Gary Webb, former investigative reporter for the Mercury News newspaper and award winning journalist who uncovered the nefarious CIA links to the burgeoning cocaine and crack epidemics of the 90s, was found dead in a suburban Sacramento home recently, reportedly of a suicide. Webb, 49, also wrote the best selling book, Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, which told the sordid tale of how the U.S. government, through the CIA, allowed its assets in a Nicaraguan Contras to smuggle in cocaine to Los Angeles to fund the Contra Wars against the Sandinista government in Managua.
Webb’s body was found on Friday, December the 10th, 2004, about 8:20 in the morning, when a moving company arrived at his home. According to published reports, a note was posted on the front door reading, “Please do not enter. Call 911, and ask for an ambulance.” Webb’s exposé of the CIA crack connection, which began as a Mercury News exclusive, resulted in a flood of criticisms from the nation’s major papers, including The New York Times, the LA Times and The Washington Post. Indeed, after a time, even the editors of the Mercury News critiqued some parts of the story, but over time, many, if not most, of the facts brought to life by his earth shattering series have been either admitted by the CIA itself or supported by other sources.
Webb’s resignation from the newspaper about a year and a half later marked the power of the press to discipline one of its own for committing an unpardonable sin: uncovering the actions of the powerful–in this case, the nation’s intelligence agencies. Once again, the media ate its own to protect power and privilege. It may very well be true that Webb committed suicide, but it seems, at the very least, odd to post a note on one’s door before doing so. Recently, in a book sharing the contributions of a wide range of American reporters, Webb penned an essay sharply critical of what he called “the mighty Wurlitzer,” or “the media machine that serves as an accompaniment to those of means and power.”
His words give a stark picture of the so-called “free press.” Do we have a free press today? Sure we do. It’s free to report all the sex scandals at once, all the stock market news we can handle. Every new health fad that comes down the pike, and every celebrity marriage or divorce that happens. But when it comes to the real down and dirty stuff, stories like Tailwind, the October Surprise, the El Mozote massacre, corporate corruption, or CIA involvement in drug trafficking, that’s where we begin to see the limits of our freedom. In today’s media environment, sadly, such stories are not even open for discussion. Back in 1938, when fascism was sweeping Europe, legendary investigative reporter George Seldes observed in his book The Lords of the Press that, “It is possible to fool all the people all the time when government and press cooperate.” “Unfortunately, we have reached that point.” That’s from Gary Webb’s essay entitled “The Mighty Wurlitzer Plays On,” published in the book Into the Buzz Saw: Leading Journalists Expose the Myth of a Free Press, published by Prometheus Books.
We haven’t the faintest idea whether Webb died through suicide or intrigue. We don’t pretend to know. What we do know is that the media elites in the nation’s big cities pointed their big guns at a colleague and blew away his career, for what now seems to be little more than professional jealousy. For years, scholars have shown how intelligence agencies, especially the CIA, have planted people within the U.S. media to protect their agencies. Many an editor in New York and Washington began his “career” in Langley, Virginia, and not at journalism school.
We know that Webb got it mostly right: (a) the CIA-created Contras had been selling cocaine to finance their dirty war against the Sandinistas, (b) the Contras had sold coke in LA ghettos, and they supplied the area’s biggest crack dealer, (c) people in the U.S. government knew about it at the time and did nothing, (d) these sales fueled and powered the first major crack cocaine market in the US, and finally, (e) this crack explosion fueled the growth and national expansion of the Crips and the Bloods as crews to push the crack game across the nation. In Webb’s words, “It wasn’t so much a conspiracy that I had outlined as it was a chain reaction: bad ideas compounded by stupid political decisions and rotten historical timing.” From death row, this is Mumia Abu-Jamal.
These commentaries are produced by Noelle Hanrahan for Prison Radio.
