In 1996 Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Gary Webb wrote a hard-hitting series for the San Jose Mercury News exposing how the CIA imported cocaine to be sold in South Central L.A. In spite of reams of evidence, he was forced to leave his job. He wrote a book about the subject instead called Dark Alliance. In 2004 he was found dead of an apparent suicide. He was 49 years old. A movie about Gary Webb, Kill the Messenger, came out on Friday, October 10th, 2014.
According to an interview Gary Webb gave to Democracy Now while he was alive, a prosecutor who was looking into the CIA cocaine dealing had been found dead of an apparent suicide, shot in the head. According to the same interview, a former Contra turned whistleblower was found dead of an apparent drug overdose after predicting the CIA might stage such an incident.
The book the movie is based on, also called Kill the Messenger, said he did commit suicide. The book was written by Nick Schou. Orange County Weekly's online index shows articles by Nick Schou going back to 1998.
http://www.ocweekly....w-of-suspicion/
In a recent article there he says he started there in 1996.
OC Weekly's website says he has earned the following awards:
2013 - Southern California Journalism Awards/LA Press Club
"The King of Cool, Don Winslow"
2012 - Southern California Journalism Awards/LA Press Club
"Orange County Jail Deaths"
2011 - AAN AltWeekly Awards, published July 29, 2010
"Don't Start a Riot"
Kill the Messenger says Gary Webb told people close to him he was having problems or was suicidal and that he left a note and mailed letters to that effect. The author refers to interviews with all the people close to Gary Webb. He says he had a history of depression. According to the book he was functional until he lost his career because of the engineered backlash to his work. According to the book, the coroner also found that his death was suicide. Gary Webb was shot twice in the face, once in the cheek, but that apparently failed so he shot himself again and bled out.
Learn more about Gary Webb here:
http://www.democracy...iance_gary_webb
http://www.democracy...iance_gary_webb
Alexander Cockburn writes about Gary Webb's death in the Nation.
http://www.thenation...-better-he-got#
I think there is a documentary called Shadows of Liberty about Gary Webb. He also published a book called Into the Buzzsaw about journalists who pissed off the powers that be by actually doing their jobs. The book Whiteout by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair goes into Gary's story, among other things.
The criticisms of Gary's series don't seem to me to have any merit. They were clearly engineered by the CIA to take the heat off themselves. It was because he was such a fine journalist that they went after him. The CIA has infiltrated major media for years. One such project was called "Project Mockingbird." It's just shameful that other journalists and editors didn't see through that.
From Wikipedia:
[Bolding added by me. Some of the brackets contain comments by me but the others contain the numbers of footnotes or the need for citations. Those are by the author of the article.]
http://en.wikipedia....ion_Mockingbird
Operation Mockingbird
Operation Mockingbird was a secret campaign by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to influence media. Begun in the 1950s . . . The organization recruited leading American journalists into a network to help present the CIA's views, and funded some student and cultural organizations, and magazines as fronts. As it developed, it also worked to influence foreign media and political campaigns . . .
. . . in 1966 Ramparts magazine published an article revealing that the National Student Association was funded by the CIA. The United States Congress investigated, and published its report in 1976. Other accounts were also published. The media operation was first called Mockingbird in Deborah Davis's 1979 book, Katharine the Great: Katharine Graham and her Washington Post Empire.[1]
. . . [The CIA] recruited Philip Graham from The Washington Post to run the project [Mockingbird] within the industry. According to Deborah Davis in Katharine the Great; "By the early 1950s, Wisner 'owned' respected members of The New York Times, Newsweek, CBS and other communications vehicles."[3] . . .
After 1953 . . . Operation Mockingbird had a major influence over 25 newspapers and wire agencies. The usual methodology was placing reports developed from intelligence provided by the CIA to witting or unwitting reporters. Those reports would then be repeated or cited by the preceding reporters which in turn would then be cited throughout the media wire services. These networks were run by people with well-known liberal but pro-American big business and anti-Soviet views such as William Paley (CBS), Henry Luce (Time and Life Magazine), Arthur Hays Sulzberger (New York Times), Alfred Friendly (managing editor of the Washington Post), Jerry O'Leary (Washington Star), Hal Hendrix (Miami News), Barry Bingham, Sr. (Louisville Courier-Journal), James Copley (Copley News Services) and Joseph Harrison (Christian Science Monitor).[7]
. . . money was used to bribe journalists and publishers.
According to Alex Constantine (Mockingbird: The Subversion of the Free Press by the CIA), in the 1950s, "some 3,000 salaried and contract CIA employees were eventually engaged in propaganda efforts". [The CIA] was able to constrain newspapers from reporting about certain events, including the CIA plots to overthrow the governments of Iran (see: Operation Ajax) and Guatemala (see: Operation PBSUCCESS).[9]
Thomas Braden, head of the International Organizations Division (IOD), played an important role in Operation Mockingbird. Many years later he revealed his role in these events:
"If the director of CIA wanted to extend a present, say, to someone in Europe—a Labour leader—suppose he just thought, This man can use fifty thousand dollars, he's working well and doing a good job - he could hand it to him and never have to account to anybody... There was simply no limit to the money it could spend and no limit to the people it could hire and no limit to the activities it could decide were necessary to conduct the war—the secret war... It was a multinational. Maybe it was one of the first. Journalists were a target, labor unions a particular target. . . [10]
. . . Guatemala: Mockingbird was very active during the overthrow of President Jacobo Arbenz Guzmán in Guatemala during Operation PBSUCCESS. Dulles restrained certain journalists from traveling to Guatemala, including Sydney Gruson of the New York Times.[15] . . .
