Gary Webb Died To Tell America How The CIA Was Trafficking Cocaine And Weapons To Fund The Contras: His Work Is More Relevant Than Ever
Was He Murdered? He Was Murdered Long Before His Death. Blame The Nation's Three Leading Newspapers, And—His Editors. John Kiriakou, Former CIA, Sums Up The Gary Webb Story. It's Time To Name Names
What the LA Times, NY Times, Washington Post, and finally, San Jose Mercury News did to Gary Webb is something that deserves more attention. A journalistic atrocity.
Reporters like Gary Webb come along maybe a few times a century.
What killed him was being right. And being naive about American journalism—his great love.
Every time I think of his own editors throwing him to the CIA media wolves, signing his death warrant, it makes me nauseous. It was their story. (They were just as responsible for it as Webb was—they commissioned it, shaped it, fact checked it, and profited off it.)
The act here was one of sacrifice—Webb was scapegoated and sacrificed, to appease the CIA, and restore calm in US media.
These sacrifices are common in American media—they are a central feature.
It happened to me, in 2006, but with one critical difference: My editors never turned against the story that set off the firestorm. I was well aware that if they did succumb to pressure from AIDS Inc, Fauci, Gallo, Larry Kramer, TAG et al, that I would not survive.
No journalist can survive it, as it is designed not for mere income, reputation and career loss, but to mimic an execution. The goal is for the reporter to suicide from the intense pressure of the public humiliations.
In most cases, as was the case with Webb, the marriage also falls apart, when the pressure causes the spouse to abandon ship. When the reporter is killed, the family always say there was no foul play. Always. Michael Hastings, Gary Webb—it’s another feature. They know all this. They have detailed profiles of every important person in the reporter’s life. They aim for the target to be isolated—as he was.
I read that as part of his ritual humiliation, he was punished by being put on a beat covering constipation in horses, in a small town. That sounds true.
I imagine he had a rough childhood, because that’s the only reason anybody gets involved in this line of work. To forget and to escape.
Nothing is more low than the very creators of the project—the editors—to turn on their reporter, who did all the hard, dangerous, dirty work, to bring them this piece of historic journalism.