Drug WarRant

[DdC]

The rest of the story: 'Kill the Messenger' does what the U.S. press wouldn't do—ask hard questions about the campaign against Gary Webb. The Mercury News investigative journalist paid a personal price for his controversial exposé of CIA ties to the crack cocaine explosion. Two years after his suicide, the debate over his landmark investigation continues.

When First We Practice To Deceive
Metro Santa Cruz Dec 20-27, 2006

A new book reveals how the media's campaign against Mercury News reporter Gary Webb may have driven him to suicide, and suggests he took the fall for the paper's failures on an explosive series of articles.

Kill the Messenger: The Tragic Life of Gary Webb
By Doug Ireland, In These Times. Posted October 13, 2006.
Gary Webb, the legendary journalist who scooped the big papers and found himself punished for it, teaches the lesson that it's often dangerous to speak truth to power.

Kill the Messenger
How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb
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IN THE mid-'90s, Gary Webb authored an explosive series for the San Jose Mercury News titled "Dark Alliance," in which he asserted that the CIA knew tons of drugs were coming into Los Angeles and that the money was being moved to fund the Contras in Nicaragua—and that they were complicit in the whole thing. Webb's story was blasted by The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. The barrage of attacks on Webb by the aforementioned media represented one of the most embarrassing charades in the history of American journalism. It wasn't that Webb's story was flawless, it's just that these other papers, instead of further exploring his evidence, decided to attack him instead.

In the end, Webb's own editors at the Mercury News didn't even stick up for him. They originally defended the pieces, but eventually ran away with their tails between their legs. Webb's career was ruined and he committed suicide two years ago, but his research has recently been expanded by investigative journalist Nick Schou, who has penned a new book on Webb's life, Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb. It includes an introduction by Charles Bowden, who defended Webb in a famous article for Esquire. In the book, Schou documents the rise and fall of a courageous reporter who did everything a journalist is supposed to do: he challenged authority and held people in positions of power accountable for their actions. He was not afraid to take on the big dogs. The CIA eventually released a report confirming a lot of the allegations made by Webb, but the mainstream press largely ignored it.

The following is an excerpt from Kill the Messenger, which tackles some tough questions about Webb's suicide, the failures of his editors at the Mercury News, and the campaign against him by the American press.

GARY WEBB'S SUICIDE didn't go unnoticed in the industry to which he had dedicated the better part of his life. But unlike "Dark Alliance," it wasn't front-page news. "Gary Webb, a prize winning investigative journalist whose star-crossed career was capped with a controversial newspaper series linking the CIA to the crack-cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles, died Friday of self-inflicted gunshot wounds," the Sacramento Bee reported in a Dec. 12 obituary. "Three of the nation's leading newspapers, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, followed up with reports questioning Mr. Webb's conclusions, and eventually his own newspaper turned on him."

Three days later, the Bee published a follow-up story intending to quell rumors then spreading throughout conspiracy websites on the Internet that the CIA had assassinated Webb. "Such a case normally would have sparked little notice," the Bee reported. "But Webb's allegations spawned a following, including conspiracy theorists who have worked the Internet feverishly for days with notions that because Webb died from two gunshots he was killed by government agents or the Contras in retribution for the stories written nearly a decade ago."

Perhaps the most absurd account of Webb's supposed murder came from Prisonplanet.com, an Austin, Texas-based Internet radio show run by Alex Jones. Under a headline "The Murder of Gary W. Webb," Jones darkly referred to "credible sources who were close to Gary Webb" and who said he was working on a new exposé involving the CIA. According to Jones' sources, Webb "was receiving death threats, being regularly followed," and "he was concerned about strange individuals who were seen on multiple occasions breaking into and leaving his house."

Jones claimed that Webb had recently complained about intruders "who were obviously not burglars but government people." When Webb confronted them, these "professionals" escaped by "jumping from his balcony" and "scaling down the pipes outside his home." The only problem with that scenario is that Webb lived in a one-story ranch house with no balcony or pipes on the wall.

Sue didn't find out that her ex-husband had shot himself twice until she got a call from the Bee reporter who wrote that story. She later discovered that Webb almost didn't succeed in killing himself. When the first bullet pierced his cheek, it missed his brain, tearing only soft tissue. Webb pulled the trigger again. The second bullet barely nicked an artery, and Webb, who likely fell unconscious moments later, ultimately bled to death.

It was hardly the mark of a professional hit. Sue told the reporter she was certain her ex-husband had committed suicide.

"The way he was acting, it would be hard for me to believe it was anything but suicide," she said, explaining that he had been "distraught for some time over his inability to get a job at another major newspaper."

Sue also received a call from a San Francisco-based private investigator who said he had been hired to investigate her ex-husband's death. He wanted a hair sample, explaining that there might be chemical traces in his hair follicles that would show whether he had been murdered. Sue agreed to meet the man at the mortuary, where she reluctantly provided him with a sample. Later, the investigator called her and asked if Sue would agree to an autopsy if he could raise the money. She said she'd think it over. The investigator called back on the day of the memorial service and said he had raised $6,000. He asked for her permission to collect Webb's body. "I told him it was too late, that he had already been cremated," Sue says. "But there was no reason to have an autopsy. I don't know what happened to that hair sample. I never got a call."

That wasn't the last of it, however. Nearly a year after Webb's death, Anita Langley, host of Black Op Radio, an Internet radio broadcast devoted to conspiracy topics, emailed Sue. Langley claimed that Webb was in contact with witnesses to unspecified secret government operations shortly before he died. Government agents recently had murdered some of those witnesses and their entire families, she said.