[A report produced by the Eisenhower administration was] highly critical of Mockingbird. . . . "what right have we to go barging around in other countries buying newspapers and handing money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that, or the other office."[16]
. . . in 1962, . . . According to Evan Thomas in his book, The Very Best Men (1995), . . . [Mockingbird] planted editorials about political candidates who were regarded as pro-CIA.
In 1964, Random House published Invisible Government by David Wise and Thomas Ross. The book exposed the role of the CIA in foreign policy. . . . The CIA considered buying up the entire printing of Invisible Government but this idea was rejected when Random House pointed out that if this happened they would have to print a second edition.[2]
John McCone, the new director of the CIA, tried to prevent Edward Yates from making a documentary on the CIA for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC). This attempt at censorship failed, and NBC broadcast this critical documentary.
At the end of 1966, [the CIA] learned that Ramparts, another CIA backed left-wing publication, [what?] had discovered that the CIA had been secretly funding the National Student Association and was considering publishing an account.[17] When the magazine advised the CIA it had "lost control of the information," and would likely be forced to publicize, FitzGerald ordered a plan to either neutralize the campaign and/or wind-down Mockingbird. [Sure they did.]
[The CIA] appointed Edgar Applewhite to organize a campaign against Ramparts. Applewhite later told Evan Thomas for his book, The Very Best Men: "I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. The people running Ramparts were vulnerable to blackmail. We had awful things in mind, some of which we carried off."[18]
Ramparts publishing the account in March 1967. The article, written by Sol Stern, was entitled NSA and the CIA.[citation needed] . . . [It detailed] funding of the literary journal Encounter.[10] Applewhite managed to control some of the account by steering references away from leftist organizations and toward most of the few conservative organizations backed by the CIA. Those organizations named in the article were not ones that could not be linked to Ramparts, itself a CIA proprietary organization. [I remember [i]Ramparts [/i]and find it hard to believe it had links to the CIA. Did someone alter this article to make it look crazy?]
In May 1967, Thomas Braden published "I'm Glad the CIA is 'Immoral'", in the Saturday Evening Post. He defended the activities of the International Organizations Division unit of the CIA. Braden said that the CIA had kept these activities secret from Congress. As he wrote: "In the early 1950s, when the Cold War was really hot, the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society's approving Medicare."[19]
. . . [the CIA] in 1972 was accused of interfering with the publication of a book, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy. [citation needed] The book was highly critical of the CIA's dealings with the drug traffic in Southeast Asia . . . [20]
Church Committee Investigations
Further details of Operation Mockingbird were revealed as a result of the Senator Frank Church investigations (Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities) in 1975. According to the Congress report published in 1976:
"The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets."
Church argued that misinforming the world cost American taxpayers an estimated $265 million a year.[21]
In February 1976, George H. W. Bush, the recently appointed Director of the CIA, announced a new policy: "Effective immediately, the CIA will not enter into any paid or contract relationship with any full-time or part-time news correspondent accredited by any U.S. news service, newspaper, periodical, radio or television network or station."
He added that the CIA would continue to "welcome" the voluntary, unpaid cooperation of journalists.[22]
http://en.wikipedia....ion_Mockingbird
Was the takedown of Gary Webb due to jealousy and laziness on the part of reporters and editors? Although here's plenty of those in the newspaper industry, I believe that this was a CIA operation, bought and paid for. They'd had people in place within the media to do their bidding since the fifties. They knowingly placed people at the three pillars of the newspaper industry; the New York Times, the Washington Post and the L.A. Times, as well as network news. I don't know if Gary Webb killed himself. I hope so. The timing was off for it to be murder, unless he was working on something threatening to some elements in the federal government and I haven't read anything about that. There is what seems to be a sympathetic account of his story by Nick Schou, who seems to have had access to people close to him. He reports that they all say he was troubled. There was the way be killed himself which seems unusual, although I'm not a coroner. Gary seems to have planned his death but shot himself in a place that would have been unreliable at best. He spent his whole life doing research. I wonder if the coroner's report was looked at and if the coroner was looked into. It would have been good to show this stuff in the book. Would have been good to offer more proof that Gary's family and friends said what they said, given the nature of this story.
I'm sorry that Gary Webb isn't here now and that I never met him. He will be remembered as an outstanding journalist and a man of great courage. There was no merit to the criticisms of his work, then or now. Those who took him down will be looked at forever as cowards who drove a good man to his death.
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To see more of what I've written about politics, go here:
http://www.longecity...cat-48-politics
http://www.longecity...at-7-commentary
Edited by Luminosity, 17 October 2014 - 06:59 AM.
