How
the Press & the CIA Killed Gary Webb's Career
Today's
Stories
December
16, 2004
Michael
Neumann
How We Became Barbarians
Merlin
Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Ralph Nader
Gabriel
Espinoza Gonzales
The Dubious Career of John Bolton
Christopher
Brauchli
Louis Freeh's New Gig: Usurer
Patrick
Cockburn
Allawi's Pre-Election Ploy: Putting "Chemical Ali"
on Trial
Mike
Whitney
Gearing Up for a Draft?
Walter
Brasch
Hillbilly Humvees and Rumsfeld's New Physics
Bill
Conroy
How Gary Webb Saved My Ass from the FBI
Website
of the Day
Saturday Memorial for Gary Webb
December
15, 2004
Robert
Fisk
Who Killed Baha Mousa?
Jennifer
Van Bergen
The Monster Under the Bed
Heather
Gray
Will the Real Christians Please Stand?: a Personal Testimony
Dave
Lindorff
The DNC, Albright and the Iraq Elections
Luis
Hernandez Navarro
To Die a Little: Migration and Coffee
in Mexico and Central America
Joshua
Frank
The Ohio Recount: an Exercise in "Dumbocracy"
Greg
Moses
Eighty-Sixing Civil Rights in Ohio?
George
Caffentzis
The Petroleum Commons
December
14, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
DNC Meddling in the Ukraine Elections
Larry
Birns / Seth DeLong
Haiti is Unraveling and No One is Saying
Anything
Richard
Thieme
My Last Talk with Gary Webb: "I Knew It Was the Truth and
That's What Kept Me Going"
Patrick
Cockburn
A Year After Saddam's Capture, Iraq
is Getting Worse
Chris
Floyd
Client State: Moral Values and Voluntary Servitude in Bush's
America
Akiva
Eldar
A One-time Hanukkah Miracle
Burbach
/ Cantor
The Legacy of Pinochet: Kissinger
and the Teflon Tyrant
December
13, 2004
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Gary Webb: a Great Reporter, Trashed
by the CIA's Claque
David
Phinney
"Contract Meal Disaster" for Iraqi Prisoners: Rancid
Food Sparked Abu Ghraib Riots
Paul
Craig Roberts
A Dose of Non-Delusional Reality
for Douglas Feith
M.
Junaid Alam
The War is the War Crime
Robert
Jensen
The US Has Lost the Iraq War...and That's a Good Thing
Richard
Oxman
Kafkaesque Lessons for the Left
Greg
Moses
Send No Messengers of Defeat
Douglas
Lummis
The Pentagon's Neurosis: Fallujah
Gulag
December
11 / 12, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Running an Empire on the Cheap
Ron
Jacobs
The Drugs of War: Getting High in the Green Zone?
Saul
Landau
Listening and Talking to God About
Invading Other Countries
Gary
Leupp
Bush's Capital
Sharon
Smith
The Horrible Toll on US Troops
Dave
Lindorff
Deja Vu All Over Again: 5,000 Desertions and Counting
Uri
Avnery
The Boss Has Gone Crazy
Jude
Wanniski
The Neo-Con Smear on Kofi Annan: What Food-for-Oil Scandal?
Heather
Gray
How the South Became Republican: an Interview with John Egerton
Patrick
Cockburn / Ken Sengupta
Fallujah: the Homecoming and the Homeless
John
Pilger
Return to Kosovo: Calling the Humanitarian Bombers to Account
Joshua
Frank
All the Rage: Mr. Solomon, Say You're Sorry
Ben
Tripp
O Canada!: the Truth About the Election of 2004
John
Stanton
God Speaks!
Laura
Nathan
Porn Stars are People, Too: a Talk with Christi Lake
Poets'
Basement
Capaccio, Davies, Louise, Ford and Albert
Website
of the Day
Fallujah Photos: Killed in Their Beds
December
10, 2004
Ralph
Nader
President Bush, Stop Destroying the
Mosques of Iraq
Greg
Moses
Whitewashing Voter Fraud
Nicole
Colson
Rebellion in the Ranks: Grunts Are Resisting Stop-Loss Orders
Frederick
B. Hudson
"They Still Got Those Dogs": A New Book Probes Old
Civil Rights Lessons
Patrick
Cockburn
Iraq's Insurgents Oppose the Occupation, Not the Elections
Kathy
Kelly
From Haiti to Iraq: Burying Water
December
9, 2004
Greg
Moses
Ask Not Who Bankrolled Fallujah
Joshua
Frank
Cobb and the Ohio Recount: Vote Fraud as Fundraiser!
Ralph
Nader
An Open Letter to Bush: It's Time to
Disclose the Real Casualty Figures
Lee
Sustar
Bhopal: the Making of a Disaster
Tom
Barry
Restrictionist Resurgence
Mickey
Z.
Sander Hicks and the 9/11 Truth Movement
Christopher
Brauchli
Bush in the Bubble
Mark
Donham
Why are House Democrats Trying to
Deny Cynthia McKinney Seniority?
Gary
Corseri
On the Anniversary of John Lennon's Death, 2012
Paul
de Rooij
The Voices of Sharon's Little Helpers
December
8, 2004
Ralph
Nader
Will the Real Michael Moore Ever Re-Emerge?
Ann
Harrison
The Ohio Recount: Reluctant Officials
and Few Rules
Paul
Craig Roberts
War Crime
Dave
Lindorff
They've Got a Secret: Inside the $40 Billion Black Budget for
Spying
Patrick
Cockburn / Andrew Buncombe
CIA Warning on Iraq: Fallujah Did Not Break the Back of the Insurgency
Col.
Dan Smith
Rules of Engagement in Iraq
Emily
Alves / Michael Johnson
Paradise Lost: Corruption and Clientelism in Costa Rica
Richard
Oxman
The Dylan Bob Wouldn't Mention: Up With Dylan Thomas
Ron
Jacobs
In Fallujah, Freedom Isn't Free
December
7, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Running Battles in Baghdad
Behrooz
Ghamari
Lost Muslim Voices of Dissent
Dave
Lindorff
American Fantasies: Psst! Hey Buddy,
Did You Hear How Well the War's Going?