"Gary would have known that these people kill children," Langley wrote. "If he wrote the suicide notes, I think it is possible he would have done so as a result of being given the option to spare his children a terrible fate. ... Gary learned about the worst types of crimes imaginable, and I do suppose it is possible that his death was a suicide, but in light of what I have told you, I hope you will consider the possibility that there may have been a professional hit here."

Langley asked Sue to search Gary's records for any notes that would confirm these contacts. In an email, Langley told me she had no proof to support her suspicions, but is certain Webb was digging into a story that could have caused powerful government forces to threaten him. Sue and Webb's son Ian, however, dug through Webb's documents and found nothing to indicate he was working on anything other than stories for the Sacramento News & Review.

There wasn't any assassin's bullet, nor was there any need for one. It was Gary Webb's controversial, career-ending story—and the combined resources and dedication of America's three largest and most powerful newspapers—that killed his career as a reporter and set the stage for his personal self-destruction. Without exception, those who knew Webb well believe he killed himself. And while the reasons they offer for that belief differ in terms of the precipitant motivation for Webb's decision to commit suicide, they converge on one point: Webb's depression may have existed for decades on one level or another, but it only became life-threatening after his banishment from journalism thanks to the controversy over "Dark Alliance."

Journalists who helped expose the connection between the CIA, the Nicaraguan Contras, and drug smuggling say that while "Dark Alliance" wasn't a perfect piece of journalism, Gary Webb deserves to be celebrated for forcing the CIA to admit that it had protected Contra drug smugglers from prosecution and then lied about it for years. They mourn the fact that Webb paid such a heavy price for one story, however controversial.

"What happened to Gary is an American tragedy, but one that still hasn't been addressed," says Bob P. Parry, the AP reporter who originally broke the Contra-cocaine story. "I'm stunned at how mean the mainstream press has chosen to be. [They are] so lacking of any self-criticism about this. The press has displayed much more self-criticism on such smaller issues, but there' there's been no self-criticism on this one."

"A good editor would have made Gary modify his conclusions," says The Nation's David Corn. "This would have saved 'Dark Alliance,' and perhaps saved Gary. He would have gone on with his life. It was an explosive story because it overreached. It's fair to assume had it not overreached it would have been better for him. But because it overreached, those Inspector General reports came out. One thing Gary should be remembered for is that his pursuit of this issue did cause huge chunks of the truth to come out of the CIA."

"I don't know why he killed himself or what would have prevented that," says Marc Cooper of the L.A. Weekly. "What I can say is that the media killed his career. That's obvious and it's really a nauseating and very discouraging story, because as a journalist, the only thing you have is your credibility. When that is shredded, there's no way to rebuild it."

Cooper agrees with Corn that "Dark Alliance" contained serious flaws, but reserves special scorn for the journalists who criticized his story. "If Gary Webb made mistakes I have no problem with exposing them," he says. "But given the sweep of American journalism over the past fifty years, this is an outstanding case where three of the major newspapers in the country decided to take out somebody, a competitor whose mistakes seem by any measure to be very minor."

Remembering the messenger: Investigative journalist Nick Schou is the author of 'Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb.'

French journalist Paul Moreira, who interviewed Webb in 1997, filmed a forty-five-minute documentary about Webb for the investigative program 90 Minutes on France's Canal Plus—the only televised coverage of his suicide anywhere in the world. Moreira also interviewed Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus about the media's lack of coverage on the CIA's inspector general report admitting the agency worked with drug dealers throughout the 1980s.

"It was much, much more grave than Watergate," Moreira says. "The report comes out precisely in the middle of all the noise around Monica and Bill, and no one pays attention! That's when I discovered that media-noise is the new censorship."

Moreira says his bosses weren't overjoyed about broadcasting his documentary. "They thought it was too distant for the French, and they were right; the ratings were not that good," he says. (Shortly after this interview, Canal Plus cancelled the show.) "But somehow I knew I was doing the right thing. I felt like justice should be given to his work, his name. Not enough people in this job are ready to take some risks. He did."

The Post's Pincus says Webb was ultimately a victim of his own celebrity, not other journalists. "One thing I have been fascinated with is what notoriety does to people who have never felt it," he says. "The fifteen-minutes-of-fame business is really dangerous. There are people who fawn all over you, who make you think you are much more important than you really are. It happens in this city all the time."

Pincus believes that the most important legacy of "Dark Alliance" was that the story—along with other scandals that plagued the agency in the 1990s, including its ties to a Guatemalan army officer who murdered a left-wing rebel married to U.S. citizen Jennifer Harbury—encouraged the CIA to be less aggressive in its efforts against Islamic terrorism, which helped enable Osama bin Laden's 9/11 terrorist attacks.

"That's horseshit," says Jack Blum, who headed Sen. Kerry's subcommittee on narcotics and terrorism during the 1980s. "The CIA and FBI didn't stop 9/11 because nobody listened to their agents in the field. And the disease that led the mainstream media to dump all over Gary Webb is the same disease that led the media to be so uncritical about the Iraq war. This guy was abused for doing his job. To the extent he was wrong, the fault lies with his editors who probably didn't work with him sufficiently or do certain checking on some of the stuff he was told."

Greg Wolf believes his lifelong friend died because he stopped taking his anti-depressants. "This has got nothing to do with politics or his career, but brain chemistry," he says. "He was clinically depressed. He was having a continuous midlife crisis and that's what killed him." But Wolf suspects that "Dark Alliance" was the central cause of Webb's depression. "That story was his first big hit of crystal meth," he says. "And then he was no longer just some respected reporter, he was a celebrity. And they took that away from him and it was too much for him. He wrote the biggest story of his life and then he was a pariah."

