{"id":284210,"date":"2025-01-06T12:00:46","date_gmt":"2025-01-06T12:00:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=284210"},"modified":"2025-01-04T06:45:51","modified_gmt":"2025-01-04T06:45:51","slug":"20-years-after-his-death-gary-webbs-truth-is-still-dangerous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2025\/01\/20-years-after-his-death-gary-webbs-truth-is-still-dangerous\/","title":{"rendered":"20 Years after His Death, Gary Webb\u2019s Truth Is Still Dangerous"},"content":{"rendered":"

29 Dec 2024 <\/em>– Twenty years ago this month, on December 10, 2004, former San Jose Mercury News<\/b> investigative reporter Gary Webb<\/a> died by apparent suicide, following a stretch of depression. The subject of the 2014 film Kill the Messenger<\/i>, Webb had left the newspaper in 1997 after his career was systematically destroyed because he had done what journalists are supposed to do: speak truth to power.<\/p>\n

\"Gary<\/p>\n

Journalist Gary Webb (1955\u20132004)<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In August 1996, Webb penned a three-part series for the Mercury News<\/b> (8\/18\u201320\/96<\/a>) that documented how profits from the sale of crack cocaine in Los Angeles in the 1980s had been funneled to the Contras, the right-wing, CIA-backed mercenary army responsible for helping to perpetrate, to borrow Noam Chomsky\u2019s words<\/a>, \u201clarge-scale terrorist war\u201d against Nicaragua. At the same time, the crack epidemic had devastated Black communities in South Central LA\u2014which meant that Webb\u2019s series generated understandable uproar among Black Americans across the country.<\/p>\n

But Webb\u2019s revelations should hardly have been a newsflash. As FAIR\u2019s Jim Naureckas (10\/21\/14<\/a>) noted in a 2014 dispatch, the CIA was informed<\/p>\n

as early as September 1981 that a major branch of the Contra \u201cleadership had made a decision to engage in drug-smuggling to the United States in order to finance its anti-Sandinista operations,\u201d according to the CIA inspector general\u2019s report.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Not that the CIA was any stranger to drug-running\u2014as indicated by, inter alia, a 1993 op-ed appearing in the New York Times<\/b> (12\/3\/93<\/a>) under the headline \u201cThe CIA Drug Connection Is as Old as the Agency.\u201d The essay traced CIA ties to narco-trafficking back to the Korean War, while the Vietnam War reportedly saw heroin from a refining lab in Laos \u201cferried out on the planes of the CIA\u2019s front airline, Air America.\u201d The piece went on to emphasize that \u201cnowhere\u2026was the CIA more closely tied to drug traffic than it was in Pakistan\u201d during the Afghan\/Soviet war of 1979 to 1989.<\/p>\n

Decade-long suppression of evidence<\/b><\/h3>\n
\"Extra!:<\/p>\n

Norman Solomon (Extra!<\/b>, 1\u20132\/97<\/a>): \u201cBesides self-serving denials, journalistic critics of the Mercury News offered little to rebut the paper\u2019s specific pieces of evidence.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

And yet, in spite of such established reality, Webb was subjected to a concerted assault by the corporate media, most notably the New York Times<\/b>, Washington Post<\/b> and LA Times<\/b>, as detailed in a 1997 intervention by FAIR\u2019s Norman Solomon (Extra!<\/b>, 1\u20132\/97<\/a>). The media hit job relied heavily on denials from the CIA itself\u2014as in \u201cCIA Chief Denies Crack Conspiracy\u201d (11\/16\/96<\/a>), one of the examples cited by Solomon\u2014which is kind of like saying that the bear investigated the sticky goo on his paws and determined that he was not the one who got into the honeypot. In December 1997, the same month Webb left the Mercury News<\/b> after being discredited across the board and abandoned by his own editors, the New York Times<\/b> (12\/19\/97<\/a>) reassured readers that the \u201cCIA Says It Has Found No Link Between Itself and Crack Trade.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Solomon argued, \u201cThe elite media\u2019s attacks on the series were clearly driven by a need to defend their shoddy record on the Contra-cocaine story\u2014involving a decade-long suppression of evidence\u201d (Extra!<\/b>,\u00a07\/87<\/a>; see also\u00a03\u20134\/88<\/a>). Time and again, the nation\u2019s leading media outlets had buried or obstructed news suggesting Contra-cocaine links; Naureckas (10\/21\/14<\/a>) pointed out that the Washington Post<\/b><\/p>\n

ignored Robert Parry and Brian Barger\u2019s groundbreaking\u00a0AP<\/b>\u00a0article (12\/20\/85<\/a>), which first revealed the involvement of Contras in drug-running, and then failed to follow up as smaller papers reported on Contra-related cocaine traffic in their backyards (In These Times,\u00a0<\/b>8\/5\/87<\/a>).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As a senior Time<\/b> magazine editor acknowledged to a staff writer whose 1987 story on Contra-related cocaine traffic was ultimately scrapped (Extra!<\/b>, 11\/91<\/a>) : \u201cTime<\/b>\u00a0is institutionally behind the Contras. If this story were about the Sandinistas and drugs, you\u2019d have no trouble getting it in the magazine.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Hospitable to the most bizarre rumors\u2019<\/b><\/h3>\n

