Meneses in the name of "national security."   Blandon's drugs flowed into L.A. and elsewhere thanks to the legendary "Freeway" Ricky Donnell Ross, a supplier of crack to the Crips and Bloods gangs. [If I am not mistaken, Goss plans to promote one of the squelchers to head all undercover operations for the CIA]

While Webb's series could be faulted for some overstatement in presenting its powerful new evidence (a controversial graphic on the Mercury News website superimposed a person smoking crack over the CIA seal), the fresh documentation mightily moved forward the CIA-Contra-cocaine story that national media had been trying to bury for years.  Any exaggeration in the Mercury News presentation was dwarfed by a mendacious, triple-barreled attack on Webb that came from the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times.

The Post and others criticized Webb for referring to the Contras of the so-called Nicaraguan Democratic Force as "the CIA's army" -- an absurd objection since by all accounts, including those of Contra leaders, the CIA set up the group, selected its leaders and paid their salaries, and directed its day-to-day battlefield strategies.

The Post devoted much ink to exposing what Webb readily acknowledged -- that while he could document Contra links to cocaine importing, he was not able to identify specific CIA officials who knew of the drug flow.  The ferocity of the attack on Webb led the Post's ombudsman to note that the three national newspapers "showed more passion for sniffing out the flaws" in the Webb series than for probing the important issue Webb had raised: U.S. government relations with drug smuggling.

The L.A. Times' anti-Webb package was curious for its handling of Freeway Ricky Ross, the dealer Webb had authoritatively linked to Contra-funder Blandon.  Two years before Webb's revelations, the Times had reported: "If there was a criminal mastermind behind crack's decade-long reign, if there was one outlaw capitalist most responsible for flooding Los Angeles' streets with mass-marketed cocaine, his name was Freeway Rick."  In a profile of Ross headlined "Deposed King of Crack," the Times went on and on about "South-Central's first millionaire crack lord" and how Ross' "coast to coast conglomerate was selling more than $550,000 rocks a day, a staggering turnover that put the drug within reach of anyone with a few dollars."

But two months after Webb's series linked Ricky Ross to Contra cocaine, the L.A. Times told a totally different story, now seeking to minimize Ross's role in the crack epidemic: Ross was just one of many "interchangeable characters" -- "dwarfed" by other dealers.  The reporter who'd written the 1994 Ross profile was the one called on to write the front-page 1996 critique of Webb; media critic Norman Solomon noted that it "reads like a show-trial recantation."

The hyperbolic reaction against Webb's series can only be understood in the context of years of bias and animosity toward the Contra-cocaine story on the part of many national media.  Bob Parry and Brian Barger first reported on Contra-cocaine smuggling for AP in 1985, at a time when President Reagan was hailing the Contras as "the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers." The story got little pickup.

In 1987 the House Narcotics Committee chaired by Charles Rangel probed Contra-drug allegations and found a need for further investigation.  After the Washington Post distorted the facts with a headline "Hill Panel Finds No Evidence Linking Contras to Drug Smuggling," the paper refused to run Rangel's letter correcting the record.

That same year, Time magazine correspondent Laurence Zuckerman and a colleague found serious evidence of Contra links to cocaine trafficking, but their story was blocked from publication by top editors.  A senior editor admitted privately to Zuckerman: "Time is institutionally behind the Contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you'd have no trouble getting it in the magazine." (The N.Y Times and Washington Post both endorsed aid to the Contra army, despite massive documentation from human rights monitors that they targeted civilians for violence and terror.)

In 1989, when Sen. John Kerry released a report condemning U.S. government complicity with Contra-connected drug traffickers, the Washington Post ran a brief report loaded with GOP criticisms of Kerry, while Newsweek dubbed Kerry a "randy conspiracy buff."

In this weekend's mainstream media reports on Gary Webb's death, it's no surprise that a key point has been overlooked -- that the CIA's internal investigation sparked by the Webb series and resulting furor contained startling admissions. CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz reported in October 1998 that the CIA indeed had knowledge of the allegations linking many Contras and Contra associates to cocaine trafficking, that Contra leaders were arranging drug connections from the beginning and that a CIA informant told the agency about the activity. [And Goss intends to promote those involved in the Bush Crime Family drug trafficing world]

When Webb stumbled onto the Contra-cocaine story, he couldn't have imagined the fury with which big-foot reporters from national dailies would come at him -- a barrage that ultimately drove him out of mainstream journalism.  But he fought back with courage and dignity, writing a book (Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion) with his side of the story and insisting that facts matter more than established power or ideology.  He deserves to be remembered in the proud tradition of muckrakers like Ida Tarbell, George Seldes and I.F. Stone.           <br>
In this era of "embedded reporters," an unembedded journalist like Gary Webb will be sorely missed.