"He was a courageous guy, but too stubborn for his own good—and paid the price," says Tom Loftus, one of Webb's friends from the Kentucky Post. "I've never seen an investigative project come under fire like 'Dark Alliance.' It hasn't happened before or since. I wonder how many Pulitzer prizes would be revoked in the Washington Post or New York Times if those papers used their best reporters to examine each other. Now all his editors have better jobs and the reporter is dead."

Tom Scheffey, who co-authored the Coal Connection articles with Webb at the Kentucky Post, believes Webb's editors at the Mercury News betrayed him. "I think that being an investigative reporter is like being a trained Doberman," he says. "All their training goes into being good at sniffing things out, running at the ground, and going after the story. For inexplicable reasons, after all these instincts and talents are built in, the chain is jerked. This is what drives Dobermans and investigative reporters nuts—getting really good at something and then being told you can't do it. Gary was betrayed by his handlers."

Tom Andrzejewski—the Polish-American reporter who always thought every phone call was "The Big One"—asserts that anybody who would claim to know the truth behind the dark events Webb chronicled in his big story is misguided.

"Somewhere in there was the truth," he says. "Gary probably got close to it. The problem was he couldn't prove it."

Andrzejewski believes the attacks Webb endured were "the beginning of the end" for his friend. "It was such an egregious, mean-spirited response," he says. "The way the respected papers took him on and treated him so shabbily was unprecedented."

Anita Webb, the last person to speak with her son before he shot himself, says she will never forgive the journalists who spent so much time and energy attacking Gary Webb.

"They destroyed my son's career," she says. "Gary was an honest reporter, and they killed him. I'll never forgive the people who destroyed my son."

The mainstream media's attacks continued even after Webb's suicide. On Dec. 12, the Los Angeles Times, which had done more than any other newspaper to destroy Webb's career eight years earlier, published a brief obituary saying his work on the CIA and drugs had been "discredited."

The source for this alleged discrediting was, of course, the Times itself. The obituary writers, Nita Lelyveld and Steve Hymon, looked no further than the paper's own response to "Dark Alliance."
Bob Parry recalls learning of Webb's suicide from the Los Angeles Times, which called him for a comment. Parry told the reporter that the American people owed a "huge debt" to Gary Webb for exposing an important, dark chapter in their country's history. "I said you'll have trouble writing about it accurately, because if you look at your paper's clips you'll have trouble finding a single accurate story about what he exposed," Parry says.

The San Jose Mercury News finally acknowledged its role in Webb's tragic fate in a Dec. 16 editorial. "After any suicide, survivors feel guilty," wrote Scott Herhold, the editor who worked with Webb in his early years at the Mercury News. "Was there any way it could have been avoided?"

Webb, he said, was an "immensely talented reporter, a good writer and a sometimes-difficult human being. In many ways he represented the best of our craft—its compassion, its obligation to speak truth to power."

Herhold also wrote that Webb's "lack of doubt" in his beliefs "demanded a firm editor to challenge him. "Gary didn't get that on any level. ... 'Dark Alliance' was as much an institutional failure as it was a personal one. Yet Webb bore the chief consequences." Herhold refused to comment on a claim by a former Mercury News reporter that the paper killed an additional line in his obituary stating that while Webb lost his job over "Dark Alliance," all of the editors who worked on that story were later promoted.

"The zeal that helped make Gary a relentless reporter was coupled with an inability to question himself, to entertain the notion that he might have erred," says former Mercury News editor Jonathan Krim. He wonders if Gary's reaction to criticism allowed other people involved in his story—such as his editors—to escape harsher scrutiny. "There was plenty of responsibility to go around," he concludes. "We failed as a newspaper."

Dawn Garcia emerged from the "Dark Alliance" controversy with her career intact. In 2000, she left the Mercury News and became the deputy director for Stanford University's John S. Knight Fellowships for Professional Journalists. Garcia never kept in touch with Webb after he left the paper, but according to Webb's former colleague, Pamela Kramer, Webb told her shortly before his death that he didn't blame Garcia for what happened to his career.

Unlike the other editors who handled the project, Garcia recognizes her own failures. "Had I to do all over again, I would have pushed to hold the story until everything was truly ready," she says. "I would have recast parts of the series to focus on the very strong reporting Gary had done, and be much more careful about how we worded the conclusions of that reporting." Garcia believes "the core of the series was correct but that the conclusions Gary drew were too sweeping. We could have had almost as strong or stronger a story by being more explanatory in what we thought and why we thought so."

But Garcia also feels the "Dark Alliance" controversy helped reveal an important part of U.S. history that had been largely ignored by the American media. "Two years after the series ran, a CIA Inspector General's report acknowledged that the CIA had indeed worked with suspected drug runners while supporting the Contras," she says. "The IG report would not have happened if 'Dark Alliance' had not been published. I also think we began a long overdue investigation into a dark chapter of U.S. policy. We raised important questions about what the government knew about drug smuggling that hadn't been covered well by the media."

Managing Editor David Yarnold, who stopped reading Webb's story halfway through the editing process, rose to become executive editor, then editor of the paper's opinion section. He left the Mercury News in 2005 and is now director of an environmental organization in New York City. Paul Van Slambrouck, who replaced Yarnold on the story, was promoted to a corporate position with Knight Ridder before becoming editor of the Christian Science Monitor. In 2003, the Monitor published a story based on forged documents accusing George Galloway, a left-wing member of the British parliament, of accepting millions of dollars from Saddam Hussein during the 1990s. After issuing a formal apology to Galloway, Van Slambrouck stepped down as editor and became a San Francisco-based correspondent for the paper.