Joshua
Frank
Dean at the DNC?
Richard
Oxman
Down with Dylan: the Insufferable Interview
Ray
McGovern
All Mosquitoes, No Swamp
John
Chuckman
The Invasion of Hallifax: The Imperial Wizard Visits Canada
James
Petras
Latin America: the Empire Changes Gears
Website
of the Day
ToxMap: Who's Poisoning You
December
6, 2004
Paul
Craig Roberts
Paranoia and Pre-emption: Is the
Bush Administration Certifiable?
December
4 / 6, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
Politicize the CIA? You've Got to
be Kidding
Joe
Bageant
Dining with the Rhinos
Alan
Maass
Reporting from the Ground in Iraq: an Interview with Patrick
Cockburn
Brian
Cloughley
Democracy, Bush-style, in the Gulf
Laura
Carlsen
Latin America Shifts Left
Lenni
Brenner
Jefferson, Madison, Bush and Religion
Anna
Ioakimedes
Brazil's Haitian Mission: Doing God's Work or Washington's?
Uri
Avnery
Widow of Opportunity?
Fred
Gardner
Supreme Court Hears Medical Pot Case
Dave
Zirin
Steroids to Heaven
Jackie
Corr
Mining Camp Blues: the Red State Variation
Don
Fitz
Will Greens Abandon IRV?
Lucy
Herschel
"Art can be a Weapon of the Oppressed": an Interview
with Artist Anthony Papa
Richard
Oxman
No Angels in America: Bashing the Gay Play
Ron
Jacobs
Holiday Greeting Card
Poets'
Basement
Collins, Albert, LaMorticella
December
3, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
Lie Then Escalate
Ben
Tripp
Fun With Boycotts: How to Shop in a
Time of Crisis
Joe
Allen
Murder in El Salvador: the Assassination of Teamster Organizer
Gilberto Soto
Matthew
B. Riley
Human Rights Court Fails Lori Berenson
Meir
Shalev
In the End, It is the Violin that Wins
Bob
Wing
The White Elephant in the Room: Race and Election 2004
Christopher
Brauchli
When McCain Bit His Tongue
Sasan
Fayazmanesh
The EU, the US, Israel and Iran
December
2, 2004
Tito
Tricot
No Justice in Chile: I'm a Torture
Survivor in a Country Where Torturers Still Run Free
Behzad
Yaghmaian
The Murder of Theo Van Gogh and Muslim Migration
Dr.
Susan Block
Lana and Me: Meetings with Remarkable Apes
Frank
/ Chowkwanyun
Liberalism and Its Bounds
Lee
Sustar
Standoff in Ukraine: the Bad v. the Corrupt
Patrick
Cockburn
Another Grim Record in Iraq
Mark
Engler
Seattle at Five
Michael
Donnelly
Something Stinks in South Bend: the Firing of Tyrone Willingham
Nate
Collins
The Bay Area Mall on an Ohlone Burial Grounds
Saul
Landau
The Assassination of Danilo Anderson
December
1, 2004
Phillip
Cryan
Associated with Whom? Rightist Bias
in Wire Coverage of Colombia
Dave
Zirin
What's the Matter with "Leon"?:
Budweiser's Racist Commercial
Ghali
Hassan
Iraq's Health Care Under the Occupation:
200 Children Die Every Day
Donna
J. Volatile
Beware Western Nations Threatening "Democracy"
Patrick
Cockburn
How Saddam Tried to Arm the Insurgency
Nick
Meo
Chemical War Over Afghanistan
Mike
Ferner
The Battle of Toledo
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Shame and Determination on Global AIDS Day: 40 Million and Rising
Kathy
Kelly
Looking the Other Way: the Real Crimes
of the UN in Iraq
November
30, 2004
Jennifer
Van Bergen
The Veil of Secrecy
Toni
Nelson Herrera
Meeting Kurtz: When Art is a Crime
Paul
Craig Roberts
The Bush Delusions: Successful at Incompetence
Patrick
Cockburn
The Insurgency Strikes Back: There Are No Safe Havens in Iraq
Chuck
Munson
WTO Protests Five Years Later: Seattle Weekly Trashes Anti-Globalization
Movement
Adam
Williams
Citizenship Sold: Back to Business in Indiana
Gregory
Elich
A Dangerous Turn in the US Plans for
North Korea
Website
of the Day
Read Lynne Cheney's Lesbian Novel Online!
November
29, 2004
Dave
Lindorff
Blowback in Ukraine: The Hand of
the CIA?
Omar
Barghouti
"The Pianist" of Palestine:
Roadblock Concerto at Gunpoint
Mike
Whitney
The US Media and Fallujah: How to
Market a Siege
Uri
Avnery
The Abu Mazen Style: "Give Me
Some Credit!"
Matt
Vidal
Globalization and Economic Inequality: a Look at the Numbers
Patrick
Cockburn
An Interview with Iraq's Foreign
Minister
Alan
Farago
Sex Change and Salvation: God, Girly Men and Endocrine Disrupters
Justin
Huggler
Bhopal 20 Years Later
Antony
Loewenstein
How Australia Reported Arafat's Death and Legacy
Gary
Leupp
Ukraine: Poll Results Aren't the Real
Issue
Website
of the Day
Mosul: Images from a Kill Zone
November
27 / 28, 2004
Peter
Linebaugh
Torture & Neo-Liberalism with
Sycorax in Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
What Happened to O'Reilly's Loofa?
Fred
Gardner
Ashcroft v. Raich: Medical Marijuana and the Supreme Court
Kathy
Kelly
What We Can Control
Diane
Christian
The Other Cheek: "Empire Doesn't Analyze, It Acts"
Gary
Leupp
One More Neocon Target: South (Yes, South) Korea
Lenni
Brenner
Equality and Rights of Return: Jefferson Instructs the New York
Times
Ron
Jacobs
Death Squads and Iraq's Elections: the Mysterious Murders of
the AMS Clerics
Joshua
Frank
An Interview with Kevin Zeese on Nader, Kerry and the ABB Crowd
Toni
Solo
The Murder of Danilo Anderson
Saul
Landau
Fallujah, the 21st Century Guernica
JoAnn
Wypijewski
Matthew Shepard Case 6 Years Later: Why Hate Crimes Laws are
No Cure for Homophobia
Justin
Taylor
Empire's Lawless Opportunities
Amos
Harel
The Case of Captain R.
