Why
They Hated Gary Webb
Alexander
Cockburn | December 19 2004
I read a piece about Kobe
Bryant a couple of days ago. The way it described his fall made me think
of Bryant as a parable of America in the Bush years, that maybe even W himself
could understand. No longer the big guy leading the winning team to victory
over Commie scum, but a street-corner lout, picking on victims quarter his
size, trying always to buy his way out of trouble. Don't leave your sister
alone with Uncle Sam! No one want to buy Uncle Sam's jerseys anymore, same
way they don't buy Kobe Bryant's.
This business of Uncle Sam's true face brings me to
Gary Webb and why they hated him. Few spectacles in journalism in the mid-1990s
were more disgusting than the slagging of Gary Webb in the New York Times,
Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Squadrons of hacks, some of them
with career-long ties to the CIA, sprayed thousands of words of vitriol
over Webb and his paper, the San Jose Mercury News for besmirching the Agency's
fine name by charging it with complicity in the importing of cocaine into
the US.
There are certain things you aren't meant to say in
public in America. The systematic state-sponsorship of torture by the US
used to be a major no-no, but that went by the board this year (even though
Seymour Hersh treated the CIA with undue kindness in Chain of Command: the
Road to Abu Ghraib) . A prime no-no is to say that the US government has
used assassination down the years as an instrument of national policy; also
that the CIA's complicity with drug dealing criminal gangs stretches from
the Afghanistan of today back to the year the Agency was founded in 1947.
That last one is the line Webb stepped over.He paid for his presumption
by undergoing one of the unfairest batterings in the history of the US press,
as the chapter from Whiteout we ran on our site yesterday narrates.
Friday, December 10, Webb died in his Sacramento apartment
by his own hand, or so it certainly seems. The notices of his passing in
many newspapers were as nasty as ever. The Los Angeles Times took care to
note that even after the Dark Alliance uproar Webb's career had been "troubled",
offering as evidence the fact that " While working for another legislative
committee in Sacramento, Webb wrote a report accusing the California Highway
Patrol of unofficially condoning and even encouraging racial profiling in
its drug interdiction program." The effrontery of the man! "Legislative
officials released the report in 1999", the story piously continued,
"but cautioned that it was based mainly on assumptions and anecdotes",
no doubt meaning that Webb didn't have dozens of CHP officers stating under
oath, on the record, that they were picking on blacks and Hispanics.
There were similar fountains of outrage in 1996 that
the CIA hadn't been given enough space in Webb's series to solemnly swear
that never a gram of cocaine had passed under its nose but that it had been
seized and turned over to the DEA or US Customs.
In 1998 Jeffrey St Clair and I published our book,
Whiteout, about the relationships between the CIA, drugs and the press since
the Agency's founding. We also examined the Webb affair in detail. On a
lesser scale, at lower volume it elicited the same sort of abuse Webb drew.
It was a long book stuffed with well-documented facts, over which the critics
lightly vaulted to charge us, as they did Webb, with "conspiracy-mongering"
though, sometimes in the same sentence, of recycling "old news".
Jeffrey and I came to the conclusion that what really affronted the critics,
some of them nominally left-wing, was that our book portrayed Uncle Sam's
true face. Not a "rogue" Agency but one always following the dictates
of government, murdering, torturing, poisoning, drugging its own subjects,
approving acts of monstrous cruelty, following methods devised and tested
by Hitler's men, themselves transported to America after the Second World
War.
One of the CIA's favored modes of self-protection
is the "uncover-up".The Agency first denies with passion, then
later concedes in muffled tones, the charges leveled against it. Such charges
have included the Agency's recruitment of Nazi scientists and SS officers;
experiments on unwitting American citizens; efforts to assassinate Fidel
Castro; alliances with opium lords in Burma, Thailand and Laos; an assassination
program in Vietnam; complicity in the toppling of Salvador Allende in Chile;
the arming of opium traffickers and religious fanatics in Afghanistan; the
training of murderous police in Guatemala and El Salvador; and involvement
in drugs-and-arms shuttles between Latin America and the US.
True to form, after Webb's series raised a storm,
particularly on black radio, the CIA issued categorical denials. Then came
the solemn pledges of an intense and far-reaching investigation by the CIA's
Inspector General, Fred Hitz. On December 18, 1997, stories in the Washington
Post by Walter Pincus and in the New York Times by Tim Weiner appeared simultaneously,
both saying the same thing: Inspector General Hitz had finished his investigation.
He had found "no direct or indirect" links between the CIA and
the cocaine traffickers. As both Pincus and Weiner admitted in their stories,
neither of the two journalists had actually seen the report.
The actual report itself, so loudly heralded, received
almost no examination. But those who took the time to examine the 149-page
document the first of two volumes--found Inspector General Hitz making
one damning admission after another including an account of a meeting between
a pilot who was making drug/arms runs between San Francisco and Costa Rica
with two Contra leaders who were also partners with the San Francisco-based
Contra/drug smuggler Norwin Meneses. Present at this encounter in Costa
Rica was a curly-haired man who said his name was Ivan Gomez, identified
by one of the Contras as CIA's "man in Costa Rica." The pilot
told Hitz that Gomez said he was there to "ensure that the profits
from the cocaine went to the Contras and not into someone's pocket ."
The second volume of CIA Inspector General Fred Hitz's investigation released
in the fall of 1998 buttressed Webb's case even more tightly, as James Risen
conceded in a story in the New York Times on October 120 of that year.
So why did the top-tier press savage Webb, and parrot
the CIA's denials. It comes back to this matter of Uncle Sam's true face.
Another New York Times reporter, Keith Schneider was asked by In These Times
back in 1987 why he had devoted a three-part series in the New York Times
to attacks on the Contra hearings chaired by Senator John Kerry. Schneider
said such a story could "shatter the Republic. I think it is so damaging,
the implications are so extraordinary, that for us to run the story, it
had better be based on the most solid evidence we could amass." Kerry
did uncover mountains of evidence. So did Webb. But neither of them got
the only thing that would have satisfied Schneider, Pincus and all the other
critics: a signed confession of CIA complicity by the DCI himself. Short
of that, I'm afraid we're left with "innuendo", "conspiracy
mongering" and "old stories". We're also left with the memory
of some great work by a very fine journalist who deserved a lot better than
he got from the profession he loved.
Footnote: a version of this column ran in the print
edition of The Nation that went to press last Wednesday. In fact the oddest
of all reviews of Whiteout was one in The Nation, a multi-page screed by
a woman who I seem to remember was on some payroll of George Soros. She
flayed us for giving aid and comfort to the war on drugs and not addressing
the truly important question, Why do people take drugs. As I said at the
time, to get high, stupid!