In 1997, Jerry Ceppos received the Society of Professional Journalists' Ethics in Journalism award for publishing his mea culpa about "Dark Alliance." Two years later, he left the Mercury News to become vice president for news at Knight Ridder. Ceppos celebrated his final day in journalism on Aug. 31, 2005, taking an early retirement to enjoy his vineyard in Saratoga.

Had he lived, Gary Webb would have turned fifty years old that day. Two weeks later, his family—Sue, Anita, Kurt, Ian, Eric, and Christine—marked Webb's birthday by driving to Santa Cruz. With the Rolling Stones song "You Can't Always Get What You Want" blaring from a boombox, they obeyed his final wish—and let him bodysurf for eternity. They tossed his ashes into the crashing waves of the Pacific.

The preceding excerpt is from 'Kill the Messenger: How the CIA's Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb' by Nick Schou (Nation Books; 278 pages; $14.95 paper). Copyright 2006 by Nick Schou. Used with permission. All Rights Reserved. Available for purchase at nationbooks.org

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DEAth Spooks

[DdC]

Gary Webb, In His Own Words
Metro Santa Cruz December 20-27, 2006
Photograph by Larry Dalton

Vindicated by history: Webb had a strong sense of fairness combined with a droll and often self-deprecating sense of humor.

At a 1999 speaking function, the late journalist discusses how he got into journalism, took on the CIA and became a target for the mainstream media.



Editor's note: It's not easy when a colleague, let alone a journalist you hold in the highest regard, commits suicide. When Gary Webb took his own life two years ago, he and I had both been working at the Sacramento News & Review. In the days that followed, I fielded numerous phone calls from well-meaning folks who were convinced that he had been shot by the agency he went after in his famed "Dark Alliance" series. My personal belief is that the CIA didn't need to kill Gary; they'd already set his demise in motion by employing "unnamed sources" to discredit him in the nation's major print media. To the very end, Gary complained that no one had ever disproved a single fact in his series. The fact that so many respected newspapers so eagerly took this bait, and that one of our nation's last true investigative reporters had been driven to such desperation, is something I could not reconcile then or now.

Meanwhile, those of us who were left behind struggled to deal with the tragedy, even as we tried to make some sense of it in print. I called Congresswoman Maxine Waters to ask for her response. "The 'Dark Alliance' series was one of the most profound pieces of journalism I have ever witnessed," maintained Waters, who spent two years following up on investigative reporter Gary Webb's revelations. "Gary's work was not only in-depth, revealing and confrontational, but it single-handedly created discussion and debate about the proliferation of crack cocaine and the role of the CIA."

As the mainstream media abandoned Webb, it was Waters who took up the battle and demanded further investigation. During a public hearing Waters held in the wake of the story, then-CIA Director John Deutch, who reportedly arrived at the hearing's South-Central high school location in a motorcade complete with helicopter cover, told the angry citizenry, "I will get to the bottom of it, and I will let you know the results of what I've found."

Ironically, when the CIA's inspector general finally did issue findings in 1998, the mainstream press opted to look the other way. "The major news organizations effectively hid the CIA's confession from the American people," claimed author Robert Parry, who broke stories on Iran-Contra for the Associated Press and Newsweek. Parry saw the whole incident as "foreshadowing the media incompetence that would fail to challenge George W. Bush's case for war with Iraq five years later."

History, I believe, will continue to reveal the importance of Webb's work. Jeff Cohen, founder of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, wrote that Webb "deserves to be remembered in the proud tradition of muckrakers like Ida Tarbell, George Seldes and I.F. Stone. In this era of 'embedded reporters,'" writes Cohen, "an unembedded journalist like Gary Webb will be sorely missed."

I can hardy claim to have known Gary Webb based on the short time I worked with him. But I did get the sense that he had a very strong sense of fairness as well as a droll and often self-deprecating sense of humor. You get some of that in the following transcript, edited for space, of a talk Webb gave in 1999 in Eugene, Ore.
Bill Forman

Gary Webb: Well, I've been a daily news reporter for about 20 years, and I've done probably a thousand interviews with people, and the strangest thing is being on the other side of the table now and having reporters ask me questions. One of them asked me about a week ago, "Why did you get into newspaper reporting?" And I really had to admit that I was stumped. Because I really didn't have an answer.

So, I went back to my clip books--you know, most reporters keep all their old clips--and I started digging around trying to figure out if there was one story that I had written that had really tipped the balance. And I found it. I was 15. I was working for my high school paper and had written an editorial against the drill team that we had for the high school games, for the football games. This was '71 or '72, at the height of the protests against the Vietnam War, and someone thought it was a cool idea to dress women up in military uniforms and send them out there to twirl rifles and battle flags at halftime. And I thought this was sort of outrageous, and I wrote an editorial saying I thought it was one of the silliest things I'd ever seen. And my newspaper adviser called me the next day and said,

"God, that editorial you wrote has really prompted a response. ... They want you to apologize for it." I said, "Apologize for what? ... I'm not apologizing because they don't want my opinion. You'll have to come up with a better reason than that." And they said, "Well, if you don't apologize, we're not going to let you in [the high school journalism society]." And I said, "Well, I don't want to be in that organization if I have to apologize to get into it." [Laughter from the audience.]

Well, when I went down to the newspaper office, there were about 15 cheerleaders sitting around this table, and they all went around one by one telling me what a scumbag I was and what a terrible guy I was ... and at that moment, I decided, "Man, this is what I want to do for a living!" [Roar of laughter from the audience.] And I wish I could say that it was because I was infused with this sense of the First Amendment ... but what I was really thinking was, "Man, this is a great way to meet women!" [More laughter.]