Walter
A. Davis
Tabloid Justice
Stephen
Hendricks
God's Kind of Men
Poets'
Basement
Albert, LaMorticella and Ford
November
26, 2004
Peter
Feng
Gavin Newsom: Man or Machine?
Greg
Moses
It's the White Vote, Stupid
Liaquat
Ali Khan
The Devil's Work: Bush's Minority Appointments
Michael
Mandel / Gail Davidson
Why Bush Should Be Banned from Canada: a Memo to the Ministry
of Immigration
Dave
Lindorff
Nation of Sheep, Turkey of an Election: Urkrainians Show the
Way
Gary
Corseri
When Black Friday Comes...
Paul
Craig Roberts
Whatever Happened to Conservatives?
Website
of the Day
Iraq Pipeline Watch
November
25, 2004
Willliam
Loren Katz
Giving Thanks to Whom?: "Thanks
to God We Sent 600 Heathen Souls to Hell Today"
Mitchel
Cohen
Why I Hate Thanksgiving
Mike
Ferner
An Uncommon Mom
November
24, 2004
Gila
Svirsky
License to Kill: the Example of Violence
is Set by the State
Winslow
T. Wheeler
The
Other Mess in Congress
Christopher
Brauchli
The Company He Keeps: the Syndicate of Tom Delay
Dave
Lindorff
Double Standards on Exit Polls: Hypocrisy Sans Irony
Ron
Jacobs
The Occupation of Iraq is the Root of t he Problem
Ken
Sengupta
Witnesses: War Crimes in Fallujah
Diana
Barahona
The Final Holocaust or Why I Voted for Ralph Nader
John
L. Hess
Safire the Shameless
Jason
Leopold
Did Harvard Hire (Another) War Criminal?
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Mark of McCain: the Senator Most Likely to Start a Nuclear
War
Map
of the Day
Now and Then: 2004 v. 1860
November
23, 2004
Forrest
Hylton
Bush and Uribe at the Beach
November
22, 2004
Dave
Zirin
Fight Night in the NBA: Selective Outrage
in Detroit
Paul
Craig Roberts
On to Iran: We Won't Get Fooled Again?
Michael
Mandel / Gail Davidson
Why Bush Should be Banned from Canada
Kathie
Helmkamp
Our Son: a Marine Who Won't Kill
Ken
Sengupta
The Triangle of Death: "This is Now the Most Dangerous Place
in Iraq"
Mike
Whitney
Greenspan's Hammer
Roger
Burbach
Why They Hate Bush in Chile
Website
of the Day
Fed Up with Government Lies and Corporate Spin?
November
20 / 21, 2004
Alexander
Cockburn
The Poisoned Chalice
Todd
May
Religion, the Election and the Politics of Fear
Abbas
Ahmed Ibrahim
The Horrors of Fallujah: a First-Hand Account
Kevin
Zeese
Mishandling Nader
Landau
/ Hassen
After Arafat
Tom
Barry
The Vulcans Consolidate Power: The Rise of Stephen Hadley
Fred
Gardner
Pot Shots: Ask Dr. Todd
Justin
E.H. Smith
Triumph of the Will: the Sequel
Carl
Estabrook
Where We Are Now
Gary
Leupp
Imperial History-Making vs. Reality-Based Thought: a Dialogue
Dave
Lindorff
Apocalypse Soon
Jenna
Michelle Liut
Plans Colombia and Patriota: Wanton Wastes of Money, Manpower
and Lives
Mickey
Z.
The Granma Moses of Radical Writing: an Interview with William
Blum
Greg
Moses
The Same Old Struggle Against Imperial America
Sharon
Smith
Abortion Rights and the Election: What Now?
Ron
Jacobs
Sandwiches and Car Bombs
Ben
Tripp
Raising d'Etre: Finding Money in Hollywood These Days
Richard
Oxman
Basketbrawl Two Pointer: Iraq Rules!
Gilad
Atzmon
Politics and Jazz
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Albert, Ford, & Anon.
Website
of the Day
Voice of the Forest
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
December 17, 2004
CounterAttack
How
the Press and the CIA Killed Gary Webb's Career
By
ALEXANDER COCKBURN
and JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
[What follows
is an extended excerpt from Chapter Two of our book Whiteout:
the CIA, Drugs and the Press. AC / JSC]
The attack on Gary Webb and his series
in the San Jose Mercury News remains one of the most venomous
and factually inane assaults on a professional journalist's competence
in living memory. In the mainstream press he found virtually
no defenders, and those who dared stand up for him themselves
became the object of virulent abuse and misrepresentation. L.
J. O'Neale, the prosecutor for the Justice Department who was
Danilo Blandón's patron and Rick Ross's prosecutor, initially
formulated the polemical program against him. When one looks
back on the assault in the calm of hindsight, what is astounding
is the way Webb's foes in the press mechanically reiterated those
attacks.
There was a disturbing racist
thread underlying the attacks on Webb's series, and on those
who took his findings seriously. It's clear, looking through
the onslaughts on Webb in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington
Post, and the New York Times, that the reaction in
black communities to the series was extremely disturbing to elite
opinion. This was an eruption of outrage, an insurgency not just
of very poor people in South Central and kindred areas, but of
almost all blacks and many whites as well. In the counterattacks,
one gets the sense that a kind of pacification program was in
progress. Karen De Young, an assistant editor at the Washington
Post, evoked just such an impulse when Alicia Shepard of
the American Journalism Review interviewed her. "I
looked at [the Mercury News series] when it initially
came out and decided it was something we needed to follow up
on. When it became an issue in the black community and on talk
shows, that seemed to be a different phenomenon." Remember
too that the O. J. Simpson jury decision had also been deeply
disturbing to white opinion. In that case, blacks had rallied
around a man most whites believed to be a vicious killer, and
there was a "white opinion riot" in response. Now blacks
were mustering in support of a story charging that their profoundest
suspicions of white malfeasance were true. So in the counterattack
there were constant, patronizing references to "black paranoia,"
decorously salted with the occasional concession that there was
evidence from the past to support the notion that such paranoia
might have some sound foundation.
