The Post-mortem Assasination Of Garry Webb

Garry Webb was a conventional reporter from a military family who wrote conventional stories about America. This all changed after he stumbled on to the story of the counter-revolutionary (Contras) forces in Nicaragua in the 80's ties with drug smuggling. The problem was that these cats were the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers and all that. We were all shocked that anyone would even mention such unmentionables given the honarable allies, the Indonesion butchers, the neo-Nazi Argentine sadistic totureres, the Zairean kleptocracy to name a few, the intellegence services had been cavorting with in the post-war period. Garry Webb made the mistake to blabb this around town. So what did US journalism do for one of their own? A full court press to distract, discredit, disinform, and in the end to destroy Garry Webb's career and now Garry Webb himself. This was done by marshalling the strength of the NY Times, LA Times, and the Washington Post to make sure that "real" evidence could be found to support such allegations. Unsurprisingly they found nothing. The problem is the contras were involved with the drug trade and the CIA actually admitted it years later.

Now that GW has offed himself the slander continues, with an obit in the LA Times this week mutering about his "troubled" career and "accusations" about drugs and other such charges. The obituary is a sorry book end to a story that epitomizes the worst of our "liberal" media.

One of the more troubling sidenotes to the story is the "left's" complicity in the whole matter. One of the coincidences of the story is the rise in the use of crack as the contras financed their murder of teachers and farmers in the 80's. Some used this coincidence to claim that this was a plot to undermine the black community through mass drug induced distraction. This was not the main point of GW's reporting but many flakistas used it as proof. I've met the type. Any evil in the world can be explained by tangential evidence to a CIA operation. The rulers will always try to marginalize the left by pointing to the conspiracy theorists but lets not make ourselves easy targets with wild accusations.

Here Alex Cockburn discusses the Webb affair. Classic Cockburn here. Marc Cooper also tells it like it is.