And that's a true story, but the reason I tell you that is because it's often those kinds of weird motivations and unthinking consequences that lead us to do things, that lead us to events that we have absolutely no concept how they're going to turn out. Little did I know, 25 years later, I'd be writing a story about the CIA's wrongdoings because I wanted to meet women by writing editorials about cheerleaders.

But that's really the way life and that's really the way history works a lot of times. You know, when you think back on your own lives, from the vantage point of time, you can see it. I mean, think back to the decisions you've made in your lifetimes that brought you to where you are tonight. Think about how close you came to never meeting your wife or your husband, how easily you could have been doing something else for a living if it hadn't been for a decision that you made or someone made that you had absolutely no control over. And it's really kind of scary when you think about how capricious life is sometimes. That's a theme I try to bring to my book, Dark Alliance, which was about the crack-cocaine explosion in the 1980s.

So, for the record, let me just say this right now. I do not believe--and I have never believed--that the crack-cocaine explosion was a conscious CIA conspiracy, or anybody's conspiracy, to decimate black America. I've never believed that South-Central Los Angeles was targeted by the U.S. government to become the crack capital of the world. But that isn't to say that the CIA's hands or the U.S. government's hands are clean in this matter. Actually, far from it. After spending three years of my life looking into this, I am more convinced than ever that the U.S. government's responsibility for the drug problems in South-Central Los Angeles and other inner cities is greater than I ever wrote in the newspaper.

But it's important to differentiate between malign intent and gross negligence. And that's an important distinction, because it's what makes premeditated murder different from manslaughter. That said, it doesn't change the fact that you've got a body on the floor, and that's what I want to talk about tonight, the body.

What I've attempted to demonstrate in my book was how the collapse of a brutal, pro-American dictatorship in Latin America, combined with a decision by corrupt CIA agents to raise money for a resistance movement by any means necessary, led to the formation of the nation's first major crack market in South-Central Los Angeles, which led to the arming and the empowerment of L.A.'s street gangs, which led to the spread of crack to black neighborhoods across the country and to the passage of racially discriminatory sentencing laws that are locking up thousands of young black men today behind bars for most of their lives.

But it's not so much a conspiracy as a chain reaction. And that's what the [San Jose Mercury News] series and my whole book Dark Alliance is about, this chain reaction. ...

Now, a lot of people disagreed with the scenario. The New York Times, the L.A. Times and the Washington Post all came out and said, "Oh, no. That's not so." They said this couldn't have happened that way, because crack would have happened anyway. Which is true, somewhat. As I pointed out in the first chapter of my book, crack was on its way here. But whether it would have happened the same way, whether it would have happened in South-Central, whether it would have happened in Los Angeles at all first, is a very different story. ...

One of the things which these newspapers who dissed my story were saying was, "We can't believe that the CIA would know about drug trafficking and let it happen." That this agency, which gets $27 billion a year to tell us what's going on, and which was so intimately involved with the Contras they were writing their press releases for them, they wouldn't know about this drug trafficking going on under their noses. But the Times and the Post all uncritically reported their claims that the CIA didn't know what was going on and that it would never permit its hirelings to do anything like that, as unseemly as drug trafficking. You know, assassinations and bombings and that sort of thing, yeah, they'll admit to right up front. But drug dealing, no, no, they don't do that kind of stuff.

Unfortunately, though, it was true, and what has happened since my series came out is that the CIA was forced to do an internal review. The DEA and Justice Department were forced to do internal reviews. The one thing that I've learned from this whole experience is, first of all, you can't believe the government-- on anything. And you especially can't believe them when they're talking about important stuff, like this stuff. The other thing is that the media will believe the government before they believe anything.

This has been the most amazing thing to me. You had a situation where you had another newspaper who reported this information. The major news organizations in this country went to the CIA, they went to the Justice Department, and they said, "What about it?" And they said, "Oh, no, it's not true. Take our word for it." And they went back and put it in the newspaper! Now, I try to imagine what would happen had reporters come back to their editors and said, "Look. I know the CIA is involved in drug trafficking. And I know the FBI knows about it, and I've got a confidential source that's telling me that. Can I write a story about that?" What do you think the answer would have been? [Murmurs of "no" from the audience.] "Get back down to the obit desk. Start cranking out those sports scores." But, if they go to the government, and the government denies something like that, they'll put it in the paper with no corroboration whatsoever.

And it's only since the government has admitted it that now the media is willing to consider that there might be a story here after all. The New York Times, after the CIA report that came out, ran a story on its front page saying, Gosh, the Contras were involved in drugs after all, and gosh, the CIA knew about it.

Now, you would think--at least I would think--that something like that would warrant congressional investigation. We're spending millions of dollars to find out how many times Bill Clinton had sex with Monica Lewinsky. Why aren't we interested in how much the CIA knew about drug traffic? Who was profiting from this drug traffic? Who else knew about it? And why did it take some guy from a California newspaper by accident stumbling over this stuff 10 years later in order for it to be important? I mean, what the hell is going on here? I've been a reporter for almost 20 years. To me, this is a natural story. The CIA is involved in drug trafficking? Let's know about it. Let's find out about it. Let's do something about it. But nobody wants to touch this thing.

Another thing that came out, but was never reported, was that the CIA inspector general went before Congress in 1999 and testified that yes, they knew about it. They found some documents that indicated that they knew about it. Yeah. I was there! And this was funny to watch, because these congressmen were up there, and they were ready to hear the absolution, right? "We had no evidence that this was going on ..." And this guy sort of threw 'em a curve ball and admitted that it had happened.

So, where does that leave us? Well, I think it sort of leaves us to rely on the judgment of history.