Another factor lent a particular
edge to the onslaughts. This was the first occasion on which
the established press had to face the changing circumstances
of the news business, in terms of registering mass opinion and
allowing popular access. Webb's series coincided with the coming
of age of the Internet. The Miami Herald, another Knight-Ridder
paper in the same corporate family as the Mercury News,
had been forced to change editorial course in the mid-1980s by
the vociferous, highly conservative Cuban American presence in
Miami. The Herald chose not to reprint Webb's series.
However, this didn't prevent anyone in south Florida from finding
the entire series on the Internet, along with all the supporting
documents.
The word "pacification"
is not inappropriate to describe the responses to Webb's story.
Back in the 1980s, allegations about Contra drug running, also
backed by documentary evidence, could be ignored with impunity.
Given the Internet and black radio reaction, in the mid-1990s
this was no longer possible, and the established organs of public
opinion had to launch the fiercest of attacks on Webb and on
his employer. This was a campaign of extermination: the aim was
to destroy Webb and to force the Mercury News into backing
away from the story's central premise. At the same time, these
media manipulators attempted to minimize the impact of Webb'
s story on the black community.
Another important point in
the politics of this campaign is that Webb's fiercest assailants
were not on the right. They were mainstream liberals, such as
Walter Pincus and Richard Cohen of the Washington Post
and David Corn of the Nation, There has always been a
certain conservative suspicion of the CIA, even if conservatives
outside the libertarian wing heartily applaud the
Agency's imperial role. The CIA's most effective friends have
always been the liberal center, on the editorial pages of the
Washington Post and the New York Times and in the
endorsement of a person like the Washington Post's president,
Katharine Graham. In 1988 Graham had told CIA recruits, "We
live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the
general public does not need to know, and shouldn't. I believe
democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate
steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether
to print what it knows."
By mid-September of 1996 the
energy waves created by Webb's series were approaching critical
mass and beginning to become an unavoidable part of the national
news agenda. For example, NBC Dateline, a prime-time news
show, had shot interviews with Webb and Rick Ross and had sent
a team down to Nicaragua, where they filmed an interview with
Norwin Meneses and other figures in the saga. Webb tells of a
conversation with one of the Dateline producers, who asked
him, "Why hasn't this shit been on TV before?" "You
tell me," Webb answered. "You're the TV man."
A couple of weeks after this
exchange, the program was telling Webb that it didn't look as
though they would be going forward with the story after all.
In the intervening weeks, the counterattack had been launched,
and throughout the networks the mood had abruptly shifted. On
November 15, NBC's Andrea Mitchell (partner of Federal Reserve
chairman Alan Greenspan, about as snugly ensconced a member of
the Washington elite as you could hope to find) was saying on NBC News in Depth
that Webb's story "was a conspiracy theory" that had
been "spread by talk radio."
The storm clouds began to gather
with the CNN-brokered exchange between Webb and Ron Kessler.
Kessler had had his own dealings with the Agency. In 1992 he
had published Inside the CIA, a highly anecdotal and relatively
sympathetic book about the Agency, entirely devoid of the sharp
critical edge that had characterized Kessler's The FBI.
A couple of CIA memos written in 1991 and 1992 record the Agency's
view of the experience of working with Kessler and other reporters.
The 1991 CIA note discusses
Kessler's request for information and brags that a close relationship
had been formed with Kessler, "which helped turn some 'intelligence
failure' stories into 'intelligence success' stories." Of
course this could have been merely self-serving fluff by an Agency
officer, but it is certainly true that Kessler was far from hard
on the Agency. That same CIA memo goes on to explain that the
Agency maintains "relationships with reporters from every
major wire service, newspaper, news weekly and TV network."
The memo continues, "In many instances we have persuaded
reporters to postpone, change, hold or even scrap stories that
could have adversely affected national security interests or
jeopardized sources or methods."
The next attack on Webb came
from another long-time friend of the Agency, Arnaud de Borchgrave.
De Borchgrave had worked for News- week as a columnist
for many years and made no secret of the fact that he regarded
many of his colleagues as KGB dupes. He himself boasted of intimate
relations with French, British and US intelligence agencies and
was violently right-wing in his views. In recent years he has
written for the sprightly Washington Times, a conservative
paper owned by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.
The thrust of de Borchgrave's
attack, which appeared in the Washington Times on September
24, 1996, was that Webb's basic thesis was wrong, because the
Contras had been rolling in CIA money. Like almost all other
critics, de Borchgrave made no effort to deal with the plentiful
documents, such as federal grand jury transcripts, that Webb
had secured and that were available on the Mercury News
website. Indeed, some of the most experienced reporters in Washington
displayed, amid their criticisms, a marked aversion to studying
such source documents. De Borchgrave did remark that when all
the investigations were done, the most that would emerge would
be that a couple of CIA officers might have been lining their
own pockets.
That same September 24, 1996,
a more insidious assault came in the form of an interview of
Webb by Christopher Matthews on the CNBC cable station. There
are some ironies here. Matthews had once worked for Speaker of
the House Tip O'Neill. O'Neill had been sympathetic to the amendment
against Contra funding offered by his Massachusetts colleague,
Edward Boland. On the other hand, O'Neill had swiftly reacted
to a firestorm of outrage about cocaine after the death of the
Celtics' draftee Len Bias, a star basketball player at the University
of Maryland. At that time, he rushed through the House some appalling
"War on Drugs" legislation whose dire effects are still
with us today.
Matthews left O'Neill's office
with a carefully calculated career plan to market himself as
a syndicated columnist and telepundit. Positioning himself as
a right-of-center liberal, Matthews habitually eschewed fact
for opinion, and is regarded by many op-ed editors as a self-serving
blowhard with an exceptionally keen eye for the main chance.
