An education re. the CIA and drug running

Most of us not living in a Bubble World realize by now that drug running provides much of the $ billions needed for covert black operations by the CIA and other unknown-to-the-public hidden agencies of the federal government. It has been this way for decades -- remember the Reagan scandal of the Iran Contra/arms deal? Top officials at the CIA knew the agency was working with Contra drug traffickers and didn't do anything about it. Ironically, at the same time, Nancy Reagan was being the dutiful First Lady with a project to rid the world of drugs -- remember the "Just Say No" project?  (Life is so insane. You really couldn't make this stuff up!)

Gary Webb tried to bring just a smidgen of this kind of information into the public eye when he wrote the series Dark Alliance about the CIA's involvement in cocaine running and pushing the drug in U.S. inner cities, published in August 1996 in the San Jose Mercury News.  Unfortunately for Webb, his timing on publicizing this factual information was cutting too close to the bone for the CIA.  So they called out their in-the-pocket major media dogs and set them loose on Webb, humiliating him and destroying his reputation and journalistic career. Having lost his career and his family (his wife divorced him in 2000), Webb committed suicide in 2004 (there is still much speculation that it might have been murder. He had TWO shots from a .38 revolver in his head). 

The article in the following link tells the truth about the story, for those who would like to know truth instead of what we are daily fed by the major media. The movie about Webb entitled Kill the Messenger will be out in theaters in early November: 

http://consortiumnews.com/2014/09/30/oh-what-a-webb-we-weave/    Read to get the full story.

OH, WHAT A WEBB WE WEAVE
By Greg Maybury

EXCERPTS from the article:

Webb’s revelations were a warning to the CIA that serious blowback was a-brewing, and its PR team had to do something drastic about. No problem there – the CIA understood “blowback,” especially where it might affect the Agency’s credibility.

It was one thing having a reputation for removing duly elected leaders from office by whatever means necessary including assassination; fomenting revolution in Third World countries by engaging in destabilizing black operations and propaganda; and conspiring to initiate regime change by funding right-wing death squads; but to be seen having a direct hand in – or even an indirect connection to – the drug epidemic that was sweeping America was another thing altogether. This was a little too close to home, and could well have been a game changer for the Agency. And not in a good way for the folks at Langley!

In a biography of the Washington Post’s long-time publisher, Katharine Graham, entitled Katharine the Great, author Deborah Davis quotes a CIA operative discussing with Graham’s husband, Phil Graham, the ease of getting journalists to write CIA propaganda and cover stories: “You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month.”

That media monoliths have indeed gone out of their way to disparage and bully smaller, less influential media outlets and even destroy the careers and lives of those people who dared to reveal these activities to the broader public is something that is well documented if not widely known. And what they did to Gary Webb was possibly the best if not the most extreme example of it.

For those looking for further corroboration of Webb’s journalistic integrity and by extrapolation, the venal, self-serving and vindictive nature of the corporate media, you need go no further than read Nick Schou’s Kill the Messenger: How the CIA’s Crack-Cocaine Controversy Destroyed Journalist Gary Webb. Along with being a fitting tribute to the man and an equally fitting coda to his legacy, it is a savage indictment of America’s major news organizations (Washington Post, NY Times, LA Times, etc.), most of whom still purport to be bastions of fair and balanced reportage in an age when we need such more than ever.