... Because they want us to forget about it. They want us to concentrate on sex crimes, because, yeah, it's titillating. It keeps us occupied. It keeps us diverted. Don't let them do it.

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The Dark Alliance

Gary Webb's Incendiary 1996 SJ Mercury News Exposé

These articles were downloaded from the web site of the Seattle Times, since the San Jose Mercury News has removed the entire series from their web site. Gary Webb's career as a professional journalist was destroyed shortly after these articles were published. Anyone who challenges the House of Rockefeller is persona non grata throughout the establishment.
-The Editor



garywebbstories.com
questions@garywebbstories.com

Gary Webb Found Dead of Apparent Suicide
Democracy Now Monday, December 13th, 2004

Investigative Reporter Gary Webb Who Linked CIA to Crack Sales Found Dead of Apparent Suicide

Past Democracy Now Coverage

* 7/1998 - The CIA-Contra Cocaine Connection

* 5/1998 - Gary Webb -- Dark Alliance Interview Part II

* 5/1998 - CIA Crack Connection Reporter Releases New Book

* 2/1998 - Analysis of C.I.A. Report On Its Involvement in Drug Trafficking

* 12/1997 - Gary Webb Resigns From the San Jose Mercury News

AMY GOODMAN: People can check the story out at consortiumnews.com . You can go to our website at democracynow.org where we will compile all of Gary Webb’s interviews. Gary Webb, the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter for the San Jose Mercury News date of an apparent suicide.



The Murder Of Gary Webb
Webb, a Pullitzer prize winning journalist, exposed CIA drug trafficking operations in a series of books and reports for the San Jose Mercury News. Credible sources who were close to Gary Webb have stated that he was receiving death threats, being regularly followed, and that he was concerned about strange individuals who were seen on multiple occasions breaking into and leaving his house before his apparent 'suicide' on Friday December 10th 2004 ....links...
Evidence Begins To Indicate Gary Webb Was Murdered
Only In Arkansas: Webb 'Double Gunshot Wounds' Explanation Defies Belief
Was Gary Webb Murdered?
Dateline report on CIA drug trafficking which includes interviews with Gary Webb, Cele Castillo and 'Freeway' Ricky Ross. Alex Jones' analysis follows.
Who Killed Gary Webb?
Was Gary Webb ’Suicided’ To Kill New Book?
Alex Jones' Rebuttal To Allegations Made By Michael Ruppert Concerning Gary Webb's Death
Gary Webb: A hero of authentic journalism
A Personal Experience With Gary Webb
Why They Hated Gary Webb
Fascist smears against Gary Webb continue even in death
Assassination of US Investigative Journalist Gary Webb?

Gary Webb: More Pieces
In The Suicided Puzzle By Charlene Fassa
bavani@insightbb.com 12-11-5

"An open and shut case..."   There comes a time when you just have to stand back and take a look at the big picture. This is one of those times. On the morning of December 10th 2004, 49 year old, Gary Webb was found dead in his modest, recently sold Carmichael, California home. Webb allegedly died from two *self-inflicted* gunshot wounds to the head from a .38 caliber pistol. The Sacramento coroner, Mr. Lyons, hastily ruled Webb's death a suicide heralded by his now infamous pronouncement: "It's unusual in a suicide case to have two shots," he said, "but it has been done in the past, and it is in fact a distinct possibility." Which brings up another possibility, as the Gershwin song goes, that "it ain't necessarily so." I'm referring to the lingering and distinct possibility-- no make that probability-- that Gary Webb was murdered.

Introduction to the original Dark Alliance website August, 1996

"For the better part of a decade, a San Francisco Bay Area drug ring sold tons of cocaine to the Crips and Bloods street gangs of Los Angeles and funneled millions in drug profits to a Latin American guerrilla army run by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, a Mercury News investigation has found.   "This drug network opened the first pipeline between Colombia's cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the crack capital of the world.

Gary Webb: More Pieces In The Suicided Puzzle - Pt 2
By Charlene Fassa bavani@insightbb.com 12-10-5

A Closer Look...

Was Gary Webb on PORTER GOSS' Purge List?

"Going back a bit in time, Goss was also intimately involved in the Congressional investigations into Iran-Contra, and with the expose by Gary Webb of the Mecury that indicated CIA knowledge of the drug importation into LA. This connection came to light again when Brian Downing Quig, an investigative journalist, uncovered large scale deals involving Goss in the varoius laundering scandals surrounding Iran-Contra {see} The Death of Brian Downing Quig. (Quig was murdered June 16, 2003.)"


Photo By Noel Neuburger Reporter Gary Webb, seen in this 1997 photo, will be remembered for his "Dark Alliance" series, first published in the San Jose Mercury News.   Gary Webb- - "A Suicide."

Afghanistan's Drug Catastrophe
Poppies Rising By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY
counterpunch December 21, 2006

"Afghans profit from the opium: so do foreigners [in] droves and by much greater amounts. Around the world, in too many financial centers and offshore tax havens, in too many banks and corporations, the income produced by illicit drug trafficking is laundered. Afghanistan gets a bad name [and] foreigners get a good income : $ 50 billion [a year]."

Drug Pushers, Inc.: Power and Profit in the Legal Drug Trade

Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press by Alexander Cockburn



Those who make peaceful revolution impossible,
will make violent revolution inevitable.
John F. Kennedy, In a speech at the White House, 1962

Liberty or D.E.A.th

Hunter S. Thompson: "I have always loved marijuana. It has been a source of joy and comfort to me for many years. And I still think of it as a basic staple of life, along with beer and ice and grapefruits - and millions of Americans agree with me."