Clearly sensing where the wind was blowing, Matthews used his
show to launch a fierce attack on Webb. First, he badgered the
reporter for supposedly producing no evidence of "the direct
involvement of American CIA officers." "Who said anything
about American CIA agents?" Webb responded. "That's
the most ethnocentric viewpoint I've ever seen in my life. The
CIA used foreign nationals all the time. In this operation they
were using Nicaraguan exiles."
Matthews had clearly prepped
himself with de Borchgrave's article that morning. His next challenge
to Webb was on whether or not the Contras needed drug money.
Matthews's research assistants had prepared a timeline purporting
to show that the Contras were flush with cash during the period
when Webb's stories said they were desperate for money from any
source.
But Webb, who had lived the
chronology for eighteen months, stood his ground. He patiently
expounded to Matthews's audience how Meneses and Blandón's
drugs-for-guns operation was at its peak during the period when
Congress had first restricted, then later totally cut off US
funding to the Contra army based in Honduras. Webb told Matthews,
"When the CIA funding was restored, all these guys got busted."
After the interview, Webb says Matthews stormed off the set,
berating his staff, "This is outrageous. I've been sabotaged."
The tempo now began to pick
up. On October 1, Webb got a call in San Diego from Howard Kurtz,
the Washington Post media reporter. "Kurtz called
me," Webb remembers, "and after a few innocuous questions
I thought that was that." It wasn't. Kurtz's critique came
out on October 2 and became a paradigm for many of the assaults
that followed. The method was simplicity itself: a series of
straw men swiftly raised up, and as swiftly demolished. Kurtz
opened by describing how blacks, liberal politicians and "some"
journalists "have been trumpeting a Mercury News
story that they say links the CIA to drug trafficking in the
United States." Kurtz told how Webb's story had become "a
hot topic," through the unreliable mediums of the Internet
and black talk radio. "There's just one problem," Kurtz
went on. "The series doesn't actually say the CIA knew about
the drug trafficking." To buttress this claim, Kurtz then
wrote that Webb had "admitted" as much in their brief
chat with the statement, "We'd never pretended otherwise.
This doesn't prove the CIA targeted black people. It doesn't
say this was ordered by the CIA. Essentially, our trail stopped
at the door of the CIA. They wouldn't return my phone calls."
What Webb had done in the series
was show in great detail how a Contra funding crisis had engendered
enormous sales of crack in South Central, how the wholesalers
of that cocaine were protected from prosecution until the funding
crisis ended, and how these same wholesalers were never locked
away in prison, but were hired as informants by federal prosecutors.
It could be argued that Webb's case is often circumstantial,
but prosecutions on this same amount of circumstantial evidence
have seen people put away on life sentences. Webb was telling
the truth on another point as well: the CIA did not return his
phone calls. And unlike Kurtz's colleagues at the Washington
Post or New York Times reporter Tim Golden, who offered
twenty-four off-the-record interviews in his attack, Webb refused
to run quotes from officials without attribution. In fact, Webb
did have a CIA source. "He told me," Webb remembers,
"he knew who these guys were and he knew they were cocaine
dealers. But he wouldn't go on the record so I didn't use his
stuff in the story. I mean, one of the criticisms is we didn't
include CIA comments in [the] story. And the reason we didn't
is because they wouldn't return my phone calls and they denied
my Freedom of Information Act requests."
But suppose the CIA had returned
Webb's calls? What would a spokesperson have said, other than
that Webb's allegations were outrageous and untrue? The CIA is
a government entity pledged to secrecy about its activities.
On scores of occasions, it has remained deceptive when under
subpoena before a government committee. Why should the Agency
be expected to answer frankly a bothersome question from a reporter?
Yet it became a fetish for Webb's assailants to repeat, time
after time, that the CIA denied his charges and that he had never
given this denial as the Agency's point of view.
The CIA is not a kindergarten.
The Agency has been responsible for many horrible deeds, including
killings. Yet journalists kept treating it as though it was some
above-board body, like the US Supreme Court. Many of the attackers
assumed that Webb had been somehow derelict in not unearthing
a signed order from William Casey mandating Agency officers to
instruct Enrique Bermúdez to arrange with Norwin Meneses
and Danilo Blandón to sell "x kilos of cocaine."
This is an old tactic, known as "the hunt for the smoking
gun." But of course, such a direct order would never be
found by a journalist. Even when there is a clearly smoking gun,
like the references to cocaine paste in Oliver North's notebooks,
the gun rarely shows up in the news stories. North's notebooks
were released to the public in the early 1990s. There for all
to see was an entry on July 9, 1984, describing a conversation
with CIA man Dewey Clarridge: "Wanted aircraft to go to
Bolivia to pick up paste." Another entry on the same day
stated, "Want aircraft to pick up 1,500 kilos."
"In Bolivia they have
only one kind of paste," says former DEA agent Michael Levine,
who spent more than a decade tracking down drug smugglers in
Mexico, Southeast Asia and Bolivia. "That's cocaine paste.
We have a guy working for the NSC talking to a CIA agent about
a phone call to Adolfo Calero. In this phone call they discuss
picking up cocaine paste from Bolivia and wanting an aircraft
to pick up 1,500 kilos." None of Webb's attackers mentioned
these diary entries.
A sort of manic literalism
permeated the attacks modeled on Kurtz's chop job. For instance,
critics repeatedly returned to Webb's implied accusation that
the CIA had targeted blacks. As we have noted, Webb didn't actually
say this, but merely described the sequence which had led to
blacks being targeted by the wholesaler. However, we shall see
that there have been many instances where the CIA, along with
other government bodies, has targeted blacks quite explicitly
in testing the toxicity of disease organisms, or the effects
of radiation and mind-altering drugs. Yet Webb's critics never
went anywhere near the well-established details of such targeting.
Instead, they relied on talk about "black paranoia,"
which liberals kindly suggested could be traced to the black
historical experience, and which conservatives more brusquely
identified as "black irrationality."
Kurtz lost no time in going
after Webb's journalistic ethics and denouncing the Mercury
News for exploitative marketing of the series. As an arbiter
of journalistic morals, Kurtz castigated Webb for referring to
the Contras as "the CIA's army," suggesting that Webb
used this phrase merely to implicate the Agency. This charge
recurs endlessly in the onslaughts on Webb, and it is by far
the silliest. One fact is agreed upon by everyone except a few
berserk Maoists-turned-Reaganites, like Robert Leiken of Harvard.