In addition to attacking Webb, many media commentators took care to suggest that the reason Black Americans were so up in arms over the Mercury News<\/b> series was that they were simply prone to conspiracy theories and paranoia. In October 1996, for instance, Washington Post<\/b> columnist Richard Cohen<\/a> (10\/24\/96<\/a>) declared pompously that \u201ca piece of Black America remains hospitable to the most bizarre rumors and myths\u2014the one about the CIA and crack being just one.\u201d Bizarre, indeed, that Black folks might be not so trusting of the government in a country founded on, um, slavery\u2014where to this day, racist persecution remains standard operating procedure rather than rumor.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, much of the CIA\u2019s behavior over the years beats any conspiracy theory hands down. The agency\u2019s mind-control program MKUltra<\/a> comes to mind, which operated from 1953 until the early 1960s and entailed administering drugs like LSD to people in twisted and psychologically destructive experiments. Stephen Kinzer, author of Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb and the CIA Search for Mind Control<\/i>, described in an interview with NPR<\/b> (11\/20\/20<\/a>) how MKUltra<\/p>\n

was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In 2012, NBC News<\/b> reported<\/a> on a lawsuit against the US federal government by the \u201csons of a Cold War scientist who plunged to his death in 1953 several days after unwittingly taking LSD in a CIA mind-control experiment.\u201d In short, who needs conspiracy theories when you have the CIA?<\/p>\n

Connecting the dots<\/b><\/h3>\n
\"FAIR:<\/p>\n

Peter Hart (FAIR.org<\/strong>, 5\/20\/13<\/a>): \u201cIf accountability for genocide is an important value, then it would stand to reason that US media would pay some attention to a genocide that our own government facilitated.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The question remains, however, as to why Webb underwent such a vicious assault when, at the end of the day, Contra drug-running was no more nefarious than anything else Washington was up to in the Americas. Objectively speaking, reports of the infliction of \u201clarge-scale terrorist war\u201d against Nicaraguan civilians should have raised the same alarms, and prompted as extreme an establishment backlash, as narco-activity by CIA mercenaries. Plus, the whole Iran\/Contra scandal<\/a> should have already alerted Americans to their government\u2019s propensity for lying\u2014not to mention violating its own laws.<\/p>\n

Around the same time that the US was enabling Contra crimes, of course, it was also backing genocide<\/a> in Guatemala, facilitating mass slaughter<\/a> by the right-wing Salvadoran military and allied paramilitary groups, and nurturing Battalion 316, \u201ca CIA-trained military unit that terrorized Honduras for much of the 1980s\u201d\u2014as the Baltimore Sun<\/b> (6\/13\/95<\/a>) put it. In December 1989, the US went about bombing the living daylights out of the impoverished Panama City neighborhood of El Chorrillo<\/a>, killing up to several thousand civilians and earning the area the moniker \u201cLittle Hiroshima<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

While Contra drug-running thus cohered just fine with imperial foreign policy, it seems that Webb\u2019s fundamental crime was connecting the dots between US-backed wars on civilians abroad and the US war on its own domestic population, which continues to disproportionately target Black communities. After all, under capitalism, all men are not created equal, and the institutionalized overlap of racial and socioeconomic inequality partially explains why African Americans have a lower life expectancy<\/a> than whites\u2014and how we\u2019ve ended up in a situation in which white police officers regularly shoot<\/a> unarmed Black people.<\/p>\n

But there we go again with those \u201cbizarre\u201d conspiracy theories.<\/p>\n

Now, two decades after Webb\u2019s death, the US government obviously hasn\u2019t managed to kick the habit of wreaking lethal havoc at home and abroad\u2014including in the Gaza Strip, where US funding of the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians has been accompanied by a calculated media campaign<\/a> to obscure reality. Rather than speak truth to power, journalists have lined up to faithfully spout one untruth after another on power\u2019s behalf, rendering themselves effectively complicit in genocide itself. And as the major outlets trip over each other to toe the establishment line, the corporate media is more of a conspiracy than ever.<\/p>\n

_____________________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a> Bel\u00e9n Fern\u00e1ndez is an <\/em>Al Jazeera columnist and <\/em>a contributing editor at <\/em>Jacobin Magazine. She has written for the<\/em> New York Times, London Review of Books, Current Affairs, and<\/em> Middle East Eye, among numerous other publications. She is the author of <\/em>Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), <\/em>Exile: Rejecting America and Finding the World (OR Books, 2019), <\/em>Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon (Warscapes, 2016), and <\/em>The Imperial Messenger: Thomas Friedman at Work (Verso, 2011). <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 fair.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Aug 1996, Webb penned a series for the Mercury News documenting how profits from the sale of crack cocaine in Los Angeles in the 1980s had been funneled to the Contras, the CIA-backed mercenary army perpetrating a terrorist war against Nicaragua.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":91892,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[229,2375,2093,133,1606,550,2738,1563,1678,2881,541,234,1308,2571,2894,800,2200,70,921,71],"class_list":["post-284210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-media","tag-activism","tag-alternative-media","tag-central-america","tag-cia","tag-contras","tag-corruption","tag-daniel-ortega","tag-expose","tag-investigative-journalism","tag-journalistic-ethics","tag-latin-america-caribbean","tag-media","tag-nicaragua","tag-official-lies-and-narratives","tag-ronald-reagan","tag-truth","tag-us-empire","tag-usa","tag-whistleblowing","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=284210"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":284211,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/284210\/revisions\/284211"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91892"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=284210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=284210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=284210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}