We cannot expect people to have respect for law and order until we teach respect to those we have entrusted to enforce those laws.

Hunter S. Thompson (July 18, 1937 - February 20, 2005), was an American journalist and author. He was known for his flamboyant writing style, known as Gonzo Journalism, which blurred the distinctions between writer and subject, fiction and non-fiction. Thompson died at his home in Woody Creek, Colorado, of what police officers stated was a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963)

Witness: Drug War Spraying Colombia To D.E.A.th
Jena Matzen has a carousel of slides from her trip to Colombia, and she’s giving slide shows throughout the Triangle. These are not your standard shots of smiling couples standing in front of national landmarks. One image shows a farmer at the center of his 12-acre field, a former corn crop now utterly decimated. Another shows a white flag raised over a black pepper crop, as a signal to airplanes that this is a legal crop. According to Matzen, a Hillsborough resident, the white flag did not have the desired effect; the pepper crop was destroyed nevertheless, by planes dropping enormous quantities of an herbicide called glyphosate -- marketed by Monsanto in this country under the brand name Round-Up -- as part of the U.S. war on drugs.

Colombia Drug War News
Activist Speaks Against U.S. Policy in Colombia

"I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive."
- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

Wellstone Heads to Colombia to Question Drug War
Colombian Police Spray Herbicide on Wellstone
Bomb Discovered Before Visit of Senator Wellstone
Sen. Paul Wellstone Killed in Plane Crash
Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?

Paul Wellstone emerged as the strongest, most persistent, most articulate and most vocal Senate opponent of the Bush administration.
Archive of articles at the Minneapolis Star Tribune. Includes timeline, photos, RealAudio files, and a small collection of speeches by Wellstone.



Conformity is the jailer of freedom, and the enemy of growth.
John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963)

* On the Larry King Show in late 1989, then drug czar William Bennett, a possible Republican presidential candidate in 2000, said he had no moral problems with beheading drug dealers -only legal ones.

The Ultimate Hypocrisy

The Online Reefer Madness Teaching Museum

Conservative Addiction Good, Liberal Addiction Bad!
Unrepentant Junkies:
Bush, Sen.Joseph McCarthy & DJ Rush Limbaugh

GOPerverted Officials

In an editorial in its May 1 issue, William F. Buckley, Jr.'s National Review commented on the case of Jimmy Montgomery, a paraplegic sentenced to 10 years in Oklahoma prisons for less than 2 ounces of marijuana. NR noted that former deputy drug czar John P. Walters criticized ABC News for reporting on the Montgomery case. Walters showed no concern for Montgomery but rather complained, "Apparently ABC couldn't find a grandmother on death row for carrying a roach clip..." NR observes that "something is seriously wrong with a drug policy that condones such treatment -- a point that the drug warriors tacitly acknowledge by changing the subject."
Continued...~olsen/NORML/WEEKLY/95-04-20.html

Bryan Epis Sentenced to Ten Years



John F. Kennedy: "Today, we need a nation of Minutemen, citizens who are not only prepared to take arms, but citizens who regard the preservation of freedom as the basic purpose of their daily life and who are willing to consciously work and sacrifice for that freedom."

Bushladen and the Terrorists Carlyles Groups

Marijuana Arrests For Year 2004: 771,608
NORML: October 17, 2005 - Washington, DC, USA
Record High; FBI Report Reveals
Pot Smokers Arrested In America At A Rate Of One Every 41 Seconds
Washington, DC: Police arrested an estimated 771,608 persons for marijuana violations in 2004, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's annual Uniform Crime Report, released today.

Winners in the War on Drugs
Congressional Family Drug Offenders
Escape Mandatory Sentences, Get Favorable Treatment

I AIN'T NO SENATRS SON!
In September 1996, Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., attacked President Clinton for being "cavalier" toward illegal drugs and for appointing  too many "soft on crime" liberal judges. "We must get tough on drug dealers,"  he declared. "Those who peddle destruction on our children must pay dearly."

Dr. Heath/Tulane Study, 1974
The Hype: Brain Damage and Dead Monkeys (Jack Herer)

Soon after xDrugczar Carlton Turner left office, Nancy Reagan recommended that no corporation be permitted to do business with the Federal government without having a urine purity policy in place to show their loyalty. Just as G. Gordon Liddy went into high-tech corporate security after his disgrace, Turner became a rich man in what has now become a huge growth industry: urine-testing.

Policing For Profit: The Drug War's Hidden Economic Agenda

Spoils of Drug War Forfeitures Prove Too Lucrative

Cunningham's Vote to Support the Death Penalty for Drug Kingpins

[DdC]

The greatest enemy of the truth is very often not the lie--delierate, contrived, and dishonest, but the myth persistent, peruasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.
John F. Kennedy (1917 - 1963)


If anybody is responsible for the death of Irma Perez (and many like her), it is people just like U.S. Congressman Mark Souder, who put the drug war above the lives of the citizens.

Mark Souder is the scum of the earth

Drug Sentencing Reform Act
Souder's proposed bill mandates that most people on parole, probation, or supervised release be subjected to random drug testing, even when their original offense is non-drug related. If enacted, thousands of non-violent Americans could be sent to prison for years for smoking marijuana in the privacy of their own home and then failing a drug test.

Higher Education Act Retracts Financial Aid From Marijuana UsersUsers
Daily Nebraskan By Hilary Stohs-Krause October 03, 2005 
Rape. Murder. Drunk driving.
None of these crimes will cost college students their Pell Grants, but walking down the street with a joint could. As of July 1, 2000, a provision in the Higher Education Act mandated that students’ eligibility for federal financial aid be suspended if they are convicted under federal or state laws of offenses involving the possession or sale of controlled substances.