That fact is that the Contras were indeed the CIA's army, and
that they had been recruited, trained and funded under the Agency's
supervision. It's true that in the biggest raids of all
the mining of the Nicaraguan harbors and the raids on the Nicaraguan
oil refineries the Agency used its own men, not trusting
its proxies. But for a decade the main Contra force was indeed
the CIA's army, and followed its orders obediently.
In attacks on reporters who
have overstepped the bounds of political good taste, the assailants
will often make an effort to drive a wedge between the reporter
and the institution for which the reporter works. For example,
when Ray Bonner, working in Central America for the New York
Times, sent a dispatch saying the unsayable that US
personnel had been present at a torture session the
Wall Street Journal and politicians in Washington attacked
the Times as irresponsible for running such a report.
The Times did not stand behind Bonner, and allowed his
professional credentials to be successfully challenged.
The fissure between Webb and
his paper opened when Kurtz elicited a statement from Jerry Ceppos,
executive editor of the Mercury News, that he was "disturbed
that so many people have leaped to the conclusion that the CIA
was involved." This apologetic note from Ceppos was not
lost on Webb's attackers, who successfully worked to widen the
gap between reporter and editor.
Another time-hallowed technique
in such demolition jobs is to charge that this is all "old
news" as opposed to that other derided commodity,
"ill-founded speculation." Kurtz used the "old
news" ploy when he wrote, "The fact that Nicaraguan
rebels were involved in drug trafficking has been known for a
decade. " Kurtz should have felt some sense of shame in
writing these lines, since his own paper had sedulously avoided
acquainting its readers with this fact. Kurtz claimed, ludicrously,
that "the Reagan Administration acknowledged as much in
the 1980s, but subsequent investigations failed to prove that
the CIA condoned or even knew about it." This odd sentence
raised some intriguing questions. When had the Reagan administration
"acknowledged as much"? And if the Reagan administration
knew, how could the CIA have remained in ignorance? Recall that
in the 1980s, the Reagan administration was referring to the
Contras as the "moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers,"
and accusing the Sandinistas of being drug runners.
Kurtz also slashed at Webb
personally, stating that he "appeared conscious of making
the news." As illustration, Kurtz quoted a letter that Webb
had written to Rick Ross in July 1996 about the timing of the
series. Webb told Ross that it would probably be run around the
time of his sentencing, in order to "generate as much public
interest as possible." As Webb candidly told Ross, this
was the way the news business worked. So indeed it does, at the
Washington Post far more than at the Mercury News,
as anyone following the Post's promotion of Bob Woodward's
books will acknowledge. But Webb is somehow painted as guilty
of self-inflation for telling Ross a journalistic fact of life.
On Friday, October 4, the Washington
Post went to town on Webb and on the Mercury News,
The onslaught carried no less than 5,000 words in five articles.
The front page featured a lead article by Roberto Suro and Walter
Pincus, headlined "CIA and Crack: Evidence Is Lacking of
Contra-Tied Plot." Also on the front page was a piece by
Michael Fletcher on black paranoia. The A section carried another
piece on an inside page, a profile of Norwin Meneses by Douglas
Farah. A brief sidebar by Walter Pincus was titled, "A Long
History of Drug Allegations," compressing the entire history
of the CIA's involvement with drug production in Southeast Asia
a saga that Al McCoy took 634 pages to chart into
300 words. Finally, the front page of the Post's Style
section that Friday morning contained an article by Donna Britt
headlined, "Finding the Truest Truth." Britt's topic
was how blacks tell stories to each other and screw things up
in the process.
Connections between Walter
Pincus and the intelligence sector are long-standing and well-known.
From 1955 to 1957, he worked for US Army Counter-Intelligence
in Washington, D.C. Pincus himself is a useful source about his
first connections with the CIA. In 1968, when the stories about
the CIA's penetration of the National Student Association had
been broken by the radical magazine Ramparts, Pincus wrote
a rather solemn expose of himself in the Washington Post.
In a confessional style, he reported how the Agency had sponsored
three trips for him, starting in 1960. He had gone to conferences
in Vienna, Accra and New Delhi, acting as a CIA observer. It
was clearly an apprenticeship in which as he well knew
Pincus was being assessed as officer material. He evidently
made a good impression, because the CIA asked him to do additional
work. Pincus says he declined, though it would be hard to discern
from his reporting that he was not, at the least, an Agency asset.
The Washington Times describes Pincus as a person "who
some in the Agency refer to as 'the CIA's house reporter.'"
Since Webb's narrative revolved
around the central figures of Blandón and Meneses, Pincus
and Suro understandably focused on the Nicaraguans, claiming
that they were never important players in Contra circles. To
buttress this view, the Post writers hauled out the somewhat
dubious assertions of Adolfo Calero. As with other CIA denials,
one enters a certain zone of unreality here. Journalists were
using as a supposedly reliable source someone with a strong motivation
to deny that his organization had anything to do with the cocaine
trafficking of which it was accused. Pincus and Suro solemnly
cited Calero as saying that when he met with Meneses and Blandón,
"We had no crystal ball to know who they were or what they
were doing." Calero's view was emphasized as reliable, whereas
Blandón and Meneses were held to be exaggerating their
status in the FDN.
Thus, we have Webb, based on
Blandón's sworn testimony as a government witness before
a federal grand jury, reporting that FDN leader Colonel Enrique
Bermúdez had bestowed on Meneses the title of head of
intelligence and security for the FDN in California. On the other
hand, we have the self-interested denials to Pincus and Suro
of a man who has been denounced to the FBI as "a pathological
liar" by a former professor at California State University,
Hayward, Dennis Ainsworth.
Just as Kurtz had done, Pincus
and Suro homed in on the charge that Webb had behaved unethically.
This time the charge was suggesting certain questions that Ross's
lawyer, Alan Fenster, could ask Blandón. Webb' s retort
has always been that it would be hard to imagine a better venue
for reliable responses than a courtroom with the witness under
oath.
