Death story number 2

From TomTomorrow I hear that it appears that Gary Webb has committed suicide.

You can be forgiven if the name just rings a vague bell. Although he won more than 30 journalism awards in his career, his name is forever linked to one three-part series he did at the Mercury News (San Jose, CA) in August of 1996. Called "Dark Alliance: The Story Behind the Crack Explosion," it explored the connections between the CIA and crack cocaine in Los Angeles in the 1980s, a connection liked through the CIA-supported contras in Nicaragua and the drug smugglers with who the contras cooperated.

The series sparked a large controversy, with official investigations followed by major papers first covering it, then attacking it (lead by the Washington Post, New York Times, and Los Angeles Times) until the Mercury News, cracking under the pressure, disowned it as "not living up to our standards." Webb was in effect demoted and left the paper about a year later.

There was only one problem: The attacks were based on distortions of the series and the charges, at least in outline if not in every detail, were true.

In fact, when the series came out, I didn't think it was all that inflammatory. The idea that the contras, in search of both profits and facilities (airplanes and airstrips, in particular), had been in cahoots with drug smugglers was old news. Indeed, a Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee had examined that very question seven years earlier, in 1989. Its report said "There are some serious questions as to whether or not US officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war effort against Nicaragua." When told about Webb's series, the person who chaired that subcommittee said "There is no question in my mind that people affiliated with, or on the payroll of the CIA were involved in drug trafficking while involved in support of the Contras...."

(That person, by the way, was John Kerry, Democrat from Massachusetts, who used his own staff to pursue what was at first considered a quixotic investigation. I don't know where that John Kerry went, but he sure as hell wasn't the one running for president.)

All Webb really did was give the story a local hook by tracing the drugs to California and thus to the kingpins of the crack cocaine trade in LA. But it was that local connection that generated the heat and thus the counterattack.

Most of the journalistic lynchings were based on a false argument: the claim that Webb had stated that the CIA was actively involved in the smuggling operation; some even claimed that Webb had said that the CIA itself actually did the smuggling. That was simply untrue; what Webb asserted was that the CIA had pulled a Sgt. Schultz ("I know nothing! I see nothing!") in order to avoid interfering with the efforts to overthrow the government of Nicaragua. And that, again, was old news.

The worst of the lot was the New York Times. In it's distorted attack on Webb, it didn't even really focus on him. Instead, it took the fact that the CIA had investigated itself and found itself not guilty as sufficient factual refutation and instead concentrated on the response in black communities across the US, wondering loudly what it was about black culture that would lead them to believe such "conspiracy theories." It could not have been more grossly condescending if it had started talking about "superstitious darkies." (Those two events are what the cartoon refers to.) Even now, the Times' obituary of Webb refers to "a series of articles, later discredited" as if there was no question about the matter.

But there was and is. While it's safe to say that Webb probably overreached on some details, it's grossly unfair both to him and to history to simply label him "discredited." But then again, what can you expect from the "liberal" media?

Footnote One: To the end of his life Webb maintained that the thrust of his reporting was accurate, and his 1998 book Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion used additional documents to uphold his original conclusions. Check them out if you're of the mind.

Footnote Two: Jeff Cohen of FAIR (thanks again to TomTomorrow) has more including the vital fact that the CIA's own internal investigation - the one by which it supposedly cleared itself - actually confirmed Webb's charges about CIA knowledge of contra involvement with drug smugglers.