Food Stamps Become a Weapon in the War on Drugs

Drug Ruling Worries Some in Public Housing

Harsh Drug Bill Coming Soon To Congress

Our Education: Up in Smoke!
Few American endeavors of the past two decades have been as rife with cronyism, corruption, and moral hypocrisy as our failed and futile War on Drugs. One can't just view it as a single issue. Directly or not, it affects every area of American life.

Congress Considers Dangerous Mandatory Minimum Sentences For Marijuana
Ask Your Member of Congress To Oppose H.R.1528!



Claude Shelby: The son of Richard "Death Penalty for Drug Kingpins" Shelby (R-Ala.) was arrested in Atlanta for possession of 13.8 grams of hash. He was fined a $570 "administrative penalty.

Death Penalty for Two Ounces of Marijuana!
(from September/October 1996 Marijuana Policy Report)
Picture this: An indiscreet American college student returning from a vacation in Mexico is caught with two ounces of marijuana in his pocket. A judge is forced to sentence him to spend the rest of his life in federal prison. If this is his second offense, he will be executed. Could this really happen in America? Yes, if U.S. Rep. Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and his cronies have their way.

'Murder Weed'

Cops Maliciously Punish Amputee by Confiscating Scooter

Pot Grower, 75, Given Year in Jail

"Dear Agent ..., please prepare all cases in your jurisdiction involving musicians in violation of the marijuana laws. We will have a great national round-up arrest of all such persons on a single day. I will let you know what day."
Harry J. Anslinger, Federal Bureau of Narcotics, 1947

'After Two Puffs, I Was Turned Into a Bat'



James Geddes: sentenced to 150 years, reduced to 90 years
charged with cultivation and possession of five marijuana plants 

Will Foster 93 Years For Cannabis
In 1996 Foster was convicted of five drug counts in Tulsa, all revolving around the plants he was growing in an underground backyard shelter. Foster says he had 38 marijuana plants. He said he was growing them to be harvested in rotation --each harvest to yield about 12 ounces. Prosecuters asserted that he had between 50 and 70 plants and that he meant to distribute. A Tulsa jury sentenced him to a little over a year per plant, 70 years for cultivation. It tacked on 20 years for possession in the presence of minors, his children. Foster asserts they never knew. The sentence "certainly falls within the realm of punishment within Oklahoma law and I think it's a fair verdict," said Tulsa County assistant District Attorney Brian Crain.

WAMM Raided on September 5, 2002

Angel's Fight to Stay Alive



The Kubby Family by Pete Brady (04 Sept, 2000)

(Excerpts) Steve Kubby, a cancer survivor and author of an award-winning book called "The Politics of Consciousness," had just finished a 1998 campaign for governor when 21 police officers burst into his California mountain home in January, 1999. After being mistreated in jail, Kubby and his wife found their home ransacked, their reputation trashed, their money and magazine business ruined by police.

A Searing Portrait of Abuse By Colbert I. King
Washington Post November 25, 2005 Washington, D.C.
This is the 12th column to be written about Jonathan Magbie, a 27-year-old man who was paralyzed from the neck down at age 4 after being struck by a drunk driver. Magbie lived at home with his mother, needed private nursing care at least 20 hours a day and was totally dependent upon others because he couldn't use any of his limbs. He got around in a motorized wheelchair that he operated with his mouth, and his breathing was aided by a tracheotomy tube and an implanted diaphragmatic pacemaker.
Read More... http://www.cannabisnews.com/news/thread21336.shtml


Tom Crosslin - Nov. 10, 1954 - Sept. 3, 2001
Rollie Rohm - Dec. 27, 1972 - Sept. 4, 2001

Federal and state police kill owner of Rainbow Farm
On the Friday before Labor Day 2001, rather than face a bail revocation hearing for holding an unauthorized marijuana rally last August Grover "Tom" Crosslin and Rolland Rohm retreated to Rainbow Farm...

Ed Rosenthal's Trial Pictures & Articles



The Murder of Peter McWilliams

Whatever the "official" cause listed on McWilliams' death certificate, he was, by any definition of the word, murdered by the federal government. If a lone human being forcibly denied a patient their lifesaving medication, which then hastened their death, that cruel person would certainly be indicted for murder. Yet Peter is only the latest victim of an uncaring, unaccountable, unquestioned "drug" policy run by a retired 4-Star Army General, Drug "Czar" Barry McCaffrey- the stone cold heart of Marijuana Prohibition.

Peter McWilliams Homepage

DEA Raids MMJ Garden of Sister Somayah


reneeboje.com

The Murder of Steve McWilliams

Todd McCormick 5 - 10 years for treating neck cancer.

Medical Cannabis Advocates Face Up to 40 Years
Lynn and Judy Osburn are charged in federal court with cultivating medical marijuana in accordance with California state law, HS 11362.5 and in agreement with the city of West Hollywood and the Los Angeles Cannabis Resource Center.

War on Drugs Hits New Low By Jordan Smith
Austin Chronicle November 23, 2005 USA
The federal war on medi-pot patients hit a new low last month when Royal Canadian Mounted Police nabbed 38-year-old Steven W. Tuck from his Vancouver, B.C., hospital bed, whisked him to the border, and relinquished him to the custody of U.S. officials, who wanted him on charges related to a 2001 marijuana bust in California. Tuck, an Army vet, uses marijuana to help treat chronic pain associated with injuries he received in a parachuting accident back in the 1980s.

The Drug War Refugees

The 'Virtues' of Ganja

"Marihuana leads to pacifism and communist brainwashing"
Federal Bureau of Narcotics Chief Harry J. Anslinger, 1948