But how did all the Washington
Post writers come to focus in so knowledgeably on this particular
courtroom scene?
Kurtz never mentions his name,
and Pincus and Suro refer to him only in passing, but Assistant
US District Attorney L. J. O'Neale was himself being questioned
by Los Angeles Sheriff's Department investigators on November
19, 1996. The department's transcript of the interview shows
O'Neale reveling in his top-secret security clearance with the
CIA, and saying that "his personal feelings were that Mr.
Webb had become an active part of Ricky Ross's defense team.
He said that it was his personal opinion that Webb's involvement
was on the verge of complicity." While he was speaking,
O'Neale was searching for a document. As the investigators put
it in their report, "In our presence he called Howard Kurtz,
the author of the first Washington Post article, but nobody
answered." Thereupon, also in their presence, he talked
to Walter Pincus.
This hint of pre-existing relations
between the Washington Post and the federal prosecutor
suggests that O'Neale had rather more input into the Post's
attacks on Webb than the passing mention of his name might suggest.
And indeed, a comparison between O'Neale's court filings and
the piece by Pincus and Suro shows that the Washington Post
duo faithfully followed the line of O'Neale's attack. Once again,
motive is important. O'Neale had every reason to try to subvert
a reporter who had described in great detail how the US District
Attorney had become the patron and handler of Danilo Blandón.
Webb had described how O'Neale had saved Blandón from
a life term in prison, found him a job as a government agent
and used him as his chief witness in a series of trials. O'Neale
had an enormous stake in discrediting Webb.
O'Neale's claim, reiterated
by Pincus and Suro, is that Blandón mainly engaged in
sending cocaine profits to the Contras in late 1981 and 1982,
before hooking up with Rick Ross. Furthermore, the amount of
cocaine sold by Blandón was a mere fraction of the national
market for the drug, and thus could not have played a decisive
role in sparking a crack plague in Los Angeles. In other words,
according to the O'Neale line in the Post, Blandón
had sold only a relatively insignificant amount of cocaine in
1981 and 1982 (later the magical figure $50,000 worth became
holy writ among Webb's critics). His association with Ross had
begun after Blandón had given up his charitable dispensations
to the Contras, and thus was a purely criminal enterprise with
no political ramifications. Therefore, even by implication, there
could be no connection between the CIA and the rise of crack.
O'Neale had reversed the position
he had taken in the days when he was prosecuting Blandón
and calling him "the largest Nicaraguan cocaine dealer in
the United States." Now he was claiming that Blandón's
total sales of cocaine amounted to only 5 tons, and thus he could
not be held accountable for the rise of crack. This specific
argument was seized gratefully by Pincus and Suro. "Law
enforcement estimates," Pincus and Suro wrote, "say
Blandón handled a total of only about five tons of cocaine
during a decade-long career."
Imagine if the Washington
Post had been dealing with a claim by Mayor Marion Barry
that during his mayoral terms "only" about 10,000 pounds
of crack had been handled by traffickers in the blocks surrounding
his office!
Webb was attacked for claiming,
in the opening lines of his series, that "millions"
had been funneled back to the Contras. In his statements to the
Los Angeles Sheriff's Department investigators, O'Neale said,
" Blandón dealt with a total of 40 kilos of cocaine
from January to December 1982. The profits of the sales were
used to purchase weapons and equipment for the Contras."
O'Neale was trying to narrow the window of "political"
cocaine sales. However, during that time Blandón was selling
cocaine worth over $2 million in only a fraction of the
period that Webb identified as the time the cocaine profits were
being remitted to Honduras.
The degree of enmity directed
toward Webb can be gauged not only by O'Neale's diligent briefings
of Webb's antagonists, but also by the raid on the office of
Gary Webb's literary agent, Jody Hotchkiss of the Sterling Lord
Agency, by agents of the Department of Justice and the DEA. The
government men came brandishing subpoenas for copies of all correspondence
between the Sterling Lord Agency, Rick Ross, Ross's lawyer Alan
Fenster, and Webb. The DEA justified the search on the grounds
that it wanted to see if Ross had any assets it could seize to
pay his hefty fines. But Webb reckons "they were really
looking for some sort of business deal between me and Ross. They
wanted to discredit me as a reporter by saying he's making deals
with drug dealers." The raid produced no evidence of any
such deal, because there was none.
Cheek by jowl with Pincus and
Suro on the Washington Post's front page that October
4 was Fletcher's essay on the sociology of black paranoia. Blacks,
Fletcher claimed, cling to beliefs regardless of "the shortage
of factual substantiation" and of "denials by government
officials." Fletcher duly stated some pieties about the
"bitter" history of American blacks. Then he bundled
together some supposed conspiracies (that the government deliberately
infected blacks with the AIDS virus, that Church's fried chicken
and Snapple drinks had been laced with chemicals designed to
sterilize black men) and implied that allegations about the CIA
and cocaine trafficking were of the same order. It is true, Fletcher
conceded, that blacks had reasons to be paranoid. "Many
southern police departments," he wrote delicately, "were
suspected of having ties to the Ku Klux Klan." He mentioned
in passing the FBI snooping on Martin Luther King Jr. and the
sting operation on Washington, D.C.'s Mayor Marion Barry. He
also touched on the syphilis experiments conducted by the government
on blacks in Tuskegee, Alabama. "The history of victimization
of black people allows myths and, at times, outright paranoia
to flourish." In other words, the black folk get it
coming and going. Terrible things happen to them, and then they're
patronized in the Washington Post for imagining that such
terrible things might happen again. "Even if a major investigation
is done," Fletcher concluded, "it is unlikely to quell
the certainty among many African Americans that the government
played a role in bringing the crack epidemic to black communities."
A few days later, a Post
editorial followed through on this notion of black irrationality
and the lack of substance in Webb's thesis. The writer observed
that "The Mercury [had] borrowed heavily from a certain
view of CIA rogue conduct that was widespread ten years ago."