Jeff Cohen (www.jeffcohen.org) is the founder of the media watch group FAIR (www.fair.org).  <br>
For more background, see:
www.fair.org/issues-news/contra-crack.html  <br>www.consortiumnews.com/2004/121304.html

Related Article

* Chaining The Watch Dog

[Moses]

See beginning/rest of this article: disaffecteddems.proboards3.com/index.cgi?board=streichers&action=display&n=1&thread=2138&start=0

CIA's Volume Two

Despite the remarkable admissions in the body of these reports, the big newspapers showed no inclination to read beyond the press releases and executive summaries. By fall 1998, official Washington was obsessed with the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, which made it easier to ignore even more stunning disclosures in the CIA's Volume Two..

In Volume Two, published Oct. 8, 1998, CIA Inspector General Hitz identified more than 50 contras and contra-related entities implicated in the drug trade. He also detailed how the Reagan-Bush administration had protected these drug operations and frustrated federal investigations, which had threatened to expose the crimes in the mid-1980s. Hitz even published evidence that drug trafficking and money laundering tracked into Reagan’s National Security Council where Oliver North oversaw the contra operations.

Hitz revealed, too, that the CIA placed an admitted drug money launderer in charge of the Southern Front contras in Costa Rica. Also, according to Hitz’s evidence, the second-in-command of contra forces on the Northern Front in Honduras had escaped from a Colombian prison where he was serving time for drug trafficking

In Volume Two, the CIA’s defense against Webb’s series had shrunk to a tiny fig leaf: that the CIA did not conspire with the contras to raise money through cocaine trafficking. But Hitz made clear that the contra war took precedence over law enforcement and that the CIA withheld evidence of contra crimes from the Justice Department, the Congress and even the CIA’s own analytical division.

Hitz found in CIA files evidence that the spy agency knew from the first days of the contra war that its new clients were involved in the cocaine trade. According to a September 1981 cable to CIA headquarters, one of the early contra groups, known as ADREN, had decided to use drug trafficking as a financing mechanism. Two ADREN members made the first delivery of drugs to Miami in July 1981, the CIA cable reported.

ADREN’s leaders included Enrique Bermudez, who emerged as the top contra military commander in the 1980s. Webb’s series had identified Bermudez as giving the green light to contra fundraising by drug trafficker Meneses. Hitz’s report added that that the CIA had another Nicaraguan witness who implicated Bermudez in the drug trade in 1988.

Priorities

Besides tracing the evidence of contra-drug trafficking through the decade-long contra war, the inspector general interviewed senior CIA officers who acknowledged that they were aware of the contra-drug problem but didn’t want its exposure to undermine the struggle to overthrow the leftist Sandinista government.

According to Hitz, the CIA had “one overriding priority: to oust the Sandinista government. … [CIA officers] were determined that the various difficulties they encountered not be allowed to prevent effective implementation of the contra program.” One CIA field officer explained, “The focus was to get the job done, get the support and win the war.”

Hitz also recounted complaints from CIA analysts that CIA operations officers handling the contra war hid evidence of contra-drug trafficking even from the CIA’s analytical division. Because of the withheld evidence, the CIA analysts incorrectly concluded in the mid-1980s that “only a handful of contras might have been involved in drug trafficking.” That false assessment was passed on to Congress and the major news organizations – serving as an important basis for denouncing Gary Webb and his series in 1996.

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.

Consequences

To this day, no editor or reporter who missed the contra-drug story has been punished for his or her negligence. Indeed, many of them are now top executives at their news organizations. On the other hand, Gary Webb’s career never recovered.

At Webb’s death, however, it should be noted that his great gift to American history was that he – along with angry African-American citizens – forced the government to admit some of the worst crimes ever condoned by any American administration: the protection of drug smuggling into the United States as part of a covert war against a country, Nicaragua, that represented no real threat to Americans.....

But the real tragedy of Webb’s historic gift – and of his life cut short – is 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.

---

Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'

[karpomrx]

Two(!) self inflicted gunshot wounds to the head followed by cremation. Case closed.

[Groucho]

Am I missing something? Where in the article does it say multiple gunshot wounds?

[Moses]

Sorry-- the details of his wounds may not have been posted here-- but had been read by some of the posters.

Mike Ruppert says:

Gary Webb fired two shots from a .38 caliber revolver into his own head. The entrance wounds for both shots were at or near the right ear. However, for the first shot Webb had the gun angled downward which produced a through-and-through wound blowing out his lower left jaw. This was obviously not a fatal wound. His second shot, angled upward, successfully reached the brain, killing him instantly.

As a former LAPD police officer and detective I have seen several suicides where multiple gunshots, especially from a relatively weak handgun like a .38, using inappropriate target ammunition, required multiple shots. In most cases the second and sometimes third shots were required because the victim made "hesitation" movements as they pulled the trigger, moving the gun barrel away from a fatal trajectory. There are many places on the human head to which a gunshot wound is not fatal (e.g. the lower and upper jaws, the cheeks, the roof of the mouth, the nose, etc.). Only a shot to the brain usually produces death but even that is not always guaranteed. I have seen attempted suicide and homicide victims survive after a .38 "ball" round had passed completely through and exited the opposite side of the skull.

[Groucho]

Thank you. I thought I was missing something.