The "biggest shock," the editorial went on, "wasn't
the story but the credibility the story seems to have generated
when it reached some parts of the black community." This
amazing sentence was an accurate rendition of what really bothered
the Washington Post, which was not charges that the CIA
had been complicit in drug running, but that black people might
be suspicious of the government's intentions toward them. The
Post's editorial said solemnly that "[i]f the CIA
did associate with drug pushers its aim was not to infect Americans
but to advance the CIA' s foreign project and purposes."
In the weeks that followed,
Post columnists piled on the heat. Mary McGrory, the doyenne
of liberal punditry, said that the Post had successfully
"discredited" the Mercury News. Richard Cohen,
always edgy on the topic of black America, denounced Rep. Maxine
Waters for demanding an investigation after the Washington
Post had concluded that Webb's charges were "baseless."
"When it comes to sheer gullibility or is it mere
political opportunism? Waters is in a class of her own."
One story in that October 4
onslaught in the Post differed markedly from its companion
pieces. That was the profile of Meneses by Douglas Farah, which
actually advanced Webb's story. Farah, the Post's man
in Central America, filed a dispatch from Managua giving a detailed
account of Meneses's career as a drug trafficker, going back
to 1974. Farah described how Meneses had "worked for the
Contras for five years, fundraising, training and sending people
down to Honduras." He confirmed Meneses's encounter with
Enrique Bermúdez and added a detail the gift of
a crossbow by Meneses to the colonel. Then Farah produced a stunner,
lurking in the twelfth paragraph of his story. Citing "knowledgeable
sources," he reported that the DEA had hired Meneses in
1988 to try to set up Sandinista political and military leaders
in drug stings. Farah named the DEA agent involved as Federico
Villareal. The DEA did not dispute this version of events. In
other words, Farah had Meneses performing a political mission
for the US government, side by side with the story by his colleagues
Pincus and Suro claiming Meneses had no such connections.
Shortly after the Post's
offensives on October 2 and October 4, the Mercury News's
editor, Jerry Ceppos, sent a detailed letter to the Post
aggressively defending Webb and rebutting the criticisms. "The
Post has every right to reach different conclusions from
those of the Mercury News," Ceppos wrote. "But
I'm disappointed in the 'what's the big deal' tone running through
the Post's critique. If the CIA knew about illegal activities
being conducted by its associates, federal law and basic morality
required that it notify domestic authorities. It seems to me
that this is exactly the kind of story that a newspaper should
shine a light on."
The Post refused to
print Ceppos's letter. Ceppos called Stephen Rosenfeld, the deputy
editor of the editorial page, who suggested that Ceppos revise
his letter and resubmit it. Ceppos promptly did this, and again
the Post refused to print his response. Rosenfeld said
Ceppos's letter was "misinformation." Ceppos later
wrote in the Mercury News: "I was stunned when the
Washington Post rejected my request to reply to its long
critique of 'Dark Alliance.' The Post at first encouraged
me, asking me to rewrite the article and then to agree to other
changes. I did. Then, a few days ago, I received a one-paragraph
fax saying that the Post is 'not able to publish' my response.
Among other reasons, the Post said [that] other papers
'essentially' confirmed the Post's criticism of our series.
I've insisted for years that newspapers don't practice 'groupthink.'
I'm still sure that most don't. But the Post's argument
certainly gives ammunition to the most virulent critics of American
journalism. The Post also said I had backed down 'elsewhere'
from positions I took in the piece I wrote for the Post.
But I didn't. I shouted to anyone who would listen (and wrote
that, in another letter to the Post). It was too late.
On the day that the Post faxed me, the Los Angeles
Times incorrectly had written that reporter Gary Webb, who
wrote the 'Dark Alliance' series, and I had backed down on several
key points. Fiction became fact. As if I had no tongue, and no
typewriter, I suddenly had lost access to the newspaper that
first bitterly criticized our series."
The Post's sordid procedures
in savaging Webb were examined by its ombudsman, Geneva Overholzer,
on November 10. Ultimately she found her own paper guilty of
"misdirected zeal," but first she took the opportunity
to stick a few more knives into poor Webb. "The San Jose
series was seriously flawed. It was reported by a seemingly hot-headed
fellow willing to have people leap to conclusions his reporting
couldn't back up principally that the CIA was knowingly
involved in the introduction of drugs into the United States."
That said, Overholzer then turned her sights on the Post's
editors, saying that the Post showed more energy for protecting
the CIA than for protecting the people from government excesses.
"Post editors and reporters knew there was strong
evidence that the CIA at least chose to overlook Contra involvement
in the drug trade. Yet when those revelations came out in the
1980s they had caused 'little stir,' as the Post delicately
noted. Would that we had welcomed the surge of public interest
as an occasion to return to a subject the Post and the
public had given short shrift. Alas, dismissing someone else's
story as old news comes more naturally."
Click
here for Part Two of CounterAttack.
Weekend Edition
Features for November
27 / 28, 2004
Peter
Linebaugh
Torture & Neo-Liberalism with
Sycorax in Iraq
Alexander
Cockburn
What Happened to O'Reilly's Loofa?
Fred
Gardner
Ashcroft v. Raich: Medical Marijuana and the Supreme Court
Kathy
Kelly
What We Can Control
Diane
Christian
The Other Cheek: "Empire Doesn't Analyze, It Acts"
Gary
Leupp
One More Neocon Target: South (Yes, South) Korea
Lenni
Brenner
Equality and Rights of Return: Jefferson Instructs the New York
Times
Ron
Jacobs
Death Squads and Iraq's Elections: the Mysterious Murders of
the AMS Clerics
Joshua
Frank
An Interview with Kevin Zeese on Nader, Kerry and the ABB Crowd
Toni
Solo
The Murder of Danilo Anderson
Saul
Landau
Fallujah, the 21st Century Guernica
JoAnn
Wypijewski
Matthew Shepard Case 6 Years Later: Why Hate Crimes Laws are
No Cure for Homophobia
Justin
Taylor
Empire's Lawless Opportunities
Amos
Harel
The Case of Captain R.
Walter
A. Davis
Tabloid Justice
Stephen
Hendricks
God's Kind of Men
Poets'
Basement
Albert, LaMorticella and Ford
|